Wings of Fire ir-2

by Charles Todd

  “Tregarth found them, sir,” Dawlish was saying. “He’s walked these moors man and boy for sixty years. Noticed the white stone wasn’t natural to the land around here, and was curious, like. He started digging, and what came to light looked odd. He called me and we laid the packet open enough to be sure what was inside, before sending for you.”

  “Good man!” Rutledge said over his shoulder to the diffident farmer waiting close by. The grizzled head nodded, satisfaction in the sharp, weather-browned face.

  Who had buried these articles deep under a bush and covered them with a flat white stone? And why? Or when? There was no way of knowing to whom they’d belonged but it was the first evidence Rutledge had discovered that proved the search mattered. Even Dawlish’s doubts were silenced.

  Rutledge put the shreds of wool carefully into a brown sack someone offered him, and carried them back to Bor-combe with him, ordering the men to comb the vicinity again, until they could swear that there was nothing else to be found. And he promised them beer from The Three Bells with their dinner, if they did their work thoroughly.

  He had already arranged to meet Rachel after dinner, while the light was still good, and walk over to the Hall to look for Olivia’s papers. It was not all that he had in mind for the evening, but it was an innocuous beginning.

  15

  Rachel was tense as they walked through the door of the Hall. “I miss the flowers,” she said, a trace of nervousness in her voice. “The Hall was always full of flowers. You could smell the beeswax polish, the scent of Rosamund’s perfume, and the flowers, whenever you walked through the door. Like a welcome. Now the air’s-I don’t know. Still. Dead…”

  “You have a right to be here,” he said. “Why don’t you cut flowers and put them in vases yourself?”

  “No. I was bequeathed a share in the Hall. That was the way they wanted it, Olivia and Nicholas. But I have no right here. No place here.” Her voice trailed off at the end.

  “Let’s start with the upper floors and work our way down,” he said prosaically, before she could get cold feet altogether. “The attics?”

  “This way,” she said, shaking off her gloomy spirits and leading him towards the stairs.

  They made their way up to the attics, warmed by the sun, spared the wind, and still comfortable. There they began looking through trunks of gowns carefully wrapped in tissue paper, and suits of clothes and coats, moving aside rocking horses and doll’s houses, chairs and old bedsteads, cribs and perambulators, canes, odds and ends of lumber, and any number of boxes stored long ago and forgotten, the debris of generations. They found a stuffed fox, ratty with age, glass eyes gleaming in the lamps they’d brought with them, and a wardrobe full of hats that caught Rachel’s fancy.

  “Look at these! I can’t believe it-they must be well over a hundred years old! The braid on these tricorns-I think it’s gold bullion! We used to play dress up, sometimes, and Nicholas had such a hat. What’s this? Yes, I see, it’s a bonnet with a tucked underbrim. Straight out of Jane Austen.” It was too small, but she perched it on her head, and made him laugh as she twirled the ribbons. Setting it back in its tissue nest, she turned to the next shelf. “My God! Ostrich plumes and bows, oh, and even a little temple set in among silk trees. Susannah would have adored this one. She was always trying on Rosamund’s hats.”

  It took Rutledge fifteen minutes to distract her, and they moved on, to christening gowns and woolens, old linens and sets of dishes, riding boots and tables of every size, a child’s saddle-and nothing that remotely resembled a poet’s work.

  Dusty and giggling, Rachel led the way to the next attics, which held more of the same, and when she began to cough from the dryness of the air, he suggested a cup of tea.

  She agreed, and lamps in hand, they went down to the kitchen to make it. There was no cream, but Rachel found a lemon in the pantry. Then, leaving one lamp in the kitchen, Rutledge took the tray from her and carried it to the sitting room that overlooked the sea. The sun was low now, warming the room with its light, and Rachel went to sit in a chair from which she could watch it set.

  It was very domestic, the pot of tea, the quiet of evening, the sense of peace and companionship. The setting he’d arranged, in a room where Rachel must have spent a great deal of her time with Nicholas. A room, unlike the study upstairs, that didn’t make her shiver with dread. As she sipped from the cup in her hand, relaxed and off her guard, he said, quietly, “Were you there when Anne fell out of the tree?”

  “Yes, I told you that.”

  “But you told me what you remembered. Time changed what you actually saw as it was happening. What the grownups said around you, the questions they asked you, it all influenced you. Would you do something for me? Would you close your eyes and let yourself go back to that afternoon, and see it again?”

  She put down her cup, shaking her head. “No, I don’t want to go back! To that time or any other! I don’t want to play that kind of game!”

  “You sent for me,” he reminded her. “You must have wanted answers of some kind. So far, I’ve got very little to show for the time I’ve spent here. But there’s evidence of a sort, and it points to Olivia. Not to Nicholas.”

  She sat there, torn. He could read it in the tightening of her shoulders. Wanting him to go, wanting him to stay and prove that Nicholas had in fact loved her, though those weren’t the words she used even to herself. That his death had nothing to do with what he felt for her. It mattered. In a fashion that went deeper than conscious thought.

  “I need to see that day through the eyes of someone who was there.”

  “Ask Cormac!”

  Before, she’d told him that she hadn’t thought Cormac was there

  …

  “But Cormac was an outsider. You weren’t. Cormac was the Irish latecomer, there on sufferance because his father had come with Rosamund’s horses. He hadn’t played all his life with the family, lived in the nursery with the other children, heard them quarrel and laugh and make up games. He hadn’t been part of their growing up, the way you’d been. He saw them as a stranger sees, superficially, the outward facade instead of the inner feelings.”

  His voice was persuasive, his body very still in the shadows of the room, just out of her line of sight, the warmth of the sun’s slanting rays taking away any sense of danger or fear, the quiet absolute, except for the sound of her breathing. And the voice of Hamish, which she couldn’t hear.

  He’d seen the doctors at the clinic use these same techniques. He’d seen them break through silences that were so deep even the men locked in them couldn’t find the key to them. Persuaded by quiet and serenity, and their own sense of need, such men would suddenly speak of events that would send them screaming into horror-and then complete breakdown-and finally, with luck, survival.

  It hadn’t worked for him. Only drugs had broken down the walls he’d built so high and strong.

  Hamish, realizing what he was up to now, roused and thundered at him not to take risks with this woman’s mind. “Ye’re no’ a doctor, you could do grave damage without knowing it!” But Rutledge couldn’t see any other way to learn the truth, and forced the voice in his own mind into rumbling, sullen stillness.

  “I don’t know what there is to tell,” Rachel said. “It was an accident.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of, have you? Except for grief and the memory of someone you loved long ago.”

  “I don’t know that I loved Anne-” She stopped.

  “Why not? She was your cousin.”

  “She was bossy. Sometimes she made me feel very young, or very stupid. Awkward, somehow. When we played games, I was always the one who had to lose, and then she’d tease me about it.”

  The cruelty of children. He could hear Smedley’s voice saying that.

  “She wasn’t mean. She could be very loving, when she wanted to be. She was just… arrogant. Like her grandmother, Nanny told me. Rosamund’s mother. But of course she was already dead, I never met h
er. So I couldn’t know if it was true or not. Anyway, for a child like me, Anne was very trying.”

  “Whose idea was it to go to the orchard that day?”

  “It was hot, we were tired of playing in the gardens, and the house was stuffy, even with the windows open. But in the orchard it was shady, the long grass was cool. In the trees, you felt cooler. I don’t know who thought of it first. I remember Nicholas telling Anne that she couldn’t climb as high as he could. And Anne had been pestering Olivia about being so slow, walking. Nicholas must have been trying to deflect her impatience.”

  He could see, from the shadows of her lashes on her cheek, that she’d closed her eyes. Clouds on the horizon began to swallow the sun. It would be dark sooner than he’d thought. Would that matter? Still, he must not hurry…

  “But that wasn’t what you felt then, was it?”

  “No, I was hoping she’d climb high enough to fall out-” She sat upright with a jolt. “No! I couldn’t have thought that! It must have been afterward, when she was climbing, and I was afraid she’d fall-”

  Yet Rutledge thought she had felt that way at the time, and buried it deep. A child’s wish, because the bully was beyond her own reach. He waited a moment, then said gently, reassuringly, “I’m sure you wished her no harm.”

  “No, of course I didn’t. In fact I was worried when Nicholas challenged her to climb to the next branches, and then Olivia went up after her, and he tried to prevent her, but she was determined to show she could do it too. I remember he was holding her sashes, trying to help her keep her balance. And then Anne was shouting something from the top of the tree, and Olivia pushed herself higher than she should, and Cormac climbed down from his tree and was over there in a flash, saying his papa would thrash him if they got hurt, and he was going to stop this nonsense now. But I saw Nicholas jerk hard on the sashes, trying to pull himself up into the tree or something, and Cormac was crashing about in the branches, and suddenly, Nicholas was ducking, and Anne came tumbling down, bowling Nicholas over, and Cormac was trying to get Olivia down, yelling at her not to put her bad foot just there, he’d hold her arm, and she was screaming at him not to touch her, and Nicholas was crawling over to Anne, and as I slid down my tree, I scraped my leg and it started bleeding, and I got blood all over Anne’s dress when I knelt there. And she was still, it was frightening, and I kept asking Nicholas why he’d pulled so hard on the sashes, and he said that Anne had been shoving Olivia, and then Olivia was down, face white as her own handkerchief, something in her eyes that terrified me, and Cormac and I ran for help, he to the stables, which were closer, while 1 ran to the house and Rosamund-”

  She was crying, he could see the tears sliding out from under her lashes. And he himself felt the surge of her pain, the shock, the child who couldn’t understand the nightmarish events she’d witnessed. The picture she’d conjured up was sharp, vivid in his mind. Even Hamish was silenced by it.

  “Please,” she begged huskily. “I don’t want to think about it any more!”

  “Then tell me about Richard being lost on the moors,” he said, after giving both of them a little time to recover. “Were you there when it happened?”

  “Yes, I’ve said it was a family picnic,” she retorted irritably. “I don’t know why you have to keep harping on the past, raking it up. Stephen wouldn’t have allowed it, it was his duty to protect Olivia! That’s why she left him all her papers.”

  “Olivia is dead. So is Nicholas. Your memory is all I have,” he said again. “Would Stephen have protected her, if he’d known she might have killed his father?”

  “Maybe that’s why we can’t find her papers. Maybe he burned them?” She sighed. “Oh, very well! We went there- to the moors-because it was a day’s outing, and children are restless, they need distraction. Uncle James thought we might enjoy looking at the old mines, the tin that’d made Cornwall rich, once upon a time. Rosamund wasn’t happy with the idea, she said we could fall down the old shafts. Which wasn’t very like her-it was as if she had a premonition-she was usually enthusiastic and fun. But it all went quite well. James showed us the mines, and then we talked about where Cornish tin might have traveled, to Egypt or Crete or Phoenicia. He could make whatever he talked about seem so real, not a lesson at all-it was a gift he had. Then we found a sheltered spot to eat our lunch.”

  He could hear her voice change as she drifted back into the past again, caught up in spite of her reluctance.

  “What was Richard wearing?”

  “I don’t remember-white shirt, long stockings, short trousers, I should think. He did have a jacket too, because he took it off for a time. It was warm in the sun. Rosamund made him put it back on again, when the wind came up. He didn’t want to put it on, and fussed about it. Later, we wondered if that’s why he’d run off, because he was still in a temper. He was so headstrong, sometimes.” She stopped. “Are you sure you want to hear so many little things?”

  “Yes. It helps me frame a picture.”

  She was one of those rare people who could tell a story coherently. Describing clearly the images she saw in her mind, without backtracking and confusing the threads he needed to follow.

  “We’d had our picnic, and Rosamund sat down to rest, James had his head in her lap, I remember thinking how comfortable they looked. Cormac had gone to talk to the guide. He was an old man whose sons left for America twenty years before, to work in the mines there. Cormac wanted to know about them, if they’d prospered, if they’d written home about their new life. I was drowsy, and Olivia sat down beside me, to rest her leg a little. But Richard wanted to go back and see the ponies. He begged her to walk with him, because his mother wouldn’t let him go alone. I don’t know where Nicholas was, he’d wandered off. He did that sometimes, exploring. He always had an unerring sense of direction, no one ever worried about him. Finally Olivia got up and followed Richard, making him promise not to run too fast for her. I was waiting for Nicholas to come back and didn’t want to be bothered with Richard, and I’ve felt very guilty about that ever since…”

  He let the silence drift, and finally her voice picked up the tale again. “I was nearly asleep when Rosamund said we ought to be starting back. She sent Cormac to look for Nicholas and James to find Olivia and Richard. We walked over to the carriages together and put the baskets away. Rosamund was saying something about a house party she was planning, friends from London. I remember that, because they came for the funeral instead. James’ funeral. Then she said, ‘I wonder what’s keeping them!’ “

  There was another pause. “Cormac came back alone and said that Nicholas had just seen some of those butterflies you only find out on the moors and didn’t want to leave. He took me off with him to persuade him. But Nicholas wasn’t by the rocks anymore, and we looked for five or ten minutes, Cormac and I. Then we went back to where Rosamund was waiting, and Nicholas was already there. James came back with Olivia, saying they couldn’t find Richard. So Rosamund left Olivia and me in the carnages, while she and James and Cor-mac and Nicholas went out to search for Richard. But he didn’t come back. And they couldn’t find him. And Olivia wasn’t sure what had happened, except that he’d gone to play with the ponies in plain sight, and she’d thought he was still with them. They sent the coachman to the Hall on one of the carriage horses to collect the grooms and servants while they went back again to look. By nightfall, it was clear we weren’t going to find him at all. But James wouldn’t hear of calling off the search. He said Richard was just being naughty, hiding from us. Nicholas came back covered in blood and scratches, from a fall, and said he’d located the ponies, and Richard wasn’t with them, but there’d been some gypsy boys about. He and Cormac went back to look again. They searched with torches. I remember the long shadows they cast, and how black the men looked in the distance, and then Rosamund sent us home in one of the carriages, Olivia and Nicholas and me. Olivia was crying, there was no comforting her. And when we got to the stables, she had herself strapped to a horse, and went
back with the men from the village, to look again. There wasn’t a horse for Nicholas, and so he went off on his own. I was told to stay at the house and send out word if any of the searchers found Richard. But of course they never did. Sometime later I remember Cormac, with tears cutting through the dirt on his face, yelling at Nicholas about Richard, wanting to know something, and I always thought that was very strange, since Richard had been with Olivia. But no one was himself, we were all distraught. Nicholas sat with Olivia, when they brought her back ill, talking, always talking to her, but from the door I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Uncle James was so exhausted that Dr. Penrith put something in his coffee and it took three men to carry him up to his bed, he was so deeply asleep…”

  But Rutledge had lost the thread of what she was saying, his thoughts busy elsewhere. When the quiet voice stopped, he said, “Did Olivia and Anne dress as twins, in the same gowns?”

  “Sometimes,” she answered, surprised at the shift in subject. “Olivia didn’t like it. She said she wasn’t part of a pair, like shoes or gloves. She wasn’t in Anne’s shadow, she was just herself. That seemed to bother her… afterward. We all felt guilty, the way children do, blaming themselves…”

  “Were they wearing the same dresses the day that Anne fell?”

  “I-I don’t know. Let me think.” She shook her head, “No. Wait! Anne was wearing the gown with bunches of cherries embroidered around the hem and on the sash. Olivia was wearing something blue-forget-me-nots, I think. I remember that my blood and Anne’s matched those cherries.” The empty cup rattled in its saucer, as her fingers trembled. He got up and poured more tea for her, using the ordinary business of spooning in sugar and taking a slice of lemon to distract her.