Wings of Fire ir-2

by Charles Todd

“I was here,” she said irritably. “I’d helped Mrs. Trepol with the clothes she was taking for the church bazaar-bags of them, there were, and Miss Susannah asked if I’d like the rags. For my rugs.”

  He looked at the gnarled hands. “You make rugs?”

  “Are ye deaf, then, young as ye are?” she retorted tartly.

  “Tell me about Mr. Stephen,” he suggested hastily.

  “He was in the house, looking for something. Searching high and low. I don’t know what it twas, but he was in a taking over it. Said he’d find it or know the reason why. He shouted at Mrs. Trepol, asking her if she’d moved it. And she were near to crying, telling him she’d never touch his things. And then she was going out the back door, and I heard Mr. Stephen on the stairs, a racket, and him yelling ‘Damned foot!’ And I knew the Gabriel hounds were here again, riding high through the passages and down the stairs like the demons they are. I turned away, afeerd of ‘em.”

  “What you heard was his fall, then? And he was alone?”

  “Except for the hounds. They were baying at him, sharp and shrill and angry.”

  “Did you say anything to Mrs. Trepol? Or anyone else?”

  “There was naught to say! Outside Mrs. Trepol was marching along the path with her back stiff with hurt, and inside the family was crying out and making fuss enough without me. Mr. Cormac caught up with us, going for the doctor, but didn’t say what was amiss. I didn’t like the look on his face, I can tell you, cold and dark.”

  “But you’re a healer,” he said. “Or so I’ve been told in the village. Didn’t you go to see if you could help Stephen FitzHugh?”

  She gave him a look of disgust. “I heal, God willing, but I don’t raise the dead from their sleep!”

  “But you couldn’t be sure-”

  “I told ye, Londoner, that I’d heard the Gabriel hounds. That’s all I needed to know. They’re never wrong. I’ve heard ‘em afore, when there was death walking the land. In this house. In the woods. Wherever evil strays.”

  She turned and walked off, hobbling on her stick, leaving him to Hamish, who was trying to force words into his mind. But what the hell were the Gabriel hounds she’d talked of, some family banshee?

  “I’ve been trying to warn you,” Hamish said grimly, “what they were. The souls of unchristened children. A child who dies before he’s blessed by the church. Unshriven. Not wanted by God-nor by the devil.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it-that’s Highland nonsense!” he said aloud before he could stop himself.

  The old woman turned and looked at him. And silently crossed herself.

  He felt his face flush.

  In the bar after lunch was an elderly man in an old but fine suit and collars and cuffs that gleamed whitely in the dimness. Several people had clustered around his bench, talking quietly and nodding at whatever he said in response. A half dozen men stood around outside in the sunshine, playing keels, their shadows flicking across the dusty glass of the windows. Four other men sat around the hearth reliving the war. Two had lost limbs-an arm, a foot. Another wore an eye patch. Except for the women speaking with the doctor, it was a male enclave.

  The barkeep said, “That’s the old doctor. The father-in-law of Dr. Hawkins. Penrith’s his name. Those that don’t hold with the new ways of Dr. Hawkins still come to speak to him. But his mind’s going these days. Shame, but there it is. Age catches us all, in the end.” The barkeep must have been as old if not older than Penrith.

  Rutledge, looking across at the bearded doctor, smiled to himself at the comment, then went up the stairs two at a time to his room, to get the photographs Rachel had sent him. When the doctor was finally sitting there alone, Rutledge joined him and bought him beer before opening the subject of the Trevelyan family.

  “Sorrowful history, the Trevelyans had,” Penrith said, tired old eyes looking up at Rutledge. “I saw them through most of it. And held their hands when they mourned. Old Adrian died in his bed, as he should, but not the others. Sad, sad, it was. I did what I could. Young Hawkins doesn’t understand about that, he’s not a village man. I was.”

  Rutledge used his handkerchief to clear off a space, then took out the photographs and made a fan of them on the table. “What can you tell me about these people?” What light there was from the narrow windows fell across them, gently touching their faces.

  “Ah-more secrets than I want to remember. That’s the gift of old age, Inspector. You begin to forget. And in for-getfulness is peace.”

  “But I’d like to know their secrets. To satisfy myself that all’s well. That there was nothing done-now or before-that should have roused suspicion.”

  The old man chuckled. “Suspicions? A doctor always has suspicions, he’s worse than the police. But sometimes there’s more compassion in silence than in words. When you can’t undo the harm that’s been done, sometimes you bury it with the dead. James Cheney killed himself, and I said it was an accident cleaning his guns. Why burden Rosamund with more grief than she already had? The boy was lost, there was no bringing either of them back. Father or son. And Olivia was in such a state that I thought she’d lose her reason, swearing she’d never let Richard out of her sight, except to look at a plover’s nest she’d found. And Nicholas saying that it was his fault, he hadn’t watched out for either of them when he’d known he ought to. And the servants crying, and no man about the place but Brian FitzHugh, to see to the burying.” “FitzHugh was there when Cheney died?” “Oh, aye, he was, he’d come and go-about the horses they raced, Miss Rosamund and her father. Winners, the lot of them. Good bloodlines. Like the Trevelyans. And now only Miss Susannah is left. And she’s more Irish than Cornish, if you don’t mind my saying it!”

  “What do you know about Cormac FitzHugh?” “Nothing,” the old man said, finishing his beer. “He never needed me for any doctoring, not a splinter in the foot nor fall from a horse. When they sent him away to earn his own living, I was glad. Miss Olivia said one day she’d write some poems about him. I paid no heed to it then, I thought it was girlish foolishness, romantic nonsense.”

  Rutledge stared at the watery eyes in the bearded face. Was the doctor trying to say that the love poems were written by Olivia to Cormac FitzHugh? That they had nothing to do with her half brother Stephen, whatever he’d tried to believe?

  Tired from a restless night, Rutledge sat in a chair by his window and let himself drowse, He was just into that soft, floating ease between sleeping and waking when he heard sharp taps, a woman’s high heels, coming briskly up the stairs. And then sharper taps as she rapped on his door.

  Jerked into wakefulness, he straightened his tie, ran a hand over his hair, and went to open the door. Rachel, he thought hazily, come to fetch her photographs.

  But it was a tall, slim blond woman with angry eyes who stared up at him when the door swung wide.

  “Inspector Rutledge?” she said crisply, looking him up and down.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m Rutledge.”

  “I’d like to speak to you. In your room, if I may. The parlor is not private, this time of day.”

  When he hesitated, she said, “I’m Susannah Hargrove. Stephen FitzHugh’s sister.”

  He stood aside and let her come in, gesturing to the chair he’d drawn up to the window. He stayed where he was by the door, on his feet.

  She ignored the chair. Instead she rounded on him like a battleship bringing her heavy guns to bear.

  “My brother Cormac telephoned to my husband’s office in London and left a message that you’re here to reopen the matter of my family’s recent losses. His secretary passed it along. Is that true? Or did she get it wrong?”

  “I’m afraid it is true,” he said gravely. “Which is not to say that Scotland Yard won’t come to the same conclusions in all three deaths.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it will-too late. Too late for us! The family, I mean. We’ll be dragged through the newspapers, our dirty linen hung out for all to goggle at, and then, when you are quite satisfied
, you’ll beg our pardon and take the train back to London as if nothing had happened! It’s bad enough, Inspector, to have to smile at people who know very well two members of your family killed themselves. If the police start whispers of murder, we’ll all be disgraced. I’m expecting a child in the late autumn. I won’t have it brought into the world in the midst of a nasty police matter!”

  He fought back a smile at her vehemence, and said only, “I’ve said nothing about murder. To you or to your half brother.”

  “Why else would Scotland Yard give a-a damn about some obscure village matters, if there weren’t suspicions on somebody’s part? Is it because Olivia was famous? Is that why you’re here to bedevil us?” Tears overlaid the anger in her eyes, but she held them back, fighting hard.

  When he didn’t immediately answer, she turned her back on him and stared out the window. “I knew that was what it must be. I told Daniel it could be nothing else! Why did Olivia have to do something so-so selfish! If she wanted to end it all, why did she have to leave shadows on the house- on us! I grew up there too, I don’t deserve to have my memories, my very childhood, turned into something hostile and empty and grotesque! And if you have your way, we won’t even be able to sell the house and be rid of it!” She whirled around and stared at him. “I hate that house now! I want it sold and all of the past ripped out of it by new owners who don’t know-don’t care-who we were!” She swallowed hard, then the tears came. “Who will buy it,” she demanded huskily, “if there was murder as well as suicide there. We’ll have it hung around our necks, like our sins, for the rest of our lives.”

  He pulled out his handkerchief and held it out to her, but she ignored it, fumbling in her handbag for one of her own. “I’ve just lost my brother,” she said brokenly. “And now this! And the doctor said I wasn’t to be upset.”

  “If you don’t believe murder has been done, why should you hate the house so much?” he asked, in an attempt to distract her. “What has it done-what has been done there- to distress you?”

  She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “It isn’t what was done, it’s what’s been lost. Rosamund-my mother-held such light in her hands, and the house-all of us-were touched by it. And then she died, and it was all changed, all different, all-I don’t know! Dark and dreary and full of Olivia’s obsessions!”

  “Obsessions about what?”

  “How should I know? Olivia was a woman who lived in her thoughts, in her feelings. I’m not like that, I feel, I cry, I laugh. She was silent. I didn’t-I couldn’t understand her. It’s-unnatural-in a woman to write as she did. I still don’t think of her as that poet. I think somehow they must have got it all wrong!”

  “Do you believe Nicholas Cheney could have written those poems?”

  She stared at him, tears drying on her lashes. “ Nicholas? I-it hadn’t occurred to me-to any of us! Do you think it was Nicholas? Truly?”

  He said carefully, “I don’t know enough about your family to offer that as a possibility. I’m just answering your question about Olivia Marlowe.”

  Her face fell. “Oh.”

  “Do you know why Nicholas and Olivia killed themselves?”

  Susannah shook her head. “I’ve lain awake at night, wondering why anyone could do such a thing. I was her sister- half sister-but she never said a word to me about her feelings-about despair, desperation. You’d have thought… but she didn’t! And Nicholas-it’s like a betrayal-to go off like that and leave me alone just before Stephen died! Mother betrayed me too-I’ve always suspected, feared, down deep inside that she killed herself too!”

  Pain welled in her eyes, deep and terrifying. “What’s wrong with my family? I’m the only one left now-not counting Cormac. One day will something awful happen to me, will I leave this child without a mother, and without anyone of its own to love? Cormac was that way-alone. He never had any one else. However beautiful he is, Cormac is terribly alone, and I don’t want my child to grow up in that kind of world!”

  7

  Rutledge calmed her down as best he could, asking her if she’d like him to summon Dr. Hawkins.

  But Susannah shook her head. “No. I don’t need a doctor, I need a little peace, and if you’d only go back to London and leave us as we were, I’d be able to forget.”

  “You said that Rosamund might have killed herself. Did you mean that metaphorically, in the sense that she killed herself with worry or ignored her own health, didn’t take proper care, that sort of thing? Or that she took her own life, deliberately and knowingly?”

  “She died of an overdose of laudanum. Dr. Penrith said it was a mistake, that in the night she’d accidently miscounted the drops she was supposed to take. But I was afraid her strength had run out. Her laughter. I was afraid that she was tired of facing the next morning, and the next night. She was afraid to marry again, even though there were any number of men who would have been glad to have her. She said she’d buried the last man she loved, she would never do it again, that there wasn’t enough left of her heart to put into another grave. Her solicitor, Mr. Chambers, was rather like James Cheney, strong, steady, a good man. I thought she was fond of him, and most certainly he cared for her. But it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t…”

  Susannah took a deep breath. “I can’t talk about it any more! Daniel is downstairs, he’ll have fits if he sees me so upset. Daniel would do anything to make me happy. It isn’t fair to worry him like this.” She asked to use the water and his basin to wash her face, and he went to find the linen cupboard in the passage outside his room, to bring towels for her. She thanked him, looked searchingly in the mirror when she’d finished, and said, “Will you give me your arm down the stairs? I don’t mind going up them, but since Stephen’s- since then, I’ve had a thing about coming down them. About falling. I dream about it, sometimes. My foot slipping, the weight of the baby…” She shivered.

  “You were all outside when he fell?”

  “Yes, impatient, in a hurry, not thinking about his foot. I remember saying to Rachel that Stephen could be so tiresome at times. All this bother just for some old books he wanted to find. As if he couldn’t come back anytime for them! And then Cormac went inside, shouted to us to come at once, and it was already too late. I felt so ill I thought I might miscarry!”

  He took her down the stairs, and she leaned heavily on his arm, as if clinging to life itself. But once in the passage outside the bar, she smoothed her skirts, gave him a relieved smile, and walked with absolute assurance through the door to where her husband was waiting.

  Daniel had some remarks of his own to make about Rut-ledge’s presence in Borcombe, hinting darkly at the Government having ignored Olivia until it was too late, and now wanting to seem efficient and solicitous.

  “It’s a nasty business, Inspector, to destroy a family for political gain!”

  Rutledge let him have his say, and finally they left in a new motorcar, murmuring something about friends in the next town who would be waiting upon them for dinner. Over her shoulder, Susannah gave him a last pleading glance before turning to answer some question her husband had put to her.

  It was very late, and Rutledge, unable to sleep, finally got up and dressed and let himself out of the inn in the darkness of a fading moon, his pockets filled with candles and matches from his room.

  He tramped through the silent streets, where not even a dog roused up to bark at him, but there was an owl in the darker woods who spoke softly as he passed. Death omens, owls had been called, but he’d always found a strange comfort in their lonely sounds.

  There was no light in the house, no indication that Cormac was in residence. Deep in his own thoughts and problems, Rutledge hadn’t considered that impediment. But somehow he knew that the house was empty the instant he put his hand on the latch and turned the key. Stepping inside and closing the door behind him, he fumbled for a candle and the matches. It flared brightly, startling him-in the trenches it could bring a sniper’s bullet in its wake-but he managed not to drop it. Hamish
, grumbling with dislike, waited until he’d lighted the candle and said, “Try the library first. Not the study. She’d not keep them there.”

  But Rutledge knew that the study was where he was heading, and he climbed the stairs slowly, quietly, to walk along the gallery and stop for a moment to listen to whispers that seemed to follow him. It was only the sea, and he recognized it at once, but a shiver passed through him all the same. He thought of Rachel and her ghosts. What was there in this house that had marked it so strongly?

  He opened the study door and was surprised that the moonlight poured so intently through the room’s windows. No one had closed the curtains here, and he stopped to count back. Yes, there must have been a full moon on that Saturday night. Olivia and Nicholas could well have died in its light, for it would have poured through these windows like a silver sea.

  Hamish, unsettled and arguing fiercely with Rutledge, blotted out the sounds of the waves coming in against the headland. But they were there, an undercurrent that somehow soothed. As if the vastness of the sea dwarfed human griefs and sorrows and pain.

  Who had been the first to die? he wondered again, looking at the couch in the candle’s faint glow. The man or the woman? The killer or the victim? Or were they both-somehow-victims?

  After a time he went over to the bookshelves by the typewriter and looked through the volumes there. Surely the others had had their own copies, they wouldn’t have needed to take hers?

  The candle’s light moved along the shelves, stirred by his breath. And there on the spine of a slim dark blue book were letters that gleamed like molten gold: Wings of Fire. He pulled it out, then began his search again. A wine-dark volume, like blood in this shadowy corner, and written in silver: Lucifer. The one his sister Frances had said set London on its ear. Trust her to know what Society felt about the new, the different, the timely.

  Soon afterward he found Light and Dark, then The Scent of Violets. And when he’d nearly given up, Shadows.

  The candle was dripping hot wax on his fingers. He swore, collected his booty, and stood up. Something seemed to move in the darkness, and in its wake stirred a faint scent of sandalwood and roses. He froze, but it was only the silk shawl over Olivia Marlowe’s typewriter, disturbed by his movements, slipping softly off the cold metal and brushing his arm.