Wings of Fire ir-2

by Charles Todd

  “I thought those had been searched.”

  “Yes, of course they have. But a boy that age is small. He could crawl where a man can’t go. You could walk by him a thousand times over and never realize it. Predators carry off small bones-birds and animals could have taken his remains anywhere. Dawlish should have explained all that.”

  “Nevertheless, I’m going to continue. Until I find him.”

  Silence ruled until they were nearly back in the village again. Rutledge, remembering a case he’d handled before the war, asked, “How long before the flesh rotted off a child’s body and you could move the bones? Or crush them beyond recognition, before scattering them?” It was worth considering-a husband had nearly gotten away with murdering his wife, experimenting with temporary burial and a very permanent exhumation.

  Turning to look at him, Hawkins nearly skidded in a puddle, then swore again and straightened the wheel in time. “You’re mad, d’you know that? Stark, staring mad!”

  He turned in at his gate without another word.

  Morning dawned fair, though cooler after the rains, as if summer’s heat had been washed away. The first task Rutledge set himself was to search the churchyard for flowers growing there.

  In his experience, English churchyards, unlike those he’d seen in Europe, were seldom planted with flowers. Along the walls, sometimes, or by the path to the front door of the church. Occasionally by the gates. But not on or around the graves themselves or close to the headstones. The English still preferred their yews as funereal offerings. These had first been set out in churchyards in the days of the long bow, as a source of raw materials, and become a habit. Their shape and somber dark green seemed to suit the mood and the gravity of the place better than a riot of color.

  Flowers were more acceptable in tall vases inside the church. Rutledge could remember as a small boy going with his mother to do the altar flowers when it was her turn. He’d sat on the cold stone floor, running his fingers in the deep crevices of the memorial brasses that held place of honor down the aisle, until he knew the shapes by heart. A knight with plumes and sword and handsome spurs. A lady in a conical hat, the sweep of her long, embroidered robes nearly hiding the little dog near the hem. And an elegantly bearded Elizabethan gentleman with padded breeches and coat, looking more like a portly merchant than the adventurer he had been.

  He walked slowly through the gravestones in the churchyard, some of them tilted with age and so mossy he could barely make out the words incised on them. Others he recognized at a glance-Trepol and Trask, Wilkins and Penrith, Dawlish and Trelawny. There were Poldarins and a Hawkins, a half-dozen Raleighs, though none later than the seventeen hundreds, and a pair of Drakes.

  But no pansies. He walked on, looking at the delicately drawn Celtic cross on one gravestone, the sad lines of verse on another for a small child drowned in the Bor, an open book with a ribbon marking its stone pages, any numbers of “Beloved wife” and “Beloved husband.” War dead and plague dead, and a very fine stone angel on a plinth with the legend below it, “In Memory of the Men of the Mary Anne, Lost at Sea in a Storm, October 23, 1847. Eternal Father, Keep Their Souls Safe in Thy Care.” And a list of the names, twenty-seven of them.

  It was surely Richard’s angel, the cool marble cheeks turned slightly so that the serene eyes stared unwaveringly towards the church tower for all eternity. There was both compassion and strength in the body, power in the wings. He could see why it had made an indelible impression on a small boy who passed the statue each Sunday morning on his way to services.

  A voice behind him said, “Lovely, isn’t it? The village took up a subscription to have it carved in London. The Trev-elyans sent an anonymous donation to help make it up to the amount required, in addition to the sum they’d given openly. It was the sort of thing they did.”

  It was Smedley, dressed in a dark suit of clothes, not the rough corduroys of the gardener. Over the wet grass his shoes had made no sound.

  “I saw you here and wondered if you were searching for a place to lay the sheep bones to rest,” he went on. But there was a sympathetic gleam in his eyes that took away any sting. “I doubt there’s a soul in the village who hasn’t heard.”

  “Yes, well, they never seem to know what I want to hear,” Rutledge said irritably. “Only what I’m doing.”

  “You’d be surprised. They seem to think you’re on the trail of a murderer. They’re wondering-among themselves, not to your face-if that terrible man doing the killings in London might be a Borcombe man. They’ve gone through the lists of who lived here once, and who moved away. Failing that, someone who’d passed through. It’s the only explanation they can come up with for a Scotland Yard inspector wasting his time on two suicides and an accident when half London is in absolute terror thinking the other half is about to cut him to ribbons.”

  Astonished, Rutledge found himself speechless. Hamish, quick to point out the fact that Rutledge might well be more useful there, was not.

  Smedley lifted his shoulders deprecatingly. “The newspaper yesterday morning reported that someone named Bowles was quoted as saying that all available manpower had been diverted to the killings. Do you know him?”

  “Yes,” Rutledge answered curtly. “The truth is, I was sent down here to keep me out of the picture. Not to run any leads to earth.”

  “That reassures me,” Smedley answered, and there was something in his voice that made Rutledge look more closely at him. “All this fuss over the boy, searching for his grave. His body. Proof that he was in fact dead. I don’t know why, I found myself fearful that perhaps he hadn’t perished on the moors, that he’d been taken away and somehow turned into a monster.”

  “You prefer the possibility that someone in his own family might have purposely let him die of exposure?”

  “No.” There was sadness in his voice. “I prefer that he rest in peace, wherever he may be. Alive. Or dead. I don’t want to think of anyone suffering and lost and alone, in need of comfort. Least of all someone I held in my arms and christened. Whose soul is, in a sense, my responsibility. And most certainly not Rosamund’s son.”

  “The murderer in London is very likely mad. What he’s doing is the work of a ruined mind. The murderer I’m searching for isn’t mad. Whatever reasons he-or she-had for killing, there was a reason.”

  Smedley sighed. “I can give one to you. Envy.”

  “Envy?” Rutledge repeated. It wasn’t necessarily his first choice of sins. And often not a murderer’s, either, in his experience.

  “Envy is at the root of many small cruelties. Watch children at play, if you don’t believe me. It’s a natural emotion in them, and they aren’t yet civilized enough to suppress it.”

  A child might kill out of envy… “What could Olivia envy?”

  “Oh, I daresay many things. A whole leg rather than a shriveled one, for starters.”

  “And Nicholas?”

  The rector tilted his head and looked at the angel’s face. “I don’t know that Nicholas ever envied anyone. He was a decisive man, in his way. He made his choices and lived with them.”

  “Then why didn’t he leave the Hall, go away to sea, make a life for himself somewhere else?”

  “Nicholas had an affinity for the sea, that’s true. In another age, he’d have been one of Drake’s sea dogs or Nelson’s captains-or perhaps one of Hakluyt’s geographers. I can see him racing a tea clipper to China and back.”

  All of which demanded daring and skill and personal courage. Not to mention ruthless leadership. Yet he’d let himself be led into suicide Rutledge shook his head. “I’m not any closer to understanding him than I was at the beginning.”

  “You won’t understand Nicholas, trust me there. Have you read the poems?”

  After the briefest hesitation, Rutledge said, “No. Not yet.”

  “Let me give you a word of advice. As a priest.”

  When Rutledge said nothing, Smedley went on. “Be sure your own ghosts don’t infringe on your lo
gical mind-don’t rain havoc on Borcombe in search of your own absolution. If you can’t finish the puzzle that worries you, be man enough to walk away from it while the rest of us can still get on with our lives. This is a very small village, you see, and we don’t have your London sophistication. We shall go on suffering long after you’ve gone away.”

  Watching Smedley walk off across the wet grass, Rutledge was prey to a variety of emotions, and Hamish, relishing the turbulence in his mind, was busy taking advantage of it.

  “Ye’re no’ wanted here,” he said, “and no’ wanted in London as well. I’ve no5 seen anywhere you belong!”

  “That has nothing to do with the Trevelyan family,” Rut-ledge replied coldly. “The rector is right. My work and my life are separate.”

  “Ye’re no’ keeping Olivia Marlowe from getting under your skin!”

  “She’s no different from any suspect! Not to me!”

  “Except that she’s dead,” Hamish reminded him. “Is that why ye’re no’ reading the poems? You read them often enough before, when ye knew she was alive!”

  Rutledge swore and headed for the stone walkway that led from the churchyard to the road. His reasons were his own affair, and none of Hamish’s.

  It was a long and tiring day. He was summoned, twice more, to come to the moors. The first time it was a boy who came to fetch him. The ground he must surely have covered last night seemed very different in the sunlight, brown and green and black and yellow, and not very much like the higher Yorkshire moors he knew so much better. But this too was sour land, that grew grass and reeds in the low-lying damp, and vast stretches of quaking marsh that could become quicksand in the blink of an eye.

  The boy cheerfully threaded his way through a maze of paths and chattered on about the war, wanting to know how many Boche Rutledge had personally (and bloodily) killed, and if he’d ever been wounded himself. They’d reached the subject of aircraft, and whether the Inspector had ever been up in one (he was disappointed when Rutledge said no), and how many flaming crashes he’d personally witnessed, when the first lines of searchers came into sight below a knoll.

  It took them fifteen minutes to find Dawlish, who was on the far right of the line. The constable was not in good spirits. inspector Harvey, returned from Plymouth, had been out there very early to demand an explanation for this business. Inspector Harvey had not caught up with his own suspect, and was in no mood for anyone else’s wild goose chases.

  “Where is Harvey now? I’ll speak to him myself.”

  “As to that, sir, I don’t know. There’s a problem out on one of the farms, somebody’s dog killing sheep, and he had to have a look himself.”

  “What progress have you made here?”

  “More sheep bones and an old dog. They had their heads still, it wasn’t difficult to tell what they were. And we found a man, sir, looked like he must have been a vagabond. Dr. Hawkins has been and gone, and he said it was an old corpse, we could bury it later.”

  “Where?”

  “By those rocks there, about a mile away. One of the men sheltered there to light his cigarette, and he saw something white in the earth. We dug it out, bit by bit, first a hand, then the head. Not very deep, you understand, but that’s the direction the wind blows, and he’d have been covered over in a season or two.”

  Rutledge walked across to see the bones, followed by the boy, whose bloodthirsty spirits were fascinated by the line of human remains laid out next to raw earth under one of the towering rock piles that mark the moor. “That a hand, sir? Where’s the middle finger, then? What’s that? Pelvis? Do I have one of ‘em too? Who et away that rib, do you think? Why’s his jaw over there, and his head here? D’ye think he was murdered, sir? Cor!”

  In fact, there was no indication what had killed the man. No holes in the skull, no signs of damage to any of the bones, no obvious indications of stabbing or a bullet clipping a rib or part of the spine. No crushed vertebrae to show a strangling. But the bones were long and well formed. He’d been tall, with no sign of the thickening that comes with heavy work in an underfed childhood or early diseases like rickets that stunted growth. According to Hawkins, the bones had lain in the earth for no more than seven years.

  “Were he a soldier, d’ye think? Left to die in the thick of the battle, and then forgotten?” the boy asked hopefully.

  Rutledge dug around in the disturbed earth with his pocket knife, looking for remnants of cloth, buttons, coins, or other debris that might have told a clearer tale. If they’d been here, they were gone now.

  A man’s skeleton, not a child’s…

  All the way back to Borcombe, the boy talked of nothing but the bones, and Rutledge was very glad to give him sixpence and see the last of him by the time they reached the road into the village. He was off then, racing to find his friends and make them envious of his good fortune in viewing the skeleton.

  Rutledge ate his lunch alone, the books of poetry beside his plate. He’d tried to approach them in the order in which they’d been published. And he found one short, early poem about the moors. Reading it, he could hear Olivia’s response to the emptiness and the mystery of that barren land. “For here the spirit dies,” she’d written, “and that is more of hell than I can bear.”

  And yet it was possible she’d consigned a small child to that same hell.

  In the afternoon he went back to see Mrs. Trepol, whose reputation as a gardener was sworn to by three women he’d spoken with in the inn’s dining room.

  She was working to straighten the storm-battered stalks of flowers, lupine and asters, marigolds and zinnias. Stakes and strips of old rag lay in the small bucket she carried with her, and in the back of the cottage wash hung on the line, blowing like signal flags.

  Mrs. Trepol looked up, saw that he intended to come through the gate rather than pause for a few words outside it, and said, “Do you mind if I keep working, sir? These turn their heads to the sun soon enough, if they aren’t righted.”

  “It’s about flowers that I came,” he told her as she reached for a tall golden head of marigold, its bruised leaves scenting the air.

  “Aye, sir? And what flowers would you be wanting to know about?” she asked, over the mallet she was using to pound in a stake.

  “Pansies.”

  “Pansies? A spring flower, mostly. Hardy in the cold, not strong in the sun. Look over there, by the rhododendron.”

  He did, and saw the straggling green stalks that flopped across the grass, the small faces lifted to stare at him.

  “They’re twice that size in the spring,” she said, reaching for a length of cloth. “But they come back in the autumn, if all’s well. That’s why I put them in the shadow of the taller bush. A little protection.”

  “Out on the moor, would they need protection?”

  She stopped what she was doing to look at him. “They don’t grow often on the moors. Unless someone sows them there. And that makes no sense. A waste of good plants! But you might find a few at the edge of a wood. Gone wild, you see.”

  Which was an interesting thought.

  “Tell me,” he said slowly, working it out in his mind as he spoke, “do you know if Stephen FitzHugh ever considered becoming a Catholic? Did the family ever discuss his choice of faith?”

  “Not that I know of, sir!” She seemed surprised. “Mr. Brian, now, he was brought up a Catholic, but the children never were. And he went to services with the family regularly, there was no fuss about it that I ever heard. He was a man who wanted to please, not one to set people at odds. But he loved Ireland, and he talked about the country often and often.”

  “In what way? Was he a supporter of the Irish rebellions?”

  “Oh, no, sir, not to my knowledge! Though he used to tease Miss Rosamund that it was a Trevelyan-not her own family, mind!-that refused to provide money for the victims of the potato famine, back in last century, so as they could emigrate to Canada or America. He had a bad name in Ireland, that one, and caused a great many deaths.
Cruel, he was. I heard Mr. Brian say once that his coldheartedness killed as many people as Cromwell and William of Orange put together.”

  “Cormac and Stephen never showed any interest in Irish politics? Sympathy for the rebels? For the suffering there?”

  “No, sir, Mr. Stephen considered himself an Englishman- he said to me that he was going off to war because it was his duty to the King. And Mr. Stephen was one that always took duty seriously. Mr. Cormac, now, he was in the war too, but I never heard he went to France. Miss Olivia told me he was doing something secret, and I shouldn’t ask.” She smiled. “I never could picture him as a spy, sir! Sneaking about and telling lies. Mr. Stephen, now, he’d see all that as a game, like hide and seek. He were-more light-hearted. The kind of man who’d shrug it off and not be touched by it. But Mr. Cormac was always one to mind appearances. Not to the manor born, you might say.”

  Cormac had spent his war breaking codes. Not as exciting as spying. And not as dangerous. But quite as important as shouldering a rifle.

  He left her and went to walk through the wood between the village and the Hall, searching along the muddy path for pansies, then looking in small clearings, before giving it up. This was far too close to the village to risk bringing the body of a small boy and burying him. And Olivia hadn’t said anything about trees in her poem.

  When he was called to the moors the second time, it was a man who came for him, and they trudged in silence to the place where a small cache of clothes had been found. The shreds were small and dirty and rotting with the damp of the earth, but a boy’s clothing. Short jacket-you could see how the collar lay, and one side seam. Short trousers-part of the waistband and a pocket, part of one leg. What might have been a shirt and underdrawers, mere threads of white that fell apart at the touch. The good wool of the jacket and trousers was tougher, and had lasted while the linen and the cotton had disintegrated. And someone had wrapped it all quite carefully in heavily oiled cloth, which had protected the fabric for a very long time. He couldn’t be sure of the colors. But there was enough of the cloth left to draw conclusions about the shape and general size of the outer garments, as he gingerly spread them out on the grass. Interestingly enough, there were no shoes…