Wings of Fire ir-2

by Charles Todd

  19

  It was nearly four in the afternoon when Rachel left the cottage and crossed the road to the rectory, disappearing into the house when the liverish housekeeper opened the door. Rutledge, lying in wait in the small wood from which he could see the cottage quite clearly, gave her a full minute in case the call was a short one, then strode quickly to the gate that shut the cottage walk off from the village street.

  The woman who opened the door to his knock was elderly, but not, he thought, as old as she appeared to be. From the yellow of her eyes, he could see that she’d had malaria more than once, and still paid dearly for her years in Africa. It was not a continent that was kind to European women.

  Startled to see him, she said, “Miss Rachel’s just gone over to visit Rector” Her voice held a degree of reserve, and no Cornish accent.

  “I know. I wanted to speak to you, if I may. Mrs. Otley, is it? I understand that your mother was nanny at the Hall.”

  She let him in, and the room itself reflected the odd life she’d lived. There was the coziness of chintz, embroidered cushions, and a worn Axminster carpet. A Zulu shield hung cheek by jowl with a crossed pair of long, deadly spears on the wall, next to a print of the King and Queen in a wooden frame, and a hand-lettered certificate stating that Mary Pol-worth Otley had crossed the Equator on the ship Ramses. The chair she pointed out to him wore a fine fringe of pale cream dog hairs. Resigning himself to collecting them on his clothing, Rutledge wondered where the dog was. It came trundling in, a fat puppy that sniffed his trousers and then tried to tear his shoelaces out by the roots. Mrs. Otley, referring to it as Rhodes, shooed it away and sat down, her face solemn.

  “What was it you wanted to see me about, sir? If you’re here to ask questions about Miss Rachel-”

  “No. I was more interested in your mother’s work at the Hall. Did she talk about the family very often?”

  “To me? No, sir. She adored Miss Rosamund, you could see that, and was very fond of the children at the Hall, but she wasn’t one to make comparisons. And she treated their business as theirs, and mine as mine.”

  Which was certainly to her credit. “Did you play with the Trevelyan children?”

  “No, sir, I was far older than any of them. I did lend a hand in the nursery from time to time, when there was sickness or company coming. It helped me, when I was out in Africa teaching little ones.”

  “Were you there when Anne Marlowe fell out of a tree in the orchard? Or when young Richard was lost on the moors?”

  “No, I was away at school. I wanted more than anything to be a governess, and Miss Rosamund was kind enough to take an interest in me. She sent me to Miss Kitchener’s Academy in Kent.” A rueful smile moved quietly across her face. “Then in my first position as governess, I met Edwin, just back from Africa and a widower. He was a fiery man, full of God and grand ideas. I became the third Mrs. Otley, but this time it was Edwin who was buried in Africa, not his wife. I came home a widow and childless. I worked in a slum school in London for a time, telling myself it was best for me to stay busy in the church. But it wasn’t. I hadn’t had a calling, you see. Only Edwin’s dream, second hand.”

  He could hear the sense of grief, not for her husband or herself but for the waste of her life on something she hadn’t believed in.

  And then as if she’d picked up his earlier conclusion, she said, “Africa’s hard on women. That’s why I persuaded Miss Rachel not to follow Peter Ashford to Kenya. She was all for going. She’d have been left out there a widow, if she hadn’t listened. And-and for many reasons I was right.”

  He wondered if Mary Otley knew-or guessed-about Rachel’s feelings for Nicholas. He asked a few more questions that took him nowhere, then stood to go.

  Rhodes, caught napping, leaped to his own feet before he was quite awake and scrambled to the attack. Rutledge sidestepped smoothly, and the little dog skidded to a halt by the chair, taking on its already well-chewed skirts instead.

  But Mrs. Otley, looking up at Rutledge and ignoring the dog as if used to mock battles, said, “Of course I was back here in Borcombe when Nicholas nearly died. If that’s any help to you, sir. I wouldn’t want Miss Rachel to know of it, but she tells me you’ve an interest in such happenings at the Hail, and I wouldn’t want to be remiss in my duty. But if it serves no purpose, I’d as soon have it left a secret. If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Secret?” Rutledge repeated, as unprepared as Rhodes for the sudden shift in direction.

  “Yes, it was kept very quiet at the time. No one wanted it talked about, but I suppose it doesn’t do any harm now, if you’re interested in the family’s history, as they say in the village you are. Though God knows why. They were always perfectly respectable people up at the Hall.”

  “Tell me.” He spoke more sharply than he’d intended.

  “There isn’t much to tell, actually. He was coming home to the Hall, late one night, Mr. Nicholas. He’d been visiting the rector-this was well before the war, oh, 1907 or thereabouts, and there’d had been rumors at the time about Mr. Nicholas leaving soon to see some of the ships being built up on Clyde Bank, in Scotland. Those liners everyone was talking about, and the prize for the Atlantic crossing speed record. Young Stephen told me he’d overheard Mr. Cormac saying he’d look into finding a place for Mr. Nicholas in one of the fleets, if he was interested. But I don’t know if that’s true or not, nothing came of it. At any rate, on the way home from Rector’s, Mr. Nicholas was stabbed by some drunkard. Too drunk to know what he was about, thank God, because the knife missed Mr. Nicholas’ heart and took a long slash out of his ribs instead. Dr. Penrith sewed him up, ordered him to stay in his own bed and not go wandering off to London or Scotland or anywhere else, and that was the end of that. I don’t think anyone knew about it except Miss Olivia and the doctor, and of course me, because the poor man dragged himself to my door when he couldn’t make it through the wood and up the hill to the Hall.”

  “And the drunkard?”

  “Oh, he was long gone away by the time Miss Olivia took some of the grooms out to hunt for him. She told them only that the man’d been making a nuisance of himself on the drive. I daresay he fled the minute he’d seen what he’d done. Drunk or not, he’d have known there’d be a hue and cry over it.”

  “And Rachel never knew?”

  “She was away, and Miss Olivia said she’d be here in a flash, worrying herself to death, and to no good purpose. I agreed, and never said a word to anyone. Mr. Nicholas ran a fever for a day or two, then began to heal. It wasn’t as if Miss Rachel was needed to help nurse him.”

  “Did Nicholas get a good look at his assailant?”

  “He said he was too rattled at the time to take much notice, except that the man was tall and thin and dressed poorly. Which was very unlike him, to my mind. Not one to lose his nerve, Mr. Nicholas. But men are strange sometimes, when it comes to pride. He wouldn’t have a fuss made over it. Someone dragged up before the magistrate for the attack, everyone talking-”

  Rutledge agreed with her first comment. Nicholas-raided?

  He thought it was much more likely that Nicholas knew exactly who had attacked him, and didn’t want to say…

  And could that explain the gold watch fob in the small collection in Olivia’s closet? Had she tried to stop him from leaving her and the Hall?

  He asked Mrs. Otley not to mention the matter to Rachel or anyone else for the time being, and left the house before Rhodes had finished trouncing the chair skirt and recollected his shoelaces.

  Rutledge went off through the woods, not ready to return to the inn, restless with the complexities of the evidence in front of him, needing the physical exercise to clear away the temptations offered, to absolve Olivia of blame. It was still there, deep inside, although he knew it was wrong, a muddle of emotions from the war, from his loss of Jean, his insecurities, the persistent fear he might still be unready to do his job properly.

  Olivia’s poetry had been an anchor for many men. Why h
adn’t the woman herself lived up to the talent she’d been given?

  He crossed the lawns of the Hall, noticing in the afternoon light that the house seemed to have changed since he came to Borcombe. Once it had seemed warmly welcoming, then haunted and alive with pain. Now-it was odd, but he could sense it strongly-there was merely emptiness. As if the occupants, man or ghost, had given up on the living and gone away. But it had only been a trick of the light, he told himself, that had once made the house seem to him so vital. And the fineness of the architecture, which led the senses astray.

  He made himself remember instead the house that he’d just visited, the Beatons’ Victorian deception. A house without a soul, his father would have called it, because it had been built to reflect a passion, not as a thing in and of itself. The ghosts there would be just as fraudulent, wanting to be noticed as part of the decor, wandering in the turrets and along the battlements like figments of the style, not as figments of reality.

  He smiled at the fanciful thought.

  For a time he stood down by the shore, near the rocks where Brian FitzHugh had died. Watching the sea come in, listening to Hamish reminding him that what you wanted was not to be considered as proper evidence.

  “And ye’re missing something, man! Ye’re wrapped up in your feelings, because that woman made sense of the war for you, and sense of love, and blinded you with her bonny words. Use your head! Ye’ll no’ find yon murderer in the sea, nor in the answers people gie you. And ye’ll no’ find it in Rachel Marlowe’s memory, mark my words. Ye’ll find it in black and white, or gie it all up for good!”

  ‘‘What about the clothes on the moor?” he asked, as gulls called overhead, blotting out the sound of his voice.

  “Someone stripped the lad. That’s what it means. And why strip a corpse? To keep him from being identified.”

  “No, they’d know, God help them, who the boy was. It was done for another reason. Not to prevent identification, but to confuse.”

  “Confuse! D’ye no’ think that the mother of that child would know his flesh? Clothed or bare, rotting or whole, she’d know!”

  “And if they found the clothes but not the boy-”

  “She’d know those as well!”

  Rutledge sighed. “True. So why strip the boy? Then bury the clothes in an oiled sack or cloth? Making them last as long as possible, rather than letting them rot. You’d think the sooner they rotted the better, as far as the killer was concerned. All right, who stripped the body? If I had the answer to that, I’d know the whole. And why the poem about the pansies? Pansies for remembrance. I don’t think anyone was likely to forget that wretched child!”

  Nicholas or Olivia. That was his choice. Break Rachel’s heart-or wound his own by taking away that one small thing Olivia’s poetry had given him, a little space of comfort in a bloody terrible war.

  He skimmed a few stones across the incoming tide, watching them skip and dance. Just as his evidence seemed to skip and dance. From one suspect to the other. And yet he knew, as strongly as he knew where he was standing at this instant, that it was not the two of them. Not working together. It had to be one-or the other. And he knew-God help him-he knew which.

  Walking back to the wood, he saw the old woman by the trees, standing there staring up at the house, looking for something in its shadows, needing something it could no longer give. Sadie, whose mind wandered but whose brain understood more than she was telling him. He was convinced of that. Or else, it was something she didn’t know that she knew She turned to stare at him as he came over the rise of the lawns and turned towards her. He thought at first she was going to leave before he reached her, disappearing so as not to be faced with more seemingly useless questions. But after a twitch of indecision she stayed her ground.

  “A fine evening, isn’t it?” he asked, trying to test her mental stability, as always. “Who’s strolling on the lawns today? Which spirits do you see?”

  “I see Miss Rosamund weeping. I see the Gabriel hounds sniffing around the chimneys, their big feet pattering on the roof like hailstones. Sniffing, looking, searching. They’ll howl in the night, once they’ve scented prey. I’ll be snug in my own hearth corner when they howl.”

  The Gabriel hounds. Her favorite theme when her mind was disturbed. He said, “Did you see the hounds when the Light Brigade charged? Did you hear them howling and racing across the field with the guns?”

  “I wasn’t there, was I? I was back in hospital, waiting for the dying. But I heard them howling. Heathen, they were, those Russians, no better than the Turks. Bloody heathen, with nothing to lose, having no souls.”

  “No souls? I thought the Turks went to Paradise if they died in battle?”

  “Paradise? Pshaw! A place of pools and cool water, with dancing girls no better than they ought to be, and wine to soak the brain in forgetfulness? I don’t call that much of a reward for the faithful. Endless whoring and sinfulness, that’s what it means. But fit for hounds. They know no better!”

  He said, “Who are the hounds of Gabriel here? At Tre-velyan Hall?”

  “The same as the others,” she said, looking away from the Hall to study his face. “Heathen.”

  “Protestant? Catholic?”

  “Neither, and that’s the point, now, isn’t it? An unbaptized soul, with nothing but evil filling it. Darkness, not light.”

  Rutledge thought for a long moment. Olivia and Anne were twins. Was Sadie trying to tell him that one of them hadn’t been properly baptized? That with two babies screaming bloody murder by the baptismal font, one had been baptized twice and the other not at all?

  He said, “Was Olivia baptized? Was Anne?”

  She looked at him as if he’d run mad. “Do you think Miss Rosamund would allow it otherwise? Of course they were. I was there, I watched the babes handed to the old rector one at a time. There was blue ribbon on Miss Olivia’s christening gown, and pale green on Miss Anne’s. To be sure ‘twas all done properly!”

  Green ribbon… a christening gown? No, he couldn’t quite see that…

  “Who burned some small personal belongings in a fire, just above the gardens? Beyond the headland, where the blaze couldn’t be seen from the village?”

  “What fire?”

  “Oh, come now!” Inspiration struck. “The rags you wanted, the rags that’d been promised to you by Miss Olivia. Someone used them instead to keep a fire going, because there were a number of things he-or she-wanted to burn well. A leather notebook. A leather picture frame with silver corners. A pile of letters, perhaps. Who was it who wanted such possessions destroyed?”

  “It weren’t Mr. Cormac!” she said briskly. “Nor Miss Rachel. I’d have known. It could have been Mr. Nicholas. I don’t know why he’d go there in the dark to burn them, but I know it might have been him that did it, because of what I saw.”

  “What did you see?” He kept his voice low, gentle. Curious, but not probing.

  “I saw him with pails, going down to the sea to fill them with water. And then he set them up on the headland. Left them there. And walked back into the house with empty hands.”

  Nicholas.

  “Was this the night they died? Olivia and Nicholas?”

  “No,’twas the night before. I was in the wood, looking for roots while the moon was near full. I watched him for a time because my back hurt, and it felt better to straighten it. So I stood there, and wondered what he was about. And then I knew.”

  “Knew? Knew what?”

  “He was putting water out for the hounds to drink. Because he knew they were coming.”

  He felt a coldness between his shoulders. As if something evil had come up behind him and laid a hand on his back.

  “Do the Gabriel hounds have a human face? Have you ever seen it?”

  “I told you. Miss Olivia warned me to have naught to do with them!”

  “Yes, I understand that. But Miss Olivia is dead. I think the hounds killed her. I think now she’d want you to be the one to tell me his name. O
r how he looked. I think it’s time to make them pay for the harm they’ve done.”

  She shook her head. “You can’t make the hounds pay for killing. It’s in their nature. It’s part of their blood. Like the Turks.”

  “Was Mr. Nicholas baptized?”

  “Aye, at the Hall, because he was sickly at first. Jaundice. And there was a storm coming that promised to be a bad one. Miss Rosamund said she’d not risk him driving in the carriage, nor in the drafty church. Truth to tell, he was better within the week, but she insisted, and the old rector came to the Hall.”

  Did a baptism in the Hall count for less in her eyes than one in the church? She was leading him round in circles.

  But Hamish, Highland bred, understood better what was being said, and rumbled with uneasiness beneath the surface of his mind.

  “The face of the hounds. You said you could tell me, now that Miss Olivia is dead.” Rutledge added, “Safely dead.”

  Her eyes were clouding over, and she said querulously,

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  After a time he left her there, and walked back to the village. On impulse he stopped at the church. The heavy west door was locked, but the smaller one in the porch was not. He lifted the latch and walked inside. There was a chill in the place, the stone cold as death. He stood for a moment looking at the architecture, the style of the arches, the strength of the pillars, the tall nave that bowed before a shorter, older choir. It was a very fine church, but not distinguished. Its proportions made it fall just short of perfection. The carvings, unlike the angel in the churchyard, were heavier, earthier, more formidable and less delicate, like some of those he’d seen in Normandy.

  He walked down the central aisle, looking back over his shoulder at the Victorian organ in the loft, then towards the stone altar that was rather handsomely carved, as if it had come from an old monastery. The choir was plain, the stalls of dark oak, and off to its left was an octagonal chapel dedicated to the Trevelyan family dead.

  There was a knight in the far shadows, old and worn, and memorials set into the walls for the dead lying in the crypt below. A very beautiful marble sarcophagus, made for two, held the remains of Rosamund Trevelyan’s parents. Weeping figures at each corner, veiled and bent, must have been carved to represent earthly mourning. Above the tomb, where the arches entwined in perpendicular harmony, a cherub with a trumpet floated among voluptuous robes. To one side was a smaller tomb carved from what appeared to be a solid block of alabaster, with a delicate tracery of flowers and birds more like a wedding bower than a place of burial. A figure on the top was barely visible in its shroud, the body seeming to melt into the marble earth almost as it touched. But at the head, the shroud was opened to show a woman’s features with curling strands of hair escaping to frame them, as if holding back death. It was Rosamund, he realized as he looked down into her face.