Wings of Fire

by Charles Todd

  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.

  Laughing to himself at his own susceptibility, he who had lived among the dead in France, he pulled the shawl gently back into place and went out of the room, closing its door behind him.

  The gallery was quiet and empty, the hall as well. There were no ghosts here. And yet—there was something that stirred Hamish into Scottish complaint again.

  Ignoring him, Rutledge went down the stairs, blew out his candle, and opened the door into the soft darkness beyond.

  Where something stood in the drive like a being out of hell and regarded him with a stillness that made Hamish yell out a warning.

  Rutledge, accustomed to night forays into no man’s land where the danger was much more real and often silently swift, held his ground and said, “What is it you want?” But he could feel his heart thudding from the surprise.

  The rector said, “It’s you, then, Inspector?”

  “What the hell?”

  Mr. Smedley lowered the blanket he’d thrown over his nightclothes and head and said, “I saw lights moving about in the Hall. I didn’t stop to dress, I came at once. I wanted to know who or what was walking about here! Was it you? Or are you here on the same errand? I’d been told that Mr. FitzHugh had decided not to stay at the Hall after all. I thought it was still quite empty!”

  “I came for some books,” Rutledge said, hearing the defensive note in his own voice. “I thought they might help me in my understanding of the poet.”

  “Ah, yes. The poems.” He sighed. “Come back to the rectory with me, man, and we’ll sit down like decent Christian folk, in good light.”

  Rutledge chuckled, locked the door, and followed him down the drive. “You’re a brave man to come looking for intruders in an empty house,” he said, catching up.

  “Pshaw!” Smedley answered. “I’m not afraid of anything the human mind can conceive! One recognizes the face of evil in my profession, just as you do in yours. But you’ll notice that I did not walk into the house, and I came armed.” From the folds of his blanket he produced a very businesslike heavy iron poker that gleamed darkly in the pale light of the moon.

  “What happened to turning the other cheek?” Rutledge asked, amused.

  Smedley laughed. The shadows of the copse fell over them. “It’s all very well in its place, you understand, but I don’t believe our Lord intended for us to turn the other cheek to criminals. After all, he threw the moneylenders out of the temple.”

  “And you believed that there was a criminal in the Hall tonight?”

  “I most certainly didn’t expect to find Scotland Yard creeping about the premises. But the house has much that’s valuable in it, and we have our share of tramps and good-for- naughts coming around. The saddest are the men who can’t find work and have too much pride to beg. We’ve done what we could as a parish, but I don’t think I could fault a man who was desperate enough to steal for his family’s table. Not
to condone it, you perceive, but to understand what needs drive him.”

  “You have an unusual Christian charity.”

  “Well, I didn’t enter the Church for sake of my pocket, but because I have a hunger in my own soul.”

  “And has it been satisfied?”

  “Ah, yes. It has. Though I must admit that the perplexities have multiplied more than I’d expected. Find one answer, and open the door to a hundred more questions. Now, if you please, we’ll walk silently here. Old Mrs. Treleth has a small dog that takes great pleasure in keeping her neighbors awake, if he can pounce on the smallest noise as an excuse.”

  They walked quietly out of the wood, down the lane to the main road, and then turned towards the church. Mrs. Treleth’s dog continued to slumber.

  By the rectory gate, Rutledge said, “I’ve disturbed your sleep enough for one night, I’ll go along to the inn.”

  “Indeed, I’m wide awake, and you’ll pay for it with your company!” Smedley said lightly. “Come along quietly, you’d not be any happier than I if we wake my housekeeper. She’s worse than the little dog, God forgive me!”

  They made their way to his study with a minimum of noise, and the rector said, pulling his blanket more closely around him, “As I’m not dressed for the church, I feel no qualms about a wee dram of something—shall we say— strengthening? As a Devon man, may I offer you a cup of our finest cider?” There was a gleam in his eye.

  Rutledge said, straight-faced, “I’d be delighted.”

  Devon cider could kick like a team of army mules, deceptively smooth on its way down, and building a fire in the belly that was unexpectedly hard on the head. He’d had Calvados in Normandy that did the same, and wondered if the two had common roots.

  Smedley returned with two tall cups and a cold jug. He set them on the table between his chair and Rutledge’s, and said, “You can put those books down, I’m not here to wrestle your soul for them. As a matter of fact, I have copies of my own. Your midnight foray was unnecessary.”

  “Ah, but I would have had to ask for them,” Rutledge said with an answering grin. “And I preferred not to do that. To draw more attention to this investigation than it’s already created.”

  “So it’s an investigation now?”

  “No,” Rutledge said shortly. “I’m still ... considering the options.”

  Smedley quietly chuckled, acknowledging that he’d touched Rutledge on the raw, and handed him his cup. Then his face changed, and as he pulled the blanket around him more comfortably, he said, “Well, I don’t know any answers. It’s between you and your conscience, when you find yours.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Smedley shrugged. “We must all decide how to use the knowledge we collect in life. In my work and in yours as well, I’m sure, there are painful decisions to be made. And painful choices. They’re never really the same, are they? Decisions and choices. Why did you suddenly want the books?”

  “Because when I came down to Cornwall, I didn’t know that one of the victims was O. A. Manning. Only that a woman named Olivia Marlowe was dead. Now I think the poems must have some bearing on her life, if not her death. I’d like to—understand—both women, if I can.”

  “Have you read them before? The poems?”

  “Oh, yes. I read Scent of Violets at the Front. My sister sent me a copy. It frightened me, in a way. That someone else saw and felt the things that haunted me and I never had the courage to write about even in letters home.” He couldn’t have said to Jean or to his sister for that matter, worldly as Frances was, what it was like to live in the nightmare of war. His letters had been light, giving a superficial account of suffering, and not the bedrock. He thought Frances had guessed.

  But Jean had preferred the lies .. .

  Hamish stirred but said nothing about Fiona.

  “And Wings of Fire? Have you read that?”

  “They’re extraordinarily moving, those poems. Where did Olivia Marlowe, spinster of this parish, learn so much about love?”

  “A question I’ve asked myself over and over again. Cor-mac was the only man she saw much of who wasn’t a part of the family. I know, Stephen claimed that she’d taken her fondness for him and extended it to the experience between a man and a woman. It may be true—she was capable of that leap of understanding, if anyone was. And Stephen was the kind of child—the kind of man—who endeared himself to everyone. I’ve forgiven him sins that I’d have turned another lad over my knee for committing. Told myself he was fatherless, and young, and meant no harm. But I loved the boy as I’d have loved my own son, for the goodness in him, and the light. He was very like Rosamund, and I know my own weakness in that direction too.” He frowned. “Perhaps that’s what Olivia saw in him. Rosamund.”

  He sat in silence, drinking from his cup, and letting the sounds of the house creak and breathe and whisper around them. Comforting sounds. Then he said, “And the last collection, the Lucifer poems? Have you read those?”

  “Not yet.” He’d been in hospital when they came out last year.

  “It’s a very interesting study of the face of evil. Olivia understood that, just as well as she understood love and war and the warmth of life. As a priest I found it ... disturbing. That she should know the dark side of man so much better than I. That she should believe that God tolerated evil because it has its place in His scheme. That there are some who are not capable of goodness in any sense. The lost, the damned, the sons of Satan, whatever you choose to call them, exist among us, and cannot be saved because they don’t have the capacity for recognizing the purpose of good. As if it had been left out of the clay from which they were formed.”

  Rutledge thought about a number of the cases he’d worked on before the war. And some of the acts of sheer wanton viciousness that he’d witnessed in France. He believed in evil, and in the capacity of man to be evil. In a sense, evil paid his wages. He wasn’t as sure as Smedley was that everyone had a capacity for good.

  Smedley drained his cup. “I’d not like to think that Olivia Marlowe knew such a being as she describes. Actually knew him. I’d not like to think that I’d met him, on the streets of Borcombe or along the farm lanes or in one of the towns on market day. I would have trouble with that.”

  Rutledge finished his cup as well, and felt his head beginning to spin. He had a hard head for liquor, but cider could leap out of the jug at you, when you were tired and unsettled and had an empty stomach. “You don’t think Olivia herself was capable of such evil?”

  Smedley stared at him. “You must lead a drearier, more despairing life in London than most of us can comprehend,” he said, “to ask me that! But I won’t answer you directly, I’ll tell you to read the poems yourself. And then decide.”

  He stood up, gathering the blanket about his burly shoulders. “I think I can sleep, now,” he added, “and I’ll be surprised if you don’t as well. Leave the books until morning. You’ll be glad of that advice, believe me.”

  Rutledge took the advice along with the books, went home to bed and fell asleep almost at once. He wondered, on the brink of sliding into the depths, if he’d have one hell of a headache tomorrow ...

  He did. But whether it was cider or lack of sleep that pounded through his skull, he wasn’t sure. Breakfast and several cups of the inn’s violent black coffee seemed to help. He realized that it was Sunday morning, and that the village of Borcombe was on its way to church services or a day of leisure.

  Suddenly Rutledge didn’t care about murder or the poems or about the job he’d been sent to do.

  He sent a note by the boot boy to Rachel Ashford. Although he himself had no idea where she was staying, he trusted to the village intelligence system that worked more swiftly and more thoroughly than anything the Allies had devised during the war. The boy said instantly he knew where she could be found, and pocketing the coin Rutledge had given him, he set off at a trot.

  Ten minutes later he was back with a reply, and had pocketed his third coin of t
he morning. Two from the London gentleman and one from the lady.

  Rutledge opened the envelope and read the brief lines at the bottom of his own scrawled request.

  “I’d love to sail. I’ll join you in twenty minutes. Ask the innkeeper if we might use his boat. I know where it’s kept.”

  So he went in search of the innkeeper, and received permission to take out the Saucy Belle with Mrs. Ashford. Although he hadn’t sailed since before the war, Rutledge had some experience and thought—correctly—that Rachel might have more.

  She came to the inn wearing sensible shoes and a pair of what looked like men’s tousers, cinched tightly at the waist with an oversized belt. Her eyes smiled as he looked at her, but she made no explanation, whether these were Peter’s clothes or borrowed from someone else. They walked together down the road towards the sea and the small assortment of boats there. Rutledge had a basket over his arm, courtesy of The Three Bells and a generous bribe to the cook. Rachel said after a moment, “You’ve more foresight than I have. I was so glad of the invitation to sail, I didn’t think of food. Or is that a man’s thing? Peter was remarkably good at foraging; he said he’d learned it young.”

  Rutledge laughed. “He was always hungry at school. I never knew anyone so good at scrounging. His mother sent him generous boxes—tins of canned goods and packages of cakes and biscuits. The Scottish shortbreads usually lasted the longest. I remember they sometimes took the taste of the woolens in his trunk, but we never minded that. When they were finished, we were desolate, until he’d convinced some other boy to share hidden rations.”

  They had reached the overturned boats on a small shingle strand that was just above the reach of the tides. “That’s the Belle,” she said, pointing to a red dinghy that looked as if it could use a fresh coat of paint and perhaps more than a little caulking.