Wings of Fire (17 page)

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…

“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 Borcombe 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.

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 in
fluenced 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 façade 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 her. 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 I 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 carriages, while she and James and Cormac 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…”