Wings of Fire (6 page)

The rector was middle-aged, a man more accustomed—from the look of him—to working in the ground than preaching from a pulpit. He straightened up when he saw Rutledge coming across the strip of lawn between the vegetables and the flowers. “Good afternoon,” he said, neither effusively nor coolly, but with the manner of a man who’d rather be about his own business just now than God’s.

“Inspector Rutledge, from London,” he replied. “Mr. Smedley?”

“Aye, that’s right,” the rector said with a sigh and put down his hoe.

“No, keep working, if you like. I’d prefer to stay out here and talk than go inside.” The housekeeper, if he was any judge, had long ears. “It isn’t a matter for a priest so much as a question of information that I need.”

“Well, then, if you don’t mind?” He picked up his hoe
and began to chip at the weeds between rows of what appeared to be marigolds and asters next to a line of sweet peas.

“I’m here because London has a few remaining questions about several deaths in May. At Trevelyan Hall.”

The rector glanced at him with a smile. “So gossip was right this morning. And you’d hardly set foot in the place.”

“Yes, but the questions I’m about to ask you aren’t for the ears of gossips. Good intentioned or ill. I want to know about the people who died. The woman and the two men. What they were like, how they lived, why they should die, so close together.”

The rector’s back was to Rutledge now, as he turned to come down the other row. “Ah. Well, that’s a long story. Do you know much about the family?”

“About the grandfather who owned the Hall. About the daughter who had three husbands and six children, only one of whom is still living. About the cousin. And about the stepson who lives in London and made his fortune. I could have learned all this from the shopkeepers and the housewives on their way to market. I need more. To satisfy London that all’s well.”

“And why should London doubt that?”

“The Home Office has been going through reports. They like to be thorough. Three deaths in one family in such a short time raises…doubts?”

“None of those here, I can tell you that much! I don’t know of any questions raised when Olivia and Nicholas were discovered, nor any gossip that’s flown about since. And in a village like this, it’s your surest sign that all’s well. As for the death of Stephen FitzHugh, the man fell in an empty house, all the members of his party outside and accounted for. Unless you believe in ghosts, I don’t suppose there’s much to be suspicious of in that.”

“Strange that you should mention ghosts,” Rutledge said idly. “I’m told the Hall is haunted. And not by anything that can be exorcised by the church.”

The rector straightened again and looked at him. “Who has told you these tales?”

“A Scotsman, for one,” Rutledge answered.

The rector smiled. “They’re great ones for the Sight, the Scots. Has he also told you whether murder has been done?”

Touché.

“Has murder been done? Now—or in the far past?”

“Not to my knowledge,” the rector said. “And I include the confessional in that answer. No one has confessed to me, and no gossip has reached me. The house has seen a good deal of sorrow in its time. But show me a house that hasn’t been touched by grief. Especially not with the war and the influenza epidemic. You’ll see the wounded for yourself. We were spared the sickness here—the worst of it, anyway. We lost only three souls to it. But even three is too many in a village this size.”

“Tell me if you will how a woman like Olivia Marlowe, who was reclusive and knew very little of the outside world, could write such poetry?”

He went back to his hoeing. “There’s a question only God can answer. But who says she knew very little of the world? I’ve read the poems. They speak to me of a frightening knowledge of the human condition. Of the human soul. And yet she never spoke of her writing to me. And I never asked her questions about it. Come to that, we only knew at the very end that she was O. A. Manning. It’d been kept a dark secret, even from her family. I’d say Nicholas knew, and that was it.”

“But if she had such understanding and such spirit, why keep it secret?”

“Well, Inspector, I take it you have no secrets—painful or otherwise—that you prefer to hide from the world? Not immoral secrets, not terrible secrets, perhaps, but those that wound your spirit?”

Which was too damned close for comfort. Rutledge began to reassess his earlier opinion of the priest. Hamish was murmuring viciously, rubbing salt into the fresh wound. But then it was always fresh…

“Her paralysis, then?”

“She found it confining,” Smedley said pensively. “But
never a cross to bear. What she feared most, I think, was to be judged on that account, and not on her work. You’ve read the literary magazines since the news broke, I suppose? Everyone scrambling to understand the woman, and not the verse. Delving into her life as if it held answers. Making an issue of her condition.”

“Was she ugly? Misshapen? Did she not know how to dress well? To do her hair? Talk to people? Is that what she ran away from, and buried in her genius?”

Mr. Smedley began to laugh before Rutledge finished his catalog. “I have a very poor opinion of the women you’ve known, Inspector, if that’s how you judge the fair sex! Even as a churchman I know better than that!”

“Then describe her to me,” Rutledge said irritably.

Smedley leaned on his hoe and looked up at the dormers of his house. “For one thing, her mother was beautiful. Rosamund. In Olivia, it came out in other ways. You found you couldn’t forget her, yet you couldn’t say why that was. She had lovely eyes, inherited from her father. I suppose her strength may have come from him as well, although Rosamund had great strength too. Transport Olivia to London, and except for the useless limb, she’d not be that much different from any young woman you found there. She’d have had more than her share of beaus, if the men in the city had half the sense they were born with! No, Olivia wasn’t ugly or misshapen. She dressed like any other countrywoman. No floating scarves, none of those shiny black gowns or exotic feathers. No literary pretensions at all. A warm manner, a pleasant nature, but never serene. Serenity had not been granted to her.” He shrugged. “Her hair, always one of her glories, was darker than Rosamund’s, that shade of brown that turns to gold in the sunlight. More like her father’s. George Marlowe was a very fine man. Rosamund adored him, and she was bereft when he died in India. She told me herself that they feared for her health, and sanity, for a time. Her courage saw her through. And her faith.”

Rutledge felt his confusion deepen. Did everyone see Oli
via in a different light? And if they did,
where was the real woman?

“I was surprised when she took her life,” Smedley said after a moment. “Olivia. I wouldn’t have expected it of her. For Nicholas to follow her seemed—oddly—reasonable enough, I can’t tell you why, it just did. But for Olivia to die by her own hand—it shook me deeply. It was as if a bedrock from which I drew my own strength had suddenly been shaken to its roots and crumbled. I wept,” he said, as if that still surprised him and left him uncertain of himself. “I wept not only for myself and for her, but for what was lost, with her going. She was the most remarkable woman I’ve ever known. Or ever hope to know.”

“And Nicholas?”

“He was an enigma,” Smedley replied slowly. “In all the years I’d known him, I never really
knew
the man. He had great depths, great passion. A wonderful mind. We played chess and argued over the war and discussed politics. And I was never allowed behind the wall of his patience.”

When Rutledge didn’t respond, Smedley added almost to himself, “I don’t know that Nicholas wasn’t my greatest failure…”

When Rutledge walked into the dark, narrow lobby of The Three Bells, the innkeeper handed him a small package that had been delivered earlier.

Rutledge took it through to the public bar, where he ordered a pint and when it came, sat staring at the package for another several minutes before opening it. Faces somehow lent reality to facts…

There were photographs inside, as he’d expected. With a note: “Please, I’d like to have these back when you’ve finished with them.”

There was no signature, but he knew they’d come from Rachel Ashford. He tried to see Rachel and Peter together, to imagine Peter marrying her, and failed. Not because she wasn’t the sort of woman Peter could have loved, but because Peter as he remembered him in school must have been very different from the man who’d died on Kilimanjaro. Just as he, Rutledge, had changed out of all recognition from the boy who’d had so many fine dreams and plans for his future.

Taking the photographs out of their wrapping and spreading them out on his table, he looked at them, not sure what he was going to see, not certain he wanted to see them now.

There were several older ones. Rosamund Trevelyan at twenty—there were names and dates on the back—shining with youth and beauty and some inner peace. He looked at her more closely. Yes, there was strength as well, and a sense
of laughter in her eyes. Anne and Olivia standing amid the roses in the back garden, so alike that there was a question mark on the reverse by their names. Two girls in lace-edged white dresses with long sashes and ribbons in their hair, smiling shyly for the camera. Pretty girls, with tumbling curls and the shape of Rosamund’s face if not her beauty. The same girls again, this time a little older, with a small boy and another child in a long dress. Nicholas and Richard. Nicholas was already tall for his age, dark unruly hair and dark eyes, although in the photograph you couldn’t tell if they were brown or dark blue. Another one, when Richard was five and Nicholas was seven or eight, on the moors with their family. Richard was now a boy with a wide, mischievous grin and gleeful eyes. A born troublemaker, some would say, ready for any game. Was that how he’d been lured away?

Nicholas, frowning at the camera, was intense, chin up, eyes defiant. But he was smiling in another photograph, with Olivia now—Anne would have been dead several years—and Rosamund, holding a pair of twins in her arms, all but invisible in swathes of christening robes. Susannah and Stephen. But Rosamund still seemed no more than a few months older than the girl she’d been at twenty, with a tilt of her head and a smile in her eyes that any man might respond to. Lovely, vivid with spirit. Olivia, on the other hand, was nearly in her shadow, a slim girl with long hair that curled around her face, Nicholas beside her with his arm protectively around her. Rutledge looked again at Olivia. This was the budding poet, this was the woman who had left her mark in words, and yet there was something about her, something in the shadows, that drew him back to her face, wishing it was larger, clearer. Unforgettable, the rector had said. But what?

A man with Cormac on one side, and the twins, now walking, at his boots, holding on to his legs and grinning shyly at the camera. Brian FitzHugh, his elder son, and his children by Rosamund. Brian wasn’t handsome, and yet he had an attractiveness that came from his smile. Cormac, on the other hand, was remarkably handsome already, a slim boy with grace in the set of his shoulders, and strength in his eyes.
Who knew himself, and felt no doubts about where he might be going. The twins were as fair and pretty as cherubs, with Rosamund’s beauty and only a faint shadow of their father, more in their sturdy build than in their features. Her liveliness in their faces.

The last two were of men. An older, bearded man, straight and broad-shouldered, beside a younger man in uniform. Captain Marlowe, Rosamund’s first husband, with her father, Adrian Trevelyan. Trevelyan wasn’t smiling, as most of his generation seldom smiled for the camera, but Marlowe had been laughing when this photograph was taken, catching him with its reflection in his eyes, and giving remarkable spirit to his face. Rutledge could understand why Rosamund had fallen in love with him. They must have been a handsome pair. The other man, tall, standing alone beside a horse, was James Cheney, Nicholas’ father, and Rutledge didn’t have to glance at the back of the photograph to identify him. His son was his image, darkly attractive and yet a quiet, introspective man.

Rutledge looked at the collection again, and thought of the faces. All dead now but two. Cormac and Susannah. One who belonged, and one who didn’t.

The elderly barkeep came over to ask if he’d like a refill for his glass, and looked down at the photographs. “The Trevelyans,” he said. “Aye, it were a grand family, that one. I remember the old master, not one to trifle with, but the fairest man I ever came across. Doted on his daughter—well, she were a beauty, and no question there, but a
lady
, and you recollected your manners around her! But one to say thank you and please, as if you’d done her a favor, not a service. Now that one—” a gnarled finger pointed to the Captain “—he died out in India of the cholera, and Mr. Trevelyan, he claimed he’d lost a son. And Miss Rosamund was so ill of grief, the doctor feared for her life. There were some saying she married Mr. Cheney hoping to forget, but there was love there as well. I saw them together, often, and there was love. But Mr. FitzHugh surprised us all, marrying Miss Rosamund. He wasn’t—he wasn’t Quality, like her. Irish gentry,
he
said,
but who’s to know? Still, she was happy enough. And she doted on the twins. A good mother.”

“Two of her children died young.”

“Aye, they never found the little one. There was a tramp through here not many years back that reminded me of Richard Cheney. Same devil’s look in his eyes. That boy was afraid of naught, and tempted God and Satan with his antics. Ran away from home twice, nearly set the Hall on fire one Guy Fawkes Night, with a bonfire in the nursery. I was a groom at the Hall then, when they kept so many horses, and he’d beg to ride anything with four legs!”

Another customer walked into the bar, crutches still awkward under his armpits. A leg missing. The barkeep heard the uneven
thump-thump
, looked over his shoulder, and said, “Right with you, Will.” He turned back to Rutledge. “They say Miss Olivia wrote poetry, but I don’t know. Not in a woman’s line, is it? How’d she know about the war, then, and the suffering? Somebody’s got it all wrong.”

He went away to serve the other man, and then to speak to a pair of fishermen slumped in the corner benches, arguing dispiritedly over what had become of the pilchard runs that had once been Cornwall’s fishing wealth, and what to do about the outlanders from as far away as Yarmouth, their big boats overfishing Cornish seas. Rutledge was left looking down at the faces that stared unseeingly back at him. Remembering what the barman had said.

Was that the key? Was that why Nicholas had had to die too? Because he wrote the poetry that had made O. A. Manning famous?

Rutledge shook his head. It wasn’t what he wanted to believe.

The next morning, Rutledge kept his promise to Rachel Ashford and accompanied her back to the Hall. The sun was brilliant, blindingly bright at sea, and touching the land with colors that vibrated against the eye.

They walked through the copse again, coming out to stand for a moment looking up at the house. It was shimmering,
like some mythical castle on a mythical hill, and Rachel said, “Odd, isn’t it? How very impressive the house is? And yet if you look at it architecturally, there must be a hundred homes in Cornwall alone that are as fine. Finer, even. This one is old and rambling and very small by most standards. But I love it with all my heart. Peter said—” she stopped, cleared her throat, and went on, “Peter said that it was in the stone, that sparkling quality. And the angle of the sun caught it sometimes.”

“Yes, that could be true,” Rutledge said. He’d thanked her for the photographs when she came to the inn, and promised to return them before he left Cornwall. But he hadn’t told her any of the thoughts that had rampaged through his head most of the night, until Hamish had clamored for peace. After that, he’d slept, but fitfully. It had seemed that he could hear the sea from his room, and the wash of the waves kept time with his heartbeats.

She looked at him. “You’ll be leaving soon. I can feel it. With nothing done about my problem.”

“I can’t find anything to keep me here,” he said. “Look, Rachel—” he realized he was using her given name, but somehow Mrs. Ashford was not how he thought of her “—there’s neither proof nor evidence to show that something’s wrong. I’m wasting the Yard’s time if I pretend there is.”

Rachel sighed. “Yes, I know.”

“Would you be happier if I did find something? That Olivia was a murderer? That Nicholas was? And as for Stephen, I can’t see that there’s anyone to kill him. If everyone is telling the truth and you were all outside at the time he fell.”

“You talk about Nicholas and Olivia,” she said harshly, walking on, “but not about the living. About me. About Susannah and Daniel. About Cormac.”

“You told me yourself that you couldn’t accept the possibility that they were murderers. Are you saying that
you
might have been the killer?”

“No, of course not! I—all right, if you want to know, Cormac came to see me last evening. He wants to buy the
house. Out of guilt, he says. Because he can’t do what Stephen wanted and make it a museum, but in a way it stays in the family. A compromise.
We
get our money and
he
has a country home and Stephen is somehow pacified.”

“Pacified?” It was an odd choice of word.

“Yes, apparently Stephen had this silly notion that he’d been the inspiration for the
Wings of Fire
poems—the love poems—and Susannah said the museum was really to his glory, not Olivia’s. It was cruel, but she was furious with him for making such a silly fuss when everyone else had agreed on selling. That’s the point, you see, we’d always more or less expected the house would be sold when Olivia and Nicholas died. But Adrian Trevelyan had made certain, in his will, that Cormac couldn’t inherit the house. He left the house to Olivia, not Rosamund, to prevent it!”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Well, I was a child, Inspector, but a child hears things, a child is sometimes very quiet in a corner, and the adults forget he—or she—is there. And they talk. And that child listens. Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything, sometimes it does. But I have a clear memory of Adrian speaking to Rosamund when James Cheney died. We’d just had the reading of his will, and so I knew what a will
was
. And Adrian said, ‘I won’t be here to see you wed again.’ And she said, ‘I don’t think it’s likely that I shall—I’ll never find another man like George Marlowe, and I won’t be as lucky as I was with James.’ And Adrian replied, ‘You’re young. You have a zest for living. You’ll take another husband, and I won’t be here. So I’m changing my will, my love, and taking the house from you. Do you mind if I give it to Olivia? I’ve loved her, and her father in her, since she was put into my arms as a newborn. I’d like to think of her here, moving through my house, loving it, after I’m gone. You’ve got the house George left you, and Nicholas will have James’. Olivia has no other home, may never have one.’ To my disappointment, eavesdropping, Rosamund asked for several days to think about it, and I never heard the outcome, until Adrian died and his will was read. I knew then what they’d decided, between them. That’s why Cormac’s suggestion…upset me. I couldn’t tell
him what Adrian had said, could I? That house has always been a haven of warmth and love, and now we’re all quarrelling over what becomes of it,
spoiling
it! Every time I’m reminded of Stephen’s death, I remember that he died still angry with us for not doing what he’d asked of us.”

“Rosamund had another home?”

“Yes, in Winchester, in the Close, actually. It was George Marlowe’s—he bought it himself. My own father inherited the family home, where he and George had grown up. George was the younger son, and chose the army.”

“And Nicholas had a house?”

“In Norfolk. I’ve been there, a very pretty place.”

“And so he could have left Trevelyan Hall, if he’d been unhappy here, and gone elsewhere to live. Or, assuming he married and didn’t want to bring his bride to the Hall, he could take her to his own home?”

They had reached the drive now, and Rachel turned away, looking towards the headland. “I don’t think Nicholas would have married and left here.”

“But if in fact he wished it, he could have.”

After a moment she said quietly, “Yes.”

Which might have given Olivia a motive for killing Nicholas?

He looked at Rachel, suddenly aware of something that he hadn’t felt in her before. “You were in love with Nicholas, weren’t you? Most of your life.”

“No! I was fond of him, but love…” Her voice died away, and the lie with it.

“Did you ever love Peter?” Rutledge asked harshly, feeling the pain of a man he’d known, somehow mixed with his own. Peter deserved better!

She whirled on him. “What do you know about love! Yes, I loved Peter, he was wonderful, gentle and kind and I’ve missed him every day since he sailed for Africa!”

“But loving him isn’t the same as being in love with Nicholas, is it?”

“Don’t!” she cried, and ran up the steps to the door, fumbling to unlock it through her tears. “I won’t listen to this!
Go away, I’ll take care of the ships myself! I don’t need you or anyone else!”

He came up behind her and quietly took the key from her. “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “I shouldn’t have said any of that to you.”

“But I brought you here, didn’t I?” she said as the door swung wide and the house seemed to be waiting for them. “It was a mistake, I see that now. Just go back to London and leave me alone!”

If Cormac had spent the night here, there was no sign of it.

Rutledge made tea in the kitchen and brought it to Rachel in the small parlor that overlooked the sea. He had opened the drapes when he took her there, to alleviate some of the air of grief that the darkened rooms seemed to evoke. She was not crying now, but there was a bleakness in her face that made him feel guilty as hell. She took the cup with a nod, then began to sip it as if she needed it badly. He walked to the windows, his back to her, and looked out at the sea. As Nicholas had done every dawn since childhood, although Rutledge wasn’t aware of that. But Rachel was. She concentrated on the tea with fierce attention, but the tall figure of the man before her, no more than a silhouette, was like a knife in her heart.