Wings of Fire ir-2 Read online

  A prayer book, pages thin as rice paper, the tiny print old and ornately lettered, the cover worn black leather, the edges of the pages once gilded.

  There was on the front cover an outline in raised leather, and Rutledge recognized it as the figure of St. Patrick, staff lifted to cast out the snakes.

  On the flyleaf inside, in a spidery scrawl in fading ink, he read, “Presented to Patrick Samuel FitzHugh, on his first Communion, June, 1803. From his loving Sister Mary Joseph Claire.”

  FitzHugh, not Trevelyan or Marlowe or Cheney. The FitzHughs had been Irish Catholic, the Trevelyans and Marlowes and Cheneys Church of England. This had been hidden, but not for reasons that had anything to do with murder. As a boy, had Stephen had Catholic leanings his family didn’t know about?

  Rutledge thumbed through the fragile pages, eyes scanning the printed lines. In the back, where the pages were blank, someone had written out a family genealogy beginning with the parents of Patrick Samuel, then his marriage and offspring. The ink and writing changed over the next generations, which followed in sad order. So many of them died in the Potato Famine and the nightmare years afterward that it was more a litany of death than of life. At the top of the last page Rutledge found Brian FitzHugh’s name, and Cormac’s, but neither Stephen nor Susannah were recorded here. Nor, apparently, any other secrets that mattered to an investigation into murder.

  After a moment, Rutledge dropped the prayer book into the drawer of the table by the bed, unwilling to go back under it. Then he changed his mind, and put the book back where it had come from. Putting it back took less time than finding it in the first place, and he did it holding his breath this time.

  Afterward he dusted off his trousers and jacket, then closed the curtains at the windows.

  The house was already too dark to do more than a cursory search elsewhere. Most of the other bedrooms had already been stripped of clothing, closets and desks and chests empty, drawers already smelling musty. But Rutledge, mindful of the hollowed out shelf in Olivia’s room, checked each closet with infinite care.

  There was nothing more to find, nothing that told him where Olivia had left her papers-not even whether they were still in the house. Susannah and her husband, Rachel and Stephen, with the help of Cormac, Mrs. Trepol, and the old woman Sadie, had spent days going through the house and cleaning room after room. He wasn’t surprised to find nothing out of the ordinary where they had worked.

  He went back to study. But the desk by the window was as sterile as the one in Olivia’s bedroom. It was a wild goose chase-Stephen must have removed any papers left to him. Yet Rutledge had the feeling that a man hell-bent and determined to preserve his half sister’s fame as a poet would stubbornly resist taking them too far, just as he’d fought to keep Olivia’s room inviolate.

  To which Hamish riposted, “What do you need the papers for, when you’ve found yon golden trophies? Or are ye shutting out what they say?”

  The sun was a red ball on the horizon when Rutledge walked out to the headland, its warmth lingering in the light wind that preceded the stillness of sunset. Behind him the windows of the Hall were ablaze, and the weather vane on the church tower as well. Red sky at night…

  He should have listened to Hamish and gone back to London on Saturday morning. He should have told Rachel this morning that there was no need to reopen the three deaths. Let sleeping murderers lie.

  Now-now he was committed, the truth was something he had to uncover, for his own peace of mind. For the policeman in him who had to look at the good and the evil in human nature and live with its impact in his own soul.

  What right had O. A. Manning to survive unscathed the nightmares of Olivia Marlowe? What right had she to be praised and revered as a creator of beauty, if she had been a woman without mercy or compassion?

  Stephen FitzHugh had been left as Olivia’s literary executor. To decide which of her papers and her worksheets biographers and critics and readers might see. And now, through no fault of his own, he was dead, and neither Rachel nor Susannah seemed to be particularly interested in shouldering the responsibility. Cormac, by his own admission, was more likely to destroy any family skeletons than allow them to rattle. The O. A. Manning he might choose to show to the public would be Olivia Marlowe’s own public face, a quiet recluse who knew very little about the real world and yet had a wondrous insight into the human heart, a gift from God.

  Or the devil. Depending on your knowledge of her.

  Even if he, Rutledge, drove back to London in the morning, he would be the only person living who had proof that what Cormac suspected could be true. His burden to learn to live with. Not Corrnac’s. Not Susannah’s. Not Rachel’s.

  Damn Stephen FitzHugh for falling down those blasted stairs!

  If he stayed in Cornwall, he’d have to find a way to get to the bottom of a string of murders committed by a woman already dead.

  But that was just the problem.

  Olivia Marlowe had been buried. It was O. A. Manning who was still alive-and possibly had no right to be.

  And when he, Rutledge, found out the whole truth, what in hell would he do about it? Deliberately destroy the author of Wings of Fire? Bring down the beauty and the genius along with the cruelty and the lies?

  “You’ve been executioner once.” Hamish warned him. “And you no’ have forgotten it. Will ye choose to do it again, then?”

  Rutledge turned and walked back towards the house and the path to the village.

  “If I have to,” he said bitterly.

  11

  The next morning Rutledge sent a carefully worded message to London.

  “Background material sparse but enlightening. No determination of crime possible at this time. Will take several more days, if presence not required in City.”

  Nothing to alarm Bowies, nothing to prevent Rutledge from coming to any conclusion he chose. And he had a feeling his superior would not be anxious to see him in London straight away.

  The Monday papers had been awash with news of another killing in the City. Bowles had been interviewed in depth about the Yard’s pursuit of the murderer, and talked ful-somely of modern forensic science and its role in tracking down the guilty party. Bowles leaned towards cold fact rather than intuition and a careful analysis of the killer’s reasons for acting now, against this particular victim, and in this particular place. Rutledge had found that scientists were not always the best witnesses in the box, and as often as not a good man for the defense could walk rings around them.

  He looked at his own cold facts. That Corrmac had seen Olivia shove her sister out of an apple tree. That Olivia hadn’t had the heart to dispose of her trophies of the dead, even in the face of her own death. That they were an admission of guilt in six possible murders, not just the two that Cormac laid at Olivia’s door-indicating, perhaps, a cooler, more cunning skill as the child grew older.

  But these facts, alone or together, were not sufficient proof of guilt in a courtroom. Cormac was young at the time, his own memory might have been at fault. A good barrister might point out that Olivia could have had those small articles in her possession for any number of reasons: she’d been given them, she’d taken them as a childhood prank, she’d won them in a wager. In themselves, without more evidence to lay out beside them, they couldn’t be viewed as the fruits of sin.

  Her papers might hold a confession. However convoluted or concealed in verse. But poets and writers were allowed literary license. That too could prove to be more circumstantial than conclusive.

  Who then among the living might give him the proof he needed? Who would make a dependable, incontrovertible witness in the box?

  He set out to look for one.

  Constable Dawlish, finishing his breakfast in his wife’s sunny kitchen, came out to the parlor to listen and found Rutledge’s line of questioning hard to follow.

  So did Hamish, who was still contending that they’d both live to regret staying on in Cornwall, and was muttering ominously about Rutledge�
��s own stubbornness.

  “You’re asking about Mr. Nicholas’ father?” Dawlish asked. “And Mr. Stephen’s father? That was well before my time in uniform, sir! But James Cheney shot himself in his own gun room, and everyone knew he’d been blaming himself for what happened to his son. He took it hard, and who’s to say whether the revolver went off by accident or of a purpose? Death by misadventure was the coroner’s verdict, and Mrs. Cheney, sick with grief, thanked him for it. Are you thinking that she or one of the children might have shot him?” Dawlish shook his head. “I’d as soon believe my own wife would take a gun to my head, as Mrs. Cheney! You didn’t know her, sir! And as for the children, they weren’t old enough, any of them, to do such mischief. Besides, no man in his right mind would have let a child so young handle a gun, much less play about with a loaded one.”

  “And Brian FitzHugh’s death?”

  “His horse threw him down by the sea, and he hit his head, drowned in the surf before anyone back at the house knew what had happened, They had to put the horse down as well, caught his leg in the rocks and damaged it badly. Mr. Cormac cried over it like a baby, holding it in his arms until Wilkins could fetch a pistol and do the job. Miss Olivia stood there watching, staring at Mr. Cormac as if he’d run mad. But Mr. Cormac, he’d trained that horse himself, and it was the best three-year-old the stables had had in twelve years.”

  “How do you know what Cormac and Olivia were doing?”

  The constable’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Why, my father was a carpenter, sir, he was working in the stables at the time, rebuilding the stalls where they kept the mares waiting to foal. Mrs. Cheney had another wing put on for that.”

  “Is your father still alive?”

  “No, sir, he died in the first year of the war.”

  A dead end. “Well, then, what was the story behind young Richard ‘s disappearance?”

  “There’s a dozen ways a boy could die out on the moors. He wouldn’t be the first lad to come to grief there. Nor the last.”

  “If he died on the moors, why was there no body found?”

  “They looked, sir. They combed the rocks and the pools and the old mine shafts, they probed the quicksand, they put up flyers in all the towns around, they talked to the folk who live by the moors and to the gypsies who’d been camping near there in the month before. My father was in one of the search parties, and I went along with him. It was thorough.”

  “I want you to send men out again. To search the same ground, to draw me a map of where you’ve looked and what you’ve seen. Anything-a button, a scrap of cloth, a bone. I want it all brought in, and the spot marked on the map. Then I’ll check it again myself.”

  “Sir!” Dawlish protested, aghast. “These are farmers and fishermen hereabouts, with a livelihood to earn! Have you any idea how many men it’ll take? And what a waste of time and energy that’ll be?”

  “Time and energy don’t matter. Finding that boy’s body does.”

  “And if after all our work, there’s none found?” “Then I’ll know for a certainty that it can’t be found.” Dawlish stared at the gaunt face, the intelligent, angry eyes. Humor the man from Scotland Yard, he’d been told. What he wants, let him have. As long as he returns to London as soon as possible, and with no cause to give a black eye to the local police in the matter of doing their duty.

  With a sigh, he glanced at the napkin in his hand, then back to Rutledge. “I’ll see that it’s done, sir. You can leave it to me.” But privately he was thinking that Scotland Yard would have been better served by putting their man onto finding that bloody killer in London, instead of raising a stir in far off Cornwall, where there was no connection to any murders.

  The morning sun quickly gave way to clouds and rain, slow and steady, that drove the inn’s keel players indoors to pass their time with skittles and long, rambling stories that seemed to lead nowhere except to wrangling over trifling details. For half an hour, Rutledge listened to them argue about which horse won the Derby in 1874 because someone swore old Mickelson had named his favorite dog after it. Even the innkeeper, Mr. Trask, couldn’t tell Rutledge who Mickelson was.

  “Could be he were that actor. A troop played in Truro one winter, and my father spoke highly of them. One had a little dog’d do tricks. I doubt half of them remember, either, who Mickelson might be, though you could hang and quarter them before they’d admit to it. Waiting for someone, are you, sir?”

  In fact he was waiting for Dr. Penrith, though he didn’t say so. Several women came in, asking for him too, but the retired doctor was not in his usual comer and it appeared he wouldn’t be.

  In the end, Rutledge walked down to Dr. Hawkins’ surgery. When Mrs. Hawkins stuck her head out the door, trying to keep the rain out of her hallway, Rutledge asked for her father instead of her husband. Surprised, she said, “He’s through by the fire, sir. His joints are bothering him fiercely in this wet. Will you come this way, please?”

  She took him into the part of the house where the family lived, and down a passage to a small room at the back. The fire burned high, a rush of warmth suffocating Rutledge after his brisk walk through the rain. The wool in his coat began to steam gently, giving off a distinct odor of Harris sheep.

  Mrs. Hawkins promised them tea shortly, and left them. Dr. Penrith, pleased to see anyone to till his empty hours, profusely welcomed Rutledge and insisted that he take a chair close by the hearth. A small spaniel, resting her nose on her master’s foot, stared at him myopically as he came across the room, and thumped a tail on the hearth rug. Rutledge, feeling like a man unfairly condemned to walk in flames for a time, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, commiserated with his host on the afflictions of age, and then gently turned the conversation to the Trevelyan family.

  Smiling, Dr. Penrith began to reminisce about Adrian Trevelyan, with whom he’d had a running battle over ancient Cornish legends as well as the Arthurian romances. With a chuckle he added, “Half the parish histories in England’ve been written by parish priests and doctors, but that old fool studied at Winchester and Cambridge, and thought himself a scholar. Pshaw! He wanted to track Arthur back to the Romans, but he’s a West Country hero, and nothing to do with the Romans!”

  Rutledge could hear the fondness in his voice, and pictured the two men arguing over their port for the sheer joy of contradiction and controversy. In lonely lives, even the smallest battles gave great satisfaction.

  “Lancelot came from France,” he pointed out, shifting in his chair as his knees turned to burned toast. Hamish, as always sensitive to Rutledge’s moods, grumbled about hellfire and damnation in the back of his mind.

  “Aye, and wasn’t it just like a Frenchman to get around Guinevere! There’d been no whispers of such goings-on until Frogs took up the tales!”

  Rutledge stifled a laugh and used the opening to change the direction of the conversation. ‘‘What were the whispers about the Hall, and Adrian Trevelyan’s beautiful daughter?”

  “None!” the doctor turned to retort angrily. “Like Caesar’s wife, Rosamund was always above reproach!”

  “What happened to Richard Trevelyan?”

  The old eyes clouded with pain. “Who can say? If the gypsies had taken him, you’d think he’d have come home when he could get away. But there’s been no boy ringing the doorbell to claim he’s Richard. And no man either.”

  “Would Rosamund have believed them if they had come?”

  “She was an intelligent woman. She tried to believe he’d been taken away-or run away and been lost, then found and not returned. It kept hope alive in her heart, and she told James the boy would turn up, wait and see! That he’d gone off to join the army, and some farmer or carter would be bringing him back soon enough, tired and hungry.”

  “And Miss Olivia?”

  Dr. Penrith frowned. “Now there was an odd thing, you know. Miss Olivia never cried. She went out with the searchers, riding a pony because of her bad leg, and was gone all that day and the next, until I met
her on one of the roads and sent her home. I’ve never seen a child look so tired; I thought she’d made herself ill again. But she stared at me, then said, ‘Richard wanted a tombstone with an angel on it. He told me so. I want to buy one, just a small one, to remember him by. Can you tell me how much it will cost?’ “

  “How did you answer her?” Rutledge asked, intrigued.

  “That they don’t put up tombstones until they have the body, and she said, quite seriously, ‘But that’s not true. There are markers in the churchyard for any man lost at sea.’ She had a raging fever by the time they got her home, and I heard no more about angels and tombstones.”

  Rutledge found himself thinking of a poem in one of the earlier volumes. It began,

  They stood an angel in the churchyard for the man they lost at sea,

  But for him I loved so dearly, there was never place for me

  To come and mourn his passing, touch the earth beneath my hand,

  Or bring him blood-red roses…

  He tried to recall the last lines and failed.

  But Hamish, the soft Scottish burr clear in his voice, provided them for him.

  Alas, a frailer angel watches where you sleep

  With pansies-for remembrance – lying at your feet.

  Olivia herself had known where Richard lay-find him there, and the case was made!

  When tea was brought, Rutledge asked about James Cheney’s death, and Dr. Penrith shook his head sadly. “I couldn’t tell Rosamund how he died. And at least he’d had sense enough to put the barrel to his temple and not in his mouth, for all the world to know what he’d been about! But who can say whether it was accidental or not, whether the thought came to him suddenly and he hadn’t the will to turn it aside. One round was all he had put in the cylinder, and he used it. To end the pain. That was my guess.”

  “Who was in the house that day?”

  “They all were. Olivia. Nicholas. Rosamund. And Adrian, of course. FitzHugh was there, he’d brought over the new brood mares. It was Cormac came for me, pleading for me to make haste, to do something. But it was useless. I knew that as soon as I saw James’ body.”