Wings of Fire ir-2 Read online

  “She’s harmless, they say, but she gives me the willies!” he’d confided to Rutledge. “Never know where you stand with her. And those eyes-they lay a man bare, like a fleshing knife, but beyond the bone.”

  “I’m told she’s a good nurse.”

  “Oh, aye, I grant her that. But what does she steal when you’re defenseless?” From the expression on his face Rutledge knew he wasn’t thinking of money. Or the brass candlesticks.

  Of such fears witch-hunts were born, Rutledge thought as he set out.

  Sadie lived in a narrow cranny that branched off the main valley of the Bor, hardly more than a cul-de-sac where her sod-roofed house squatted in the rain like a wet gray toad. A garden had been hacked out of the hillsides and into the narrow strip of flatland on which the house had been built. He could recognize herbs of different kinds-although he only knew the names of half of them-and rows of cabbage and onions and carrots next to straggling lines of flowers beaten down by the heavy rains. A dozen bedraggled chickens scratched in a muddy pen out back.

  She must have seen him coming, because the old wooden door inched open before he got there. “Leave the umbrella by the sill, and wipe your feet on yon rag!” she told him sharply. “I want no mud on my floors!”

  He did as he was told and was surprised when he finally crossed the threshold and stepped into the low beamed room that served her as both parlor and kitchen. She had whitewashed the wails, and they glowed like butter in the fire that didn’t begin to fill a hearth broad enough to hold a pig. But the room was warm, and the bright rag rugs that covered the stone floor kept out the damp. The furniture was old, worn, castoffs that had seen finer days. Bunches of drying herbs and flowers hung in the rafters, giving the room an oddly exotic tang of mixed scents. Baskets, woven of rushes, held a stock of dry wood, and a large black cat-her familiar? he wondered in wry amusement-slept on a cushion by the only window.

  Sadie looked him up and down with those bright eyes. “What brings a London policeman out in a West Country rain to talk to an old woman?” Her mind seemed clear enough today, he thought, listening for the querulousness that seemed to come with confusion, when she began drifting out of reach.

  “I’m trying to piece together information about the family at the Hall. You know that,” Rutledge answered mildly. “I thought you might remember some other things that would be useful.”

  “Like?”

  “Like, where are the servants who used to work there?”

  “Scattered. Gone to other houses, or retired. Or dead.”

  “Do you remember their names?”

  She grinned at him. “At my age?” But he thought she could, if she tried. “Ask Mrs. Trepol. Or the rector.”

  “Then tell me about Nicholas Cheney.”

  Suddenly wary, she stared at him.

  “Why should I? He’s not one I care to speak about.”

  “I’m trying to understand why he killed himself. Why he chose to die beside Olivia. It seems… out of character.”

  She chuckled. “Ever seen a man gassed in the war?”

  “Many times.” Their crusted faces and red, blistered mouths, the hoarse gasping as they struggled for air. He shuddered, remembering it.

  “Then you don’t need me to tell you how the lungs burn, how you can’t draw a deep breath because the tubes are raw, and you choke on your own phlegm. He said he dreamt of the scent of violets. And lemons.”

  “Nicholas wasn’t that ill. You know it. And I know it now.”

  She went over to the window and touched the cat, her face turned away from him. “Don’t ask me about Nicholas Cheney. Or the boy Richard. That’s why you’ve come, I can read it in your eyes. And I’ve listened to the men grumbling on their way to search the moors.”

  “Do you plant pansies in your garden?” Rutledge asked, reaching to the rafters to touch the upside down heads of strawflowers, brittle between his fingers.

  “They don’t dry well,” she said, straightening up to look at him.

  “Do they grow well on the moors?”

  “Sometimes they do. Volunteers that the wind blows. Or a bird leaves behind.” She was wary still, but not afraid of these questions. He wondered why. “Pansies like the cool of springtime, and a little shade in the afternoon. If that’s what you’re looking for, find the place where they’d want to grow. Not where someone thought of putting ‘em.”

  Rutledge considered her. The old, stooped body, the worn, bright eyes, the knowledge and the experiences of a lifetime fading with age, slipping into forgetfulness.

  He remembered a chaplain in the war, at a hasty service for a half-dozen soldiers killed in the shelling. Saying, “They’ll never grow old-never feel fear and cold, hunger or pain, or the sorrows of lost love or the pity of the young. While they have missed much, these men who won’t see their sons in their mothers’ arms, or the moon over a summer sea, or the beauty of a rose, they have what we all look for in the end-eternal springtime. It is not their grief but ours that haunts us.” Oddly enough, it had helped weary men. But not, he thought, the chaplain.

  “Has your life been a happy one?” Rutledge asked her.

  Shock spread across her face, then lingered in her eyes. “No one ever asked me that before,” she said quietly. “But no. I was never given the choice of happiness. Only of service. I don’t know that I wasn’t better off, come to that. If you feel happiness, you must also feel grief.”

  “Did Olivia Marlowe know grief?”

  “Miss Livia? She went to funerals like the rest of them, and cried.”

  “No. Grief for what her life brought her. Not the paralysis. Not the poetry. Not the dead in her family. But grief for what she was.”

  “Aye,” the old woman answered finally. “She carried a great burden on her soul. And had no way to put it right. She said to me once, a long time ago, that God had put an affliction upon her, and I asked what that was. She told me, to live with evil and not know how to stop it.”

  “And did she, by dying, put an end to it?”

  Sadie frowned. “I don’t know, sir. For her sake, I pray she did. I’d hate to think of her lying in her grave with no hope of peace!”

  He turned to go. Then thought of one final question. “Was she the frail angel that watched at Richard’s grave?”

  But Sadie didn’t know what he was talking about. “She were crippled, aye, but never frail. And I’d not call her an angel. She had feelings, like any other woman!”

  Wet and tired and thoroughly depressed, Rutledge tramped back to the inn and went through to the bar. But time had already been called, and he went instead to his room, where Hamish clamored so insistently in his mind that he couldn’t concentrate on the volumes of poetry that rested on the stand by his bed. After a time he put them down again, feeling as if he’d been prying.

  Rachel came to the inn for her dinner that night, and he thought it was on purpose, to discover what he’d been up to. For reasons of his own, he was very happy to see her walk through the door.

  “I hear that Tom Chambers came to call on you today,” she said when he’d asked her to join him at his table.

  “I’m surprised that gossip hasn’t also told you what we discussed.”

  She grinned, some of the strain slipping out of her face. “The truth is, Mr. Trask’s hearing is failing.”

  He laughed outright.

  Tilting her head, she said, “You’re younger when you laugh. I’ve often wondered what Peter would have been like, if he’d survived his war out in Africa. Stephen seemed to take France in stride-in fact he was quite the daredevil. Not that he told us, mind you! But somehow it was as if-as if it was only just another game he was very good at. When his foot went bad and they sent him home barely a month before the Armistice, I expected to find him cheering up half the hospital with his wild spirits. Instead he was desperately depressed. As if he wouldn’t have minded dying, but he minded terribly losing his foot. It was the oddest thing.”

  He knew, but didn’t tell
her, that often the men who taunted death had a terrible fear of it. And reached out to it in bravery because that was easier than waiting for it to come and fetch them, cowering in some corner. He knew-he’d taken his own wild risks, hoping to put an end to suffering he didn’t know how to face.

  When he didn’t answer, she added, “But it was Thomas Chambers I came to torment you about, wasn’t it?”

  ‘‘Short of fiercely twisting my arm, alarming Mr. Trask, not to mention giving the gossips an earful before morning, how do you propose to do that?” He fell back on teasing her while he considered what he wanted to say to her.

  “You don’t want to talk about it?” She was disappointed.

  “There is little to tell, if you want the truth,” he said mildly. “He wanted to know what in blazes I was doing here on his turf-sounded much like Cormac FitzHugh and Dr. Hawkins in that regard-and agreed that if Stephen inherited Olivia’s papers, he-Chambers-has no idea what’s become of them. And Susannah would be the most likely person to have charge of them now, once they are found.”

  Rachel considered that. “I wonder what she’ll do with them?”

  “They have great intrinsic value. I don’t know their monetary worth, on the auction block. Oxford would be delighted to have them. Or Cambridge. She was a major poet.”

  “But a woman. I wonder if she’ll be valued so highly, now that everyone knows who O. A. Manning really is. The war poems, for one thing-they seemed so, I don’t know, so genuine, a part of personal experience. But she never went to France, she was a woman who wore a brace on her leg and hardly ever left Cornwall, much less came face to face with war.”

  “Does she have to shoulder a rifle and kill to understand war?”

  “I don’t know,” Rachel answered honestly. “I wasn’t in France either. I can appreciate the words on the page, but I wasn’t there.”

  “You sent a husband off to war. Nicholas went to France. Stephen. You loved all three of them. What did you feel?”

  He knew how Jean had felt-she had wanted him back without four years of suffering and guilt and pain coming between them. Unchanged, nothing to remind her that he’d ever gone away from her. The man he was now terrified her. The man he had been was lost somewhere still in France.

  She hesitated. “Fear, mainly. I was so afraid. The war dragged on, it seemed as if it would never end. And you tell yourself, ‘He can make it a few more days, another month, he can last out this year, there’s so little of it left!’ But you know, deep down inside, that he can’t live forever, that simple arithmetic, the number of shots fired, the number of shells that fall, the number of assaults and snipers-they have to find their targets, sometimes. And it’s really a matter of chance-the hazards of war-” She broke off and spread her napkin across her lap, taking pains with it so that he couldn’t see her face. He wondered whether she was speaking mostly about Peter or Nicholas. And told himself that he was being unfair to judge her for Peter’s sake.

  Then she said in a different voice, “That’s all that you had to say to Mr. Chambers? Or he to you?”

  “What were you expecting him to tell me? That he’d been waiting for me or someone like me, to come down here and open Pandora’s Box?”

  “No,” she said, wistfulness in her face. “I don’t know what I expected. Not really.”

  “Did Olivia like flowers? Pansies, for an example? Did she plant pansies in the gardens at the Hall? Or out on the moors?”

  “There’ve always been drifts of pansies in the borders at the Hall. I don’t have any idea who planted them first. But Nicholas was very fond of them, I do know that. As for pansies on the moors,” she shook her head, “I don’t recall ever finding pansies there. But then I never looked for them.”

  “I’m having the moors searched again. For Richard’s body.”

  Rachel sighed. “Do you think you’ll find it? After all these years?”

  “Who knows? I have to look.”

  “Constable Dawlish must have been very happy about that!”

  Rutledge shrugged. “I didn’t make an inquiry into his feelings on the subject. I just asked him to set up a search.”

  She regarded him for a moment, then said, “You’re used to having your way, aren’t you?”

  Surprised, he said, “No. I seldom have my way. But when something has to be done, and the local man can do it better than I can, I expect him to get on with it. He knows who can be spared for the job-”

  “While you,” she said irritably, “sit in a warm and dry inn!”

  “Hardly that. I saw you walking towards the Hall earlier. Why?”

  Trask brought a tray with their orders, cutlets for him, a breast of chicken for her, and began to arrange the plates on the table, saving her from having to answer.

  By the time the innkeeper had finished and gone away again, she had a pat reply ready for Rutledge. And he had a question of his own ready for her.

  There was a pounding on his door in the dark of night, and Rutledge came awake with a start. “Who is it?” he called sharply, after sitting up and clearing his throat. One hand fumbled for his watch.

  “Constable Dawlish, sir.” There was a certain pitch to his voice, as if he relished dragging the Inspector out of a warm bed at three o’clock. “I think we’ve found something. Out on the moors.”

  Rutledge threw back the blankets and reached for his trousers.

  14

  In a city there’s never true darkness in the night. But in a place like Borcombe, where people still used oil lamps and clouds obscured what little starlight there was, the blackness was nearly absolute. Rutledge bumped into the bicycle that one of Dawlish’s men had leaned against the wall by the inn door, and swore feelingly.

  “You’ll make better time with that,” Dawlish was saying, “than going in your motorcar. We can take some of the paths. Shortcuts.”

  Still rubbing his shin, Rutledge nodded, then swung the other leg over the saddle. Side by side the two men pedaled down the wet road, coming to a halt at Dawlish’s signal by Doctor Hawkins’ surgery. The doctor, rumbling with bad temper, came out leading his own bicycle, then without a word, joined them.

  It was a long, wet ride, and Rutledge, who didn’t know where he was going, had to follow the shadowy figure of the Constable while Hawkins, still grumbling, brought up the rear. Hamish, of them all, seemed to be most comfortable with the night. The Highlander, keeper of sheep and cattle before turning soldier, had been bred to it.

  The moors were several miles away, even by the shortcuts that Dawlish took over fields, across hummocky meadows- once startling a herd of sleeping cows-and through one stand of trees.

  The moors were not what Rutledge had expected. Bare, yes. Barren, yes. Rolling, yes. But there were rocks and marshes, rills that tumbled into pools, and scrub growth here and there that rose up like humbled spirits out of the ground. The silence he noticed most. There was a whispering wind that seemed to be saying something just under the range of human hearing, but it didn’t displace the quiet. A ghostly white flock of sheep went scurrying off over a hill like disturbed spirits, jostling each other in their haste, and leaving behind a strong aroma of wet wool that mixed with the wind from the sea and the smell of rotting earth like a miasma.

  It was nearly two hours before they reached their destination, and Rutledge was never quite sure how the constable had found his way across the featureless expanse. Tracks there were, but they seemed to go where they willed rather than in any discernible direction, to any discernible destination.

  A great pile of rocks loomed up, ruins of a colliery, Rutledge thought, peering at it through the darkness. And then the sputtering fire that the men had lit to keep warm if not dry. The rains had stopped, but there was a drizzle in the wind that clung to everything. It was easy to understand why a small boy might die out here of exposure, even in summer.

  In the lea of a boulder, where erosion had widened the crevice over the years, there was a pile of bones, pitiful in their smallness. Rutle
dge could see the whiteness of a longer one behind the others. He dismounted, leaving the bike in the charge of a roughly dressed man who appeared out of nowhere to take it.

  “There’s no skull,” Dawlish was saying to Hawkins. “And no pelvis, as I told you. Only the little bones, and that leg bone yonder. Can you tell anything about it, sir?” Someone was bringing a lantern over to them, its light spilling across their feet, and then their faces.

  Hawkins knelt. “You’ve looked for the skull? Or ribs?”

  “Aye, sir, all through the rocks. Nothing.”

  “Carried off then, by wild dogs,” he said, running his fingers over the smaller fragments. Lifting the leg bone, he brought it closer to his face, then adjusted the lantern in the holder’s hand so that it fell the way he wished it to. “This was broken. Here.” He pointed to a jagged fracture line in the bone. “Died before it began to heal. Caught a foot in the hole by the rock, I’d say, and couldn’t get out again.” He got up and went to the fire, using that and the lantern to better judge the bone.

  After a few minutes he said, “Just as I thought. Sheep carcass. That’s what you dragged me out here for!”

  “There was no knowing for certain, sir. With nothing larger than that one bone to go by,” Dawlish said apologetically.

  “Next time, bring the damned things in to me.”

  “No,” Rutledge said, countermanding that instruction. “I want to see them in place. Not on a laboratory table. And as soon as they’re found.”

  Hawkins glared at him, went to fetch his bicycle, and Rut-ledge had to hurry to catch up with him-or stay on the moors with the searchers, as Dawlish was doing.

  Halfway back to the village, Rutledge heard Hawkins say, “You’re a damned fool. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I’m a policeman. I do what I have to do. No more, no less.”

  “You could go back to London and leave us in peace! Half those men out there in the rain will be sick before the week’s out, and they’ll still have to work the nets or tend their sheep or dig in their fields. The boy’s long dead, and God alone knows where he could be. Murdered by gypsies, down one of the mine shafts-”