Wings of Fire Page 2

  “That’s a dreadful thought!” Daniel exclaimed. There were skeletons in his family closet that he wouldn’t care to see rattled. Name him an Irishman who didn’t have them!

  “The price of fame,” Susannah said sourly, her fair, pretty face twisting into a grimace. “And an even more cogent reason for stopping them in their tracks. By selling the house. None of us ever expected to live here anyway. Olivia knew that, she could have arranged for her own museum if that was what she truly wanted. She didn’t.”

  There was another silence. Then Cormac, used to board meetings and finding consensus, used to making choices, said, “Right, I take it you’re three to one? For the sale of this property? Stephen can do as he pleases with Olivia’s personal papers—manuscripts, letters, contracts, and so on. That ought to satisfy inquisitive scholars. Sad to say, I doubt there’s much of a literary estate. She was young. And poets aren’t . . . prolific.”

  No, Rachel thought, watching him. You’ve already gone through her papers, haven’t you? You were here first. Did you take any of them, I wonder? Were you afraid for your reputation in the City? Or were you merely curious about your stepsister’s secrets?

  “Livia seldom wrote to any of us,” she said aloud. “Or to anyone else, as far as I know. Perhaps Stephen might want whatever letters we’ve kept of hers? For the collection?” But not Nicholas’ letters, not those.

  “Did she keep a diary?” Daniel asked, and as every face swiveled to stare at him, he added, “Well, surprising numbers of people do! Lonely people, especially. Invalids—” He stopped.

  “No,” Stephen said shortly. “I’m sure she didn’t.”

  “You didn’t know her any better than the rest of us did,” Susannah retorted. “Not after you were grown. She could have kept twelve diaries, and who would have guessed?”

  “I came home more often than the rest of you put together!”

  “What? Four times a year? At most five? It was uncomfortable here, you know that. She didn’t want us to come. She’d made herself a recluse, yes, and Nicholas too, he was as set in his way as she was. And they were only in their middle thirties—it’s unnatural!”

  “I remember the last time I was here,” Daniel said. “You could tell she couldn’t wait until we were gone.”

  “We brought in the real world,” Susannah agreed. “Life. She lived in that strange half-world of hers. I never understood why she wrote such bleak poetry. Well, not counting Wings of Fire, of course. Scent of Violets and Lucifer gave me the creeps, I can tell you! But then she was a cripple. They’re often dreary people anyway, suffering and wretched. I suppose her mind dwelt on such things.”

  “She wasn’t dreary,” Rachel said suddenly. “And she wasn’t truly crippled. I think we bored her.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Daniel said. “That’s ridiculous. Her family?”

  “It’s true! For the past six or seven years I’ve had the feeling she didn’t need us. That her life was full, that she had all she wanted right here.”

  “I don’t know how Nicholas put up with it all these years,” Susannah said, glaring at Rachel. “I’d have gone mad!”

  “Livia told me once that he was paying a debt,” Stephen remembered out of nowhere. “Odd thing to say, wasn’t it? I asked what sort of debt, and she said a debt of blood.” He got up and limped over to the drinks table and poured himself another whiskey.

  Cormac said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” And sat down again, impatient with the lot of them.

  “I don’t want to stay the night here,” Susannah said, looking up at her husband as she changed the subject. “We’ll find rooms at The Three Bells.”

  “Don’t be morbid!” Daniel told her. “Mrs. Trepol has already made up our rooms here.”

  “I’m not morbid! This place is morbid! It’s like a hothouse where something unhealthy thrived. And it was never that way while Mother was alive.” She glanced up at the elegantly framed portrait over the hearth. Rosamund Beatrice Trevelyan, who’d had three husbands and children by each of them, loving them all with equal devotion, stared back at her with a half smile that captured both serenity and passion. The artist had found more than just beauty in the face he’d painted. “Mother had such life! Such warmth. There was always laughter, brightness, here. And that’s all disappeared, it—it drained away without our knowing it, after she died. I’ve come to hate the Hall. I never actually realized that until now. And after dinner we’re leaving.”

  “I’ll go with you, if you don’t mind. I’d—rather not stay, either,” Rachel said, but for reasons of her own. There were ghosts here. She knew it now. She, who’d never believed in ghosts in her life, believed in them here. Not things in sheets that moaned and rattled chains. Those she could handle. These were . . . different.

  “You haven’t decided—” Cormac began.

  “Sell,” Susannah said, and Daniel nodded. After a moment, Rachel sighed and with a single movement of her head acknowledged her agreement.

  “Over my dead body.” Stephen promised. “In the courts if need be, but I’ll fight you. This house ought to be preserved!”

  “Selling is the soundest move you could make,” Cormac said. “Put it off, and you’ll find yourselves taking a loss. That’s a majority, then? When the wills are read tomorrow, you should instruct Chambers accordingly. As to the furniture, you might draw up lists of what you each want. And if there should be any conflict—”

  “We’re not touching a stick of furniture until this has been settled,” Stephen said stubbornly, his jaw tight and his face flushed.

  “Let Chambers work out a compromise. Agreed? What you don’t want personally, you should put up for sale. With the house, I think. It’ll bring far more that way. People with money enough to buy country houses these days don’t have the proper furnishings to put in them.” He looked around thoughtfully. “I’ve been considering a place in the country myself. I wonder...” With a shrug he let the thought die, then said, “I suppose it’s nostalgia. I spent a good part of my own life here too.”

  “I want Mother’s portrait,” Susannah said immediately. “And there’s the Wedgwood coffee service. I’d like to have that as well. It was Grandmother FitzHugh’s.”

  Her husband added, “I’d like to have the trophies for the horse races Rosamund’s stables won. Those ought to stay in the family anyway.”

  Cormac said, “I haven’t any right to ask, but I’d like the guns. The ones that came from Ireland with my father. And his collection of walking sticks. They belonged to him before he married Rosamund, so in a sense I have some small claim on them.”

  Susannah turned to Rachel. “Is there anything you particularly fancy?” Rosamund had loved Rachel like one of her own. They all had. Nicholas had been deeply fond of her, you could tell that, and they always said Richard—Susannah shivered and refused to think of Richard.

  Rachel looked down at her hands, and the glass of sherry they were holding. “I don’t know. Yes, I do!” She lifted her eyes and regarded all of them. “I don’t have any claim on the Cheney side of the family. But, I’d like Nicholas’ collection of ships. The ones he carved. If no one else wishes for them?”

  Her glance reached Stephen’s furious face and then she realized how callous it must sound to him, four people coolly coming to terms over the household goods of the newly dead. Her face flushed.

  “They haven’t been decently buried for more than three hours!” Stephen said. “You’re ghouls! It’s revolting!”

  “Practical, that’s all,” Daniel answered. “Just as well to have it all straight in our minds. What about you?”

  “Nothing of mine is leaving here.” He gripped his glass tightly. “And nothing of Olivia’s is to be touched. Do you hear me? Nothing!”

  “Then that’s settled,” Susannah said with satisfaction. “And very amicably.” She smiled up at Rosamund’s image again. “Mother would be proud of us, not quarreling.”

  “Who’s left to quarrel?” Rachel said pensively. Except fo
r you and Stephen, she added to herself. The youngest, the FitzHughs. I barely remember Anne—only that she and Olivia were so much alike that the adults couldn’t tell them apart. And I could. Now Olivia is dead as well. The end of the Marlowes. And both of the Cheneys are gone too, Richard ... and Nicholas. Rachel threw off her deepening depression and pulled herself back to what Stephen was saying.

  “Not yet, it isn’t settled!” Stephen fumed. “If Chambers won’t stop you, I’ll find my own lawyers. Bennet will act for me—”

  “Don’t be an ass, Stephen,” Cormac said without rancor. “You’ll still lose. And more to the point, so will the family. The courts will agree with the majority—once the family’s dirty wash has been thoroughly aired in all the newspapers. Do any of us want that?”

  Mrs. Trepol came to the door to say that dinner was waiting. She looked tired and sad.

  Stephen put down his drink and made to follow her.

  “Will they? Agree with you?” he asked over his shoulder. “She’s O. A. Manning, remember? That’s bound to count for something. And the fact that none of us is going hungry. You don’t destroy a national heritage as easily as you might a mere family estate.”

  Putting down her glass on the small walnut table beside her chair, Rachel watched them walk out the door of the drawing room and across the hall to the dining room. She’d never seen Stephen so angry. Or so determined. She had a very uneasy feeling that it just might come down to a court matter. And in the end, he’d win. Stephen.

  Somehow Stephen always seemed to win. Even as a child, he’d been the luckiest of them all. Cornish luck, Rosamund called it. He’d survived four years of bloody war with half a dozen medals for bravery and a reputation for wildly daring heroics. Devil FitzHugh, they’d called him at the Front. Lucky.

  Fey, the old woman in the woods would have said ...

  2

  Ian Rutledge, returning to London in late June, found a mixed welcome at Scotland Yard. Warwickshire had not been a complete triumph—there were those who believed the outcome was more politically sound than judicially defensible, and others saw in his success a taste for notoriety. Chief Superintendent Bowles himself had set that rumor flying. “Not a well-defined closure, would you say? Field day for the press, of course, name in all the papers. I’d not care for that sort of thing, myself ... but some do.”

  Rutledge himself, still mentally and physically drained by events in Upper Streetham, was glad enough to be relegated once more to the mundane while he tried to heal.

  It didn’t last as long as he’d anticipated. There had been a series of brutal knifings in the City and the newspapers were attempting to resurrect the old Ripper killings, making farfetched comparisions in order to expand circulation. People had tired of the Peace, which had brought more misery to the country than any sense of enormous Victory. They were tired of grimness and stoicism, of poor food, no jobs, strikes, and unrest, and there was even a boredom with the struggle to revive the England they remembered before the Kaiser played for power in Europe. Any news that didn’t have to do with the strife of ordinary life, that could be parlayed into sensationalism, was followed with the frisson of fear that comes from knowing that you’re safe even while the tigers noisily devour your neighbor.

  Superintendent Bowles, on whose turf the knifings began, was already scenting a powerful public upsurge in attention, and never one to shirk the glow of reflected glory, he took over the cases himself.

  And that soon meant allowing Rutledge into the investigation as well, because of the need for manpower.

  It was not something Bowles relished, and he put off any briefings for three whole days.

  Then fate stepped in—he had extraordinary good fortune, he told himself, it was a sign of his righteous nature—and offered a partial solution. He grabbed it with both fists, and had soon twisted it around to his own satisfaction. Then, with energy and a sense of mission, he went to find Inspector Rutledge.

  It was a warm day in early July, the sun flooding the dusty windows and collecting in pools on the dusty floor of the small office Rutledge had been allotted.

  ‘‘Beautiful day! Damned shame to be shut up inside. And I’m off to the City and conferences for the rest of the afternoon.”

  Rutledge, looking up from his paperwork, said, “The Ripper?” He’d been expecting Bowles to send for him.

  “Yes, they’ve all but called him that, haven’t they? Certainly drawn every parallel they can think of, although this fellow doesn’t gut his victims, just all but flays them, there’s so many cuts on the body. Still, it’s bloody enough to make the innuendos successful. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s this.”

  He tossed a heavy sheet of paper on Rutledge’s desk, and it settled upside down on the dark green blotter. Rutledge turned it over and saw the crest at the top. “Home Office.”

  “Yes, well, that’s where it came from, but if you want my own interpretation, it originated in the War Office. Or the Foreign Ministry. Read it.”

  Rutledge scanned the typed lines.

  It said, in the flowery phrases of a man asking a favor he didn’t care to ask, that Scotland Yard was kindly requested to look into a trio of deaths in Cornwall that had been ruled a double suicide and an accidental death. The local people had not seen fit to pursue the cases further, but now information had come to hand that these were possibly not, in fact, what they appeared. If an officer could be spared from the Yard to travel to Cornwall and quietly go over the evidence, to be sure that ail was as it should be, the undersigned would be very grateful.

  Rutledge considered the letter again, then regarded Bowles. “What cases? And what new information?”

  “It seems,” Bowles said, availing himself of a chair, “that a certain Lady Ashford, who is somehow related to all three deceased parties, felt that there had been a hasty judgment, and insufficient consideration had been given to the likelihood of murder. Sounds like the old bitch got left out of the wills, and is now raising holy hell with some lord or other of her acquaintance, and he’s palmed her off on another lord in the Home Office, who’s now palming her off on us, worse luck!”

  Suddenly realizing what he’d just been saying, Bowles’ amber goat’s eyes flickered. In his irritation, he’d lost sight of his goal. Rapidly mending fences, he added, “It means, of course, that whoever we send out has got to mind his manners with the local people and still satisfy this Lady Ashford that her fears are groundless. Or, if they aren ‘t, reopen the cases as soon as possible and deal with them before we all get a black name for sheer incompetence.” He gestured to the letter. “He’s important, this Secretary. If we don’t please him, we’ll never hear the end of it from upstairs.”

  Rutledge read the letter again. “There’s a Henry Ashford in the Foreign Office,” he said thoughtfully. “Very highly placed.” He had gone to school with Ashford’s brother.

  Trust Rutledge to know! Bowles scowled. “Yes, well, that’s as may be.”

  “And you want me to go to Cornwall?”

  “It’s the kind of thing you can handle. Bennett, now, he’s available, but he’s as clumsy as hell when it comes to soothing ruffled feathers in little old ladies, however good he is in Whitechapel. And there’s Harrison. I could spare him, but he’s not got the patience to pussyfoot around anyone else’s investigation. He’ll go in with the notion they’re in the wrong and before you know it, the Chief Constable will be demanding his recall! And the Home Office will be wanting to know what we thought we were about, choosing the likes of him.” He sighed. “You’re the best I’ve got. Simple as that.”

  “And what about those murders in the City?” Rutledge asked. He was beginning to know his man. Bowles wanted Rutledge out of the way ...

  “Well, I don’t think we’ll solve them overnight! And if you don’t stay beyond a week, then I’ll have you to fall back on when I need you.”

  A week. You didn’t spend a week exploring the closed cases of the County constabularies. Did
that mean that Bowles felt there would be a reopening of the investigation? Something to keep Rutledge out of London—more to the point, out of the City—until Bowles had caught his own man?

  Suddenly Rutledge realized that he didn’t care either way.

  Going to Cornwall would be better than being cooped up at the Yard with time on his hands and Hamish growling from boredom at the back of his mind ... He turned and looked out at the sunshine. “The report you asked me to do is finished. I can leave this afternoon, if it suits you.”

  Bowles stared at the other man. Was he too willing? Was he intending to be down in Cornwall and finished with this matter before the weekend? Or did Rutledge know something that he didn’t about the London killings? And was all too pleased to be excluded from them? That would be a fine kettle of fish, sending Rutledge out of harm’s way just as the roof started to fall in here! Suspicious, he said, “Well, I’d not rush the investigation if I were you. It’ll all be to do over again if we don’t satisfy this sod in the Home Office!”

  “I won’t rush it.” Rutledge was still looking out the window, his mind already on the road west. Stirring to life, Hamish, a voice from the past, said, “It’s a bonny day. I’m not the man for four walls and a door.”

  Which made them seem to shrink in upon him. Shivering, Rutledge turned back to Bowles. “What do you have on these cases?”

  ‘‘Precious little. His lordship didn’t deign to send us more than this.”

  He passed over several sheets. Copies of death certificates for Olivia Alison Marlowe, spinster. Nicholas Michael Cheney, bachelor. Both dead by their own hands. The dates were the same. This spring. And for Stephen Russell FitzHugh, bachelor, death by misadventure. A fall. Three weeks ago. While he, Rutledge, was still in Warwickshire.

  “Seems ordinary enough. In both cases.”

  “It is. But as far as we’re concerned, the Home Office, like God, is never wrong!”