Wings of Fire ir-2 Read online

  6

  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. Rut-ledge 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 heri 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 Rosamend. 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 Ash-ford 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.

  Afterward they went up to the gallery. There were boxes she’d left in one of the bedrooms, and she fetched those while he went into the study, opened the cases, and brought out the finely wrought ship’s models. They were of such perfection that he could see the tiniest detail clearly, and he marveled at the patience and workmanship that had gone into them. But then the rector had spoken of Nicholas’ patience.

  He gave her the first one, the Queen of the Sea, at the door of the room, and she took it the way a priest takes the host, with trembling fingers. He made a point not to look at her face, her eyes. She knelt and began to wrap it carefully in cotton batting, then just as carefully lowered it into a box filled with torn strips of newspaper. He went back for the next, and brought that to her as well. The Olympic. He remembered when she was launched, 1910. The sister ship of the ill-fortuned Titanic. There was also the German Deutschland and her sister, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. And the earliest of the great liners, the Sirius, handsomely afloat on a beautifully carved sea with dolphins at her bows. And the Acquitaine, launched in time to become a hospital ship in the Dardanelles. He wondered how many ghosts had followed her home to England. The Mauritania had served off Gallipoli, the sister ship of the Lusitania sunk by a German U-boat in 1915.

  “Was it the ships or the sea that intrigued Nicholas Cheney?” he asked as the last of the liners went into her paper and batting slip. He hadn’t told Rachel how empty the cabinet looked without them, as if something that was alive in the room had been taken away.

  “Both, I think. He told me once-when we were children-that h
e’d grow up to be a great sea captain. One of his ancestors was an admiral, on his mother’s side, and had fought at Trafalgar. I suppose that was what put the idea into his head. There was a small boat down on the strand that he used from time to time. Sometimes Olivia went out with him. Sometimes I did. He was a different man on the water. I-I don’t exactly how, but it was there.”

  She closed the last box, and with his help taped the tops of the others as well, then together they carried them down to the hall. But at the stairs she stopped and looked back over her shoulder with such haunted eyes that he turned away and made a show of shifting the boxes in his arms. Hamish, in the back of his mind, stirred restlessly and ominously. He was sensitive to lost love-he’d died before returning to his own.

  Rachel left before Rutledge did, and when he came out, shutting the door behind him, he found himself face to face with the old crone who’d given him the longer directions to the house on his first morning. She stared up at him and grinned. What had Rachel called her? He couldn’t remember.

  “Ye found your way, I take it?”

  “Both ways, actually.”

  She cackled. “Is Miss Rachel still here?”

  “No, she left some time ago.”

  “And you’d not be knowing, would ye, of any old rags Miss Olivia was leaving for me? They’d not be in those boxes yonder in the hall?”

  “No, Mrs. Ashford packed those this morning. She’s coming to fetch them in a cart later.”

  “And none in the kitchen by the back door?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  She sighed. “I saw the devil yesterday, and wasn’t asking the likes of him for rags. But Miss Rachel’s a lady, she’d not turn me off.”

  Rutledge smiled. She might seem sharp as a tack, but her mind wandered. “I’ll ask her when I see her next.”

  The old woman leaned back and looked up at the house. “I was here the day Mr. Stephen fell.”

  “You were what?”