Wings of Fire

EXTRAORDINARY ACCLAIM FOR THE

WORK OF CHARLES TODD

WINGS OF FIRE

“Todd writes exceptionally about a time when people found not just meaning but healing in poetry, when intuition was viewed as kind of ‘second sight,’ and when everyone was stamped by war—not just the legless men, but also the women who lost their loves and so their futures.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“Novelist Charles Todd now joins that growing little circle of American authors like Elizabeth George and Martha Grimes who have made themselves at home in the exclusive field of the British literary mystery.”

—The Buffalo News

“Todd’s writing is graceful and evocative of a bygone time and place.”

—The Miami Herald

“[Rutledge] makes a welcome return in the haunting WINGS OF FIRE . . . Thoughtful and evocative, Todd’s tale offers interesting, three-dimensional characters.”

—The Orlando Sentinel

“Splendid imagery, in-depth characterization, and glimpses of more than one wounded psyche: an excellent historical mystery.”

—Library Journal

“A brilliant return . . . Memorable characters, subtle plot twists, the evocative seaside setting and descriptions of architecture, the moors and the sea fully reward the attention this novel commands.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A TEST OF WILLS

named a New York Times Notable Book of the year and one of Publishers Weekly’s six best mysteries of the year

“ . . . Both a meticulously wrought puzzle and harrowing psychological drama about a shell-shocked police inspector who investigates a murder.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“The emotional and physical carnage of World War I is used to remarkable effect in A TEST OF WILLS, an excellent new mystery and, one hopes, the first of a series.”

— Chicago Tribune

“Psychologically sophisticated, tautly written, and craftily plotted.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“Todd seems to have perfect pitch in his ability to capture the tenor and nuances of English country life with its clearly defined social strata. A TEST OF WILLS may on the surface be another whodunit, but Todd raises disturbing issues of war and peace that still confront us today.”

—Orlando Sentinel

“A newcomer returns us to the essential pleasures of the well-crafted puzzle . . . an absorbing story . . . Todd, depicts the outer and inner worlds of his character with authority and sympathy as he closes in on his surprising—and convincing— conclusion.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

WINGS

OF FIRE

Charles Todd

For D

You know why.

1

T he bodies were discovered by Mrs. Trepol, widow, occupation housekeeper and cook to the deceased.

It was not a morning of swirling sea mists and gray drifting sheets of rain, although afterward Mrs. Trepol remembered it that way.

In fact, the clouds had lifted in the night. The sea was gleaming in patchy May sunlight down below the headland, the house cast long shadows across the wet grass, and an unseasonable warmth already touched the light breeze as she came out of the wood at the side of the big kitchen garden. Her eyes jealously studied the cabbages in their neat rows, measuring them against the size of her own, deciding that hers still had an edge. Weil, of course they should! She’d always had the finest garden in the village, and hadn’t she proved it with ribbons won at every Harvest Festival? The onions were taller—surely they hadn’t been that high on Saturday? But anyone could grow onions. Her peas were already straggling up the sticks she’d set beside them, and growing peas was an art. No sticks stood beside these sad little stalks! She’d be cooking hers before these saw their first blossoms. Old Wilkins, who had kept the Hall’s gardens and stables since the lads had all gone off to the war, knew more about horses than vegetables.

Not that he didn’t crow over his work.

“Your carrots look a mite small, Mrs. Trepol,” he’d say, hanging over the rock wall by her front walk. “Compared to mine, that is.” Or, “Them beans is spindly. Put ‘em in late, did ye?”

Nosy old fool!

Her complacency restored, she went up the three steps to the kitchen door and let herself in with her key as she always did. Not that this was her day to clean. Mondays normally were her day off. But tomorrow she wanted to visit her sister—Naomi’s husband had offered to take them both to market in the morning—and Miss Livia never minded if occasionally she shifted her time.

The long stone passage was cool and quiet. At the end of it, she took off her coat, hung it on the peg as she always did, pulled her apron over her head, then stepped into the heart of her domain. And noticed at once that the breakfast dishes, usually neatly stacked on the drain board, hadn’t been brought down. She looked around the kitchen, saw that it was much as she’d left it on Saturday evening, not even a crumb marring her scrubbed floor, saw too that no one had opened the curtains.

Oh, my dear! she thought, pityingly, Miss Livia must’ve had another bad night, and she’s still asleep!

Going up to the back parlor, she found that those curtains were also closed. And for the first time she felt a tremor of alarm.

Mr. Nicholas always opened them at first light, to watch the sea. He’d said once that it made him feel alive to see the dawn come and touch the water ...

Miss Livia must have had a terrible night, then, if he’d missed the dawn on her account! Mrs. Trepol had never known that to happen in all the years she’d worked in the house. Mr. Nicholas was always up at first light... always ...

She went out into the hall and looked up the curving stairs.

“Mr. Nicholas?” she called softly. “I’ve come. Is there anything I can do? Would you care for a cup of tea?”

The silence around her echoed her words and she felt very uneasy now. Surely if he was sitting by Miss Livia’s bed, he’d have heard her and come out to speak to her?

Unless something was wrong with him—

She hurried up the stairs and went down the passage to Mr. Nicholas’ room, tapping lightly on the panel. No one answered. After a moment’s uncertainty, she turned the knob and opened the door.

The bed was made. From the look of it, it had not been slept in. Mr. Nicholas could always make it neatly, but never as smoothly as she did. This was her work. Saturday’s work . . .

She went back down the passage and knocked lightly at Miss Livia’s door. Again there was no answer. She opened it gently, so as not to disturb Miss Livia, or Mr. Nicholas, if he’d fallen asleep in the chair by his sister’s bed, and peered around the edge.

That bed too was untouched. The coverlet was as smooth as glass. Like Mr. Nicholas’. And there was no one in the chairs.

Suddenly very frightened, she listened to the house around her. Surely if Miss Livia had been taken down to the doctor’s surgery in the night, there’d be a message left in the kitchen! But this wasn’t her day; Mr. Nicholas wouldn’t have known she was coming in. Well, then, someone would have mentioned it at services on Sunday morning. Eager to gossip—

Going to the long study at the end of the gallery, which Mr. Nicholas and Miss Livia shared, Mrs. Trepol knocked and waited, then reached for the knob as she had twice before.

And then fright turned suddenly to terror. She quickly drew her hand back, bringing it to her flat chest almost protectively, her heart thudding uncomfortably beneath her fingertips.

She stood there for several seconds, staring at the shut door, her voice refusing to call Mr. Nicholas’ name, her hand refusing to reach again for the brass knob.

Whatever was behind that door, it was something she couldn’t face, not alone, not with her heart hammering like it was going to jump out of her chest and run away.

She turned and fled down the stairs, stumbling on the old, worn treads, nearly falling headfirst in her haste, thinking only of the safety of the kitchen but not stopping there, rushing down the passage, on into the early sunlight and back the way she’d come, toward the village and Dr. Hawkins. Only then did she remember her coat, but nothing would have taken her back into that house. Shivering, on the verge of tears, driven by uncertainty, she ran heavily and awkwardly through the gardens, heedless of the cabbages, and towards the copse of trees where the path to the village began.

What was left of the family gathered in the drawing room for a drink when everyone else had finally gone home, but conversation was stilted, uneasy, as if they were strangers meeting for the first time and had yet to find common ground. The truth was, they felt like strangers. In the circumstances. Unsettled, uncomfortable. Isolated by their thoughts.

Then Stephen said abruptly, “Why do you suppose they did it?”

There was an odd silence. No one, thank God, had asked that all the long day! Not through the services nor the burials nor the reception at the Hall afterward, where friends and villagers had mingled, talking in subdued voices. Remembering Olivia and Nicholas, recalling some small incident or ordinary encounter, a conversation—all safely in the past. Avoiding the how and why of death, as if by tacit agreement. Avid curiosity dwelt in their eyes, but they were sensitive to the delicacy of the situation. Suicides.

No one had spoken of the poems, either.

Susannah said quickly, “What business is it of ours? They’re dead. Let that be the end of it.”

“Good God, Nicholas and Olivia were your brother and sister—”

“Half brother and sister!” she retorted, as if that might distance her from real pain.

“All right, then, half brother and sister! Haven’t you even wondered about it? Don’t you feel anything?”

“I feel grateful that they could be buried with Mother in the family vault,” Susannah answered. “Thanks to the rector’s kindness! In the old days, it wouldn’t have been allowed, you know that. Suicides weren’t buried in the churchyard, much less in the crypt! And we’d have been ostracized along with them. It’s still bad enough, God knows. London will be an ordeal, facing all my friends, knowing pity’s behind their sympathy—” She stopped, unwilling to lay her emotions out, raw and painful, for the others to paw over. “I don’t want to talk about it! What we’ve got to face now is, what’s to become of the house?”

Daniel said, “I’d always understood it was left to the survivors to sell.” He glanced around the room. Susannah. Rachel. Stephen. Himself. He was Susannah’s husband, but he’d always been treated as one of the family. That had been a source of great pride to him. With feelings running so high over the Troubles in Ireland, he might have been seen as less, well, acceptable socially, without the Trevelyan connection behind him. Not that the Trevelyans were so high and mighty, but they were old blood, respected. His eyes moved on. Cormac. Olivia and Nicholas’d left Cormac out of their wills. Daniel had found himself wondering, sometimes, who Cormac’s Irish mother had been—if it had made a difference. Cormac was a FitzHugh, but not a Trevelyan. Not Rosamund’s child. Nor wed to one of Rosamund’s children. Nor, like Rachel, a cousin on the Marlowe side.

Rachel said, “Yes, that’s what I’d been told. Unless they changed their minds. At the end.” As they’d changed their minds about living ... She took a deep breath and refused to think about it. And instead found herself listening again. To the sounds of the house. Since she’d walked through the door two days ago, she’d felt it. Swallowing her, drawing the very breath from her body. Frightening her with a stillness that wasn’t stillness ...

Stephen said, moving his cane along the pattern of the Persian carpet’s intertwined medallions. “Well, I for one know what I think we should do. We should turn this place into a memorial. A museum in Livia’s memory.”

Susannah stared at him in surprise.

Cormac said, “Don’t be ridiculous! It’s the last thing she’d have wanted! Olivia spent her entire life hiding from people. Do you think she’d be pleased to have strangers wandering about in here now?” He moved gracefully around the room, tall and oddly beautiful in a very masculine way.

“It isn’t up to you,” Stephen retorted. He tried not to watch. He tried not to resent that grace. And couldn’t help it. The war had left him with half a foot. And this damned cane. Trenchfoot and gangrene, for God’s sake, not honorable wounds! No more long walks over the Downs, no more tennis, no more dancing, no more riding to hounds. He could still bowl at cricket, but awkwardly, terrified he’d lose his balance and fall flat on his face.

“All the same, Cormac’s right,” Rachel said. “I can’t imagine this place a museum. Livia would feel it was a betrayal.”

“Think of the cost,” Daniel added. “You’d need money for upkeep, repairs, staff. A trust of some sort. Olivia may have been famous, but she wasn’t that rich! In her own right, I mean.”

“We could afford it,” Stephen persisted. “Or perhaps the National Trust would be interested.”

“Not without a handsome endowment,” Cormac replied, stopping by the windows, his back to them. “It would take more than three quarters of your inheritance.”

“What are you saying? That we divide up the furniture— the sideboard for me, the piano for you, and who’s going to take the grandfather’s clock?—then sell the house and grounds? Pretend Olivia and Nicholas never existed, that the family—what’s left of it—doesn’t care?” Stephen was steadily losing his temper.

“You want a museum to your own memory, not hers,” Susannah said suddenly. “It’s your immortality you’re thinking about, don’t pretend it isn’t!”

“Mine?”

“Yes, yours! The war’s changed you, Stephen—and not for the better. Oh, I’ve heard you at dinners since she was found out, simpering when someone asks who the love poems were written about. You think it’s you, her darling, her favorite!” There was heavy sarcasm in her quiet voice. He’d been Mother’s favorite too. He was Susannah’s twin—and always so much more than her equal.

“Well, what if they were written about me? I’ve as much right as any of you to think what I please. You’re greedy, that’s what it is, wanting the money, wanting every penny you can squeeze. And that’s why she left her literary estate to me. A pity she didn’t include the house as well!”

“Who died last?” Rachel put in diffidently, not sure she wanted to know. “If it was Nicholas, then it’s his will we’re haggling over, not hers.”

“They were the same. Everything to each other, and if that failed, the poems to Stephen, and the house to the four survivors, jointly,” Cormac told her over his shoulder. There was no resentment in the level voice that he hadn’t been included.

“I’d hate to see day-trippers wandering through here,” Susannah said, “staring like spectators at a hanging, then eating their pasties and cider out on the lawns overlooking the sea.” She shuddered. “It’s horrid.”

“More horrid if this place is lost,” Stephen declared. “She’s a major English poet, for God’s sake!”

“When was the last time you were in Stratford? Or Word-worth’s home in Grasmere?” Rachel asked. “Empty, musty, travesties of houses. Like mummified bodies, on view because of vulgar curiosity. I don’t want to see this place kept like a waxwork long beyond its usefulness, genteelly crumbling at the edges. I want—to be finished with it.”

“Or is it yourself you’re thinking about?” Stephen demanded. “Is it your own secrets they might find, browsing around in here?”

Rachel looked at him coldly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That all of us have private lives, and one day biographers will be delving into them, laying them bare in the name of scholarship. To learn more about Olivia, how she lived, who her family was—that’s the lot of us—how she came to be a poet in the first place.”

“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 for 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!”

It was four o’clock in the afternoon before Rutledge was ready to leave for Cornwall. But the days are still long in July, and the warmth of the sun was soothing. In the trenches during the Great War he’d hated the hot days of summer, when the smells of urine and corpses and unwashed bodies overwhelmed the senses and sickened the mind. You cursed the Germans for making you stand in your own stink, never mind that they were standing in the lines smelling their own. One sergeant, who swore he’d never bathed at home in Wales, laughed at the raw replacements who gagged and puked, calling them sodding poufs for their sensitive noses. Blankets, coats, shirts, trousers, socks, they all were unspeakable in summer, and worse in winter when the wool never dried. Hamish chuckled. “Missing it, are ye?” “No,” Rutledge said tiredly, “unable to forget.” “Aye,” Hamish answered with relish from the dark corners of his mind, “that’s the game, man, you can’t run from it.”

The doctors at the clinic had told him that it was natural for him to hear the voice of Corporal MacLeod, shot by a firing squad just before the shelling that buried the salient, smothering men and mud and corpses alike with such force that that it had taken hours to dig out the barely living— Rutledge among them. He’d suffered several wounds, shell-shock, and severe claustrophobia, but the doctors at the aid station had pronounced it fatigue, given him twenty-four hours to sleep it off, patched him up, and sent him back to the lines. Experienced officers were in short supply. He couldn’t remember much about the year after that, only Ham-ish’s voice keeping him at his post—harrying, tormenting, haunting him until he was sure that others must have heard it too. He’d lived in agony at the thought of seeing the owner of that voice in the dark of the night or a star shell burst or among the rotting corpses that sometimes twitched from the maggots inside them. Somehow he must have carried out his duties well enough—no one reported him, and his men left him alone, too exhausted and worried and frightened themselves to care about anything except survival, and the dreaded next offensive. A long war ...

The road to Salisbury was not busy. And in the air flowing through the motorcar, sweet scents of wildflowers and ripening corn and the early haying followed him through the countryside. It would have been faster by train but he hated the small compartments, crammed cheek by jowl with other people while his heart pounded with fear and the palms of his hands were damp with the sweat of being hemmed in and unable to fight his way out.

Finding an inn twenty miles beyond Salisbury, he stopped for the night, ate a dinner of baked mutton and potatoes, with green beans on the side, and slept ill in the small, airless, low-ceilinged room he’d been given. The next day he picked up a line of squalls along the Devon border, riding the winds over the coast and disputing with the sunshine for dominance. Twice he nearly missed his turning as the rains poured down, and half an hour later the roadsides steamed as the sun broke through again. Hamish kept up a running commentary as they drove through villages that brimmed with life, waysides still thick with late wildflowers, and tiny, isolated cottages with thatched roofs or rampantly blooming gardens. So different, so different from the devastation in France. Sometimes small herds of dairy cows being driven down the road from one field to another blocked his path, or fat gray geese waddling between rain puddles and village ponds, or carts pulled by patient horses, in no hurry to be anywhere, the drivers turning to stare with intent interest at his motorcar. Between the deep hedgerows he was often the only human being in sight, although birds darted in and out and butterflies danced across the bonnet. The peace spread through him, soothing.

It was late in the evening when he reached Borcombe, tucked into a deep valley that ran down to the sea below a long headland. The rain had stopped, but heavy clouds still obscured the sky, and lights from houses and a busy pub already glistened across the wet pavements though the time was only a little after nine. It was a smallish village, and he quickly found the house he was looking for on the corner of Butcher’s Lane, home of Constable Dawlish. Pulling up before the white picket gate, he opened the door and got out stiffly, taking a moment to stretch his tired legs and massage aching shoulders. Then the door was opening at the top of the stone steps and a man in shirtsleeves was staring out.

“Inspector Rutledge?”

“Yes.” He opened the gate and went up the short, flagstone walk. “Constable Dawlish?”

They shook hands on the threshold and Dawlish ushered him into a small, warm room off the entry hall. “Let me take your coat, sir. A bit cool for July, isn’t it? It’s the rain, I expect. Have you had any dinner?”

“Yes, thank you. But I could do with some tea.”

“Kettle’s on the boil now, sir.” Dawlish gestured to the dark red horsehair sofa. “You’ll be comfortable over there. And I’ve got all the papers about the case in the folder on the table beside you. Inspector Harvey is sorry he can’t be here, but he had to go along to Plymouth. There’s a man there, fits the description of one we’ve been looking for. Talked three widows out of their savings.”

“We’ll manage well enough without Harvey at this stage,” Rutledge replied, taking Dawlish’s measure. He was tall and thin, a young man with old eyes. “On the Somme, were you?” he asked, hazarding a guess.

“Part of the time. I was over there three years. Felt like thirty.”

“Yes. It did.”

Mrs. Dawlish, small and plump, came in with a tray of tea, thick sandwiches, and dainty cakes. She smiled shyly at Rutledge as she set the tray on a second table by the hearth but well within reach of the sofa, and said, “Help yourself, Inspector. There’s plenty more in the kitchen.” And then she whisked herself out of the room, the perfect policeman’s wife.

“I’ll read these reports tonight,” Rutledge said as he took the cup Dawlish poured. “First, I’d rather hear your own point of view.”

Dawlish sat down and frowned earnestly at the cup in his hands. “Well, to tell the truth, I don’t see murder anywhere in this affair. Two suicides and an accident. That’s how it seemed to me. And to Inspector Harvey as well. There was no note with the suicides, but I was there, I saw the bodies, and you’d have a hard time, Inspector, setting up a murder to appear a suicide so fine as that. The bodies, the room, their faces. We don’t know why they decided to kill themselves, that’s right enough. But Miss Olivia Marlowe, she’d been a cripple and must have suffered something fierce from it. The housekeeper said she had many a bad night. And Mr. Nicholas Cheney, he’d done naught else but care for her all his life. Except for the war, of course—he was gassed at Ypres, and sent home. I suppose he felt there was nothing left to him if she went first. Too late, to his way of thinking, to start again. With his damaged lungs. Or maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to. Some people are like that, they’re content with what they know, however bad it is, and fear what they don’t know, however good it might turn out. He was young, younger than she was by four years, he could have married, had a family of his own. But I’m wandering from the facts—”

Rutledge shook his head. “No, no, I want to hear. You knew these people, after all. And you saw the bodies.”

Relieved that the gaunt man from London wasn’t pushing to have his own way, willy-nilly, Dawlish nodded. “Well, then, I accepted what I saw for what it seemed. There was no reason to do otherwise, and you can’t make up a case for murder when there’s no cause, no evidence to base it on. So the family was notified, they came and buried their brother and sister. It was as simple as that. But then they were clearing out the house to ready it for the market—and it’s a handsome house, they’ll sell it easy, even out here in the middle of nowhere. There was money made on the war, and a lot of it wants to be respectable money now.” There was no bitterness in the quiet voice, and only a hint of irony that those who had done the fighting weren’t the ones who had made their fortunes from it.

“The house might bring in enough to kill for?” “Possibly, though it’ll require a good deal of work to bring it up to being a showplace again. They’ll have to consider that in setting the price. And whatever they do get, it has to be split among the surviving family. It took more than a fortnight to clear out the house—just of personal belongings and the like. They’d all stayed to do that, except Mr. Cormac, who’d had to return to the City part of the time but was back that last weekend. At any rate, that last day when they were leaving, Mr. Stephen, the youngest, went head over heels down the stairs and broke his neck. But there was no one who could have been responsible for that, as far as we can tell. They were all outside at the time; he called out the window and said he was on his way down. And the next thing you knew, he’d fallen. Mr. Cormac went in to see what was keeping him, and set up a shout at once. No time to push him, no time to do more than find him, from what the others said. It’s a long sweep of stairs, the treads worn, and he went down with enough force to bruise the body. So he wasn’t dead to begin with and then just tossed over a banister. Besides, he’d called down, every one of them heard him.” He finished his first sandwich and reached for another. “Dr. Hawkins said he may have been hurrying, and with his bad foot—from the war—just missed his step. The others were that upset they’d been so impatient with him.” “And they are? These others?”

“It’s a complicated family, sir. There’s Cormac FitzHugh, now, he’s very well thought of in the City. He was there. He’s Mr. Brian FitzHugh’s son, born in Ireland before Mr. Brian married Miss Rosamund. Miss Susannah was there, she’s twin sister to the man who fell. Miss Susannah and Mr. Stephen were Mr. Brian’s children by Miss Rosamund, you see. And Miss Susannah’s husband, Daniel Hargrove, was there. And of course Miss Rachel, she’s a cousin on the Marlowe side of the family. Miss Olivia’s cousin, to be exact. Miss Olivia’s father was a Marlowe. Miss Rosamund, Miss Olivia’s mother, was married three times, and had two children by each of her husbands. But they’re all gone now except for Miss Susannah. She’s the last of the lot. Marlowe, Cheney, or FitzHugh.”

“This Rosamund, the mother—and stepmother—of all these children—”

“Rosamund Trevelyan, sir, whose family has owned the Hall since time out of mind. Her father’s only child. A lovely lady, sir, quite a beauty in her day. There’s a fine portrait of her up at the house, if they haven’t taken it away yet. If ever a woman deserved to be happy, it was that one. But sorrow seemed to be her lot. Still, to her dying day, nobody ever heard a harsh word from her. At her services, the rector spoke of the ‘light within,’ and she had that.” He smiled wistfully. “So few people do.”

“She’s—in one way or another—the key to this family, then. And to the house.”

“Aye, that’s true enough. Miss Rachel, now, she was Miss Rosamund’s first husband’s mece. Captain Marlowe, that was, Olivia’s father. Miss Rachel has been in and out of the house all her life. Mr. Hargrove, Miss Susannah’s husband, first came here when he was going on twelve, I’d say. Miss Rosamund had a string of race horses, most of them Irish bred, and more than a few bought from the Hargrove stables. Fine animals, they were, won dozens of prizes. As a lad I won more than a bob or two betting on them myself.”

“Who inherited the house when Rosamund died?”

“The house belonged to old Adrian Trevelyan, like I said. Miss Olivia’s grandfather. He left it to her, not her mother— no reflection on Miss Rosamund, you understand, but he wasn’t best pleased with her choice of third husband, and there’re some who say he left the house to Miss Olivia to keep it out of FitzHugh hands. Not to speak of the fact that Miss Olivia was a cripple and it was more likely that she’d have need of a home, unmarried and not apt to be. Í doubt anyone in the family—and certainly no one in the village— knew she was to become a famous poet.”

“Poet? Olivia Marlowe?”

“Aye. O. A. Manning, she was known as. I’ve never read any of her poems. Well, not much in my line, poetry. But the wife has, and she tells me it was very pretty.”

Pretty, thought Rutledge, was an understatement for O. A. Manning’s work. Haunting, lyrical, with undercurrents of dark humor at times, and subtle contrasts that caught people and emotions with such precision that lines stayed with you long afterward, like personal memories. She’d written about the war too, and he’d read some of those poems in the trenches, marveling that anyone could have captured so clearly what men felt out there in the bloody shambles of France. Could have found the courage to put it into words. He hadn’t known then that O. A. Manning was a woman.

But of course the Wings of Fire poems were different, and perhaps it was those that Dawlish’s wife knew. Love poems, and unlike the poems Shakespeare had written to his dark lady, these were light and warmth and beauty intermingled with such passion that they sang in the heart as you read them. Wings of Fire had touched him in a way that few things had.

Hamish growled, his voice a low rumble in the back of Rutledge’s mind. “Thought of your Jean, did you, as you read those lines? She’s no’ worthy of that kind of love! My Fiona was. She gave me the book before I took the troop train to London. They found it in my pocket, wet with my blood, when they dug out my corpse.”

Nearly choking on his tea, Rutledge coughed and said, “Leaving the suicides for the moment, none of the four at the house that last day had anything to gain from killing Stephen FitzHugh?”

“As to Mr. Cormac FitzHugh, nothing. He has no rights in the house. Miss Rachel and Mr. and Mrs. Hargrove will receive a larger share of the sale now, but we looked into that. Their finances are in order, and there’s no reason to think they needed the extra money.”

‘‘Where money’s concerned, people will do strange things. All right, I think you’ve told me all I need to hear for the moment. Where am I staying?”

“I’ve put you at The Three Bells, sir. Not far from the church. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank Mrs. Dawlish for the tea.” Rutledge collected the papers on the table and added a good night. It was raining again, and he dashed to his car, reaching it and climbing inside just as a wind-driven downpour swept over the headland and rattled against the picket fence like distant machine gun fire.

“Do ye think it was witchcraft that made yon woman write as she did?” Hamish asked, still intrigued with Olivia Marlowe. “She knew the war too well, man! It’s unnatural!”

“It wasn’t witchcraft, it was genius,” he answered before he could stop himself. It was a habit too hard to break, responding to Hamish.

Rutledge got out as the squall passed, started the engine, and drove too fast though the slanting rain. The inn came up before he expected it, and he nearly skidded as he came to a splashing stop in front of it. Beyond it he could see the spire of the church rising like a spear against the backdrop of storm clouds and wind-tossed trees.

“With your luck, you’d survive the car crash. And live in a chair for the rest of your days, with no one but me for company,” Hamish pointed out, and Rutledge swore.

The inn was small, sway-backed gray stone under a dark slate roof that seemed to be slowly pushing the whole building deeper into the earth from sheer weight. He was expected, and the landlord gave him a room overlooking a small cultivated enclosure in the back, more a tangle of overgrown roses and rhododendron than anything that could be dignified by the name of ‘‘garden.” He unpacked with swift efficiency and in ten minutes was abed and asleep.

He was never afraid to sleep. Hamish couldn’t follow him there.

But Jean could.

In the darkness, hours later, the wind shifted, and the sea’s breath drifted in the half-open window, bringing with it the softness of summer. Rutledge stirred, turned over, and began to dream of the woman he’d loved—and who’d wanted no part of the shattered remnants of the man she’d promised to marry. Jean, who in her own way haunted him too.

She touched his arm, and led him down a path he remembered, and for a time he thought it was real, that she was there beside him, her hand warm in his, her laughter silvery in the stillness, her skirts brushing lightly against him, and nothing had changed ...

3

Breakfast was hearty the next morning, the innkeeper inquisitive. Rutledge parried his questions and left after his second cup of coffee. Out on the street, he turned and looked at the sky, a habit drilled into him by war, when the direction of the wind could mean the difference between a gas attack and none. He thought it was going to be a fair, warmish day, in spite of the mists that twisted like wraiths around chimney tops and trees, and he decided to walk. There had been a set of keys in the folder Constable Dawlish had given him, and a sketchy map. It gave no indication of distances. A countryman’s map.

It was very early, and although a few people were already in their gardens getting a jump on the day, the streets were still quiet. A smallish village with only one main road coming in, passing the church, and running downhill between the shops to catch up again with the tiny River Bor close to where it met the sea. Houses jostled each other as they spilled down the valley, sometimes roof to porch or separated by lanes and rock gardens. A glimmer of water at the bottom of the road marked the sea, he thought, though it was just as likely to be the little river.

The ironmonger was busy setting out barrels and a plow or two, the sounds of children’s laughter floated from somewhere, and there was an elderly woman limping down the other side of the street. He crossed over and stopped her.

Closer to, she was truly a crone, bent with age, gray hair bundled into an untidy bun at the back of her neck, a black shawl that was so old it was nearly gray over her shoulders, and a gnarled cane that seemed to be no more than an exten-tion of the gnarled hand that held it.

“Please—” he began, not wanting to startle her.

But she looked at him with sharp, watery eyes that seemed to see him—and through him.

“Stranger in Borcombe, are ye?” she demanded, looking him up and down. “If you’re wanting the constable, he’ll not be about for another twenty minutes at best.”

Startled, Rutledge said, “Actually—”

“You want directions, then?”

“To the Trevelyan house. Can you tell me how to find it?”

“Are ye a walker, lad?”

It had been years since anyone had called him lad. “Yes.”

“Ye’ll need to be. Follow this road for a mile, more or less. Ye’ll soon come to a parting of the way, and ye’ll take the right fork. Follow that as far as it goes, and ye’ll see a pair of gates and a drive leading uphill. When you come to the top, ye’ll have the way fine from there.”

As directions went—if they were correct—they were as clear as any he’d ever been given. The crone chuckled hoarsely. “I’ve lived here eighty year and more.”

It was as if she’d read his mind. Hamish stirred uneasily, and the woman’s glance seemed to sharpen. But she said nothing, limping on her way as if the conversation had come to a satisfactory conclusion. He watched her, and she seemed to know it. Old as she was, he thought, a woman feels a man’s eyes.

Hamish laughed. “You’ve no’ spent any time in the Highlands, man!” was all he said to that.

Rutledge set out, following the woman’s directions, along the narrow, hilly road he’d traveled the night before. Finding the fork between curving fields of late hay, he walked on past a cottage or two and small patches of farmed land, and beside a long sweep of rough pasture. Within half an hour, he had reached the gates, dark with age and damp, leading through tall, wet stands of rhododendron backed by taller trees, into what seemed to be a sea of mist. But as he followed the rutted drive curling uphill, he came out into sunlight and brightness. And there at the end of a graceful sweep of lawn stood a house set in formal gardens, protected by the slope of the headland beyond.

It was an old house, the architectural history of four centuries locked in its embrace. Rutledge could trace a Tudor core, with Restoration, Georgian, and Victorian additions, but there was also an older, battlemented gateway near the stables that came from a dimmer past. The great palaces of the English nobility, Blenheim and Hatfield, Longleat and Chat-sworth, spoke of power and money. This house whispered of longevity and old bloodlines. Of timelessness and pride and peace.

He stood there, looking across at it, imagining its past, and searching for a key to its owners. What he felt was . . . sadness? No, that wasn’t it, it was a stronger emotion, something about the place that tugged at him.

Hamish, on the other hand, didn’t find it to his liking. “There’s too many dead here,” he said uneasily. “And they don’t lie quietly in their graves!”

Rutledge chuckled. “I’d haunt the estate too, if it’d been mine. I wouldn’t go peacefully to the churchyard in the town. Not with that view.”

For beyond the headland he could see the sea, already in the clear and gleaming in the morning light, whitecaps dancing in the sun. There seemed to be a small strand where the land ran down to the sea. Then, turning to his right, he could see the distant roofs of Borcombe.

Damned if the old crone hadn’t sent him the longest way around! You could walk from the last house he could see in the village into a copse of trees, and out of them into Tre-velyan land, in what? Ten minutes? Say, fifteen all the way to the house.

He unlocked the door with the key that Dawlish had given him and stepped into the wide front hall, where the curving staircase swept down from a gallery above. The hall itself was old, with a massive stone hearth at one side, and great oak beams that were black with age and smoke encompassing the hall and the long gallery that ran at the top of the stairs.

It was here then that Stephen FitzHugh must have fallen to his death. Rutledge walked to the stairs and began to examine them carefully, the uneven treads, the dark oak of the banisters, the ornately carved balustrade. If you fell to the left from the top, he thought, considering the possibilities, you’d come straight down, avoiding the curve. If you slipped on the right, you’d glance off the curve, slowing your momentum certainly, but with force enough to do damage anyway. But no one had said in the Inquest which direction Stephen had been coming from, his left or his right along the gallery.

The report Rutledge had read over breakfast indicated that Stephen FitzHugh hit the balustrade somewhere at the curve, broke his neck, and rolled the rest of the way to the hall, either dead already or nearly so. The doctor had noted the imprint of the carving on the back of Stephen FitzHugh’s neck, just below the cracked vertebrae that had killed him. Hawkins had also included a description of the amputation of the foot that had made the dead man’s balance uncertain at best, and possibly in this situation, prevented him from recovering it quickly enough to save himself from a nasty fall. The man’s cane had been found at the curve, jammed into the balustrade on the opposite side of the stairs. An accident ... it would be hard to quarrel with the Inquest’s results.

The house was cold, no fires lit with no one living here, and he kept his coat on as he walked through it slowly, carefully. A handsome home, not a baronial palace. The formal rooms—dining room, drawing room, a large library—were well furnished with heirlooms but looked as if they had not seen company for some time. Everything stood in its proper place, no magazines strewn about, no flowers in their tall vases, no sunlight pouring through open drapes, no dogs lolled on the hearth rugs. He remembered as a child being taken to a stately home, and a woman’s shrill echoing voice declaiming, “Here the family entertained three prime ministers, six members of the royal family, and the Queen, who was particularly fond of that blue silk chair.”

And he had twisted about, seaching in vain for them, until his father had told him to stand still and pay attention.

A back parlor, overlooking the gardens and the sea, and the kitchen quarters below, were more ordinary, as if people actually lived there, mussing up the carpet with their shoes, wearing out the upholstery with their bodies, reading the books on the low shelves. Or cooking at the big stove, washing up at the stone sink, sitting down to peel potatoes in one of the old brown wooden chairs.

He returned to the staircase. Generations had come down them, gone up them, and no one had worried about them. Until now. Hamish, stirring restlessly in the back of his mind, whispered, “I didna’ like this business. Leave the dead in their graves, man!”

Upstairs were the bedrooms. They were beautifully proportioned, with tall windows and handsome fireplaces. But old-fashioned now, as if no one had worried about the faded hangings and the worn carpets, preferring the familiar to the new.

He found the upstairs study where the suicides had occurred, thanks to the floor plan that Dawlish had sketched for him. It was a long room, windows looking out over the sea and over the gardens. A room of light and the warmth of the sun, neither a man’s nor a woman’s, but used, comfortable, ordinary. Nothing here to tell anyone where a famous poet worked, except perhaps for the typewriter sitting covered on a table by the seaward window. A guide would have to make do with the collection of books on either side of the table, set neatly on their shelves. “Here the poet found her inspiration among the works of ...”

But did she? Who could know?

Nearby was another table, where someone had been carving. The hull of a great ship lay, white and unfinished, among the scraps and curls of wood. It was a scale model of an ocean liner, Rutledge thought, looking at it. And there were others in a long case beneath the garden windows, intricately fashioned miniatures. He recognized several of them—the Olympia, the Sirius, the Lusitania. Whose work were these? Nicholas Cheney’s? Had they been a hobby for its own sake or did they represent a love of the sea that had been repressed to this room?

He crossed the room to the couch against the wall, where the bodies of brother and sister had lain side by side in death, their hands touching as if for comfort as the darkness closed in. Why had they died?

“I don’t like it here, man,” Hamish said. “If you’re going to investigate a murder, get about it.”

“Murder sometimes has its roots in other places than the few feet of space where it happened. Still, why here? Why on that night?”

“Hello?”

A voice calling from the hall below startled him badly.

He walked out to the gallery at the top of the stairs and looked down. There was a woman at the foot of the stairs, the front door open behind her, and she was looking up anxiously, as if almost afraid of what might walk out of one of the rooms there to confront her.

“Inspector Rutledge,” he said, moving towards the steps. “I arrived last night and came to have a look around. Constable Dawlish provided me with keys.”

“Oh!” she said, smiling up at him with relief on her face. “I thought I heard voices when I walked in. I didn’t know who might have found their way in. The press has been very troublesome.”

She was slim, perhaps in her thirties—it was hard to tell— her oval face pink from walking, her light brown hair curling ridiculously around it, escaping from the knot at the back of her neck. Not pretty, yet very attractive. She waited until he had reached the hall and said, “I’m so glad they’ve finally sent someone from Scotland Yard. I’m Rachel Ashford. The one who’s been fighting to get these ... deaths ... reopened.”

“Lady Ashford?”

Her smile changed. “My husband is dead. His brother has the title now. Sir Henry. Did he tell you that Lady Ashford wanted to reopen the investigation? How very like him!”

“You’re Peter Ashford’s widow?” Rutledge asked, surprised. “I was in school with him.”

“Peter died in the war. Trying to take Mount Kilimanjaro, out in Kenya.”

“I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.” So much for Bowles’ “titled old bitch.” But it was a shock, Peter’s death. Another name added to the long list of friends gone. More than once he’d felt the guilt of surviving. As if it was somehow obscenely selfish, when so many had died. After a moment, he made himself go on. “And you believe the investigations done by Inspector Harvey and Constable Dawlish were mishandled?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because—oh, because of intuition, I suppose.” She made a wry face at him. “And I can’t help but feel that coincidence can only be stretched so far. Three deaths in the same family in little more than a month? I—I knew Livia and Nicholas, they weren’t at all what the papers say, an invalid and her devoted keeper. It’s wrong, the notion that they could have killed themselves because of ill health!”

“I understood that Olivia Man—Marlowe—was crippled. And that Nicholas Cheney had been gassed in the war.”

“Well, yes,” she said defensively, “certainly that’s true, since you put it so baldly. Olivia lost the strength of one leg in childhood, from the crippling disease. She used a chair for a long time, then Nicholas carved a brace for her, and after that, she could move about as she pleased. It was wonderful! I can still hear her laughter when she first tried it—we were all outside her bedroom door, while Nanny put it on—and she began to laugh, and Nicholas was jumping up and down beside me, shouting encouragement, and Rosamund was crying, and Richard was pounding on the door, he was so beside himself with excitement ...” Her voice faded and she looked up the stairs defensively, as if afraid she’d hear the children’s voices again. “If she killed herself,” Rachel continued after a moment, “it wasn’t because of her leg! She accepted it, she lived with it, she’d come to terms with the pain—it wasn’t something that drove her to despair and suicide.”

The sunlight pouring through the open door failed to reach them or warm the vastness of the hall. But he could hear birds somewhere, singing.

“If she had wanted to kill herself—for whatever reason—” Rutledge said, “why would she allow Nicholas to join her in death? Why not see that he survived, and got on with life. However hard it might seem to be at first? Why not kill herself in her bedroom, with no one to see?”

She pressed her fingers to her eyes, as if they still hurt from crying. Or to hide them from him. “I’ve asked myself that a hundred—a thousand—times since then. They were very close, Olivia and Nicholas. I’d have said, if anyone had ever thought to ask me, that she would have jumped into the sea in the night, rather that let him die with her. It doesn’t mean that perhaps in the first shock he might not have wished to follow, but Nicholas had a cool head, a clear mind, he wasn’t the dramatic, overly emotional sort of man who could leap into the sea himself the next morning. When she was already dead.” Dropping her hands, she said painfully, “If you understand what I’m saying?”

He did, though Hamish was grumbling that it made no sense. “Yet they died together.”

“Yes, and that’s what put me off in the very beginning. I didn’t say much to the others; they wouldn’t have wanted to hear me worrying over what couldn’t be changed. Or making it worse by starting a fuss over it. But the more I thought about the circumstances, the more I was convinced that something was very wrong, very—unusual.”

“Do you think one of your cousins—including Stephen— could be capable of murdering Olivia and Nicholas? For whatever reasons?”

She stared at him, stunned. “Oh, God, no! Susannah and Stephen couldn’t have killed either of them. And Daniel, what on earth for?”

Rutledge smiled. “Where there’s murder, there’s usually a murderer.”

“But not one of us!” she cried, alarmed.

How often had he heard the same cry when he’d begun an investigation into suspicious death. Murder, possibly. But not one of us. A stranger. A madman. An envious neighbor or colleague. The woman down the road. But not one of us. Then the finger-pointing began, as suspicion and fear and uncertainty and old memories came to the surface.

“Who, then?” he asked gently.

“That’s why I called Henry and begged him to ask the Yard to come down here and look into the deaths. Someone who could be objective, someone with the experience to judge what had really happened. Not a village policeman who preferred the safest answer to embarrassing the family any more than it already was. I mean, suicide is unacceptable enough— murder would be, well, a family calamity.” She looked at him, seeing him for the first time. The thin face. The haunted eyes. Intelligence, too, but something more. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“There were no photographs upstairs. Do you have any of the family that I could borrow for a time?” He was mainly interested in Olivia Marlowe, the woman behind the poems. But it helped, often, to see the faces of the dead if you were late at the murder scene.

“We’d taken them all. The house will be put up for sale soon, and we didn’t want to leave—I’ve just come to fetch the ships,” she said, flustered. “I—I haven’t had the courage yet to go in there. Where they—where it happened. There are photographs in my things, I’ll find them. Where are you staying?”

“The Three Bells,” he said, curious about her reaction. “What can you tell me about Stephen FitzHugh’s death?”

She shivered, not looking over his shoulder at the stairs, though her head had turned that way. “It was awful. He was lying at the foot of the steps, his eyes wide, a little blood— I couldn’t tell if it was from his ear or his mouth—smeared across his cheek. Cormac said he died as we watched, but I saw nothing change, didn’t hear a sigh or—or anything. And I was kneeling there, beside him, my hand on his chest, calling his name. It was—I’ve seen men die before. I was in London when the Zeppelins came over, I was there when they pulled people out of one of the buildings. But this was Stephen.” She collected herself with an effort and turned towards the open door. “I’d better leave now,” she said ruefully. “Men don’t like it when women start to cry, and I’ve found it hard sometimes ...”

He let her go, watching her slim figure hurry down the drive and turn towards the sea.

So that was Lady Ashford, born Rachel Marlowe, and cousin to the people who lived here. Peter’s wife. Widow. He remembered Peter, tall and fast at games, level-headed and very good at whatever he did. He’d had a gift for languages, he could pick them up with apparently no effort, and speak them like a native. All that wasted in an obscure action on the flanks of a mountain whose one claim to fame was that Queen Victoria had had two mountains in East Africa, and had given Kilimanjaro to the Kaiser, next door in Tanganyika, who’d had none. Bloody silly thing to do in the first place. And Englishmen had died trying to retake it from the Germans under that master strategist, Von Lettow-Vorbeck, who knew how to pin down men who would otherwise have been fighting in France.

Rutledge turned and went back up the stairs to the sitting room, standing there with his eyes roving the furnishings, the books, the wooden ships that Nicholas Cheney carved. He had left more of himself here than the poet, after all ...

Two people who died together for no apparent reason. No expression of regret, no apologies to the living. No explanation of the deed, no excuses, no last confessions, no lines of bitterness meant to hurt the survivors. Just ... silence.

Hamish, uneasy and sensitive to the unsettled atmosphere of Rutledge’s mind, called to him to leave, to wash his hands of this case and go back to London.

Rutledge gave up trying to hear the stillness, and walked out into the gallery again on his way to Olivia’s bedroom.

A voice down in the hall said harshly, “What the hell— who the hell are you?”

Rutledge looked down, not seeing anyone at first, then finding the tall man who stood just in the shadows of a doorway.

“Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard,’’ he said. “I’ve a key from Constable Dawlish, and I’m here on official business. Who are you?”

“Official—what’s happened?” the other man demanded sharply.

“The inquiry into the deaths of Miss Marlowe, Mr. Cheney, and Mr. FitzHugh is being reconsidered by the Yard,” Rutledge said, and started down the stairs.

The man in the doorway was handsome in a way that few men are, reminding Rutledge of Greek statues, that same mix of perfect body and face and mind that the Golden Age admired most. And yet there was something about him that was pure Irish. Was this Daniel Hargrove, the husband of Susannah FitzHugh?

Before he could test that, the man said, “I’m Cormac FitzHugh. A member of the family. No one has told me of any renewed inquiry! Neither the local police nor the family’s solicitors. What are you doing here?”

“Surveying the scenes of death,” Rutledge responded, coming to the last step and staying where he was. He’d dealt with officers of this man’s ilk, accustomed to giving orders and expecting instant, unquestioning obedience to them. He’d never liked such men.

Hamish growled, “Bloody, arrogant bastards, the lot!”

“I’m putting a stop to this right now! You’ll hand over your keys, if you please, and leave the grounds at once. There will be no reopening of any affairs to do with my family.”

“I’m afraid, Mr. FitzHugh, that you have no say in this business. It’s a police matter, at the request of the Home Office. You have no option but to cooperate.” He paused. “Unless, of course, you have something to hide in any of these three deaths?”

FitzHugh looked as if Rutledge had struck him. “I wield considerable power in the City—”

“That’s as may be,” Rutledge answered him. “It doesn’t count here, I’m afraid.”

“Yes, I’ve something to hide,” FitzHugh said shortly, changing directions so quickly that Rutledge was nearly caught off guard. “My stepbrother and my stepsister killed themselves. It isn’t something I’m happy about, but it was a choice they both made. The reasons behind their deaths were extremely personal, and since there’s no question that suicide was the cause of death, laudanum to be precise, self-administered, I see no reason on earth why their unhappiness must be dragged through the newspapers. It serves no purpose, and it will hurt my cousin, my half sister, her husband, and me. For the delectation of a public who couldn’t care less about my family but who thrive on titillation. My God, look at what they’re already doing with these knifings, raising the spectre of the Ripper as if it was something to be proud of, not buried and forgotten!”

Rutledge agreed with him there, but said nothing.

After a moment, Cormac FitzHugh sighed and then added more reasonably, “There’s no hope of deflecting you from this investigation?”

“Sorry. None.” He made no mention of the fact that the conclusions might well be the same as those the Inquest had reached. Or that so far he’d seen no evidence, heard no new information, to do more than he was already doing, asking general questions. Rutledge was more interested in where the other man’s mood was taking them.

Cormac seemed to argue something with himself and, reluctantly, to come to a decision. “All right, then, come in here; we needn’t stand in the hall like unwelcomed guests.” He led the way into the drawing room, looking with distaste at the closed curtains and the empty space over the mantel where a large portrait had hung. “I’m not used to the house like this. It was never empty in my childhood. Nor dark and dreary and full of sadness. But then my childhood has vanished, taking the memories with it, I suppose. Sit down, man.”

Rutledge took the chair across from his and wondered what this polished denizen of the City was about to tell him in such confidence.

It wasn’t what he expected.

“I’ve never told anyone of this. If you speak of it, I’ll deny I said it now. I’ll claim that you made it up in a desperate need for promotion or to build your reputation, whatever fits. Do you understand me? I can do you considerable harm, professionally.”

Rutledge got to his feet. “The Yard doesn’t respond to threats.”

“This isn’t a threat, God damn it! I’m trying to protect my family, and 1 have every right to do that. What I’m about to tell you is disturbing, unproved, and frighteningly true. But the murderer is already dead, and there’s no use in punishing the living, is there?”

“What are you talking about?” Rutledge asked, as Hamish growled a warning.

Cormac FitzHugh took a deep breath. He’d judged his man, he knew he was right, and he got on with it. “Olivia Marlowe—O. A. Manning—was a brilliant poet and a woman to whom life was a thing to be possessed, to be lived and worshipped and enjoyed. She was also a cold-blooded murderer.”

4

Rutledge stared at the man’s face, at the conviction and the pain there. He himself felt the shock, the onslaught of an unexpected grief. He hadn’t known the woman at all, but he’d known her poems. How could a soul that produced Wings of Fire be capable of wanton killing?

“Because,” Hamish shouted at him, “she knew the depths as well as the heights a man can reach! And it’s uncanny— I want no part of her!”

FitzHugh was watching him, acknowledging his reaction. His eyes were a very fine gray-blue in this light, clear and straightforward.

“Now you know why I’d stoop to any threat to protect what I’ve told you.”

“You’ve told me, but you haven’t convinced me,” Rut-ledge heard himself saying.

FitzHugh got up and went to the lacquered cabinet against the wall that led to the hall, and opened it. Rummaging around inside, he found two glasses and a cut-glass decanter of whiskey. “I don’t know about you, but I need this.” He held up the second glass, raising his eyebrows.

Rutledge nodded. Talking as he poured the whiskey and added soda, FitzHugh said, “I think she killed Nicholas. That it was a murder and suicide, not a double suicide. I don’t see Nicholas cravenly taking the easy way out. She must have tricked him. Although, to be truthful, the gassing left him with a cough and rawness in his lungs. He may, for the first time, have really understood the pain that Olivia felt all those years. I don’t know. It’s hard to fathom. I have to believe it was suicide, but I can’t help but feel, when I’m honest about it, that she planned his dying. Whatever he himself decided in the end, she was prepared to take him with her. She’d never been alone. It may be that she couldn’t bear to be alone in death. Who knows what was in her mind.”

He brought the whiskey and soda to Rutledge and sat down with his own, taking a long draught as if to dull the pain. Rutledge drank a little of his, waiting, looking at the room again, this time seeing the Chinese silk on the walls, the lovely proportions of the fireplace, the molded medallions on the ceiling. The polished wood of the floors, dark now and lifeless. As Olivia was lifeless. None of this could touch her. But there was still her reputation . . .

“I do know for a fact—for a fact, mind you, although there’s no proof whatsoever—that Olivia killed her twin sister Anne. Anne died at eight, fell from an apple tree where we were all playing. I wasn’t part of the family then, my father had come here with horses he’d sold to Rosamund. Rosamund Cheney, she was, her second marriage. Her first husband, Captain Marlowe, died out in India. Cholera, when he went back to wind up his affairs out there. She married a close friend of his, James Cheney. At any rate, Nicholas was a child at the time I’m talking about, his brother Richard still in leading strings. We’d all gone out to the orchard to play, and I started climbing trees, throwing down apples. They don’t grow very well here, small and sour, but as children we didn’t care. Olivia said she’d climb as well, and found a tree of her own.”

He swirled the whiskey in his glass, staring at it as if it might have more answers than he did. “I was still in the other tree when Anne climbed up after Olivia. Nicholas was just under their tree, holding on to the trunk and looking up at them—probably wishing he could do the same, but his legs were too short to reach the first branch. Anne was—sometimes stubborn. Spoiled a little, I think. She reached the branch where Olivia was sitting and said, “These are my apples now, you must find another tree.”

Looking at Rutledge again, he said, “Olivia refused. She was never one to give way when it was wrong. ‘That’s not fair,’ she’d say, and stick to her guns through whatever battle followed. I admired her for that ...”

“What happened?” Rutledge asked, as he stopped again. “Get on with it, man!”

“They argued, Anne insisted. And Olivia shoved her out of the tree. She hit a branch coming down, that’s what saved Nicholas. But it tipped her on her head, and when she struck the tree trunk’s main root, which was just showing above the grass, it fractured her skull.” He shivered. “God! When I saw Stephen lying at the foot of the stairs, I thought he’d done the same thing!” He drank more of his whiskey, then said, “I was out of the tree I’d climbed in an instant, skinning both knees as I came down, though I didn’t remember that until much later. And I got to Anne first. She was dead. I looked up at Olivia, and she stared back down at me. There was nothing in her face. I was the hireling’s son then, the horse trainer’s brat. I played with them, I ate with them sometimes, but I wasn’t one of them. So I ran for help and never told what I’d seen. Just that Anne had fallen while we were climbing.”

“You never spoke of it to your father?”

“He was already besotted with Rosamund Cheney. He wouldn’t have believed me—that one of her precious daughters could have killed the other one? He’d have called me a troublemaker and boxed my ears, instead. The lucky thing is, Anne didn’t fall on Nicholas. There might have been two deaths that day, instead of one. They were both some distance up, she and Olivia. It was a long way to fall.”

“I thought Olivia was crippled. How is it that she could climb so high?”

“She was. But the bad leg followed her, braced her, as her arms pulled her higher into the tree. Coming down again was more of a problem. But Olivia wasn’t one to—to be denied a normal life. We pushed her chair everywhere, to the water’s edge, to the orchard, to the cliff. Down to the village, sometimes.”

“An interesting story. But as you said, there’s no proof.”

“No. It could still do a great deal of harm, all the same. And there’s Richard.”

“The one in leading strings?”

“Yes, that’s right. He was lost on the moors when he was five. There was a family picnic, and he and Olivia went for a walk. She came back without him, and although we searched until dark and again through the night, with lamps brought from the nearest houses, we never found him. Or his body. He had simply disappeared.”

“And you think Olivia killed him, somehow hiding the body?”

“God knows. Speculation was rampant. Some said the gypsies had taken him. He was a handsome child, very fair and more like Rosamund than Nicholas, who was dark. Others believed he’d fallen down one of the old mine shafts. The point is, Olivia had walked away with him and Olivia came back without him. He may have wandered into one of those bottomless pools on the moors. Or he may have been thrown in. The pool nearest the picnic was dragged, with no luck. I wouldn’t have thought about Olivia killing him—if I hadn’t been a witness to Anne’s death. And that left only the two, you see, Olivia Marlowe and Nicholas Cheney. James Cheney died soon afterward. Cleaning his guns. That was the verdict at the inquest. I often wondered if it was grief over Richard that made him careless. He was distraught—they had to lash him to a horse to get him off the moors. Rosamund, Rosamund was always a pillar of strength. I’ll never forget her tramping through the darkness, lamp in hand, determined, silent, tears on her face, but not a single word did she speak. I went with her. I thought if anyone could find the boy, she might. She had this streak of—I don’t know—intuition. She hadn’t wanted to go on the picnic, but there were guests from Wells, and James thought it would please them. That haunted him to the end.”

“There’s still no proof,” Rutledge said, as Hamish took up the theme of intuition. Rutledge had nearly lost his own in the aftermath of war and in the struggle to regain his balance. Now he fought against the deep voice in his head, reminding him of the last time he’d used that intuition. Warwickshire. Not a time he wanted to dwell on. Instead, he said to FitzHugh, “You tell me these things, but they could all be lies. Someone else could have done the killings. Or they could have been accidents, misfortunes, not murder.”

FitzHugh drained his glass, then rose to set it on the mantelpiece. “As you say. But for God’s sake, man, bear it in mind, what I’ve told you. And don’t be the hero, don’t drag Olivia Marlowe or O. A. Manning or any of the rest of us through the tribulations of exposure. If I’m right, and Nicholas died at Olivia’s hand, let it go down as suicide. Can you do that much for us?”

“And Stephen FitzHugh? Your half brother?”

“He lost half of his foot in the war. He fell down worn stairs. But it was my fault, if you want the truth. When he stuck his head out the window to say that he would be no more than five minutes, I was impatient, I had a train to catch, and I told him that he’d damned well better make haste or we were leaving without him. And he did make haste. And he died. I’m still waking up at night in a cold sweat, trying to call back those words.”

“But he was the only family member who was against selling the house, as I understand it. Now it can be sold without any problems.”

“And I’m very likely to buy it,” Cormac FitzHugh said, reaching for Rutledge’s empty glass and setting it beside his own. “That’s what brought me down this morning. I’d toyed with the idea. I’m looking for a house in the country, but I was thinking of something closer to town than this. Now I feel guilty about the house as well. Letting it go out of the family. I can’t follow Stephen’s plan, I can’t turn it into a museum for O. A. Manning—God, the scholars would have a field day if they stumbled over what I’ve just told you! Olivia would not only be famous, she’d be notorious.”

Rutledge stood up. “Which window did your brother call from, before he fell?”

FitzHugh stared at him blankly. “Which window? It was from the room that had been Father’s. To the right of the stairs. Do you want to see it?”

“No, that’s not necessary. Not this morning. I’ve taken enough of your time. I’ve work to do in the village. Will you be staying here? In the house?”

“If I can find Mrs. Trepol and persuade her to make up my room.” He grinned. “I’m not useful in that regard. Horses I know, and contracts, and how to handle stockholders at a meeting. Sheets and towels are beyond me.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I have a business in the City. FitzHugh Enterprises. Made my fortune in iron and steel, branched out into other interests. Oil. The Navy’s looking into that.” He smiled, immense charm, Irish charm, changing his face. “They call me a war profiteer in some quarters. Because I made money on the killing. But the men in the trenches, when the first tanks came over the barbed wire, didn’t worry about their cost, only about what they could do to the Germans. I saved lives, if you come right down to it.”

“Were you in the war as well as profiting from it?”

The grin faded. “Oh, yes, Inspector, I was. That surprises most people. I was one of the code breakers. I have a skill at mathematics that certain people at Cambridge remembered quite well. I don’t think I could have gotten into the real fighting—I was more useful where I was. Boring work. You never knew whether what you’d just decoded was the most important secret of the campaign or the least important. You just did your best. Like everyone else.”

Rutledge closed the front door behind him and stepped out into the drive. The sunlight now was brilliant, the mists gone, the sea such a deep blue it hurt the eyes to look at it. He walked down the drive and took the path towards what turned out to be a shingle strand, long and narrow and swept by the tides in every gale, but this morning busy with gulls and choughs and a pair of ravens that were squabbling over something the water had brought in. It appeared to be what was left of a fish. The headland shut out the wind, and there was unseasonable warmth by the water, and a stillness of the air that reminded him of France, just before the artillery barrages began. He stood there, looking out to sea, watching a wisp of steam that came out of Wales and sailed, below the horizon, to faraway ports. It was peaceful here, but there were straggles of rocks again to his right, jutting out where the land began to rise once more, tumbled and rough and water-sprayed. He wondered if in the past wreckers had stood here with their lanterns and lured ships onto a stormy shore. Cornwall had always lived from the sea, one way or another.

Shadowed, the headland on his left was massive and dark, white water creaming at its base. And the house was invisible from here, only the line of the roof and the clipped lawns foretelling its presence.

There was the sound of footsteps on the shingle behind him, and he turned to see Rachel Ashford coming towards him. He waited for her, and she said, “Has he gone yet?”

“Cormac FitzHugh? No, I left him in the house.”

Chewing her lip for a moment, she thought about it. “Well, I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow, won’t I? For the ships.” Then she looked up at him, shading her eyes with her hand. “I know,” she said, answering what she read in his face. “I wasn’t actually ready to fetch them anyway. It’s just—” After a moment, she went on in different voice, “You’ve been in there. What did you feel?”

She meant the study upstairs. And he couldn’t pretend to misunderstand.

He said, looking out to sea, “I don’t know.”

But Hamish said, very clearly, “The lassie didn’t ask for lies!”

Startled, Rutledge turned back to her and said, “What makes you think there’s anything to feel?”

It was her turn to be evasive. “I—you don’t make decisions like that, and expect no trace of them to survive. I’m not fanciful, you know. But when I go inside that house, I hear the silence. And I can’t tell what it’s whispering to me. But I’m frightened.”

“Would you like me to fetch the ships for you? Put them out in the gallery, where you could box them up without going inside the study?” He couldn’t have said, afterward, why he’d volunteered to do it. Except that he could sense her pain. And pain he understood.

Surprised, she said, “Would you? I couldn’t impose on Mrs. Trepol. Or ask the others, they’d have laughed at me. But if you could—when Cormac has gone? It—it would be very kind of you.”

He couldn’t stop the next question. It came out more bluntly than he’d intended. Because, he knew, it disturbed him deeply. “Do you think; Olivia Marlowe could have murdered her half brother, then killed herself?”

For an instant he thought she was going to faint, her face turned so white, and she took several gasping breaths, as if to steady herself. He reached out to catch her arm, but she shook him off.

“You—is that what you feel in that room?”

“No, it’s a policeman’s curiosity exploring the possibilities. After all, you sent for me to do that.”

Color flooded back into her face, and she swallowed hard. “That was very cruel,” she said, voice low and husky. “I can’t picture, in my wildest fancies, any reason why Olivia would harm Nicholas. Or why he would harm her!”

And yet the very question had struck a chord in her, one she’d shut out of her mind with all the strength of her will. Until he’d put it into words.

5

They walked back to the village together, in a silence that brooded between them like a summer’s storm, building and darkening, but not breaking. The shortcut through the copse was cool and dim after the sunlight.

Hamish was rattling on about women, about the moodiness this one evoked, about his relief at leaving the house and grounds of Trevelyan Hall. Rutledge ignored him. He was still trying to deal with the concept of Olivia Marlowe as a killer, and damning Cormac FitzHugh for putting it into his head.

No, it wasn’t Olivia Marlowe that disturbed him. He, Rutledge, knew very little about Olivia Marlowe. It was O. A. Manning he knew, and the poetry had touched his own spirit in the darkness of war. Standing before God, Rutledge would have sworn that O. A. Manning was not a murderer. Could not have been. And yet, Cormac FitzHugh had no reason to lie, no reason to twist the truth, no reason to know that Rutledge the man, not the police officer, had seen something fragile shatter as he spoke.

As if she’d sensed something of the turmoil in Rutledge’s mind, Rachel touched his arm and stopped. “What is it? What’s bothering you?”

“I don’t know,” he told her truthfully. “I think I’ve come to Cornwall on a useless errand.” Better London, and boredom, than this!

“You’ve only been here one day,” she said gravely. “How can you know that? Or did the Yard send you here just to please Henry Ashford, a gesture that was never intended to dig very deeply into these deaths?”

The old proverb—to let sleeping dogs lie—flitted through his mind. Instead, he said to her, out of nowhere, except that they were taking the shorter path to Borcombe, “Who is the old crone I met in the village this morning? She must be eighty, by the look of her. Stooped. But with extraordinarily clear eyes.” And a perverted sense of humor, if he was any judge.

Rachel frowned. “Ah. You must mean Sadie. I’m not really sure what her last name is. She’s been here for so long that she’s just—Sadie. The old rector, Mr. Nelson, who’s gone now, said he thought she’d been a nurse in the Crimea, and it turned her mind. But she has a healer’s touch, it might be true enough. Midwife, confessor, horse doctor, comforter, prescriber of herbs. The villagers may go to her more often than to Dr. Hawkins.”

“Witch?”

She chuckled, a low husky laugh that was at odds with her personality as he’d come to know it. Sensual, almost, and yet full of an appreciation of the ridiculous. “I suppose she’s been called that too! No, if she’s a witch, it’s a white witch, not a black one. I’ve never heard of spells put on anyone or people dying under her care. Well, they die, yes, but of their ailments.”

“No love potions?”

“No, sadly not,” she said, a twist of pain in her voice that came out of nowhere. As if she sensed he’d heard it, she said, smiling, “I went to her once, begging a potion. I was madly in love, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I thought she might give me something to put in his soup or his breakfast porridge—we were too young for goblets of wine, but I grew up on the stories of Tristan and Isolde. I knew—thought I knew—that such potions worked. She was very gentle, but she told me that love couldn’t be bought.”

He thought she was belittling herself and what had actually happened, but said nothing. It occurred to him to ask her about Anne, but it was not the time. Then she mentioned the name herself.

“It was Anne who’d read the old Cornish legends to me. Her grandfather Trevelyan—Rosamund’s father—had compiled a collection of them, it was famous in its day, and there’s a letter in the house from Tennyson, telling him how much the book stirred his imagination while he was writing Idylls of the King. I could quote long passages from it by heart. Well, we all could. Nicholas, especially. You’d have thought, watching our theatricals, that he was the poet. He read so beautifully.”

“Tell me about Anne.”

“Anne? My goodness, there’s nothing to tell. Anne died when she was eight or nine. She was Olivia’s twin, and they were so much alike, to look at them, that you couldn’t believe it. But oddly enough they were quite different in natures. Anne was the sort of child who’d never met a stranger—she could cajole anyone into doing anything. Except Livia, of course! Stephen reminds—reminded—me of Anne, the same golden charm. Livia was, I don’t know, one of those people who lived in her imagination, and found it rich enough that she didn’t need other stimulation. She was quiet and thoughtful and very much her own woman, even in childhood.”

“How did Anne die?”

“She fell out of an apple tree in the old orchard. It isn’t there now, Rosamund had the orchard cut down, but it was beyond the back garden, sheltered by brick walls. We were all playing there, Nicholas and Olivia and Anne and I. And she reached too far for an apple, lost her balance, and came down on a root. I’d never seen a dead person before. I was terrified, out of my wits. I thought she was teasing, playing games with us.”

“Was Cormac there?”

Rachel frowned. “I don’t remember. He may have been. It was Nicholas I remember most, kneeling beside Anne, taking her hand, calling to her, crying because she wouldn’t answer him. And Olivia having trouble coming down from the tree. Because of her leg. This was before Nicholas had carved a brace, of course.”

“Anne fell? No one pushed her?”

She looked at him, surprised. “No, why should anyone push her? She was up in the tree, picking apples, and then she reached too far. We were all children, we would never have dreamed of such a thing!”

But children killed. It was something that he’d learned in London, his first year at the Yard.

They came out of the woods into a lane that joined the main street of the village, where houses clustered together under slate roofs that looked like quicksilver in the sun, lead in the rain. There were gardens behind every gate, crowded with vegetables and flaming with color.

Rachel stopped, “I go this way—I’m staying with a friend on the outskirts.” She shaded her eyes again with her hand, and said, “You didn’t mean that—about going back to London? You’ll stay and see what you can find? I’ll never persuade Henry to appeal for help again.”

He laughed. “Probably not.” Remembering the heat in London, the cramped little office, Bowles’ pretensions, and the squalid knifings that had somehow captured the imagination of the city, he found himself saying, “No, I’m not going back yet. I’ll be here for several more days.”

She left, reassured, and he turned towards The Three Bells. But noticing the shingle on the front of the doctor’s surgery, he opened the garden gate and went through to knock at the door.

A young woman with pretty strawberry blond hair opened the door and said, “Ah, you’re just in time, if you want to see the doctor. Five more minutes, and he’d have gone through to his luncheon.”

“Mrs. Hawkins?” he asked, guessing.

“Yes, and if you’ll just wait here a moment,” she answered, leading him into a small sitting room fitted out with bits and pieces of worn furnishings that had been relegated here from the rest of the house, “I’ll tell him you’re here. The name, please?”

Rutledge gave it to her, and she disappeared through the door beside him. A moment later she whisked back into the waiting room. “Dr. Hawkins will see you now.” She held the door wide, ready to shut it behind him.

Rutledge went through into the tidy, surprisingly bright surgery. “Dr. Hawkins?” he said to the short, thickset man behind the desk. He was not as young as his wife, but not much beyond thirty-five, he thought.

“Indeed, and what can I do for you this morning?” His eyes raked Rutledge, from crown to toe. Seeing more than Rutledge cared to have him see. “Having trouble sleeping, are you?”

“No, I’m having no trouble at all, as it happens,” Rutledge said stiffly. “I’m Inspector Rutledge, from Scotland Yard—”

“Oh, Lord, and what’s happened now!”

“It isn’t what is happening now that concerns me. I’ve been asked to look into the deaths of three of your patients, Stephen FitzHugh, Olivia Marlowe, and Nicholas Cheney.”

Hawkins stared at him, then threw his pen on the desk with such force that it bounced and nearly rolled off the edge. “Those deaths are history. Closed. The Inquest agreed with my first impressions and my considered opinion. An accident and a double suicide. Surely you’ve read the medical report?”

“I have, and it’s very thorough. All the same, there are questions I must ask. And that you are required to answer.”

“I know damned well what I’m required to do,” Hawkins said irritably. “And I’ve done it.” His eyes narrowed and he looked at Rutledge with sudden suspicion. “You aren’t planning to dig up the bodies, are you? That’s all I need right now!”

“In what way?”

“Look, I’ve been a good doctor here. I took over from my wife’s father, who’s nearly gaga now, war finished him, too much to do, too little energy to do it. I’ve built a decent practice, and I’m being considered for a partnership in Plymouth. I learned my craft in the war, doing things I’d never thought in school I’d be expected to do. Sew up the dying, send the living back to the Front, find a way to keep the shell-shock cases from being shot for cowardice—” he saw Rut-ledge flinch, and added with relish “—and even deliver forty-seven babies to refugees who had no place to sleep themselves, much less with infants to nurse! I’ve paid my dues, I’ve earned the right to move on to better things, and if my future partners get wind of the fact that three—three— of my cases are being exhumed, under Scotland Yard’s eager eye, I’ll be dead, stuck here forever. No chance at Plymouth, no hope of London in the end.”

“The fact that Scotland Yard has an interest in these deaths in no way is a reflection on you—”

“The hell it isn’t! For God’s sake, man, I filled out the death certificates! It has everything to do with me!”

“Then you’re convinced that there’s nothing in either of the suicides or in the accident that could warrant further police interest?”

“That’s exactly what I am! Convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt!”

“It hasn’t occurred to you that something in the pasts of these three people might change the circumstances enough that what appeared to be suicide was actually murder and suicide? To use an instance I came across recently.”

Hawkins threw up his hands. “Murder and suicide? You’ve been drinking, I can smell it on your breath. Enough to be having delusions?”

“No, I’m as sober as you are,” Rutledge said, reining his temper in hard.

“Not bloody likely, when you suggest such things as you did just now! I walked into that study and found two people on the couch. A man and a woman. Their hands were touching, his left and her right. In the other hand, each held a glass. There had been laudanum in the glasses, and it was on their lips and in their mouths and in their guts. Enough to kill both quickly, and several times over. Miss Marlowe had had poliomyelitis, and contrary to what people tell you, paralysis is not painless. She had been given laudanum by my father-in-law and by me, as needed. Until this spring she’d used it responsibly, no indications of addictions or abuse. But it’s as painless a death as you could wish for, if you have to go out. I can’t blame her for choosing it, and I saw no evidence that either one had forced drinking it on the other. No bruises about the mouth or tongue, none on the lips. Nothing else in their stomachs to arouse suspicion. Double suicide. That’s precisely what it was. No more, no less.”

“Nothing in their stomachs to suggest that one might have secretly given an overdose to the other, before swallowing his or her own draught?”

“It’s hard to introduce laudanum secretly into clear soup, spring lamb, roasted, vegetables and potatoes.”

“People of their sort usually drank wine with meals, and coffee afterward.”

“The state of digestion tells me that they lived for enough hours after their meal that it couldn’t have been in their wine or their coffee. I’d say they swallowed the laudanum some time after midnight. As if they’d sat up talking about it, and then decided to do it. Or possibly around dawn. They’d been dead for some time when Mrs. Trepol discovered them on Monday morning. Over twenty-four hours. Now my own meal is waiting, and if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and eat it. My advice to you is to return to London and do something useful there. There’s very little crime in a place like Borcombe. We haven’t needed the services of Scotland Yard in living memory, and I doubt if we will in the next twenty years!”

Rutledge left the doctor’s office, thinking over what he’d been told that morning.

Damn all, if you came right down to it!

No crimes, no murderers, no reason for a seasoned Scotland Yard inspector to waste his time here.

“But just what ye’re good for—nithing,” Hamish declared. “What if Warwickshire was only a bit of luck, and none of your doing? What if you failed there, and haven’t had the sense yet to see it? What if ye’re failing now, because you haven’t got the skills to tell whether there’s murder here or no? That house is haunted, man, and if you don’t find out why, ye’ll be defeated by your own fears!”

After lunch at The Three Bells, Rutledge felt restless and uncertain. He told himself it had nothing to do with Hamish’s remarks, or the frustration he felt over where to turn next. Cormac FitzHugh had seemed to be so certain of his facts. Rachel Ashford was unsettled by the notion of murder being done, even though she’d called in the Yard herself. Hawkins was not cooperative, and the police in Borcombe had no reason to stir up the pot for murder, when their investigation had ended so creditably.

He thought about it for several minutes, staring out his window towards the sea, then picked up his coat and went in search of the rectory. It stood four-square beside the church, gray stone with white trim at the windows and doors, but built more for long service than for beauty.

The rector wasn’t in his office, but the housekeeper sent Rutledge around the back to where he was pottering about in his garden. It was a big garden, green and prosperous, with roses by the house and the scent of wall flowers coming from somewhere, sweet and elusive.

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 op 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 Olivia 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 ...”

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 herí 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 he’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?”

“I was here,” she said irritably. “I’d helped Mrs. Trepol with the clothes she was taking for the church bazaar—bags of them, there were, and Miss Susannah asked if I’d like the rags. For my rugs.”

He looked at the gnarled hands. “You make rugs?”

“Are ye deaf, then, young as ye are?” she retorted tartly.

“Tell me about Mr. Stephen,” he suggested hastily.

“He was in the house, looking for something. Searching high and low. I don’t know what it twas, but he was in a taking over it. Said he’d find it or know the reason why. He shouted at Mrs. Trepol, asking her if she’d moved it. And she were near to crying, telling him she’d never touch his things. And then she was going out the back door, and I heard Mr. Stephen on the stairs, a racket, and him yelling ‘Damned foot!’ And I knew the Gabriel hounds were here again, riding high through the passages and down the stairs like the demons they are. I turned away, afeerd of ‘em.”

“What you heard was his fall, then? And he was alone?”

“Except for the hounds. They were baying at him, sharp and shrill and angry.”

“Did you say anything to Mrs. Trepol? Or anyone else?”

“There was naught to say! Outside Mrs. Trepol was marching along the path with her back stiff with hurt, and inside the family was crying out and making fuss enough without me. Mr. Cormac caught up with us, going for the doctor, but didn’t say what was amiss. I didn’t like the look on his face, I can tell you, cold and dark.”

“But you’re a healer,” he said. “Or so I’ve been told in the village. Didn’t you go to see if you could help Stephen FitzHugh?”

She gave him a look of disgust. “I heal, God willing, but I don’t raise the dead from their sleep!”

“But you couldn’t be sure—”

“I told ye, Londoner, that I’d heard the Gabriel hounds. That’s all I needed to know. They’re never wrong. I’ve heard ‘em afore, when there was death walking the land. In this house. In the woods. Wherever evil strays.”

She turned and walked off, hobbling on her stick, leaving him to Hamish, who was trying to force words into his mind. But what the hell were the Gabriel hounds she’d talked of, some family banshee?

“I’ve been trying to warn you,” Hamish said grimly, “what they were. The souls of unchristened children. A child who dies before he’s blessed by the church. Unshriven. Not wanted by God—nor by the devil.”

“I don’t believe a word of it—that’s Highland nonsense!” he said aloud before he could stop himself.

The old woman turned and looked at him. And silently crossed herself.

He felt his face flush.

In the bar after lunch was an elderly man in an old but fine suit and collars and cuffs that gleamed whitely in the dimness. Several people had clustered around his bench, talking quietly and nodding at whatever he said in response. A half dozen men stood around outside in the sunshine, playing keels, their shadows flicking across the dusty glass of the windows. Four other men sat around the hearth reliving the war. Two had lost limbs—an arm, a foot. Another wore an eye patch. Except for the women speaking with the doctor, it was a male enclave.

The barkeep said, “That’s the old doctor. The father-in-law of Dr. Hawkins. Penrith’s his name. Those that don’t hold with the new ways of Dr. Hawkins still come to speak to him. But his mind’s going these days. Shame, but there it is. Age catches us all, in the end.” The barkeep must have been as old if not older than Penrith.

Rutledge, looking across at the bearded doctor, smiled to himself at the comment, then went up the stairs two at a time to his room, to get the photographs Rachel had sent him. When the doctor was finally sitting there alone, Rutledge joined him and bought him beer before opening the subject of the Trevelyan family.

“Sorrowful history, the Trevelyans had,” Penrith said, tired old eyes looking up at Rutledge. “I saw them through most of it. And held their hands when they mourned. Old Adrian died in his bed, as he should, but not the others. Sad, sad, it was. I did what I could. Young Hawkins doesn’t understand about that, he’s not a village man. I was.”

Rutledge used his handkerchief to clear off a space, then took out the photographs and made a fan of them on the table. “What can you tell me about these people?” What light there was from the narrow windows fell across them, gently touching their faces.

“Ah—more secrets than I want to remember. That’s the gift of old age, Inspector. You begin to forget. And in for-getfulness is peace.”

“But I’d like to know their secrets. To satisfy myself that all’s well. That there was nothing done—now or before—that should have roused suspicion.”

The old man chuckled. “Suspicions? A doctor always has suspicions, he’s worse than the police. But sometimes there’s more compassion in silence than in words. When you can’t undo the harm that’s been done, sometimes you bury it with the dead. James Cheney killed himself, and I said it was an accident cleaning his guns. Why burden Rosamund with more grief than she already had? The boy was lost, there was no bringing either of them back. Father or son. And Olivia was in such a state that I thought she’d lose her reason, swearing she’d never let Richard out of her sight, except to look at a plover’s nest she’d found. And Nicholas saying that it was his fault, he hadn’t watched out for either of them when he’d known he ought to. And the servants crying, and no man about the place but Brian FitzHugh, to see to the burying.” “FitzHugh was there when Cheney died?” “Oh, aye, he was, he’d come and go—about the horses they raced, Miss Rosamund and her father. Winners, the lot of them. Good bloodlines. Like the Trevelyans. And now only Miss Susannah is left. And she’s more Irish than Cornish, if you don’t mind my saying it!”

“What do you know about Cormac FitzHugh?” “Nothing,” the old man said, finishing his beer. “He never needed me for any doctoring, not a splinter in the foot nor fall from a horse. When they sent him away to earn his own living, I was glad. Miss Olivia said one day she’d write some poems about him. I paid no heed to it then, I thought it was girlish foolishness, romantic nonsense.”

Rutledge stared at the watery eyes in the bearded face. Was the doctor trying to say that the love poems were written by Olivia to Cormac FitzHugh? That they had nothing to do with her half brother Stephen, whatever he’d tried to believe?

Tired from a restless night, Rutledge sat in a chair by his window and let himself drowse, He was just into that soft, floating ease between sleeping and waking when he heard sharp taps, a woman’s high heels, coming briskly up the stairs. And then sharper taps as she rapped on his door.

Jerked into wakefulness, he straightened his tie, ran a hand over his hair, and went to open the door. Rachel, he thought hazily, come to fetch her photographs.

But it was a tall, slim blond woman with angry eyes who stared up at him when the door swung wide.

“Inspector Rutledge?” she said crisply, looking him up and down.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m Rutledge.”

“I’d like to speak to you. In your room, if I may. The parlor is not private, this time of day.”

When he hesitated, she said, “I’m Susannah Hargrove. Stephen FitzHugh’s sister.”

He stood aside and let her come in, gesturing to the chair he’d drawn up to the window. He stayed where he was by the door, on his feet.

She ignored the chair. Instead she rounded on him like a battleship bringing her heavy guns to bear.

“My brother Cormac telephoned to my husband’s office in London and left a message that you’re here to reopen the matter of my family’s recent losses. His secretary passed it along. Is that true? Or did she get it wrong?”

“I’m afraid it is true,” he said gravely. “Which is not to say that Scotland Yard won’t come to the same conclusions in all three deaths.”

“Yes, I’m sure it will—too late. Too late for us! The family, I mean. We’ll be dragged through the newspapers, our dirty linen hung out for all to goggle at, and then, when you are quite satisfied, you’ll beg our pardon and take the train back to London as if nothing had happened! It’s bad enough, Inspector, to have to smile at people who know very well two members of your family killed themselves. If the police start whispers of murder, we’ll all be disgraced. I’m expecting a child in the late autumn. I won’t have it brought into the world in the midst of a nasty police matter!”

He fought back a smile at her vehemence, and said only, “I’ve said nothing about murder. To you or to your half brother.”

“Why else would Scotland Yard give a—a damn about some obscure village matters, if there weren’t suspicions on somebody’s part? Is it because Olivia was famous? Is that why you’re here to bedevil us?” Tears overlaid the anger in her eyes, but she held them back, fighting hard.

When he didn’t immediately answer, she turned her back on him and stared out the window. “I knew that was what it must be. I told Daniel it could be nothing else! Why did Olivia have to do something so—so selfish! If she wanted to end it all, why did she have to leave shadows on the house— on us! I grew up there too, I don’t deserve to have my memories, my very childhood, turned into something hostile and empty and grotesque! And if you have your way, we won’t even be able to sell the house and be rid of it!” She whirled around and stared at him. “I hate that house now! I want it sold and all of the past ripped out of it by new owners who don’t know—don’t care—who we were!” She swallowed hard, then the tears came. “Who will buy it,” she demanded huskily, “if there was murder as well as suicide there. We’ll have it hung around our necks, like our sins, for the rest of our lives.”

He pulled out his handkerchief and held it out to her, but she ignored it, fumbling in her handbag for one of her own. “I’ve just lost my brother,” she said brokenly. “And now this! And the doctor said I wasn’t to be upset.”

“If you don’t believe murder has been done, why should you hate the house so much?” he asked, in an attempt to distract her. “What has it done—what has been done there— to distress you?”

She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “It isn’t what was done, it’s what’s been lost. Rosamund—my mother—held such light in her hands, and the house—all of us—were touched by it. And then she died, and it was all changed, all different, all—I don’t know! Dark and dreary and full of Olivia’s obsessions!”

“Obsessions about what?”

“How should I know? Olivia was a woman who lived in her thoughts, in her feelings. I’m not like that, I feel, I cry, I laugh. She was silent. I didn’t—I couldn’t understand her. It’s—unnatural—in a woman to write as she did. I still don’t think of her as that poet. I think somehow they must have got it all wrong!”

“Do you believe Nicholas Cheney could have written those poems?”

She stared at him, tears drying on her lashes. “Nicholas? I—it hadn’t occurred to me—to any of us! Do you think it was Nicholas? Truly?”

He said carefully, “I don’t know enough about your family to offer that as a possibility. I’m just answering your question about Olivia Marlowe.”

Her face fell. “Oh.”

“Do you know why Nicholas and Olivia killed themselves?”

Susannah shook her head. “I’ve lain awake at night, wondering why anyone could do such a thing. I was her sister— half sister—but she never said a word to me about her feelings—about despair, desperation. You’d have thought ... but she didn’t! And Nicholas—it’s like a betrayal—to go off like that and leave me alone just before Stephen died! Mother betrayed me too—I’ve always suspected, feared, down deep inside that she killed herself too!”

Pain welled in her eyes, deep and terrifying. “What’s wrong with my family? I’m the only one left now—not counting Cormac. One day will something awful happen to me, will I leave this child without a mother, and without anyone of its own to love? Cormac was that way—alone. He never had any one else. However beautiful he is, Cormac is terribly alone, and I don’t want my child to grow up in that kind of world!”

7

Rutledge calmed her down as best he could, asking her if she’d like him to summon Dr. Hawkins.

But Susannah shook her head. “No. I don’t need a doctor, I need a little peace, and if you’d only go back to London and leave us as we were, I’d be able to forget.”

“You said that Rosamund might have killed herself. Did you mean that metaphorically, in the sense that she killed herself with worry or ignored her own health, didn’t take proper care, that sort of thing? Or that she took her own life, deliberately and knowingly?”

“She died of an overdose of laudanum. Dr. Penrith said it was a mistake, that in the night she’d accidently miscounted the drops she was supposed to take. But I was afraid her strength had run out. Her laughter. I was afraid that she was tired of facing the next morning, and the next night. She was afraid to marry again, even though there were any number of men who would have been glad to have her. She said she’d buried the last man she loved, she would never do it again, that there wasn’t enough left of her heart to put into another grave. Her solicitor, Mr. Chambers, was rather like James Cheney, strong, steady, a good man. I thought she was fond of him, and most certainly he cared for her. But it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t ...”

Susannah took a deep breath. “I can’t talk about it any more! Daniel is downstairs, he’ll have fits if he sees me so upset. Daniel would do anything to make me happy. It isn’t fair to worry him like this.” She asked to use the water and his basin to wash her face, and he went to find the linen cupboard in the passage outside his room, to bring towels for her. She thanked him, looked searchingly in the mirror when she’d finished, and said, “Will you give me your arm down the stairs? I don’t mind going up them, but since Stephen’s— since then, I’ve had a thing about coming down them. About falling. I dream about it, sometimes. My foot slipping, the weight of the baby ...” She shivered.

“You were all outside when he fell?”

“Yes, impatient, in a hurry, not thinking about his foot. I remember saying to Rachel that Stephen could be so tiresome at times. All this bother just for some old books he wanted to find. As if he couldn’t come back anytime for them! And then Cormac went inside, shouted to us to come at once, and it was already too late. I felt so ill I thought I might miscarry!”

He took her down the stairs, and she leaned heavily on his arm, as if clinging to life itself. But once in the passage outside the bar, she smoothed her skirts, gave him a relieved smile, and walked with absolute assurance through the door to where her husband was waiting.

Daniel had some remarks of his own to make about Rut-ledge’s presence in Borcombe, hinting darkly at the Government having ignored Olivia until it was too late, and now wanting to seem efficient and solicitous.

“It’s a nasty business, Inspector, to destroy a family for political gain!”

Rutledge let him have his say, and finally they left in a new motorcar, murmuring something about friends in the next town who would be waiting upon them for dinner. Over her shoulder, Susannah gave him a last pleading glance before turning to answer some question her husband had put to her.

It was very late, and Rutledge, unable to sleep, finally got up and dressed and let himself out of the inn in the darkness of a fading moon, his pockets filled with candles and matches from his room.

He tramped through the silent streets, where not even a dog roused up to bark at him, but there was an owl in the darker woods who spoke softly as he passed. Death omens, owls had been called, but he’d always found a strange comfort in their lonely sounds.

There was no light in the house, no indication that Cormac was in residence. Deep in his own thoughts and problems, Rutledge hadn’t considered that impediment. But somehow he knew that the house was empty the instant he put his hand on the latch and turned the key. Stepping inside and closing the door behind him, he fumbled for a candle and the matches. It flared brightly, startling him—in the trenches it could bring a sniper’s bullet in its wake—but he managed not to drop it. Hamish, grumbling with dislike, waited until he’d lighted the candle and said, “Try the library first. Not the study. She’d not keep them there.”

But Rutledge knew that the study was where he was heading, and he climbed the stairs slowly, quietly, to walk along the gallery and stop for a moment to listen to whispers that seemed to follow him. It was only the sea, and he recognized it at once, but a shiver passed through him all the same. He thought of Rachel and her ghosts. What was there in this house that had marked it so strongly?

He opened the study door and was surprised that the moonlight poured so intently through the room’s windows. No one had closed the curtains here, and he stopped to count back. Yes, there must have been a full moon on that Saturday night. Olivia and Nicholas could well have died in its light, for it would have poured through these windows like a silver sea.

Hamish, unsettled and arguing fiercely with Rutledge, blotted out the sounds of the waves coming in against the headland. But they were there, an undercurrent that somehow soothed. As if the vastness of the sea dwarfed human griefs and sorrows and pain.

Who had been the first to die? he wondered again, looking at the couch in the candle’s faint glow. The man or the woman? The killer or the victim? Or were they both—somehow—victims?

After a time he went over to the bookshelves by the typewriter and looked through the volumes there. Surely the others had had their own copies, they wouldn’t have needed to take hers?

The candle’s light moved along the shelves, stirred by his breath. And there on the spine of a slim dark blue book were letters that gleamed like molten gold: Wings of Fire. He pulled it out, then began his search again. A wine-dark volume, like blood in this shadowy corner, and written in silver: Lucifer. The one his sister Frances had said set London on its ear. Trust her to know what Society felt about the new, the different, the timely.

Soon afterward he found Light and Dark, then The Scent of Violets. And when he’d nearly given up, Shadows.

The candle was dripping hot wax on his fingers. He swore, collected his booty, and stood up. Something seemed to move in the darkness, and in its wake stirred a faint scent of sandalwood and roses. He froze, but it was only the silk shawl over Olivia Marlowe’s typewriter, disturbed by his movements, slipping softly off the cold metal and brushing his arm.

Laughing to himself at his own susceptibility, he who had lived among the dead in France, he pulled the shawl gently back into place and went out of the room, closing its door behind him.

The gallery was quiet and empty, the hall as well. There were no ghosts here. And yet—there was something that stirred Hamish into Scottish complaint again.

Ignoring him, Rutledge went down the stairs, blew out his candle, and opened the door into the soft darkness beyond.

Where something stood in the drive like a being out of hell and regarded him with a stillness that made Hamish yell out a warning.

Rutledge, accustomed to night forays into no man’s land where the danger was much more real and often silently swift, held his ground and said, “What is it you want?” But he could feel his heart thudding from the surprise.

The rector said, “It’s you, then, Inspector?”

“What the hell?”

Mr. Smedley lowered the blanket he’d thrown over his nightclothes and head and said, “I saw lights moving about in the Hall. I didn’t stop to dress, I came at once. I wanted to know who or what was walking about here! Was it you? Or are you here on the same errand? I’d been told that Mr. FitzHugh had decided not to stay at the Hall after all. I thought it was still quite empty!”

“I came for some books,” Rutledge said, hearing the defensive note in his own voice. “I thought they might help me in my understanding of the poet.”

“Ah, yes. The poems.” He sighed. “Come back to the rectory with me, man, and we’ll sit down like decent Christian folk, in good light.”

Rutledge chuckled, locked the door, and followed him down the drive. “You’re a brave man to come looking for intruders in an empty house,” he said, catching up.

“Pshaw!” Smedley answered. “I’m not afraid of anything the human mind can conceive! One recognizes the face of evil in my profession, just as you do in yours. But you’ll notice that I did not walk into the house, and I came armed.” From the folds of his blanket he produced a very businesslike heavy iron poker that gleamed darkly in the pale light of the moon.

“What happened to turning the other cheek?” Rutledge asked, amused.

Smedley laughed. The shadows of the copse fell over them. “It’s all very well in its place, you understand, but I don’t believe our Lord intended for us to turn the other cheek to criminals. After all, he threw the moneylenders out of the temple.”

“And you believed that there was a criminal in the Hall tonight?”

“I most certainly didn’t expect to find Scotland Yard creeping about the premises. But the house has much that’s valuable in it, and we have our share of tramps and good-for- naughts coming around. The saddest are the men who can’t find work and have too much pride to beg. We’ve done what we could as a parish, but I don’t think I could fault a man who was desperate enough to steal for his family’s table. Not to condone it, you perceive, but to understand what needs drive him.”

“You have an unusual Christian charity.”

“Well, I didn’t enter the Church for sake of my pocket, but because I have a hunger in my own soul.”

“And has it been satisfied?”

“Ah, yes. It has. Though I must admit that the perplexities have multiplied more than I’d expected. Find one answer, and open the door to a hundred more questions. Now, if you please, we’ll walk silently here. Old Mrs. Treleth has a small dog that takes great pleasure in keeping her neighbors awake, if he can pounce on the smallest noise as an excuse.”

They walked quietly out of the wood, down the lane to the main road, and then turned towards the church. Mrs. Treleth’s dog continued to slumber.

By the rectory gate, Rutledge said, “I’ve disturbed your sleep enough for one night, I’ll go along to the inn.”

“Indeed, I’m wide awake, and you’ll pay for it with your company!” Smedley said lightly. “Come along quietly, you’d not be any happier than I if we wake my housekeeper. She’s worse than the little dog, God forgive me!”

They made their way to his study with a minimum of noise, and the rector said, pulling his blanket more closely around him, “As I’m not dressed for the church, I feel no qualms about a wee dram of something—shall we say— strengthening? As a Devon man, may I offer you a cup of our finest cider?” There was a gleam in his eye.

Rutledge said, straight-faced, “I’d be delighted.”

Devon cider could kick like a team of army mules, deceptively smooth on its way down, and building a fire in the belly that was unexpectedly hard on the head. He’d had Calvados in Normandy that did the same, and wondered if the two had common roots.

Smedley returned with two tall cups and a cold jug. He set them on the table between his chair and Rutledge’s, and said, “You can put those books down, I’m not here to wrestle your soul for them. As a matter of fact, I have copies of my own. Your midnight foray was unnecessary.”

“Ah, but I would have had to ask for them,” Rutledge said with an answering grin. “And I preferred not to do that. To draw more attention to this investigation than it’s already created.”

“So it’s an investigation now?”

“No,” Rutledge said shortly. “I’m still ... considering the options.”

Smedley quietly chuckled, acknowledging that he’d touched Rutledge on the raw, and handed him his cup. Then his face changed, and as he pulled the blanket around him more comfortably, he said, “Well, I don’t know any answers. It’s between you and your conscience, when you find yours.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Smedley shrugged. “We must all decide how to use the knowledge we collect in life. In my work and in yours as well, I’m sure, there are painful decisions to be made. And painful choices. They’re never really the same, are they? Decisions and choices. Why did you suddenly want the books?”

“Because when I came down to Cornwall, I didn’t know that one of the victims was O. A. Manning. Only that a woman named Olivia Marlowe was dead. Now I think the poems must have some bearing on her life, if not her death. I’d like to—understand—both women, if I can.”

“Have you read them before? The poems?”

“Oh, yes. I read Scent of Violets at the Front. My sister sent me a copy. It frightened me, in a way. That someone else saw and felt the things that haunted me and I never had the courage to write about even in letters home.” He couldn’t have said to Jean or to his sister for that matter, worldly as Frances was, what it was like to live in the nightmare of war. His letters had been light, giving a superficial account of suffering, and not the bedrock. He thought Frances had guessed.

But Jean had preferred the lies .. .

Hamish stirred but said nothing about Fiona.

“And Wings of Fire? Have you read that?”

“They’re extraordinarily moving, those poems. Where did Olivia Marlowe, spinster of this parish, learn so much about love?”

“A question I’ve asked myself over and over again. Cor-mac was the only man she saw much of who wasn’t a part of the family. I know, Stephen claimed that she’d taken her fondness for him and extended it to the experience between a man and a woman. It may be true—she was capable of that leap of understanding, if anyone was. And Stephen was the kind of child—the kind of man—who endeared himself to everyone. I’ve forgiven him sins that I’d have turned another lad over my knee for committing. Told myself he was fatherless, and young, and meant no harm. But I loved the boy as I’d have loved my own son, for the goodness in him, and the light. He was very like Rosamund, and I know my own weakness in that direction too.” He frowned. “Perhaps that’s what Olivia saw in him. Rosamund.”

He sat in silence, drinking from his cup, and letting the sounds of the house creak and breathe and whisper around them. Comforting sounds. Then he said, “And the last collection, the Lucifer poems? Have you read those?”

“Not yet.” He’d been in hospital when they came out last year.

“It’s a very interesting study of the face of evil. Olivia understood that, just as well as she understood love and war and the warmth of life. As a priest I found it ... disturbing. That she should know the dark side of man so much better than I. That she should believe that God tolerated evil because it has its place in His scheme. That there are some who are not capable of goodness in any sense. The lost, the damned, the sons of Satan, whatever you choose to call them, exist among us, and cannot be saved because they don’t have the capacity for recognizing the purpose of good. As if it had been left out of the clay from which they were formed.”

Rutledge thought about a number of the cases he’d worked on before the war. And some of the acts of sheer wanton viciousness that he’d witnessed in France. He believed in evil, and in the capacity of man to be evil. In a sense, evil paid his wages. He wasn’t as sure as Smedley was that everyone had a capacity for good.

Smedley drained his cup. “I’d not like to think that Olivia Marlowe knew such a being as she describes. Actually knew him. I’d not like to think that I’d met him, on the streets of Borcombe or along the farm lanes or in one of the towns on market day. I would have trouble with that.”

Rutledge finished his cup as well, and felt his head beginning to spin. He had a hard head for liquor, but cider could leap out of the jug at you, when you were tired and unsettled and had an empty stomach. “You don’t think Olivia herself was capable of such evil?”

Smedley stared at him. “You must lead a drearier, more despairing life in London than most of us can comprehend,” he said, “to ask me that! But I won’t answer you directly, I’ll tell you to read the poems yourself. And then decide.”

He stood up, gathering the blanket about his burly shoulders. “I think I can sleep, now,” he added, “and I’ll be surprised if you don’t as well. Leave the books until morning. You’ll be glad of that advice, believe me.”

Rutledge took the advice along with the books, went home to bed and fell asleep almost at once. He wondered, on the brink of sliding into the depths, if he’d have one hell of a headache tomorrow ...

He did. But whether it was cider or lack of sleep that pounded through his skull, he wasn’t sure. Breakfast and several cups of the inn’s violent black coffee seemed to help. He realized that it was Sunday morning, and that the village of Borcombe was on its way to church services or a day of leisure.

Suddenly Rutledge didn’t care about murder or the poems or about the job he’d been sent to do.

He sent a note by the boot boy to Rachel Ashford. Although he himself had no idea where she was staying, he trusted to the village intelligence system that worked more swiftly and more thoroughly than anything the Allies had devised during the war. The boy said instantly he knew where she could be found, and pocketing the coin Rutledge had given him, he set off at a trot.

Ten minutes later he was back with a reply, and had pocketed his third coin of the morning. Two from the London gentleman and one from the lady.

Rutledge opened the envelope and read the brief lines at the bottom of his own scrawled request.

“I’d love to sail. I’ll join you in twenty minutes. Ask the innkeeper if we might use his boat. I know where it’s kept.”

So he went in search of the innkeeper, and received permission to take out the Saucy Belle with Mrs. Ashford. Although he hadn’t sailed since before the war, Rutledge had some experience and thought—correctly—that Rachel might have more.

She came to the inn wearing sensible shoes and a pair of what looked like men’s tousers, cinched tightly at the waist with an oversized belt. Her eyes smiled as he looked at her, but she made no explanation, whether these were Peter’s clothes or borrowed from someone else. They walked together down the road towards the sea and the small assortment of boats there. Rutledge had a basket over his arm, courtesy of The Three Bells and a generous bribe to the cook. Rachel said after a moment, “You’ve more foresight than I have. I was so glad of the invitation to sail, I didn’t think of food. Or is that a man’s thing? Peter was remarkably good at foraging; he said he’d learned it young.”

Rutledge laughed. “He was always hungry at school. I never knew anyone so good at scrounging. His mother sent him generous boxes—tins of canned goods and packages of cakes and biscuits. The Scottish shortbreads usually lasted the longest. I remember they sometimes took the taste of the woolens in his trunk, but we never minded that. When they were finished, we were desolate, until he’d convinced some other boy to share hidden rations.”

They had reached the overturned boats on a small shingle strand that was just above the reach of the tides. “That’s the Belle,” she said, pointing to a red dinghy that looked as if it could use a fresh coat of paint and perhaps more than a little caulking.

Rutledge considered it dubiously. “Are you sure it won’t sink beneath us?”

“Oh, no,” she assured him. “It’s quite sound. He just hasn’t had it out much this summer. His son Fred didn’t come back from the Navy. Torpedoed in the North Atlantic. Fishing hasn’t been all that good, anyway. Cornwall’s going to have a bleak future, economically. Trade gone and the pilchards as well. Everyone is complaining.”

So were the hopeful gulls, wheeling overhead. Between them, Rachel and Rutledge dragged the Belle down to the water and clambered in. Rachel watched him critically.

He grinned at her. “You don’t trust me. I see that.”

“It isn’t a matter of trust but of self-preservation. I’ve still time to leap overboard if you’re a rank amateur, likely to do us a mischief.”

But he knew what he was about, and soon had the little boat out of the shelter of the river’s mouth and into open water. The sea was smooth this morning, wind ruffling it much farther out, where whitecaps danced lightly, but in the lee of the land, it was easy to row as far as the small strand below the Hall, beyond to round the headland, and then back to the strand again, where they pulled the boat up and splashed ashore.

Rachel turned to him, her face aglow with something he couldn’t read, until she said, “I haven’t done that in ages! It’s wonderful to be on the water again. Peter was a landsman, he didn’t know stem from stern, but Nicholas loved to sail, to be out in all weathers, to feel the tug of the sea under the hull and the fierce pull of the wind. When he went off to war, he had his heart set on the Navy, but they wouldn’t have him—no experience, they said! And so he wound up in Flanders, in the mud and the horror and the killing—and the gas.” The glow faded, and she turned to reach for the basket as Rutledge made the boat fast to some rocks.

“Tell me about your cousin Susannah, Mrs. Hargrove.”

She straightened up and stared at him, the basket in her arms.

“Is that why you brought me here?” she asked quietly. “To pick over my memories and then make your decision about returning tomorrow to London?”

“No,” he said curtly. “You mentioned the family, not I. She came to see me yesterday. That’s why I asked.”

She looked away from him, then set down the basket and began to climb the slight rise that led from the strand to the lawns. He followed her. At the top she stood looking across at the garden front of the house. “She’s very much like Stephen, but a paler version—not quite as handsome, not quite as charming, not quite as lively, not quite as . . . loved. I think Rosamund somehow loved him best, because she saw in him her own immortality. Herself, young again and ready to go on with life. Or perhaps he reminded her of Richard. I thought about that sometimes myself. She loved Olivia because she saw George in her, and Nicholas because he was so—so very like his father. In his appearance, I mean. Inside, Nicholas had Rosamund’s strength. Rosamund never showed favorites, at least not openly, but in her heart of hearts, who knows?”

“Tell me about her husbands.”

“George was a wonderful man, exciting and very masculine. James was a fine man, with depths and intelligence and a sense of humor. And Brian FitzHugh loved her so much she couldn’t help but love him back, but he was a weaker man.” She turned to look at him, strain in her face. “Does that answer you?”

“Susannah said something about a Mr. Chambers who was in love with Rosamund and would have married her.”

“Oh, yes, Tom Chambers was a very near thing. And I think he could have brought her out of her loneliness and depression. She was beginning to feel that too many of the people she loved had died. That it was somehow because of her. Her fault. I don’t mean she told us that in so many words—we sort of pieced it together, among us. Which is why Mr. Chambers mattered. A new love, a new lease on life—soon she’d be happy again! And then one night she took a little too much laudanum to help her sleep, and died before morning.”

“Susannah is afraid that her mother deliberately killed herself. But she won’t accept that, she turns away from it in fear.”

Rachel stared at him in surprise. “Does she? Susannah’s never spoken of that to me! Or to anyone else, as far as I know. Are you sure? I mean, could it simply be the strange fancies of a woman expecting a child?”

“She was quite upset. If it’s a fancy, she’ll make herself ill before she delivers. I think, judging by what little I saw, that she’s terrified it might be true. Why?”

Rachel shook her head. “Rosamund took too much joy in life to kill herself. I find it hard to believe such a thing myself.”

“You said just now that she was depressed—”

“Yes, but we’re all depressed at some time or another! We all go through dark periods when living seems to be harder than giving up. Have you never felt that death seemed a friend you could turn to gladly?”

Hamish answered her first, bitterly. “Not for me did it come in friendship! I’d have lived if I could!”

Rutledge turned away, afraid she might read Hamish’s response in his own eyes. “We’re talking about Rosamund—” he answered lamely.

“No,” Rachel said firmly. “Rosamund couldn’t have killed herself! Nicholas would have known! Nicholas would have told me!”

8

Without waiting for Rutledge to respond, Rachel added with false briskness, “Do you mind? While I’m here, I ought to see if Wilkins kept his promise to water the urns on the terrace. He sometimes forgets ...” She set off towards” the house, a deprecating glance apologizing to him for not suggesting that he come with her. But she needed time on her own, to try to recover some of the promise of the morning.

She’d already dealt with—or tried to deal with—enough grief as it was. She couldn’t bear to think of Rosamund as a suicide. Not the woman who’d been the very symbol of serenity, of brightness and vitality. Not the woman who’d been such a strong influence in her own childhood. It was impossible—a contradiction! But she hadn’t been able to comprehend Nicholas choosing his own way out of whatever it was haunting him, either. She’d finally asked for Scotland Yard’s help because she couldn’t tolerate the uncertainty, the doubt. And now this man from London was making things worse, not better. Talking about murder. Questioning the very bedrock of the Hall, the woman who’d been its soul, its center ...

She’d approached Henry Ashford out of personal desperation. And they’d sent her a man who didn’t care about Nicholas—who felt nothing for Rosamund, or even Olivia. He was dredging up more pain, more hurt, more doubt—dredging up all the things she’d much rather forget forever. He wasn’t here to answer her need, he was too busy with his own, London’s, and she’d never expected that to happen. While she still walked in the terrible darkness of Nicholas’s death . . .

She could feel herself hating Rutledge, blaming him. It was wrong, of course, and she could tell herself that as many times as she liked, but deep inside, she found herself wanting to lash out, to hurt him, as he’d hurt her. For planting seeds that might grow.

Hamish was scolding him for upsetting Rachel, but Rutledge himself was glad enough for a brief space to think. He turned and walked up the lawns towards the headland, mind busy with the complexities of this case that wasn’t a case. And with Rachel, who had loved Nicholas Cheney, whether she believed that or not.

The wind came bounding over the cliff face, ruffling his hair and tugging at his trouser legs as he moved higher along the grassy edge that rose at a fairly steep angle the closer he came to the top. Below him, the sea rhythmically threw itself at the rocky face, whispered softly, and then came back for another try. Farther out, there was a fishing boat moving slowly across the water, trailed by a half a dozen gulls. He could hear their cries echoing against the headland.

Turning, he looked back at the house. It rose above the colorful gardens with comfortable grace, first to a lawn that was reached by a broad flight of Italianate stone steps, and then by way of another flight, to the terrace enfolded by the two short wings that looked down on it. Rachel was moving about there now, where great stone urns spilled over with flowers, trailing blossoms and vines like bridal bouquets. It was a peaceful setting, not grand, but beautiful.

He turned again, this time to look towards the village, half hidden behind the copse that separated it from the grounds of the Hall. Past the church tower, he could just see the upper floor of the rectory, its windows dark blue squares in the sun.

Why had the rector been stirring at such a late hour of the night, much less looking out his windows? And could he see the Hall from there, could he have caught the movement of a candle in the study on the upper floor?

An interesting pair of questions . . .

Something had brought the man out of his bed and into the dark woods in such haste that he’d not stopped to pull on his trousers or a coat, he’d simply thrown a blanket around his nightclothes and taken a poker from the hearth. A poker for a living threat, not a dead one.

Rutledge crested the headland and moved a few yards down the far side, looking towards a meadow that he thought might well have been a walled orchard once, the land still rough and hummocky where the trees had been cut down but the roots and stumps left for the grass to swallow with time. Yes, now he could see the faint line of foundation that marked where a wall had run. It was here, then, that Olivia’s twin sister had died. Out of sight of the house, the stables, and the gardens, behind a wall of brick and leaves.

Hamish was insistently calling his attention to something, and he glanced down at his feet. There was what looked like a large, scorched patch of earth, as if someone had burned something here. Not recently, not within the past few weeks— the grass was already growing greenly through the blackened stubs, and the fine ash was like a film on the ground, evenly spread about, no chunks, no remnants of anything identifiable. Scuffing the surface with his shoe, Rutledge thought it might have been paper rather than wood or rags that had fueled the fire, it had burned so thoroughly. Or else whatever was not consumed had been taken away.

He knelt, looking more closely, his fingers probing, and found something caught in one of the clumps of grass just outside the circle. It looked like a bit of faded ribbon, blue perhaps, or pale green, it was hard to say after days of wind and sun and rain draining it of most of its color. And closer in there was a thick edge of harder stuff, that might once have been heavy leather, like the end of a belt. Casting around for anything else, he discovered a small decorative silver corner, thin and blackened but still possessing a fine tracery of Celtic design. From a picture frame? A book? A locket?

Odd things to have cast into a fire!

Still squatting in the grass, he realized that he was just able to see the roof of the Hall, but there was not even a glimpse of the village, except for the battlemented top of the church tower. In the other direction, fields and woods. At his back, the sea.

Whoever had worked here knew he—or she—was out of sight of watchful eyes.

If you lived at the Hall and wanted to burn something, he thought to himself, why not in the grate? Or the stove in the kitchen? Or in the basket in the kitchen garden where trash was usually sent to be incinerated?

To come out here on the headland and build a fire with the wind clawing up over the cliff must have been a damned nuisance, trying to keep the flames from leaping out of control, to keep bits of paper or cloth from blowing every which way in a flurry of sparks, trying to prevent your eyebrows and fingers from being scorched as you worked over the blaze, feeding it. Then pouring water over the lot, to make sure it was dead before leaving it.

Unless ... unless you had something to burn that you didn’t want anyone else to see. Or find the remnants of, in the ashes of the hearth. Or smell in the passages of the house, smoke hanging heavily, like a confession.

To come out here, in the daylight or the darkness, where the smoke and the smell and any remnants that the fire might accidentally leave wouldn’t be noticed or rouse suspicion, indicated a need for privacy—or secretiveness.

He stood up, wondering who had used this patch of ground.

Rachel was coming towards him, just closing the last garden gate, and he hurried to meet her, not wanting her to see the burned spot. “Hungry?” he called, when she stopped to wait for him.

“Starved!” she answered, fetching up a smile. It was almost natural. “What were you looking at so intently? I called, and you didn’t hear me.”

“Did you? It was lost in the wind. I was wondering if that meadow over there might have been an old orchard.”

“Yes, actually it was.” She didn’t pursue that train of thought, but said instead, “It’s sad to think of the Hall being sold. Of strangers living here.”

“I thought you were in agreement about selling the house? That only Stephen held out against it.”

“Oh, I think it should be sold. There’s nothing left here now of what we loved as children, and trying to keep it alive artificially, as a museum, would be much worse than strangers moving in. I mourn the past, that’s all.” She looked over her shoulder as they walked down the headland towards the beach again, as if hoping the house itself would tell her she was wrong. After a moment she added more to herself than to him, “I expect the best course after all is for Cormac to buy it. Which keeps the Hall in the family in a roundabout way, and we’ll none of us feel guilty about choosing strangers over Olivia. Although it seems selfish to make poor Cormac the family’s sacrificial lamb!” She smiled ruefully. “Have you ever noticed how many times feeling guilty shapes human decisions? Rather than love or pity or avarice or whatever else one might have felt instead? A wretched way of getting through life, isn’t it?”

He grinned down at her. “In my work, feelings of guilt can be useful—sometimes even solve the crime for me.” But there had been other times, he could have told her, when remorse and guilt never entered into the picture. A killer caught by some tiny mistake he made, not because of any human emotion driving him. Careful, elusive, cold. Rutledge found himself thinking that this new Ripper wouldn’t be such a man. He was lashed by such savage desires he could tear flesh like paper. And he’d grow more and more careless as the fires consumed him as well as his victims.

The picnic basket was bountiful, pasties wrapped in napkins, beer for him, a thermos of tea for Rachel, an assortment of biscuits in a small tin, and a packet of cheese with a fresh loaf of bread. There were plums in the bottom in another napkin.

They did it justice, although Rutledge was preoccupied and Rachel found herself making self-conscious small talk, sticking with topics that couldn’t lead her—and the Inspector— back to the Hall or its inhabitants.

Discussing her interest in Roman ruins in England was easier, then she found herself wondering aloud why he’d chosen police work when he might have gone into the law, like his father.

“I remember my father talking about briefs. A barrister defended the accused, he said, and a KC defended the law, and if the victim was alive, he might present his evidence about the robbery, the assault, the trespass. But if he was dead, he was the primary cause of the case, and had no role in it, except as proof that a crime had been committed.” He grinned at her. “That seemed very unjust to a small boy burning with a sense of right and wrong that was entirely his own. I felt the victim should be heard, that his voice as well as his life’d been taken from him. I believed that the truth mattered. That protecting the innocent mattered. It seemed to me the police must be concerned about that if the courts were not. But that wasn’t true, either.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he said, looking away, “as I learned soon enough, the primary task of the police isn’t to prove innocence, it’s to prove guilt.”

Something in his voice at the end warned her not to pursue the subject. She glanced up, and saw Cormac FitzHugh coming towards them across the lawns.

She said quickly, beginning to gather up the lunch things and put them back into the basket, “Are you leaving for London in the morning?”

“No,” he answered, “not yet. I’ve a few more loose ends to clear up before I’m satisfied. But I promise I’ll tell you when I’m finished here.”

“That’s fair enough,” she answered, and stood up, brushing the sand from her trousers. By the time Cormac had reached them, she was already walking away along the strand, towards the headland.

Cormac called a greeting, and looking at the boat on the shingle said as he reached Rutledge, “I see you talked the landlord out of his boat for the day. I wish I’d thought about that myself.” Then, his eyes following Rachel, where she was already out of earshot, he added, “I’ve been worried about her. She took Nicholas’ death hard. Following on the heels of Peter’s. Rachel is too level-headed to deny they’re gone, but there’s an emptiness she doesn’t quite know how to fill. Lately she’s even avoided me, and Susannah. As if the living remind her too much of the dead.” He shook his head. “I know how that is. I bury myself in my work and let the days run into each other.”

“You aren’t staying at the Hall?”

“I’d asked Mrs. Trepol to make up a bed,” he said wryly, “then couldn’t face the silence. Friends at Pervelly are putting me up.”

“Is that where Mrs. Hargrove and her husband are visiting?”

Cormac turned back to Rutledge, surprise in his face. “Is Susannah down here? Daniel swore he wasn’t letting her leave London again until she delivered. But she’s always been more strong-minded than she looks. If she wants something, he can’t stand in her way for very long. She’s probably staying with the Beatons. She was in school with Jenny Beaton. Jenny Throckmorton, she was then.”

* ‘Your sister didn’t want to hear of the investigations being reopened, either. She said there was enough disgrace in a double suicide, she didn’t want her child born into a family where murder was suspected.”

Cormac grinned. “Pregnant women are often edgy, I’m told.”

“You’ve never married?”

He walked away, his back to Rutledge, and picked up a stone to skip over the incoming waves. “No,” he said finally, “I haven’t married. Like Rachel, I have scars that haven’t healed.”

Hamish rumbled uneasily, and Rutledge tried to ignore him. He said, “I haven’t found any evidence of a crime being committed here. But I’d like to know why Nicholas Cheney died. To understand why,” he amended. “I can’t quite accept your suggestion, that Olivia didn’t want to die alone.”

Cormac came back to where Rutledge was standing. The whisper of the water running in was louder as the tide turned. “God knows,” he said tiredly. “It might have had something to do with her poetry. Or what Nicholas knew about her, about her life. Or what she thought he might do afterward— after she’d gone. Or it might have been sheer bloody-mindedness.”

“If she wanted her secrets kept, why leave her literary papers to Stephen? And surely you knew nearly as much about her history as Nicholas did. Possibly more. Killing him didn’t seal her secrets in the grave.”

“Ah, but she knew I was making a name for myself in London. That I’d go to any lengths to avoid scandal that might hurt my reputation in the City. It wasn’t very likely, was it, that I’d be eager to rattle any family skeletons? There’s a passage in one of her poems about ‘secret histories, kept to the grave, last defense of master and slave ‘gainst the final onslaught of heaven and hell, a Resurrection where the soul will tell what the tongue and the mind, in dreadful fear, had hoped against hope that none might hear.’ “ He shrugged. “The transfer of thousands of pounds is made on my handshake, the agreement to contracts and the trust of banks and investors. I’m as good as my word, and people depend on that. I had more to lose in telling than she did. She could have ruined me more easily than I could ever have ruined her.”

“But you might have ruined O. A. Manning.”

“Did she really care about O. A. Manning? She cut that part of her life short as well.”

“Unless she’d said what it was she wanted to say, and knew it was safe forever, printed into lines on paper. That no one could take it from her.”

Cormac studied Rutledge’s face. “Do you mean a confession of sorts? I don’t know the poems that well. I couldn’t begin to guess what she intended, in writing them. I really don’t believe that she herself knew what they were—only a force that had to find expression, regardless of the hand and mind that created it. Olivia was the most complex person I’ve ever known.”

Rachel had reached the headland, where rocky outcrops blocked her way and the sea sent spray flying in the sunlight. She stopped, hesitating, looking back at them, a small, frail figure against the massive land mass and the vastness of the sea. After a moment, she turned and started towards them again. She moved with grace, her hair flying in the wind, her strides long and sure.

“From here, she might be Jean ...” Hamish said softly.

Watching her, Rutledge said, “I still think Nicholas’ death is the key. I could believe the rest of what you’ve told me, if I was satisfied there.”

Cormac said, “Then you’ll have to go to the grave for your answers. I don’t have any to give you.”

“Could it be connected with the house? In some way? If she’d died and Nicholas Cheney had lived, he would have inherited the Hall. And I don’t believe, from what little I know of him, that he’d have sold it.”

Surprised, Cormac’s fair brows snapped together. He said slowly, “Then why not simply change her will—cut him out of it? The Hall was hers, to do with as she pleased. Why not leave it to Stephen? He claimed to be her favorite, and I think there might be some truth to that.”

“Stephen would have kept the Hall, too.”

“As a memorial, not as his home. There’s a difference, I suppose.”

Rutledge shook his head. “Whatever it is, I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

“Well, do me the courtesy of telling me what to expect,” Cormac said, “when you’ve made up your mind. I don’t want scandalous headlines in the morning paper staring back at me over my breakfast!”

“If I can,” Rutledge said, but it wasn’t the same promise he’d given Rachel.

After a moment Cormac said, “I’ve got to be on my way. Tell Rachel I’m sorry I missed her.” His eyes crinkled at the corners in a smile. “But warn her I’m not ready to leave Cornwall yet.” He walked off, moving swiftly and gracefully towards the house. Rutledge wondered whether he would buy it, as he’d thought about doing—or if the bitter memories here outweighed the sweet, even for him.

Cormac, whether he liked it or not, was still under Olivia Marlowe’s spell. Just as Rachel was under Nicholas Cheney’s—

She reached him, looking after Cormac and saying, “He doesn’t look very happy. What surprises did you spring on him?”

“I didn’t know that there were any surprises,” he countered.

Rachel turned her attention back to Rutledge. “Does it ever bother you—as a man, I mean—when the policeman in you has to break into a person’s peace and destroy it? Do you ever have qualms of conscience—nightmares—”