Wings of Fire

Hamish, answering for him, said, “Aye, there’s nightmares! But no’ the kind the lassie could bear!”

Seeing Rutledge’s face respond to what she thought was her own challenge, she didn’t wait for him to answer, and said instead, “Well, I suppose a conscience can grow accustomed to many things, when it has to!”

When he’d seen Rachel back to Borcombe, settled the boat where he’d found it, and returned the picnic basket to the inn, Rutledge went in search of Mrs. Trepol, housekeeper and cook. She was working in her garden, her hair tied up in a kerchief and an apron over her dress. As he paused at the gate that separated her walk from the road, she looked up, her eyebrows twitched, and she said, “I knew you’d come here before very long. When I saw you with Miss Rachel awhile ago.”

“Inspector Rutledge. I’d like to talk to you about the deaths at the Hall.” He opened the small iron gate set into the stone wall.

“It’s my Christian duty to answer you, but thinking about it bothers my sleep. I try not to.” She set the small trowel in the trug beside her and pulled off the old pair of men’s gloves she wore to protect her hands. “Would you care for a cup of tea, then?”

Following her into the dimness of the house, he saw that there was a cat in the chair he’d chosen to sit in, and moved instead to the long window overlooking the front garden. She unceremoniously dumped the torn out of the chair and dusted it with her apron. “He knows better,” she said, “but it’s his favorite place. I’ll be just a minute. Sit down, please, sir.”

He did, and the torn stared balefully at him from sleep-narrowed eyes. The room was small, with more furniture than it could comfortably hold, but clean of dust. Silverplate picture frames of people he didn’t recognize covered one table, beside small seaside souvenirs from Truro and Penzance. A plate holding pride of place commemorated the coronation of Edward VII, and a smaller one marked that of George V and Queen Mary. A cutting from a magazine, a photograph of the Prince of Wales in his Gaiter robes, had been framed and hung over the couch. This could be the parlor of any cottage in the west of England, Rutledge thought, feeling the quiet peace of it.

“Or in Scotland,” Hamish said with a sense of loss in his voice. “There was my sister’s wedding flowers under a glass bell, and the souvenirs were from Bannockburn and Edinburgh, not the seaside. A photograph of me in my uniform, with Fiona at my side ...”

Mrs. Trepol came in with a tray bearing cups and a teapot, a small dish of cakes to one side. She set it on the tea table in front of the cold hearth, and poured a cup for him. That done, she sighed, as if she’d put off interrogation as long as good manners allowed. Straightening her back, she turned, handed him the cup, and said, “I told the police when it happened—”

“Yes, I know, and your statement was very clear,” he assured her. “But I’m here merely to satisfy the Yard that the deaths were investigated—er—properly.”

Nodding, she said, “Aye, well, the family was well thought of. I’m sure everything that could be done was. It was a shock to me, I can tell you! Walking into that house on my day off, and not finding Mr. Nicholas about—but sometimes Miss Olivia had a bad night, and he’d sit with her until the worst passed. After Miss Rosamund died, Mrs. FitzHugh she was then, and the staff was reduced, he was the one Dr. Penrith showed how to rub Miss Olivia’s limbs and her back, to help the pain. Well, there was no entertaining, only the family coming there from time to time, and a full staff was wasteful! But to end their lives like that ... I can’t say how long it took me to get over my grief. I felt—I felt I should have been there, somehow.” She brought him milk and the small bowl of sugar, then the cakes.

“That you could have prevented it? That you’d have guessed what was in their minds?”

“There was no warning, sir, none, just life going on in its ordinary way!” she told him earnestly. “But I thought if I hadn’t been in such a hurry on the Saturday to leave, to run some errands I’d put off, I might have noticed some little difference, and Mr. Smedley could have come out to the Hall and spoken with them. Restored the balance of their minds!” There was pain in her voice, a heavy sense of guilt as she quoted unconsciously from the inquest verdict.

Suicide was still viewed as a crime against God. Mrs. Tre-pol sincerely felt a responsibility to save her employers’ souls if she could—as well as their earthly lives. Not out of zeal-ousness but from affection. She cared deeply.

“But if you didn’t notice anything—if their behavior was normal—then whatever caused them to take their lives must have occurred after you left.”

“What could have happened? There were no visitors expected that I knew of, and the post had come already, I’d have heard if it brought bad news. And look back on the day as I will, there was nothing that changed in that house! Nothing to cause such anguish that they’d want to die!”

“People don’t kill themselves without a reason,” he said, preparing to ask the question he knew very well would hurt her more. “Unless you think that Miss Marlowe was in such terrible pain that Mr. Cheney gave her too much laudanum, saw what he’d done, and then killed himself in grief.”

She put her own cup down and stared at him. “Mr. Nicholas would never have done such a terrible thing as give her too much! Oh, no, sir, he was not the kind of man to make a mistake like that!”

Without answering her directly, he shifted tactics. “There has been a good deal of sadness in the Hall. Two children dying young. Miss Rosamund losing her husbands before their time. Then Mr. Cheney and Miss Marlowe. And finally, Stephen FitzHugh.”

“As to that, sir, we all have our crosses to bear,” she said stiffly.

“But sometimes there’s a history of violence in a family. And sometimes one person is at the root of it.”

“And who do you think stands at the root of this family’s tragedies, sir?” she asked, bristling. “Mr. Cormac, who lives in London? Or Miss Susannah, who’s the last of the Treve-lyans? They’re all that’s left to do anybody a harm!”

“Miss Marlowe was an unusual woman. She wrote poetry of a kind that few men can produce. Where did she learn so much of life?”

“I never asked her, sir! Come to that, I never knew until she’d died that she was a writer of poems or anything else. Mr. Nicholas must have known, he sat working on his ships in her study, or went to find books she wanted in the library, or talked to her long hours of the day and night. I’d hear their voices, quiet and steady, as I moved about doing my cleaning. I think she’d have told him, she told him most everything important to her.”

“Except the name of the man she was in love with?”

Her mouth fell open. “And who was that likely to be, I ask you! She never had suitors coming to the Hall, and she went out so little. No man was likely to stumble over her in Plymouth or London and sweep her off her feet! Mr. Nicholas and Mr. Stephen, they were her brothers. And old Wilkins couldn’t light a fire in a grate!”

“Cormac FitzHugh wasn’t her brother. He wasn’t related to her or to her mother. A stepbrother by courtesy alone.”

Mrs. Trepol gave Rutledge an odd look. “What makes you think Miss Marlowe was fond of Mr. Cormac? Or he of her?”

“Because she wrote of love in one of her books of poetry, and no woman—no man for that matter—could have written of love with such emotion if he or she had no knowledge of it.”

Mrs. Trepol laughed. “Oh, there was love enough in that house to write a dozen books of poetry! Miss Rosamund loved her husbands and her children and her father with a deep and abiding feeling. Just living there, as I did as a young housemaid, you could wrap yourself in it. And Miss Olivia, she was very fond of Mr. Stephen; he could brighten her day just like his mother did. Mr. Nicholas used to tease her that she’d spoil him—Mr. Stephen—and Miss Olivia would say, ‘He was born to spoil and love. Some people are.’ “

Which told Rutledge that Mrs. Trepol had never read the Wings of Fire poems . . .

“Mr. Cormac FitzHugh used to live in the household. Miss Marlowe might have loved him once.”

“But he never loved her, sir! I’d swear to that on a Bible, if I had to. He was close to her, in an odd way, Mr. Cormac was, like he knew her better even than Mr. Nicholas did. But it wasn’t love between them. At least not on his part.”

Because Cormac FitzHugh had recognized Olivia Marlowe for what she was, a murderer?

“Do you think that Miss Marlowe was capable of killing anyone? Besides herself?”

“Killing anyone? Miss Marlowe? I’d sooner believe my own husband, God rest his soul, could do such a thing! Whatever put such a nasty idea into your head? Not anyone in Borcombe, I’d trust my life to that!” The indignation in her voice was very real.

“And you’d be willing to swear, in a court of law, that no one in the Hall—none of Miss Rosamund’s family—was capable of murder?”

She regarded him severely. “I don’t know what they are getting up to in London,” she said tersely, “to send you down here with such questions as that to ask decent, law-abiding folk, but I’ll tell you straight out, that if there was murder done in the Hall on the night that Miss Olivia and Mr. Nicholas died, it was a cruel and godless person that did it and he’s nobody we’ve ever seen in Borcombe or want to see. Now if there’re no more you want to ask me, I’ve plants in my garden that still need to be watered!”

Back in his room at The Three Bells, Rutledge sat in the chair by the window with the books of O. A. Manning’s poetry in front of him. But looking at the slim volumes, he found himself thinking instead about the poet. About the woman who had found such resources of understanding within her. And yet who had killed herself because her strength somehow came to an end.

Could a man or woman be so deeply aware of the mysteries of the human soul and yet be capable of such terrible crimes as the murder of children? Could she live with that knowledge of herself, and still create such beauty? Was that, finally, why she had killed herself? Assuming that Cormac FitzHugh had told Rutledge the truth . . .

How did you write poetry? How many words did you put on paper, and how often did you throw them away because they didn’t say what you heard in your spirit? How many poems went wrong, how many lines were flat and soulless, how many were trite and tired and empty? How many pages were crumpled up and tossed aside before a few unexpected words sang in your head, while you responded with blood and bone? How easy had it been—or how painfully arduous? How tiring or overwhelming?

He thought about the opening lines to one of the love poems.LoveComes on wings of fireThat sear the heart with longingAnd a white-hot heat.In its wake, no peace remains,Only the scars of a terrible lossThat mark the end of innocence.

How many times had she revised that until she was satisfied?

He’d been inside the study where she had worked and died.

It was amazingly tidy.

Where Nicholas had been carving his fleet of ocean liners, there were scraps and curls of wood, the fineness of sawdust from sanding, the small splashes of paint from finishing touches put to bow and portholes and the funnels. He hadn’t put them away, swept and dusted, before swallowing the laudanum. It was as if he’d expected to come back to them tomorrow.

But where the poet worked there was only the shawl-covered typewriter. No balled up sheets of paper, no pen or pencil lying where she’d scribbled a line to think about it, or tried a rhyme and found it weak. She had known she wasn’t going to sit there ever again and write. She’d prepared for her death.

His hand came down hard on the embossed leather cover, hard enough to sting the flesh as he swore aloud. Inventively.

Olivia Marlowe had bequeathed O. A. Manning—all her papers and letters and contracts—to her half brother Stephen. And Stephen was dead.

Where were these papers now? And what was in them?

9

But neither Rachel nor the rector could tell Rutledge what had become of Olivia Marlowe’s papers.

“I—I think Olivia’s will is still in probate. And Stephen’s as well,” Rachel said. “I really wasn’t interested in the papers. I mean, I was, in the sense that they were important for a study of Livia’s poems, but not in any personal sense. If you’re asking me if there was box sitting in the middle of a room, marked Papers for Stephen, or something, there wasn’t. I just assumed—well, if she’d left them to him, he must have known where to look for them.”

She was standing in the doorway of the cottage where she was staying, and Rutledge could hear someone moving about inside, and then a bird singing from a cage. It was a pretty place, with vines swallowing the narrow little porch and hollyhocks leaning against the walls between the windows.

“Which firm is handling the wills?”

“Chambers and Westcott for Olivia and for Nicholas. I don’t know about Stephen. He had a friend in the City who was a solicitor.”

It would be easy enough to find that out in London.

He thanked her and walked on to the rectory, expecting Smedley to be tending his garden, but the grim-faced housekeeper announced that he was having a nap and she wasn’t about to disturb him.

Rutledge was just turning away when Smedley came down the stairs into the hall, his hair standing up in the back and his shirttail on one side hanging out of his trousers.

“Good afternoon, Inspector,” he said, voice still thick with sleep. “Give me two minutes, and I’ll walk in the garden with you.”

Rutledge went around the back, walked along the tidy rows of vegetables and flowers, and was nearly to the small, scummy pond that had once held fish before Smedley stepped out the back door and came to join him. His hair was combed and his shirt neatly tucked into his trousers, his braces in place.

He cast a look at the sky, and said, “It has been a beautiful day. I hear you and Rachel took a boat out.”

Rutledge smiled. “We did. And lived to tell the tale, though she had some doubts in the beginning. Who was the gossip?”

“It came by way of Mrs. Hinson, who had seen Mr. Trask outside the inn on her way to morning service. She then stopped to offer my housekeeper a small pot of the jam she made yesterday. And I was given the news with my tea, along with the jam.”

“What do the gossips of Borcombe have to say about three deaths at the Hall, all in a matter of months?”

“Much as you’d expect. The women felt that Olivia’s writing must have turned her mind. We aren’t used to famous poets in Borcombe. I think they believed somehow it was a proper judgment on her, for writing about things best left unsaid and probably best left unfelt in a woman.”

“And the men?”

Smedley frowned as he stooped to pull a yellowed leaf off the nearest carrot. “The men are of two minds about Olivia Marlowe. She was of course a Trevelyan, and they’re above the common lot, in most eyes. You forgive a Trevelyan much that you might hold against the greengrocer or your neighbor across the road. At the same time, dying by her own hand was an admission that she’d overstepped the bounds, in a manner of speaking, and finally became aware of it. The universe, you might say, is now back in its stable orbit.”

“What about Stephen FitzHugh? And Nicholas?”

“Stephen was a sore loss. Half the village adored him— every female under sixty, and more than a few over that! The other half, the men, admired him. A good man to have on your side, sense of humor, knew how to lose as well as to win. Quite a reputation for courage in the war, was wounded, decorated. Sportsman. Successful in his business, which was banking. Popular with the ladies. Yes, he was admired—and sometimes envied. That’s natural. Nicholas was respected— Rosamund’s son, the natural leader in village affairs, the man you turned to when there was trouble. Pillar of strength. Not the sort you’d expect to choose suicide. The general belief was that he found Olivia dead or dying, and in the first shock of grief, took his own life. That’s romantic nonsense, but they’re more comfortable with it than with the truth—that he might have wanted to die. But this isn’t why you came to see me, I think?”

“I wanted to know what became of Olivia’s papers. The ones she left to Stephen as her literary executor.”

“They’re probably still at the house. Stephen didn’t want to sell, he wanted to keep the Hall as a memorial to his sister. The others took a few personal things, but he was dead set against removing much else. And was prepared to fight a bitter battle to have his way. Have you looked in Olivia’s room? Or her desk?” He read the expression on Rutledge’s face. “No, of course not. Well, I’d start there. It’s not likely, is it, that Olivia sent them off to her solicitor? He’d have guessed something was wrong, and she didn’t want that. Besides, we aren’t sure just how soon after she decided to put an end to her life she acted on that decision. A day? A month? Five years? A few hours?”

“She had straightened up her desk. Nicholas hadn’t cleared away his ships.”

Smedley looked at him. “That’s proof of nothing.”

“Of, perhaps, a state of mind?”

“You’re saying that she knew where she was going, what she was planning to do, and Nicholas didn’t?”

Rutledge watched the light and shadows play on the upper windows of the rectory, a bird’s flight reflected in them, and the movement of the apple tree’s higher branches. “I’m saying that she was prepared. He wasn’t.”

“Or it might be that her poetry was terribly important. And his ships weren’t. He could leave those, in safety.”

Which brought Rutledge back again to those literary papers.

He walked to the Hall after dinner and stood looking up at the house in the golden shadows of the westering sun. He could hear sea birds calling, and somewhere a jackdaw singing lyrically. In his mind’s eye, ghosts of the people who’d made the Hall a home stirred and moved about the lawns, laughing and talking and bringing life to the scene. To the emptiness.

Someone said, behind him, “They’ve not left—”

He turned to find the old woman, and remembered her name this time. Rachel had called her Sadie.

“No,” he said. Then, playing her game, he asked, “Which ones do you see? Is Anne there?”

“Anne was willful, she must have her way or she’d set the nursery on its ear. They said it was a child’s tantrums, but the tree grows as the twig is bent, and if her father had lived, that would have been different. Instead, the women spoiled her and let her do as she pleased, and she wanted to hold tight to everyone’s affection, even the old master’s— Mr. Trevelyan. Miss Rosamund’s father, that was. Sometimes she’d put off her stormy ways, and sit quiet with a book in her lap, and he’d come into the room and mistake her for her sister. There was no telling them apart, unless Miss Anne was being her naughty self. Or she’d tell tales on the others, and once got Master Cormac a hiding for beating a horse, and him never one to abuse the animals. Master Nicholas, now, he stood up to her once, and refused to let her have the little soldiers he’d been given for his birthday. But she found them later and buried them out in the garden, and he never did discover where they were. She died soon after.”

Her words made Rutledge’s blood run cold. Here was a reason for Olivia to have killed her sister. A child’s excuse for murder. He found he didn’t want to know about Anne.

“Why did Richard die out on the moors?”

“There’s none sure he did. ‘Twas no body ever found. Miss Olivia said they fell asleep in the sunshine, and he was gone when she opened her eyes. She thought mayhap he’d wandered off to find the moor ponies. He were a restless child, with the energy of two and a devil in his eyes. Miss Rosamund called him her little soldier, and said he was born to wear a uniform. Like her first husband.”

“And Nicholas?”

“Ah, he was one who always knew more than he said. Kept himself to himself, and you never guessed at what rivers ran inside him, or how deep. Bookish, some thought, but if you want to know my mind on that, he was waiting with a dreadful patience to grow up. As if there was something waiting for him. If there was, we never knew of it. He was content to stay by Miss Olivia and keep her spirits high when the pain was hard. But if you looked into his eyes when he stared out at the sea, you knew there was a roamer inside him. Not like Master Richard, but a man who saw distant places in his soul.”

“How did you come to know the Trevelyan family so intimately?”

There was roguish laughter in her eyes as she stared back at him, giving a bawdy twist to his words. “Even the mighty use bedpans, like ordinary mortals,” she told him. “I nursed the living when needful, and laid out the dead. Dr. Penrith sent for me when Miss Olivia had the crippling disease and was like to die. He didn’t trust the London nurses they wanted.”

She seemed today to be clear-minded and aware of what she was saying. Testing it, he repeated, “You laid out the dead?”

A wariness moved behind her eyes, though her expression didn’t change. He took a chance and asked her, “Was there a killer in that house?”

But her eyes clouded as he watched her lined face, and she said, “I told you there were a Gabriel Hound in that house, and you’d hear him running some nights, before something bad happened. Running through the rooms, in the dark, looking for his soul. On those nights, the wind howled in the trees and rattled the windows, and I kept the coverlet over my head. Miss Olivia warned me once, when I spoke to her of it, and I knew to heed her. I’d die too if I told what I heard or saw. Which is why I’ve outlived them all but two, and Miss Susannah’s safe enough in London.”

“What about Cormac FitzHugh?”

“He’s not a Trevelyan, is he?” she asked. “There’s no Gabriel hound wants anything he has.”

She walked off before he could ask her what had brought her to the Hall on this particular evening. Or what she knew of a fire built out on the headland. But her mind was already slipping away again, and he wasn’t sure he’d have gotten a straight answer anyway.

Still, he listened again to what she’d said. “Miss Olivia warned me once, when I spoke to her of it, and I knew to heed her. I’d die too if I told what I heard or saw.”

Miss Olivia.

He went on his way, taking his time and approaching the house as if he’d come as a guest and not an intruder.

Where would Olivia have left her papers? Not in the hallway where anyone might stumble over them, that was true enough. But would she have hidden them, or simply put them where Stephen would think to look?

He unlocked the door and went inside. Someone had left the drapes open. Cormac? The sun’s warmth had flooded the hall along with its light, and there was a brightness here that somehow made him think of Rosamund.

“There doesna’ need to be anything howling from the attics to haunt a house,” Hamish reminded him suddenly.

“No,” Rutledge answered aloud, agreeing with him. “But this brightness will fade with the dusk. What else is here?”

He went up the stairs to the study and stood in its doorway again, eyes roving the walls and furnishings. There was no place of easy concealment here. Not without moving rows of books—or Nicholas’ ships—and then shifting heavy shelves. And Nicholas shared this room, after all.

He shut the door and made his way down the gallery to Olivia’s bedroom, glancing briefly at the plan Constable Daw-lish had drawn up for him, although he knew very well which door to open.

He stood on the threshold for a moment, then crossed to open the drapes, allowing the setting sun to wash into the dimness. As he did, he caught again that elusive perfume that he’d smelled when the shawl slipped off the typewriter. And it was stronger when he opened Olivia’s closet door and looked at the clothing hanging on both sides of the deep recess. Skirts, dresses, dinner gowns, robes, coats, shawls, in neat and orderly rows, coats first, night robes last. Hatboxes stood in the back on shelves, next to half a dozen handbags. Several umbrellas hung on hooks to one side, and a cane with a heavily wrought silver head. Beneath the clothing were two rows of shoes, the right of each pair with a small metal tab like a stirrup under the instep, and straps at each end. For the brace she wore.

Without touching them he surveyed the clothes. She liked colors, rose and a particular shade of dark blue and a deep forest green, as well as crimson and winter black, summer white and pastels. Tailored clothes, evening dresses very stylish but never fussy. His sister, Frances, would have approved of them, would have pronounced Olivia Marlowe a woman of quiet good taste. Just as the rector had said. But was there another side of her? And where did it reside?

The closet had been built into what had in the past been a small dressing room. He walked into it, towards the shelves at the back, brushing against the clothing, and that perfume whirled out around him, almost in angry protest at his invasion of her privacy. Where had she found such an expressive scent? It touched the senses, lingered in the memory, confused the image he tried over and over again to draw. Elusive as she was—and more alive.

He began methodically to open each hatbox, starting at the top, and from some of them, the heavy odor of cedar shavings wafted up to him, displacing Olivia’s perfume. Sweaters in a range of colors. Woolen stockings and scarves and gloves. Leather belts and leather gloves, Italian made and very supple. A fur hat, with upswept brim and a dashing style. Frances would have adored it—and looked stunning in it.

Nothing else.

He had carefully stacked the boxes on the floor. Now he pulled out the thick wooden shelves, beginning with the top shelf, looking to see if any of the panels in the wall behind it were loose or even hinged. If Olivia had kept her writing a secret for so many years, it meant she knew how to guard her privacy. From servants as well as family. If there was no space for storing personal papers in the study where she worked, she would most certainly have considered her bedroom next as a repository, and this wide closet, which no one but a maid had any excuse to enter, was Rutledge’s first choice.

The closet was too dark for him to be sure that the end panels couldn’t be opened somehow, and he had to remove the middle and then the bottom shelf to run his hands over the wall.

Nothing.

He retrieved the bottom shelf to settle it back on the brackets that held it, and instead clipped the edge on the left-hand bracket. Part of the shelf broke off, and then something else tumbled down, ringing merrily as it bounced twice on the hard wood of the floor. A key? He got down on one knee to search for it, running his hand back and forth across the wood, and there was nothing. Frustrated, he moved back to the front of the closet and started again. It took him nearly five minutes to find it, where it had landed in a shoe.

A small locket, gold, the sort of thing little girls often wore. He took it over to the window, where the light was better. There were entwined initials on the outer face of the locket, and he made them out—MAM. Margaret Anne Marlowe? His fingers found the delicate catch and he opened the frame to two tiny portraits inside. They were in oil, lovely little miniatures of a man and a woman. After a moment he recognized them. Rosamund and her first husband, Captain George Marlowe. Anne’s parents. An exquisite gift to a child on her birthday or at Christmas, to be worn when she was dressed up, with special care.

How had it come to be hidden among Olivia’s things? Or had Olivia simply inherited it when her sister died, and lost track of it over the years?

Rutledge went back to the closet and brought the shelves out again, then the boxes and the shoes. On hands and knees, then standing, he searched every inch of the walls and the floor.

Nothing. Except for the half inch sliver of wood that had been knocked off the bottom shelf by his clumsiness.

He picked up the shelf, looking to see where the chip had come from, and if he could put it back where it belonged.

It was the end of a longer strip of wood that had been set very carefully into the back edge of the heavy shelf. With his penknife he gently pried that out of its slot, and when he did, another object tumbled out of the space hollowed out behind,

He picked up that and the shelf, and carried them both to the windows.

The second object was a man’s gold pipe cleaner, smooth from long use, but the initials engraved in it were still legible. JSC. James Cheney, Nicholas’s father? He set that on the sill beside the locket.

Holding the shelf up to the light, he looked into the carved-out hollow. Someone had stuffed cotton deep inside it, and embedded within the soft fibers he could see bits and pieces of other articles. The sun caught them in its brightness, as if pointing to them. He winkled them out, slowly and gently.

First came a small boy’s cuff buttons, heavy gold and again with initials engraved on them. RHC. Richard Cheney? Behind them was a lovely little signet ring, that looked as if it had been crafted for a child. And carved deeply into the face of the ring was a coat of arms. Inside, engraved in the band itself, were the initials REMT. Rosamund Trevelyan. A gold crucifix came out easily, finely wrought, with the figure a little worn. From the letters on the reverse, it had belonged to Brian FitzHugh. Finally, at the very back, a watch fob in the shape of a small boat, with the initials NMC. Nicholas.

The sunlight flashed across the raised sail as Rutledge laid it with the others he had spread out on the wooden win-dowsill, and in spite of the warmth that poured through the glass panes, he felt cold.

He knew exactly what these were.

He had seen dozens of collections like them, in the trenches in France. A button from the greatcoat of a German officer, goggles from a downed airman, stripes from the sleeves of corporals and sergeants, collar tabs from officers, a battered Prussian helmet, a pistol taken from a corpse, an empty ammo belt from a machine gunner’s nest, whatever a man fancied ...

When his mind stubbornly refused to frame the words, Hamish did it for him.

“Trophies of the dead,” he said softly.

Small golden treasures, very personal and surely very precious, that marked each of Olivia Marlowe’s unwitting victims.

10

Rutledge forced himself to walk away from the things he’d found, and instead to go through the motions required of him.

He began with the olive wood desk on its graceful, delicate legs. In the several drawers he found stationery in various sizes, engraved, and matching envelopes, bottles of ink, scissors, a box of visiting cards with Rosamund’s name on them, a book of accounts for shops in London and in Borcombe, a leather notebook with stamps and addresses—none of them of special interest—and the usual clutter of pens and pencils. The only truly personal item was a wooden pen holder, hand carved, in the shape of a monster fish, the kind drawn on ancient maps at the edge of the known world, where they waited to swallow unwary ships. On the bottom, following the curve of a tiny scale, he found the initials NMC/OAM. From Nicholas to Olivia. Or to O. A. Manning?

The bottom drawer on the left side was empty.

The dressing table, the tall chest, the bureau, and the bedside table yielded more personal things, perfume and cosmetics, combs and brushes, odds and ends of jewelry, filmy lingerie, silk scarves and stockings, lacy handkerchiefs, and a prayer book, candles, and matches. Nothing out of the ordinary in any way, though sometimes intimate and daunting.

He knew, from what Rachel had told him, that the family had already taken away the things that made a room personal and individual—pictures and photographs and possessions with a particular value that wouldn’t be put up for sale with the house. But perhaps out of respect for Stephen’s insistence, much of Olivia’s life still survived in this room.

Yet Olivia had been careful to leave nothing behind for either the police or her biographers that could be construed— or misconstrued—into the woman who’d lived in this room.

The items buried deep in the closet must have been there a very long time, and if no one had found them before now, the chances were that no one might have discovered them for years to come. When they would have no meaning to strangers living here ...

He went back to the window and picked up each article, one at a time.

Six victims, if these were indeed trophies. Olivia’s sister, Anne. Her stepfather James Cheney. Her half brother Richard Cheney. Her stepfather Brian FitzHugh.

Her own mother, Rosamund Trevelyan.

And the man who’d spent his life in her service. Nicholas Cheney.

She’d been so sure of him, then, so sure that he would die with her. Or that she could send him into the darkness before her.

“Gentle God,” Rutledge whispered softly.

And after a moment, he found himself silently cursing Chief Superintendent Bowles for sending him here.

Drawing the drapes again and closing the door firmly behind him, Rutledge went down the passage, his mind still working with a policeman’s precision, his thoughts far from where his feet carried him. The tiny, betraying trophies had been safely returned to their hiding place, out of sight. But not out of his thoughts, burned with molten brightness into his very brain. In Stephen’s room was the comfortable chaos of living. There was a cricket bat in the corner, a pair of riding boots by the closet door, suits and shirts and jackets hung haphazardly on the rod inside, books on the table under the window—they were mostly about golf and tennis, Ireland and horses—and ivory inlaid cuff links in the dish on the dressing table, with a fish hook and a length of gut from a tennis racket beside them. But no boxes. No folders of personal papers, no literary failures or private letters or contracts. What Stephen kept here was the detritus of boyhood and the things one left in a country house visited fairly often.

In the interim between her death and his, Stephen might well have taken Olivia’s papers to his bank for safekeeping. But Rutledge went through the drawers again, found a routine letter from Stephen’s bank manager, and copied the address in his notebook.

As he was about to close the curtains, Hamish said, “When I was a laddie, Ma was a fierce one with broom and rag, nothing safe from her eyes when the fit to clean was on her. I’d hide what 1 cherished in the shed behind the straw, or above the rafters in the loft, after Pa died. She wasna’ as tall as my pa.”

Rutledge stopped, listening to what Hamish said. Stephen was a child from a large family. Nosy sisters and prying brothers. He might well have had a secret place of his own. But not in this room. He, Rutledge, had been damned thorough . . .

Or had he?

He glanced around the room again. He’d even had up the carpet, looked inside the grate, under the bed—

He knelt again by the bed. Nothing, only a thin coating of dust, sifting down gently since Mrs. Trepol’s last visit.

The frame. The slats that held the springs. Above that the mattress, sagging a little in the center. The bedclothes—

The slats? What could you hide on a slat? A key, perhaps ...

He went under the bed, on his back, mindful of his coat and careful not to scrape his head on the springs as he used his arms on the side boards to propel himself. Claustrophobia caught at him, and he had to shut his eyes against the wave of terror that ran through him. He coughed hard, the dry dust sucked into his drier throat. The springs were all but pressing into his face, not as high as he’d first thought!

With eyes still shut tight, he forced his breathing back to a normal rhythm. What you don’t see can’t fall in on you! he told himself sternly.

After a moment, searching with his memory rather than his eyes, he ran shaking fingers over the nearest slat, between the springs and the wood, barking his knuckles and collecting fine splinters. Nothing but more dust. There were five slats in all. He felt for the others, and began again, moving his shoulders and hips across the floor until he could reach each slat. Nothing. It was useless, he might as well give up. The last slat now—

Only the slight rustle of sound warned him in time, but the object still clipped his ear, falling, and he banged his head as he recoiled.

Slithering swiftly out from under the frame again, he turned and looked back. The springs were a good fifteen inches above the floor, not face high.

And a small book was lying, spine upward, in an inverted V on the floor. He reached for it, and managed to fish it out without going back under the bed again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or the devil. Depending on your knowledge of her.

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

Damn Stephen FitzHugh for falling down those blasted stairs!

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

But that was just the problem.

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

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

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

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

“If I have to,” he said bitterly.

11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He set out to look for one.

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

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

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

“And Brian FitzHugh’s death?”

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

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

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

“Is your father still alive?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened to Richard Trevelyan?”

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

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

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

“And Miss Olivia?”

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

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

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

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

They stood an angel in the churchyard for the man they

lost at sea,

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

To come and mourn his passing, touch the earth beneath

my hand,

Or bring him blood-red roses ...

He tried to recall the last lines and failed.

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

Alas, a frailer angel watches where you sleep

With pansies—for remembrance—lying at your feet.

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

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

“Who was in the house that day?”

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

“And you never thought of murder?”

“Good God! Self-murder is terrible enough! And who would want to kill James? He was a kind man, a good man. The house had seen enough grief already, who could possibly want to add to Rosamund’s burdens? There’s no one alive that cruel!”

Agitated, he spilled his tea, and Rutledge knelt to mop it up with his napkin, his back to the scorching fire.

“What did Olivia have to say when she was told of James’ death?”

“I don’t remember,” Penrith said testily. “It was a long time ago, and I was not concerned with Olivia, I was worried about Rosamund, and her father. He never recovered his spirits after that, you could see it clear.”

The old eyes, fading into a milky gray, looked back into a past he didn’t want to remember. “I walked behind their coffins,” he said sadly. “Not because they’d been in my care. Not for Adrian’s sake. But because in that house I found something I’ve never felt since under any roof, not even my own. Laughter was there, and happiness. And most of all, a glory. Brian FitzHugh told me once that it was in the very stones of the Hall, that it had been handed down with the Trevelyan blood and the Trevelyan land. That’s romantic nonsense, an Irishman’s blarney. But I knew what it was, I knew from the very first day I set eyes on her. It was Rosamund ...”

Emotion had drained him. He began to nod over his tea cup, head sinking slowly until his chin rested on his cravat, and Rutledge gently removed the saucer from the gnarled fingers. Then, with the wet napkin and the tray, he slipped quietly out of the room and into the—by comparison—frigid passage.

Mrs. Hawkins, taking the tray from him, said apologetically, “He slips off to sleep easier every day. I wonder sometimes ...” But she left the sentence unfinished, and instead showed him to the door. “Thank you for coming to cheer him a little,” she said. “I don’t expect you’ll be in Borcombe much longer, but I know he’d be glad to see you again before you leave.”

“Did you know Olivia Marlowe very well?” he asked, looking out at the rain coming down in sheets.

“She was friendly enough, whenever we ran into each other, but no, I wasn’t likely to know her well. She didn’t go about much. I was that surprised when they told me she wrote poetry, but then she was an invalid, wasn’t she? With time heavy on her hands. Nicholas was here sometimes in the evening, to visit my father. I always thought he might marry Rachel.” A pink flush rose in her cheeks. “I’ve never known a man quite like him—there was an intensity about him, a—a force.” She began to search through the Chinese stand beside the door, and took out an old umbrella. ‘‘You can borrow this, if you like. Otherwise, you’ll sure to be calling on the doctor with a fever.” Then, in a rush, as if she felt she had to finish what she’d begun. she said, “Nicholas tried to protect Olivia from everything. He thought if he was there, with her, he could hold off the pain, he could keep her from the darkness that beset her. He tried so hard, you could see it— I could see it, I mean—and I thought, when I heard how he’d died, that he was still afraid for her in death. As if, somehow, he could save her from what came after ...”

Rutledge splashed through the puddles on his way back to the inn, heedless of where he put his feet or the dampness spreading through his socks. Wet feet had been the ever-present hell of the trenches; it had cost more men than Stephen FitzHugh their toes or part of a foot. You learned somehow to shut it out, until the smell told you that the rot had begun.

Hamish was fuming at the back of his mind, telling him something, and he ignored the voice, his mind on Olivia Marlowe.

If she knew where Richard was buried, then she’d killed him. And if she knew, then it was a place that could be found. The boy hadn’t been taken by gypsies or thrown into quicksand, he’d been killed and hidden.

“With pansies—for remembrance—”

Had Olivia meant that figuratively? Or literally?

“It doesna’ matter. What if she meant pansies to put near him, flowers that wilted and were gone in a day? Who would see them, who would guess what she was about?”

The angel then, a frailer angel. Herself? Somewhere that Olivia, with her brace, could reach?

She could ride a pony. That widened the circle. He’d been right to order the constable to search the moors again.

Rutledge turned, crossed over to the nearest shop. In the small window fronting the road there was a collection of ribbons and laces behind a spill of colorful embroidery thread, packets of needles, and an array of handkerchiefs that reminded him of those he’d seen in Olivia’s room. As he opened the door, a gust of wind and rain nearly jerked the knob out of his hand.

Startled, a middle-aged woman looked up from a cushion of bobbins and threads and a half-finished lace collar on her lap. “Could I help you, sir?” she asked, trying hastily to get to her feet.

“No, sit down, I’m too wet to come in. I need directions, that’s all.”

She sank back into her chair, somehow preventing the bobbins from roiling to every point of the compass. Then he saw that like the Belgian nuns he’d come across during the war, she had them pinned in place. “To where?”

“I’m looking for the man who did the gardening at the Hall. Wilkins is his name.”

“Oh, you’ve come the wrong way, sir! He’s down towards the river, in a little house you can’t miss. There’s a stone wall and a garden in front, and beehives out back.”

Five minutes later, his shoes squeaking with rain water, Rutledge was knocking on the door of a stone house half hidden under its slate roof.

Wilkins came to answer the summons with his bedroom slippers on his feet. He grinned at Rutledge and said, “I’ve seen drowned men drier than you! Here, wait till I’ve fetched some rags.”

As Rutledge furled his umbrella, Wilkins disappeared down the dark stone-flagged passage towards the back of the house, and soon returned with a handful of old cloths. Rutledge dried his shoes as best he could, and then followed the old man into his kitchen, where something smelled suspiciously like rabbit stew in the pot simmering on the hearth.

“I knew you’d be along before the day was out. They say you’re nosing around the Hall and the village, looking for answers that London wants. About the deaths at the Hall. Aye, I’m not surprised. If you ask me, Inspector Harvey is a fool, and Constable Dawlish too full of himself to know the difference between his nose and his toes! I’ve got some good ale in that jug over there, fresh from The Three Bells. And if you’ll hand it to me, I’ll pour you a cup.”

Rutledge picked up the heavy stone jug and passed it to him. Wilkins filled two cups and sat down with a sigh of satisfaction.

“I never thought Mr. Brian was killed falling from his horse. He was too good a rider. Born on a horse, like as not, and knew what he was about. And you don’t ride a valuable animal through sea-wet rocks, not if you’ve got any sense, with the risk of ruining his legs! It were murder, pure and simple, that happened that day—to man and mount!”

12

Caught off balance, Rutledge stared at the old man. “Did you say this to anyone at the time? When Brian FitzHugh died?”

Wilkins gave him a toothless grin, “Lord, and lose my job on the spot? Which I nearly did anyway, when Miss Rosamund gave up the racing stables. And come to that, what was I to say to her? Or to the police?” He drank his ale, belched with pleasure, and shrugged his shoulders with almost Gallic expressiveness.

“But if you believed it was murder—”

“Aye, it were murder,” he said bluntly. “I were there when they raised the alarm, running for all I was worth to see what were wrong and to look to the horse. I’d saddled him for Mr. FitzHugh, I knew which mount he’d taken out!”

“Tell me, then.”

“Mr. FitzHugh was lying face down in the sea, blood on his head, and they found blood on one of the rocks just there, where he’d been thrown and then rolled into the surf. But the horse were deeper among the rocks, wild-eyed and shaking. A spur had raked one flank, not the other. I’d never known Mr. FitzHugh to use a spur on his horses, and I’d never known Lucifer to need more than the lightest rein, he were that clever. Read your mind almost! Something happened that put the fear of God into him, and he bolted. But with an empty saddle, if I know anything about it!”

“What makes you say that?”

“There were neither horse hair nor blood on Mr. Fitz-Hugh’s spurs. And if he’d been throwed, just there, where he would hit his head on the rocks coming down, then roll over, his face into the water, why was there water in his hoots when I pulled ‘em off him, so’s they could carry him back to the house?”

“Surely the police asked that same question?”

“Aye, and they answered it, too, that the sea’d come in with the tide, soaking his trousers and his stockings. There were no footprints on the shingle but ours and Master Nicholas’, coming up from his boat, no signs of a struggle or trouble of any kind, and the doctor, he said Mr. FitzHugh had drowned, before he’d regained his wits from the fall.” He finished his ale, then went to stir the stew, squinting in the heat of the fire.

Rutledge bent down, untied his shoes, and looked at his stockings. They were wet with rain. The shoes themselves were pliable with rain water. But when he upended them, water didn’t run out. The stockings and the lining had absorbed it. Interesting point, he told himself as he laced them again.

“And no one else raised objections about the horse?”

“Mr. Cormac did. He said his father wouldn’t have taken Lucifer among the rocks, not without good reason.” Wilkins came back to sit down at the table, refilling his cup and offering more to Rutledge, who shook his head. “We found a bee caught under the girth,” he said. “Where it’d stung the horse. And that satisfied the lot of them. But I walked back down there later and had a look around. Before the stir, mind you, Master Nicholas’d drawn his boat up on shore just a few yards away, and turned it over, planning to come back and work on the seams. Well, I looked under it, and I found the print of Mr. Brian’s riding boot, next to the print of another shoe, but the tide had half erased that. He were on foot, then, talking to someone. He weren’t alone down there on the shingle, not the whole time!”

“He might have been there when Nicholas Cheney brought the boat in, and helped drag it above the tide line.” ‘‘Then why didn’t Master Nicholas say so?” “All right. Who would have wanted to kill FitzHugh?” Wilkins sighed. “That were the problem, you see. Not Miss Rosamund—siie were Mrs. FitzHugh—she’d not be likely to send him off. The twins, now, they were little ‘uns, and you’d not see them on the strand or near the headland or in the stables without their nanny in tow. Miss Olivia were a cripple. Mr. FitzHugh were Mr. Cormac’s own father. None of the servants, that I knew of, had any quarrel with him. Mr. FitzHugh had a temper, mind you, but he were fair, and no one held any grudge that I’d heard about. And that left Master Nicholas, whose boat it was. Why would he want to harm his stepfather? It made no sense to me. So I held my tongue and waited to see what happened, and when naught did, I kept on holding of it.”

Nicholas might have no reason to kill his stepfather, but he might well have covered up for Olivia, if he’d had any fear that she was involved.

With the brace on her leg, could she have moved around among the rocks?

He asked that question aloud. Wilkins thought about it. “She weren’t one to plead helplessness. I’d see her struggle to do what she wanted to do. Aye, she could get over them rocks, spider fashion, pulling her leg along. Slowlike and careful. But where she had the will, she got her way.”

Remembering what Constable Dawlish had said, Rutledge asked, “You put the horse down, didn’t you? Was she there, watching?”

“Aye, it were left to me, and a hard job it were. Loved that horse, I did. Mr. Cormac were there, his head buried in the horse’s neck and crying. Miss Olivia came with Dawlish, who were only a boy then, and said, There’s no saving him? Not even if he never races again? Must we put him down?’ And I said, The smith looked at that foreleg, miss, and he said t’were shattered, there were no way to mend it so’s it’d take his weight.’ Fleet as he were, I couldn’t watch him live out his days a cripple, struggling over every step, though I didn’t say that to her face, her being a cripple herself!”

He looked into his cup and swished the ale thoughtfully. “She stayed till it were done. Not a bit squeamish, as you’d think in a young lady like her. Afterward, she told Mr. Cor-mac, if he cared so much for Lucifer, he could help dig the hole to bury him in. And we did it, out on the headland, Mr. Cormac and a few of the lads and me.”

Rutledge walked back to the inn as the church clock struck twelve. The rain had turned into a misty drizzle again, and the street was no longer a river under his feet. More people were about, now, men and women, a few of them nodding to him in recognition. Mrs. Trepol, hurrying past, wished him a good day, and in the distance he glimpsed Rachel moving head down towards the woods that separated the village from the Hall. Hamish, rumbling with suppressed irritation, kept Rutledge from concentrating his thoughts on the morning’s work. Or was it his own reluctance?

At the inn, Mr. Trask took his umbrella and greeted him with the news that he had a visitor waiting in the parlor. Rutledge went through into a long narrow room with a ceiling so low it seemed to brush his head. In the wave of claustrophobia that followed, he saw only the dark furnishings, the empty grate, and a tall man with white hair who rose from a chair and stood where he was, waiting for Rutledge to speak.

After a moment, he managed to say, “I’m Rutledge. I’m afraid I don’t know who you are.”

The man looked him over, then said, “Chambers. Thomas Chambers. I represent the Trevelyan family—”

Rutledge had him pegged. This was the lawyer who had courted Rosamund and almost won her. The family solicitor, handling the wills. Regarding him with new interest, he crossed the room to light the lamps on the chimney piece. Their glow, added to the one lamp already burning on the table, pushed back the darkness and the cavelike atmosphere of the room. Breathing more easily, he could concentrate on what Chambers was saying.

“—and I understand that you’ve come down to reconsider the circumstances of their deaths. I’d like to know why.”

Rutledge stood with his back to the cold hearth and said, “Because the Home Office wished to be sure that all was as it should be. Miss Marlowe—as O. A. Manning—is a person of some prominence.”

Chambers all but snorted in disbelief. “You may tell the locals that, and they’d be impressed. I’m not.”

“Suspicious, are you?” Rutledge asked.

“Of course I’m suspicious when Scotland Yard feels it needs to stick its nose into a death where I’m handling the estate.”

“Is there anything wrong with the wills? Any provisions that make you especially nervous?” He was deliberately misunderstanding the man, stripping him of his authority and aggressively taking charge of the meeting. Not out of personal animosity but as a tool.

Chambers stared at him. At the thinness, the gaunt face, the lines that had prematurely aged a much younger man than he’d guessed at in the beginning. And wasn’t above a little aggression of his own.

“In the war, were you?”

Rutledge nodded.

“Wounded?”

Rutledge hesitated, then said briefly, “Yes.”

“Thought as much! Stephen looked the same way when he came back. Shell of himself. Damned foot killed him in the end, too.”

Over Hamish’s rude comments about that, Rutledge recaptured the salient.

“What did you do in the war?”

“They wouldn’t take me,” Chambers said in disgust. “Too old, they told me. But I knew that part of France better than they did! My mother’s mother was from there. Stupid place to fight infantry battles, for God’s sake! No geographical advantage. No high ground. Prolonged deadlock, that’s what you’ll get, I told them. Enormous loss of life, I told them. No one will come out of it a winner. Americans tipped the balance, of course. And the tank. And still the best they could do was an Armistice!” Chambers realized suddenly that he’d mounted one of his hobby horses, and stopped, watching the advantage slip back to Rutledge. Then he grinned. ‘‘Over to you, I think.”

Rutledge found himself grinning back. He liked Chambers. He could also see what had attracted Rosamund FitzHugh to the man.

“Who sent for you?” Rutledge asked. “Susannah Hargrove?”

“Daniel Hargrove. He was worried, because his wife is in delicate health and this whole business was upsetting her. They tell me now she’s likely to bear twins, but that runs in the family, not surprising.”

They were still standing, Rutledge by the hearth, Chambers at the far end of the room, a position chosen to make Rutledge come to him, not the reverse. Rutledge said, impatiently, “Sit down, man!” He was aware of the smell of wool again, and with resignation ignored it. Hamish, perversely, did not.

After a moment, Chambers moved forward and took one of the chairs near the fireplace. The room was damp, chill, with an old coldness that seemed to come from the walls, seeping up from the earth that waited to consume the stone when it finally sank under its own weight.

Rutledge took the chair across from him, and said, “Actually, I’m glad you’ve come, I was considering traveling to Plymouth to find you.”

Surprised, Chambers said, “Not about the wills, I think?”

“In a way. I know that Olivia Marlowe made her half brother Stephen FitzHugh her literary executor. But then Stephen died soon after. And I haven’t been able to find her papers. Do you have them?”

“No, I understood that Stephen knew what was involved in that bequest and was prepared to deal with the responsibility himself. If Nicholas had survived, he’d have had that duty.”

“And if Stephen died?”

“Ah, now that’s a very good question. I think Susannah, Mrs. Hargrove. He didn’t specify her as literary executor, you understand. His will was made out while Olivia was still alive and it would have been presumptuous to consider that need. But he did leave everything else to her, and the courts will, I think, accept the inclusion of Olivia’s papers in his estate.”

“Not to Cormac FitzHugh, then?”

Chambers frowned. “No. There was some ... coolness between the two of them. Cormac and Olivia, I mean. She made it very clear to me at the time she drew up her will that she didn’t wish Cormac to be in any way responsible for her affairs. Stephen was still very young then, which is why I’d suggested an older and wiser man to handle the papers.”

“What was the cause of this coolness?”

“I never knew quite what it was, but Rosa—” his face flushed, and he quickly changed that to “—Mrs. FitzHugh told me once that even she didn’t know the reasons behind it.”

“You were well acquainted with Mrs. FitzHugh, I think?”

“Yes.” He looked down at his hands, turning a ring on his little finger. “I’d hoped to marry her,” he added reluctantly.

“Then she would have told you the reasons, if in fact she had known them? It wasn’t a polite lie to an outsider?”

“I think she would have been honest with me,” he said slowly. “Except at the end. She was very distressed. I begged her to tell me what was wrong, why she was upset. But she wouldn’t say. The doctor called it depression. It wasn’t that. Rosamund—Mrs. FitzHugh—was not the kind of woman who either felt sorry for herself or dwelt on the sadness of life. God knows, she’d had enough suffering, heartbreak, but she dealt with it with such courage—”

His voice broke off. Then he said, forcing it back to normal tones, “I never knew why she killed herself. It left me scarred. Not just her death, but the fact that she never turned to me in whatever anguish there was.”

Rutledge considered him. The thick white hair, still-black brows, the strong, almost attractive face. The squared shoulders and straight back. A good man to have beside you in the trenches when the next assault came, because you knew you could depend on him not to break .. .

Hamish said, unexpectedly, “But he’d protect her, wouldn’t he? He’d not give up her confidences to a stranger come to make trouble!”

Which was very true.

Rutledge changed tactics. “Who was the murderer in that house?”

For once, Chambers was completely off guard, completely vulnerable, his face stripped of the mask that the law and his years had fashioned for it.

But Rutledge had been right in his judgment as well. Stunned, speechless for an instant, still Chambers didn’t break.

“Murderer! Christ, man, what are you talking about?”

“A cold-blooded killer who for reasons we can’t fathom, decimated the Trevelyan family with methodical cunning. He—or she—was there, in the household. I’ve discovered that much. But so far, I can’t prove it.”

Chambers stared at him, his intelligence slowly reasserting itself as the first shock receded. “I don’t believe you! In Rosamund’s house? No, it’s not possible, you’ve been grasping for straws and looking for an excuse to make your trip down here worthwhile! Looking for promotion on the reputations of people who can’t defend themselves!”

Rutledge smiled, a cold smile that never reached his eyes. “If that were true, I could cause a great deal of trouble. But in the end, I’d only harm myself. No. Come with me, Mr. Chambers.”

He stood up, and without waiting to see if Chambers would follow, he went out into the inn’s hallway, fetched his coat from the rack, and was already picking up the borrowed umbrella when Chambers slowly came after him through the parlor door.

“Where are we going?”

“To the Hall,” Rutledge told him. “Do you have any objections?”

“I don’t—I’d rather not go there!”

“Why?”

“None of your damned business!” Chambers flared into anger as a defense. “I have no responsibility to you or to Scotland Yard. Only to my clients. I have neither obligation nor duty to cooperate with the police in a wild goose chase!”

“If you have a clear conscience, I see no reason why you should refuse to go with me to the Hall. Today or any day.”

“No.” It was very final.

Rutledge shoved the umbrella back into the tall brass stand and went back into the parlor, tossing his coat across the nearest chair. After a moment, Chambers followed him and shut the door with a pointed slam.

“What do you want of me?” he asked, standing there blocking it. “And what do you want of this investigation? Besides this ridiculous charge of murderers in the Trevelyan household.”

“You know something was wrong in that house, don’t you? Rachel felt it, because—she was particularly susceptible to the moods of the people who lived there.” He couldn’t bring himself, objectivity or not, to betray Rachel’s regard for Nicholas. “And you’re vulnerable too. Because you cared deeply for Rosamund and you know she wasn’t a woman likely to kill herself. Or let’s take Nicholas as an example, if you find thinking about Rosamund too painful. Would you have pegged him as a potential suicide? The sort of man who’d quietly choose to die with his half sister rather than face life on his own? A sentimental pact, in the moonlight, on a peaceful Saturday night? Or did Nicholas strike you as a man with a burden he carried with great patience and strength?”

Chambers’ expression was closed, the solicitor yielding nothing, loyalty to his clients coming ahead of any personal feelings.

“Damn it, you’re too intelligent to put your own responses down to sentimentality, but you feel uncomfortable in the Hall. Let me describe it for you. You walk through the door, and the house isn’t benign, it’s alive with jarring forces. To some extent, it’s a subjective response, I grant you, because of the uneasiness in your own mind. Your intuition tries to point out that there’s something very wrong here, but you refuse to listen, you don’t want to believe that what you sense could be true. And you won’t help me to find the answers for the same reasons!”

Rutledge was met with a wall of resistance. But he was beginning to take the measure of it now.

“Even I have felt the emotions in that house! I was moved by O. A. Manning’s poetry, I was shocked by the manner of the poet’s death, I was personally involved in a way that an ordinary policeman wouldn’t have been. And I’m not by nature one to look for moods or—what is it that the crackpots call it?—vibrations? I don’t believe in ghosts, either. But Tre-velyan Hall is haunted, in a sense that you and I both accept.”

Chambers still didn’t answer, but his face was paler, strained.

“I survived in those hellholes they called trenches for four years. It seemed like forty—a lifetime. I learned to trust my intuition. Men who didn’t often died. I was lucky to possess it in the first place, and war honed it. I learned that it wasn’t a figment of my imagination. Nor was it a replacement for the God I’d lost. Whatever it was, you came to recognize it. An inkling, a warning, a sudden flash of caution, a split-second insight that saved your life. Indisputably real, however unorthodox the means of reaching you. It gave you an edge on death, and you were grateful. Then I lost it for a time, it doesn’t matter why. But it hasn’t failed me completely, and I can tell you why you’re afraid to go back to that house. You know that Rosamund’s death haunts you there. You can feed yourself lies down in Plymouth. But not here. Not in the house itself!”

Rutledge could see the clenched jaw. The desperate rejection. In his own head Hamish was clamoring for him to leave the man in peace—

“It was an accidental overdose!”

The words, when they finally came, seemed to be torn from the depths of Chambers’ soul.

“No.” Rutledge waited, relentless. “Rosamund didn’t make such mistakes. She was a strong woman. She was sunshine and light, not despair and darkness. It wasn’t suicide, and it wasn’t an accidental overdose.”

“I refuse to accept murder!”

“Because you believe that murder, if it was done, was your fault. For loving Rosamund. For wanting to marry her. For winning her love. Just as suicide could mean a rejection of your love, murder means someone wanted to prevent another stepfather in the house, another family. Another long wait for whatever it was he—or she—wanted badly enough to kill for.”

Hamish was saying in agitation, “Where did this notion come from? You never spoke of it before!”

In the tumult of his own emotions, Rutledge tersely answered the voice aloud. “I didn’t know before. But it makes sense now. I see the pattern!”

He did. Olivia had systematically eliminated her family— the twin sister who could pass for her and steal her grandfather’s love. The stepfathers she hadn’t wanted. The half brother who had stirred up the household and kept it on its ear. The mother who was planning to marry again. But not Nicholas, never Nicholas, who had looked after her. Not until the very end, when he no longer served any purpose—

Hamish was still raising fierce objections. Rutledge ignored them. He was angry and unsettled and—yes—bewildered by the leap his intuition had taken without warning.

Without a motive, he could keep to himself his suspicions about Olivia. He could deny, on the surface, that he believed in them because there was no real evidence except the carefully hidden trophies of the dead. It was possible—it was likely—it was practicable—But still theory. Still his own torment.

Now, it was real. Suddenly, it was real—

He had nearly forgotten about Chambers in the dark, low-ceilinged room, standing by the door like a man who’d lost his way and waited for a sign.

The hoarse voice startled him.

“Damn you! You should have died in France!” Chambers said with such bitterness that Rutledge knew he’d won.

It was a hollow victory. It had cost both men very dearly.

Suddenly, exhausted and drained, he felt he was on the edge of a precipice inside himself, the blackness he’d fought so long in the hospital, and once, too short a time ago, in Warwickshire. It seemed to draw him, to beckon like the Sirens, a place of peace and darkness and silence where nothing could ever touch him again.

The doctors had warned him he was still at risk, that it might be too soon to go back to the pressures of the Yard, while his own stability was an uncertain factor—and he’d fought them, inch by inch, to try returning.

And then a line of poetry came running through his head like a bright and deadly thread.If I choose to die,There is peace in darkness, and no pain.The grave is safe—

It was as if Olivia herself urged him to fail, to choose the darkness and leave the past intact. Chambers would never speak of it again. Rutledge was certain of that—

But the very last lines of the same poem came back to him too.If I choose to live,Oh, God, it will never be the same ...Yet I prevail—

The dilemma of Olivia Marlowe, who could give and who could destroy with equal adroitness.

13

His voice still shaken, Chambers said, “I need a drink. From the look of you, I’ve no doubt you could use one too.” He turned and opened the parlor door, crossing the hall to the inn’s dining room. There he took a table by the window, pulled out the other chair for Rutledge, and sat down heavily. In the watery light, he looked old and tired, but Rutledge knew it was an illusion.

Trask came hurrying across the room to ask them what they’d have, and Chambers ordered whiskey, glancing at Rutledge to see if that met with his approval. “Make it a strong one, and then we’ll have our lunch. I can’t travel back to Plymouth half sober.”

When Trask had gone again, Chambers sighed. “You’re a damned hard man, do you know that?”

“I’m stubborn, that’s all.”

Chambers smiled grimly. “Well, so am I. I loved Rosamund, damn it. I don’t want to think I missed the causes of her distress at the end, and I don’t want to think that one of her family could be—evil. That’s what it would have to be. Not wickedness, you understand. That’s entirely different. Do you believe in evil, Inspector, or did you lose that, along with God?”

“I’ve seen enough evil in my work. I respect its existence.”

“Yes, that’s probably very true. I don’t, as a country solicitor, deal with crime as often as I deal with property and wills and contracts, the ongoing bits and bobs of everyday life. Still, God knows money often brings out the worst in people! But it strikes me—having seen some of the dregs of life myself—that evil is something we don’t understand because it’s outside the pale of ordinary experience.”

“You should tell that to the rector, Smedley. He has strong views in that direction himself.”

“Yes, I know him, a good man. But the point I’m making here is that I knew everyone in Mrs. FitzHugh’s household, and I sensed no evil there. I couldn’t point my finger at any one of them, and say, ‘There I have some doubts’ or ‘I can’t feel easy about that one.’ Mind you, I’m still not agreeing with you on any of this,” he added wryly, “but for the sake of argument—”

Yet Rutledge could see that Chambers was already following the path of his own reasoning. “We can eliminate both Stephen and Susannah. They were born after it all began,” he said.

“Began? Where?”

“With Anne, Olivia’s twin sister. To be more precise, with her death.”

“Damn it, she fell out of a tree!”

“Or was pushed. And our choices are broader now. Nicholas, Rachel, Olivia. Rosamund. James Cheney and Brian FitzHugh. Cormac. They were all alive at that time. The servants. We can’t leave them out of the equation.”

“You can omit the adults,” Chambers said testily. “They weren’t there when it happened. Not even one of the nursery maids.”

Ignoring him, Rutledge said, “And next was young Richard.”

Chambers’ black brows snapped together. Trask came just then with their glasses, and as he walked away again, Chambers said, “All right. He was out on the moors, during a family picnic. Olivia was with—”

He stopped.

Rutledge waited, watching the trained mind work behind the disbelieving eyes. Watching the solicitor vie with the prejudices of the lover.

“No!” he said in a fierce whisper. “No, I will not accept that! Not Olivia! She was the apple of her grandfather’s eye. She was Rosamund’s shadow. She was, for God’s sake, a remarkably courageous and astute woman, never mind the poetry! She wouldn’t have touched that child!”

“But don’t you see? That’s the key to a successful murderer. When no one is willing to believe he or she could possibly be behind such cruelty.”

Chambers shook his head adamantly. “No. If we must put the blame on someone, let it be Cormac. He was no child of Rosamund’s, and I know very little about his childhood, which makes it easier to point my finger in that direction. Yes, hypothetically Cormac I will accept! But not Olivia!”

“All right, Cormac, if you will. What did he have to gain, killing Anne? Or young Richard? I can see that killing James Cheney might have made way for Cormac’s father to marry the grieving widow, but Cormac was never in line to inherit the house or vast sums of money, and still isn’t. I don’t know how Susannah Hargrove’s will stands, but I should think she leaves her share of the estate to her husband, if it hasn’t been sold by the time she dies.”

“I can’t break my trust and tell you how her affairs stand, but yes, I can be frank about one matter. Susannah doesn’t leave her share of the house to Cormac. After all, she’s got a family of her own to think of. Or soon will.”

“Then why should Cormac kill people and risk being caught? If he’s nothing to gain? And without fail the outsider is the first to draw suspicion. There’s always the ugly possibility of childhood jealousy, I grant you, but somehow that doesn’t fit him, does it? Cormac strikes me as a clearheaded businessman who will take calculated risks in the market, but not in his personal life.”

“Well, yes, I must agree there,” Chambers replied reluctantly. “There was no call to be jealous. I know for a fact that Rosamund saw to his education, then gave him introductions to prominent men in the City when he came down from Cambridge. Just what she’d have done for her own sons! The rest he’s earned on his own considerable merit. Which brings us back to where we started. There’s no possible motive I can see for your choice to light on Olivia, either. Even if Richard did go wandering while in her care.” He finished his whiskey and turned to signal Trask, saying to Rutledge over his shoulder, “But let me put this question to you. Suppose you’re right about her. Where will prosecuting a dead woman, however evil she might have been, take you? Certainly not into a court of law.”

“O.A. Manning is still very much alive,” Rutledge responded.

Chambers turned back, staring at him speculatively. “I begin to see,” he said quietly.

Chambers left after the meal, with a final comment. “I’ll give you a hearing when you’ve got incontrovertible evidence to show me. Until then, I shall do my best not to give credence to a word you’ve told me. And my best is very good indeed, let me assure you!”

Luncheon appeared to have restored his balance.

Rutledge went up to his room, overwhelming fatigue dogging his steps as he climbed the narrow stairs.

The reactions he’d gotten from Chambers proved how far the case he could presently lay out would go in a courtroom. He’d sown seeds of doubt in the solicitor’s mind, but he hadn’t done more than make him think. And a jury is no better than the evidence presented to it. That was a maxim at the Yard.

All right then, where to go next?

The men searching the moors in this wretched weather would have to find more than suspicions . ..

Richard’s body and the manner in which it was found could go a long way towards proving murder. But by whom? What if there were no pansies at his feet to link the small body with the poem Olivia had written?

In the afternoon Rutledge set out in a lowering mist to look for the small isolated cottage where the old midwife lived. Trask had reluctantly told him how to find it.

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

“I’m told she’s a good nurse.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like?”

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

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

“Do you remember their names?”

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

“Then tell me about Nicholas Cheney.”

Suddenly wary, she stared at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do they grow well on the moors?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Did Olivia Marlowe know grief?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He laughed outright.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who knows? I have to look.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rutledge threw back the blankets and reached for his trousers.

14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought those had been searched.”

“Yes, of course they have. But a boy that age is small. He could crawl where a man can’t go. You could walk by him a thousand times over and never realize it. Predators carry off small bones—birds and animals could have taken his remains anywhere. Dawlish should have explained all that.”

“Nevertheless, I’m going to continue. Until I find him.”

Silence ruled until they were nearly back in the village again. Rutledge, remembering a case he’d handled before the war, asked, “How long before the flesh rotted off a child’s body and you could move the bones? Or crush them beyond recognition, before scattering them?” It was worth considering—a husband had nearly gotten away with murdering his wife, experimenting with temporary burial and a very permanent exhumation.

Turning to look at him, Hawkins nearly skidded in a puddle, then swore again and straightened the wheel in time. “You’re mad, d’you know that? Stark, staring mad!”

He turned in at his gate without another word.

Morning dawned fair, though cooler after the rains, as if summer’s heat had been washed away. The first task Rutledge set himself was to search the churchyard for flowers growing there.

In his experience, English churchyards, unlike those he’d seen in Europe, were seldom planted with flowers. Along the walls, sometimes, or by the path to the front door of the church. Occasionally by the gates. But not on or around the graves themselves or close to the headstones. The English still preferred their yews as funereal offerings. These had first been set out in churchyards in the days of the long bow, as a source of raw materials, and become a habit. Their shape and somber dark green seemed to suit the mood and the gravity of the place better than a riot of color.

Flowers were more acceptable in tall vases inside the church. Rutledge could remember as a small boy going with his mother to do the altar flowers when it was her turn. He’d sat on the cold stone floor, running his fingers in the deep crevices of the memorial brasses that held place of honor down the aisle, until he knew the shapes by heart. A knight with plumes and sword and handsome spurs. A lady in a conical hat, the sweep of her long, embroidered robes nearly hiding the little dog near the hem. And an elegantly bearded Elizabethan gentleman with padded breeches and coat, looking more like a portly merchant than the adventurer he had been.

He walked slowly through the gravestones in the churchyard, some of them tilted with age and so mossy he could barely make out the words incised on them. Others he recognized at a glance—Trepol and Trask, Wilkins and Penrith, Dawlish and Trelawny. There were Poldarins and a Hawkins, a half-dozen Raleighs, though none later than the seventeen hundreds, and a pair of Drakes.

But no pansies. He walked on, looking at the delicately drawn Celtic cross on one gravestone, the sad lines of verse on another for a small child drowned in the Bor, an open book with a ribbon marking its stone pages, any numbers of “Beloved wife” and “Beloved husband.” War dead and plague dead, and a very fine stone angel on a plinth with the legend below it, “In Memory of the Men of the Mary Anne, Lost at Sea in a Storm, October 23, 1847. Eternal Father, Keep Their Souls Safe in Thy Care.” And a list of the names, twenty-seven of them.

It was surely Richard’s angel, the cool marble cheeks turned slightly so that the serene eyes stared unwaveringly towards the church tower for all eternity. There was both compassion and strength in the body, power in the wings. He could see why it had made an indelible impression on a small boy who passed the statue each Sunday morning on his way to services.

A voice behind him said, “Lovely, isn’t it? The village took up a subscription to have it carved in London. The Trev-elyans sent an anonymous donation to help make it up to the amount required, in addition to the sum they’d given openly. It was the sort of thing they did.”

It was Smedley, dressed in a dark suit of clothes, not the rough corduroys of the gardener. Over the wet grass his shoes had made no sound.

“I saw you here and wondered if you were searching for a place to lay the sheep bones to rest,” he went on. But there was a sympathetic gleam in his eyes that took away any sting. “I doubt there’s a soul in the village who hasn’t heard.”

“Yes, well, they never seem to know what I want to hear,” Rutledge said irritably. “Only what I’m doing.”

“You’d be surprised. They seem to think you’re on the trail of a murderer. They’re wondering—among themselves, not to your face—if that terrible man doing the killings in London might be a Borcombe man. They’ve gone through the lists of who lived here once, and who moved away. Failing that, someone who’d passed through. It’s the only explanation they can come up with for a Scotland Yard inspector wasting his time on two suicides and an accident when half London is in absolute terror thinking the other half is about to cut him to ribbons.”

Astonished, Rutledge found himself speechless. Hamish, quick to point out the fact that Rutledge might well be more useful there, was not.

Smedley lifted his shoulders deprecatingly. “The newspaper yesterday morning reported that someone named Bowles was quoted as saying that all available manpower had been diverted to the killings. Do you know him?”

“Yes,” Rutledge answered curtly. “The truth is, I was sent down here to keep me out of the picture. Not to run any leads to earth.”

“That reassures me,” Smedley answered, and there was something in his voice that made Rutledge look more closely at him. “All this fuss over the boy, searching for his grave. His body. Proof that he was in fact dead. I don’t know why, I found myself fearful that perhaps he hadn’t perished on the moors, that he’d been taken away and somehow turned into a monster.”

“You prefer the possibility that someone in his own family might have purposely let him die of exposure?”

“No.” There was sadness in his voice. “I prefer that he rest in peace, wherever he may be. Alive. Or dead. I don’t want to think of anyone suffering and lost and alone, in need of comfort. Least of all someone I held in my arms and christened. Whose soul is, in a sense, my responsibility. And most certainly not Rosamund’s son.”

“The murderer in London is very likely mad. What he’s doing is the work of a ruined mind. The murderer I’m searching for isn’t mad. Whatever reasons he—or she—had for killing, there was a reason.”

Smedley sighed. “I can give one to you. Envy.”

“Envy?” Rutledge repeated. It wasn’t necessarily his first choice of sins. And often not a murderer’s, either, in his experience.

“Envy is at the root of many small cruelties. Watch children at play, if you don’t believe me. It’s a natural emotion in them, and they aren’t yet civilized enough to suppress it.”

A child might kill out of envy ... “What could Olivia envy?”

“Oh, I daresay many things. A whole leg rather than a shriveled one, for starters.”

“And Nicholas?”

The rector tilted his head and looked at the angel’s face. “I don’t know that Nicholas ever envied anyone. He was a decisive man, in his way. He made his choices and lived with them.”

“Then why didn’t he leave the Hall, go away to sea, make a life for himself somewhere else?”

“Nicholas had an affinity for the sea, that’s true. In another age, he’d have been one of Drake’s sea dogs or Nelson’s captains—or perhaps one of Hakluyt’s geographers. I can see him racing a tea clipper to China and back.”

All of which demanded daring and skill and personal courage. Not to mention ruthless leadership. Yet he’d let himself be led into suicide—

Rutledge shook his head. “I’m not any closer to understanding him than I was at the beginning.”

“You won’t understand Nicholas, trust me there. Have you read the poems?”

After the briefest hesitation, Rutledge said, “No. Not yet.”

“Let me give you a word of advice. As a priest.”

When Rutledge said nothing, Smedley went on. “Be sure your own ghosts don’t infringe on your logical mind—don’t rain havoc on Borcombe in search of your own absolution. If you can’t finish the puzzle that worries you, be man enough to walk away from it while the rest of us can still get on with our lives. This is a very small village, you see, and we don’t have your London sophistication. We shall go on suffering long after you’ve gone away.”

Watching Smedley walk off across the wet grass, Rutledge was prey to a variety of emotions, and Hamish, relishing the turbulence in his mind, was busy taking advantage of it.

“Ye’re no’ wanted here,” he said, “and no’ wanted in London as well. I’ve no5 seen anywhere you belong!”

“That has nothing to do with the Trevelyan family,” Rut-ledge replied coldly. “The rector is right. My work and my life are separate.”

“Ye’re no’ keeping Olivia Marlowe from getting under your skin!”

“She’s no different from any suspect! Not to me!”

“Except that she’s dead,” Hamish reminded him. “Is that why ye’re no’ reading the poems? You read them often enough before, when ye knew she was alive!”

Rutledge swore and headed for the stone walkway that led from the churchyard to the road. His reasons were his own affair, and none of Hamish’s.

It was a long and tiring day. He was summoned, twice more, to come to the moors. The first time it was a boy who came to fetch him. The ground he must surely have covered last night seemed very different in the sunlight, brown and green and black and yellow, and not very much like the higher Yorkshire moors he knew so much better. But this too was sour land, that grew grass and reeds in the low-lying damp, and vast stretches of quaking marsh that could become quicksand in the blink of an eye.

The boy cheerfully threaded his way through a maze of paths and chattered on about the war, wanting to know how many Boche Rutledge had personally (and bloodily) killed, and if he’d ever been wounded himself. They’d reached the subject of aircraft, and whether the Inspector had ever been up in one (he was disappointed when Rutledge said no), and how many flaming crashes he’d personally witnessed, when the first lines of searchers came into sight below a knoll.

It took them fifteen minutes to find Dawlish, who was on the far right of the line. The constable was not in good spirits. inspector Harvey, returned from Plymouth, had been out there very early to demand an explanation for this business. Inspector Harvey had not caught up with his own suspect, and was in no mood for anyone else’s wild goose chases.

“Where is Harvey now? I’ll speak to him myself.”

“As to that, sir, I don’t know. There’s a problem out on one of the farms, somebody’s dog killing sheep, and he had to have a look himself.”

“What progress have you made here?”

“More sheep bones and an old dog. They had their heads still, it wasn’t difficult to tell what they were. And we found a man, sir, looked like he must have been a vagabond. Dr. Hawkins has been and gone, and he said it was an old corpse, we could bury it later.”

“Where?”

“By those rocks there, about a mile away. One of the men sheltered there to light his cigarette, and he saw something white in the earth. We dug it out, bit by bit, first a hand, then the head. Not very deep, you understand, but that’s the direction the wind blows, and he’d have been covered over in a season or two.”

Rutledge walked across to see the bones, followed by the boy, whose bloodthirsty spirits were fascinated by the line of human remains laid out next to raw earth under one of the towering rock piles that mark the moor. “That a hand, sir? Where’s the middle finger, then? What’s that? Pelvis? Do I have one of ‘em too? Who et away that rib, do you think? Why’s his jaw over there, and his head here? D’ye think he was murdered, sir? Cor!”

In fact, there was no indication what had killed the man. No holes in the skull, no signs of damage to any of the bones, no obvious indications of stabbing or a bullet clipping a rib or part of the spine. No crushed vertebrae to show a strangling. But the bones were long and well formed. He’d been tall, with no sign of the thickening that comes with heavy work in an underfed childhood or early diseases like rickets that stunted growth. According to Hawkins, the bones had lain in the earth for no more than seven years.

“Were he a soldier, d’ye think? Left to die in the thick of the battle, and then forgotten?” the boy asked hopefully.

Rutledge dug around in the disturbed earth with his pocket knife, looking for remnants of cloth, buttons, coins, or other debris that might have told a clearer tale. If they’d been here, they were gone now.

A man’s skeleton, not a child’s .. .

All the way back to Borcombe, the boy talked of nothing but the bones, and Rutledge was very glad to give him sixpence and see the last of him by the time they reached the road into the village. He was off then, racing to find his friends and make them envious of his good fortune in viewing the skeleton.

Rutledge ate his lunch alone, the books of poetry beside his plate. He’d tried to approach them in the order in which they’d been published. And he found one short, early poem about the moors. Reading it, he could hear Olivia’s response to the emptiness and the mystery of that barren land. “For here the spirit dies,” she’d written, “and that is more of hell than I can bear.”

And yet it was possible she’d consigned a small child to that same hell.

In the afternoon he went back to see Mrs. Trepol, whose reputation as a gardener was sworn to by three women he’d spoken with in the inn’s dining room.

She was working to straighten the storm-battered stalks of flowers, lupine and asters, marigolds and zinnias. Stakes and strips of old rag lay in the small bucket she carried with her, and in the back of the cottage wash hung on the line, blowing like signal flags.

Mrs. Trepol looked up, saw that he intended to come through the gate rather than pause for a few words outside it, and said, “Do you mind if I keep working, sir? These turn their heads to the sun soon enough, if they aren’t righted.”

“It’s about flowers that I came,” he told her as she reached for a tall golden head of marigold, its bruised leaves scenting the air.

“Aye, sir? And what flowers would you be wanting to know about?” she asked, over the mallet she was using to pound in a stake.

“Pansies.”

“Pansies? A spring flower, mostly. Hardy in the cold, not strong in the sun. Look over there, by the rhododendron.”

He did, and saw the straggling green stalks that flopped across the grass, the small faces lifted to stare at him.

“They’re twice that size in the spring,” she said, reaching for a length of cloth. “But they come back in the autumn, if all’s well. That’s why I put them in the shadow of the taller bush. A little protection.”

“Out on the moor, would they need protection?”

She stopped what she was doing to look at him. “They don’t grow often on the moors. Unless someone sows them there. And that makes no sense. A waste of good plants! But you might find a few at the edge of a wood. Gone wild, you see.”

Which was an interesting thought.

“Tell me,” he said slowly, working it out in his mind as he spoke, “do you know if Stephen FitzHugh ever considered becoming a Catholic? Did the family ever discuss his choice of faith?”

“Not that I know of, sir!” She seemed surprised. “Mr. Brian, now, he was brought up a Catholic, but the children never were. And he went to services with the family regularly, there was no fuss about it that I ever heard. He was a man who wanted to please, not one to set people at odds. But he loved Ireland, and he talked about the country often and often.”

“In what way? Was he a supporter of the Irish rebellions?”

“Oh, no, sir, not to my knowledge! Though he used to tease Miss Rosamund that it was a Trevelyan—not her own family, mind!—that refused to provide money for the victims of the potato famine, back in last century, so as they could emigrate to Canada or America. He had a bad name in Ireland, that one, and caused a great many deaths. Cruel, he was. I heard Mr. Brian say once that his coldheartedness killed as many people as Cromwell and William of Orange put together.”

“Cormac and Stephen never showed any interest in Irish politics? Sympathy for the rebels? For the suffering there?”

“No, sir, Mr. Stephen considered himself an Englishman— he said to me that he was going off to war because it was his duty to the King. And Mr. Stephen was one that always took duty seriously. Mr. Cormac, now, he was in the war too, but I never heard he went to France. Miss Olivia told me he was doing something secret, and I shouldn’t ask.” She smiled. “I never could picture him as a spy, sir! Sneaking about and telling lies. Mr. Stephen, now, he’d see all that as a game, like hide and seek. He were—more light-hearted. The kind of man who’d shrug it off and not be touched by it. But Mr. Cormac was always one to mind appearances. Not to the manor born, you might say.”

Cormac had spent his war breaking codes. Not as exciting as spying. And not as dangerous. But quite as important as shouldering a rifle.

He left her and went to walk through the wood between the village and the Hall, searching along the muddy path for pansies, then looking in small clearings, before giving it up. This was far too close to the village to risk bringing the body of a small boy and burying him. And Olivia hadn’t said anything about trees in her poem.

When he was called to the moors the second time, it was a man who came for him, and they trudged in silence to the place where a small cache of clothes had been found. The shreds were small and dirty and rotting with the damp of the earth, but a boy’s clothing. Short jacket—you could see how the collar lay, and one side seam. Short trousers—part of the waistband and a pocket, part of one leg. What might have been a shirt and underdrawers, mere threads of white that fell apart at the touch. The good wool of the jacket and trousers was tougher, and had lasted while the linen and the cotton had disintegrated. And someone had wrapped it all quite carefully in heavily oiled cloth, which had protected the fabric for a very long time. He couldn’t be sure of the colors. But there was enough of the cloth left to draw conclusions about the shape and general size of the outer garments, as he gingerly spread them out on the grass. Interestingly enough, there were no shoes ...

“Tregarth found them, sir,” Dawlish was saying. “He’s walked these moors man and boy for sixty years. Noticed the white stone wasn’t natural to the land around here, and was curious, like. He started digging, and what came to light looked odd. He called me and we laid the packet open enough to be sure what was inside, before sending for you.”

“Good man!” Rutledge said over his shoulder to the diffident farmer waiting close by. The grizzled head nodded, satisfaction in the sharp, weather-browned face.

Who had buried these articles deep under a bush and covered them with a flat white stone? And why? Or when? There was no way of knowing to whom they’d belonged but it was the first evidence Rutledge had discovered that proved the search mattered. Even Dawlish’s doubts were silenced.

Rutledge put the shreds of wool carefully into a brown sack someone offered him, and carried them back to Bor-combe with him, ordering the men to comb the vicinity again, until they could swear that there was nothing else to be found. And he promised them beer from The Three Bells with their dinner, if they did their work thoroughly.

He had already arranged to meet Rachel after dinner, while the light was still good, and walk over to the Hall to look for Olivia’s papers. It was not all that he had in mind for the evening, but it was an innocuous beginning.

15

Rachel was tense as they walked through the door of the Hall. “I miss the flowers,” she said, a trace of nervousness in her voice. “The Hall was always full of flowers. You could smell the beeswax polish, the scent of Rosamund’s perfume, and the flowers, whenever you walked through the door. Like a welcome. Now the air’s—I don’t know. Still. Dead ...”

“You have a right to be here,” he said. “Why don’t you cut flowers and put them in vases yourself?”

“No. I was bequeathed a share in the Hall. That was the way they wanted it, Olivia and Nicholas. But I have no right here. No place here.” Her voice trailed off at the end.

“Let’s start with the upper floors and work our way down,” he said prosaically, before she could get cold feet altogether. “The attics?”

“This way,” she said, shaking off her gloomy spirits and leading him towards the stairs.

They made their way up to the attics, warmed by the sun, spared the wind, and still comfortable. There they began looking through trunks of gowns carefully wrapped in tissue paper, and suits of clothes and coats, moving aside rocking horses and doll’s houses, chairs and old bedsteads, cribs and perambulators, canes, odds and ends of lumber, and any number of boxes stored long ago and forgotten, the debris of generations. They found a stuffed fox, ratty with age, glass eyes gleaming in the lamps they’d brought with them, and a wardrobe full of hats that caught Rachel’s fancy.

“Look at these! I can’t believe it—they must be well over a hundred years old! The braid on these tricorns—I think it’s gold bullion! We used to play dress up, sometimes, and Nicholas had such a hat. What’s this? Yes, I see, it’s a bonnet with a tucked underbrim. Straight out of Jane Austen.” It was too small, but she perched it on her head, and made him laugh as she twirled the ribbons. Setting it back in its tissue nest, she turned to the next shelf. “My God! Ostrich plumes and bows, oh, and even a little temple set in among silk trees. Susannah would have adored this one. She was always trying on Rosamund’s hats.”

It took Rutledge fifteen minutes to distract her, and they moved on, to christening gowns and woolens, old linens and sets of dishes, riding boots and tables of every size, a child’s saddle—and nothing that remotely resembled a poet’s work.

Dusty and giggling, Rachel led the way to the next attics, which held more of the same, and when she began to cough from the dryness of the air, he suggested a cup of tea.

She agreed, and lamps in hand, they went down to the kitchen to make it. There was no cream, but Rachel found a lemon in the pantry. Then, leaving one lamp in the kitchen, Rutledge took the tray from her and carried it to the sitting room that overlooked the sea. The sun was low now, warming the room with its light, and Rachel went to sit in a chair from which she could watch it set.

It was very domestic, the pot of tea, the quiet of evening, the sense of peace and companionship. The setting he’d arranged, in a room where Rachel must have spent a great deal of her time with Nicholas. A room, unlike the study upstairs, that didn’t make her shiver with dread. As she sipped from the cup in her hand, relaxed and off her guard, he said, quietly, “Were you there when Anne fell out of the tree?”

“Yes, I told you that.”

“But you told me what you remembered. Time changed what you actually saw as it was happening. What the grownups said around you, the questions they asked you, it all influenced you. Would you do something for me? Would you close your eyes and let yourself go back to that afternoon, and see it again?”

She put down her cup, shaking her head. “No, I don’t want to go back! To that time or any other! I don’t want to play that kind of game!”

“You sent for me,” he reminded her. “You must have wanted answers of some kind. So far, I’ve got very little to show for the time I’ve spent here. But there’s evidence of a sort, and it points to Olivia. Not to Nicholas.”

She sat there, torn. He could read it in the tightening of her shoulders. Wanting him to go, wanting him to stay and prove that Nicholas had in fact loved her, though those weren’t the words she used even to herself. That his death had nothing to do with what he felt for her. It mattered. In a fashion that went deeper than conscious thought.

“I need to see that day through the eyes of someone who was there.”

“Ask Cormac!”

Before, she’d told him that she hadn’t thought Cormac was there ...

“But Cormac was an outsider. You weren’t. Cormac was the Irish latecomer, there on sufferance because his father had come with Rosamund’s horses. He hadn’t played all his life with the family, lived in the nursery with the other children, heard them quarrel and laugh and make up games. He hadn’t been part of their growing up, the way you’d been. He saw them as a stranger sees, superficially, the outward facade instead of the inner feelings.”

His voice was persuasive, his body very still in the shadows of the room, just out of her line of sight, the warmth of the sun’s slanting rays taking away any sense of danger or fear, the quiet absolute, except for the sound of her breathing. And the voice of Hamish, which she couldn’t hear.

He’d seen the doctors at the clinic use these same techniques. He’d seen them break through silences that were so deep even the men locked in them couldn’t find the key to them. Persuaded by quiet and serenity, and their own sense of need, such men would suddenly speak of events that would send them screaming into horror—and then complete breakdown—and finally, with luck, survival.

It hadn’t worked for him. Only drugs had broken down the walls he’d built so high and strong.

Hamish, realizing what he was up to now, roused and thundered at him not to take risks with this woman’s mind. “Ye’re no’ a doctor, you could do grave damage without knowing it!” But Rutledge couldn’t see any other way to learn the truth, and forced the voice in his own mind into rumbling, sullen stillness.

“I don’t know what there is to tell,” Rachel said. “It was an accident.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of, have you? Except for grief and the memory of someone you loved long ago.”

“I don’t know that I loved Anne—-” She stopped.

“Why not? She was your cousin.”

“She was bossy. Sometimes she made me feel very young, or very stupid. Awkward, somehow. When we played games, I was always the one who had to lose, and then she’d tease me about it.”

The cruelty of children. He could hear Smedley’s voice saying that.

“She wasn’t mean. She could be very loving, when she wanted to be. She was just ... arrogant. Like her grandmother, Nanny told me. Rosamund’s mother. But of course she was already dead, I never met her. So I couldn’t know if it was true or not. Anyway, for a child like me, Anne was very trying.”

“Whose idea was it to go to the orchard that day?”

“It was hot, we were tired of playing in the gardens, and the house was stuffy, even with the windows open. But in the orchard it was shady, the long grass was cool. In the trees, you felt cooler. I don’t know who thought of it first. I remember Nicholas telling Anne that she couldn’t climb as high as he could. And Anne had been pestering Olivia about being so slow, walking. Nicholas must have been trying to deflect her impatience.”

He could see, from the shadows of her lashes on her cheek, that she’d closed her eyes. Clouds on the horizon began to swallow the sun. It would be dark sooner than he’d thought. Would that matter? Still, he must not hurry ...

“But that wasn’t what you felt then, was it?”

“No, I was hoping she’d climb high enough to fall out—” She sat upright with a jolt. “No! I couldn’t have thought that! It must have been afterward, when she was climbing, and I was afraid she’d fall—”

Yet Rutledge thought she had felt that way at the time, and buried it deep. A child’s wish, because the bully was beyond her own reach. He waited a moment, then said gently, reassuringly, “I’m sure you wished her no harm.”

“No, of course I didn’t. In fact I was worried when Nicholas challenged her to climb to the next branches, and then Olivia went up after her, and he tried to prevent her, but she was determined to show she could do it too. I remember he was holding her sashes, trying to help her keep her balance. And then Anne was shouting something from the top of the tree, and Olivia pushed herself higher than she should, and Cormac climbed down from his tree and was over there in a flash, saying his papa would thrash him if they got hurt, and he was going to stop this nonsense now. But I saw Nicholas jerk hard on the sashes, trying to pull himself up into the tree or something, and Cormac was crashing about in the branches, and suddenly, Nicholas was ducking, and Anne came tumbling down, bowling Nicholas over, and Cormac was trying to get Olivia down, yelling at her not to put her bad foot just there, he’d hold her arm, and she was screaming at him not to touch her, and Nicholas was crawling over to Anne, and as I slid down my tree, I scraped my leg and it started bleeding, and I got blood all over Anne’s dress when I knelt there. And she was still, it was frightening, and Í kept asking Nicholas why he’d pulled so hard on the sashes, and he said that Anne had been shoving Olivia, and then Olivia was down, face white as her own handkerchief, something in her eyes that terrified me, and Cormac and I ran for help, he to the stables, which were closer, while 1 ran to the house and Rosamund—”

She was crying, he could see the tears sliding out from under her lashes. And he himself felt the surge of her pain, the shock, the child who couldn’t understand the nightmarish events she’d witnessed. The picture she’d conjured up was sharp, vivid in his mind. Even Hamish was silenced by it.

“Please,” she begged huskily. “I don’t want to think about it any more!”

“Then tell me about Richard being lost on the moors,” he said, after giving both of them a little time to recover. “Were you there when it happened?”

“Yes, I’ve said it was a family picnic,” she retorted irritably. “I don’t know why you have to keep harping on the past, raking it up. Stephen wouldn’t have allowed it, it was his duty to protect Olivia! That’s why she left him all her papers.”

“Olivia is dead. So is Nicholas. Your memory is all I have,” he said again. “Would Stephen have protected her, if he’d known she might have killed his father?”

“Maybe that’s why we can’t find her papers. Maybe he burned them?” She sighed. “Oh, very well! We went there— to the moors—because it was a day’s outing, and children are restless, they need distraction. Uncle James thought we might enjoy looking at the old mines, the tin that’d made Cornwall rich, once upon a time. Rosamund wasn’t happy with the idea, she said we could fall down the old shafts. Which wasn’t very like her—it was as if she had a premonition—she was usually enthusiastic and fun. But it all went quite well. James showed us the mines, and then we talked about where Cornish tin might have traveled, to Egypt or Crete or Phoenicia. He could make whatever he talked about seem so real, not a lesson at all—it was a gift he had. Then we found a sheltered spot to eat our lunch.”

He could hear her voice change as she drifted back into the past again, caught up in spite of her reluctance.

“What was Richard wearing?”

“I don’t remember—white shirt, long stockings, short trousers, I should think. He did have a jacket too, because he took it off for a time. It was warm in the sun. Rosamund made him put it back on again, when the wind came up. He didn’t want to put it on, and fussed about it. Later, we wondered if that’s why he’d run off, because he was still in a temper. He was so headstrong, sometimes.” She stopped. “Are you sure you want to hear so many little things?”

“Yes. It helps me frame a picture.”

She was one of those rare people who could tell a story coherently. Describing clearly the images she saw in her mind, without backtracking and confusing the threads he needed to follow.

“We’d had our picnic, and Rosamund sat down to rest, James had his head in her lap, I remember thinking how comfortable they looked. Cormac had gone to talk to the guide. He was an old man whose sons left for America twenty years before, to work in the mines there. Cormac wanted to know about them, if they’d prospered, if they’d written home about their new life. I was drowsy, and Olivia sat down beside me, to rest her leg a little. But Richard wanted to go back and see the ponies. He begged her to walk with him, because his mother wouldn’t let him go alone. I don’t know where Nicholas was, he’d wandered off. He did that sometimes, exploring. He always had an unerring sense of direction, no one ever worried about him. Finally Olivia got up and followed Richard, making him promise not to run too fast for her. I was waiting for Nicholas to come back and didn’t want to be bothered with Richard, and I’ve felt very guilty about that ever since ...”

He let the silence drift, and finally her voice picked up the tale again. “I was nearly asleep when Rosamund said we ought to be starting back. She sent Cormac to look for Nicholas and James to find Olivia and Richard. We walked over to the carriages together and put the baskets away. Rosamund was saying something about a house party she was planning, friends from London. I remember that, because they came for the funeral instead. James’ funeral. Then she said, ‘I wonder what’s keeping them!’ “

There was another pause. “Cormac came back alone and said that Nicholas had just seen some of those butterflies you only find out on the moors and didn’t want to leave. He took me off with him to persuade him. But Nicholas wasn’t by the rocks anymore, and we looked for five or ten minutes, Cormac and I. Then we went back to where Rosamund was waiting, and Nicholas was already there. James came back with Olivia, saying they couldn’t find Richard. So Rosamund left Olivia and me in the carnages, while she and James and Cor-mac and Nicholas went out to search for Richard. But he didn’t come back. And they couldn’t find him. And Olivia wasn’t sure what had happened, except that he’d gone to play with the ponies in plain sight, and she’d thought he was still with them. They sent the coachman to the Hall on one of the carriage horses to collect the grooms and servants while they went back again to look. By nightfall, it was clear we weren’t going to find him at all. But James wouldn’t hear of calling off the search. He said Richard was just being naughty, hiding from us. Nicholas came back covered in blood and scratches, from a fall, and said he’d located the ponies, and Richard wasn’t with them, but there’d been some gypsy boys about. He and Cormac went back to look again. They searched with torches. I remember the long shadows they cast, and how black the men looked in the distance, and then Rosamund sent us home in one of the carriages, Olivia and Nicholas and me. Olivia was crying, there was no comforting her. And when we got to the stables, she had herself strapped to a horse, and went back with the men from the village, to look again. There wasn’t a horse for Nicholas, and so he went off on his own. I was told to stay at the house and send out word if any of the searchers found Richard. But of course they never did. Sometime later I remember Cormac, with tears cutting through the dirt on his face, yelling at Nicholas about Richard, wanting to know something, and I always thought that was very strange, since Richard had been with Olivia. But no one was himself, we were all distraught. Nicholas sat with Olivia, when they brought her back ill, talking, always talking to her, but from the door I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Uncle James was so exhausted that Dr. Penrith put something in his coffee and it took three men to carry him up to his bed, he was so deeply asleep ...”

But Rutledge had lost the thread of what she was saying, his thoughts busy elsewhere. When the quiet voice stopped, he said, “Did Olivia and Anne dress as twins, in the same gowns?”

“Sometimes,” she answered, surprised at the shift in subject. “Olivia didn’t like it. She said she wasn’t part of a pair, like shoes or gloves. She wasn’t in Anne’s shadow, she was just herself. That seemed to bother her ... afterward. We all felt guilty, the way children do, blaming themselves ...”

“Were they wearing the same dresses the day that Anne fell?”

“I—I don’t know. Let me think.” She shook her head, “No. Wait! Anne was wearing the gown with bunches of cherries embroidered around the hem and on the sash. Olivia was wearing something blue—forget-me-nots, I think. I remember that my blood and Anne’s matched those cherries.” The empty cup rattled in its saucer, as her fingers trembled. He got up and poured more tea for her, using the ordinary business of spooning in sugar and taking a slice of lemon to distract her.

“And Nicholas would have known, very well, whose sashes he was holding? Young as he was?”

“Yes, I told you they were Olivia’s—”

She stopped. The room was dark now, with only starlight to brighten it, except for the single lamp on the table near the wall. “No,” she said slowly, to the darkness and not to him. “The sash ends weren’t blue, were they? I thought they were. I’d always been so sure. Olivia told me they were blue!”

“And it was Nicholas who couldn’t be found, when Cormac went out to search for him? On the moors?” He tried to keep his voice level, unemotional. “And he went out alone again, when he’d brought you and Olivia to the Hall?”

“Yes—”

“Was he envious of his brother, the attention he got for being wild? Or were they close? Did they spend much of their time together?”

“I—I think they were too different to be close. Olivia and Nicholas were more alike, really. Quiet by nature, found it easy to amuse themselves. While Richard always needed ... distractions. He was so exuberant. He took up a lot of Rosamund’s time, never wanting a nap, always demanding a game or to be read to, or to be taken to see the horses.” She smiled to herself. “Richard and Anne should have been twins. They were so much alike, quite bossy and active. Headstrong. Exhausting, Nanny called them.”

“And when James shot himself, where was Nicholas?”

“I don’t—-he was already in the passage when Cormac wanted to know what the noise was he’d heard, and Nicholas said it was a shot, and he’d already knocked, and then Cormac and one of the servants broke down the door. But I don’t think it was locked after all. I saw Nicholas pushing the bolt back and forth, standing there like a stone. Olivia came then and made him stop, but wouldn’t let him into the room, wouldn’t let him go to his father. Then Rosamund heard the commotion and ran to see what was wrong, and Cormac went racing to the village for Dr. Penrith, and she stood in the door, white as I’d ever seen anyone’s face, but not crying, just shaking as if she’d never stop, and I remember Brian FitzHugh putting his arm around her shoulders, and she shoved him from her, and went on standing there, and Nicholas kept saying, over and over again, ‘It was an accident, I know it was an accident!’ as if it was dreadfully important to hear the words.”

He waited again, letting her take her time, but she said nothing more.

Over the years Rutledge had questioned many witnesses to a crime. Even during the war he’d had to debrief returned prisoners, night scouts, men in the forefront of an assault or an attack. What weapons did you see, what collar tabs? What’s the strength in reserve? Where are the big guns? It was an art, getting at the truth rather than miring down in the tricks of a man’s memory.

The first person on the scene of a gruesome killing in London had told him that she didn’t recall much blood, and yet the room to him, hardened as he was, had seemed to be bathed in it. But she had blocked it out, controlling her memory to exclude what had shocked her the most.

Rachel wasn’t afraid of blood, she was frightened of betrayal, of the possibility that someone she knew and loved was a stranger.

And yet she’d sent for Scotland Yard, irrevocably calling public attention to her doubts and suspicions.

It was an odd decision for someone like Rachel to make. A washing of hands. A refusal to be a party to accusation, and at the same time, feeling a desperate need for closure.

What had she wanted from him, the objective Inspector from London? What sort of proof was she after? What did she know, and how was he going to find it under the layers of protective emotional armor?

And what did it have to do with Nicholas? Nicholas, the quiet one. Always there, always in the background. Had he played an objective role? Or a subjective one? Had he protected Olivia? Or had she protected him?

Was it knowledge that Nicholas had carried to the grave? Or guilt?

Hamish was angry with him, telling him he was wrong. But he couldn’t stop himself from grasping at this particular straw. It might solve so many problems ...

“It’s your own armor you’re after, any excuse you can find to shift the blame! Any name to put in place of the woman who bewitched you with her verse! Ye’ll sacrifice him for her sake! Hae ye no conscience, man?” Hamish raged.

Yet he had to know. If there was a chance, he had to know it.

Finally he asked, “Rachel? What are you afraid of? What are you afraid to remember? Who made Anne fall out of that tree? It wasn’t an accident, was it? And who lured Richard away, on the moors? He was only five. How could he have wandered so far on his own? And who put the gun into James Cheney’s dead hand? When Brian FitzHugh was down on that beach the day he died, who was he talking to? Someone he trusted enough to tum his back on him—or her.”

She sat in stony silence. He went on quietly, “They were murdered. You tell me you don’t want to believe it’s true, but you feel it, deep inside yourself. The truth. Just as I do. And Rosamund very likely died by the same hand. Just because the murderer is also dead doesn’t matter. But the truth does. Was it Olivia? Or Nicholas? Who hated—or loved—or envied—enough to commit murder?”

“No one,” she cried, turning to face him, her eyes black with despair. “It’s nonsense, what you keep trying to say. There’s no murderer in this house! I lived here, I ought to know!”‘

“It had to be Olivia or Nicholas. You must choose.”

“No! Nicholas never hurt anyone! Nicholas was not the kind of man who’d kill children—or his own father—or his mother!”

“Then we’re left with Olivia.”

“No—I—there is no murderer, I tell you!”

“But there is. And you believed in it strongly enough that you sent for Scotland Yard!”

“No. I had to know why Nicholas wanted to die! I couldn’t believe he would want to take his own life, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t Nicholas!”

“But he did. Or else Olivia killed him.”

“No!”

She was out of her chair, lunging towards him, her face stark with pain, her hands balled into fists, as if she wanted to pound them against him. Rutledge got to his feet, braced.

She stood in front of him, shaking and livid with emotion, but didn’t touch him. “Go away! Go back to London, damn you! Leave me in peace!”

“But you sent for Scotland Yard. What did you know, Rachel, that made you think it was murder?”

“No—no! I tell you, no!”

“You thought Nicholas would marry you, didn’t you? If Olivia was dead. Instead, he chose to die with her. Or was killed. Or killed her, then himself. They’re the only possibilities we have.”

Her face crumpled, and furious with himself for what he’d done, he reached for her, pulling her into his arms. She buried her face in the front of his coat and cried, her body shaking with the force of her grief. “Tell me what you know,” he urged, against her hair, his voice little more than a whisper.

“He wrote to me before he died—Nicholas—” she began brokenly.

Then the door slammed open, and Cormac FitzHugh came into the room, his shadow springing before him across the ceiling, like a great black monster, breaking the spell.

“What the bloody hell!” he exclaimed, staring at them in sheer astonishment. “What are you doing—what’s going on here!”

16

Startled and red-faced, her tears catching in her throat, Rachel broke free from Rutledge’s hold and whirled to the night-darkened windows, as far from Cormac as she could move in the little room, drawing silence around her as if it made her invisible.

Rutledge, furiously angry, turned on him instead. The two men glared at each other, shoulders tight, on the balls of their feet, ready to act or to block. They were breathing hard, for an instant the only sound in the room.

“I might ask you the same question!”

“What is this, harassment? Or a rendezvous?”

Their voices clashed, loud and thick with the force of dislike.

Hamish was clamoring. Warning. Rutledge ignored him, his whole attention concentrated on Cormac. For an instant it was touch and go, the policeman struggling to rein in his desire to wipe up the floor with the man in the doorway for interrupting when he did, and the levelheaded entrepreneur fighting the primitive urge to feel fist against flesh. The soldier and the Irishman. But Scotland Yard and the City won.

With difficulty, Cormac managed to say in a near-normal tone, “I saw the light in the kitchen. I came to find out who was in the house. What’ve you done to Rachel? Why is she crying?”

“The Hall upsets her,” Rutledge retorted. “But she came to help me look for something. It was kind of her. Leave her alone.”

“Rachel? Has he hurt you?”

She answered softly, without turning around. “I’m all right, Cormac. Just—it’s as he said. I—I still haven’t—Olivia and Nicholas. And Stephen. I—if they ‘d only hurry up and sell this house, I’d he all right!” she finished despairingly. “I can’t go, I can’t stay! I beg you just put an end to it!”

“I’m—the lawyers are dragging their feet. There’re three wills involved,” he said slowly, as if she’d blamed him, not Rutledge, for her tears. “But I’ll do what I can to speed up the sale.” He hadn’t looked away from Rutledge, except for a brief glance at Rachel. Now he looked back at her again. “Let me take you home. If the Inspector has any more business here, he can finish it in the morning, damn it!”

“No. I’m all right, Cormac. Truly.”

“You aren’t. I can see you shaking from here.” He crossed the room, ignoring Rutledge, almost daring him to step in the way. Then, gently touching Rachel’s shoulder, he turned her towards him and gave her his handkerchief. Rutledge felt himself bristling as she took it gratefully and nodded her thanks, for a moment burying her face in its white folds. With his arm around her shoulders, Cormac led her past Rutledge to the door, but there Rachel stopped and looked at the Londoner with something in her eyes that he couldn’t read. Was she asking him to go with them? Or begging him to stay where he was?

When he didn’t respond, she turned and let Cormac take her out into the passage. Rutledge picked up the lamp, left the tea things where they were, and went down to the kitchen. Blowing out the lamps, he set them on the kitchen table and walked out to the hall in the cold darkness of the house. To his surprise, Cormac and Rachel were still there, waiting for him, silhouettes without presence.

Cormac held the door key in his gloved hand, impatience marking the line of his body as he watched Rutledge take his time crossing the hall.

Then they were out in the starlit night, the door slamming behind them, the lock turning with a click of finality. Cormac came down the steps to take Rachel’s arm, and lead her along the drive. Rutledge, feeling like a left thumb—and knowing that was how Cormac meant for him to feel—followed.

“Will you let me take you back to London tomorrow?” Cormac was saying to Rachel. “Your friends keep asking when you’ll come to town again, I promise soon, but it doesn’t satisfy anyone. Let’s surprise them!”

She had stopped crying, but there were tears still blocking her throat, in spite of all she could do. Ail the same, Rachel wasn’t easily cowed, as Rutledge was learning.

“I—I’m just not ready, Cormac. But thanks for the offer.” She glanced across at Rutledge, a shadowy figure to Cormac’s left. He could see her pale face turn towards him. There was steel in her voice as she added, “When Scotland Yard goes, I’ll go.”

“If you’re sure that’s what you want?” She nodded. “All right. I suppose it never hurts to keep an eye on what’s happening. Daniel won’t give me any peace; he’s insisting that I use my influence in London to get rid of the police. I told him that might cause more problems. But Susannah is in bed right now, doctor’s orders, so he may contact the Yard himself.”

“Not the baby—is anything wrong?” Rachel asked quickly.

“No, just precautions. But try to tell Daniel that. You’d think he was the one carrying twins, damn it! I’ve seen foaling horses with more composure.”

She laughed huskily, as he’d meant for her to.

“That’s better,” he told her, squeezing her arm. They reached the shadows of the wood, and Rutledge let them walk ahead, his mind busy.

“I’ll go to see her tomorrow,” Rachel said. “I’ll even take Inspector Rutledge with me. He’s made the muddle, let him set it to rights again!”

But somehow Rutledge didn’t think that was what Cormac wanted.

He could sense the stiffness in the man as they said good night to Rachel at the cottage gate, and watched her walk up the path.

Continuing towards the inn, Cormac said harshly, “I don’t understand why you don’t pack it in. I don’t see what you can hope to achieve here—combing the moors for Richard isn’t going to solve any riddles. Or is rumor for once telling the truth? You’re here for other reasons?”

“What other reasons might there be?” Rutledge parried.

Cormac sighed. “I don’t have any idea.” They walked in silence for a dozen yards, listening to the sound of their shoes crunching along the road. Then Cormac went on, his voice weary. “What really happened in that house tonight?”

“It’s a police matter,” Rutledge said, refusing to be drawn.

“Don’t give me that bloody rot!” Cormac fumed. “If you’re trying to protect Rachel, I’ve known for years how she felt about Nicholas. What I couldn’t understand for a very long time was why he didn’t love her.”

“Are you quite sure Olivia is the killer? Anne’s killer, and possibly Richard’s?” Rutledge asked, hoping to take him off guard.

Cormac stopped in his tracks, peering at Rutledge’s face, trying to see his eyes. They were of a height, and a world apart. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I was just wondering if I ought to put my money on Nicholas, instead.”

Cormac swore, inventively and viciously, as they walked on. Even in the darkness Rutledge could see the handsome brows drawn together in an angry frown. “No, of course it wasn’t Nicholas! I may be many things, but I’m not a fool. I know what I saw in that apple tree. Nicholas was a pawn.”

“She would have protected him. She might well have forced him into killing himself to keep the truth hidden. When she was afraid she couldn’t go on controlling him.”

“Yes, that’s a very fine idea. The only problem is, it doesn’t work!”

“Then why didn’t Nicholas love Rachel?”

“At first I thought it was because she was there so much of his childhood. Like another half sister, familiar and unexciting. Rosamund was very fond of Rachel, treated her like one of her own children, and that’s hardly the stuff great romance is made of. Then—later—when Rachel married Peter, I realized that Nicholas was probably protecting her, forcing her by his very indifference to find someone else to love. If he hadn’t, I think Olivia might have killed her too.”

The voice in the darkness was oddly strained.

“Are you telling me that what Olivia held over Nicholas most of his life—the way she bound him to her—was the threat of harm to Rachel?”

“It was the only way I can think of for Olivia to make Nicholas swallow that laudanum. Unless of course she tricked him. I don’t want Rachel to know what I think, I don’t want her to carry unnecessary guilt around for the rest of her life. But if you keep digging, that’s what’s going to happen. You’ll solve your case quite neatly, and she’ll never have a chance of finding love again. If you’ve got any compassion at all, send her back to London. Or better still, take her back.”

“No.”

“It’s quite true, what I told Rachel. I’ve considered going over your head, pulling strings to have the Yard close this case officially. I know enough people in high places, to get it done. And it’s what Daniel wants. But even that can cause more grief than good. That’s the trouble with this wretched affair, there’s no damned solution any way I turn!”

When Rutledge didn’t respond, Cormac was goaded into saying more than he’d intended. “I’ve half a notion to find out why you aren’t in London working on this new Ripper— why you’ve spent a week in Cornwall with nothing but speculation and a good deal of vexatious prying to show for it. I thought we’d been sent a proper investigator, someone who knew his business and was just taking precautions, because of Olivia’s sudden fame.”

“If you were expecting a rubber stamp,” Rutledge said, “you don’t have much experience of the Yard.”

“No, I wasn’t expecting a rubber stamp. Just a man who knew his job. I can’t quite understand what makes you tick, Inspector. And why the odd persistence in a case that’s finished, even if Nicholas and Olivia between them slaughtered half the village!”

“Be patient,” Rutledge told him as he held open the inn’s door. “And you’ll be sure to find out.”

It was what his father had often said to him, when he was pestering his parents to know what was inside the birthday wrappings, or under the silver paper on Boxing Day. The way an adult put off a child, and sure to aggravate.

He was delighted to see that it worked perfectly well for a grown man.

Cormac was gone in the morning, whether back to London or to the house, no one seemed to know. In any event, as Rutledge had no need to go back to the Hall straightaway, it didn’t matter.

Rachel came, as she’d promised, to take him to call on Susannah. They went in Rutledge’s car, the sun bright through the glass and the wind bringing with it first the smell of the sea and then the smell of the land.

“Cormac is right, you ought to see her yourself,” Rachel said after a long silence. “Susannah, I mean. You’re a very hard man. I’ve never met anyone quite like you. You ought to see the results of your handiwork. It might shame you into respecting the feelings of others!”

As he had seen the results of his handiwork last night, though for reasons of her own she refrained from mentioning that. Rutledge was as aware of the omission as Rachel was.

“I don’t see how talking to her is going to deter me,” Rutledge said. “And I owe you an apology for last night. I most particularly owe you one for embarrassing you in front of your cousin. It was—awkward. I’m sorry.”

Clearing the air. It had to be done.

“And didn’t serve any purpose,” she reminded him.

“On the contrary,” he said, risking a glance at her. “It served a variety of purposes.” The roads in this part of Cornwall weren’t metalled, just winding lanes for the most part, hardly wide enough for a horse and cart. Puddles from the rains hid deep washouts, while the mud itself was sometimes as slick as black ice. He knew he ought to concentrate on what he was doing. “Rachel, you told me you’d had a letter from Nicholas, before he died.”

“Did I?” He gave her another swift glance, and saw that she was frowning. “I don’t remember saying that.”

Or didn’t want to. He let it go for the moment.

They were heading inland, away from the sea. The high hedgerows shut off the view, and the deep-cut roads tended to come suddenly out of a curve and into a crossroads, where a heavy dray or a small cart was often and unexpectedly in his way. He nearly missed the turning they were after, but soon found the gates to the Beaton house at the head of a pretty valley.

It was one of those medieval monstrosities the Victorians had loved to build, with half-ruined towers, crenelations, and even a mock Gothic gatehouse. There was so much ivy climbing the walls that when the wind blew, the leaves ruffled and quaked as if the walls themselves were in imminent danger of collapse.

“Gentle God!” Rutledge said, slowing the car to stare.

“Yes, well, I’m told the family knew Disraeli, and admired his novels enormously. They couldn’t wait to tear down the old house and replace it with this. If you say one word, you’ll hurt their feelings! Jenny Beaton is a lovely person. She doesn’t deserve to be made unhappy.”

“I’m incapable of comment,” Rutledge answered weakly.

Mrs. Beaton was a lovely person. The house, built on the foundations of a much older structure, had its finer points, for one an exquisite fan ceiling in the great hall that served as a dining room. The craftsman who created it knew how to turn plaster into a work of art. The drawing room, with its coffered ceilings and stained-glass windows, looked as if it had escaped from a stage set. When asked his opinion of it, Rutledge answered, “it’s stunning!” Mrs. Beaton was satisfied. Rachel glared at him.

Susannah was lying on a chair with a footstool, a white lacy shawl thrown over her lap, but she looked perfectly healthy to Rutledge.

“I’m sorry to hear you’ve been ordered to rest. I hope it doesn’t mean complications of any kind,” he said, taking her hand in greeting.

“No,” she said irritably, “just a fussy doctor and an equally fussy husband. I’m perishing from boredom!” She glanced wryly at Jenny Beaton.

“She’s a terrible patient,” Jenny agreed, smiling warmly at her friend. She was dark and very pretty, with small hands and feet, and Harnish had noticed her before Rutledge had. “We’d toss her out on her ear, if she had anywhere else to go. Sad, isn’t it?”

“Daniel’s in London, he’s running himself thin trying to be in two places at once. But the doctor refuses to let me travel just now,” Susannah added, “even by easy stages.” She cocked her head and looked at Rutledge. “They say you’re searching the moors for Richard.”

“Susannah!” Jenny Beaton exclaimed. “Who told you that!”

“I may be pregnant. I’m not deaf! Well, is it true?”

“Yes, it’s true,” Rutledge told her.

“Why on earth are you interested in a child who died over twenty years ago? Do bodies even last that long? I don’t see any point in it!”

“I’m interested in what became of him.” He paused, then said, “If he’s still alive, he’s one of the heirs, isn’t he? Nicholas’ younger brother.”

He heard Rachel gasp, across the small inlaid table from him, but he didn’t look up at her. It was Susannah’s response he was interested in.

“If he’s alive, why hasn’t he turned up? Even a child of five knows who he is, where he came from. You’d think he’d have found a way home by now. Somehow.” Susannah was fidgeting with the fringe on her shawl, more from exasperation, he thought, than nervousness.

“Yes, there’s always that possibility. But he hasn’t. I’m just being thorough, that’s all. Did you ever hear stories of what happened on the moor? As you were growing up?”

“No, it wasn’t the sort of thing discussed around children, and by the time I was old enough to be curious about Richard, or Anne, or even my father, Rosamund always managed to change the subject. I remember my father, but of course not the early years, before he married Rosamund.”

“He was brought up a Catholic, I’m told. What about you? And Stephen. Or Cormac?”

“We’re all Anglican. Well, I suppose Cormac was born a Catholic, but he never practiced, as far as I know. What difference does it make?”

“Does he have close ties in Ireland? Has he ever talked about the rebellions and the uprisings? Michael Collins? The black and tans?”

“He’s not interested in politics. Never was, as far as I know. Cormac is typical of the City—he’s very good at what he does, he enjoys making money, and he behaves himself. Reputation is money, he says.”

“He’s an attractive man. Wealthy. Socially acceptable. Why hasn’t he married? In his position a hostess is almost indispensable.”

“Yes, I know, I’ve acted for him often enough. So has Rachel.” She shot a sidelong glance at Rachel. “I always wondered—growing up, watching them together—if there might be something between Cormac and Olivia. The tension between the two of them and the way they very carefully avoided each other. She never married. I thought perhaps he was the reason, I wondered if she was ashamed of her bad leg, and wouldn’t marry him. But wanted to, very badly.”

“You know that’s all in your imagination,” Rachel said, suddenly restless. She shifted so that her face was out of the light coming through the stained glass in vivid shades of port wine and honey, dappling the walls and the floor and her shoulder. “They never seemed to have much in common, and I was around them for years before you were born.”

“Which tells me,” Susannah said, “that they had a lot in common! Didn’t you find Cormac attractive? All my school friends were desperately in love with him! Everyone wanted to come down to the Hall for weekends.”

Jenny Beaton laughed. “I was fondest of Stephen. I had such a crush on him when I was twelve. Do you remember that?”

“Cormac’s very attractive,” Rachel answered defensively. “But I never really thought of him in that way—”

“Nicholas didn’t like him, and so you didn’t!” Susannah retorted.

“Why didn’t Nicholas like him?” Rutledge asked before Rachel could answer. Jenny was watching them, her face inquisitive, but he kept his eyes on Susannah and Rachel.

“Nicholas was the oldest son. Until Cormac’s father married Rosamund,” Susannah said. “It put his nose out of joint, I think. This newcomer lording it over him. Except that Cor-mac didn’t lord it over anyone.”

“That’s not true! Nicholas was never jealous. It was something else, something I never did really understand until I asked Rosamund about it once, and she said that Cormac’s father replaced Nicholas’ father, and sons often found that hard to swallow.” She turned quickly, her eyes flying to Rut-ledge’s face. “I’d forgotten that conversation,” she said, surprised. “I don’t know why it suddenly came to mind. What happened last night must have jarred my memory—”

“What do you mean, what happened?” Susannah broke in, sitting up straight, her face sharp with curiosity. “What are you talking about!”

But Rutledge knew what Rachel was thinking, that he had stirred up the past, like a stick spun in muddy water, churning up what lay at the bottom, wanted or not.

“Family relationships,” Rutledge answered for her. “We were discussing them. After dinner.”

Disappointed Susannah lay back against her cushions again. “Well, Nicholas never took any resentment out on Stephen or me,” she said. “And we were the children of that marriage! Why blame Cormac? It certainly wasn’t his doing that Mother chose to marry his father. It probably changed his life far more than Nicholas’, when you stop and think about it.”

From the mutinous expression on her face, Rutledge could tell that Rachel strongly disagreed. But remembering Susannah’s health, she held back the defense that seemed to be burning on the tip of her tongue.

“But I was fond of Nicholas myself,” Susannah went on complacently. “He had more patience with us than most boys his age. When Father died, I remember sitting on his knee, terribly frightened about putting Father into that huge, cold vault in the church. I kept telling everyone that he’d want to be out in the light, where he could hear the horses running and the sea coming in and children playing. And Nicholas said, That’s why he died out on the strand, so he could be free. What we’re putting in the vault tomorrow is only a token, a place where Rosamund can put flowers.’ Then he took us on a pirate’s hunt, looking for Father’s gold crucifix to put in the coffin. But we never found it. I don’t know whether he did later, or not.”

Hamish was already pointing out that it meant nothing, but Rutledge felt the coldness in his bones.

Suddenly tired and out of spirits, Susannah added, “I don’t want to think about death and unhappiness. What you’re doing in Borcombe is a waste of time. It distresses Daniel, and that always disturbs me. Richard is dead, and so is everyone else, and I don’t see why Scotland Yard should care a ha’penny about any of us. Stephen’s gone, and you can’t bring him back, however hard you try. Nobody murdered him, he just fell! And as far as I know, that’s still not a crime, is it? So just go away and let us get on with life!”

Jenny Beaton was about to interject a change of subject, but Rutledge was faster.

“Did your brother take Olivia’s papers from the house? Those she left him regarding her writing?”

“Stephen took hardly anything. I feel so guilty now about how we all behaved over that. Like—like dustmen quarreling over the bins! You were as bad as the rest of us, Rachel!” she ended accusingly, her face flushing with emotion.

Rachel was on the point of denying it, then closed her mouth firmly.

Mrs. Beaton hastily overrode her anyway, extending an invitation to stay for luncheon, but Rutledge thanked her and claimed pressing business back in Borcombe. He and Rachel left soon afterward.

“A fine diplomat you are!” she accused him, back on the main road. “She’s supposed to have rest, tranquillity!”

“She seemed perfectly capable of looking after herself. Susannah is a lot stronger than you give her credit for.”

“You aren’t a doctor—”

“No, and neither are you! Now tell me about Cormac and Nicholas.”

“Tell you what? I thought I’d made that plain at the Bea-tons. They never found common ground. They were envious of each other, Nicholas because Cormac was older, Cormac because Nicholas was Rosamund’s son and he wasn’t. What’s wrong between you and Cormac? Why do you bristle at each other? Explain that, and you’ll see why Cormac and Nicholas didn’t get along.”

Rutledge knew why he and Cormac bristled. They were at opposite ends of the pole. Cormac wanted the family skeletons packed away where they couldn’t rattle, and he, Rutledge, was in the process of digging them out and displaying them on the village green. Antagonists. Two men used to having their own way—and each finding the other blocking it.

He found himself wondering suddenly if it was Cormac’s City reputation that he was protecting so ardently—or a woman he’d wanted to love but couldn’t.

Hamish said, out of the blue, “The heart doesna’ care what she is, if he wants her badly enough. But the head doesna’ rest easy on the pillow when she’s a killer.”

Which was true.

He, Rutledge, still wanted Jean, though he knew—he had seen for himself—that she couldn’t bear to have him come near her ...

They were nearly back to the village when Rutledge pulled into a farmer’s muddy lane and switched off the engine.

Turning to Rachel, he said, “You told me about a letter last night. Whether you want to remember telling me or not, it’s up to you. But it will save all of us a great deal of time and fuss if you simply finish what you started.”

“What will you do, if I don’t? Make me walk back to Borcombe from here?” she retorted.

“You know I wouldn’t do that. Rachel for God’s sake, you may well be concealing evidence.”

“No, I’m not!” she said fiercely, turning in her seat to face him. “The letter was to me! Not to the police or an inquest full of prying eyes. I don’t know how you managed to make me speak of it. If I’d been myself, if you hadn’t tricked me, I never would have!”

“You told me, the day you sent for Scotland Yard,” he said tiredly, ignoring Hamish’s accusations and objections. “You made your decision then. And there’s nothing you can do now to take it back again.”

“I won’t let you have my letter!”

“Then tell me what it says.”

There was an angry silence between them. And then, in a voice that was so different he didn’t realize at first what she was doing, she began to repeat the words from memory.“My Dear,“The time has come for you to move away from the

past. Myself Peter. We’ve both cared for you, in our different

ways. But I’m not the man you think I am—I never was.

You must believe that! And Peter is gone. You’ve

grieved for him, and you may grieve for me, but neither

of us could have given you the happiness you want. More

than anything else, you must remember that we were only

pale shadows of what life ought to bring to you, the man

who will give you love and children and long years of joy.“I have loved you too dearly to walk away in silence

and leave you alone with an empty heart. I have been

guilty of many things, but I have never taken your affection

for granted. Whatever may be said about me, I have never

lied to you. Don’t ever let them tell you otherwise!

“Yours,

Nicholas.”

There was a stillness in the car after she’d finished. He made himself look down at his hands, resting on the wheel, and not at her.

“I didn’t know, when I got it, that he was going to die. I thought—I thought he was worried for me, Peter’s death, my—my own feelings towards him, my hopelessness about that. I did know—for some time—that Olivia was having trouble again, with the paralysis. I suppose I’d told myself that in a few years—five, perhaps—she might—something might happen. The doctors had never held out much hope of—of a long life for her! And if he was free—if I were free—if he wanted to come to me, he could. That for Olivia’s sake, all these years he’d lied to himself—lied to me—lied to her. About how he really cared for me. I told myself he’d let me marry Peter because he thought it was for the best. I told myself that he couldn’t leave Olivia alone in that house, with no one but the servants to look after her. That he’d stay with her—and I respected him for that!—until the end. That—Oh, damn, damn, damn! I told myself what I wanted to hear. But he didn’t want to go on living, did he? Or he would have!”

There were no tears on her cheeks when he finally looked at her, only a great sadness in her face that touched him deeply.

“And for weeks afterward I asked myself, What hold did she have over him? What was it that was stronger than anything he could have felt for me? Why couldn’t she let him live? What was it that Olivia knew and I didn’t?”

This time there was a fierce anger in her voice, a need that was so ferocious, so passionately real, that she had been driven to act. To send for the Yard.

17

Rutledge didn’t know what to say, how to answer her.

Instead he got out and started the car again, and drove silently back to the village. In front of the cottage, as he pulled up the brake, he said, “You weren’t prepared for murder, were you?”

“No—I thought—I don’t know what I thought.” Her voice was still husky. “But I had to know why—And there wasn’t anyone else I could speak to. Most certainly not Peter’s brother in Whitehall! I told myself that Scotland Yard would be objective and quick, and I’d at least know why Nicholas died. That’s all I wanted to hear. And now, now you’ve dragged in Richard—and Anne—and Rosamund— and I’m so frightened I can’t sleep. I don’t want to know any more. I’d rather believe that Nicholas didn’t love me than discover something awful about him that I couldn’t bear to live with!”

“Will you come back to the Hall with me? I want to show you something.”

“No, I won’t be tricked again.”

“This isn’t a trick. Let me show you some things I found. Some things I’m not sure I understand. But very .. . worrying. And the reasons why I’m still here. You may be able to explain them away. It would be better for all of us, if you could.”

She shook her head, then raised it and looked hard at him. “If I do, will you go away? Back to London and let it be?” “That depends,” he said, “on the truth.”

They drove to the Hall, taking the long way around and leaving the car in front of the steps while he led her out to the headland to see the burned stretch of land. The rain had made the grass grow again, and the patch was nearly covered now. But she could still make it out. Barely.

Frowning, she said, “Are you telling me that Stephen burned Olivia’s papers here? But why?”

He took an envelope from his pocket and shook the small objects it contained into the palm of his hand. A bit of ribbon, the silver edge of something, the length of leather.

She touched them gently. “My first thought would be love letters, seeing that ribbon. Was it blue, do you think? A woman would choose blue. Olivia liked green, but not that pale shade. It isn’t the sort of ribbon you see on a woman’s clothing, is it? Or the hair. But a nightgown? Or a very young child’s gown? Love letters would be more likely. Olivia’s, I’d say.” She smiled wryly at him to hide the hurt. “I can’t imagine Nicholas being sentimental enough to keep all my letters bound in ribbon!”

The corner of silver puzzled her for a time, then suddenly she laughed. “Of course! One Christmas, Rosamund gave us all matching frames for photographs. Leather and silver, for traveling. She said we might choose our own photographs, and I had one of Rosamund and Nicholas I put in mine.”

“What did Nicholas and Olivia keep in theirs?”

“Nicholas wanted one of his parents. It was in his bedroom, for a time. I don’t know what Olivia chose, but she said she wouldn’t be traveling much, and might like one of George in India, because he’d done her traveling for her. I remember Rosamund hugging her, pain in her face.”

“And the leather?”

“Well, Olivia kept a leather notebook by her bed. There was a strap that closed it, and a small lock. I thought it was a journal. But she said no, it was for thoughts in the night. I didn’t understand what she meant, until I discovered she was a poet.” She picked it up, turning it in her fingers. “How sad that she burned it. If that’s what it was.”

“She? Do you think Olivia did this?”

“Who else? Cormac was the first one down here, he might have taken things he didn’t want us to find. Personal things. Something to do with his relationship to Olivia. But somehow I don’t picture him out on a hillside in the dark, with a fire blazing. The smart thing would have been to carry them back to London and burn them there, where no one would notice.”

“Why in the dark? Why do you think this was done at night?”

Rachel shrugged. “It has that kind of feeling. Clandestine?”

Next, he took her into the house and up to Olivia’s room. She entered it reluctantly, looking around her as if somehow she’d see the other woman standing silently in the shadows. He opened the closet and began to work. She watched, trusting him in spite of herself to explain when he was ready, but she started when one of the canes fell to the floor with a loud clatter, indicating that she was very tense. He continued to remove boxes from the back of the closet without a word, then pulled out the shelf, and carried it to the window.

Rachel followed him, and bent over him, curiosity aroused, their heads nearly touching as he worked, using his penknife carefully to draw out the strip of wood, then the cotton. Finally, on the windowsill as before lay the row of small gold objects, sparkling in the sun, telling a tale without words.

Rachel gasped, moving them about in turn with her fingertip.

“That’s Rosamund’s ring. Her father gave it to her when she was very young. And a silver box of wax, so that she could seal all her letters. She wore it on her little finger, sometimes, even when she’d outgrown it. And I remember Anne wearing that locket! She’d let me look at the pictures, if I was quiet in church. Were these Richard’s? The cuff buttons? Olivia used to put them in for him, to help Nanny—he couldn’t be still for an instant. And that fob’s Nicholas’, he was so proud of it. James gave him his first watch, and Rosamund gave him the fob. It was a beautiful watch. Stephen let me have it—when—when he was going through Nicholas’ room. The fob had been in the family for ages. I thought perhaps he’d taken that. And that pipe cleaner is James’, he carried it everywhere he went. I always thought it was much too handsome to use in a pipe, and he laughed when I told him so. I don’t know about the crucifix. Was that the one Susannah mentioned? Brian’s? I never saw Cormac wearing one.”