Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

Rutledge agreed with him there, but said nothing.

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t what he expected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You never spoke of it to your father?”

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

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

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