Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Witch?”

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

“No love potions?”

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

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

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

“Tell me about Anne.”

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

“How did Anne die?”

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

“Was Cormac there?”

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

“Anne fell? No one pushed her?”

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

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

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