Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

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

Rachel said, “Yes, that’s what I’d been told. Unless they changed their minds. At the end.” As they’d changed their minds about living

… She took a deep breath and refused to think about it. And instead found herself listening again. To the sounds of the house. Since she’d walked through the door two days ago, she’d felt it. Swallowing her, drawing the very breath from her body. Frightening her with a stillness that wasn’t stillness…

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

Susannah stared at him in surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mine?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s a dreadful thought!” Daniel exclaimed. There were skeletons in his family closet that he wouldn’t care to see rattled. Name him an Irishman who didn’t have them!

“The price of fame,” Susannah said sourly, her fair, pretty face twisting into a grimace. “And an even more cogent reason for stopping them in their tracks. By selling the house. None of us ever expected to live here anyway. Olivia knew that, she could have arranged for her own museum if that was what she truly wanted. She didn’t.”

There was another silence. Then Cormac, used to board meetings and finding consensus, used to making choices, said, “Right, I take it you’re three to one? For the sale of this property? Stephen can do as he pleases with Olivia’s personal papers-manuscripts, letters, contracts, and so on. That ought to satisfy inquisitive scholars. Sad to say, I doubt there’s much of a literary estate. She was young. And poets aren’t… prolific.”

No, Rachel thought, watching him. You’ve already gone through her papers, haven’t you? You were here first. Did you take any of them, I wonder? Were you afraid for your reputation in the City? Or were you merely curious about your stepsister’s secrets?

“Livia seldom wrote to any of us,” she said aloud. “Or to anyone else, as far as I know. Perhaps Stephen might want whatever letters we’ve kept of hers? For the collection?” But not Nicholas’ letters, not those.

“Did she keep a diary?” Daniel asked, and as every face swiveled to stare at him, he added, “Well, surprising numbers of people do! Lonely people, especially. Invalids-” He stopped.

“No,” Stephen said shortly. “I’m sure she didn’t.”

“You didn’t know her any better than the rest of us did,” Susannah retorted. “Not after you were grown. She could have kept twelve diaries, and who would have guessed?”

“I came home more often than the rest of you put together!”

“What? Four times a year? At most five? It was uncomfortable here, you know that. She didn’t want us to come. She’d made herself a recluse, yes, and Nicholas too, he was as set in his way as she was. And they were only in their middle thirties-it’s unnatural!”