Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

He thought about the opening lines to one of the love poems.

Love

Comes on wings of fire

That sear the heart with longing

And a white-hot heat.

In its wake, no peace remains,

Only the scars of a terrible loss

That 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?

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 respectedRosamund’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.