Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

“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!”