Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

“I can’t break my trust and tell you how her affairs stand, but yes, I can be frank about one matter. Susannah doesn’t leave her share of the house to Cormac. After all, she’s got a family of her own to think of. Or soon will.”

“Then why should Cormac kill people and risk being caught? If he’s nothing to gain? And without fail the outsider is the first to draw suspicion. There’s always the ugly possibility of childhood jealousy, I grant you, but somehow that doesn’t fit him, does it? Cormac strikes me as a clearheaded businessman who will take calculated risks in the market, but not in his personal life.”

“Well, yes, I must agree there,” Chambers replied reluctantly. “There was no call to be jealous. I know for a fact that Rosamund saw to his education, then gave him introductions to prominent men in the City when he came down from Cambridge. Just what she’d have done for her own sons! The rest he’s earned on his own considerable merit. Which brings us back to where we started. There’s no possible motive I can see for your choice to light on Olivia, either. Even if Richard did go wandering while in her care.” He finished his whiskey and turned to signal Trask, saying to Rutledge over his shoulder, “But let me put this question to you. Suppose you’re right about her. Where will prosecuting a dead woman, however evil she might have been, take you? Certainly not into a court of law.”

“O.A. Manning is still very much alive,” Rutledge responded.

Chambers turned back, staring at him speculatively. “I begin to see,” he said quietly.

Chambers left after the meal, with a final comment. “I’ll give you a hearing when you’ve got incontrovertible evidence to show me. Until then, I shall do my best not to give credence to a word you’ve told me. And my best is very good indeed, let me assure you!”

Luncheon appeared to have restored his balance.

Rutledge went up to his room, overwhelming fatigue dogging his steps as he climbed the narrow stairs.

The reactions he’d gotten from Chambers proved how far the case he could presently lay out would go in a courtroom. He’d sown seeds of doubt in the solicitor’s mind, but he hadn’t done more than make him think. And a jury is no better than the evidence presented to it. That was a maxim at the Yard.

All right then, where to go next?

The men searching the moors in this wretched weather would have to find more than suspicions…

Richard’s body and the manner in which it was found could go a long way towards proving murder. But by whom? What if there were no pansies at his feet to link the small body with the poem Olivia had written?

In the afternoon Rutledge set out in a lowering mist to look for the small isolated cottage where the old midwife lived. Trask had reluctantly told him how to find it.

“She’s harmless, they say, but she gives me the willies!” he’d confided to Rutledge. “Never know where you stand with her. And those eyes-they lay a man bare, like a fleshing knife, but beyond the bone.”

“I’m told she’s a good nurse.”

“Oh, aye, I grant her that. But what does she steal when you’re defenseless?” From the expression on his face Rutledge knew he wasn’t thinking of money. Or the brass candlesticks.

Of such fears witch-hunts were born, Rutledge thought as he set out.

Sadie lived in a narrow cranny that branched off the main valley of the Bor, hardly more than a cul-de-sac where her sod-roofed house squatted in the rain like a wet gray toad. A garden had been hacked out of the hillsides and into the narrow strip of flatland on which the house had been built. He could recognize herbs of different kinds-although he only knew the names of half of them-and rows of cabbage and onions and carrots next to straggling lines of flowers beaten down by the heavy rains. A dozen bedraggled chickens scratched in a muddy pen out back.

She must have seen him coming, because the old wooden door inched open before he got there. “Leave the umbrella by the sill, and wipe your feet on yon rag!” she told him sharply. “I want no mud on my floors!”

He did as he was told and was surprised when he finally crossed the threshold and stepped into the low beamed room that served her as both parlor and kitchen. She had whitewashed the wails, and they glowed like butter in the fire that didn’t begin to fill a hearth broad enough to hold a pig. But the room was warm, and the bright rag rugs that covered the stone floor kept out the damp. The furniture was old, worn, castoffs that had seen finer days. Bunches of drying herbs and flowers hung in the rafters, giving the room an oddly exotic tang of mixed scents. Baskets, woven of rushes, held a stock of dry wood, and a large black cat-her familiar? he wondered in wry amusement-slept on a cushion by the only window.

Sadie looked him up and down with those bright eyes. “What brings a London policeman out in a West Country rain to talk to an old woman?” Her mind seemed clear enough today, he thought, listening for the querulousness that seemed to come with confusion, when she began drifting out of reach.

“I’m trying to piece together information about the family at the Hall. You know that,” Rutledge answered mildly. “I thought you might remember some other things that would be useful.”

“Like?”

“Like, where are the servants who used to work there?”

“Scattered. Gone to other houses, or retired. Or dead.”

“Do you remember their names?”

She grinned at him. “At my age?” But he thought she could, if she tried. “Ask Mrs. Trepol. Or the rector.”

“Then tell me about Nicholas Cheney.”

Suddenly wary, she stared at him.

“Why should I? He’s not one I care to speak about.”

“I’m trying to understand why he killed himself. Why he chose to die beside Olivia. It seems… out of character.”

She chuckled. “Ever seen a man gassed in the war?”

“Many times.” Their crusted faces and red, blistered mouths, the hoarse gasping as they struggled for air. He shuddered, remembering it.

“Then you don’t need me to tell you how the lungs burn, how you can’t draw a deep breath because the tubes are raw, and you choke on your own phlegm. He said he dreamt of the scent of violets. And lemons.”

“Nicholas wasn’t that ill. You know it. And I know it now.”

She went over to the window and touched the cat, her face turned away from him. “Don’t ask me about Nicholas Cheney. Or the boy Richard. That’s why you’ve come, I can read it in your eyes. And I’ve listened to the men grumbling on their way to search the moors.”

“Do you plant pansies in your garden?” Rutledge asked, reaching to the rafters to touch the upside down heads of strawflowers, brittle between his fingers.

“They don’t dry well,” she said, straightening up to look at him.

“Do they grow well on the moors?”

“Sometimes they do. Volunteers that the wind blows. Or a bird leaves behind.” She was wary still, but not afraid of these questions. He wondered why. “Pansies like the cool of springtime, and a little shade in the afternoon. If that’s what you’re looking for, find the place where they’d want to grow. Not where someone thought of putting ‘em.”

Rutledge considered her. The old, stooped body, the worn, bright eyes, the knowledge and the experiences of a lifetime fading with age, slipping into forgetfulness.

He remembered a chaplain in the war, at a hasty service for a half-dozen soldiers killed in the shelling. Saying, “They’ll never grow old-never feel fear and cold, hunger or pain, or the sorrows of lost love or the pity of the young. While they have missed much, these men who won’t see their sons in their mothers’ arms, or the moon over a summer sea, or the beauty of a rose, they have what we all look for in the end-eternal springtime. It is not their grief but ours that haunts us.” Oddly enough, it had helped weary men. But not, he thought, the chaplain.