Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

“Why not? She was your cousin.”

“She was bossy. Sometimes she made me feel very young, or very stupid. Awkward, somehow. When we played games, I was always the one who had to lose, and then she’d tease me about it.”

The cruelty of children. He could hear Smedley’s voice saying that.

“She wasn’t mean. She could be very loving, when she wanted to be. She was just… arrogant. Like her grandmother, Nanny told me. Rosamund’s mother. But of course she was already dead, I never met her. So I couldn’t know if it was true or not. Anyway, for a child like me, Anne was very trying.”

“Whose idea was it to go to the orchard that day?”

“It was hot, we were tired of playing in the gardens, and the house was stuffy, even with the windows open. But in the orchard it was shady, the long grass was cool. In the trees, you felt cooler. I don’t know who thought of it first. I remember Nicholas telling Anne that she couldn’t climb as high as he could. And Anne had been pestering Olivia about being so slow, walking. Nicholas must have been trying to deflect her impatience.”

He could see, from the shadows of her lashes on her cheek, that she’d closed her eyes. Clouds on the horizon began to swallow the sun. It would be dark sooner than he’d thought. Would that matter? Still, he must not hurry…

“But that wasn’t what you felt then, was it?”

“No, I was hoping she’d climb high enough to fall out-” She sat upright with a jolt. “No! I couldn’t have thought that! It must have been afterward, when she was climbing, and I was afraid she’d fall-”

Yet Rutledge thought she had felt that way at the time, and buried it deep. A child’s wish, because the bully was beyond her own reach. He waited a moment, then said gently, reassuringly, “I’m sure you wished her no harm.”

“No, of course I didn’t. In fact I was worried when Nicholas challenged her to climb to the next branches, and then Olivia went up after her, and he tried to prevent her, but she was determined to show she could do it too. I remember he was holding her sashes, trying to help her keep her balance. And then Anne was shouting something from the top of the tree, and Olivia pushed herself higher than she should, and Cormac climbed down from his tree and was over there in a flash, saying his papa would thrash him if they got hurt, and he was going to stop this nonsense now. But I saw Nicholas jerk hard on the sashes, trying to pull himself up into the tree or something, and Cormac was crashing about in the branches, and suddenly, Nicholas was ducking, and Anne came tumbling down, bowling Nicholas over, and Cormac was trying to get Olivia down, yelling at her not to put her bad foot just there, he’d hold her arm, and she was screaming at him not to touch her, and Nicholas was crawling over to Anne, and as I slid down my tree, I scraped my leg and it started bleeding, and I got blood all over Anne’s dress when I knelt there. And she was still, it was frightening, and I kept asking Nicholas why he’d pulled so hard on the sashes, and he said that Anne had been shoving Olivia, and then Olivia was down, face white as her own handkerchief, something in her eyes that terrified me, and Cormac and I ran for help, he to the stables, which were closer, while 1 ran to the house and Rosamund-”

She was crying, he could see the tears sliding out from under her lashes. And he himself felt the surge of her pain, the shock, the child who couldn’t understand the nightmarish events she’d witnessed. The picture she’d conjured up was sharp, vivid in his mind. Even Hamish was silenced by it.

“Please,” she begged huskily. “I don’t want to think about it any more!”

“Then tell me about Richard being lost on the moors,” he said, after giving both of them a little time to recover. “Were you there when it happened?”

“Yes, I’ve said it was a family picnic,” she retorted irritably. “I don’t know why you have to keep harping on the past, raking it up. Stephen wouldn’t have allowed it, it was his duty to protect Olivia! That’s why she left him all her papers.”

“Olivia is dead. So is Nicholas. Your memory is all I have,” he said again. “Would Stephen have protected her, if he’d known she might have killed his father?”

“Maybe that’s why we can’t find her papers. Maybe he burned them?” She sighed. “Oh, very well! We went there- to the moors-because it was a day’s outing, and children are restless, they need distraction. Uncle James thought we might enjoy looking at the old mines, the tin that’d made Cornwall rich, once upon a time. Rosamund wasn’t happy with the idea, she said we could fall down the old shafts. Which wasn’t very like her-it was as if she had a premonition-she was usually enthusiastic and fun. But it all went quite well. James showed us the mines, and then we talked about where Cornish tin might have traveled, to Egypt or Crete or Phoenicia. He could make whatever he talked about seem so real, not a lesson at all-it was a gift he had. Then we found a sheltered spot to eat our lunch.”

He could hear her voice change as she drifted back into the past again, caught up in spite of her reluctance.

“What was Richard wearing?”

“I don’t remember-white shirt, long stockings, short trousers, I should think. He did have a jacket too, because he took it off for a time. It was warm in the sun. Rosamund made him put it back on again, when the wind came up. He didn’t want to put it on, and fussed about it. Later, we wondered if that’s why he’d run off, because he was still in a temper. He was so headstrong, sometimes.” She stopped. “Are you sure you want to hear so many little things?”

“Yes. It helps me frame a picture.”

She was one of those rare people who could tell a story coherently. Describing clearly the images she saw in her mind, without backtracking and confusing the threads he needed to follow.

“We’d had our picnic, and Rosamund sat down to rest, James had his head in her lap, I remember thinking how comfortable they looked. Cormac had gone to talk to the guide. He was an old man whose sons left for America twenty years before, to work in the mines there. Cormac wanted to know about them, if they’d prospered, if they’d written home about their new life. I was drowsy, and Olivia sat down beside me, to rest her leg a little. But Richard wanted to go back and see the ponies. He begged her to walk with him, because his mother wouldn’t let him go alone. I don’t know where Nicholas was, he’d wandered off. He did that sometimes, exploring. He always had an unerring sense of direction, no one ever worried about him. Finally Olivia got up and followed Richard, making him promise not to run too fast for her. I was waiting for Nicholas to come back and didn’t want to be bothered with Richard, and I’ve felt very guilty about that ever since…”

He let the silence drift, and finally her voice picked up the tale again. “I was nearly asleep when Rosamund said we ought to be starting back. She sent Cormac to look for Nicholas and James to find Olivia and Richard. We walked over to the carriages together and put the baskets away. Rosamund was saying something about a house party she was planning, friends from London. I remember that, because they came for the funeral instead. James’ funeral. Then she said, ‘I wonder what’s keeping them!’ “

There was another pause. “Cormac came back alone and said that Nicholas had just seen some of those butterflies you only find out on the moors and didn’t want to leave. He took me off with him to persuade him. But Nicholas wasn’t by the rocks anymore, and we looked for five or ten minutes, Cormac and I. Then we went back to where Rosamund was waiting, and Nicholas was already there. James came back with Olivia, saying they couldn’t find Richard. So Rosamund left Olivia and me in the carnages, while she and James and Cor-mac and Nicholas went out to search for Richard. But he didn’t come back. And they couldn’t find him. And Olivia wasn’t sure what had happened, except that he’d gone to play with the ponies in plain sight, and she’d thought he was still with them. They sent the coachman to the Hall on one of the carriage horses to collect the grooms and servants while they went back again to look. By nightfall, it was clear we weren’t going to find him at all. But James wouldn’t hear of calling off the search. He said Richard was just being naughty, hiding from us. Nicholas came back covered in blood and scratches, from a fall, and said he’d located the ponies, and Richard wasn’t with them, but there’d been some gypsy boys about. He and Cormac went back to look again. They searched with torches. I remember the long shadows they cast, and how black the men looked in the distance, and then Rosamund sent us home in one of the carriages, Olivia and Nicholas and me. Olivia was crying, there was no comforting her. And when we got to the stables, she had herself strapped to a horse, and went back with the men from the village, to look again. There wasn’t a horse for Nicholas, and so he went off on his own. I was told to stay at the house and send out word if any of the searchers found Richard. But of course they never did. Sometime later I remember Cormac, with tears cutting through the dirt on his face, yelling at Nicholas about Richard, wanting to know something, and I always thought that was very strange, since Richard had been with Olivia. But no one was himself, we were all distraught. Nicholas sat with Olivia, when they brought her back ill, talking, always talking to her, but from the door I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Uncle James was so exhausted that Dr. Penrith put something in his coffee and it took three men to carry him up to his bed, he was so deeply asleep…”