Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

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She was moving before she’d finished, catching him off balance, and was out the door, slamming it behind her. He could hear her running down the gallery, almost stumbling in blind haste.

He didn’t need Hamish’s warning. Remembering the stairs, remembering how Stephen had fallen on the worn treads, Rut-ledge swore and was across the room in four swift strides, going after her.

He overtook her at the top of the steps, catching her arm in a fierce grip, swinging her around to face him.

“I’m not trying to ruin Nicholas! Or Olivia! There’s murder here, damn it. You’re an intelligent woman, you could see it for yourself if you weren’t so bloody wrapped up in your emotions!” he told her, furious with her, furious with himself.

Rachel didn’t cry. Where protecting Nicholas was concerned, she was braver than most of the men who wore medals from the war. He hoped that Nicholas was worth it-and feared that he wasn’t.

“Don’t talk to me about emotions!” she said, her voice like ice. “It’s Olivia, isn’t it? You don’t want her to be a killer, you don’t want all that poetry to come out of darkness and hate. Those damned poems blind you, and everybody else. Olivia was a witch, she had a withered leg, and yet she was able to take Nicholas down with her into depression and death! She could kill her own sister and her own half brother, and give an overdose of laudanum to her mother, and still you want to see her as saint! Her sufferings are just another part of the myth, her writing something you wrestle with because she’s a woman and respect because you once thought it was a man’s, and women shouldn’t write about lying in bed with a lover or standing knee-deep in your own ordure in a trench, or how near we all are to hell! But you wonder, don’t you, what kind of lover she’d have been, and where she might have learned the tricks that mattered. Well, ask Cormac. Maybe he’ll tell you what she was like!”

Stung, he let her go, dropping his hand from her arm, and she turned, walking down the stairs with her head high and her shoulders straight with anger. Fighting for breath and control even while she still seethed with the fury consuming her.

At the foot of the steps she turned to look back up at him and said, “Now you know how I felt in Olivia’s bedroom! I’ve given you a taste of your own poison, and you found it hard to swallow, didn’t you? I don’t know if a word of what I’ve just said is true, and I don’t really care. But now you can see for yourself what lies a twisted imagination might come up with. How easily you can twist the truth to debase other people’s emotions. I loved Nicholas, and I mourn the man he was. And I won’t believe your lies about him. You can think what you like about Olivia. I’m going back to London, if I can find Cormac and ask him to take me. But I promise you this: I’ll ruin you if you ruin Nicholas.”

“Rachel, listen to me-”

“No. I’ve already listened to you, and I think it’s all hog-wash. What you think is your own business. What you do about what you think is very much my business. Consider yourself warned.” She walked to the door.

“Wait!” he commanded, already on his way down the stairs.

“Why? To be insulted again? Or worse still, hurt? I can’t think how you could have been Peter Ashford’s friend. He was such a gentle, good man.”

“I’ll make a bargain with you.”

She laughed. “I don’t bargain with the devil.”

Ignoring that, he said, “Help me find out the truth. And I swear to you, if Nicholas is guilty-no, wait, let me finish-if Nicholas is the one I’m after, I’ll walk away from it, go back to London, and tell the Yard they were wrong, there was nothing further to investigate in any of the three deaths in Borcombe this spring. The past-the others-can stay buried with him.”

Rachel stood with her back to him, the door’s handle in her hand, the door already swinging gently towards her.

“I don’t believe you!”

“I swear!” And he would do it. He knew that, deep down inside.

“And if it isn’t Nicholas?”

“Then we’ll decide what ought to be done. In fairness to the dead. All of the dead.” To O. A. Manning. To the poems that might be worse than lies.

“I’ll think about that. And give you my answer tonight. I’ll send a message to The Three Bells.”

The door was open now, and she went through it without looking back, the wind from the sea picking up strands of her hair and blowing them around her face. She seemed awfully slim and lonely, very small and very bereft as she moved down the steps and onto the drive, skirting his car.

Hamish was calling him a fool for swearing to such a bargain.

“The Yard brings in their man, you can’t turn your back on your oath, no’ for a slip of a girl that can’t see where the wind’s blowing!”

“So you believe me now, do you?” Rutledge silently challenged Hamish. “You see I’m right.”

“I think ye’re a damned fool, and a long way from home! What is there about witchery in a woman that touches you? Your Jean wasn’t that sort, she’s no’ the kind to spin a man’s head or set his soul on the brink. Olivia Marlowe casts a spell out of her grave, and ye’re lost!”

“It has nothing to do with Jean. Or Olivia Marlowe,” Rutledge countered, watching Rachel’s long, clean strides as she walked towards the wood. “And it has naught to do with yon lassie, either!” Hamish retorted.

Rutledge closed the door after Rachel before she reached the shadows of the trees and then took the stairs two at a time, to put away the articles he’d left on Olivia’s windowsill. Back into their cotton nests again, for the moment. Until he was ready to bring them out for good. His sixth sense told him he’d won in his bargain with Rachel. He hoped he was right.

As he passed the closed door to Nicholas’ room, he said aloud, his voice rough, “You should have lived, you fool, and married her. She’d have made a better wife than any you’ll find in the grave.”

Hamish chuckled.

Rutledge, irritated, ignored him.

But Hamish was in Rutledge’s own mind. And Hamish recognized what Rutledge had just admitted to Nicholas.

That he couldn’t be guilty, or he wouldn’t have won Rachel’s heart.

It was one of the first lessons Rutledge had learned at the Yard. That love seldom had anything to do with murder. Pity, yes. And compassion, sometimes. Even mercy, on occasion. But not love.

And the question in this case was not whether Rachel loved Nicholas, but how Nicholas loved Rachel.

Enough to protect her, as Cormac had suggested, or enough to use her to protect himself. Which had it been? Which way had Nicholas turned?

As Rutledge carefully worked with the little gold trophies, he realized all at once that Nicholas might well have included himself among the dead, before swallowing his laudanum. But not Olivia. That’s why there was no trophy for Olivia. She had escaped through her poetry. He had waited too long to kill her-if that’s what he’d done, if that was what had actually happened. She’d already found her wings of fire.

18

Rutledge drove thoughtfully back to Borcombe, and didn’t realize, until he stepped around the men seated on their sun-warmed bench before the inn door, drinking their beer, that he’d missed his lunch.

Hamish pointed out that the dining room had already closed.

Which did nothing to improve Rutledge’s mood.

He felt he was ready to start taking statements from his witnesses: Mrs. Trepol and Wilkins the gardener, Rachel and Cormac, Smedley, Dr. Penrith and Dr. Hawkins. Getting it on paper where he could sort it, challenge it, or use it to move forward.

But Borcombe was a tiny place, and everyone knew everyone’s business. To speak to people, to ask them for a general picture of the family at the Hall and the events that might-or might not-impinge on matters that concerned him, stirred up talk and rumors. To ask for official statements was tantamount to providing a blueprint for exactly what he was after: old murders, not new ones. Room for Constable Dawlish and his choleric superior to raise hell with London. Bringing Bowles down on him like a cyclone, demanding to know what he meant by stirring up the county, causing problems for the Yard when it already had its hands full. Room too for Cormac to have him recalled summarily, citing harassment of a prominent family, never mind the local police.

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