Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

Walking back to the wood, he saw the old woman by the trees, standing there staring up at the house, looking for something in its shadows, needing something it could no longer give. Sadie, whose mind wandered but whose brain understood more than she was telling him. He was convinced of that. Or else, it was something she didn’t know that she knew She turned to stare at him as he came over the rise of the lawns and turned towards her. He thought at first she was going to leave before he reached her, disappearing so as not to be faced with more seemingly useless questions. But after a twitch of indecision she stayed her ground.

“A fine evening, isn’t it?” he asked, trying to test her mental stability, as always. “Who’s strolling on the lawns today? Which spirits do you see?”

“I see Miss Rosamund weeping. I see the Gabriel hounds sniffing around the chimneys, their big feet pattering on the roof like hailstones. Sniffing, looking, searching. They’ll howl in the night, once they’ve scented prey. I’ll be snug in my own hearth corner when they howl.”

The Gabriel hounds. Her favorite theme when her mind was disturbed. He said, “Did you see the hounds when the Light Brigade charged? Did you hear them howling and racing across the field with the guns?”

“I wasn’t there, was I? I was back in hospital, waiting for the dying. But I heard them howling. Heathen, they were, those Russians, no better than the Turks. Bloody heathen, with nothing to lose, having no souls.”

“No souls? I thought the Turks went to Paradise if they died in battle?”

“Paradise? Pshaw! A place of pools and cool water, with dancing girls no better than they ought to be, and wine to soak the brain in forgetfulness? I don’t call that much of a reward for the faithful. Endless whoring and sinfulness, that’s what it means. But fit for hounds. They know no better!”

He said, “Who are the hounds of Gabriel here? At Tre-velyan Hall?”

“The same as the others,” she said, looking away from the Hall to study his face. “Heathen.”

“Protestant? Catholic?”

“Neither, and that’s the point, now, isn’t it? An unbaptized soul, with nothing but evil filling it. Darkness, not light.”

Rutledge thought for a long moment. Olivia and Anne were twins. Was Sadie trying to tell him that one of them hadn’t been properly baptized? That with two babies screaming bloody murder by the baptismal font, one had been baptized twice and the other not at all?

He said, “Was Olivia baptized? Was Anne?”

She looked at him as if he’d run mad. “Do you think Miss Rosamund would allow it otherwise? Of course they were. I was there, I watched the babes handed to the old rector one at a time. There was blue ribbon on Miss Olivia’s christening gown, and pale green on Miss Anne’s. To be sure ‘twas all done properly!”

Green ribbon… a christening gown? No, he couldn’t quite see that…

“Who burned some small personal belongings in a fire, just above the gardens? Beyond the headland, where the blaze couldn’t be seen from the village?”

“What fire?”

“Oh, come now!” Inspiration struck. “The rags you wanted, the rags that’d been promised to you by Miss Olivia. Someone used them instead to keep a fire going, because there were a number of things he-or she-wanted to burn well. A leather notebook. A leather picture frame with silver corners. A pile of letters, perhaps. Who was it who wanted such possessions destroyed?”

“It weren’t Mr. Cormac!” she said briskly. “Nor Miss Rachel. I’d have known. It could have been Mr. Nicholas. I don’t know why he’d go there in the dark to burn them, but I know it might have been him that did it, because of what I saw.”

“What did you see?” He kept his voice low, gentle. Curious, but not probing.

“I saw him with pails, going down to the sea to fill them with water. And then he set them up on the headland. Left them there. And walked back into the house with empty hands.”

Nicholas.

“Was this the night they died? Olivia and Nicholas?”

“No,’twas the night before. I was in the wood, looking for roots while the moon was near full. I watched him for a time because my back hurt, and it felt better to straighten it. So I stood there, and wondered what he was about. And then I knew.”

“Knew? Knew what?”

“He was putting water out for the hounds to drink. Because he knew they were coming.”

He felt a coldness between his shoulders. As if something evil had come up behind him and laid a hand on his back.

“Do the Gabriel hounds have a human face? Have you ever seen it?”

“I told you. Miss Olivia warned me to have naught to do with them!”

“Yes, I understand that. But Miss Olivia is dead. I think the hounds killed her. I think now she’d want you to be the one to tell me his name. Or how he looked. I think it’s time to make them pay for the harm they’ve done.”

She shook her head. “You can’t make the hounds pay for killing. It’s in their nature. It’s part of their blood. Like the Turks.”

“Was Mr. Nicholas baptized?”

“Aye, at the Hall, because he was sickly at first. Jaundice. And there was a storm coming that promised to be a bad one. Miss Rosamund said she’d not risk him driving in the carriage, nor in the drafty church. Truth to tell, he was better within the week, but she insisted, and the old rector came to the Hall.”

Did a baptism in the Hall count for less in her eyes than one in the church? She was leading him round in circles.

But Hamish, Highland bred, understood better what was being said, and rumbled with uneasiness beneath the surface of his mind.

“The face of the hounds. You said you could tell me, now that Miss Olivia is dead.” Rutledge added, “Safely dead.”

Her eyes were clouding over, and she said querulously,

“You said it, I didn’t.”

After a time he left her there, and walked back to the village. On impulse he stopped at the church. The heavy west door was locked, but the smaller one in the porch was not. He lifted the latch and walked inside. There was a chill in the place, the stone cold as death. He stood for a moment looking at the architecture, the style of the arches, the strength of the pillars, the tall nave that bowed before a shorter, older choir. It was a very fine church, but not distinguished. Its proportions made it fall just short of perfection. The carvings, unlike the angel in the churchyard, were heavier, earthier, more formidable and less delicate, like some of those he’d seen in Normandy.

He walked down the central aisle, looking back over his shoulder at the Victorian organ in the loft, then towards the stone altar that was rather handsomely carved, as if it had come from an old monastery. The choir was plain, the stalls of dark oak, and off to its left was an octagonal chapel dedicated to the Trevelyan family dead.

There was a knight in the far shadows, old and worn, and memorials set into the walls for the dead lying in the crypt below. A very beautiful marble sarcophagus, made for two, held the remains of Rosamund Trevelyan’s parents. Weeping figures at each corner, veiled and bent, must have been carved to represent earthly mourning. Above the tomb, where the arches entwined in perpendicular harmony, a cherub with a trumpet floated among voluptuous robes. To one side was a smaller tomb carved from what appeared to be a solid block of alabaster, with a delicate tracery of flowers and birds more like a wedding bower than a place of burial. A figure on the top was barely visible in its shroud, the body seeming to melt into the marble earth almost as it touched. But at the head, the shroud was opened to show a woman’s features with curling strands of hair escaping to frame them, as if holding back death. It was Rosamund, he realized as he looked down into her face.