Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

With the same care he’d exercised coming here he made his way out of the valley and back to the inn, returning the tool to its place in the car before going upstairs again to his room. Looking down at his shoes, he grimaced. The caked mud reminded him of the trenches. Taking them off, he set them outside his door for the boot boy.

Washing his hands well, then blotting the worst of the dew out of his trouser knees, he went back to his earlier task. The poems.

It was in some ways quite unnerving to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Like working out the obituaries of people he knew. But Olivia seldom failed him once he learned the technique of what she had tried to do. All the members of her family were here, cleverly disguised by the allegorical themes she’d chosen for each. Sometimes, like “Eve,” they were given biblical names, at others wrapped in Cornish legends, or cloaked in bits of well-known history-whatever fit her purpose, but always with such artistry that the mask itself had a life and drama of its own. He marveled again at such talent, and the tragedy of its loss. She had barely reached her prime…

Of course she wasn’t the first to use poetry as a vehicle for her own designs. Poets-Swift and Wordsworth were the first names he thought of-had employed their pens to mock political figures or make literary allusions to famous events or writers. Some employed satire and a vicious humor to bring down governments or ruin reputations and careers. But to his knowledge this was the first time one had grimly catalogued a murderer’s career.

“Bathsheba,” the faithful wife whose husband had been placed in the forefront of battle because King David desired her, had become Rosamund. Olivia described her as an unwitting pawn of a cruel and passionate man who wanted her at any price, and took from her the mainstay of her life, the kind and thoughtful husband who had filled her with happiness. James Cheney? Or Brian FitzHugh? Which had been killed because he was Rosamund’s husband?

No, Rutledge told himself, from the description it had to be Cheney, the kind and thoughtful man who’d replaced the dashing soldier.

The hidden depths of feeling in the lines, the understanding of love and lust, gave them a soaring beauty that worked at any level, but it was also a devastating portrait of a killer scheming to have what he wanted most, at any price.

He went on, skimming again, looking for something, missing it at first glance, then turning back again to see.

It was a short poem. Two men standing at the water’s edge argued over possession of the land that stretched out behind them, rich and fallow in the sun. Anger turned to blows, and one was killed. To that point the lines seemed to follow the death of Brian FitzHugh, and then it took an odd twist as the killer stared down at the bleeding body. “My hand it was that gave you this, Mine that takes it from you!” And the dying man answers, “Was it so-was it yours to give? I’m glad I never knew.”

Nicholas? Somehow Rutledge couldn’t quite see that parallel. What could Nicholas have given and taken away again from Brian FitzHugh? He reread the poem, and shook his head. Be patient, man! he told himself. Olivia knew the answer to that-she’d leave it for him somewhere if not here.

Hamish, in the back of his mind, was more or less agreeing with Harvey about women penning such lines. “A tormented soul-” he began.

“Yes. And a damned brave one,” Rutledge retorted.

Later there was a reference to a man passing through a wood, finding Death waiting for him there, and facing it with courage and disdain. Death struck, and laughed. The man managed to break away, but felt no sense of victory, only of postponement.

For Death could come again, and it was not what he desired…

Not yet, with so much of life in his grasp.

So much of life… and yet Nicholas had chosen suicide.

Rutledge was tired, his eyes burning, his head spinning from the effort he was making to follow the remarkable thread set out for him. To sort through Olivia’s allusions, to find the bedrock of accusation beneath. And yet he felt he was missing something. What was behind what Olivia was trying to tell him? She hadn’t written a great body of poetry just as a memorial to her family’s suffering. Or just as a record for any astute policeman who might stumble over the evidence she’d documented in it. It was a warning. A very public forum of denunciation, but to what end? She must have said. Somewhere…

Then where had he, Rutledge, gone astray? Surely it wasn’t just his own stubborn insistence on closure, surely Olivia would have wanted that too. Then why hadn’t he seen it? What didn’t he know about the Trevelyan family that might have guided him now?

Another poem to Rosamund was moving, a tribute that made his eyes sting with tears as it spoke of her life, her loves, her deep belief that she could find peace for herself and her family.

And the last line left him chilled.

“When he couldn’t have her, the hound of Hell destroyed her.”

They were all there. Anne, Richard, Rosamund, James, Brian. All of them. Except the last pair to die…

He went through the book again, searching. Finding nothing. And then he saw something unexpected. It was in a poem-on the surface-about Rome, and two small children suckled by a wolf. Romulus and Remus, who grew up to found a great city. Only this was not a city, this was a tower of the heart. He’s missed it, confused by the legend. Mistakenly taking the wolf literally, as an animal and not as a childhood nightmare of death and fear that drove two people to a strange and tender interdependence.

I have loved, and he has listened, both have given holy grace.

In his eyes I saw my soul, then found my life in his embrace…

Unexpected-and enlightening. If it was true, it explained so much.

But it was only half of the final answer. He was sure of it now.

It was well after three o’clock-he’d heard the church clock strike the hours since midnight, and felt time passing like a heavy burden. His mind was worn and his spirits had sunk like a stone, the earlier enthusiasm already attacked by doubt. Writers often used their own experience for inspiration. Was that all she’d done? Had he counted too much on her, wishing his own need into her words?

No, that was all wrong, all wrong. He just hadn’t learned to see it in the right way yet. With exhaustion nagging at him, caught in the tumult of his own depression and Hamish’s prodding, he’d failed her. Not the other way around.

He rubbed his eyes, then got up and washed his face in the cold water from the pitcher. The coffee was even colder, but he forced himself to drink it, and then stretching his shoulders as he’d done a thousand times on night watches in the war, he finally sat back down again. Giving up was defeat. And by God, he wasn’t going to face the shaving mirror in the morning with excuses and evasions. He’d start all over again, if he had to. At the beginning if that’s what it took to cudgel his wits into action.

“There’re still the papers,” Hamish reminded him. “If ye’re half the detective ye think ye are, you’d have found them by now.”

The finest moment in the final volume was “Lucifer,” the centerpiece of the book, a description of the great and glorious prince whose ambition reached too far. To Milton he’d been the archangel who had dared to envy God, finally to be disgraced and hurled, headlong and flaming, into the pit of Hell to reign over the damned.

To Olivia Marlowe, he’d been the dark angel of death.

Rutledge read the lines again, and this time the image created by the words took shape in his mind.

The dark angel. Beyond her power to control, beyond her power to condemn. Beyond her power, nearly, to understand.