Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

Rutledge was just beside the Trepol gate when the housekeeper stepped out her door and called to him.

“Inspector Rutledge?”

He opened the gate and went up the walk where he would be out of earshot of Rachel. If Mrs. Trepol had questions about the statement she’d given, it was better not to broadcast them.

When he reached her, she acknowledged him with a nod and then said, “You’ll be wanting me to clean up after all those feet tracking dirt into the hall and the drawing room?”

“It would be kind of you,” he said. “Yes, thank you.”

“Miss Rosamund would never have allowed it,” she said, resigned to what she must have considered little short of desecration. One did not invite half the village in to sit in a fine chair under the best portrait in the house, not in the age in which Mrs. Trepol or Rosamund Trevelyan had grown up and learned their respective places in Borcombe.

“I know,” he told her, “but sometimes the law must do what has to be done, and worry about the fitness of it afterward. I think she would have been glad to be a party to settling her family’s affairs.”

“Is that what you’re doing, sir?” Mrs. Trepol asked earnestly.

“It’s what I’m trying to do. To explain the deaths of Olivia Marlowe and Nicholas Cheney. To set it right.”

She nodded, as if she understood.

“Thank you, sir,” she said quietly. “I’d not like to think of them in pain and grief over what they did. A sad end to two lives, that was. I could never feel quite right about it, and I couldn’t see the purpose. We have to live the lives we’ve been given, there’s naught else for it. God doesn’t give us a choice. That’s what the church says. Suffering teaches in its own way.”

“Yes, sometimes,” he said, knowing how close he himself had come more than once to ending his own suffering.

She nodded again, and looked around her for her cat. Rut-ledge turned and started up the walk again.

Mrs. Trepol said, tentatively, “Sir?”

“Yes?” He only half turned back towards her, wanting to go on to the inn and read the statements.

“If you’re finished with us, well, sir, I was wondering if maybe you’d know what was best to do with them boxes Mr. Stephen gave me to hold for him. I kept expecting Mr. Chambers to come and fetch them, after Mr. Stephen died, but he hasn’t. Maybe he doesn’t want them any more, now that Mr. Stephen is dead? Just some old things, he told me, some treasures he wanted to keep for himself, memories of the family, he said. Nothing but a boy’s foolishness, he said, but he didn’t want them left behind in the empty house and he wasn’t ready to take them up to London with him, no room in the car with all those things Miss Susannah and the others wanted to carry away.”

Rutledge turned and looked at her in the late evening light, at the plain, earnest face that waited for him to do what was best.

“I thought of mentioning it to Miss Rachel, but they’re Mr. Stephen’s things, and I haven’t seen Miss Susannah by herself, only with Mr. Daniel there, and I didn’t know-I thought perhaps that wasn’t what Mr. Stephen would want. He’d said I was to keep the boxes for him, you see. Just for him, as a favor. And he was always a hard one to say no to, so I thought I’d just ask and you might tell me what was best. They’re not my things-I wouldn’t want to do anything wrong.”

He couldn’t turn to see if Rachel was still in her doorway. He couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t see him carrying boxes away.

Instead, he scooped up the cat that was coming through the open gate, and said, quietly, “Show me.”

Mrs. Trepol went indoors, and Rutledge, still carrying the cat, followed her. In a closet set in the hall between her bedroom and the kitchen there was a stack of boxes, three of them. To the other side two coats, a rack of gardening boots, and a line of old umbrellas crowded the narrow space.

Rutledge had already put down the squirming cat, and he stood there staring for a moment at the boxes. Then he lifted down the first of the three and opened it carefully. Mrs. Trepol turned away, as if afraid she might be trespassing if she looked at the contents.

He felt no such compunction.

The first box held Olivia’s notebooks of verse, annotated and revised, her record of creative thought, the process of making words do her bidding. He regarded the neat rows thoughtfully, not reading any of them but paying silent homage to them as his fingers gently touched their spines. The second box held contracts, letters, and bank records. He was amazed at how well good verse paid. The third was a collection of many things, photographs, a genealogy of the Trevel-yan family, personal letters, childhood scribbling that gradually foretold the growth of a formidable talent, and a number of books with her name in lovely script on the flyleaves.

Rutledge, trying to hide his disappointment and quell Hamish’s fierce litany of “I told you so!” prodded the contents again, as if expecting them to produce, by magic, the answers he wanted. Mrs. Trepol had gone into the kitchen to feed her cat, and he squatted on the wide floorboards, refusing to give up.

It wasn’t until then that he noticed that some of the contents, stacked as if in a file drawer, were higher than the others. Lifting them out gently, he found a slim journal under this batch, and took it out in its turn.

The hand was strong and clear, the writing of a woman who had used a pen most of her life and was at home with words.

Not a journal, a letter to her half brother. He skimmed it swiftly.

Dear Stephen,

There are some things you must know, and I shall not be here to tell them to you. I’m sorry about that, to leave you with these revelations when you are grieving for us. But I must arm you for what’s to come. I have done my best to protect you and Susannah. For one thing, 1 have left the house in such a way that it must be sold, and you’ve been aware for years that that was my wish as well as Nicholas’. For another, I have kept you in ignorance as long as I dared, and drawn the lightning myself all these years. By dying, I have set him free at last. And you will be safe now. You have nothing he wants. I have promised him that. But who can know what the future holds? Circumstances change, and I cannot foresee every possibility. The time may come when what I am writing down here is all you have. Whether you believe me or not, I pray you’ll trust me and for your own sake, keep the confidence I am sharing with you. Vengeance will only bring you and Susannah down into the pit. And my death will have been for nothing!

Let me tell you, then, about the murderer who has lived with us for all of your life and most of mine.

Rutledge stopped there and closed the journal, returning it to its resting place. Hamish for once was silenced, his voice if not his presence shut down in the face of truth. Rutledge felt his heart racing, his mind torn between triumph and depression. Triumphant that there was something more than lines of verse on which to base his case, and depressed that Olivia Marlowe had had to sacrifice herself to keep her younger half brother and sister alive. Had that been what drove her to suicide? A threat against Stephen: his life or yours?

Was that the bargain struck with Lucifer? Or only a part of it?

Mrs. Trepol stuck her head around the kitchen door and said, “Will you be taking them with you, sir? Mr. Stephen’s things?”

Rutledge got to his feet and began to stack the boxes into the closet again.

“Go on keeping them safe for now,” he told Mrs. Trepol. “Let them stay where they are. I’ll come for them myself before I leave. Sooner, if I can. And I wouldn’t bother either Miss Rachel or Miss Susannah about them now. They’ve got enough on their minds, I don’t want to worry them about Mr. Stephen at the moment.”