Dawlish sat down and frowned earnestly at the cup in his hands. “Well, to tell the truth, I don’t see murder anywhere in this affair. Two suicides and an accident. That’s how it seemed to me. And to Inspector Harvey as well. There was no note with the suicides, but I was there, I saw the bodies, and you’d have a hard time, Inspector, setting up a murder to appear a suicide so fine as that. The bodies, the room, their faces. We don’t know why they decided to kill themselves, that’s right enough. But Miss Olivia Marlowe, she’d been a cripple and must have suffered something fierce from it. The housekeeper said she had many a bad night. And Mr. Nicholas Cheney, he’d done naught else but care for her all his life. Except for the war, of course—he was gassed at Ypres, and sent home. I suppose he felt there was nothing left to him if she went first. Too late, to his way of thinking, to start again. With his damaged lungs. Or maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to. Some people are like that, they’re content with what they know, however bad it is, and fear what they don’t know, however good it might turn out. He was young, younger than she was by four years, he could have married, had a family of his own. But I’m wandering from the facts—”
Rutledge shook his head. “No, no, I want to hear. You knew these people, after all. And you saw the bodies.”
Relieved that the gaunt man from London wasn’t pushing to have his own way, willy-nilly, Dawlish nodded. “Well,
then, I accepted what I saw for what it seemed. There was no reason to do otherwise, and you can’t make up a case for murder when there’s no cause, no evidence to base it on. So the family was notified, they came and buried their brother and sister. It was as simple as that. But then they were clearing out the house to ready it for the market—and it’s a handsome house, they’ll sell it easy, even out here in the middle of nowhere. There was money made on the war, and a lot of it wants to be
respectable
money now.” There was no bitterness in the quiet voice, and only a hint of irony that those who had done the fighting weren’t the ones who had made their fortunes from it.
“The house might bring in enough to kill for?”
“Possibly, though it’ll require a good deal of work to bring it up to being a showplace again. They’ll have to consider that in setting the price. And whatever they do get, it has to be split among the surviving family. It took more than a fortnight to clear out the house—just of personal belongings and the like. They’d all stayed to do that, except Mr. Cormac, who’d had to return to the City part of the time but was back that last weekend. At any rate, that last day when they were leaving, Mr. Stephen, the youngest, went head over heels down the stairs and broke his neck. But there was no one who could have been responsible for that, as far as we can tell. They were all outside at the time; he called out the window and said he was on his way down. And the next thing you knew, he’d fallen. Mr. Cormac went in to see what was keeping him, and set up a shout at once. No time to push him, no time to do more than find him, from what the others said. It’s a long sweep of stairs, the treads worn, and he went down with enough force to bruise the body. So he wasn’t dead to begin with and then just tossed over a banister. Besides, he’d called down, every one of them heard him.” He finished his first sandwich and reached for another. “Dr. Hawkins said he may have been hurrying, and with his bad foot—from the war—just missed his step. The others were that upset they’d been so impatient with him.”
“And they are? These others?”
“It’s a complicated family, sir. There’s Cormac FitzHugh, now, he’s very well thought of in the City. He was there. He’s Mr. Brian FitzHugh’s son, born in Ireland before Mr. Brian married Miss Rosamund. Miss Susannah was there, she’s twin sister to the man who fell. Miss Susannah and Mr. Stephen were Mr. Brian’s children by Miss Rosamund, you see. And Miss Susannah’s husband, Daniel Hargrove, was there. And of course Miss Rachel, she’s a cousin on the Marlowe side of the family. Miss Olivia’s cousin, to be exact. Miss Olivia’s father was a Marlowe. Miss Rosamund, Miss Olivia’s mother, was married three times, and had two children by each of her husbands. But they’re all gone now except for Miss Susannah. She’s the last of the lot. Marlowe, Cheney, or FitzHugh.”
“This Rosamund, the mother—and stepmother—of all these children—”
“Rosamund Trevelyan, sir, whose family has owned the Hall since time out of mind. Her father’s only child. A lovely lady, sir, quite a beauty in her day. There’s a fine portrait of her up at the house, if they haven’t taken it away yet. If ever a woman deserved to be happy, it was that one. But sorrow seemed to be her lot. Still, to her dying day, nobody ever heard a harsh word from her. At her services, the rector spoke of the ‘light within,’ and she had that.” He smiled wistfully. “So few people do.”
“She’s—in one way or another—the key to this family, then. And to the house.”
“Aye, that’s true enough. Miss Rachel, now, she was Miss Rosamund’s first husband’s niece. Captain Marlowe, that was, Olivia’s father. Miss Rachel has been in and out of the house all her life. Mr. Hargrove, Miss Susannah’s husband, first came here when he was going on twelve, I’d say. Miss Rosamund had a string of race horses, most of them Irish bred, and more than a few bought from the Hargrove stables. Fine animals, they were, won dozens of prizes. As a lad I won more than a bob or two betting on them myself.”
“Who inherited the house when Rosamund died?”
“The house belonged to old Adrian Trevelyan, like I said.
Miss Olivia’s grandfather. He left it to her, not her mother—no reflection on Miss Rosamund, you understand, but he wasn’t best pleased with her choice of third husband, and there’re some who say he left the house to Miss Olivia to keep it out of FitzHugh hands. Not to speak of the fact that Miss Olivia was a cripple and it was more likely that she’d have need of a home, unmarried and not apt to be. I doubt anyone in the family—and certainly no one in the village—knew she was to become a famous poet.”
“Poet? Olivia Marlowe?”
“Aye. O. A. Manning, she was known as. I’ve never read any of her poems. Well, not much in my line, poetry. But the wife has, and she tells me it was very pretty.”
Pretty
, thought Rutledge, was an understatement for O. A. Manning’s work. Haunting, lyrical, with undercurrents of dark humor at times, and subtle contrasts that caught people and emotions with such precision that lines stayed with you long afterward, like personal memories. She’d written about the war too, and he’d read some of those poems in the trenches, marveling that anyone could have captured so clearly what men felt out there in the bloody shambles of France. Could have found the courage to put it into words. He hadn’t known then that O. A. Manning was a woman.
But of course the
Wings of Fire
poems were different, and perhaps it was those that Dawlish’s wife knew. Love poems, and unlike the poems Shakespeare had written to his dark lady, these were light and warmth and beauty intermingled with such passion that they sang in the heart as you read them.
Wings of Fire
had touched him in a way that few things had.
Hamish growled, his voice a low rumble in the back of Rutledge’s mind. “Thought of your Jean, did you, as you read those lines? She’s no’ worthy of that kind of love! My Fiona was. She gave me the book before I took the troop train to London. They found it in my pocket, wet with my blood, when they dug out my corpse.”
Nearly choking on his tea, Rutledge coughed and said, “Leaving the suicides for the moment, none of the four at
the house that last day had anything to gain from killing Stephen FitzHugh?”
“As to Mr. Cormac FitzHugh, nothing. He has no rights in the house. Miss Rachel and Mr. and Mrs. Hargrove will receive a larger share of the sale now, but we looked into that. Their finances are in order, and there’s no reason to think they needed the extra money.”
“Where money’s concerned, people will do strange things. All right, I think you’ve told me all I need to hear for the moment. Where am I staying?”
“I’ve put you at The Three Bells, sir. Not far from the church. You can’t miss it.”
“Thank Mrs. Dawlish for the tea.” Rutledge collected the papers on the table and added a good night. It was raining again, and he dashed to his car, reaching it and climbing inside just as a wind-driven downpour swept over the headland and rattled against the picket fence like distant machine gun fire.
“Do ye think it was witchcraft that made yon woman write as she did?” Hamish asked, still intrigued with Olivia Marlowe. “She knew the war too well, man! It’s unnatural!”
“It wasn’t witchcraft, it was genius,” he answered before he could stop himself. It was a habit too hard to break, responding to Hamish.
Rutledge got out as the squall passed, started the engine, and drove too fast though the slanting rain. The inn came up before he expected it, and he nearly skidded as he came to a splashing stop in front of it. Beyond it he could see the spire of the church rising like a spear against the backdrop of storm clouds and wind-tossed trees.
“With your luck, you’d survive the car crash. And live in a chair for the rest of your days, with no one but me for company,” Hamish pointed out, and Rutledge swore.
The inn was small, sway-backed gray stone under a dark slate roof that seemed to be slowly pushing the whole building deeper into the earth from sheer weight. He was expected, and the landlord gave him a room overlooking a small cultivated enclosure in the back, more a tangle of overgrown
roses and rhododendron than anything that could be dignified by the name of “garden.” He unpacked with swift efficiency and in ten minutes was abed and asleep.
He was never afraid to sleep. Hamish couldn’t follow him there.
But Jean could.
In the darkness, hours later, the wind shifted, and the sea’s breath drifted in the half-open window, bringing with it the softness of summer. Rutledge stirred, turned over, and began to dream of the woman he’d loved—and who’d wanted no part of the shattered remnants of the man she’d promised to marry. Jean, who in her own way haunted him too.
She touched his arm, and led him down a path he remembered, and for a time he thought it was real, that she was there beside him, her hand warm in his, her laughter silvery in the stillness, her skirts brushing lightly against him, and nothing had changed…
Breakfast was hearty the next morning, the innkeeper inquisitive. Rutledge parried his questions and left after his second cup of coffee. Out on the street, he turned and looked at the sky, a habit drilled into him by war, when the direction of the wind could mean the difference between a gas attack and none. He thought it was going to be a fair, warmish day, in spite of the mists that twisted like wraiths around chimney tops and trees, and he decided to walk. There had been a set of keys in the folder Constable Dawlish had given him, and a sketchy map. It gave no indication of distances. A countryman’s map.
It was very early, and although a few people were already in their gardens getting a jump on the day, the streets were still quiet. A smallish village with only one main road coming in, passing the church, and running downhill between the shops to catch up again with the tiny River Bor close to where it met the sea. Houses jostled each other as they spilled down the valley, sometimes roof to porch or separated by lanes and rock gardens. A glimmer of water at the bottom of the road marked the sea, he thought, though it was just as likely to be the little river.
The ironmonger was busy setting out barrels and a plow or two, the sounds of children’s laughter floated from somewhere, and there was an elderly woman limping down the other side of the street. He crossed over and stopped her.
Closer to, she was truly a crone, bent with age, gray hair bundled into an untidy bun at the back of her neck, a black shawl that was so old it was nearly gray over her shoulders, and a gnarled cane that seemed to be no more than an extention of the gnarled hand that held it.
“Please—” he began, not wanting to startle her.
But she looked at him with sharp, watery eyes that seemed to see him—and through him.
“Stranger in Borcombe, are ye?” she demanded, looking him up and down. “If you’re wanting the constable, he’ll not be about for another twenty minutes at best.”
Startled, Rutledge said, “Actually—”
“You want directions, then?”
“To the Trevelyan house. Can you tell me how to find it?”
“Are ye a walker, lad?”
It had been years since anyone had called him
lad
. “Yes.”
“Ye’ll need to be. Follow this road for a mile, more or less. Ye’ll soon come to a parting of the way, and ye’ll take the right fork. Follow
that
as far as it goes, and ye’ll see a pair of gates and a drive leading uphill. When you come to the top, ye’ll have the way fine from there.”
As directions went—if they were correct—they were as clear as any he’d ever been given. The crone chuckled hoarsely. “I’ve lived here eighty year and more.”
It was as if she’d read his mind. Hamish stirred uneasily, and the woman’s glance seemed to sharpen. But she said nothing, limping on her way as if the conversation had come to a satisfactory conclusion. He watched her, and she seemed to know it. Old as she was, he thought, a woman feels a man’s eyes.
Hamish laughed. “You’ve no’ spent any time in the Highlands, man!” was all he said to that.
Rutledge set out, following the woman’s directions, along the narrow, hilly road he’d traveled the night before. Finding the fork between curving fields of late hay, he walked on past a cottage or two and small patches of farmed land, and beside a long sweep of rough pasture. Within half an hour, he had
reached the gates, dark with age and damp, leading through tall, wet stands of rhododendron backed by taller trees, into what seemed to be a sea of mist. But as he followed the rutted drive curling uphill, he came out into sunlight and brightness. And there at the end of a graceful sweep of lawn stood a house set in formal gardens, protected by the slope of the headland beyond.
It was an old house, the architectural history of four centuries locked in its embrace. Rutledge could trace a Tudor core, with Restoration, Georgian, and Victorian additions, but there was also an older, battlemented gateway near the stables that came from a dimmer past. The great palaces of the English nobility, Blenheim and Hatfield, Longleat and Chatsworth, spoke of power and money. This house whispered of longevity and old bloodlines. Of timelessness and pride and peace.
He stood there, looking across at it, imagining its past, and searching for a key to its owners. What he felt was…sadness? No, that wasn’t it, it was a stronger emotion, something about the place that tugged at him.
Hamish, on the other hand, didn’t find it to his liking. “There’s too many dead here,” he said uneasily. “And they don’t lie quietly in their graves!”
Rutledge chuckled. “I’d haunt the estate too, if it’d been mine. I wouldn’t go peacefully to the churchyard in the town. Not with that view.”
For beyond the headland he could see the sea, already in the clear and gleaming in the morning light, whitecaps dancing in the sun. There seemed to be a small strand where the land ran down to the sea. Then, turning to his right, he could see the distant roofs of Borcombe.
Damned if the old crone hadn’t sent him the longest way around! You could walk from the last house he could see in the village into a copse of trees, and out of them into Trevelyan land, in what? Ten minutes? Say, fifteen all the way to the house.
He unlocked the door with the key that Dawlish had given him and stepped into the wide front hall, where the curving
staircase swept down from a gallery above. The hall itself was old, with a massive stone hearth at one side, and great oak beams that were black with age and smoke encompassing the hall and the long gallery that ran at the top of the stairs.
It was here then that Stephen FitzHugh must have fallen to his death. Rutledge walked to the stairs and began to examine them carefully, the uneven treads, the dark oak of the banisters, the ornately carved balustrade. If you fell to the left from the top, he thought, considering the possibilities, you’d come straight down, avoiding the curve. If you slipped on the right, you’d glance off the curve, slowing your momentum certainly, but with force enough to do damage anyway. But no one had said in the Inquest which direction Stephen had been coming from, his left or his right along the gallery.
The report Rutledge had read over breakfast indicated that Stephen FitzHugh hit the balustrade somewhere at the curve, broke his neck, and rolled the rest of the way to the hall, either dead already or nearly so. The doctor had noted the imprint of the carving on the back of Stephen FitzHugh’s neck, just below the cracked vertebrae that had killed him. Hawkins had also included a description of the amputation of the foot that had made the dead man’s balance uncertain at best, and possibly in this situation, prevented him from recovering it quickly enough to save himself from a nasty fall. The man’s cane had been found at the curve, jammed into the balustrade on the opposite side of the stairs. An accident…it would be hard to quarrel with the Inquest’s results.
The house was cold, no fires lit with no one living here, and he kept his coat on as he walked through it slowly, carefully. A handsome home, not a baronial palace. The formal rooms—dining room, drawing room, a large library—were well furnished with heirlooms but looked as if they had not seen company for some time. Everything stood in its proper place, no magazines strewn about, no flowers in their tall vases, no sunlight pouring through open drapes, no dogs lolled on the hearth rugs. He remembered as a child being taken to a stately home, and a woman’s shrill echoing voice declaiming, “Here the family entertained three prime minis
ters, six members of the royal family, and the Queen, who was particularly fond of that blue silk chair.”
And he had twisted about, seaching in vain for them, until his father had told him to stand still and pay attention.
A back parlor, overlooking the gardens and the sea, and the kitchen quarters below, were more ordinary, as if people actually lived there, mussing up the carpet with their shoes, wearing out the upholstery with their bodies, reading the books on the low shelves. Or cooking at the big stove, washing up at the stone sink, sitting down to peel potatoes in one of the old brown wooden chairs.
He returned to the staircase. Generations had come down them, gone up them, and no one had worried about them. Until now. Hamish, stirring restlessly in the back of his mind, whispered, “I didna’ like this business. Leave the dead in their graves, man!”
Upstairs were the bedrooms. They were beautifully proportioned, with tall windows and handsome fireplaces. But old-fashioned now, as if no one had worried about the faded hangings and the worn carpets, preferring the familiar to the new.
He found the upstairs study where the suicides had occurred, thanks to the floor plan that Dawlish had sketched for him. It was a long room, windows looking out over the sea and over the gardens. A room of light and the warmth of the sun, neither a man’s nor a woman’s, but used, comfortable, ordinary. Nothing here to tell anyone where a famous poet worked, except perhaps for the typewriter sitting covered on a table by the seaward window. A guide would have to make do with the collection of books on either side of the table, set neatly on their shelves. “Here the poet found her inspiration among the works of…”
But did she? Who could know?
Nearby was another table, where someone had been carving. The hull of a great ship lay, white and unfinished, among the scraps and curls of wood. It was a scale model of an ocean liner, Rutledge thought, looking at it. And there were others in a long case beneath the garden windows, intricately fash
ioned miniatures. He recognized several of them—the
Olympia
, the
Sirius
, the
Lusitania
. Whose work were these? Nicholas Cheney’s? Had they been a hobby for its own sake or did they represent a love of the sea that had been repressed to this room?
He crossed the room to the couch against the wall, where the bodies of brother and sister had lain side by side in death, their hands touching as if for comfort as the darkness closed in. Why had they died?
“I don’t like it here, man,” Hamish said. “If you’re going to investigate a murder, get about it.”
“Murder sometimes has its roots in other places than the few feet of space where it happened. Still, why here? Why on that night?”
“Hello?”
A voice calling from the hall below startled him badly.
He walked out to the gallery at the top of the stairs and looked down. There was a woman at the foot of the stairs, the front door open behind her, and she was looking up anxiously, as if almost afraid of what might walk out of one of the rooms there to confront her.
“Inspector Rutledge,” he said, moving towards the steps. “I arrived last night and came to have a look around. Constable Dawlish provided me with keys.”
“Oh!” she said, smiling up at him with relief on her face. “I thought I heard voices when I walked in. I didn’t know who might have found their way in. The press has been very troublesome.”
She was slim, perhaps in her thirties—it was hard to tell—her oval face pink from walking, her light brown hair curling ridiculously around it, escaping from the knot at the back of her neck. Not pretty, yet very attractive. She waited until he had reached the hall and said, “I’m so glad they’ve finally sent someone from Scotland Yard. I’m Rachel Ashford. The one who’s been fighting to get these…deaths…reopened.”
“Lady Ashford?”
Her smile changed. “My husband is dead. His brother has
the title now. Sir Henry. Did
he
tell you that Lady Ashford wanted to reopen the investigation? How very like him!”
“You’re Peter Ashford’s widow?” Rutledge asked, surprised. “I was in school with him.”
“Peter died in the war. Trying to take Mount Kilimanjaro, out in Kenya.”
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.” So much for Bowles’ “titled old bitch.” But it was a shock, Peter’s death. Another name added to the long list of friends gone. More than once he’d felt the guilt of surviving. As if it was somehow obscenely selfish, when so many had died. After a moment, he made himself go on. “And you believe the investigations done by Inspector Harvey and Constable Dawlish were mishandled?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because—oh, because of intuition, I suppose.” She made a wry face at him. “And I can’t help but feel that coincidence can only be stretched so far. Three deaths in the same family in little more than a month? I—I
knew
Livia and Nicholas, they weren’t at all what the papers say, an invalid and her devoted keeper. It’s wrong, the notion that they could have killed themselves because of ill health!”
“I understood that Olivia Man—Marlowe—was crippled. And that Nicholas Cheney had been gassed in the war.”
“Well, yes,” she said defensively, “certainly that’s true, since you put it so baldly. Olivia lost the strength of one leg in childhood, from the crippling disease. She used a chair for a long time, then Nicholas carved a brace for her, and after that, she could move about as she pleased. It was wonderful! I can still hear her laughter when she first tried it—we were all outside her bedroom door, while Nanny put it on—and she began to laugh, and Nicholas was jumping up and down beside me, shouting encouragement, and Rosamund was crying, and Richard was pounding on the door, he was so beside himself with excitement…” Her voice faded and she looked up the stairs defensively, as if afraid she’d hear the children’s voices again. “If she killed herself,” Rachel continued after a moment, “it wasn’t because of her leg! She accepted it, she
lived with it, she’d come to terms with the pain—it wasn’t something that drove her to despair and suicide.”
The sunlight pouring through the open door failed to reach them or warm the vastness of the hall. But he could hear birds somewhere, singing.
“If she had wanted to kill herself—for whatever reason—” Rutledge said, “why would she allow Nicholas to join her in death? Why not see that he survived, and got on with life. However hard it might seem to be at first? Why not kill herself in her bedroom, with no one to see?”
She pressed her fingers to her eyes, as if they still hurt from crying. Or to hide them from him. “I’ve asked myself that a hundred—a thousand—times since then. They were very close, Olivia and Nicholas. I’d have said, if anyone had ever thought to ask me, that she would have jumped into the sea in the night, rather that let him die with her. It doesn’t mean that perhaps in the first shock he might not have
wished
to follow, but Nicholas had a cool head, a clear mind, he wasn’t the dramatic, overly emotional sort of man who could leap into the sea himself the next morning. When she was already dead.” Dropping her hands, she said painfully, “If you understand what I’m saying?”