Rachel frowned. “Ah. You must mean Sadie. I’m not really sure what her last name is. She’s been here for so long that she’s just—Sadie. The old rector, Mr. Nelson, who’s gone now, said he thought she’d been a nurse in the Crimea, and it turned her mind. But she has a healer’s touch, it might be true enough. Midwife, confessor, horse doctor, comforter, prescriber of herbs. The villagers may go to her more often than to Dr. Hawkins.”
“Witch?”
She chuckled, a low husky laugh that was at odds with her personality as he’d come to know it. Sensual, almost, and yet full of an appreciation of the ridiculous. “I suppose she’s been called that too! No, if she’s a witch, it’s a white witch, not a black one. I’ve never heard of spells put on anyone or people dying under her care. Well, they die, yes, but of their ailments.”
“No love potions?”
“No, sadly not,” she said, a twist of pain in her voice that came out of nowhere. As if she sensed he’d heard it, she said, smiling, “I went to her once, begging a potion. I was madly in love, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I thought she might give me something to put in his soup or his breakfast porridge—we were too young for goblets of wine, but I grew up on the stories of Tristan and Isolde. I knew—thought I knew—that such potions worked. She was very gentle, but she told me that love couldn’t be bought.”
He thought she was belittling herself and what had actually happened, but said nothing. It occurred to him to ask her about Anne, but it was not the time. Then she mentioned the name herself.
“It was Anne who’d read the old Cornish legends to me. Her grandfather Trevelyan—Rosamund’s father—had compiled a collection of them, it was famous in its day, and there’s a letter in the house from Tennyson, telling him how much the book stirred his imagination while he was writing Idylls of the King. I could quote long passages from it by heart. Well, we all could. Nicholas, especially. You’d have thought, watching our theatricals, that he was the poet. He read so beautifully.”
“Tell me about Anne.”
“Anne? My goodness, there’s nothing to tell. Anne died when she was eight or nine. She was Olivia’s twin, and they were so much alike, to look at them, that you couldn’t believe it. But oddly enough they were quite different in natures. Anne was the sort of child who’d never met a stranger—she could cajole anyone into doing anything. Except Livia, of course! Stephen reminds—reminded—me of Anne, the same golden charm. Livia was, I don’t know, one of those people who lived in her imagination, and found it rich enough that she didn’t need other stimulation. She was quiet and thoughtful and very much her own woman, even in childhood.”
“How did Anne die?”
“She fell out of an apple tree in the old orchard. It isn’t there now, Rosamund had the orchard cut down, but it was beyond the back garden, sheltered by brick walls. We were all playing there, Nicholas and Olivia and Anne and I. And she reached too far for an apple, lost her balance, and came down on a root. I’d never seen a dead person before. I was terrified, out of my wits. I thought she was teasing, playing games with us.”
“Was Cormac there?”
Rachel frowned. “I don’t remember. He may have been. It was Nicholas I remember most, kneeling beside Anne, taking her hand, calling to her, crying because she wouldn’t answer him. And Olivia having trouble coming down from the tree. Because of her leg. This was before Nicholas had carved a brace, of course.”
“Anne fell? No one pushed her?”
She looked at him, surprised. “No, why should anyone push her? She was up in the tree, picking apples, and then she reached too far. We were all children, we would never have dreamed of such a thing!”
But children killed. It was something that he’d learned in London, his first year at the Yard.
They came out of the woods into a lane that joined the main street of the village, where houses clustered together under slate roofs that looked like quicksilver in the sun, lead in the rain. There were gardens behind every gate, crowded with vegetables and flaming with color.
Rachel stopped, “I go this way—I’m staying with a friend on the outskirts.” She shaded her eyes again with her hand, and said, “You didn’t mean that—about going back to London? You’ll stay and see what you can find? I’ll never persuade Henry to appeal for help again.”
He laughed. “Probably not.” Remembering the heat in London, the cramped little office, Bowles’ pretensions, and the squalid knifings that had somehow captured the imagination of the city, he found himself saying, “No, I’m not going back yet. I’ll be here for several more days.”
She left, reassured, and he turned towards The Three Bells. But noticing the shingle on the front of the doctor’s surgery, he opened the garden gate and went through to knock at the door.
A young woman with pretty strawberry blond hair opened the door and said, “Ah, you’re just in time, if you want to see the doctor. Five more minutes, and he’d have gone through to his luncheon.”
“Mrs. Hawkins?” he asked, guessing.
“Yes, and if you’ll just wait here a moment,” she answered, leading him into a small sitting room fitted out with bits and pieces of worn furnishings that had been relegated here from the rest of the house, “I’ll tell him you’re here. The name, please?”
Rutledge gave it to her, and she disappeared through the door beside him. A moment later she whisked back into the waiting room. “Dr. Hawkins will see you now.” She held the door wide, ready to shut it behind him.
Rutledge went through into the tidy, surprisingly bright surgery. “Dr. Hawkins?” he said to the short, thickset man behind the desk. He was not as young as his wife, but not much beyond thirty-five, he thought.
“Indeed, and what can I do for you this morning?” His eyes raked Rutledge, from crown to toe. Seeing more than Rutledge cared to have him see. “Having trouble sleeping, are you?”
“No, I’m having no trouble at all, as it happens,” Rutledge said stiffly. “I’m Inspector Rutledge, from Scotland Yard—”
“Oh, Lord, and what’s happened now!”
“It isn’t what is happening now that concerns me. I’ve been asked to look into the deaths of three of your patients, Stephen FitzHugh, Olivia Marlowe, and Nicholas Cheney.”
Hawkins stared at him, then threw his pen on the desk with such force that it bounced and nearly rolled off the edge. “Those deaths are history. Closed. The Inquest agreed with my first impressions and my considered opinion. An accident and a double suicide. Surely you’ve read the medical report?”
“I have, and it’s very thorough. All the same, there are questions I must ask. And that you are required to answer.”
“I know damned well what I’m required to do,” Hawkins said irritably. “And I’ve done it.” His eyes narrowed and he looked at Rutledge with sudden suspicion. “You aren’t planning to dig up the bodies, are you? That’s all I need right now!”
“In what way?”
“Look, I’ve been a good doctor here. I took over from my wife’s father, who’s nearly gaga now, war finished him, too much to do, too little energy to do it. I’ve built a decent practice, and I’m being considered for a partnership in Plymouth. I learned my craft in the war, doing things I’d never thought in school I’d be expected to do. Sew up the dying, send the living back to the Front, find a way to keep the shell-shock cases from being shot for cowardice—” he saw Rut-ledge flinch, and added with relish “—and even deliver forty-seven babies to refugees who had no place to sleep themselves, much less with infants to nurse! I’ve paid my dues, I’ve earned the right to move on to better things, and if my future partners get wind of the fact that three—three— of my cases are being exhumed, under Scotland Yard’s eager eye, I’ll be dead, stuck here forever. No chance at Plymouth, no hope of London in the end.”