Touché.
“Has murder been done? Now—or in the far past?”
“Not to my knowledge,” the rector said. “And I include the confessional in that answer. No one has confessed to me, and no gossip has reached me. The house has seen a good deal of sorrow in its time. But show me a house that hasn’t been touched by grief. Especially not with the war and the influenza epidemic. You’ll see the wounded for yourself. We were spared the sickness here—the worst of it, anyway. We lost only three souls to it. But even three is too many in a village this size.”
“Tell me if you will how a woman like Olivia Marlowe, who was reclusive and knew very little of the outside world, could write such poetry?”
He went back to his hoeing. “There’s a question only God can answer. But who says she knew very little of the world? I’ve read the poems. They speak to me of a frightening knowledge of the human condition. Of the human soul. And yet she never spoke of her writing to me. And I never asked her questions about it. Come to that, we only knew at the very end that she was O. A. Manning. It’d been kept a dark secret, even from her family. I’d say Nicholas knew, and that was it.”
“But if she had such understanding and such spirit, why keep it secret?”
“Well, Inspector, I take it you have no secrets—painful or otherwise—that you prefer to hide from the world? Not immoral secrets, not terrible secrets, perhaps, but those that wound your spirit?”
Which was too damned close for comfort. Rutledge began to reassess his earlier opinion of the priest. Hamish was murmuring viciously, rubbing salt into the fresh wound. But then it was always fresh ...
“Her paralysis, then?’
“She found it confining,” Smedley said pensively. “But never a cross to bear. What she feared most, I think, was to be judged on that account, and not on her work. You’ve read the literary magazines since the news broke, I suppose? Everyone scrambling to understand the woman, and not the verse. Delving into her life as if it held answers. Making an issue of her condition.”
“Was she ugly? Misshapen? Did she not know how to dress well? To do her hair? Talk to people? Is that what she ran away from, and buried in her genius?”
Mr. Smedley began to laugh before Rutledge finished his catalog. “I have a very poor opinion of the women you’ve known, Inspector, if that’s how you judge the fair sex! Even as a churchman I know better than that!”
“Then describe her to me,” Rutledge said irritably.
Smedley leaned on his hoe and looked op at the dormers of his house. “For one thing, her mother was beautiful. Rosamund. In Olivia, it came out in other ways. You found you couldn’t forget her, yet you couldn’t say why that was. She had lovely eyes, inherited from her father. I suppose her strength may have come from him as well, although Rosamund had great strength too. Transport Olivia to London, and except for the useless limb, she’d not be that much different from any young woman you found there. She’d have had more than her share of beaus, if the men in the city had half the sense they were born with! No, Olivia wasn’t ugly or misshapen. She dressed like any other countrywoman. No floating scarves, none of those shiny black gowns or exotic feathers. No literary pretensions at all. A warm manner, a pleasant nature, but never serene. Serenity had not been granted to her.” He shrugged. “Her hair, always one of her glories, was darker than Rosamund’s, that shade of brown that turns to gold in the sunlight. More like her father’s. George Marlowe was a very fine man. Rosamund adored him, and she was bereft when he died in India. She told me herself that they feared for her health, and sanity, for a time. Her courage saw her through. And her faith.”
Rutledge felt his confusion deepen. Did everyone see Olivia in a different light? And if they did, where was the real woman ?
“I was surprised when she took her life,” Smedley said after a moment. “Olivia. I wouldn’t have expected it of her. For Nicholas to follow her seemed—oddly—reasonable enough, I can’t tell you why, it just did. But for Olivia to die by her own hand—it shook me deeply. It was as if a bedrock from which I drew my own strength had suddenly been shaken to its roots and crumbled. I wept,” he said, as if that still surprised him and left him uncertain of himself. “I wept not only for myself and for her, but for what was lost, with her going. She was the most remarkable woman I’ve ever known. Or ever hope to know.”
“And Nicholas?”
“He was an enigma,” Smedley replied slowly. “In all the years I’d known him, I never really knew the man. He had great depths, great passion. A wonderful mind. We played chess and argued over the war and discussed politics. And I was never allowed behind the wall of his patience.”
When Rutledge didn’t respond, Smedley added almost to himself, “I don’t know that Nicholas wasn’t my greatest failure ...”
6
When Rutledge walked into the dark, narrow lobby of The Three Bells, the innkeeper handed him a small package that had been delivered earlier.
Rutledge took it through to the public bar, where he ordered a pint and when it came, sat staring at the package for another several minutes before opening it. Faces somehow lent reality to facts ...
There were photographs inside, as he’d expected. With a note: “Please, I’d like to have these back when you’ve finished with them.”
There was no signature, but he knew they’d come from Rachel Ashford. He tried to see Rachel and Peter together, to imagine Peter marrying her, and failed. Not because she wasn’t the sort of woman Peter could have loved, but because Peter as he remembered him in school must have been very different from the man who’d died on Kilimanjaro. Just as he, Rutledge, had changed out of all recognition from the boy who’d had so many fine dreams and plans for his future.
Taking the photographs out of their wrapping and spreading them out on his table, he looked at them, not sure what he was going to see, not certain he wanted to see them now.
There were several older ones. Rosamund Trevelyan at twenty—there were names and dates on the back—shining with youth and beauty and some inner peace. He looked at her more closely. Yes, there was strength as well, and a sense of laughter in her eyes. Anne and Olivia standing amid the roses in the back garden, so alike that there was a question mark on the reverse by their names. Two girls in lace-edged white dresses with long sashes and ribbons in their hair, smiling shyly for the camera. Pretty girls, with tumbling curls and the shape of Rosamund’s face if not her beauty. The same girls again, this time a little older, with a small boy and another child in a long dress. Nicholas and Richard. Nicholas was already tall for his age, dark unruly hair and dark eyes, although in the photograph you couldn’t tell if they were brown or dark blue. Another one, when Richard was five and Nicholas was seven or eight, on the moors with their family. Richard was now a boy with a wide, mischievous grin and gleeful eyes. A born troublemaker, some would say, ready for any game. Was that how he’d been lured away?
Nicholas, frowning at the camera, was intense, chin up, eyes defiant. But he was smiling in another photograph, with Olivia now—Anne would have been dead several years—and Rosamund, holding a pair of twins in her arms, all but invisible in swathes of christening robes. Susannah and Stephen. But Rosamund still seemed no more than a few months older than the girl she’d been at twenty, with a tilt of her head and a smile in her eyes that any man might respond to. Lovely, vivid with spirit. Olivia, on the other hand, was nearly in her shadow, a slim girl with long hair that curled around her face, Nicholas beside her with his arm protectively around her. Rut-ledge looked again at Olivia. This was the budding poet, this was the woman who had left her mark in words, and yet there was something about her, something in the shadows, that drew him back to her face, wishing it was larger, clearer. Unforgettable, the rector had said. But what?