“Rosamund had another home?”
“Yes, in Winchester, in the Close, actually. It was George Marlowe’s—he bought it himself. My own father inherited the family home, where he and George had grown up. George was the younger son, and chose the army.”
“And Nicholas had a house?”
“In Norfolk. I’ve been there, a very pretty place.”
“And so he could have left Trevelyan Hall, if he’d been unhappy here, and gone elsewhere to live. Or, assuming he married and didn’t want to bring his bride to the Hall, he could take her to his own home?”
They had reached the drive now, and Rachel turned away, looking towards the headland. “I don’t think Nicholas would have married and left here.”
“But if in fact he wished it, he could have.”
After a moment she said quietly, “Yes.”
Which might have given Olivia a motive for killing Nicholas?
He looked at Rachel, suddenly aware of something that he hadn’t felt in her before. “You were in love with Nicholas, weren’t you? Most of your life.”
“No! I was fond of him, but love ...” Her voice died away, and the lie with it.
“Did you ever love Peter?” Rutledge asked harshly, feeling the pain of a man he’d known, somehow mixed with his own. Peter deserved better!
She whirled on him. “What do you know about love! Yes, I loved Peter, he was wonderful, gentle and kind and I’ve missed him every day since he sailed for Africa!”
“But loving him isn’t the same as being in love with Nicholas, is it?”
“Don’t!” she cried, and ran up the steps to the door, fumbling to unlock it through her tears. “I won’t listen to this! Go away, I’ll take care of the ships myself! I don’t need you or anyone else!”
He came up behind her and quietly took the key from her. “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “I shouldn’t have said any of that to you.”
“But I brought you here, didn’t I?” she said as the door swung wide and the house seemed to be waiting for them. “It was a mistake, I see that now. Just go back to London and leave me alone!”
If Cormac had spent the night here, there was no sign of it. Rutledge made tea in the kitchen and brought it to Rachel in the small parlor that overlooked the sea. He had opened the drapes when he took her there, to alleviate some of the air of grief that the darkened rooms seemed to evoke. She was not crying now, but there was a bleakness in her face that made him feel guilty as hell. She took the cup with a nod, then began to sip it as if she needed it badly. He walked to the windows, his back to her, and looked out at the sea. As Nicholas had done every dawn since childhood, although Rutledge wasn’t aware of that. But Rachel was. She concentrated on the tea with fierce attention, but the tall figure of the man before her, no more than a silhouette, was like a knife in her heart.
Afterward they went up to the gallery. There were boxes she’d left in one of the bedrooms, and she fetched those while he went into the study, opened the cases, and brought out the finely wrought ship’s models. They were of such perfection that he could see the tiniest detail clearly, and he marveled at the patience and workmanship that had gone into them. But then the rector had spoken of Nicholas’ patience.
He gave her the first one, the Queen of the Sea, at the door of the room, and she took it the way a priest takes the host, with trembling fingers. He made a point not to look at her face, her eyes. She knelt and began to wrap it carefully in cotton batting, then just as carefully lowered it into a box filled with torn strips of newspaper. He went back for the next, and brought that to her as well. The Olympic. He remembered when she was launched, 1910. The sister ship of the ill-fortuned Titanic. There was also the German Deutschland and her sister, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. And the earliest of the great liners, the Sirius, handsomely afloat on a beautifully carved sea with dolphins at her bows. And the Acquitaine, launched in time to become a hospital ship in the Dardanelles. He wondered how many ghosts had followed her home to England. The Mauritania had served off Gallipoli, the sister ship of the Lusitania sunk by a German U-boat in 1915.
“Was it the ships or the sea that intrigued Nicholas Cheney?” he asked as the last of the liners went into her paper and batting slip. He hadn’t told Rachel how empty the cabinet looked without them, as if something that was alive in the room had been taken away.
“Both, I think. He told me once—when we were children—that he’d grow up to be a great sea captain. One of his ancestors was an admiral, on his mother’s side, and had fought at Trafalgar. I suppose that was what put the idea into his head. There was a small boat down on the strand that he used from time to time. Sometimes Olivia went out with him. Sometimes I did. He was a different man on the water. I—I don’t exactly how, but it was there.”
She closed the last box, and with his help taped the tops of the others as well, then together they carried them down to the hall. But at the stairs she stopped and looked back over her shoulder with such haunted eyes that he turned away and made a show of shifting the boxes in his arms. Hamish, in the back of his mind, stirred restlessly and ominously. He was sensitive to lost love—he’d died before returning to his own.
Rachel left before Rutledge did, and when he came out, shutting the door behind him, he found himself face to face with the old crone who’d given him the longer directions to the house on his first morning. She stared up at him and grinned. What had Rachel called her? He couldn’t remember.
“Ye found your way, I take it?”
“Both ways, actually.”
She cackled. “Is Miss Rachel still here?”
“No, she left some time ago.”
“And you’d not be knowing, would ye, of any old rags Miss Olivia was leaving for me? They’d not be in those boxes yonder in the hall?”
“No, Mrs. Ashford packed those this morning. She’s coming to fetch them in a cart later.”
“And none in the kitchen by the back door?”
“Not that I recall.”
She sighed. “I saw the devil yesterday, and wasn’t asking the likes of him for rags. But Miss Rachel’s a lady, she’d not turn me off.”