Rutledge smiled. She might seem sharp as a tack, but her mind wandered. “I’ll ask her when I see her next.”
The old woman leaned back and looked up at the house. “I was here the day Mr. Stephen fell.”
“You were what?”
“I was here,” she said irritably. “I’d helped Mrs. Trepol with the clothes she was taking for the church bazaar—bags of them, there were, and Miss Susannah asked if I’d like the rags. For my rugs.”
He looked at the gnarled hands. “You make rugs?”
“Are ye deaf, then, young as ye are?” she retorted tartly.
“Tell me about Mr. Stephen,” he suggested hastily.
“He was in the house, looking for something. Searching high and low. I don’t know what it twas, but he was in a taking over it. Said he’d find it or know the reason why. He shouted at Mrs. Trepol, asking her if she’d moved it. And she were near to crying, telling him she’d never touch his things. And then she was going out the back door, and I heard Mr. Stephen on the stairs, a racket, and him yelling ‘Damned foot!’ And I knew the Gabriel hounds were here again, riding high through the passages and down the stairs like the demons they are. I turned away, afeerd of ‘em.”
“What you heard was his fall, then? And he was alone?”
“Except for the hounds. They were baying at him, sharp and shrill and angry.”
“Did you say anything to Mrs. Trepol? Or anyone else?”
“There was naught to say! Outside Mrs. Trepol was marching along the path with her back stiff with hurt, and inside the family was crying out and making fuss enough without me. Mr. Cormac caught up with us, going for the doctor, but didn’t say what was amiss. I didn’t like the look on his face, I can tell you, cold and dark.”
“But you’re a healer,” he said. “Or so I’ve been told in the village. Didn’t you go to see if you could help Stephen FitzHugh?”
She gave him a look of disgust. “I heal, God willing, but I don’t raise the dead from their sleep!”
“But you couldn’t be sure—”
“I told ye, Londoner, that I’d heard the Gabriel hounds. That’s all I needed to know. They’re never wrong. I’ve heard ‘em afore, when there was death walking the land. In this house. In the woods. Wherever evil strays.”
She turned and walked off, hobbling on her stick, leaving him to Hamish, who was trying to force words into his mind. But what the hell were the Gabriel hounds she’d talked of, some family banshee?
“I’ve been trying to warn you,” Hamish said grimly, “what they were. The souls of unchristened children. A child who dies before he’s blessed by the church. Unshriven. Not wanted by God—nor by the devil.”
“I don’t believe a word of it—that’s Highland nonsense!” he said aloud before he could stop himself.
The old woman turned and looked at him. And silently crossed herself.
He felt his face flush.
In the bar after lunch was an elderly man in an old but fine suit and collars and cuffs that gleamed whitely in the dimness. Several people had clustered around his bench, talking quietly and nodding at whatever he said in response. A half dozen men stood around outside in the sunshine, playing keels, their shadows flicking across the dusty glass of the windows. Four other men sat around the hearth reliving the war. Two had lost limbs—an arm, a foot. Another wore an eye patch. Except for the women speaking with the doctor, it was a male enclave.
The barkeep said, “That’s the old doctor. The father-in-law of Dr. Hawkins. Penrith’s his name. Those that don’t hold with the new ways of Dr. Hawkins still come to speak to him. But his mind’s going these days. Shame, but there it is. Age catches us all, in the end.” The barkeep must have been as old if not older than Penrith.
Rutledge, looking across at the bearded doctor, smiled to himself at the comment, then went up the stairs two at a time to his room, to get the photographs Rachel had sent him. When the doctor was finally sitting there alone, Rutledge joined him and bought him beer before opening the subject of the Trevelyan family.
“Sorrowful history, the Trevelyans had,” Penrith said, tired old eyes looking up at Rutledge. “I saw them through most of it. And held their hands when they mourned. Old Adrian died in his bed, as he should, but not the others. Sad, sad, it was. I did what I could. Young Hawkins doesn’t understand about that, he’s not a village man. I was.”
Rutledge used his handkerchief to clear off a space, then took out the photographs and made a fan of them on the table. “What can you tell me about these people?” What light there was from the narrow windows fell across them, gently touching their faces.
“Ah—more secrets than I want to remember. That’s the gift of old age, Inspector. You begin to forget. And in for-getfulness is peace.”
“But I’d like to know their secrets. To satisfy myself that all’s well. That there was nothing done—now or before—that should have roused suspicion.”
The old man chuckled. “Suspicions? A doctor always has suspicions, he’s worse than the police. But sometimes there’s more compassion in silence than in words. When you can’t undo the harm that’s been done, sometimes you bury it with the dead. James Cheney killed himself, and I said it was an accident cleaning his guns. Why burden Rosamund with more grief than she already had? The boy was lost, there was no bringing either of them back. Father or son. And Olivia was in such a state that I thought she’d lose her reason, swearing she’d never let Richard out of her sight, except to look at a plover’s nest she’d found. And Nicholas saying that it was his fault, he hadn’t watched out for either of them when he’d known he ought to. And the servants crying, and no man about the place but Brian FitzHugh, to see to the burying.” “FitzHugh was there when Cheney died?” “Oh, aye, he was, he’d come and go—about the horses they raced, Miss Rosamund and her father. Winners, the lot of them. Good bloodlines. Like the Trevelyans. And now only Miss Susannah is left. And she’s more Irish than Cornish, if you don’t mind my saying it!”
“What do you know about Cormac FitzHugh?” “Nothing,” the old man said, finishing his beer. “He never needed me for any doctoring, not a splinter in the foot nor fall from a horse. When they sent him away to earn his own living, I was glad. Miss Olivia said one day she’d write some poems about him. I paid no heed to it then, I thought it was girlish foolishness, romantic nonsense.”
Rutledge stared at the watery eyes in the bearded face. Was the doctor trying to say that the love poems were written by Olivia to Cormac FitzHugh? That they had nothing to do with her half brother Stephen, whatever he’d tried to believe?
Tired from a restless night, Rutledge sat in a chair by his window and let himself drowse, He was just into that soft, floating ease between sleeping and waking when he heard sharp taps, a woman’s high heels, coming briskly up the stairs. And then sharper taps as she rapped on his door.
Jerked into wakefulness, he straightened his tie, ran a hand over his hair, and went to open the door. Rachel, he thought hazily, come to fetch her photographs.
But it was a tall, slim blond woman with angry eyes who stared up at him when the door swung wide.
“Inspector Rutledge?” she said crisply, looking him up and down.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m Rutledge.”
“I’d like to speak to you. In your room, if I may. The parlor is not private, this time of day.”
When he hesitated, she said, “I’m Susannah Hargrove. Stephen FitzHugh’s sister.”
He stood aside and let her come in, gesturing to the chair he’d drawn up to the window. He stayed where he was by the door, on his feet.
She ignored the chair. Instead she rounded on him like a battleship bringing her heavy guns to bear.