It was very late, and Rutledge, unable to sleep, finally got up and dressed and let himself out of the inn in the darkness of a fading moon, his pockets filled with candles and matches from his room.
He tramped through the silent streets, where not even a dog roused up to bark at him, but there was an owl in the darker woods who spoke softly as he passed. Death omens, owls had been called, but he’d always found a strange comfort in their lonely sounds.
There was no light in the house, no indication that Cormac was in residence. Deep in his own thoughts and problems, Rutledge hadn’t considered that impediment. But somehow he knew that the house was empty the instant he put his hand on the latch and turned the key. Stepping inside and closing the door behind him, he fumbled for a candle and the matches. It flared brightly, startling him—in the trenches it could bring a sniper’s bullet in its wake—but he managed not to drop it. Hamish, grumbling with dislike, waited until he’d lighted the candle and said, “Try the library first. Not the study. She’d not keep them there.”
But Rutledge knew that the study was where he was heading, and he climbed the stairs slowly, quietly, to walk along the gallery and stop for a moment to listen to whispers that seemed to follow him. It was only the sea, and he recognized it at once, but a shiver passed through him all the same. He thought of Rachel and her ghosts. What was there in this house that had marked it so strongly?
He opened the study door and was surprised that the moonlight poured so intently through the room’s windows. No one had closed the curtains here, and he stopped to count back. Yes, there must have been a full moon on that Saturday night. Olivia and Nicholas could well have died in its light, for it would have poured through these windows like a silver sea.
Hamish, unsettled and arguing fiercely with Rutledge, blotted out the sounds of the waves coming in against the headland. But they were there, an undercurrent that somehow soothed. As if the vastness of the sea dwarfed human griefs and sorrows and pain.
Who had been the first to die? he wondered again, looking at the couch in the candle’s faint glow. The man or the woman? The killer or the victim? Or were they both—somehow—victims?
After a time he went over to the bookshelves by the typewriter and looked through the volumes there. Surely the others had had their own copies, they wouldn’t have needed to take hers?
The candle’s light moved along the shelves, stirred by his breath. And there on the spine of a slim dark blue book were letters that gleamed like molten gold: Wings of Fire. He pulled it out, then began his search again. A wine-dark volume, like blood in this shadowy corner, and written in silver: Lucifer. The one his sister Frances had said set London on its ear. Trust her to know what Society felt about the new, the different, the timely.
Soon afterward he found Light and Dark, then The Scent of Violets. And when he’d nearly given up, Shadows.
The candle was dripping hot wax on his fingers. He swore, collected his booty, and stood up. Something seemed to move in the darkness, and in its wake stirred a faint scent of sandalwood and roses. He froze, but it was only the silk shawl over Olivia Marlowe’s typewriter, disturbed by his movements, slipping softly off the cold metal and brushing his arm.
Laughing to himself at his own susceptibility, he who had lived among the dead in France, he pulled the shawl gently back into place and went out of the room, closing its door behind him.
The gallery was quiet and empty, the hall as well. There were no ghosts here. And yet—there was something that stirred Hamish into Scottish complaint again.
Ignoring him, Rutledge went down the stairs, blew out his candle, and opened the door into the soft darkness beyond.
Where something stood in the drive like a being out of hell and regarded him with a stillness that made Hamish yell out a warning.
Rutledge, accustomed to night forays into no man’s land where the danger was much more real and often silently swift, held his ground and said, “What is it you want?” But he could feel his heart thudding from the surprise.
The rector said, “It’s you, then, Inspector?”
“What the hell?”
Mr. Smedley lowered the blanket he’d thrown over his nightclothes and head and said, “I saw lights moving about in the Hall. I didn’t stop to dress, I came at once. I wanted to know who or what was walking about here! Was it you? Or are you here on the same errand? I’d been told that Mr. FitzHugh had decided not to stay at the Hall after all. I thought it was still quite empty!”
“I came for some books,” Rutledge said, hearing the defensive note in his own voice. “I thought they might help me in my understanding of the poet.”
“Ah, yes. The poems.” He sighed. “Come back to the rectory with me, man, and we’ll sit down like decent Christian folk, in good light.”
Rutledge chuckled, locked the door, and followed him down the drive. “You’re a brave man to come looking for intruders in an empty house,” he said, catching up.
“Pshaw!” Smedley answered. “I’m not afraid of anything the human mind can conceive! One recognizes the face of evil in my profession, just as you do in yours. But you’ll notice that I did not walk into the house, and I came armed.” From the folds of his blanket he produced a very businesslike heavy iron poker that gleamed darkly in the pale light of the moon.
“What happened to turning the other cheek?” Rutledge asked, amused.
Smedley laughed. The shadows of the copse fell over them. “It’s all very well in its place, you understand, but I don’t believe our Lord intended for us to turn the other cheek to criminals. After all, he threw the moneylenders out of the temple.”
“And you believed that there was a criminal in the Hall tonight?”
“I most certainly didn’t expect to find Scotland Yard creeping about the premises. But the house has much that’s valuable in it, and we have our share of tramps and good-for- naughts coming around. The saddest are the men who can’t find work and have too much pride to beg. We’ve done what we could as a parish, but I don’t think I could fault a man who was desperate enough to steal for his family’s table. Not to condone it, you perceive, but to understand what needs drive him.”
“You have an unusual Christian charity.”
“Well, I didn’t enter the Church for sake of my pocket, but because I have a hunger in my own soul.”
“And has it been satisfied?”
“Ah, yes. It has. Though I must admit that the perplexities have multiplied more than I’d expected. Find one answer, and open the door to a hundred more questions. Now, if you please, we’ll walk silently here. Old Mrs. Treleth has a small dog that takes great pleasure in keeping her neighbors awake, if he can pounce on the smallest noise as an excuse.”
They walked quietly out of the wood, down the lane to the main road, and then turned towards the church. Mrs. Treleth’s dog continued to slumber.
By the rectory gate, Rutledge said, “I’ve disturbed your sleep enough for one night, I’ll go along to the inn.”
“Indeed, I’m wide awake, and you’ll pay for it with your company!” Smedley said lightly. “Come along quietly, you’d not be any happier than I if we wake my housekeeper. She’s worse than the little dog, God forgive me!”
They made their way to his study with a minimum of noise, and the rector said, pulling his blanket more closely around him, “As I’m not dressed for the church, I feel no qualms about a wee dram of something—shall we say— strengthening? As a Devon man, may I offer you a cup of our finest cider?” There was a gleam in his eye.