“Except the name of the man she was in love with?”
Her mouth fell open. “And who was that likely to be, I ask you! She never had suitors coming to the Hall, and she went out so little. No man was likely to stumble over her in Plymouth or London and sweep her off her feet! Mr. Nicholas and Mr. Stephen, they were her brothers. And old Wilkins couldn’t light a fire in a grate!”
“Cormac FitzHugh wasn’t her brother. He wasn’t related to her or to her mother. A stepbrother by courtesy alone.”
Mrs. Trepol gave Rutledge an odd look. “What makes you think Miss Marlowe was fond of Mr. Cormac? Or he of her?”
“Because she wrote of love in one of her books of poetry, and no woman—no man for that matter—could have written of love with such emotion if he or she had no knowledge of it.”
Mrs. Trepol laughed. “Oh, there was love enough in that house to write a dozen books of poetry! Miss Rosamund loved her husbands and her children and her father with a deep and abiding feeling. Just living there, as I did as a young housemaid, you could wrap yourself in it. And Miss Olivia, she was very fond of Mr. Stephen; he could brighten her day just like his mother did. Mr. Nicholas used to tease her that she’d spoil him—Mr. Stephen—and Miss Olivia would say, ‘He was born to spoil and love. Some people are.’ “
Which told Rutledge that Mrs. Trepol had never read the Wings of Fire poems . . .
“Mr. Cormac FitzHugh used to live in the household. Miss Marlowe might have loved him once.”
“But he never loved her, sir! I’d swear to that on a Bible, if I had to. He was close to her, in an odd way, Mr. Cormac was, like he knew her better even than Mr. Nicholas did. But it wasn’t love between them. At least not on his part.”
Because Cormac FitzHugh had recognized Olivia Marlowe for what she was, a murderer?
“Do you think that Miss Marlowe was capable of killing anyone? Besides herself?”
“Killing anyone? Miss Marlowe? I’d sooner believe my own husband, God rest his soul, could do such a thing! Whatever put such a nasty idea into your head? Not anyone in Borcombe, I’d trust my life to that!” The indignation in her voice was very real.
“And you’d be willing to swear, in a court of law, that no one in the Hall—none of Miss Rosamund’s family—was capable of murder?”
She regarded him severely. “I don’t know what they are getting up to in London,” she said tersely, “to send you down here with such questions as that to ask decent, law-abiding folk, but I’ll tell you straight out, that if there was murder done in the Hall on the night that Miss Olivia and Mr. Nicholas died, it was a cruel and godless person that did it and he’s nobody we’ve ever seen in Borcombe or want to see. Now if there’re no more you want to ask me, I’ve plants in my garden that still need to be watered!”
Back in his room at The Three Bells, Rutledge sat in the chair by the window with the books of O. A. Manning’s poetry in front of him. But looking at the slim volumes, he found himself thinking instead about the poet. About the woman who had found such resources of understanding within her. And yet who had killed herself because her strength somehow came to an end.
Could a man or woman be so deeply aware of the mysteries of the human soul and yet be capable of such terrible crimes as the murder of children? Could she live with that knowledge of herself, and still create such beauty? Was that, finally, why she had killed herself? Assuming that Cormac FitzHugh had told Rutledge the truth . . .
How did you write poetry? How many words did you put on paper, and how often did you throw them away because they didn’t say what you heard in your spirit? How many poems went wrong, how many lines were flat and soulless, how many were trite and tired and empty? How many pages were crumpled up and tossed aside before a few unexpected words sang in your head, while you responded with blood and bone? How easy had it been—or how painfully arduous? How tiring or overwhelming?
He thought about the opening lines to one of the love poems.LoveComes on wings of fireThat sear the heart with longingAnd a white-hot heat.In its wake, no peace remains,Only the scars of a terrible lossThat mark the end of innocence.
How many times had she revised that until she was satisfied?
He’d been inside the study where she had worked and died.
It was amazingly tidy.
Where Nicholas had been carving his fleet of ocean liners, there were scraps and curls of wood, the fineness of sawdust from sanding, the small splashes of paint from finishing touches put to bow and portholes and the funnels. He hadn’t put them away, swept and dusted, before swallowing the laudanum. It was as if he’d expected to come back to them tomorrow.
But where the poet worked there was only the shawl-covered typewriter. No balled up sheets of paper, no pen or pencil lying where she’d scribbled a line to think about it, or tried a rhyme and found it weak. She had known she wasn’t going to sit there ever again and write. She’d prepared for her death.
His hand came down hard on the embossed leather cover, hard enough to sting the flesh as he swore aloud. Inventively.
Olivia Marlowe had bequeathed O. A. Manning—all her papers and letters and contracts—to her half brother Stephen. And Stephen was dead.
Where were these papers now? And what was in them?
9
But neither Rachel nor the rector could tell Rutledge what had become of Olivia Marlowe’s papers.
“I—I think Olivia’s will is still in probate. And Stephen’s as well,” Rachel said. “I really wasn’t interested in the papers. I mean, I was, in the sense that they were important for a study of Livia’s poems, but not in any personal sense. If you’re asking me if there was box sitting in the middle of a room, marked Papers for Stephen, or something, there wasn’t. I just assumed—well, if she’d left them to him, he must have known where to look for them.”
She was standing in the doorway of the cottage where she was staying, and Rutledge could hear someone moving about inside, and then a bird singing from a cage. It was a pretty place, with vines swallowing the narrow little porch and hollyhocks leaning against the walls between the windows.
“Which firm is handling the wills?”
“Chambers and Westcott for Olivia and for Nicholas. I don’t know about Stephen. He had a friend in the City who was a solicitor.”
It would be easy enough to find that out in London.
He thanked her and walked on to the rectory, expecting Smedley to be tending his garden, but the grim-faced housekeeper announced that he was having a nap and she wasn’t about to disturb him.
Rutledge was just turning away when Smedley came down the stairs into the hall, his hair standing up in the back and his shirttail on one side hanging out of his trousers.
“Good afternoon, Inspector,” he said, voice still thick with sleep. “Give me two minutes, and I’ll walk in the garden with you.”
Rutledge went around the back, walked along the tidy rows of vegetables and flowers, and was nearly to the small, scummy pond that had once held fish before Smedley stepped out the back door and came to join him. His hair was combed and his shirt neatly tucked into his trousers, his braces in place.
He cast a look at the sky, and said, “It has been a beautiful day. I hear you and Rachel took a boat out.”
Rutledge smiled. “We did. And lived to tell the tale, though she had some doubts in the beginning. Who was the gossip?”