At the inn, Mr. Trask took his umbrella and greeted him with the news that he had a visitor waiting in the parlor. Rutledge went through into a long narrow room with a ceiling so low it seemed to brush his head. In the wave of claustrophobia that followed, he saw only the dark furnishings, the empty grate, and a tall man with white hair who rose from a chair and stood where he was, waiting for Rutledge to speak.
After a moment, he managed to say, “I’m Rutledge. I’m afraid I don’t know who you are.”
The man looked him over, then said, “Chambers. Thomas Chambers. I represent the Trevelyan family—”
Rutledge had him pegged. This was the lawyer who had courted Rosamund and almost won her. The family solicitor, handling the wills. Regarding him with new interest, he crossed the room to light the lamps on the chimney piece. Their glow, added to the one lamp already burning on the table, pushed back the darkness and the cavelike atmosphere of the room. Breathing more easily, he could concentrate on what Chambers was saying.
“—and I understand that you’ve come down to reconsider the circumstances of their deaths. I’d like to know why.”
Rutledge stood with his back to the cold hearth and said, “Because the Home Office wished to be sure that all was as it should be. Miss Marlowe—as O. A. Manning—is a person of some prominence.”
Chambers all but snorted in disbelief. “You may tell the locals that, and they’d be impressed. I’m not.”
“Suspicious, are you?” Rutledge asked.
“Of course I’m suspicious when Scotland Yard feels it needs to stick its nose into a death where I’m handling the estate.”
“Is there anything wrong with the wills? Any provisions that make you especially nervous?” He was deliberately misunderstanding the man, stripping him of his authority and aggressively taking charge of the meeting. Not out of personal animosity but as a tool.
Chambers stared at him. At the thinness, the gaunt face, the lines that had prematurely aged a much younger man than he’d guessed at in the beginning. And wasn’t above a little aggression of his own.
“In the war, were you?”
Rutledge nodded.
“Wounded?”
Rutledge hesitated, then said briefly, “Yes.”
“Thought as much! Stephen looked the same way when he came back. Shell of himself. Damned foot killed him in the end, too.”
Over Hamish’s rude comments about that, Rutledge recaptured the salient.
“What did you do in the war?”
“They wouldn’t take me,” Chambers said in disgust. “Too old, they told me. But I knew that part of France better than they did! My mother’s mother was from there. Stupid place to fight infantry battles, for God’s sake! No geographical advantage. No high ground. Prolonged deadlock, that’s what you’ll get, I told them. Enormous loss of life, I told them. No one will come out of it a winner. Americans tipped the balance, of course. And the tank. And still the best they could do was an Armistice!” Chambers realized suddenly that he’d mounted one of his hobby horses, and stopped, watching the advantage slip back to Rutledge. Then he grinned. ‘‘Over to you, I think.”
Rutledge found himself grinning back. He liked Chambers. He could also see what had attracted Rosamund FitzHugh to the man.
“Who sent for you?” Rutledge asked. “Susannah Hargrove?”
“Daniel Hargrove. He was worried, because his wife is in delicate health and this whole business was upsetting her. They tell me now she’s likely to bear twins, but that runs in the family, not surprising.”
They were still standing, Rutledge by the hearth, Chambers at the far end of the room, a position chosen to make Rutledge come to him, not the reverse. Rutledge said, impatiently, “Sit down, man!” He was aware of the smell of wool again, and with resignation ignored it. Hamish, perversely, did not.
After a moment, Chambers moved forward and took one of the chairs near the fireplace. The room was damp, chill, with an old coldness that seemed to come from the walls, seeping up from the earth that waited to consume the stone when it finally sank under its own weight.
Rutledge took the chair across from him, and said, “Actually, I’m glad you’ve come, I was considering traveling to Plymouth to find you.”
Surprised, Chambers said, “Not about the wills, I think?”
“In a way. I know that Olivia Marlowe made her half brother Stephen FitzHugh her literary executor. But then Stephen died soon after. And I haven’t been able to find her papers. Do you have them?”
“No, I understood that Stephen knew what was involved in that bequest and was prepared to deal with the responsibility himself. If Nicholas had survived, he’d have had that duty.”
“And if Stephen died?”
“Ah, now that’s a very good question. I think Susannah, Mrs. Hargrove. He didn’t specify her as literary executor, you understand. His will was made out while Olivia was still alive and it would have been presumptuous to consider that need. But he did leave everything else to her, and the courts will, I think, accept the inclusion of Olivia’s papers in his estate.”
“Not to Cormac FitzHugh, then?”
Chambers frowned. “No. There was some ... coolness between the two of them. Cormac and Olivia, I mean. She made it very clear to me at the time she drew up her will that she didn’t wish Cormac to be in any way responsible for her affairs. Stephen was still very young then, which is why I’d suggested an older and wiser man to handle the papers.”
“What was the cause of this coolness?”
“I never knew quite what it was, but Rosa—” his face flushed, and he quickly changed that to “—Mrs. FitzHugh told me once that even she didn’t know the reasons behind it.”
“You were well acquainted with Mrs. FitzHugh, I think?”
“Yes.” He looked down at his hands, turning a ring on his little finger. “I’d hoped to marry her,” he added reluctantly.
“Then she would have told you the reasons, if in fact she had known them? It wasn’t a polite lie to an outsider?”
“I think she would have been honest with me,” he said slowly. “Except at the end. She was very distressed. I begged her to tell me what was wrong, why she was upset. But she wouldn’t say. The doctor called it depression. It wasn’t that. Rosamund—Mrs. FitzHugh—was not the kind of woman who either felt sorry for herself or dwelt on the sadness of life. God knows, she’d had enough suffering, heartbreak, but she dealt with it with such courage—”
His voice broke off. Then he said, forcing it back to normal tones, “I never knew why she killed herself. It left me scarred. Not just her death, but the fact that she never turned to me in whatever anguish there was.”
Rutledge considered him. The thick white hair, still-black brows, the strong, almost attractive face. The squared shoulders and straight back. A good man to have beside you in the trenches when the next assault came, because you knew you could depend on him not to break .. .
Hamish said, unexpectedly, “But he’d protect her, wouldn’t he? He’d not give up her confidences to a stranger come to make trouble!”
Which was very true.
Rutledge changed tactics. “Who was the murderer in that house?”
For once, Chambers was completely off guard, completely vulnerable, his face stripped of the mask that the law and his years had fashioned for it.
But Rutledge had been right in his judgment as well. Stunned, speechless for an instant, still Chambers didn’t break.