“Were he a soldier, d’ye think? Left to die in the thick of the battle, and then forgotten?” the boy asked hopefully.
Rutledge dug around in the disturbed earth with his pocket knife, looking for remnants of cloth, buttons, coins, or other debris that might have told a clearer tale. If they’d been here, they were gone now.
A man’s skeleton, not a child’s .. .
All the way back to Borcombe, the boy talked of nothing but the bones, and Rutledge was very glad to give him sixpence and see the last of him by the time they reached the road into the village. He was off then, racing to find his friends and make them envious of his good fortune in viewing the skeleton.
Rutledge ate his lunch alone, the books of poetry beside his plate. He’d tried to approach them in the order in which they’d been published. And he found one short, early poem about the moors. Reading it, he could hear Olivia’s response to the emptiness and the mystery of that barren land. “For here the spirit dies,” she’d written, “and that is more of hell than I can bear.”
And yet it was possible she’d consigned a small child to that same hell.
In the afternoon he went back to see Mrs. Trepol, whose reputation as a gardener was sworn to by three women he’d spoken with in the inn’s dining room.
She was working to straighten the storm-battered stalks of flowers, lupine and asters, marigolds and zinnias. Stakes and strips of old rag lay in the small bucket she carried with her, and in the back of the cottage wash hung on the line, blowing like signal flags.
Mrs. Trepol looked up, saw that he intended to come through the gate rather than pause for a few words outside it, and said, “Do you mind if I keep working, sir? These turn their heads to the sun soon enough, if they aren’t righted.”
“It’s about flowers that I came,” he told her as she reached for a tall golden head of marigold, its bruised leaves scenting the air.
“Aye, sir? And what flowers would you be wanting to know about?” she asked, over the mallet she was using to pound in a stake.
“Pansies.”
“Pansies? A spring flower, mostly. Hardy in the cold, not strong in the sun. Look over there, by the rhododendron.”
He did, and saw the straggling green stalks that flopped across the grass, the small faces lifted to stare at him.
“They’re twice that size in the spring,” she said, reaching for a length of cloth. “But they come back in the autumn, if all’s well. That’s why I put them in the shadow of the taller bush. A little protection.”
“Out on the moor, would they need protection?”
She stopped what she was doing to look at him. “They don’t grow often on the moors. Unless someone sows them there. And that makes no sense. A waste of good plants! But you might find a few at the edge of a wood. Gone wild, you see.”
Which was an interesting thought.
“Tell me,” he said slowly, working it out in his mind as he spoke, “do you know if Stephen FitzHugh ever considered becoming a Catholic? Did the family ever discuss his choice of faith?”
“Not that I know of, sir!” She seemed surprised. “Mr. Brian, now, he was brought up a Catholic, but the children never were. And he went to services with the family regularly, there was no fuss about it that I ever heard. He was a man who wanted to please, not one to set people at odds. But he loved Ireland, and he talked about the country often and often.”
“In what way? Was he a supporter of the Irish rebellions?”
“Oh, no, sir, not to my knowledge! Though he used to tease Miss Rosamund that it was a Trevelyan—not her own family, mind!—that refused to provide money for the victims of the potato famine, back in last century, so as they could emigrate to Canada or America. He had a bad name in Ireland, that one, and caused a great many deaths. Cruel, he was. I heard Mr. Brian say once that his coldheartedness killed as many people as Cromwell and William of Orange put together.”
“Cormac and Stephen never showed any interest in Irish politics? Sympathy for the rebels? For the suffering there?”
“No, sir, Mr. Stephen considered himself an Englishman— he said to me that he was going off to war because it was his duty to the King. And Mr. Stephen was one that always took duty seriously. Mr. Cormac, now, he was in the war too, but I never heard he went to France. Miss Olivia told me he was doing something secret, and I shouldn’t ask.” She smiled. “I never could picture him as a spy, sir! Sneaking about and telling lies. Mr. Stephen, now, he’d see all that as a game, like hide and seek. He were—more light-hearted. The kind of man who’d shrug it off and not be touched by it. But Mr. Cormac was always one to mind appearances. Not to the manor born, you might say.”
Cormac had spent his war breaking codes. Not as exciting as spying. And not as dangerous. But quite as important as shouldering a rifle.
He left her and went to walk through the wood between the village and the Hall, searching along the muddy path for pansies, then looking in small clearings, before giving it up. This was far too close to the village to risk bringing the body of a small boy and burying him. And Olivia hadn’t said anything about trees in her poem.
When he was called to the moors the second time, it was a man who came for him, and they trudged in silence to the place where a small cache of clothes had been found. The shreds were small and dirty and rotting with the damp of the earth, but a boy’s clothing. Short jacket—you could see how the collar lay, and one side seam. Short trousers—part of the waistband and a pocket, part of one leg. What might have been a shirt and underdrawers, mere threads of white that fell apart at the touch. The good wool of the jacket and trousers was tougher, and had lasted while the linen and the cotton had disintegrated. And someone had wrapped it all quite carefully in heavily oiled cloth, which had protected the fabric for a very long time. He couldn’t be sure of the colors. But there was enough of the cloth left to draw conclusions about the shape and general size of the outer garments, as he gingerly spread them out on the grass. Interestingly enough, there were no shoes ...
“Tregarth found them, sir,” Dawlish was saying. “He’s walked these moors man and boy for sixty years. Noticed the white stone wasn’t natural to the land around here, and was curious, like. He started digging, and what came to light looked odd. He called me and we laid the packet open enough to be sure what was inside, before sending for you.”
“Good man!” Rutledge said over his shoulder to the diffident farmer waiting close by. The grizzled head nodded, satisfaction in the sharp, weather-browned face.
Who had buried these articles deep under a bush and covered them with a flat white stone? And why? Or when? There was no way of knowing to whom they’d belonged but it was the first evidence Rutledge had discovered that proved the search mattered. Even Dawlish’s doubts were silenced.
Rutledge put the shreds of wool carefully into a brown sack someone offered him, and carried them back to Bor-combe with him, ordering the men to comb the vicinity again, until they could swear that there was nothing else to be found. And he promised them beer from The Three Bells with their dinner, if they did their work thoroughly.
He had already arranged to meet Rachel after dinner, while the light was still good, and walk over to the Hall to look for Olivia’s papers. It was not all that he had in mind for the evening, but it was an innocuous beginning.
15
Rachel was tense as they walked through the door of the Hall. “I miss the flowers,” she said, a trace of nervousness in her voice. “The Hall was always full of flowers. You could smell the beeswax polish, the scent of Rosamund’s perfume, and the flowers, whenever you walked through the door. Like a welcome. Now the air’s—I don’t know. Still. Dead ...”