“You have a right to be here,” he said. “Why don’t you cut flowers and put them in vases yourself?”
“No. I was bequeathed a share in the Hall. That was the way they wanted it, Olivia and Nicholas. But I have no right here. No place here.” Her voice trailed off at the end.
“Let’s start with the upper floors and work our way down,” he said prosaically, before she could get cold feet altogether. “The attics?”
“This way,” she said, shaking off her gloomy spirits and leading him towards the stairs.
They made their way up to the attics, warmed by the sun, spared the wind, and still comfortable. There they began looking through trunks of gowns carefully wrapped in tissue paper, and suits of clothes and coats, moving aside rocking horses and doll’s houses, chairs and old bedsteads, cribs and perambulators, canes, odds and ends of lumber, and any number of boxes stored long ago and forgotten, the debris of generations. They found a stuffed fox, ratty with age, glass eyes gleaming in the lamps they’d brought with them, and a wardrobe full of hats that caught Rachel’s fancy.
“Look at these! I can’t believe it—they must be well over a hundred years old! The braid on these tricorns—I think it’s gold bullion! We used to play dress up, sometimes, and Nicholas had such a hat. What’s this? Yes, I see, it’s a bonnet with a tucked underbrim. Straight out of Jane Austen.” It was too small, but she perched it on her head, and made him laugh as she twirled the ribbons. Setting it back in its tissue nest, she turned to the next shelf. “My God! Ostrich plumes and bows, oh, and even a little temple set in among silk trees. Susannah would have adored this one. She was always trying on Rosamund’s hats.”
It took Rutledge fifteen minutes to distract her, and they moved on, to christening gowns and woolens, old linens and sets of dishes, riding boots and tables of every size, a child’s saddle—and nothing that remotely resembled a poet’s work.
Dusty and giggling, Rachel led the way to the next attics, which held more of the same, and when she began to cough from the dryness of the air, he suggested a cup of tea.
She agreed, and lamps in hand, they went down to the kitchen to make it. There was no cream, but Rachel found a lemon in the pantry. Then, leaving one lamp in the kitchen, Rutledge took the tray from her and carried it to the sitting room that overlooked the sea. The sun was low now, warming the room with its light, and Rachel went to sit in a chair from which she could watch it set.
It was very domestic, the pot of tea, the quiet of evening, the sense of peace and companionship. The setting he’d arranged, in a room where Rachel must have spent a great deal of her time with Nicholas. A room, unlike the study upstairs, that didn’t make her shiver with dread. As she sipped from the cup in her hand, relaxed and off her guard, he said, quietly, “Were you there when Anne fell out of the tree?”
“Yes, I told you that.”
“But you told me what you remembered. Time changed what you actually saw as it was happening. What the grownups said around you, the questions they asked you, it all influenced you. Would you do something for me? Would you close your eyes and let yourself go back to that afternoon, and see it again?”
She put down her cup, shaking her head. “No, I don’t want to go back! To that time or any other! I don’t want to play that kind of game!”
“You sent for me,” he reminded her. “You must have wanted answers of some kind. So far, I’ve got very little to show for the time I’ve spent here. But there’s evidence of a sort, and it points to Olivia. Not to Nicholas.”
She sat there, torn. He could read it in the tightening of her shoulders. Wanting him to go, wanting him to stay and prove that Nicholas had in fact loved her, though those weren’t the words she used even to herself. That his death had nothing to do with what he felt for her. It mattered. In a fashion that went deeper than conscious thought.
“I need to see that day through the eyes of someone who was there.”
“Ask Cormac!”
Before, she’d told him that she hadn’t thought Cormac was there ...
“But Cormac was an outsider. You weren’t. Cormac was the Irish latecomer, there on sufferance because his father had come with Rosamund’s horses. He hadn’t played all his life with the family, lived in the nursery with the other children, heard them quarrel and laugh and make up games. He hadn’t been part of their growing up, the way you’d been. He saw them as a stranger sees, superficially, the outward facade instead of the inner feelings.”
His voice was persuasive, his body very still in the shadows of the room, just out of her line of sight, the warmth of the sun’s slanting rays taking away any sense of danger or fear, the quiet absolute, except for the sound of her breathing. And the voice of Hamish, which she couldn’t hear.
He’d seen the doctors at the clinic use these same techniques. He’d seen them break through silences that were so deep even the men locked in them couldn’t find the key to them. Persuaded by quiet and serenity, and their own sense of need, such men would suddenly speak of events that would send them screaming into horror—and then complete breakdown—and finally, with luck, survival.
It hadn’t worked for him. Only drugs had broken down the walls he’d built so high and strong.
Hamish, realizing what he was up to now, roused and thundered at him not to take risks with this woman’s mind. “Ye’re no’ a doctor, you could do grave damage without knowing it!” But Rutledge couldn’t see any other way to learn the truth, and forced the voice in his own mind into rumbling, sullen stillness.
“I don’t know what there is to tell,” Rachel said. “It was an accident.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of, have you? Except for grief and the memory of someone you loved long ago.”
“I don’t know that I loved Anne—-” She stopped.
“Why not? She was your cousin.”
“She was bossy. Sometimes she made me feel very young, or very stupid. Awkward, somehow. When we played games, I was always the one who had to lose, and then she’d tease me about it.”
The cruelty of children. He could hear Smedley’s voice saying that.
“She wasn’t mean. She could be very loving, when she wanted to be. She was just ... arrogant. Like her grandmother, Nanny told me. Rosamund’s mother. But of course she was already dead, I never met her. So I couldn’t know if it was true or not. Anyway, for a child like me, Anne was very trying.”
“Whose idea was it to go to the orchard that day?”
“It was hot, we were tired of playing in the gardens, and the house was stuffy, even with the windows open. But in the orchard it was shady, the long grass was cool. In the trees, you felt cooler. I don’t know who thought of it first. I remember Nicholas telling Anne that she couldn’t climb as high as he could. And Anne had been pestering Olivia about being so slow, walking. Nicholas must have been trying to deflect her impatience.”
He could see, from the shadows of her lashes on her cheek, that she’d closed her eyes. Clouds on the horizon began to swallow the sun. It would be dark sooner than he’d thought. Would that matter? Still, he must not hurry ...
“But that wasn’t what you felt then, was it?”
“No, I was hoping she’d climb high enough to fall out—” She sat upright with a jolt. “No! I couldn’t have thought that! It must have been afterward, when she was climbing, and I was afraid she’d fall—”
Yet Rutledge thought she had felt that way at the time, and buried it deep. A child’s wish, because the bully was beyond her own reach. He waited a moment, then said gently, reassuringly, “I’m sure you wished her no harm.”