Someone had been here before him, lifting the rocks in the center just as he’d done, loosening the soil. He should have realized that as soon as he touched the earth—it would have made sense if he’d had his wits about him.
Working carefully, winkling it and using his other hand to clear a little space here, a little there, he very soon had the long slender length of wood out of its hiding place.
A carving. No, something else, the sides were too smooth.
He let his fingers gently feel the thing in his hand. It was not old wood—he knew the texture of that. They’d used and reused whatever lumber came to hand in the trenches, scavenged for boardwalks to keep their feet dry above the filth, for shelter from the rain, for a place out of the hot sun or the cold wind. On the Somme the generals had forbidden even such simple, rough comforts, while the Germans had lived in tunnels they’d efficiently dug deep in the earth. No, this wood was hard and firm and new to the ground it had been buried in. Three sides were smooth as sanding could make them. The fourth had something cut into it. Deeply incised, and at midlength. Like a blind man he worked at the shapes, slowly letting his sense of touch and not his eyes tell him what was there. There was a flow to the shapes, but they were separate. Letters, then.
R, yes, most certainly an R. Then a space before the next. A. Next to that an E, he thought. No, he was wrong. H. And the very last, C.
He thought back to the photographs he’d been given by Rachel Marlowe, and the names on the reverse. Richard Allen Harris Cheney.
Nicholas had left his calling card. And not very long ago ...
21
Rutledge put everything back exactly as he’d found it, brushing the pansy leaves clean of any bits of earth, using his hands to smooth and press the disturbed earth. Then he got to his feet and thought about what he’d done, whether he’d left any task undone. Then he remembered the entrenching tool, and groped for that.
With the same care he’d exercised coming here he made his way out of the valley and back to the inn, returning the tool to its place in the car before going upstairs again to his room. Looking down at his shoes, he grimaced. The caked mud reminded him of the trenches. Taking them off, he set them outside his door for the boot boy.
Washing his hands well, then blotting the worst of the dew out of his trouser knees, he went back to his earlier task. The poems.
It was in some ways quite unnerving to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Like working out the obituaries of people he knew. But Olivia seldom failed him once he learned the technique of what she had tried to do. All the members of her family were here, cleverly disguised by the allegorical themes she’d chosen for each. Sometimes, like “Eve,” they were given biblical names, at others wrapped in Cornish legends, or cloaked in bits of well-known history—whatever fit her purpose, but always with such artistry that the mask itself had a life and drama of its own. He marveled again at such talent, and the tragedy of its loss. She had barely reached her prime .. .
Of course she wasn’t the first to use poetry as a vehicle for her own designs. Poets—Swift and Wordsworth were the first names he thought of—had employed their pens to mock political figures or make literary allusions to famous events or writers. Some employed satire and a vicious humor to bring down governments or ruin reputations and careers. But to his knowledge this was the first time one had grimly catalogued a murderer’s career.
“Bathsheba,” the faithful wife whose husband had been placed in the forefront of battle because King David desired her, had become Rosamund. Olivia described her as an unwitting pawn of a cruel and passionate man who wanted her at any price, and took from her the mainstay of her life, the kind and thoughtful husband who had filled her with happiness. James Cheney? Or Brian FitzHugh? Which had been killed because he was Rosamund’s husband?
No, Rutledge told himself, from the description it had to be Cheney, the kind and thoughtful man who’d replaced the dashing soldier.
The hidden depths of feeling in the lines, the understanding of love and lust, gave them a soaring beauty that worked at any level, but it was also a devastating portrait of a killer scheming to have what he wanted most, at any price.
He went on, skimming again, looking for something, missing it at first glance, then turning back again to see.
It was a short poem. Two men standing at the water’s edge argued over possession of the land that stretched out behind them, rich and fallow in the sun. Anger turned to blows, and one was killed. To that point the lines seemed to follow the death of Brian FitzHugh, and then it took an odd twist as the killer stared down at the bleeding body. “My hand it was that gave you this, Mine that takes it from you!” And the dying man answers, “Was it so—was it yours to give? I’m glad I never knew.”
Nicholas? Somehow Rutledge couldn’t quite see that parallel. What could Nicholas have given and taken away again from Brian FitzHugh? He reread the poem, and shook his head. Be patient, man! he told himself. Olivia knew the answer to that—she’d leave it for him somewhere if not here.
Hamish, in the back of his mind, was more or less agreeing with Harvey about women penning such lines. “A tormented soul—” he began.
“Yes. And a damned brave one,” Rutledge retorted.
Later there was a reference to a man passing through a wood, finding Death waiting for him there, and facing it with courage and disdain. Death struck, and laughed. The man managed to break away, but felt no sense of victory, only of postponement.
For Death could come again, and it was not what he
desired ...
Not yet, with so much of life in his grasp.
So much of life . .. and yet Nicholas had chosen suicide.
Rutledge was tired, his eyes burning, his head spinning from the effort he was making to follow the remarkable thread set out for him. To sort through Olivia’s allusions, to find the bedrock of accusation beneath. And yet he felt he was missing something. What was behind what Olivia was trying to tell him? She hadn’t written a great body of poetry just as a memorial to her family’s suffering. Or just as a record for any astute policeman who might stumble over the evidence she’d documented in it. It was a warning. A very public forum of denunciation, but to what end? She must have said. Somewhere . . .
Then where had he, Rutledge, gone astray? Surely it wasn’t just his own stubborn insistence on closure, surely Olivia would have wanted that too. Then why hadn’t he seen it? What didn’t he know about the Trevelyan family that might have guided him now?
Another poem to Rosamund was moving, a tribute that made his eyes sting with tears as it spoke of her life, her loves, her deep belief that she could find peace for herself and her family.
And the last line left him chilled.
“When he couldn’t have her, the hound of Hell destroyed her.”
They were all there. Anne, Richard, Rosamund, James, Brian. All of them. Except the last pair to die .. .
He went through the book again, searching. Finding nothing. And then he saw something unexpected. It was in a poem—on the surface—about Rome, and two small children suckled by a wolf. Romulus and Remus, who grew up to found a great city. Only this was not a city, this was a tower of the heart. He’s missed it, confused by the legend. Mistakenly taking the wolf literally, as an animal and not as a childhood nightmare of death and fear that drove two people to a strange and tender interdependence.
I have loved, and he has listened, both have given
holy grace.