"Wings of Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Todd Charles)

6

When Rutledge walked into the dark, narrow lobby of The Three Bells, the innkeeper handed him a small package that had been delivered earlier.

Rutledge took it through to the public bar, where he ordered a pint and when it came, sat staring at the package for another several minutes before opening it. Faces somehow lent reality to facts…

There were photographs inside, as he’d expected. With a note: “Please, I’d like to have these back when you’ve finished with them.”

There was no signature, but he knew they’d come from Rachel Ashford. He tried to see Rachel and Peter together, to imagine Peter marrying her, and failed. Not because she wasn’t the sort of woman Peter could have loved, but because Peter as he remembered him in school must have been very different from the man who’d died on Kilimanjaro. Just as he, Rutledge, had changed out of all recognition from the boy who’d had so many fine dreams and plans for his future.

Taking the photographs out of their wrapping and spreading them out on his table, he looked at them, not sure what he was going to see, not certain he wanted to see them now.

There were several older ones. Rosamund Trevelyan at twenty-there were names and dates on the back-shining with youth and beauty and some inner peace. He looked at her more closely. Yes, there was strength as well, and a sense of laughter in her eyes. Anne and Olivia standing amid the roses in the back garden, so alike that there was a question mark on the reverse by their names. Two girls in lace-edged white dresses with long sashes and ribbons in their hair, smiling shyly for the camera. Pretty girls, with tumbling curls and the shape of Rosamund’s face if not her beauty. The same girls again, this time a little older, with a small boy and another child in a long dress. Nicholas and Richard. Nicholas was already tall for his age, dark unruly hair and dark eyes, although in the photograph you couldn’t tell if they were brown or dark blue. Another one, when Richard was five and Nicholas was seven or eight, on the moors with their family. Richard was now a boy with a wide, mischievous grin and gleeful eyes. A born troublemaker, some would say, ready for any game. Was that how he’d been lured away?

Nicholas, frowning at the camera, was intense, chin up, eyes defiant. But he was smiling in another photograph, with Olivia now-Anne would have been dead several years-and Rosamund, holding a pair of twins in her arms, all but invisible in swathes of christening robes. Susannah and Stephen. But Rosamund still seemed no more than a few months older than the girl she’d been at twenty, with a tilt of her head and a smile in her eyes that any man might respond to. Lovely, vivid with spirit. Olivia, on the other hand, was nearly in her shadow, a slim girl with long hair that curled around her face, Nicholas beside her with his arm protectively around her. Rut-ledge looked again at Olivia. This was the budding poet, this was the woman who had left her mark in words, and yet there was something about her, something in the shadows, that drew him back to her face, wishing it was larger, clearer. Unforgettable, the rector had said. But what?

A man with Cormac on one side, and the twins, now walking, at his boots, holding on to his legs and grinning shyly at the camera. Brian FitzHugh, his elder son, and his children by Rosamund. Brian wasn’t handsome, and yet he had an attractiveness that came from his smile. Cormac, on the other hand, was remarkably handsome already, a slim boy with grace in the set of his shoulders, and strength in his eyes. Who knew himself, and felt no doubts about where he might be going. The twins were as fair and pretty as cherubs, with Rosamund’s beauty and only a faint shadow of their father, more in their sturdy build than in their features. Her liveliness in their faces.

The last two were of men. An older, bearded man, straight and broad-shouldered, beside a younger man in uniform. Captain Marlowe, Rosamund’s first husband, with her father, Adrian Trevelyan. Trevelyan wasn’t smiling, as most of his generation seldom smiled for the camera, but Marlowe had been laughing when this photograph was taken, catching him with its reflection in his eyes, and giving remarkable spirit to his face. Rutledge could understand why Rosamund had fallen in love with him. They must have been a handsome pair. The other man, tall, standing alone beside a horse, was James Cheney, Nicholas’ father, and Rutledge didn’t have to glance at the back of the photograph to identify him. His son was his image, darkly attractive and yet a quiet, introspective man.

Rutledge looked at the collection again, and thought of the faces. All dead now but two. Cormac and Susannah. One who belonged, and one who didn’t.

The elderly barkeep came over to ask if he’d like a refill for his glass, and looked down at the photographs, “The Trevelyans,” he said. “Aye, it were a grand family, that one. I remember the old master, not one to trifle with, but the fairest man I ever came across. Doted on his daughter-well, she were a beauty, and no question there, but a lady, and you recollected your manners around heri But one to say thank you and please, as if you’d done her a favor, not a service. Now that one-” a gnarled finger pointed to the Captain “- he died out in India of the cholera, and Mr. Trevelyan, he claimed he’d lost a son. And Miss Rosamund was so ill of grief, the doctor feared for her life. There were some saying she married Mr. Cheney hoping to forget, but there was love there as well. I saw them together, often, and there was love. But Mr. FitzHugh surprised us all, marrying Miss Rosamend. He wasn’t-he wasn’t Quality, like her. Irish gentry, he said, but who’s to know? Still, she was happy enough. And she doted on the twins. A good mother.”

“Two of her children died young.”

“Aye, they never found the little one. There was a tramp through here not many years back that reminded me of Richard Cheney. Same devil’s look in his eyes. That boy was afraid of naught, and tempted God and Satan with his antics. Ran away from home twice, nearly set the Hall on fire one Guy Fawkes Night, with a bonfire in the nursery. I was a groom at the Hall then, when they kept so many horses, and he’d beg to ride anything with four legs!”

Another customer walked into the bar, crutches still awkward under his armpits. A leg missing. The barkeep heard the uneven thump-thump, looked over his shoulder, and said, “Right with you, Will.” He turned back to Rutledge. “They say Miss Olivia wrote poetry, but I don’t know. Not in a woman’s line, is it? How’d she know about the war, then, and the suffering? Somebody’s got it all wrong.”

He went away to serve the other man, and then to speak to a pair of fishermen slumped in the corner benches, arguing dispiritedly over what had become of the pilchard runs that had once been Cornwall’s fishing wealth, and what to do about the outlanders from as far away as Yarmouth, their big boats overfishing Cornish seas. Rutledge was left looking down at the faces that stared unseeingly back at him. Remembering what the barman had said.

Was that the key? Was that why Nicholas had had to die too? Because he wrote the poetry that had made O. A. Manning famous?

Rutledge shook his head. It wasn’t what he wanted to believe.

The next morning, Rutledge kept his promise to Rachel Ash-ford and accompanied her back to the Hall. The sun was brilliant, blindingly bright at sea, and touching the land with colors that vibrated against the eye.

They walked through the copse again, coming out to stand for a moment looking up at the house. It was shimmering, like some mythical castle on a mythical hill, and Rachel said, “Odd, isn’t it? How very impressive the house is? And yet if you look at it architecturally, there must be a hundred homes in Cornwall alone that are as fine. Finer, even. This one is old and rambling and very small by most standards. But I love it with all my heart. Peter said-” she stopped, cleared her throat, and went on, “Peter said that it was in the stone, that sparkling quality. And the angle of the sun caught it sometimes.”

“Yes, that could be true,” Rutledge said. He’d thanked her for the photographs when she came to the inn, and promised to return them before he left Cornwall. But he hadn’t told her any of the thoughts that had rampaged through his head most of the night, until Hamish had clamored for peace. After that, he’d slept, but fitfully. It had seemed that he could hear the sea from his room, and the wash of the waves kept time with his heartbeats.

She looked at him. “You’ll be leaving soon. I can feel it. With nothing done about my problem.”

“I can’t find anything to keep me here,” he said. “Look, Rachel-” he realized he was using her given name, but somehow Mrs. Ashford was not how he thought of her “-there’s neither proof nor evidence to show that something’s wrong. I’m wasting the Yard’s time if I pretend there is.”

Rachel sighed. “Yes, I know.”

“Would you be happier if I did find something? That Olivia was a murderer? That Nicholas was? And as for Stephen, I can’t see that there’s anyone to kill him. If everyone is telling the truth and you were all outside at the time he fell.”

“You talk about Nicholas and Olivia,” she said harshly, walking on, “but not about the living. About me. About Susannah and Daniel. About Cormac.”

“You told me yourself that you couldn’t accept the possibility that they were murderers. Are you saying that you might have been the killer?”

“No, of course not! I-all right, if you want to know, Cormac came to see me last evening. He wants to buy the house. Out of guilt, he says. Because he can’t do what Stephen wanted and make it a museum, but in a way it stays in the family. A compromise. We get our money and he has a country home and Stephen is somehow pacified.”

“Pacified?” It was an odd choice of word.

“Yes, apparently Stephen had this silly notion that he’d been the inspiration for the Wings of Fire poems-the love poems-and Susannah said the museum was really to his glory, not Olivia’s. It was cruel, but she was furious with him for making such a silly fuss when everyone else had agreed on selling. That’s the point, you see, we’d always more or less expected the house would be sold when Olivia and Nicholas died. But Adrian Trevelyan had made certain, in his will, that Cormac couldn’t inherit the house. He left the house to Olivia, not Rosamund, to prevent it!”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Well, I was a child, inspector, but a child hears things, a child is sometimes very quiet in a corner, and the adults forget he-or she-is there. And they talk. And that child listens. Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything, sometimes it does. But I have a clear memory of Adrian speaking to Rosamund when James Cheney died. We’d just had the reading of his will, and so I knew what a will was. And Adrian said, “I won’t be here to see you wed again.’ And she said, ‘I don’t think it’s likely that I shall-I’ll never find another man like George Marlowe, and I won’t be as lucky as I was with James.’ And Adrian replied, ‘You’re young. You have a zest for living. You’ll take another husband, and I won’t be here. So I’m changing my will, my love, and taking the house from you. Do you mind if I give it to Olivia? I’ve loved her, and her father in her, since she was put into my arms as a newborn. I’d like to think of her here, moving through my house, loving it, after I’m gone. You’ve got the house George left you, and Nicholas will have James’. Olivia has no other home, may never have one.’ To my disappointment, eavesdropping, Rosamund asked for several days to think about it, and I never heard the outcome, until Adrian died and his will was read. I knew then what they’d decided, between them. That’s why Cormac’s suggestion… upset me. I couldn’t tell him what Adrian had said, could I? That house has always been a haven of warmth and love, and now we’re all quarrelling over what becomes of it, spoiling it! Every time I’m reminded of Stephen’s death, I remember that he died still angry with us for not doing what he’d asked of us.”

“Rosamund had another home?”

“Yes, in Winchester, in the Close, actually. It was George Marlowe’s-he bought it himself. My own father inherited the family home, where he and George had grown up. George was the younger son, and chose the army.”

“And Nicholas had a house?”

“In Norfolk. I’ve been there, a very pretty place.”

“And so he could have left Trevelyan Hall, if he’d been unhappy here, and gone elsewhere to live. Or, assuming he married and didn’t want to bring his bride to the Hall, he could take her to his own home?”

They had reached the drive now, and Rachel turned away, looking towards the headland. “I don’t think Nicholas would have married and left here.”

“But if in fact he wished it, he could have.”

After a moment she said quietly, “Yes.”

Which might have given Olivia a motive for killing Nicholas?

He looked at Rachel, suddenly aware of something that he hadn’t felt in her before. “You were in love with Nicholas, weren’t you? Most of your life.”

“No! I was fond of him, but love…” Her voice died away, and the lie with it.

“Did you ever love Peter?” Rutledge asked harshly, feeling the pain of a man he’d known, somehow mixed with his own. Peter deserved better!

She whirled on him. “What do you know about love! Yes, I loved Peter, he was wonderful, gentle and kind and I’ve missed him every day since he sailed for Africa!”

“But loving him isn’t the same as being in love with Nicholas, is it?”

“Don’t!” she cried, and ran up the steps to the door, fumbling to unlock it through her tears. “I won’t listen to this! Go away, I’ll take care of the ships myself! I don’t need you or anyone else!”

He came up behind her and quietly took the key from her. “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “I shouldn’t have said any of that to you.”

“But I brought you here, didn’t I?” she said as the door swung wide and the house seemed to be waiting for them. “It was a mistake, I see that now. Just go back to London and leave me alone!”

If Cormac had spent the night here, there was no sign of it. Rutledge made tea in the kitchen and brought it to Rachel in the small parlor that overlooked the sea. He had opened the drapes when he took her there, to alleviate some of the air of grief that the darkened rooms seemed to evoke. She was not crying now, but there was a bleakness in her face that made him feel guilty as hell. She took the cup with a nod, then began to sip it as if she needed it badly. He walked to the windows, his back to her, and looked out at the sea. As Nicholas had done every dawn since childhood, although Rutledge wasn’t aware of that. But Rachel was. She concentrated on the tea with fierce attention, but the tall figure of the man before her, no more than a silhouette, was like a knife in her heart.

Afterward they went up to the gallery. There were boxes she’d left in one of the bedrooms, and she fetched those while he went into the study, opened the cases, and brought out the finely wrought ship’s models. They were of such perfection that he could see the tiniest detail clearly, and he marveled at the patience and workmanship that had gone into them. But then the rector had spoken of Nicholas’ patience.

He gave her the first one, the Queen of the Sea, at the door of the room, and she took it the way a priest takes the host, with trembling fingers. He made a point not to look at her face, her eyes. She knelt and began to wrap it carefully in cotton batting, then just as carefully lowered it into a box filled with torn strips of newspaper. He went back for the next, and brought that to her as well. The Olympic. He remembered when she was launched, 1910. The sister ship of the ill-fortuned Titanic. There was also the German Deutschland and her sister, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. And the earliest of the great liners, the Sirius, handsomely afloat on a beautifully carved sea with dolphins at her bows. And the Acquitaine, launched in time to become a hospital ship in the Dardanelles. He wondered how many ghosts had followed her home to England. The Mauritania had served off Gallipoli, the sister ship of the Lusitania sunk by a German U-boat in 1915.

“Was it the ships or the sea that intrigued Nicholas Cheney?” he asked as the last of the liners went into her paper and batting slip. He hadn’t told Rachel how empty the cabinet looked without them, as if something that was alive in the room had been taken away.

“Both, I think. He told me once-when we were children-that he’d grow up to be a great sea captain. One of his ancestors was an admiral, on his mother’s side, and had fought at Trafalgar. I suppose that was what put the idea into his head. There was a small boat down on the strand that he used from time to time. Sometimes Olivia went out with him. Sometimes I did. He was a different man on the water. I-I don’t exactly how, but it was there.”

She closed the last box, and with his help taped the tops of the others as well, then together they carried them down to the hall. But at the stairs she stopped and looked back over her shoulder with such haunted eyes that he turned away and made a show of shifting the boxes in his arms. Hamish, in the back of his mind, stirred restlessly and ominously. He was sensitive to lost love-he’d died before returning to his own.

Rachel left before Rutledge did, and when he came out, shutting the door behind him, he found himself face to face with the old crone who’d given him the longer directions to the house on his first morning. She stared up at him and grinned. What had Rachel called her? He couldn’t remember.

“Ye found your way, I take it?”

“Both ways, actually.”

She cackled. “Is Miss Rachel still here?”

“No, she left some time ago.”

“And you’d not be knowing, would ye, of any old rags Miss Olivia was leaving for me? They’d not be in those boxes yonder in the hall?”

“No, Mrs. Ashford packed those this morning. She’s coming to fetch them in a cart later.”

“And none in the kitchen by the back door?”

“Not that I recall.”

She sighed. “I saw the devil yesterday, and wasn’t asking the likes of him for rags. But Miss Rachel’s a lady, she’d not turn me off.”

Rutledge smiled. She might seem sharp as a tack, but her mind wandered. “I’ll ask her when I see her next.”

The old woman leaned back and looked up at the house. “I was here the day Mr. Stephen fell.”

“You were what?”

“I was here,” she said irritably. “I’d helped Mrs. Trepol with the clothes she was taking for the church bazaar-bags of them, there were, and Miss Susannah asked if I’d like the rags. For my rugs.”

He looked at the gnarled hands. “You make rugs?”

“Are ye deaf, then, young as ye are?” she retorted tartly.

“Tell me about Mr. Stephen,” he suggested hastily.

“He was in the house, looking for something. Searching high and low. I don’t know what it twas, but he was in a taking over it. Said he’d find it or know the reason why. He shouted at Mrs. Trepol, asking her if she’d moved it. And she were near to crying, telling him she’d never touch his things. And then she was going out the back door, and I heard Mr. Stephen on the stairs, a racket, and him yelling ‘Damned foot!’ And I knew the Gabriel hounds were here again, riding high through the passages and down the stairs like the demons they are. I turned away, afeerd of ‘em.”

“What you heard was his fall, then? And he was alone?”

“Except for the hounds. They were baying at him, sharp and shrill and angry.”

“Did you say anything to Mrs. Trepol? Or anyone else?”

“There was naught to say! Outside Mrs. Trepol was marching along the path with her back stiff with hurt, and inside the family was crying out and making fuss enough without me. Mr. Cormac caught up with us, going for the doctor, but didn’t say what was amiss. I didn’t like the look on his face, I can tell you, cold and dark.”

“But you’re a healer,” he said. “Or so I’ve been told in the village. Didn’t you go to see if you could help Stephen FitzHugh?”

She gave him a look of disgust. “I heal, God willing, but I don’t raise the dead from their sleep!”

“But you couldn’t be sure-”

“I told ye, Londoner, that I’d heard the Gabriel hounds. That’s all I needed to know. They’re never wrong. I’ve heard ‘em afore, when there was death walking the land. In this house. In the woods. Wherever evil strays.”

She turned and walked off, hobbling on her stick, leaving him to Hamish, who was trying to force words into his mind. But what the hell were the Gabriel hounds she’d talked of, some family banshee?

“I’ve been trying to warn you,” Hamish said grimly, “what they were. The souls of unchristened children. A child who dies before he’s blessed by the church. Unshriven. Not wanted by God-nor by the devil.”

“I don’t believe a word of it-that’s Highland nonsense!” he said aloud before he could stop himself.

The old woman turned and looked at him. And silently crossed herself.

He felt his face flush.

In the bar after lunch was an elderly man in an old but fine suit and collars and cuffs that gleamed whitely in the dimness. Several people had clustered around his bench, talking quietly and nodding at whatever he said in response. A half dozen men stood around outside in the sunshine, playing keels, their shadows flicking across the dusty glass of the windows. Four other men sat around the hearth reliving the war. Two had lost limbs-an arm, a foot. Another wore an eye patch. Except for the women speaking with the doctor, it was a male enclave.

The barkeep said, “That’s the old doctor. The father-in-law of Dr. Hawkins. Penrith’s his name. Those that don’t hold with the new ways of Dr. Hawkins still come to speak to him. But his mind’s going these days. Shame, but there it is. Age catches us all, in the end.” The barkeep must have been as old if not older than Penrith.

Rutledge, looking across at the bearded doctor, smiled to himself at the comment, then went up the stairs two at a time to his room, to get the photographs Rachel had sent him. When the doctor was finally sitting there alone, Rutledge joined him and bought him beer before opening the subject of the Trevelyan family.

“Sorrowful history, the Trevelyans had,” Penrith said, tired old eyes looking up at Rutledge. “I saw them through most of it. And held their hands when they mourned. Old Adrian died in his bed, as he should, but not the others. Sad, sad, it was. I did what I could. Young Hawkins doesn’t understand about that, he’s not a village man. I was.”

Rutledge used his handkerchief to clear off a space, then took out the photographs and made a fan of them on the table. “What can you tell me about these people?” What light there was from the narrow windows fell across them, gently touching their faces.

“Ah-more secrets than I want to remember. That’s the gift of old age, Inspector. You begin to forget. And in for-getfulness is peace.”

“But I’d like to know their secrets. To satisfy myself that all’s well. That there was nothing done-now or before-that should have roused suspicion.”

The old man chuckled. “Suspicions? A doctor always has suspicions, he’s worse than the police. But sometimes there’s more compassion in silence than in words. When you can’t undo the harm that’s been done, sometimes you bury it with the dead. James Cheney killed himself, and I said it was an accident cleaning his guns. Why burden Rosamund with more grief than she already had? The boy was lost, there was no bringing either of them back. Father or son. And Olivia was in such a state that I thought she’d lose her reason, swearing she’d never let Richard out of her sight, except to look at a plover’s nest she’d found. And Nicholas saying that it was his fault, he hadn’t watched out for either of them when he’d known he ought to. And the servants crying, and no man about the place but Brian FitzHugh, to see to the burying.” “FitzHugh was there when Cheney died?” “Oh, aye, he was, he’d come and go-about the horses they raced, Miss Rosamund and her father. Winners, the lot of them. Good bloodlines. Like the Trevelyans. And now only Miss Susannah is left. And she’s more Irish than Cornish, if you don’t mind my saying it!”

“What do you know about Cormac FitzHugh?” “Nothing,” the old man said, finishing his beer. “He never needed me for any doctoring, not a splinter in the foot nor fall from a horse. When they sent him away to earn his own living, I was glad. Miss Olivia said one day she’d write some poems about him. I paid no heed to it then, I thought it was girlish foolishness, romantic nonsense.”

Rutledge stared at the watery eyes in the bearded face. Was the doctor trying to say that the love poems were written by Olivia to Cormac FitzHugh? That they had nothing to do with her half brother Stephen, whatever he’d tried to believe?

Tired from a restless night, Rutledge sat in a chair by his window and let himself drowse, He was just into that soft, floating ease between sleeping and waking when he heard sharp taps, a woman’s high heels, coming briskly up the stairs. And then sharper taps as she rapped on his door.

Jerked into wakefulness, he straightened his tie, ran a hand over his hair, and went to open the door. Rachel, he thought hazily, come to fetch her photographs.

But it was a tall, slim blond woman with angry eyes who stared up at him when the door swung wide.

“Inspector Rutledge?” she said crisply, looking him up and down.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m Rutledge.”

“I’d like to speak to you. In your room, if I may. The parlor is not private, this time of day.”

When he hesitated, she said, “I’m Susannah Hargrove. Stephen FitzHugh’s sister.”

He stood aside and let her come in, gesturing to the chair he’d drawn up to the window. He stayed where he was by the door, on his feet.

She ignored the chair. Instead she rounded on him like a battleship bringing her heavy guns to bear.

“My brother Cormac telephoned to my husband’s office in London and left a message that you’re here to reopen the matter of my family’s recent losses. His secretary passed it along. Is that true? Or did she get it wrong?”

“I’m afraid it is true,” he said gravely. “Which is not to say that Scotland Yard won’t come to the same conclusions in all three deaths.”

“Yes, I’m sure it will-too late. Too late for us! The family, I mean. We’ll be dragged through the newspapers, our dirty linen hung out for all to goggle at, and then, when you are quite satisfied, you’ll beg our pardon and take the train back to London as if nothing had happened! It’s bad enough, Inspector, to have to smile at people who know very well two members of your family killed themselves. If the police start whispers of murder, we’ll all be disgraced. I’m expecting a child in the late autumn. I won’t have it brought into the world in the midst of a nasty police matter!”

He fought back a smile at her vehemence, and said only, “I’ve said nothing about murder. To you or to your half brother.”

“Why else would Scotland Yard give a-a damn about some obscure village matters, if there weren’t suspicions on somebody’s part? Is it because Olivia was famous? Is that why you’re here to bedevil us?” Tears overlaid the anger in her eyes, but she held them back, fighting hard.

When he didn’t immediately answer, she turned her back on him and stared out the window. “I knew that was what it must be. I told Daniel it could be nothing else! Why did Olivia have to do something so-so selfish! If she wanted to end it all, why did she have to leave shadows on the house- on us! I grew up there too, I don’t deserve to have my memories, my very childhood, turned into something hostile and empty and grotesque! And if you have your way, we won’t even be able to sell the house and be rid of it!” She whirled around and stared at him. “I hate that house now! I want it sold and all of the past ripped out of it by new owners who don’t know-don’t care-who we were!” She swallowed hard, then the tears came. “Who will buy it,” she demanded huskily, “if there was murder as well as suicide there. We’ll have it hung around our necks, like our sins, for the rest of our lives.”

He pulled out his handkerchief and held it out to her, but she ignored it, fumbling in her handbag for one of her own. “I’ve just lost my brother,” she said brokenly. “And now this! And the doctor said I wasn’t to be upset.”

“If you don’t believe murder has been done, why should you hate the house so much?” he asked, in an attempt to distract her. “What has it done-what has been done there- to distress you?”

She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “It isn’t what was done, it’s what’s been lost. Rosamund-my mother-held such light in her hands, and the house-all of us-were touched by it. And then she died, and it was all changed, all different, all-I don’t know! Dark and dreary and full of Olivia’s obsessions!”

“Obsessions about what?”

“How should I know? Olivia was a woman who lived in her thoughts, in her feelings. I’m not like that, I feel, I cry, I laugh. She was silent. I didn’t-I couldn’t understand her. It’s-unnatural-in a woman to write as she did. I still don’t think of her as that poet. I think somehow they must have got it all wrong!”

“Do you believe Nicholas Cheney could have written those poems?”

She stared at him, tears drying on her lashes. “ Nicholas? I-it hadn’t occurred to me-to any of us! Do you think it was Nicholas? Truly?”

He said carefully, “I don’t know enough about your family to offer that as a possibility. I’m just answering your question about Olivia Marlowe.”

Her face fell. “Oh.”

“Do you know why Nicholas and Olivia killed themselves?”

Susannah shook her head. “I’ve lain awake at night, wondering why anyone could do such a thing. I was her sister- half sister-but she never said a word to me about her feelings-about despair, desperation. You’d have thought… but she didn’t! And Nicholas-it’s like a betrayal-to go off like that and leave me alone just before Stephen died! Mother betrayed me too-I’ve always suspected, feared, down deep inside that she killed herself too!”

Pain welled in her eyes, deep and terrifying. “What’s wrong with my family? I’m the only one left now-not counting Cormac. One day will something awful happen to me, will I leave this child without a mother, and without anyone of its own to love? Cormac was that way-alone. He never had any one else. However beautiful he is, Cormac is terribly alone, and I don’t want my child to grow up in that kind of world!”