Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [109]
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.
In his eyes I saw my soul, then found my life in his
embrace ...
Unexpected—and enlightening. If it was true, it explained so much.
But it was only half of the final answer. He was sure of it now.
It was well after three o’clock—he’d heard the church clock strike the hours since midnight, and felt time passing like a heavy burden. His mind was worn and his spirits had sunk like a stone, the earlier enthusiasm already attacked by doubt. Writers often used their own experience for inspiration. Was that all she’d done? Had he counted too much on her, wishing his own need into her words?
No, that was all wrong, all wrong. He just hadn’t learned to see it in the right way yet. With exhaustion nagging at him, caught in the tumult of his own depression and Hamish’s prodding, he’d failed her. Not the other way around.
He rubbed his eyes, then got up and washed his face in the cold water from the pitcher. The coffee was even colder, but he forced himself to drink it, and then stretching his shoulders as he’d done a thousand times on night watches in the war, he finally sat back down again. Giving up was defeat. And by God, he wasn’t going to face the shaving mirror in the morning with excuses and evasions. He’d start all over again, if he had to. At the beginning if that’s what it took to cudgel his wits into action.
“There’re still the papers,” Hamish reminded him. “If ye’re half the detective ye think ye are, you’d have found them by now.”
The finest moment in the final volume was “Lucifer,” the centerpiece of the book, a description of the great and glorious prince whose ambition reached too far. To Milton he’d been the archangel who had dared to envy God, finally to be disgraced and hurled, headlong and flaming, into the pit of Hell to reign over the damned.
To Olivia Marlowe, he’d been the dark angel of death.
Rutledge read the lines again, and this time the image created by the words took shape in his mind.
The dark angel. Beyond her power to control, beyond her power to condemn. Beyond her power, nearly, to understand.
But not an angel, not an allegory of Death. A man.
Clever, unemotional, his own law. Resolute, fearless. Without compassion. And immutable. However long it took, however dangerous it was, however destructive, he got what he desired.
A man who was neither good nor evil, merely unbound by the constraints of humanity or God. A glittering archangel, perhaps, but without a soul. And yet, like Lucifer, filled with envy and the need to possess what to him was omnipotence. Only, his heaven had been earthbound.
A Gabriel Hound, the old woman called him, heathen.
It was a chilling portrait, and it was the most truly devastating study of cold, hard ego, of a core of being without light or grace, that he’d ever seen.
By the time Rutledge had finished the poem the last time, he felt an exaltation in his blood that had nothing to do with poetry or Olivia Marlowe, and everything to do with the great courage of O. A. Manning.
He knew now the name and face of the Gabriel Hound. Proving it was going to be very dangerous. And Rachel would be brought to tears if he succeeded.
22
Rutledge found it hard to sleep, and Hamish, ever vigilant for an opening, was there in his mind, critical, disagreeing, ridiculing, citing all the objections to his arguments. Pointing out over and over again— “You havena’ found a why. You havena’ got the reason!