Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [13]
Closer to, she was truly a crone, bent with age, gray hair bundled into an untidy bun at the back of her neck, a black shawl that was so old it was nearly gray over her shoulders, and a gnarled cane that seemed to be no more than an exten-tion of the gnarled hand that held it.
“Please—” he began, not wanting to startle her.
But she looked at him with sharp, watery eyes that seemed to see him—and through him.
“Stranger in Borcombe, are ye?” she demanded, looking him up and down. “If you’re wanting the constable, he’ll not be about for another twenty minutes at best.”
Startled, Rutledge said, “Actually—”
“You want directions, then?”
“To the Trevelyan house. Can you tell me how to find it?”
“Are ye a walker, lad?”
It had been years since anyone had called him lad. “Yes.”
“Ye’ll need to be. Follow this road for a mile, more or less. Ye’ll soon come to a parting of the way, and ye’ll take the right fork. Follow that as far as it goes, and ye’ll see a pair of gates and a drive leading uphill. When you come to the top, ye’ll have the way fine from there.”
As directions went—if they were correct—they were as clear as any he’d ever been given. The crone chuckled hoarsely. “I’ve lived here eighty year and more.”
It was as if she’d read his mind. Hamish stirred uneasily, and the woman’s glance seemed to sharpen. But she said nothing, limping on her way as if the conversation had come to a satisfactory conclusion. He watched her, and she seemed to know it. Old as she was, he thought, a woman feels a man’s eyes.
Hamish laughed. “You’ve no’ spent any time in the Highlands, man!” was all he said to that.
Rutledge set out, following the woman’s directions, along the narrow, hilly road he’d traveled the night before. Finding the fork between curving fields of late hay, he walked on past a cottage or two and small patches of farmed land, and beside a long sweep of rough pasture. Within half an hour, he had reached the gates, dark with age and damp, leading through tall, wet stands of rhododendron backed by taller trees, into what seemed to be a sea of mist. But as he followed the rutted drive curling uphill, he came out into sunlight and brightness. And there at the end of a graceful sweep of lawn stood a house set in formal gardens, protected by the slope of the headland beyond.
It was an old house, the architectural history of four centuries locked in its embrace. Rutledge could trace a Tudor core, with Restoration, Georgian, and Victorian additions, but there was also an older, battlemented gateway near the stables that came from a dimmer past. The great palaces of the English nobility, Blenheim and Hatfield, Longleat and Chat-sworth, spoke of power and money. This house whispered of longevity and old bloodlines. Of timelessness and pride and peace.
He stood there, looking across at it, imagining its past, and searching for a key to its owners. What he felt was . . . sadness? No, that wasn’t it, it was a stronger emotion, something about the place that tugged at him.
Hamish, on the other hand, didn’t find it to his liking. “There’s too many dead here,” he said uneasily. “And they don’t lie quietly in their graves!”
Rutledge chuckled. “I’d haunt the estate too, if it’d been mine. I wouldn’t go peacefully to the churchyard in the town. Not with that view.”
For beyond the headland he could see the sea, already in the clear and gleaming in the morning light, whitecaps dancing in the sun. There seemed to be a small strand where the land ran down to the sea. Then, turning to his right, he could see the distant roofs of Borcombe.
Damned if the old crone hadn’t sent him the longest way around! You could walk from the last house he could see in the village into a copse of trees, and out of them into Tre-velyan land, in what? Ten minutes? Say, fifteen all the way to the house.
He unlocked the door with the key that Dawlish had given him and stepped into the wide front hall, where the curving staircase swept down from a gallery above.