Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [19]
He brought the whiskey and soda to Rutledge and sat down with his own, taking a long draught as if to dull the pain. Rutledge drank a little of his, waiting, looking at the room again, this time seeing the Chinese silk on the walls, the lovely proportions of the fireplace, the molded medallions on the ceiling. The polished wood of the floors, dark now and lifeless. As Olivia was lifeless. None of this could touch her. But there was still her reputation . . .
“I do know for a fact—for a fact, mind you, although there’s no proof whatsoever—that Olivia killed her twin sister Anne. Anne died at eight, fell from an apple tree where we were all playing. I wasn’t part of the family then, my father had come here with horses he’d sold to Rosamund. Rosamund Cheney, she was, her second marriage. Her first husband, Captain Marlowe, died out in India. Cholera, when he went back to wind up his affairs out there. She married a close friend of his, James Cheney. At any rate, Nicholas was a child at the time I’m talking about, his brother Richard still in leading strings. We’d all gone out to the orchard to play, and I started climbing trees, throwing down apples. They don’t grow very well here, small and sour, but as children we didn’t care. Olivia said she’d climb as well, and found a tree of her own.”
He swirled the whiskey in his glass, staring at it as if it might have more answers than he did. “I was still in the other tree when Anne climbed up after Olivia. Nicholas was just under their tree, holding on to the trunk and looking up at them—probably wishing he could do the same, but his legs were too short to reach the first branch. Anne was—sometimes stubborn. Spoiled a little, I think. She reached the branch where Olivia was sitting and said, “These are my apples now, you must find another tree.”
Looking at Rutledge again, he said, “Olivia refused. She was never one to give way when it was wrong. ‘That’s not fair,’ she’d say, and stick to her guns through whatever battle followed. I admired her for that ...”
“What happened?” Rutledge asked, as he stopped again. “Get on with it, man!”
“They argued, Anne insisted. And Olivia shoved her out of the tree. She hit a branch coming down, that’s what saved Nicholas. But it tipped her on her head, and when she struck the tree trunk’s main root, which was just showing above the grass, it fractured her skull.” He shivered. “God! When I saw Stephen lying at the foot of the stairs, I thought he’d done the same thing!” He drank more of his whiskey, then said, “I was out of the tree I’d climbed in an instant, skinning both knees as I came down, though I didn’t remember that until much later. And I got to Anne first. She was dead. I looked up at Olivia, and she stared back down at me. There was nothing in her face. I was the hireling’s son then, the horse trainer’s brat. I played with them, I ate with them sometimes, but I wasn’t one of them. So I ran for help and never told what I’d seen. Just that Anne had fallen while we were climbing.”
“You never spoke of it to your father?”
“He was already besotted with Rosamund Cheney. He wouldn’t have believed me—that one of her precious daughters could have killed the other one? He’d have called me a troublemaker and boxed my ears, instead. The lucky thing is, Anne didn’t fall on Nicholas. There might have been two deaths that day, instead of one. They were both some distance up, she and Olivia. It was a long way to fall.”
“I thought Olivia was crippled. How is it that she could climb so high?”
“She was. But the bad leg followed her, braced her,