Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [31]
“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