Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [40]
“Oh, no,” she assured him. “It’s quite sound. He just hasn’t had it out much this summer. His son Fred didn’t come back from the Navy. Torpedoed in the North Atlantic. Fishing hasn’t been all that good, anyway. Cornwall’s going to have a bleak future, economically. Trade gone and the pilchards as well. Everyone is complaining.”
So were the hopeful gulls, wheeling overhead. Between them, Rachel and Rutledge dragged the Belle down to the water and clambered in. Rachel watched him critically.
He grinned at her. “You don’t trust me. I see that.”
“It isn’t a matter of trust but of self-preservation. I’ve still time to leap overboard if you’re a rank amateur, likely to do us a mischief.”
But he knew what he was about, and soon had the little boat out of the shelter of the river’s mouth and into open water. The sea was smooth this morning, wind ruffling it much farther out, where whitecaps danced lightly, but in the lee of the land, it was easy to row as far as the small strand below the Hall, beyond to round the headland, and then back to the strand again, where they pulled the boat up and splashed ashore.
Rachel turned to him, her face aglow with something he couldn’t read, until she said, “I haven’t done that in ages! It’s wonderful to be on the water again. Peter was a landsman, he didn’t know stem from stern, but Nicholas loved to sail, to be out in all weathers, to feel the tug of the sea under the hull and the fierce pull of the wind. When he went off to war, he had his heart set on the Navy, but they wouldn’t have him—no experience, they said! And so he wound up in Flanders, in the mud and the horror and the killing—and the gas.” The glow faded, and she turned to reach for the basket as Rutledge made the boat fast to some rocks.
“Tell me about your cousin Susannah, Mrs. Hargrove.”
She straightened up and stared at him, the basket in her arms.
“Is that why you brought me here?” she asked quietly. “To pick over my memories and then make your decision about returning tomorrow to London?”
“No,” he said curtly. “You mentioned the family, not I. She came to see me yesterday. That’s why I asked.”
She looked away from him, then set down the basket and began to climb the slight rise that led from the strand to the lawns. He followed her. At the top she stood looking across at the garden front of the house. “She’s very much like Stephen, but a paler version—not quite as handsome, not quite as charming, not quite as lively, not quite as . . . loved. I think Rosamund somehow loved him best, because she saw in him her own immortality. Herself, young again and ready to go on with life. Or perhaps he reminded her of Richard. I thought about that sometimes myself. She loved Olivia because she saw George in her, and Nicholas because he was so—so very like his father. In his appearance, I mean. Inside, Nicholas had Rosamund’s strength. Rosamund never showed favorites, at least not openly, but in her heart of hearts, who knows?”
“Tell me about her husbands.”
“George was a wonderful man, exciting and very masculine. James was a fine man, with depths and intelligence and a sense of humor. And Brian FitzHugh loved her so much she couldn’t help but love him back, but he was a weaker man.” She turned to look at him, strain in her face. “Does that answer you?”
“Susannah said something about a Mr. Chambers who was in love with Rosamund and would have married her.”
“Oh, yes, Tom Chambers was a very near thing. And I think he could have brought her out of her loneliness and depression. She was beginning to feel that too many of the people she loved had died. That it was somehow because of her. Her fault. I don’t mean she told us that in so many words—we sort of pieced it together, among us. Which is why Mr. Chambers mattered. A new love, a new lease on life—soon she’d be happy again! And then one night she took a little too much laudanum to help her sleep, and died before morning.”
“Susannah is afraid that her mother deliberately killed herself. But she won’t accept that, she turns away from it in fear.”