Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [48]
Back in his room at The Three Bells, Rutledge sat in the chair by the window with the books of O. A. Manning’s poetry in front of him. But looking at the slim volumes, he found himself thinking instead about the poet. About the woman who had found such resources of understanding within her. And yet who had killed herself because her strength somehow came to an end.
Could a man or woman be so deeply aware of the mysteries of the human soul and yet be capable of such terrible crimes as the murder of children? Could she live with that knowledge of herself, and still create such beauty? Was that, finally, why she had killed herself? Assuming that Cormac FitzHugh had told Rutledge the truth . . .
How did you write poetry? How many words did you put on paper, and how often did you throw them away because they didn’t say what you heard in your spirit? How many poems went wrong, how many lines were flat and soulless, how many were trite and tired and empty? How many pages were crumpled up and tossed aside before a few unexpected words sang in your head, while you responded with blood and bone? How easy had it been—or how painfully arduous? How tiring or overwhelming?
He thought about the opening lines to one of the love poems.
Love
Comes on wings of fire
That sear the heart with longing
And a white-hot heat.
In its wake, no peace remains,
Only the scars of a terrible loss
That mark the end of innocence.
How many times had she revised that until she was satisfied?
He’d been inside the study where she had worked and died.
It was amazingly tidy.
Where Nicholas had been carving his fleet of ocean liners, there were scraps and curls of wood, the fineness of sawdust from sanding, the small splashes of paint from finishing touches put to bow and portholes and the funnels. He hadn’t put them away, swept and dusted, before swallowing the laudanum. It was as if he’d expected to come back to them tomorrow.
But where the poet worked there was only the shawl-covered typewriter. No balled up sheets of paper, no pen or pencil lying where she’d scribbled a line to think about it, or tried a rhyme and found it weak. She had known she wasn’t going to sit there ever again and write. She’d prepared for her death.
His hand came down hard on the embossed leather cover, hard enough to sting the flesh as he swore aloud. Inventively.
Olivia Marlowe had bequeathed O. A. Manning—all her papers and letters and contracts—to her half brother Stephen. And Stephen was dead.
Where were these papers now? And what was in them?
9
But neither Rachel nor the rector could tell Rutledge what had become of Olivia Marlowe’s papers.
“I—I think Olivia’s will is still in probate. And Stephen’s as well,” Rachel said. “I really wasn’t interested in the papers. I mean, I was, in the sense that they were important for a study of Livia’s poems, but not in any personal sense. If you’re asking me if there was box sitting in the middle of a room, marked Papers for Stephen, or something, there wasn’t. I just assumed—well, if she’d left them to him, he must have known where to look for them.”
She was standing in the doorway of the cottage where she was staying, and Rutledge could hear someone moving about inside, and then a bird singing from a cage. It was a pretty place, with vines swallowing the narrow little porch and hollyhocks leaning against the walls between the windows.
“Which firm is handling the wills?”
“Chambers and Westcott for Olivia and for Nicholas. I don’t know about Stephen. He had a friend in the City who was a solicitor.”
It would be easy enough to find that out in London.
He thanked her and walked on to the rectory, expecting Smedley to be tending his garden, but the grim-faced housekeeper announced that he was having a nap and she wasn’t about to disturb him.
Rutledge was just turning away when