Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [6]
“Practical, that’s all,” Daniel answered. “Just as well to have it all straight in our minds. What about you?”
“Nothing of mine is leaving here.” He gripped his glass tightly. “And nothing of Olivia’s is to be touched. Do you hear me? Nothing!”
“Then that’s settled,” Susannah said with satisfaction. “And very amicably.” She smiled up at Rosamund’s image again. “Mother would be proud of us, not quarreling.”
“Who’s left to quarrel?” Rachel said pensively. Except for you and Stephen, she added to herself. The youngest, the FitzHughs. I barely remember Anne—only that she and Olivia were so much alike that the adults couldn’t tell them apart. And I could. Now Olivia is dead as well. The end of the Marlowes. And both of the Cheneys are gone too, Richard ... and Nicholas. Rachel threw off her deepening depression and pulled herself back to what Stephen was saying.
“Not yet, it isn’t settled!” Stephen fumed. “If Chambers won’t stop you, I’ll find my own lawyers. Bennet will act for me—”
“Don’t be an ass, Stephen,” Cormac said without rancor. “You’ll still lose. And more to the point, so will the family. The courts will agree with the majority—once the family’s dirty wash has been thoroughly aired in all the newspapers. Do any of us want that?”
Mrs. Trepol came to the door to say that dinner was waiting. She looked tired and sad.
Stephen put down his drink and made to follow her.
“Will they? Agree with you?” he asked over his shoulder. “She’s O. A. Manning, remember? That’s bound to count for something. And the fact that none of us is going hungry. You don’t destroy a national heritage as easily as you might a mere family estate.”
Putting down her glass on the small walnut table beside her chair, Rachel watched them walk out the door of the drawing room and across the hall to the dining room. She’d never seen Stephen so angry. Or so determined. She had a very uneasy feeling that it just might come down to a court matter. And in the end, he’d win. Stephen.
Somehow Stephen always seemed to win. Even as a child, he’d been the luckiest of them all. Cornish luck, Rosamund called it. He’d survived four years of bloody war with half a dozen medals for bravery and a reputation for wildly daring heroics. Devil FitzHugh, they’d called him at the Front. Lucky.
Fey, the old woman in the woods would have said ...
2
Ian Rutledge, returning to London in late June, found a mixed welcome at Scotland Yard. Warwickshire had not been a complete triumph—there were those who believed the outcome was more politically sound than judicially defensible, and others saw in his success a taste for notoriety. Chief Superintendent Bowles himself had set that rumor flying. “Not a well-defined closure, would you say? Field day for the press, of course, name in all the papers. I’d not care for that sort of thing, myself ... but some do.”
Rutledge himself, still mentally and physically drained by events in Upper Streetham, was glad enough to be relegated once more to the mundane while he tried to heal.
It didn’t last as long as he’d anticipated. There had been a series of brutal knifings in the City and the newspapers were attempting to resurrect the old Ripper killings, making farfetched comparisions in order to expand circulation. People had tired of the Peace, which had brought more misery to the country than any sense of enormous Victory. They were tired of grimness and stoicism, of poor food, no jobs, strikes, and unrest, and there was even a boredom with the struggle to revive the England they remembered before the Kaiser played for power in Europe. Any news that didn’t have to do with the strife of ordinary life, that could be parlayed into sensationalism, was followed with the frisson of fear that comes from knowing that you’re safe even while the tigers noisily devour your neighbor.
Superintendent Bowles, on whose turf the knifings began, was already scenting a powerful public upsurge in attention, and never one to shirk the glow of reflected glory, he took over the cases himself.
And that