Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [69]
“They don’t dry well,” she said, straightening up to look at him.
“Do they grow well on the moors?”
“Sometimes they do. Volunteers that the wind blows. Or a bird leaves behind.” She was wary still, but not afraid of these questions. He wondered why. “Pansies like the cool of springtime, and a little shade in the afternoon. If that’s what you’re looking for, find the place where they’d want to grow. Not where someone thought of putting ‘em.”
Rutledge considered her. The old, stooped body, the worn, bright eyes, the knowledge and the experiences of a lifetime fading with age, slipping into forgetfulness.
He remembered a chaplain in the war, at a hasty service for a half-dozen soldiers killed in the shelling. Saying, “They’ll never grow old—never feel fear and cold, hunger or pain, or the sorrows of lost love or the pity of the young. While they have missed much, these men who won’t see their sons in their mothers’ arms, or the moon over a summer sea, or the beauty of a rose, they have what we all look for in the end—eternal springtime. It is not their grief but ours that haunts us.” Oddly enough, it had helped weary men. But not, he thought, the chaplain.
“Has your life been a happy one?” Rutledge asked her.
Shock spread across her face, then lingered in her eyes. “No one ever asked me that before,” she said quietly. “But no. I was never given the choice of happiness. Only of service. I don’t know that I wasn’t better off, come to that. If you feel happiness, you must also feel grief.”
“Did Olivia Marlowe know grief?”
“Miss Livia? She went to funerals like the rest of them, and cried.”
“No. Grief for what her life brought her. Not the paralysis. Not the poetry. Not the dead in her family. But grief for what she was.”
“Aye,” the old woman answered finally. “She carried a great burden on her soul. And had no way to put it right. She said to me once, a long time ago, that God had put an affliction upon her, and I asked what that was. She told me, to live with evil and not know how to stop it.”
“And did she, by dying, put an end to it?”
Sadie frowned. “I don’t know, sir. For her sake, I pray she did. I’d hate to think of her lying in her grave with no hope of peace!”
He turned to go. Then thought of one final question. “Was she the frail angel that watched at Richard’s grave?”
But Sadie didn’t know what he was talking about. “She were crippled, aye, but never frail. And I’d not call her an angel. She had feelings, like any other woman!”
Wet and tired and thoroughly depressed, Rutledge tramped back to the inn and went through to the bar. But time had already been called, and he went instead to his room, where Hamish clamored so insistently in his mind that he couldn’t concentrate on the volumes of poetry that rested on the stand by his bed. After a time he put them down again, feeling as if he’d been prying.
Rachel came to the inn for her dinner that night, and he thought it was on purpose, to discover what he’d been up to. For reasons of his own, he was very happy to see her walk through the door.
“I hear that Tom Chambers came to call on you today,” she said when he’d asked her to join him at his table.
“I’m surprised that gossip hasn’t also told you what we discussed.”
She grinned, some of the strain slipping out of her face. “The truth is, Mr. Trask’s hearing is failing.”
He laughed outright.
Tilting her head, she said, “You’re younger when you laugh. I’ve often wondered what Peter would have been like, if he’d survived his war out in Africa. Stephen seemed to take France in stride—in fact he was quite the daredevil. Not that he told us, mind you! But somehow it was as if—as if it was only just another game he was very good at. When his foot went bad and they sent him home barely a month before the Armistice, I expected to find him cheering up half the hospital with his wild spirits. Instead he was desperately depressed. As if he wouldn’t have minded dying, but he minded terribly