Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [75]
“Where is Harvey now? I’ll speak to him myself.”
“As to that, sir, I don’t know. There’s a problem out on one of the farms, somebody’s dog killing sheep, and he had to have a look himself.”
“What progress have you made here?”
“More sheep bones and an old dog. They had their heads still, it wasn’t difficult to tell what they were. And we found a man, sir, looked like he must have been a vagabond. Dr. Hawkins has been and gone, and he said it was an old corpse, we could bury it later.”
“Where?”
“By those rocks there, about a mile away. One of the men sheltered there to light his cigarette, and he saw something white in the earth. We dug it out, bit by bit, first a hand, then the head. Not very deep, you understand, but that’s the direction the wind blows, and he’d have been covered over in a season or two.”
Rutledge walked across to see the bones, followed by the boy, whose bloodthirsty spirits were fascinated by the line of human remains laid out next to raw earth under one of the towering rock piles that mark the moor. “That a hand, sir? Where’s the middle finger, then? What’s that? Pelvis? Do I have one of ‘em too? Who et away that rib, do you think? Why’s his jaw over there, and his head here? D’ye think he was murdered, sir? Cor!”
In fact, there was no indication what had killed the man. No holes in the skull, no signs of damage to any of the bones, no obvious indications of stabbing or a bullet clipping a rib or part of the spine. No crushed vertebrae to show a strangling. But the bones were long and well formed. He’d been tall, with no sign of the thickening that comes with heavy work in an underfed childhood or early diseases like rickets that stunted growth. According to Hawkins, the bones had lain in the earth for no more than seven years.
“Were he a soldier, d’ye think? Left to die in the thick of the battle, and then forgotten?” the boy asked hopefully.
Rutledge dug around in the disturbed earth with his pocket knife, looking for remnants of cloth, buttons, coins, or other debris that might have told a clearer tale. If they’d been here, they were gone now.
A man’s skeleton, not a child’s .. .
All the way back to Borcombe, the boy talked of nothing but the bones, and Rutledge was very glad to give him sixpence and see the last of him by the time they reached the road into the village. He was off then, racing to find his friends and make them envious of his good fortune in viewing the skeleton.
Rutledge ate his lunch alone, the books of poetry beside his plate. He’d tried to approach them in the order in which they’d been published. And he found one short, early poem about the moors. Reading it, he could hear Olivia’s response to the emptiness and the mystery of that barren land. “For here the spirit dies,” she’d written, “and that is more of hell than I can bear.”
And yet it was possible she’d consigned a small child to that same hell.
In the afternoon he went back to see Mrs. Trepol, whose reputation as a gardener was sworn to by three women he’d spoken with in the inn’s dining room.
She was working to straighten the storm-battered stalks of flowers, lupine and asters, marigolds and zinnias. Stakes and strips of old rag lay in the small bucket she carried with her, and in the back of the cottage wash hung on the line, blowing like signal flags.
Mrs. Trepol looked up, saw that he intended to come through the gate rather than pause for a few words outside it, and said, “Do you mind if I keep working, sir? These turn their heads to the sun soon enough, if they aren’t righted.”
“It’s about flowers that I came,” he told her as she reached for a tall golden head of marigold, its bruised leaves scenting the air.
“Aye, sir? And what flowers would you be wanting to know about?” she asked,