Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [79]
“Whose idea was it to go to the orchard that day?”
“It was hot, we were tired of playing in the gardens, and the house was stuffy, even with the windows open. But in the orchard it was shady, the long grass was cool. In the trees, you felt cooler. I don’t know who thought of it first. I remember Nicholas telling Anne that she couldn’t climb as high as he could. And Anne had been pestering Olivia about being so slow, walking. Nicholas must have been trying to deflect her impatience.”
He could see, from the shadows of her lashes on her cheek, that she’d closed her eyes. Clouds on the horizon began to swallow the sun. It would be dark sooner than he’d thought. Would that matter? Still, he must not hurry ...
“But that wasn’t what you felt then, was it?”
“No, I was hoping she’d climb high enough to fall out—” She sat upright with a jolt. “No! I couldn’t have thought that! It must have been afterward, when she was climbing, and I was afraid she’d fall—”
Yet Rutledge thought she had felt that way at the time, and buried it deep. A child’s wish, because the bully was beyond her own reach. He waited a moment, then said gently, reassuringly, “I’m sure you wished her no harm.”
“No, of course I didn’t. In fact I was worried when Nicholas challenged her to climb to the next branches, and then Olivia went up after her, and he tried to prevent her, but she was determined to show she could do it too. I remember he was holding her sashes, trying to help her keep her balance. And then Anne was shouting something from the top of the tree, and Olivia pushed herself higher than she should, and Cormac climbed down from his tree and was over there in a flash, saying his papa would thrash him if they got hurt, and he was going to stop this nonsense now. But I saw Nicholas jerk hard on the sashes, trying to pull himself up into the tree or something, and Cormac was crashing about in the branches, and suddenly, Nicholas was ducking, and Anne came tumbling down, bowling Nicholas over, and Cormac was trying to get Olivia down, yelling at her not to put her bad foot just there, he’d hold her arm, and she was screaming at him not to touch her, and Nicholas was crawling over to Anne, and as I slid down my tree, I scraped my leg and it started bleeding, and I got blood all over Anne’s dress when I knelt there. And she was still, it was frightening, and Í kept asking Nicholas why he’d pulled so hard on the sashes, and he said that Anne had been shoving Olivia, and then Olivia was down, face white as her own handkerchief, something in her eyes that terrified me, and Cormac and I ran for help, he to the stables, which were closer, while 1 ran to the house and Rosamund—”
She was crying, he could see the tears sliding out from under her lashes. And he himself felt the surge of her pain, the shock, the child who couldn’t understand the nightmarish events she’d witnessed. The picture she’d conjured up was sharp, vivid in his mind. Even Hamish was silenced by it.
“Please,” she begged huskily. “I don’t want to think about it any more!”
“Then tell me about Richard being lost on the moors,” he said, after giving both of them a little time to recover. “Were you there when it happened?”
“Yes, I’ve said it was a family picnic,” she retorted irritably. “I don’t know why you have to keep harping on the past, raking it up. Stephen wouldn’t have allowed it, it was his duty to protect Olivia! That’s why she left him all her papers.”
“Olivia is dead. So is Nicholas. Your memory is all I have,” he said again. “Would Stephen have protected her, if he’d known she might have killed his father?”
“Maybe that’s why we can’t find her papers. Maybe he burned them?” She sighed. “Oh, very well! We went there— to the moors—because it was a day’s outing, and children are restless, they need distraction. Uncle James thought we might enjoy looking at the old mines, the tin that’d made Cornwall rich, once upon a time. Rosamund wasn’t happy with the idea, she said we could fall down the old shafts. Which wasn’t very like her