Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [92]
She backed over to the bed, her eyes still on his face, her own very bleak, her mind listening, whatever her heart was denying. She sank down on the edge of the coverlet, and as she did, he caught that same illusive hint of perfume again, and so did she. Straightening hastily, she moved across the room to the desk instead. As far from the fragrance as she could get. “You can’t prove it!” Rachel told him defiantly. “You can’t prove any of this. And I won’t let you ruin Nicholas’ memory with speculation and doubt. Olivia was famous. They won’t let you tear her down either, wait and see. You’ll end up ruining yourself. But I’m going to find out what drives you so hard, and I’m going to stop you, before I’ve lost my own way, and start believing this filth. This was a close, happy family! Why do you want to destroy it?”
“I want the truth,” he said tiredly.
“No, you don’t,” she told him coldly. “You’ve come out of the war a broken man, I can read that much in your face. You need to prove yourself again. And you think that the dead are easier targets than the living. All right, I don’t know what made Olivia want to kill herself. I expect it was suffering that drove her to it. And I don’t know why Nicholas wanted to die. But I’d rather go through the rest of my life wondering than lose him entirely. You don’t have anything to lose, do you? You’ve never loved anyone enough to give yourself for them. I must have been mad, asking for Scotland Yard to be sent down here. I believed in justice, and you only believe in revenge!”
She was moving before she’d finished, catching him off balance, and was out the door, slamming it behind her. He could hear her running down the gallery, almost stumbling in blind haste.
He didn’t need Hamish’s warning. Remembering the stairs, remembering how Stephen had fallen on the worn treads, Rut-ledge swore and was across the room in four swift strides, going after her.
He overtook her at the top of the steps, catching her arm in a fierce grip, swinging her around to face him.
“I’m not trying to ruin Nicholas! Or Olivia! There’s murder here, damn it. You’re an intelligent woman, you could see it for yourself if you weren’t so bloody wrapped up in your emotions!” he told her, furious with her, furious with himself.
Rachel didn’t cry. Where protecting Nicholas was concerned, she was braver than most of the men who wore medals from the war. He hoped that Nicholas was worth it—and feared that he wasn’t.
“Don’t talk to me about emotions!” she said, her voice like ice. “It’s Olivia, isn’t it? You don’t want her to be a killer, you don’t want all that poetry to come out of darkness and hate. Those damned poems blind you, and everybody else. Olivia was a witch, she had a withered leg, and yet she was able to take Nicholas down with her into depression and death! She could kill her own sister and her own half brother, and give an overdose of laudanum to her mother, and still you want to see her as saint! Her sufferings are just another part of the myth, her writing something you wrestle with because she’s a woman and respect because you once thought it was a man’s, and women shouldn’t write about lying in bed with a lover or standing knee-deep in your own ordure in a trench, or how near we all are to hell! But you wonder, don’t you, what kind of lover she’d have been, and where she might have learned the tricks that mattered. Well, ask Cormac. Maybe he’ll tell you what she was like!”
Stung, he let her go, dropping his hand from her arm, and she turned, walking down the stairs with her head high and her shoulders straight with anger. Fighting for breath and control even while she still seethed with the fury consuming her.
At the foot of the steps she turned to look back up at him and said, “Now you know how I felt in Olivia’s bedroom! I’ve given you a taste of your own poison, and you found it hard to swallow, didn’t you? I don’t know