In the afternoon Rutledge set out in a lowering mist to look for the small isolated cottage where the old midwife lived. Trask had reluctantly told him how to find it.
“She’s harmless, they say, but she gives me the willies!” he’d confided to Rutledge. “Never know where you stand with her. And those eyes—they lay a man bare, like a fleshing knife, but beyond the bone.”
“I’m told she’s a good nurse.”
“Oh, aye, I grant her that. But what does she steal when you’re defenseless?” From the expression on his face Rutledge knew he wasn’t thinking of money. Or the brass candlesticks.
Of such fears witch-hunts were born, Rutledge thought as he set out.
Sadie lived in a narrow cranny that branched off the main valley of the Bor, hardly more than a cul-de-sac where her sod-roofed house squatted in the rain like a wet gray toad. A garden had been hacked out of the hillsides and into the narrow strip of flatland on which the house had been built. He could recognize herbs of different kinds—although he only knew the names of half of them—and rows of cabbage and onions and carrots next to straggling lines of flowers beaten down by the heavy rains. A dozen bedraggled chickens scratched in a muddy pen out back.
She must have seen him coming, because the old wooden door inched open before he got there. “Leave the umbrella by the sill, and wipe your feet on yon rag!” she told him sharply. “I want no mud on my floors!”
He did as he was told and was surprised when he finally crossed the threshold and stepped into the low beamed room that served her as both parlor and kitchen. She had whitewashed the wails, and they glowed like butter in the fire that didn’t begin to fill a hearth broad enough to hold a pig. But the room was warm, and the bright rag rugs that covered the stone floor kept out the damp. The furniture was old, worn, castoffs that had seen finer days. Bunches of drying herbs and flowers hung in the rafters, giving the room an oddly exotic tang of mixed scents. Baskets, woven of rushes, held a stock of dry wood, and a large black cat—her familiar? he wondered in wry amusement—slept on a cushion by the only window.
Sadie looked him up and down with those bright eyes. “What brings a London policeman out in a West Country rain to talk to an old woman?” Her mind seemed clear enough today, he thought, listening for the querulousness that seemed to come with confusion, when she began drifting out of reach.
“I’m trying to piece together information about the family at the Hall. You know that,” Rutledge answered mildly. “I thought you might remember some other things that would be useful.”
“Like?”
“Like, where are the servants who used to work there?”
“Scattered. Gone to other houses, or retired. Or dead.”
“Do you remember their names?”
She grinned at him. “At my age?” But he thought she could, if she tried. “Ask Mrs. Trepol. Or the rector.”
“Then tell me about Nicholas Cheney.”
Suddenly wary, she stared at him.
“Why should I? He’s not one I care to speak about.”
“I’m trying to understand why he killed himself. Why he chose to die beside Olivia. It seems . . . out of character.”
She chuckled. “Ever seen a man gassed in the war?”
“Many times.” Their crusted faces and red, blistered mouths, the hoarse gasping as they struggled for air. He shuddered, remembering it.
“Then you don’t need me to tell you how the lungs burn, how you can’t draw a deep breath because the tubes are raw, and you choke on your own phlegm. He said he dreamt of the scent of violets. And lemons.”
“Nicholas wasn’t that ill. You know it. And I know it now.”
She went over to the window and touched the cat, her face turned away from him. “Don’t ask me about Nicholas Cheney. Or the boy Richard. That’s why you’ve come, I can read it in your eyes. And I’ve listened to the men grumbling on their way to search the moors.”
“Do you plant pansies in your garden?” Rutledge asked, reaching to the rafters to touch the upside down heads of strawflowers, brittle between his fingers.
“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 losing his foot. It was the oddest thing.”