Looking at Rutledge again, he said, “Olivia refused. She was never one to give way when it was wrong. ‘That’s not fair,’ she’d say, and stick to her guns through whatever battle followed. I admired her for that ...”

“What happened?” Rutledge asked, as he stopped again. “Get on with it, man!”

“They argued, Anne insisted. And Olivia shoved her out of the tree. She hit a branch coming down, that’s what saved Nicholas. But it tipped her on her head, and when she struck the tree trunk’s main root, which was just showing above the grass, it fractured her skull.” He shivered. “God! When I saw Stephen lying at the foot of the stairs, I thought he’d done the same thing!” He drank more of his whiskey, then said, “I was out of the tree I’d climbed in an instant, skinning both knees as I came down, though I didn’t remember that until much later. And I got to Anne first. She was dead. I looked up at Olivia, and she stared back down at me. There was nothing in her face. I was the hireling’s son then, the horse trainer’s brat. I played with them, I ate with them sometimes, but I wasn’t one of them. So I ran for help and never told what I’d seen. Just that Anne had fallen while we were climbing.”

“You never spoke of it to your father?”

“He was already besotted with Rosamund Cheney. He wouldn’t have believed me—that one of her precious daughters could have killed the other one? He’d have called me a troublemaker and boxed my ears, instead. The lucky thing is, Anne didn’t fall on Nicholas. There might have been two deaths that day, instead of one. They were both some distance up, she and Olivia. It was a long way to fall.”

“I thought Olivia was crippled. How is it that she could climb so high?”

“She was. But the bad leg followed her, braced her, as her arms pulled her higher into the tree. Coming down again was more of a problem. But Olivia wasn’t one to—to be denied a normal life. We pushed her chair everywhere, to the water’s edge, to the orchard, to the cliff. Down to the village, sometimes.”

“An interesting story. But as you said, there’s no proof.”

“No. It could still do a great deal of harm, all the same. And there’s Richard.”

“The one in leading strings?”

“Yes, that’s right. He was lost on the moors when he was five. There was a family picnic, and he and Olivia went for a walk. She came back without him, and although we searched until dark and again through the night, with lamps brought from the nearest houses, we never found him. Or his body. He had simply disappeared.”

“And you think Olivia killed him, somehow hiding the body?”