When maidens mourn ssm-7

by C. S. Harris

  `I thought you didn't believe in ghosts.'

  `This place could change a body's mind, it could.'

  Smiling, Sebastian handed his tiger the reins and jumped down.

  `Walk them.'

  `Aye, gov'nor.'

  A distinct scuffing noise, as of a shovel biting dirt, carried on the breeze. Sebastian turned toward the sound. The site was obviously not as deserted as it had first appeared.

  The land bridge to the island lay on the eastern side of the moat. He crossed it warily, one hand on the pistol in his pocket. Sir Stanley had run his excavation trenches at right angles on the far side of the bridge, where at one time a drawbridge might have protected the approach to the now vanished castle.

  The rushing sound of cascading dirt cut through the stillness, followed again by the scrape of a shovel biting deep into loose earth. Sebastian could see him now, a big, thickly muscled man with golden red hair worn long, so that it framed his face like a lion s mane. He had the sleeves of his smock rolled up to expose bronzed, brawny arms, and rough trousers tucked into boots planted wide as he worked shoveling dirt back into the farthest trench.

  He caught sight of Sebastian and paused, his chest rising and falling with his hard breathing. He was a startlingly good-looking man, with even features and two dimples that slashed his cheeks when he squinted into the sun. He swiped the back of one sinewy arm across his sweaty face and his gaze locked with Sebastian's.

  `You Rory Forster?' Sebastian asked.

  The man slammed his shovel into the dirt pile and wrenched it sideways, sending a slide of dark loam over the edge into the trench.

  `I am.'

  `I take it Sir Stanley has decided to end the excavations?'

  The man had a head built like a battering ram, with a thick neck and a high forehead, his eyes pale blue and thickly lashed and set wide apart. `'Pears that way, don't it?' he said without looking up again.

  Sebastian let his gaze drift around the otherwise deserted site.

  `Where's the rest of your crew?'

  `Sir Stanley told 'em they could go look fer them nippers.'

  `You're not interested in the reward?'

  Rory Forster hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and spat.

  `Tain't nobody gonna find them nippers.'

  `So certain?'

  `Ye think they're out there, why ain't ye joinin' the search?'

  `I am, in my own fashion.'

  Forster grunted and kept shoveling.

  Sebastian wandered between the trenches, his gaze slowly discerning the uncovered remnants of massively thick foundations of what must once have been mighty walls. Pausing beside a mound of rubble, he found himself staring at a broken red tile decorated with a charging knight picked out in white.

  He reached for the tile fragment, aware of Forster's eyes watching him. `Did you come out here this past Sunday?' asked Sebastian, straightening.

  Forster went back to filling his trench. `We don't work on Sundays.'

  `No one stays to guard the site?'

  `Why would they?'

  `I heard rumors you've had trouble with treasure hunters.'

  Forster paused with his shovel idle in his hands. `I wouldn't know nothin' 'bout that.'

  Sebastian kept a wary eye on the man's shovel. `I've also heard you and Miss Tennyson didn't exactly get along.'

  `Who said that?'

  `Does it matter?'

  Forster set his jaw and put his back into his digging again, the dirt flying through the air. Sebastian breathed in the scent of damp earth and decay and a foul, dark smell that was like a breath from an old grave. He said, `I can understand how it might get under a man's skin, having to take orders from a woman.'

  Forster scraped the last of the dirt into the trench with the edge of his shovel, his attention seemingly all for his task. `I'm a good overseer, I am. Sir Stanley wouldn't have kept me on if I wasn't.'

  Sebastian watched Rory Forster move on to the next trench. The man's very name Forster, a corruption of forester harkened back to the days when this wood had been part of a vast royal hunting park. His ancestors would have been the kings foresters, charged with husbanding the royal game and protecting them from the encroachments of poachers. But those days were long gone, lost in the misty past.

  Sebastian said, `Did Miss Tennyson tell Sir Stanley she suspected you were the one vandalizing the site in search of treasure?'

  Forster straightened slowly, the outer corner of one eye twitching as if with a tic, the rough cloth of his smock dark with sweat across his shoulders and chest and under his arms. `Ye ain't gonna pin this murder on me. Ye hear me?' he said, raising one beefy arm to stab a pointed finger at Sebastian. `I was home with me wife all that night. Never left the house, I didn't.'

  `Possibly,' said Sebastian. `However, we don't know precisely when Miss Tennyson was murdered. She may well have met her death in the afternoon.'

  The twitch beside the man's eye intensified. `What ye want from me?'

  `The truth.'

  `The truth?' Forster gave a harsh laugh. `Ye don't want the truth.'

  `Try me.'

  `Huh. Ye think I'm a fool?'

  Sebastian studied the man's handsome, dirt-streaked face.

  `You can say what you have to say to me, in confidence. Or you can tell your tale to Bow Street. The choice is yours.'

  Forster licked his lower lip, then gave Sebastian a sly, sideways look. `Ye claim it was me what told ye, and I'll deny it.'

  `Fair enough. Now, tell me.'

  Forster sniffed. `To my way o' thinkin', them Bow Street magistrates ought to be lookin' into Sir Stanley's lady.'

  `You mean Lady Winthrop?'

  `Aye. Come out here Saturday about noon, she did. In a real pelter.'

  Sebastian frowned. Lady Winthrop had told him she'd never visited her husband's controversial excavations. `Was Sir Stanley here?'

  `Nah. He'd gone off by then. Somethin' about a prize mare what was near her time. But Miss Tennyson was still here. She's the one her ladyship come to see. A right royal row they had, and ye don't haveta take me word for it. Ask any o' the lads workin' the trenches that day; they'll tell ye.'

  `What was the argument about?'

  `I couldn't catch the sense o' most o' it. Her ladyship asked to speak to Miss Tennyson in private and they walked off a ways, just there.' Forster nodded toward the northeastern edge of the island, where a faint path could be seen winding through the thicket of bushes and brambles.

  `But you did hear something,' said Sebastian.

  `Aye. Heard enough to know it was Sir Stanley they was fightin' about. And as she was leavin', I heard her ladyship say, Cross me, young woman, and ye ll be sorry!'

  Chapter 20

  `You're certain you heard her right?' asked Sebastian.

  The foreman sniffed. `Ye don't believe me, ask some of the lads what was here that day. Or better yet, ask her ladyship herself. But like I said, if ye let on 'twas me what told ye, I'll deny it. I'll deny it to yer face.'

  `Who are you afraid of?' asked Sebastian. `Sir Stanley? Or his wife?'

  Forster huffed a scornful laugh. `Anybody ain't afraid of them two is a fool. Oh, they're grand and respectable, ain't they? Livin' in that big house and hobnobbin' wit the King hisself. But I hear tell Sir Stanley, he started out as some clerk with little more 'n a sixpence to scratch hisself with. How ye think he got all that money? Mmm? And how many bodies ye think he walked over to get it?'

  `And Lady Winthrop?'

  `She's worse 'n him, any day o' the week. Sir Stanley, he'll leave ye alone as long as yer not standin' between him and somethin' he wants. But Lady Winthrop, she'd destroy a man out o' spite, just cause she's mean.'

  Some twenty minutes later, Sebastian's knock at Trent House's massive doors was answered by a stately, ruddy-faced butler of ample proportions who bowed and intoned with sepulchral detachment, `I fear Sir Stanley is not at present at home, my lord.'

  `Actually, I'm here to see Lady Winthrop. And th
ere's no point in telling me she's not at home either,' said Sebastian cheerfully when the butler opened his mouth to do just that, `because I spotted her in the gardens when I drove up. And I'm perfectly willing to do something vulgar like cut around the outside of the house and accost her directly, if you re too timid to announce me.'

  The butler's nostrils quivered with righteous indignation. Then he bowed again and said, `This way, my lord.'

  Lady Winthrop stood at the edge of the far terrace, the remnants of last night's wind flapping the figured silks of her high-necked gown. She had been watching over the activities of the band of workmen tearing out the old wall of the terrace. But at Sebastian's approach she turned, one hand coming up to straighten her plain, broad-brimmed hat as she shot the butler a tight-jawed glare that warned of dire future consequences.

  `Don't blame him,' said Sebastian, intercepting the look. `He denied you with commendable aplomb. But short of bowling me over, there really was no stopping me.'

  She brought her icy gaze back to Sebastian's face and said evenly to the red-faced butler, `Thank you, Huckabee; that will be all.'

  The butler gave another of his flawless bows and withdrew.

  `My husband is out with the men from the estate searching for the missing Tennyson children,' she said, her fingers still gripping the brim of her hat. `He'll be sorry he missed you. And now you really must excuse me...'

  `Why don't you show me your gardens, Lady Winthrop?' said Sebastian when she would have turned away.

  `No need to allow the interesting details of our conversation to distract these men from their work.'

  She froze, then forced a stiff laugh. `Of course. Since you are here.'

  She waited until they were out of earshot before saying evenly, `I resent the implication that I have something to hide from my servants.'

  `Don't you? You told me yesterday that you never visited the excavations at the moat. Except you did, just last Saturday. In fact, you had what's been described as a right royal row with Miss Tennyson herself.'

  Lady Winthrop's lips tightened into a disdainful smile.

  `I fear you misunderstood me, Lord Devlin. I said I did not make it a practice of visiting the site; I did not say I had never done so.'

  Sebastian studied her proud, faintly contemptuous face, the weak chin pulled back against her neck in a scowl. As the plain but extraordinarily well-dowered only daughter of a wealthy merchant, she had married not once, but twice. Her first, brief marriage to a successful banker ended when her husband broke his neck on the hunting field and left his considerable holdings to her; her second marriage a few years later to Sir Stanley united two vast fortunes. But this second union, like her first, had remained childless, an economic merger without affection or shared interests or any real meeting of the minds.

  It must be difficult, Sebastian thought, to be a wealthy but plain, dull woman married to a handsome, virile, charismatic man. And he understood then just how much this woman must have hated Gabrielle Tennyson, who was everything she, Lady Winthrop, was not: not only young and beautiful, but also brilliant and well educated and courageous enough to defy so many of the conventions that normally held her sisters in check.

  He said, `And your argument?'

  She drew her brows together in a pantomime of confusion. `Did we argue? Frankly, I don't recall it. Have you been speaking to some of the workmen? You know how these yokels exaggerate.'

  `Doing it a bit too brown, there, Lady Winthrop.'

  Angry color mottled her cheeks. `I take it that must be one of those vulgar cant expressions gentlemen are so fond of affecting these days. Personally I find the tendency to model one's speech on that of the lower orders beyond reprehensible.'

  Sebastian let out his breath in a huff of laughter. `So why did you visit Camlet Moat last Saturday?'

  `Years before the light of our Lord was shown upon this land, England was given over to a terrible superstition dominated by a caste of evil men bound in an unholy pact with the forces of darkness.'

  `By which I take it you mean the Druids.'

  She inclined her head. `I do. Unfortunately, there are those in our age who in their folly have romanticized the benighted days of the past. Rather than seek salvation through our Lord and wisdom in his word, they choose to dabble in the rituals and tarnished traditions of the ignorant.'

  Sebastian stared off down the hill, to where a doe could be seen grazing beside a stretch of ornamental water. `I've heard that the locals consider the island to be a sacred site.'

  `They do. Which is why I chose to visit Camlet Moat last Saturday. My concern was that the recent focus of attention on the area might inspire the ignorant to hold some bizarre ritual on the island.'

  `Because Lammas began Saturday night at sunset?'

  Again, the regal inclination of the head. `Precisely.'

  `So why approach Miss Tennyson? Why not Sir Stanley?'

  `I fear I have not made myself clear. I went to the site in search of my husband. But when I found him absent, I thought to mention my concerns to Miss Tennyson.' The thin lips pinched into a tight downward curve. `Her response was predictably rude and arrogant.'

  Those were two words Sebastian had yet to hear applied to Miss Tennyson. But he had been told she didn't suffer fools lightly, and he suspected she might well have perceived Lady Winthrop as a very vain and foolish woman. He said, `She didn't think you had anything to worry about?'

  `On the contrary. She said she believed the island was a profoundly spiritual place of ancient significance.'

  `Is that when you quarreled?'

  She fixed him with an icy stare full of all the moral outrage of a woman long practiced in the art of self-deception, who had already comfortably convinced herself that the confrontation with Gabrielle had never occurred. `We did not quarrel,' she said evenly.

  There were any number of things he could have said. But none of them would have penetrated that shield of righteous indignation, so he simply bowed and took his leave.

  He did not believe for a moment that she had overcome her distaste for her husband's excavations in order to drive out to the moat and have a conversation that could just as easily have been held over the breakfast table. Instead, she had deliberately chosen a time when she knew Sir Stanley to be elsewhere.

  Jealousy could be a powerful motive for murder. He could imagine Lady Winthrop killing Gabrielle in a rage of jealousy and religious zeal. But he could not imagine her then murdering two children and disposing of their bodies somewhere in the wilds of the chase.

  Yet as he drove away, he was aware of her standing at the edge of her garden watching him.

  And he wondered why.

  Sebastian was standing in the middle of his library and studying the new boxes of books and papers that had appeared since that morning when he heard the peal of the front bell. A moment later, Morey paused in the library's entrance to clear his throat.

  `Yes?' prompted Sebastian when the majordomo seemed temporarily at a loss for words.

  `A personage to see you, my lord.'

  `A personage?'

  `Yes, my lord. I have taken the liberty of putting him in the drawing room.'

  Sebastian studied the majordomo's painfully wooden face. Morey normally left personages cooling their heels in the hall.

  `I'll be right up,' he said.

  The man who stood before the empty fireplace was dressed all in black: black breeches, black coat, black waistcoat, black cravat. Only his shirt was white. He stood with his dark head tilted back as he stared up at the portrait of the Countess of Hendon that hung over the mantel. With the grace of a dancer or fencer, he pivoted slowly when Sebastian entered the room to pause just inside the doorway.

  `So we meet,' said Sebastian, and carefully closed the door behind him.

  Chapter 21

  The man called Jamie Knox was built tall and lean, taller even than Sebastian, with wavy, almost black hair and the yellow eyes of a wolf or feral cat.

  Sebast
ian had been told once that he had his father's eyes - his real father's eyes. But he'd always thought he looked like his mother. Now, as he stared at the face of the man who stood across the room from him, he wondered if it was his imagination that traced a resemblance in the tavern owner's high-boned cheeks and gently curving mouth.

  Then he remembered Morey's strange reaction and knew it was not his imagination.

  He crossed to where a decanter and glasses rested on a side table.

  `May I offer you a brandy?'

  `Yes, thank you.'

  The inflections were similar to that of the curly-headed man of the night before. The accent was not that of a gentleman.

  `Where are you from?' asked Sebastian, splashing brandy into two glasses.

  `Shropshire, by way of a rifle regiment.'

  `You're a rifleman?'

  `I was.'

  Sebastian held out one of the glasses. After the briefest of hesitations, the man took it.

  `I fought beside riflemen in Italy and the Peninsula,' said Sebastian. `I've often thought it will be Napoléon's insistence on arming his men with only muskets that will ultimately cause his downfall.'

  `You may be right. Only, don't go telling the French bugger himself, hmm?' Knox took a deep drink of his brandy, his intense yellow gaze never leaving Sebastian's face. `You don't look much like your da, the Earl, do you?'

  `I'm told I resemble my mother.'

  Jamie Knox jerked his chin toward the portrait over the mantel.

  `That her?'

  `Yes.'

  He took another sip. `I never knew my father. My mother said he was a cavalry captain. Your father ever in the cavalry?'

  `Not to my knowledge.'

  A faint gleam of amusement lit up the other man's eyes. He drained his brandy with the offhand carelessness of a man well accustomed to hard drinking, then shook his head when Sebastian offered him another.

  `You came around asking about my conversation with Gabrielle Tennyson last week.'

  `So you don't deny the confrontation occurred.'

  `Why should I? She heard I'd uncovered one of those old picture pavements in my cellars, and she kept pestering me to let her take a look at it.'