by C. S. Harris
“My . . .” Miss Austen’s naturally ruddy cheeks darkened ever so slightly. “Who told you? My brother?”
“Indirectly—along with Captain Wyeth.”
“Ah.” She paused while the young housemaid reappeared bearing a hastily assembled tea tray, the delicate, rose-strewn china cups and plates clattering as the girl dumped the tray on the table. “Throughout history, we women have been endlessly scorned for our supposed readiness to reveal things which ought by rights to remain private. Yet I find that, in practice, men are equally—if not more—inclined to indiscretion.”
Hero laughed. “I suspect you are right. Although the truth is, your novels have excited so much interest in fashionable circles that I doubt you’ll be able to remain anonymous much longer.”
It was a thought that did not appear to trouble the author overly much, and Hero suspected the choice to publish anonymously had been prompted less by a desire to remain unknown than by the realization that society would condemn any spinster vicar’s daughter who appeared to be chasing fame and recognition.
Miss Austen eased the cover from the teapot and began to pour. “Surely Lord Devlin can’t think my novels have anything to do with this murder.”
“No, of course not. But your brother says you think Captain Wyeth might be another Wickham or Willoughby, and I assume it isn’t simply because the three men’s names all begin with the same consonant.”
Miss Austen kept her attention on the task of pouring the tea. “It would be more accurate to say I worry that he might be. Have you met him?”
“No.”
“He comes across as an agreeable, sensible man with good understanding and a warm heart. A man of strength and principle.”
“But?” prompted Hero.
Miss Austen looked up from the tea. “Who can answer for the true sentiments of a clever man?”
“Is he clever?”
“Very.”
Hero took the teacup handed her. “Has he given you reason to suspect his sincerity?”
“Truthfully? No.” Miss Austen took a sip of her own tea and stared out over the sun-warmed, French-style garden. “Eliza—my cousin—believes that Anne’s love has proven itself so enduring that she ought to be allowed to marry her captain, although of course she worries what sort of future lies ahead for them. We’ve all known young women who married poor men for love, only to live a life of regret. Poverty can be so terribly grinding.”
Hero studied her hostess’s even, carefully composed features and found herself wondering about this woman’s own romantic past. How much of the author’s own life experiences, Hero wondered, had made their way into her books?
“Yet she won’t be poor,” said Hero, choosing her words carefully. “Stanley Preston’s death means that Anne is now free to marry her impoverished young captain and keep her inheritance from her father.”
Miss Austen raised her gaze to Hero’s face. “I may have questioned Captain Wyeth’s sincerity, but I never would have believed him capable of—of—”
“Murder?”
“Especially one of such savagery.”
“He’s spent the last six years at war. That sort of experience can brutalize some men.”
“Most men, I should think,” said Miss Austen quietly.
Hero took a sip of her tea and shifted her gaze to where the old gardener, Jenkins, was forking over the earth of one of the parterres. “I understand Miss Preston attended Lady Farningham’s musical evening in your company.”
“She did, yes. My cousin had hoped to be able to go with her, but I’m afraid Eliza rarely leaves her room these days.”
“Did you know Captain Wyeth would be there?”
Miss Austen expelled her breath in a kind of a sigh. “No. Although I realize in retrospect that Anne obviously knew it. No simple musical evening could have inspired the level of excitement and anticipation she displayed. Unfortunately, she and the captain had words during the break, and he left almost immediately afterward.”
“They quarreled?”
“Yes, although I couldn’t tell you the reason for the disagreement. Anne refused to discuss it, and I had no desire to press her. We ourselves left not long afterward. She pled a sick headache and wanted to go home.”
“So she was home before ten?” A good half hour before her father’s murder, thought Hero, although she didn’t say it.
“Yes.”
“Interesting. I don’t believe that was made clear to anyone.”
A vaguely troubled look came over Miss Austen’s features. But she simply picked up the plate of biscuits from the tray and held it out to Hero. “Please, have some.”
“Thank you.”
“That’s an interesting necklace you’re wearing,” said Miss Austen, adroitly shifting to a safer topic of conversation as she set the plate between them. “It looks quite ancient.”
Hero touched her fingertips to the bluestone and silver triskelion at her neck. “I believe it is, yes. Although I must confess, I don’t know its history.”
“I saw something quite like it once while visiting friends near Ludlow. We were invited to dine one evening at Northcott Abbey, and Lady Seaton showed us the portrait gallery. There was a painting of a woman wearing an almost identical piece. I remember it because the family legend attached to it caught my imagination. According to the story, the necklace had the power to choose its next owner by growing warm to that person’s touch. It seems Lord Seaton’s great-great-grandmother was a natural daughter of James II, and the necklace was his gift to her on her wedding day.”
Hero was suddenly, intensely conscious of the pendant lying warm against the flesh of her throat, and of the inscribed initials entwined on its back.
A.C. and J.S.
“There was some tragedy involved,” Miss Austen was saying, “although I must confess I don’t recall all the details. I believe she married a Scottish lord who treated her abysmally after her father the King lost his throne. In fiction, we can mold reality to our will and make all rich men as worthy and handsome as anyone could wish. But life is unfortunately far less tidy. Wealthy men are often silly, insufferable bores—or worse—while far too many handsome men with good hearts have everything to recommend them except a comfortable independence.”
“So is Captain Wyeth a particularly vicious version of George Wickham, or a sadly impoverished Mr. Darcy?”
Miss Austen’s worried gaze met Hero’s. “I wish I knew.”
Hero was perched halfway up the library ladder, a copy of Debrett’s Peerage open in her hands, when Devlin walked into the room.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Trying to find the name of the Scottish lord who married one of James II’s natural daughters,” said Hero, still flipping through the pages.
“Why?”
“I saw Miss Austen this afternoon.”
“And?”
“You were right; she does indeed worry that Captain Wyeth might not be as amiable or openhearted as he takes pains to appear. She also tells me that Anne and her captain quarreled halfway through Lady Farningham’s musical evening, at which point Anne pled a sick headache and went home. Before ten.”
She looked up then to find him frowning. He said, “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“No; I didn’t think you would.”
He nodded to the book in her hands. “What does James II’s natural daughter have to do with anything?”
“She doesn’t. But Miss Austen was intrigued by my necklace. She said it reminded her of a piece she’d once seen in a portrait of a woman reputed to be the daughter of James Stuart by one of his mistresses. Which is fascinating because on the back of this necklace are two sets of entwined initials—”
“A.C. and J.S.”
Hero stared at him. “How did you know?”
He turned away a
nd went to where the brandy stood warming by the fire. She could see the rigid set to his shoulders, hear the tension in his voice. “The necklace once belonged to my mother,” he said, easing the stopper from the decanter. “She was wearing it when she was lost at sea the summer I was eleven.”
Hero felt a yawing ache open up inside her, the ache she always felt when she thought of the losses suffered by the boy he’d once been. In one hot, unforgettable summer, he had lost both his older brother Cecil and his mother.
There was a portrait of Sophia, the Countess of Hendon, that hung over the fireplace in the drawing room, and Hero often found herself studying it. The Countess had been a beautiful woman, her hair the color of gold guineas, her features exquisitely molded, her eyes clear and sparkling with intelligence and humor and a wild kind of thirst, as if she yearned for something missing in her life. And then one sunny August day, she’d sailed away from Brighton on a friend’s yacht for what was supposed to be a few hours’ pleasure cruise, and she’d never returned.
Lost at sea, they told the world—told Sebastian, even though he refused to believe it. Day after day he stood on the cliffs, looking out to sea, waiting for her to return, convinced that she couldn’t be dead. Convinced that if she were dead, he’d know it—feel it. In time, he had come to accept that they told the truth, only to learn as a man grown that it was all lies. She had simply left the Earl—the man he had falsely believed to be his father.
Left him.
Sebastian had shared with Hero many of his darkest, most painful secrets. But the truth about his mother—that she still lived—Hero had learned only from Jarvis. And she had never told Devlin what she knew.
Now she watched him splash brandy into his glass and said softly, “Except that she wasn’t really lost at sea, was she, Devlin?”
He looked at her over his shoulder, the decanter held forgotten in his hand, his face a mask of control. “Jarvis told you?”
“Yes.”
“Did he also tell you that she ran off to Venice with her latest lover—a handsome young poet a good ten years her junior?”
“No.” Hero set aside the book and stepped off the ladder, her gaze never leaving his face. “How did my father come to have the necklace?”
“It reappeared two years ago, around the neck of Guinevere Anglessey’s dead body.”
“But . . .” She shook her head, not understanding. He’d solved Guinevere’s murder, as he had solved so many. But that had been before Hero’s life became inextricably merged with his. “Where did she get it?”
“It seems my mother gave it to her years ago, when they met briefly in the South of France after the Peace of Amiens. Guinevere was still a child at the time, while my mother . . .” He replaced the stopper in the decanter and set it aside. “My mother was the mistress of a French general.”
Hero studied his tightly held face. “Do you know where she is now? Lady Hendon, I mean.”
He shook his head. “I’ve hired men to look for her, but the war does rather complicate things.”
Why? Hero wanted to ask. Why are you so desperate to find the mother who sailed off and left you when you were so young? Left you with a man she knew was not your father?
But she realized she knew the answer: He searched for the beautiful, laughing Countess because he still loved her, despite the hurt and anger and sting of betrayal. And because he wanted to ask her which of her many unnamed lovers had fathered the man now known to the world as Viscount Devlin.
“I still don’t understand how Jarvis came to have the necklace,” said Hero.
“I gave it to him. I had no desire to see it again.”
Reaching up, she loosed the necklace’s clasp and held it out to him. “I’m sorry I wore it. I didn’t know.”
He made no move to take it from her. “The portrait Jane Austen told you about; did she mention where she’d seen it?”
“A place called Northcott Abbey, near Ludlow.”
“Ludlow?”
“Yes. Why?” she asked. And then, as soon as she said it, she realized why: Jamie Knox, the Bishopsgate tavern keeper who looked enough like Devlin to be his brother, was from Ludlow.
Devlin simply shook his head, obviously unwilling to put his thoughts into words. But when she laid the necklace on the table beside him, he picked it up.
Chapter 37
Jamie Knox was stripped down to his shirtsleeves and chopping kindling in the ancient courtyard at the rear of the Black Devil when Sebastian walked up to him.
He glanced over at Sebastian but kept at his task, the muscles in his back bunching and flexing beneath the linen of his shirt as he swung the axe. “Still looking for your murderer, are you?”
“Yes. But that’s not why I’m here.”
“Oh?”
Sebastian held up the silver and bluestone necklace so that the pendant dangled from its chain. “Have you ever seen this before?”
Knox paused to swipe one forearm across his sweaty forehead, then reached out and cupped the pendant in his left palm, his yellow eyes narrowing. “Not to my knowledge. Why?”
“I’m told it can be seen in a seventeenth-century painting that hangs in the portrait gallery of Northcott Abbey, near Ludlow.”
Knox gave a soft grunt. “And you’re thinking that because I’m from Shropshire, I might’ve seen this painting? It’s a grand place, Northcott Abbey. Last I heard, Lord and Lady Seaton were more than a bit choosy about who they invited inside. Or do you suspect me of having prigged the bobble at some point in my long and varied career?”
“Actually, it once belonged to my mother. An old Welshwoman gave it to her before I was born.”
Knox reached for a pitcher of ale that rested atop a nearby stretch of stone wall, and drank heavily. Then he stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, his breath coming heavy from his labors, his gaze thoughtful on Sebastian’s face. “You ever been to Shropshire?”
Sebastian shook his head. “Not since I was quite young.”
“You have people there?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
A breeze gusted up, filled with the rattle of dead leaves across the ancient paving and the whisper of unanswered questions that had never been asked.
Knox wiped his sleeve across his forehead again. “When I was sixteen, I couldn’t get away from there fast enough. Took the King’s shilling and marched off to see the world, convinced I’d never want to go back. But lately I find myself thinking Shropshire wouldn’t be such a bad place to raise a family.”
“You could still go back. They have pubs in Shropshire.”
Knox’s teeth flashed in a smile as he hefted his axe. “So they do.”
Once, the tavern keeper had told Sebastian that his mother was a young barmaid who’d named three men as the possible father of her child: a Gypsy stable hand, an English lord, and a Welsh cavalry officer. But she died before she was able to tell anyone which of the three the boy resembled.
For Sebastian, the desire to know the truth—the truth about the mysterious man who may have sired them both, the truth about the shared blood that in all likelihood flowed through their veins—was like an open, festering wound. As a boy, he’d grown up with two brothers—or rather, two half brothers, sons of the Earl of Hendon and his unfaithful Countess. Both were long dead. Now Sebastian looked at Jamie Knox and wondered if he were looking at another brother, a third half brother he’d never known he had. It was, Sebastian knew, the real reason he kept coming back here. The real reason the two men kept circling around each other, for he didn’t need to be told to know that Jamie Knox was as puzzled and intrigued as he.
“I heard an interesting tale last night,” said Knox as he turned back to his work, his axe blade biting deep into a new length of wood.
Sebastian watched him free the axe and swing again. “Oh? What’s that?”
“Seems a month or so ago, your Stanley Preston bought a medieval reliquary from Priss Mulligan. Paid a pretty penny for it, he did, only to discover just last week that it’s a fake. And that Priss knew it all along.”
“So what did he do?”
“Went charging over to Houndsditch and demanded his money back. Even threatened to expose Priss to the authorities.”
“When was this?”
“Last Saturday.”
“The day before he was killed?”
“That’s right.”
“How reliable is your source?”
Knox paused to look at Sebastian over one shoulder, his lean face slick with sweat, his expression unreadable. “Very.”
“And how did Priss Mulligan respond to Preston’s threat?”
“She swore that if he so much as thought about going to the authorities, she’d send her lads to strangle Preston with his own intestines and feed what was left of him to the dogs.”
“Colorful,” said Sebastian.
Knox sank his axehead deep into the chopping block and straightened. “She is that—and more.”
Priss Mulligan was winding the key of a mechanical nightingale when Sebastian pushed open the battered door and walked into her shop.
Despite the brightness of the afternoon, the interior was gloomy, the small panes of the front windows thick with the accumulated grime, cobwebs, and entombed dead insects of centuries. Rather than look up, Priss simply kept winding the gilded, jewel-encrusted trinket, and he realized she must keep lookouts posted on the street outside, because she’d obviously known he was coming.
“Back again, are you?” she said, setting the trinket on the counter between them. The nightingale began to sing melodiously, its delicate, gilded wings beating slowly up and down, its tiny beak opening and closing, the jeweled collar around its neck glittering with simulated fire.
“Interesting,” said Sebastian, watching it.
“Ain’t it just? And the jewels are real rubies and sapphires too—no paste.”