by C. S. Harris
She gave a sad smile. “And you, Sebastian? Hendon is desperate for an heir.”
“I will take no woman to wife unless I can give her a whole heart.” Or unless I must, he thought, to preserve her honor.
She nodded, and drew her hood back up over her hair.
“Thank you,” he said with a painful formality that hurt him almost as much as anything else.
“I spoke to Gibson,” she said, her hand on the door, as if she knew she should leave but could not quite bring herself to go. Through all that had happened in the past ten months, she and the Irish surgeon had remained friends. “He told me about Obadiah Slade.” She hesitated. “Please be careful, Sebastian.”
Somehow, he managed to give her a jaunty smile. “I’m always careful.”
“No. You’re not. You’re never careful. That’s what worries me.”
After she had gone, he retrieved his book from the floor. But the words swam before his eyes and he imagined the scent of her lingered still in the room, like a sweet memory just beyond his grasp.
The Reverend Malcolm Earnshaw sank before the high altar of St. Margaret’s, his hands clasped in supplication before him as he let out a low moan.
Beneath his aching knees, the worn stone paving of the aisle felt cold and cruelly hard, but he welcomed the pain as a kind of penance. The jewel-toned stained glass of the soaring windows of the apse before him showed only black against black, while the distant recesses of the church were lost in the gloom of the night. He let his head fall back, his throat working to swallow as he stared up at the intricately carved groins of the ancient vaults above him, alive now with strange, ghostly shadows cast by the flickering flames of the two heavy candles flanking the altar.
He squeezed his eyes shut, his lips moving in a soundless prayer. Oh, Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest my lying down and my rising up; thou understandest my thoughts afar off. . . .
It was so difficult to know what to do in such a situation. One shrank from accidentally implicating the innocent, but what if . . . What if the innocent were not truly innocent? How was one to know? Never had Earnshaw felt more in need of guidance and wisdom.
“ ’Thou compassest my path and my lying down,’ ” he whispered, finding solace in speaking the words aloud. “ ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Whither shall I flee from thy presence?’ ”
At some point, the rain had started up again. He could hear it beating on the slate roof above him, and he shivered with the cold and the damp and a quick leap of unaccountable fear.
“ ‘Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God,’ ” he said, his voice rising shrilly. “ ‘Depart from me therefore, ye bloody men.’ ”
From somewhere startlingly near came a soft thump.
The Reverend pushed to his feet, his knees creaking, his breath bunching hot in his throat as he whirled about to peer helplessly into the gloom. “Who’s there?”
His own voice echoed back at him. He swallowed hard, feeling an odd mixture of foolishness and terror. “Is anybody there?”
The urge to bolt toward the west door was strong. But the fat beeswax candles flanking the altar were atrociously dear; he never should have lit them. It had been a foolish extravagance, however spooked he might be.
Bent on extinguishing the flames quickly, he lurched up the step toward the altar, stumbling in his haste. Then he threw another frightened glance toward the nave and whispered, “Oh, my God.”
Chapter 22
SATURDAY, 11 JULY 1812
The next morning, Sebastian drove out toward Prescott Grange, intending to speak to the widow of Sir Nigel Prescott. But when he passed through Tanfield Hill, he found the village green crowded with men fanning out under the direction of the Squire, Douglas Pyle.
“What’s all this?” asked Sebastian, reining in beside him.
“That fool priest,” said the Squire. “He’s gone missing. According to Mrs. Earnshaw, he went out last night, saying he couldn’t remember if he’d locked the sacristy door. Nobody’s seen him since.”
Sebastian glanced over at the ancient church, its heavy sandstone walls looking dark and brooding beneath the cloudy sky. “Did you check the crypt?”
The Squire drew in a deep breath that lifted his broad chest, and blew it out slowly. “Aye, we did. He’s not there, thank God. Although we did find this.” He slipped something from his waistcoat and held it out.
Sebastian found himself staring at a black carved classical profile mounted on a heavy silver setting. “Sir Nigel’s ring?”
The Squire nodded. “One of the lads found it in the rubble near those old collapsed coffins. Musta got kicked back there somehow, which is why we didn’t see it before.”
Sebastian handed the ring back. “Does Earnshaw do this often? Visit the church at night, I mean?”
“His wife says sometimes. When he’s troubled.”
“He was troubled?”
“She says he seemed to be.”
“Does she know about what?”
The Squire shook his head. “He’s been acting queer ever since he found the bodies in the crypt. But then, who wouldn’t?”
“True,” said Sebastian. He studied the Squire’s pleasant, fleshy face. “How well did you know Sir Nigel Prescott?”
“Sir Nigel? Not all that well. He was a good bit older’n me.” The Squire rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “I hear they’re saying the fright in blue velvet was him.”
“So it would seem.”
The Squire shook his head. “It’s unsettling to think about it, him lying there with a knife stuck in his back right beneath our feet, every Sunday, for close onto thirty years. And no one knew it.”
Sebastian watched the men moving off in all directions. “I understand he was an unpleasant man.”
“Unpleasant?” The Squire grunted. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone around here with something nice to say about him.”
“It’s not often you see brothers so unlike each other.”
The Squire rubbed a hand over his jaw and looked away, as if choosing his words carefully. “I’ve heard tales about old Lady Prescott—Sir Nigel’s mother—if you know what I mean? There wasn’t a strong family resemblance between Francis Prescott and the rest of his brothers and sisters.”
“Yet Prescott Grange would have passed to the Bishop, would it not, if Sir Peter hadn’t been born?”
“Aye, that it would,” said the Squire, shaking his head. “Who’d have thought, with five sons?” He shook his head again, as if to underscore the point. “Five sons. And if not for that wee posthumous babe, the youngest would have inherited it all.”
The estate Sir Peter Prescott had inherited at birth from his dead father lay just to the north of the village, on the edge of Hounslow Heath. Sebastian drove through well-tended, ripening fields of barley and wheat and oats waving gently in the July breeze. Fat brown cows grazed pastures edged by sturdy stone walls and thick hedgerows. Children played outside thatched cottages with dogs that loped, barking, behind the curricle as he bowled up the lane to the ancient manor house.
The house itself was a picturesque, rambling conglomerate, some parts half-timbered, some of red Tudor brick, others of medieval stone, all grouped around a broad paved quadrangle and centered on a great hall with an arch-braced roof that must have dated back to the thirteenth or fourteenth century.
Lady Prescott, mother to the current baronet and widow of Sir Nigel, was in the gardens that stretched to the east of the ancient hall. She had a basket looped over one arm and secateurs in hand as she worked snipping blooms from the wide, riotous border of peonies and roses, hollyhocks and lavender that that ran along the grassy embankment of what had once been a moat. She was a small, slim woman, her guinea gold hair fading slowly to gray, her soft blue eyes sad beneath the wide brim of her hat as she turned at Sebastian’s approach. Now somewhere in her fifties, she wore a plain black gown made high at the neck, as befitted a woman in deepest mourning for bot
h her husband and her husband’s brother.
“I’m sorry my son isn’t here to receive you,” she said, extending her hand to Sebastian. “But he should return presently. I believe he’s conferring with workmen making repairs on some of the cottages.” She passed the flower basket and secateurs to the footman who’d escorted Sebastian and said to the man with a smile, “Ask Mrs. Norwood to put these in water for me, will you, Frederick?”
“Actually, I saw Sir Peter yesterday,” said Sebastian as the footman withdrew with a bow. “I was hoping I might be able to speak with you.”
She nodded. “Sir Henry told me the Archbishop had asked for your assistance in this dreadful business. I’m willing to help in any way I can.”
They turned to walk together along the border. The day was warm despite the clouds, the pinks and scarlets of the rambling roses bright in the flat light. She said, “You’d think that after thirty years, I wouldn’t find the discovery of Sir Nigel’s body such a shock. But somehow, thinking someone is dead and knowing it for certain are two entirely different things.”
Sebastian studied her fine-boned face, the gentle fan of lines that bracketed her eyes. She was still a remarkably attractive woman; in her prime, she must have been stunning. He said, “What did you think had happened to Sir Nigel when he disappeared?”
“At first? When his horse was discovered wandering the heath, I thought he must have suffered some sort of accident. That he’d be found under a bush, injured.”
“And when he wasn’t found?”
“In all honesty? I assumed someone had killed him.”
“Any idea who?”
She glanced over at him, the faintest hint of an odd smile touching the edges of her lips. “Tell me something, Lord Devlin: You’ve obviously spoken to people who knew my husband. Have you found anyone who knew him well and still had anything good to say about him?”
Sebastian returned her smile. “I believe someone said he could be charming.”
“Oh, yes, he could indeed be charming. When he wished to be.” She reached out to pluck a pink hollyhock from the riot of blooms in the border beside them. “Do I shock you?”
“I admire your candor.”
She twirled the hollyhock back and forth between gloved fingers. “Thirty years ago I would not have been so honest. But three decades of living as neither wife nor widow have had their effect.”
She glanced back toward the terrace, to where a gardener in a smock was working manure into an empty flower bed. After a moment, she said, “I’ll be even more frank with you, Lord Devlin. I didn’t care what had happened to him, as long as he was indeed dead so that I would never have to see him again.” She raised her chin, her jaw hardening. “There; I’ve said it. Think of me what you will.”
He studied her pale, strained face. What manner of man, he wondered, could have inspired such passionate, enduring animosity in his gently bred young wife? And yet . . .
And yet, according to Lovejoy, she had wept when shown the evidence that Sir Nigel was, indeed, dead.
Aloud, Sebastian said, “I’m told Sir Nigel’s brother, Francis Prescott, was the priest in residence at St. Margaret’s at the time your husband disappeared.”
“Yes. He was a tremendous comfort to me at the time.” Turning away from the ancient moat, they followed a track that wound toward a distant copse of elms and chestnuts. “Why do you ask?”
“Do you remember the circumstances surrounding his decision to brick up the church’s crypt?”
“Very clearly. Francis had wanted to seal it off for some time. The smell was truly appalling, particularly in the heat of summer. And there were concerns that the air wafting up from the decomposing bodies might expose the congregation to disease. Unfortunately, the Dowager Lady Prescott—my late mother-in-law—was adamantly against the idea. She was determined to be buried in the crypt, beside two daughters who had died as children. She begged him to wait until after she was gone, and he did.”
“When did she die?”
“That June, not long before Sir Nigel disappeared. After her funeral, Francis moved quickly to have the crypt closed.”
“You never connected the sealing of the crypt with the disappearance of your husband?”
She turned to face him, her soft blue eyes wide in a pale face. “No. Why ever would I?”
Why, indeed? thought Sebastian. Aloud, he said, “I understand it was Sir Nigel’s intention to visit his clubs the evening he disappeared.”
“Yes.”
“Any idea as to why he might have changed his mind and gone to St. Margaret’s instead?”
She looked at him blankly. “No.”
“You can’t think of any reason he might have decided to visit the crypt?”
She shook her head. “I can’t imagine. It was such a frightful place.”
“What can you tell me of his activities in the days immediately preceding his disappearance?”
“His activities?” She made a vague gesture with one gloved hand. “How much do you remember about a particular point in time thirty years ago?”
“I wasn’t born thirty years ago.”
She gave a soft laugh. “No, I suppose you weren’t. Neither was my son.” She walked on for a moment, lost in memories of the past. Then she said, “As I recall, he was very busy in those last weeks, riding back and forth to London nearly every day for meetings at the Palace and at Whitehall. He was something of a leader in the Commons, you know—allied with Pitt. If he hadn’t died, he would probably have been named foreign secretary when the government was reorganized. I know he wanted the position. It’s one of the reasons he went on the mission to the Colonies.”
Sebastian drew up short. “Sir Nigel was in America?”
“Why, yes; didn’t you know? He’d only just returned.”
Sebastian watched the gardener load his tools in the now empty wheelbarrow and push it back toward the stables. The rattle of his rake and shovel carried clearly on the breeze as he bumped over heavy ground. It seemed oddly inevitable that Sir Nigel had only just returned from the American Colonies. Somehow, everything kept circling back to the Americas.
Sebastian said, “In 1782, we were still at war with the rebels.”
“Yes, but there was growing opposition in Parliament to the King’s determination to continue the war effort. In the end, Lord North and the King agreed to send a mission to evaluate the true state of affairs in the Colonies.”
“Who were the other members of the mission?” Sebastian asked, although somehow, he already knew the answer.
She tipped her head to one side and hesitated, as if wondering how he would receive what she was about to say. “There were three of them: Sir Nigel; Charles, Lord Jarvis; and your own father, the Earl of Hendon.”
Chapter 23
Sebastian found his father at the Horse Guards.
“Walk with me,” said Sebastian, coming upon the Earl in the small circular hall overlooking Whitehall.
Hendon glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantel of the vestibule’s empty fireplace. “I’ve a meeting with Channing at—”
“This won’t take long.”
Hendon raised his eyebrows, his jaw working thoughtfully in that way he had as he studied his son’s face in silence. “Very well,” he said, and turned toward the door.
Sebastian waited until they’d reached the gravel path that ran along the canal in St. James’s Park before saying, “Thirty years ago, you were one of three men sent by the King to evaluate the situation in the American Colonies.”
Hendon’s forehead furrowed in a frown. “That’s right. Why do you ask?”
“The other two men were Charles, Lord Jarvis, and Sir Nigel Prescott?”
“Ah. I see. Yes, Sir Nigel was with us. I heard his body had finally been found. Who’d have thought, after all these years?”
“How long after the three of you returned from America did Sir Nigel disappear?”
Hendon’s lips pursed with the effort of memory. �
��A week. Perhaps less.”
Sebastian frowned. Lady Prescott had spoken of “weeks.” Yet after thirty years, one’s memory might be expected to grow distorted. “Did you think at the time his disappearance might have something to do with your recent mission to America?”
Hendon glanced at him sharply. “No. Why would I?”
Sebastian studied his father’s unexpectedly closed, angry face. “I don’t know. I’m not entirely certain I understand why the three of you were sent to the Colonies in the first place.”
Hendon was silent for a moment, the fingers of his right hand running absently up and down his watch chain. He said, “The King took the Americans’ rebellion against his authority personally. Very personally. He was determined they be punished for it. The problem was, once the French and Spanish entered the war against us, our ability to actually subdue the colonists was seriously compromised. We simply didn’t have the troops to fight the French and Spanish in every corner of the world, and occupy the rebellious colonies, too. We’d send the Army into an area and occupy it, but as soon as the Army left, the rebels would take control of it again.”
“There was opposition in Parliament to continuing the war?”
“That’s right. But the King remained adamant that it could be won. His idea was to concentrate on fighting the French in India and the West Indies while crushing the Americans financially—basically by destroying their maritime trade, burning their coastal towns, and supporting the natives on the frontiers, until the rebels came begging to be taken back under the King’s protection.”
“Even after Yorktown?”
Hendon sighed. “Yorktown was undeniably a turning point. The King remained resolute, but the surrender of Cornwallis emboldened the peace party in Parliament to move against His Majesty’s Prime Minister, Lord North. In the end, it was actually North who convinced the King to send a delegation to America, to evaluate the situation at first hand—and, if possible, to open channels to the members of the Confederation Congress, urging them to accept some form of dominion status, with a separate parliament loyal to a common king.”