by C. S. Harris
He could have driven the short distance to Heddie Kincaid’s cottage, for a gentleman who journeys with his wife and infant son does not travel lightly. But he had no desire to order out either his crested chaise and four or the light, fast curricle that was his preferred means of transportation. He walked, listened to the bees buzz in the clover, and thought about the past.
Growing up, Sebastian had always known he was different from his siblings even if he’d never understood why. Born the fourth child and third son of the Earl of Hendon and his countess, Sophia, Sebastian had instinctively felt himself to be an outlier, utterly unlike the Earl in looks, temperament, interests, and talents. Whereas his sister and older brothers had eyes of the famous St. Cyr blue, Sebastian’s were a feral yellow, with a strange, animalistic ability to see clearly both in the dark and over great distances. And it didn’t take Sebastian long to realize that his hearing was abnormally acute as well.
Yet somehow he’d never questioned his parentage, never questioned that he was a St. Cyr—until two years ago, when he’d learned the truth: that Hendon’s beautiful, fun-loving, rebellious Countess had played her lord false; that Sebastian was not, in fact, a son of Alistair St. Cyr but the bastard offspring of one of the Countess’s many nameless lovers.
It was a secret Hendon had always known, although he’d kept it hidden from both Sebastian and the world. Even when Hendon’s first and second sons died, leaving Sebastian as the only heir, he hid it still, which was why Sebastian was known as Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, son and heir of the Earl of Hendon.
When in truth he was none of these things.
The discovery had helped send Sebastian into a downward spiral and very nearly destroyed him. He’d somehow managed to pull himself out of it—largely, he suspected, thanks to the appearance in his life of Hero and Simon. But the painful sense of being a stranger to himself, and the questions, remained. For if he wasn’t who he’d always thought he was, then who was he?
And then he had encountered Jamie Knox, the tall, lean ex-rifleman who looked enough like Sebastian to be his brother.
Or at least a half brother.
He came upon Heddie Kincaid’s cottage a quarter mile or so beyond the Blue Boar, beside a clear, small stream that flowed through a ferny glade shaded by towering beech and elm. The cottage was small, with only a single dormer, a lean-to shed, and a few chickens scratching in the yard. But the thatch was new, the casement windows freshly painted a cheery blue, and the vegetables, herbs, and flowers in the garden well tended.
Sebastian hesitated just a shade too long, then turned up the lavender – and rosemary-edged path to the cottage’s front door.
The information that Heddie Kincaid was blind had eased one of his major concerns: that the old woman would see the resemblance between Sebastian and her grandson and be troubled and confused by it. Except that it was not Heddie Kincaid who opened the door to Sebastian’s knock, but a willowy, striking woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties. Jamie Knox had been dark and yellow eyed, whereas this woman had reddish blond hair and eyes of a light, crystal-like blue. But her resemblance to the ex-rifleman was startling enough that for a moment Sebastian could only stare at her—as she stared at him, one hand tightening around the edge of the door.
“The Lord preserve us,” she said at last, her chest jerking on a quickly indrawn breath. “Who are you?”
He removed his hat and held it in one hand against his thigh. “My apologies for the intrusion, madam. I am Devlin.”
“You’re the London lord the young Squire asked to help him with this murder?”
“Yes, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m looking for Heddie Kincaid. I knew her grandson, Jamie Knox.”
“Jamie’s dead.”
“I know.”
Sebastian studied the unknown woman’s flaring high cheekbones and square chin. He had always assumed that Knox must resemble the unknown man who had fathered him—who had perhaps fathered them both. But now, looking at this woman, he found that assumption called into doubt. And the implications had him reeling.
Somehow, he managed to say, “I was with him when he died. I’ve brought something he wanted his grandmother to have.”
“Och, and look at me,” she said, taking a step back as she opened the door wide. “Leaving you standing on the step. I beg your pardon, my lord. Please, come in.”
Ducking through the low doorway, he found himself in a small room that served as a combination living area, dining room, and kitchen. A curtain half hid a bed in a small alcove, while steep stairs led up to an attic loft above. The ceiling was low, the room cramped. But the uneven, flagged floor was cleanly swept, the walls newly whitewashed. And it occurred to Sebastian that Knox must have been sending money back to Shropshire, to help the family he’d left behind.
An elderly woman sat on one of the old-fashioned high-backed benches at a trestle table drawn up before the smoke-blackened stone hearth. Her hair was snow-white, her weathered, aged face crisscrossed with deeply etched lines. But her frame was still robust, and though she stared straight ahead with milky white eyes, she was busy snapping peas in a bowl she balanced on her lap, her fingers moving easily with a lifetime of practice.
“Nana,” said the younger woman, raising her voice slightly as she went to crouch beside her grandmother and lay a hand on her arm. “Here’s a Lord Devlin to see you, from London. He knew Jamie.”
The woman’s fingers stilled at their task, her head turning toward Sebastian even though she could not see him. And he watched a breath of sadness waft across her features at the mere mention of her grandson’s name.
Once, Sebastian thought, she must have been a handsome woman. He could trace quite clearly in her strong-boned face and faintly cleft chin the image of her dead grandson. And it occurred to him that the ways in which Jamie Knox had differed from Sebastian, he had resembled these two women.
“You knew Jamie?” she said, her voice still strong and unquavering. And he found himself wondering how old she was, this woman who had buried three husbands and countless children and grandchildren.
“I did, yes,” said Sebastian, coming to take the seat indicated by the younger woman. “I have something he bought for you the very day he died.”
The younger woman lifted the bowl of peas from her grandmother’s lap so that Sebastian could place the box in her gnarled, work-roughened hands.
“For me?” she said in wonder as she lifted the box’s lid and reached inside.
He watched her fingers move deftly over the bird’s beak, its jeweled collar and gilded wings. “There’s a key hidden in the tail feathers,” he explained. “It’s mechanical.”
She lifted the nightingale clumsily from its box, feeling for the key as her granddaughter moved to help her.
“Here,” said the younger woman. She wound the key and set the bird on the table beside them. The familiar, joyous melody filled the small cottage. “It’s beautiful, Nana. And it looks just like a nightingale.”
The old woman sat motionless, listening to the gracefully flowing notes, moisture glistening in her sightless eyes as the bird slowly wound down. “I’ve always loved nightingales,” she said, her voice cracking as she reached up one bent knuckle to wipe away a tear that threatened to fall. “Did he truly buy it for me?”
“He did, yes.”
She nodded and swallowed, hard. “He was an amazing lad. So bright and quick. Had the eyesight of a hawk and the hearing of a bat. Never seen anything like it.”
Sebastian was aware of the younger woman’s gaze upon him but said nothing. The abnormal acuteness of their senses was something else he and Knox had had in common.
“He was a rifleman, you know,” said Heddie Kincaid proudly. “Best shot the army ever had, I reckon.”
“Yes,” said Sebastian. He cleared his throat, but his voice was still husky as he asked one of the questio
ns he had come here hoping to have answered. “Did he get his eyesight and hearing from your daughter?”
“Och, no. No one else in our family has such gifts—not even Jenny here, and she’s his twin.”
Sebastian looked at the younger woman and felt the skin stretch oddly taut against the bones of his face. For if Jamie Knox had, in truth, been Sebastian’s half brother, then that would make this self-possessed, vaguely hostile woman Sebastian’s half sister.
“—must’ve come from his da, I always figured,” the old woman was saying. “Whoever he was. My girl Eleanor—his mama—she died not long after the babies was born, poor child. Was too much for her, carryin’ the two of ’em. Maybe if she’d lived, she could’ve said who their da was. But that weren’t the way it turned out.”
It fit with what Knox had once told Sebastian. But the disappointment was still intense. He said, “Jamie told me his mother worked at the Crown and Thorn, in Ludlow.”
“Aye. She had a row with her stepda and took off after he found out she was in the family way.” The old woman’s face tightened as if with pain. “Maybe if she’d ’ve stayed, she wouldn’t ’ve died.”
He watched Heddie’s fingers slide slowly over the now-silent bird, her face quivering with emotion. She said, “I’ve always loved nightingales. But I didn’t realize Jamie knew it. And to think he remembered it all these years.”
“He was planning to come see you,” said Sebastian. “He wanted to bring it to you himself.”
The old woman turned her face to the warm afternoon breeze gusting through the low, open windows. They could hear the scratching of the chickens in the yard, smell the fecund odor of the recently hoed garden mingling with the stale peat smoke from the cold hearth beside them. She said, “All them years he was in the army, I worried. Worried he was gonna die of fever in some godforsaken foreign outpost or get blown to bits in battle and lie forever in an unmarked grave. Never thought he’d get himself shot in London.”
“He died quickly,” said Sebastian, although it was a lie. The sucking wound in Knox’s chest had taken nearly an hour to kill him. “He didn’t suffer.”
The old woman nodded, her fingers finding the mechanical bird’s key. She wound it wordlessly, and the nightingale’s gilded wings lifted up and down again as it poured forth its sweetly haunting melody.
Sebastian drew an envelope from his pocket and laid it beside her. “He also wanted you to have this.” He pushed to his feet as her hand shifted to the envelope and the banknotes it contained. “If there’s anything else I can do,” he said, “please don’t hesitate to let me know.”
Jenny walked with him to the door but stopped him on the threshold by saying quietly, “Is it true? Did Jamie die quickly?”
He met her frank, level gaze. But all he said was, “Quick enough.”
She blinked. “Why did you come here? Truly?”
He glanced back at the old woman, who now sat unmoving, staring blindly into space. “The man who shot your brother mistook him for me. He died because he looked like me.”
Jenny’s nostrils flared on a quickly indrawn breath. “That’s why you gave my grandmother money? You think in some way it makes up for the death of my brother? Well, it doesn’t.”
“No,” agreed Sebastian.
The hostility emanating from her was as stark and powerful as it was inexplicable. And he wondered if her antagonism was provoked by him personally, or by everything he represented—socially, economically, and culturally.
He said, “Miss Knox—”
She shook her head. “It’s Jenny Dalyrimple. My husband’s Alex Dalyrimple.” She said it as if the name should mean something to him, although it did not.
She tipped her head to one side. “Jamie wrote to me about you. Said he’d met a grand lord who looked enough like him to be his brother. He thought maybe your father—the Earl of Hendon himself—might be our father. Only, then he got a look at Lord Hendon. And you know what he said? He said the Earl looked nothing like us. Or you.”
Sebastian studied her fine-boned face, flushed golden by the hours she spent working hard beneath the sun. He traced with fascination the ways in which she resembled her twin—and him—and the ways she did not. But all he said was, “I mean it; if there is anything else I can do, you’ve only to let me know.”
Her eyes flared. “We don’t need your help.”
“I didn’t intend to suggest that you do.” He ducked beneath the low lintel, then paused to settle his hat on his head. The day was bright and warm, the flox, lavender, and mulleins in her garden blooming a riot of yellow, pink, blue, and purple. He knew now that she was the one who tended them, just as she fed the chickens and milked the cow he could hear lowing in the shed. She was slender with a hard-muscled leanness that spoke of a life spent hoeing fields and kneading bread dough and hauling firewood. Yet there was a mental quickness about her, an instinctive intelligence that was impossible to miss. And she had, one way or another, managed to acquire something of an education, for her brother had regularly sent her letters, and she could read them.
“I saw her, you know,” she said, one hand coming up to brush the hair from her forehead as he started to leave. “That widow they’re saying someone killed.”
Sebastian turned to face her again. “When was this?”
“Early yesterday afternoon. I’d taken the cow to graze in the grass along the side of the road and that’s when I saw her, coming up from the village. She climbed over the stile by the stream and took the footpath that runs up to the old priory ruins.”
“Did you happen to notice if she was carrying a reticule?”
The question obviously puzzled her, but Jenny answered readily enough. “I don’t remember it. But she did have a canvas satchel with a leather strap over one shoulder.”
“Did you see her come back?”
“No. But then, I spent the rest of the day weeding the kitchen garden on the other side of the cottage.”
“She was alone?”
“She was, yes.” Her face lifted to his, her unusual, faceted blue eyes dark now with some emotion he could not name. “I hear Constable Nash is saying she killed herself.”
“She didn’t.”
“So certain?”
“Yes.”
“She was a stranger. Why would anyone from around here want to kill her?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet. Who do you think could have done it?”
She gave him a wary look, as if she suspected him of trying to lead her into a trap. “Me? What do I know of such things?”
“You know the people around here.”
He thought she might deny that anyone in the village could be a killer. Instead, she looked thoughtful a moment, then said, “If anybody did it, I’d say it was probably Reuben—the Widow Dickie’s simpleminded son.”
Sebastian recalled one of Emma Chance’s portraits, of a round-faced, vacuous-looking man with small, wide-set eyes and a mouthful of oddly spaced teeth. “What makes you suspect him?”
“He’s always creeping about, peeping in folks’ windows—particularly if it’s a house with women living alone. He ain’t right in the head.”
“Where would I find him?”
“He hangs about the village green most of the time. Likes to sit on the step of the pump house—although the truth is, you never know where he’s gonna pop up.”
Sebastian doubted that anyone simpleminded could be either cunning or resourceful enough to carefully stage a murder to look like suicide. But he knew that people often treated the simpleminded as if they weren’t there—as if they couldn’t hear what was said or see what was done, or remember it.
Which meant that Reuben Dickie sounded like someone Sebastian ought to speak to.
Chapter 8
Roofed with lichen-encrusted slate, its paving stones worn shiny by centuries of passing f
eet, Ayleswick’s pump house stood near one corner of the village green. Its sides were open, the roof supported by dark old beams that rested on weathered columns of large, square-cut stone blocks.
A short, squat-looking man sat on the pump house’s single step and whistled tunelessly as he carved a piece of wood into a quadruped of an as yet indeterminate species. The man had lank, greasy brown hair and a wide, flat face that remained emotionless as he watched Sebastian walk toward him.
“I know who you are,” said Reuben Dickie as Sebastian drew up before him.
“Do you?”
“Aye. Yer that grand London lord come to town with the pretty lady—the tall one with the baby. Heard about you, I did.”
“Did you hear I’m helping Squire Rawlins with this recent murder?”
Reuben’s tongue darted out to lick his lips as his gaze slid sideways. He said nothing.
Sebastian studied the man’s small, oddly shaped eyes and flat nose. He looked to be somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, although the hands wielding the knife with expert care were as small and short fingered as those of a child.
After a moment, Reuben thrust out his lower lip and said, “Heard Constable Nash tell the smith she killed herself.”
Sebastian squinted off across the green, toward the gentle hill that rose above the village to the north. He was becoming seriously annoyed with the village’s talkative constable. “She didn’t, actually.”
Reuben nodded and kept whittling. “Constable Nash ain’t near as smart as he thinks he is.”
“The lady drew your picture, didn’t she?”
Reuben slanted a wary look up at him. “How’d you know that?”
“I saw it, in the sketchbook she left in her room. It was a picture of you sitting here, at the pump house.”
He gave a quick, unexpected smile. “She drew it last Saturday. I was sittin’ here whittling, and she said, ‘Do you mind if I sketch you?’ And I said, ‘No.’ So she did.”