by C. S. Harris
“Did you happen to see her yesterday?”
Again, that vague shadow of wariness darkened the man’s eyes. “I s’pose I did.”
“Where was that?”
“Well, it must’ve been when I was sittin’ here, don’t ye think? Saw her go in and out the Blue Boar a time or two. She was sketchin’ all the old buildings hereabouts—the church and Maplethorpe Hall and the Grange.”
That caught Sebastian’s attention. “She drew Maplethorpe Hall?” According to the vicar, Maplethorpe was the ancestral home of the Baldwyns, the family whose tomb she’d been studying when he first came upon her in the churchyard.
Reuben looked up and blinked, as if puzzled by Sebastian’s interest. “Aye. Why?”
“When was this?”
“I dunno. But Major Weston could tell ye. He lives in the old Dower House, ye know.”
“And who lives at Maplethorpe?”
Reuben Dickie gave an odd, breathy giggle. “Ain’t nobody lives there now. Not since it burned.”
“It’s a ruin?”
“Aye. Ain’t nothing left but a few blackened walls.” He tipped his head to one side. “Didn’t ye know?”
“No, I did not.” Sebastian propped one boot on the low step and leaned an elbow on his bent knee. “I’m afraid there’s a great deal about Ayleswick that I don’t know. Perhaps you can help me with that. I would imagine you know everyone around here.”
“Pretty much,” said Reuben, grinning with pride.
“What do you think happened to Emma Chance?”
The smile slid away from the man’s broad, childlike face. “How would I know?”
“I imagine you must see and hear a great deal, sitting here all the time, watching people. I suspect most of the villagers don’t realize just how much you see.”
“They think I’m an idiot.”
“I don’t think you’re an idiot.” Reuben Dickie looked much like certain other mentally deficient men and women Sebastian had known in the past. But in Sebastian’s experience, the intellectual capabilities of those so afflicted could vary widely, and he suspected Reuben Dickie’s abilities were better than most. “Do you live with your mother, Reuben?”
“Aye.” He nodded to the picturesque row of half-timbered houses that ranged along the eastern side of the village green. “Our cottage is the one on the end.”
Sebastian studied the ancient house’s fanciful facade, its timbers enlivened with quatrefoils and cusps and carved faces. “You and your mother live alone?”
“Oh, no. I got a brother, Jeb. He’s not like me; he’s real smart, he is. Works as a carter. Hauling a load of timber to Wales, he is. He’s my little brother, but he takes care of me. Looks out for me, he does.”
Sebastian straightened. “If you think of anything you saw or heard that might be helpful, you will tell me, won’t you?”
Reuben grinned up at him. “I can do that.”
As Sebastian walked back across the green toward the Blue Boar, he was aware of Reuben watching him, the knife and block of wood held slack in his hands. There was something about the man that unsettled Sebastian, although he could not have articulated it. Reuben Dickie had grown up an outcast in his own village. Mentally slow and physically different, he would have been the butt of children’s pranks and a target for the taunts of the cruel his entire life. There were some who managed to retain their equanimity and good humor in the face of such relentless torment. But most grew sullen and resentful, and he suspected Reuben fell squarely into the latter category.
Yet there was something else about the man that troubled Sebastian, and he realized now it had something to do with the sly gleam in Reuben Dickie’s eyes when he spoke of the tall, pretty lady with the baby.
Hero.
“You can’t seriously think that poor, slow-witted man killed Emma Chance?” said Hero.
She was sitting at the table in their private parlor, thumbing through Emma’s sketchbook while Simon played with a stuffed lamb on the nearby hearthrug.
“I think it’s a possibility, yes,” said Sebastian. “And not simply because Jenny Dalyrimple suspects him. I think he’s hiding something.”
“But . . . He could never have come up with the idea of carrying Emma’s body down to the water meadow and leaving a bottle of laudanum at her side.”
“No. But his clever brother, Jeb, might have done it. He ‘takes care of’ Reuben, remember?”
Hero sat back in her chair. “You don’t think it’s possible that Emma could have reached the water meadows by a different path than the one you and Rawlins followed? One that wasn’t muddy?”
Sebastian shook his head. “According to Archie, there’s a path that runs along the river, but it’s muddy in both directions.”
She went back to turning the sketchbook’s pages, studying the various portraits.
He saw her forehead crease with a frown. “What is it?”
“Have you noticed that almost all these portraits are of men? There are a few women, but not many.”
“No, I hadn’t noticed.” He moved to look over her shoulder. “But you’re right. Maybe she simply found men more interesting to draw.”
Hero grunted and flipped back to the beginning of the notebook. “She also wrote the names of some of the people she drew—but not others. She named Archie Rawlins and Reuben Dickie, but not Martin McBroom . . .” She paused at one of the rare sketches of a woman: a young woman with thick wavy hair framing a strong-boned, familiar face. He wasn’t surprised to read the neatly printed caption. Jenny Dalyrimple.
Hero looked up at him. “Did she tell you Emma Chance had drawn her portrait?”
“No. No, she didn’t. But then, perhaps she didn’t know it. Neither McBroom nor Rawlins did.”
Hero studied the sketch in silence for a moment. “She looks a lot like Jamie Knox.”
Sebastian walked over to the bottle of surprisingly fine French brandy from Martin McBroom’s cellars and poured himself a glass. “Which is to say, she looks a lot like me.”
“Yes.” Hero set the sketchbook aside, her gaze on his face. “I assume Jenny also noticed the resemblance?”
“How could she not?” Sebastian took a slow swallow of his brandy and felt it burn all the way down. “She said Knox had written to her about me. He told her he thought Hendon might be their father—until he got a good look at the Earl.”
“And she doesn’t know any more about their father than Jamie did?”
“If she does, she’s not talking. About a lot of things, actually.”
“What are you going to do next?”
“Pay a visit to this Dr. Higginbottom. Hopefully he can tell us something about how and where Emma Chance actually died. Although I have my doubts.”
“Not all country physicians are incompetent.”
“No. But few have much experience with postmortems. And I’ve never needed Gibson’s rare genius more than I do with this one.”
“Perhaps Higginbottom will surprise you.”
Sebastian drained his brandy with a grunt and set the glass aside.
Chapter 9
Sebastian hated looking at the victims of violent death.
He’d spent six years in the army, fighting King George III’s wars from Italy and Portugal to the West Indies. He’d seen men blown into unidentifiable bloody strips of flesh by cannon fire and disemboweled by the swift, hot rush of lead. He’d decapitated men with the singing slash of his own cavalry sword and ridden through villages filled with nothing but bloating, blackened, fly-ridden corpses. Yet the sight of the cold, waxy corpse of a murder victim still hit his gut, still left him feeling sick and shaky and filled with a crusader’s rage.
Someone had once told him that he was locked in a war with death—a useless vendetta that he could never win. But while he acknowledged that possibility, it hadn’t ch
anged anything.
Dr. Hiram Higginbottom lived in an old farmhouse just off the road that stretched northeast toward Ludlow. As was the case for most country doctors, the practice of medicine was something he did on the side. He also ran a large herd of sheep and hired cottagers to tend his orchards and milk his cows and plant, hoe, and harvest his fields.
The distance was not far, but this time Sebastian chose to drive himself in his curricle, an elegant, lightly sprung chaise drawn by a pair of white-socked chestnuts.
“Word round about the stables is that she killed ’erself,” said Tom, the sharp-faced, half-grown lad who served as Sebastian’s tiger, or young groom. “They’re sayin’ that if somebody’d murdered ’er, there’d ’ave been blood, and there weren’t no blood.”
“No, no blood.” Sebastian swung the curricle in between two drunken brick gateposts and ran up a long drive flanked by rolling green pastures dotted with sheep. “I do trust you haven’t felt inclined to try to change their minds with your fists.”
Tom clung to his perch at the rear of the curricle and remained silent.
Sebastian ducked his head to hide his smile. “While I appreciate the impulse, I somewhat doubt your pugnacious approach will have its desired effect.”
“My pug-what?”
“Pugnacious approach,” said Sebastian, drawing up before a two-story square brick farmhouse that looked as if it had been built early in the previous century. “In other words, focus more on listening to what the locals are saying and give over attempting to protect my reputation. Understood?”
“Aye, gov’nor.”
Sebastian handed Tom the reins and hopped down to the rutted, weed-choked sweep.
Once, the house must have been gracious; he could still follow the ghostly outlines of a pleasure garden long since vanished beneath what had now been turned into more pastureland. All that remained of the once extensive borders and beds was a stand of gnarled, overgrown yews that must throw the house into a sepulchral gloom, and a broken sundial marooned in a patch of thistles. The front step was cracked; only faint traces of paint showed on window frames weathered gray, and crows nested in the eaves. It occurred to Sebastian that if Dr. Hiram Higginbottom conducted his autopsies with the same care he showed the upkeep of his house, then the chances of finding out exactly how Emma Chance had died were slim.
A breeze kicked up, bringing him the smell of manure from the nearby barns and the pungent pinch of burning tobacco.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” said a gravelly voice from behind him. “That grand London lord with all the nonsensical notions.”
Sebastian was getting more than a bit tired of hearing himself described as “that grand London lord.” He turned slowly to find a man seated on a rusty bench buried in the depths of the yews.
“I’m Devlin, yes. I take it you’re Hiram Higginbottom?”
The doctor straightened and shuffled forward with a peculiar, splayfooted gait. He held the bowl of a burl wood pipe in one hand; the hem of his old-fashioned, bottle green frock coat flared as he walked. He was a small man, his frame solid and compact. But his head was huge, as if it should by rights have belonged to a much larger man, and it looked as if it had been stuck onto his body without a neck. In age, he could have been anywhere between forty and sixty, his sagging jaw gray with several days’ growth of beard, his shoulders rounded and already tending to stoop.
“Young Archie Rawlins said you might be coming by. Said I was to give you my findings if you did. Well, here they are: She committed suicide.”
He started to turn away toward the barns.
Sebastian said, “You’ve already completed the autopsy?”
Higginbottom kept walking. “There’s no need for an autopsy, and it wouldn’t show nothing anyway. It’s obvious how she died: opium poisoning.”
“I’m told it’s impossible to detect an opium overdose in a postmortem.”
Higginbottom swung around to jab one pointed finger into the air at him. “No need to detect it when you’ve got an empty laudanum bottle lying right there, and a suicide note in her hand.”
“Suicide note? What suicide note?”
Higginbottom jerked his head toward the farm outbuildings. “I’ll show you.”
He led the way to a lean-to shed attached to one end of the cow barn. He’d left the door open, and Sebastian could hear the buzzing of flies as they approached, smell the sickly sweet scent of insipient decay. Instead of a stone slab like the one used by Paul Gibson for his official autopsies and surreptitious dissections, Higginbottom had only a stained wooden table. Emma Chance lay upon it still fully clothed. As far as Sebastian could see, the only thing the doctor had done was to lay her arms straight down at her sides before the rigor rendered her completely stiff.
“Here,” said Higginbottom, plucking a small slip of paper from a shelf near the door. “See? Suicide.”
Sebastian found himself staring at a narrow strip of heavy, aged paper that looked as if it had been sliced from an old book. It contained only four words, printed in an elegant Baroque typeface.
The rest is silence.
Sebastian looked up at him. “You call this a suicide note?”
“Well, what would you call it, then? Hmmm?”
“Actually, I’d call it one more deliberate misdirection by the killer—just like the empty laudanum bottle.”
The other man’s nostrils quivered, his gray eyes narrowing with annoyance. “This is ridiculous. It’s as if you’re determined to make this out to be a murder. Why can’t you simply accept that it is what it is? A suicide!”
“How the bloody hell do you know? You didn’t even look.”
“Of course I looked. She hasn’t been strangled. And if she’d been stabbed or shot, there’d be stains on her clothing. Well, there are none—except for the usual seepages of body fluids that are to be expected after death.”
Sebastian shifted his gaze to the pale, slack face of the murdered woman on the table. She looked so very young—younger by far than twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Her nose was small and delicately molded, the tender flesh of her eyelids nearly translucent, her lips brown and dry now in death. And he suddenly felt swamped by a tide of inexplicable, useless fury. How did you die? he wanted to rage at her. How did he kill you? How?
And then Sebastian saw it: the faintest blur of purpling, almost like a shadow along the lower edge of her jaw.
He stared at it, then walked around to examine the other side of her face. It took a moment to find it, but it was there: a small, faint, elliptical bruise just to the left of her mouth, exactly the size of a man’s fingertip.
Thoughtfully, he reached out to lay his right hand over Emma Chance’s lower face, positioning it just so.
“What are you doing?” demanded Higginbottom.
Sebastian looked up at him. “I know how she was killed.”
“What the devil are you talking about?”
“She was smothered.” He lifted his hand, then carefully placed it back in position. “The killer put his palm over her mouth like this. He used the heel of his hand to shove up her jaw and hold her mouth closed while he pinched her nostrils together with his thumb and first finger. You can see the hint of a bruise here, on her cheek, where his little finger dug into her face as he applied the pressure.”
Sebastian took his hand away and shifted to study the dead woman’s wrists. Higginbottom was right; there was no sign of bruising. And any marks on her arms were hidden by the sleeves of her dress. Although . . .
“If he sat on her chest and held her arms down with his weight,” Sebastian said aloud, “she might not even have any bruises on her arms. But the weight on her chest would have made it that much harder for her to breathe.”
“You’re mad. There are no bruises on her face. I had a good look at her before I had her brought in here, and I tell you there are
no bruises. And you couldn’t possibly see ’em in this light even if there were!”
“Get a lantern.”
Higginbottom stared at him a moment, then turned away, grumbling, to light a lantern that rested on a nearby shelf. He was clumsy with the tinderbox, so that it was a moment before he swung back around, the lantern held high, his face twisted into a sneer.
“There. See? No bru—”
He broke off, his lips twitching as he leaned in close to peer at the edge of the dead woman’s jaw. “Well, I’ll be go to Ludlow,” he said after a long, heavy silence. “How the blazes did you see that—especially in this light?”
“I see unusually well in the dark.”
“Huh. You must be part owl.” The doctor shifted around to shine the light on her left cheek. “Yes, there it is.” He shifted the lantern back and forth. “There might also be the vaguest hint of a bruise from the killer’s third finger, just here.”
He set down the lantern, then rubbed his hand across his beard-stubbled face. “There could be some bruising other places on the body,” he said almost to himself. “And sometimes with smothering you’ll see changes in the heart and lungs—but not always.”
He turned abruptly and walked out of the shed into the warm golden sunshine of the morning. Sebastian followed him.
The two men stood together in silence for a moment. Then Higginbottom shook his head and pushed out a painful sigh. “It’s a nasty way to die—trying desperately to suck in air but not being able to breathe. Feeling your lungs burn, mad with panic for a good two or three minutes before everything goes dim and you finally lose consciousness. And then you’ve still got another two minutes till death finally comes. That poor girl. And to think her killer was sitting on her the whole time with his hand over her face, looking into her terrified eyes and watching her die.” Higginbottom glanced over at him. “What kind of man could do something like that?”
The depths of compassion revealed by the old doctor’s words took Sebastian by surprise. He stared off across the sunlit field, where sheep grazed lazily in a tableau of bucolic peace that was so cruelly misleading. “A very cold, dangerous one.”