by C. S. Harris
“Did Mrs. Chance ask about the Baldwyns?”
“Not so’s I remember, no.”
Sebastian gazed toward the brick stables and its attached coach house. “They were lucky the fire didn’t reach the stables.”
“Aye. Some sparks fell on the roof, but we was able to put ’em out.”
“They’re still maintained, I see.”
Silas shifted his posture, as if drawing into himself, his arms coming up to fold across his chest. “I live there now. Use the old stalls ’n’ carriage house for storage.”
Sebastian studied the rutted track leading to the old carriage house. But all he said was, “I’m surprised the house was never rebuilt.”
Silas hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and turned his head to spit downwind. “Old Mr. Irving, he was always right clever ’bout a heap of things. But he got sick near the end, and it made him foolish. Foolish as a child, he was, for a couple of years. Let the major do whatever he wanted.” The gardener’s jaw sagged, then tightened again as he clenched his teeth down hard on the stem of his unlit pipe.
Sebastian waited for the gardener to elaborate, but he simply stared out over the rows of quinces, plums, and apples in the orchard. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what would happen to an estate under the stewardship of a man such as Eugene Weston, however temporary it might have been. The wonder was that anything was left at all.
Sebastian squinted up at the gaping, empty windows of the house’s blackened facade, the broken tracery standing out stark against the blue sky. “I hear the place is haunted,” he said with a smile.
He expected the gardener to scoff at the notion. Instead, Silas simply shrugged, although there was a noticeable increase in the intensity of his breathing.
“Do you ever see her?” asked Sebastian. “Marie Baldwyn, I mean. That was her name, was it not?”
“Ain’t just her,” said Silas, his voice quiet and gruff. “The dead don’t rest when they been done wrong. And there’s a heap of folks been done wrong hereabouts. A heap of folks.” He turned back to his barrow. “Now you’ll have t’excuse me. Miss Liv don’t pay me t’stand about and natter.”
Sebastian watched the gardener wrap his strong, sun-darkened fists around the handles of his barrow and lean into it, the wheel squealing faintly as he pushed it away.
A light breeze kicked up, shifting one of the long tendrils of ivy that hung from the walls of the ruined house. On the surface, the tragedies suffered long ago by the ill-fated inhabitants of Maplethorpe Hall seemed to have nothing to do with Monday’s death of Emma Chance beside the River Teme. Yet Emma had expressed an unusual interest in the history of this house. And Sebastian understood enough about human nature to suspect that there was probably more to those stories than he’d been told.
Chapter 18
When people said the Blue Boar was Ayleswick’s only respectable inn, they didn’t mean it was the area’s only hostelry. For everyone who wasn’t respectable, there was the Ship.
It stood at the crossroads to the east of the village, where the main road to Ludlow intersected the lane that led to Maplethorpe Hall’s main gates before narrowing to a track that snaked south across the Teme. Once, this had been the site of a small hamlet. But only a few cottages were now left standing, the rest having long since collapsed into ivy – and thistle-covered mounds of rubble. It was a common enough sight in the English countryside these days, since the Enclosure Acts had squeezed an increasing number of small farmers and their even poorer neighbors off the land.
The Ship itself was a ramshackle, timber-framed affair with casement windows and a ratty thatched roof. Sebastian turned into its dusty yard to find a lean, dark-haired man currying a fine blood bay. He’d stripped down to his shirtsleeves, the muscles of his back and shoulders bunching and flexing with his work. As Sebastian reined in, the man looked up, his hand stilling at his task as he watched Sebastian hand the reins to Tom.
“You’re Jude Lowe?” said Sebastian, hopping down from the high seat.
The man rested his bent wrists on his hips. “I am.”
He had dark, almost black hair worn long over his collar, so that it gave him a faintly rakish look. His cheeks were cleanly shaven, his features rugged but handsome, his eyes a dark brown. Despite his task, he was dressed well, his linen clean and white, his boots worn but polished; the coat he’d taken off lay thrown over a nearby bench. And Sebastian found himself reminded again in some indefinable way of Jamie Knox.
“I’d like to ask you about Emma Chance,” said Sebastian.
Lowe let out his breath in an incredulous grunt. “What makes you think I know anything about her?”
“She drew your portrait.”
“Did she now? I didn’t know that.”
“When did you see her?”
Lowe tossed aside his currycomb and reached for a rag to wipe his hands. “Must’ve been Sunday, I guess. She was sittin’ there”—he nodded toward the grassy bank on the far side of the road, beside the mound of some vanished cottage—“drawing a picture. She looked hot, so I walked over and offered her some lemonade.”
“You knew who she was?”
Lowe’s dark eyes gleamed with quiet amusement. “Ain’t like we get a lot of strangers hereabouts, especially pretty young ladies drawing pictures. Of course I figured who she was. Everybody’s been talkin’ about her.”
“Did you speak with her?”
“A bit. She wanted to know about the tavern. How long I been here—that sort of thing.”
It struck Sebastian as a profoundly peculiar line of questioning for a young gentlewoman to have asked the owner of a wayside tavern. But then, Emma Chance had been asking a number of peculiar questions.
“So how long have you been here?”
Lowe shrugged. “Lived here my whole life. Took over from my father when he died back in ’ninety-seven.”
Sebastian stared off across the treetops, to where the blackened chimneys of the ruined great house showed dark against a puffy white cloud. “So you were here the night Maplethorpe Hall burned?”
“Aye. Lit up the whole sky, it did. Ain’t never seen nothin’ like it.”
Sebastian studied the tavern owner’s strong cleft chin and straight brows. The resemblance to both Jamie Knox and Jenny Dalyrimple was definitely there. Although in an area this sparsely populated, Sebastian supposed most people were related to one another to some degree.
He shifted his gaze to the tumbled ruins of a nearby cottage. “How long has the hamlet been like this?”
Lowe’s jaw hardened, a flinty look coming into his eyes. “Old George Irving pushed a Bill of Enclosure through Parliament in ’ninety-two. After that, those who could either left for London or immigrated to America. The rest died in the poorhouse. And then the old bastard howled when his poor rates went up.” Lowe turned his head and spat. “May his blackened soul burn in hell forevermore.”
“How long was he bedridden before the fire?”
“A year, maybe. I dunno. Why? What’s any of this to do with the dead lady?”
“I’m told she was asking about the Irvings.”
Lowe gave a soft laugh. “From what I hear, she was asking about anyone and everyone.”
“Any idea why?”
“Said she wanted to know about the places she was sketching. Said it helped her to understand them. Sounds right peculiar, if you ask me. But then, I’m no artist, now, am I?”
“What do you think happened to her?”
Lowe stared at him a moment, his features tight, his eyes hooded and unreadable. “Why you askin’ me?”
“You own a tavern. Men tend to talk in their cups.”
“Not about murder. Not if they don’t want to hang.” Lowe reached for his nearby coat and slipped it on, his gaze still fixed on Sebastian’s face as he carefully adjusted his cuffs. “Jenny tells me you knew Jamie.
”
“I did.”
Sebastian waited for the tavern owner to remark on the resemblance between the two men. Instead, he said, “M’mother hasn’t been well since he died. Took it right hard, she did.”
My mother.
She buried three husbands, the Reverend had said of Heddie Kincaid. And Sebastian realized now that Heddie’s first husband must have been Jamie Knox’s grandfather; the second had fathered Jude Lowe, while the third was the unknown Mr. Kincaid.
“You’re saying Heddie Kincaid is your mother?”
“Aye. Eleanor Knox was my sister—half sister, anyway, for all she was sixteen years older than me. I was only a babe myself when Nellie died, and m’mother raised her babies as her own. So Jamie and me, we grew up like brothers.” Lowe tilted his head to one side. “I didn’t believe Jenny when she said you looked enough like Jamie to be his twin. But ’tis true. Course, it’s near twenty years since I seen him. Took the King’s shilling when he was barely sixteen.”
Sebastian was silent for a moment, his gaze drifting over the tavern’s sagging roof and ancient walls. He’d been imagining Knox growing up in Heddie Kincaid’s cottage beside the shady millstream. Now he realized the rifleman must have come of age here, in this tavern, in the midst of a dying hamlet strangled by the worst excesses of the enclosure movement.
It explained much.
Jude Lowe drew a deep breath that flared his nostrils. “I always meant to go up t’London and see him. Now it’s too late.”
“You know he left a son?”
“Aye. M’mother wants Pippa to bring the boy up here to her, but she won’t hear of it.”
“She may change her mind.”
“She may.”
Lowe watched in silence as Sebastian turned to leap up to his curricle’s high seat. He waited until Sebastian was gathering the reins before saying, “Everybody in the village thinks that widow killed herself. What makes you so certain she didn’t?”
“Because she was smothered.”
Lowe shook his head in disbelief. “Don’t know if I’d put much stock in anything old Higginbottom tells you. He told my granddad there was nothing wrong with him a good cupping wouldn’t cure—and was still heating the damned cups when the old man keeled over dead. Charged us for the cupping too. Said it weren’t his fault the man died before he finished.”
“The bruises on Emma Chance’s face are faint, but they’re there,” said Sebastian. “She was smothered.”
Lowe reached for his bay’s lead. “Never heard of such a thing. Who’d know how to kill without leaving no sign of it?”
Someone with experience at killing, thought Sebastian. But he kept that observation to himself.
Sebastian drove next to the dilapidated farm of Dr. Hiram Higginbottom.
He found the doctor in a pen near the barn, down on his knees beside a prostrate sick cow.
“She going to be all right?” asked Sebastian as Higginbottom lumbered to his feet with a grunt.
“Who knows? Maybe God—assuming God takes an interest in sick cows. I’ll have to remember to ask the Reverend.”
Sebastian watched the doctor bend to brush the dirt from the knees of his old-fashioned breeches. “Have you finished Emma Chance’s postmortem?”
Higginbottom straightened slowly. “I have.”
“Anything interesting?”
The doctor stared at him a moment, and Sebastian suspected the man was tempted to tell him to wait for the coroner’s inquest like everyone else. Then a gleam of nasty amusement came into his watery gray eyes, and he jerked his head toward the barn. “Come. I’ll show you.”
The dilapidated lean-to was even more hot, stuffy, and fly ridden than before, and thick with the stench of death. Emma Chance lay on the crude table where Sebastian had seen her before, her remains looking oddly shrunken now beneath a stained sheet that didn’t quite cover her bare toes. Her clothes formed a jumbled pile on a nearby shelf beside several dirty, fly-covered tin bowls that held what he realized must be her internal organs.
He was aware of Higginbottom smiling at him openly now, eyes narrowed with malicious satisfaction. “Sure you’re up to this?”
“Yes.”
Higginbottom gave a disappointed grunt and shoved aside the sheet to pick up the cadaver’s right arm. All traces of rigor had gone off by now, leaving the body limp. “There’s a faint bruise here,” he said, pointing to her forearm. “Course, she could’ve done it before, somehow. But it looks to me like the imprint of a man’s thumb.”
He let go of the arm, and it slid off the edge of the table to dangle down toward the dirt floor. “Other than that, the only thing of interest is this—” He rolled the body onto its side, revealing a long, slender bare back now purple with lividity. “Probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t had a couple of the lads move the table out into the sun while I did the postmortem. But I assume with your stellar eyesight you can see what I’m talking about?”
Sebastian studied the strange pattern of faint abrasions on Emma Chance’s shoulder blades. “What are they from?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the doctor, letting the body flop back onto the table. He made no move to cover it again with the sheet.
“That’s it?” said Sebastian.
“That’s it.”
“What about her lungs and heart?”
“They look normal enough.”
“When do you think she was killed?”
“Sometime Monday, presumably. How’m I supposed to know?”
Sebastian reached to draw the sheet back over the dead woman’s naked body. “I assume you looked at the contents of her stomach?”
Higginbottom glared at him from beneath bushy gray brows. “I did. She had a fair amount of half-digested food in there. But from which meal, I’ve no idea.”
Sebastian paused with the sheet still in his hands, his gaze on Emma Chance’s pale, waxy face. Her skin had taken on the color and texture of old vellum. And he found himself wishing that he could have met and spoken with her when she was still a laughing, breathing, vital, and talented young woman.
Before she was reduced to this husk of decaying flesh.
He drew the sheet over her face and turned toward the door.
“So who do you think did it?” asked Higginbottom, following Sebastian into the yard.
“I’ve no notion.” Sebastian stood in the late-morning sunshine, his face lifted to the light as he sucked clean, fresh air into his lungs. “You’re certain she wasn’t sexually assaulted?”
Higginbottom fumbled in his pockets to come up with his pipe. “No sign of it.”
Sebastian started to turn away.
“Did find one thing might be of interest, though,” said Higginbottom.
Sebastian paused to glance back at him.
“She was still a virgin.”
“You’re certain? She was a widow, married seven years.”
Higginbottom stared at him, one lip curling in contempt. “I may not know as much as your fancy London doctors, but this is one thing I do know. She was a maid, all right. When it comes right down to it, marriage is just a piece of paper; it’s what happens afterward in the marriage bed—if not before—that makes a difference. Fact is, I ain’t convinced she’s twenty-eight, neither, like they’re saying. Looks more like twenty or twenty-one, if you ask me. But then, what do I know? I’m just an old country doctor with more cows and sheep than patients.”
Sebastian studied Higginbottom’s dirty, unshaven face, the yellow teeth bared now in another of those malicious smiles. “The inquest is still scheduled for Friday?”
“It is.” The smile widened. “You’re lucky she’s as fresh as she is, seeing as how you’re staying at the Blue Boar.” Inquests were typically held at inns and public houses, even in London, mainly because they were the only
structures capable of holding such a crowd. “I remember last summer when they held the inquest over Nathan Black; cleared the place out, it did. He was in the Teme a week before they found him, and I sure as hell wasn’t keeping him here. Half the jurors cast up their accounts before it was over. Although whether that was from the smell or the way he looked, I couldn’t tell you.”
“Have you given the postmortem results to Squire Rawlins?” asked Sebastian, refusing to rise to Higginbottom’s bait.
“Ain’t seen him. Said he was going to Ludlow to try and find out what he could about the dead woman’s people. If he don’t, the parish is gonna have to pay to bury her.”
“I suspect when her goods are sold, there’ll be sufficient funds to pay for her interment.”
“That a fact? Well, lucky for her. Maybe she can pay for her own postmortem while she’s at it.”
Sebastian glanced back at that silent, still form, the stained sheet now thick with flies. Who are you? he wanted to ask her. Who are you really? It seemed everything from her name to her age to her true marital status had been called into question. About the only thing he knew for certain about the woman who’d called herself Emma Chance was that she was a gifted artist.
And that someone had wanted her dead.
Chapter 19
Shortly after Devlin left for the Dower House that morning, Hero sat down for an interview with the middle-aged chambermaid, Mary Beth Hodge, who in the process of tidying up had let slip the information that she’d been born and raised in the nearly abandoned hamlet that lay to the east of Ayleswick.
“You’re certain this is all right with Mr. McBroom?” asked Mary Beth, nervously eying the notebook and pencil in Hero’s hands.
“It is, yes; I’ve already spoken to him. I’m interested in knowing more about the effects of the Enclosure Acts on the area. Please sit down and relax, and tell me about your hamlet.”
Mary Beth perched on the edge of one of the chairs near the cold hearth and clenched her hands together in her lap. “It was called Maplethorpe in those days, milady. That’s why the Baldwyns named their big house Maplethorpe Hall—after the hamlet. Though there ain’t many remembers that nowadays.”