When Falcons Fall

by C. S. Harris

  Sebastian studied the publican’s lean, handsome face. Jude Lowe would have been just sixteen or so himself in those days. What part had he played in the incidents that ended with four men hanged, six transported, and Alex Dalyrimple’s body rotting in chains on a gibbet?

  “When did Leopold Seaton die?” asked Sebastian.

  “Few years after they killed Alex. Why?”

  “Did Seaton play a part in that? Alex’s execution, I mean.”

  “Not so much.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Seaton? Fell off his horse drunk one night, riding home from the Blue Boar. Hit his head on the side of the bridge not too far from his gatehouse.” Lowe wrapped his hands around the back of his chair, his dark eyes narrowed, thoughtful. “It all happened long ago. Why are you bringing it up now?”

  Rather than answer, Sebastian said, “Knox’s sister, Jenny, never remarried?”

  “No. She had a boy, Nicholas, born just a few months after they hanged Alex. I think he’s what kept her going at first. But the lad died when he was still a wee tyke. And when he did, it was like any joy she had left in life just drained away. Those were hard years hereabouts. Right hard.”

  “Hard and dangerous,” said Sebastian.

  But Lowe simply shrugged one shoulder, as if for the villagers of Ayleswick the two were one and the same.

  Chapter 41

  After Devlin left, Hero hired the little mare again from Martin McBroom’s stables and rode out to Northcott’s home farm for her appointment with Samuel Atwater. She found the steward supervising the storing of a load of newly harvested grain in the ricks.

  “Devlin tells me you’re a critic of the enclosure movement,” she said after her groom had taken the horse off and they turned to walk up the lane.

  “That surprises you?” said Atwater.

  She found herself smiling. “Actually, it does. I would think that as a steward, you’d be the first to criticize the ancient open-field system.”

  The laugh lines beside his eyes deepened as he squinted into the distance. “Perhaps I’m simply getting old. I liked England the way it was when I was a lad. But we’ll never see those days again, will we? And it isn’t only the look of the land that’s changed, I’m afraid; the people have changed too. Time was, Englishmen were part of a community; they had a stake in the land they worked. But not anymore. The enclosures have changed our entire sense of who and what we are.”

  “You must admit the old ways were wasteful,” said Hero.

  “You mean, the three-course rotation system? Oh, aye; but that wasn’t the fault of the open-field system. Four-course rotation can work in an open field as easily as on a rich man’s enclosed estate.”

  “Yet surely it’s easier to get one man to change his ways than to get fifty to agree to it?”

  “Not if those fifty are educated. But then, that’s the last thing those pushing for enclosure want, now, isn’t it? Education makes men dangerous.”

  It was a remarkably radical thing to say, and Hero found herself wondering if Samuel Atwater, like Alex Dalyrimple, had been a member of one of the Corresponding Societies that sprang up across England in the first days of the French Revolution.

  “Those are the arguments used to justify enclosures,” he was saying. “But they make about as much sense as the argument that access to commons makes men too lazy to work for wages.” He gave a rough laugh. “I wonder how willing the likes of Malthus and Burke would be to spend sixteen hours working in a factory for a shilling a day.”

  “Or down in a mine,” said Hero.

  He threw her a quick, penetrating glance. “You’ve read Adam Smith?”

  “I have, yes.”

  “Smith claimed the best way to help the poor is by making the rich richer. And we’ve seen how well that’s worked, now, haven’t we? I suppose that’s why the population of America is swelling with all the families we’ve pushed off the land here. Those who lived long enough to make it there, at any rate.”

  Hero watched the sun slip behind the oak trees lining the lane, leaving them in shadow. She said, “I’ve seen what’s left of the hamlet of Maplethorpe. It’s very sad.”

  “You should have seen it back in ’ninety-five, when wages were falling as fast as prices were rising, and folk took to wearing shirts made of sackcloth and eating acorns. A lot of the little ones died—the little ones, and the old.” He took a breath that lifted his chest. “The thing is, you drive the cottagers and small farmers off the land, and most everyone else suffers too, don’t they? How’re the millers and thatchers, the carpenters and shoemakers, to feed their families if there’s no work for them? Only ones don’t suffer are the rich men in their big houses.”

  “Yet George Irving is dead, and his big house a ruin.”

  “Aye, that’s true enough.”

  “I’m told you had a run-in some years ago with a group of men in blackface.”

  “I did, yes. But they did me no harm. You’ll find no mantraps or spring guns on Northcott—not while I’m steward here, at any rate. It’s a sorry state of affairs when a rich man’s deer, hare, and pheasant are allowed to eat a poor man’s crops, and there’s nothing he can do about it without hanging.”

  “Was Irving behind the hangings and transportations that took place in the parish twenty years ago?”

  “Of course he was. He couldn’t catch the protestors at what they were doing, so he hired someone to make things up. And it worked, didn’t it?”

  “Do you believe the fire that killed him was an accident?”

  Atwater glanced up at the dark shapes of swifts darting across the sky above. “You’ve heard about the Earl over in Oxfordshire who evicted all his cottagers and leveled their village so he could expand his park, only to go hunting one day and fall down the abandoned well of one of the cottages he’d leveled? His greed killed him, didn’t it? It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while people do get what they deserve in this life.”

  He drew up then and turned to face her. “Never tell me you’re thinking there’s some connection between the events of fifteen and twenty years ago and what’s happening now?”

  “Devlin thinks it a possibility, yes.”

  He frowned. “You’ve read Goldsmith’s poem? ‘The Deserted Village’?”

  “Yes.”

  Atwater nodded. “It’s good you’re writing this article. Someone needs to explain what the enclosures are doing—someone besides the poets. A hundred years from now, their words will be dismissed as romantic sentimentalism—if they’re read at all.”

  Hero studied the steward’s plain, earnest face and knew a whisper of disquiet. “We still read Shakespeare.”

  “We do. So we do,” he said quickly, clearing his throat in a way that made her wonder if his thoughts had paralleled hers. “And now you must excuse me. I see another wagon coming in from the fields. Shall I send a man for your groom?”

  Later, when the sun was high in the sky, Hero walked up the lane to the ruined medieval tower that overlooked Ayleswick and its surrounding countryside. She was sitting with her back to one of the crumbling walls, her gaze on the ghostly traces of the lost furrows and ridges of the past, when she noticed Sebastian climbing the hill toward her.

  “It’s an impressive view,” he said, coming to sit beside her.

  She shifted to lean gently against him. “I keep thinking that if I stare at it long and hard enough, everything will make sense.”

  “Is it helping?”

  “No,” she said with a laugh. “I had an interesting interview with Samuel Atwater this morning. He’s . . . very radical.”

  “He is, indeed.”

  “You think that might be significant?”

  “I think it could be.” He told her then of his conversations with Liv Weston and Jude Lowe. When he had finished, she said, “Is it possible Leopold
Seaton was Emma’s father?”

  “I’m beginning to think he was. But we may never know for certain.”

  She was silent a moment, her gaze on the rain clouds bunching over the Welsh mountains to the west. “While you were gone, I borrowed the Reverend Underwood’s copy of Debrett’s Peerage, along with a weighty history of Scotland and another of Wales.”

  He turned his head to look at her. “And?”

  “Guinevere Stuart did marry a Scottish laird, Malcolm Gordon. In addition to her seven ill-fated sons, she had a daughter she named Addienna after her mother.”

  “So that part of the tale is true.”

  “It is. Addienna married a Welsh nobleman, the Earl of Penlynn, and had two daughters and four sons.”

  “And it was one of those daughters who married a Lord Seaton?”

  Hero nodded. “Isabella. It was with Isabella Seaton that Guinevere first took refuge after her husband divorced her. But the Lord Seaton of the time wasn’t comfortable with her presence, so Guinevere lived the last years of her life in Wales with her daughter Addienna.”

  Hero hesitated, and after a moment Devlin said, “There’s something else; what is it?”

  She met his strange yellow gaze and held it. “It’s about Guinevere’s daughter, Addienna—the one who married the Earl of Penlynn.”

  “Yes?”

  “Three of her four sons joined the Jacobite cause along with her seven brothers and were all killed. But the eldest son, Edwyn, publicly repudiated his brothers and became, in time, the next Earl of Penlynn. By all accounts, he was a rather unpleasant fellow and eventually died without a son of his own. But he did have one daughter, Katherine, born late in his life. Katherine married unwisely, probably out of desperation to get away from her father.”

  Devlin kept his gaze on her face, and she wondered what he saw there. “Hero, what are you trying to tell me?”

  She sucked in a deep breath that did nothing to ease the strange pressure in her chest. “Katherine married the Earl of Atherstone and died giving birth to a daughter, also named Guinevere.”

  Devlin stood up abruptly and went to stare out over the valley below. “I take it this daughter is the same Guinevere who married the Marquis of Anglessey several years ago?”

  “Yes.” It was through Guinevere Anglessey that Devlin had recovered his mother’s necklace when it was found clasped around the beautiful young woman’s dead body.

  It was a long moment before he spoke, his voice scratchy with the intensity of his emotions. “Someone told me once that Katherine Atherstone’s great-grandmother was burned as a witch. But that can’t be true if her great-grandmother was Guinevere Stuart.”

  Hero went to stand beside him. “No; Guinevere Stuart lived to be a hundred and two. But such tales are often corrupted and twisted as they’re passed down through the generations. It could have been some earlier ancestor.”

  “Perhaps. Yet none of this explains why my mother was given the necklace.”

  “No.”

  They watched as a tall, slender young woman with a basket over one arm left the cottage near the millstream and turned toward the village. After a moment, Sebastian said, “I sometimes wonder if the problem is that I keep trying to find connections where none actually exist—between my mother and the necklace and the women who once possessed it, and between the dark past of this village and these recent murders.”

  “There’s a connection,” said Hero, slipping her hand into his. “In both cases. We simply haven’t discovered it yet.”

  Chapter 42

  Some twenty minutes later, Sebastian was waiting outside the village shop while Jenny Dalyrimple exchanged the two pounds of butter she’d made for a length of candlewicking and other supplies. She packed her purchases in her basket, then cast him a decidedly hostile look as she left the shop and turned toward home.

  “What you want with me?” she asked as he fell into step beside her.

  “I want to know how Alex Dalyrimple came to be accused of working with the French.”

  She kept walking, her gaze on the road ahead. “What difference does it make to you?”

  “It does. Isn’t that enough?”

  For a long moment, he didn’t think she meant to answer him. Then she said, “You ever hear of Colonel Edward Despard?”

  Sebastian suspected there were few in England who hadn’t heard of Colonel Despard. An army officer who had served with distinction from Jamaica and the American colonies to Honduras, Despard was accused by a government informant of plotting to seize control of the Bank of England and kill King George III. It was true that Despard had become a vocal member of one of the many Corresponding Societies that sprang up across Britain in the years after 1789. But the Corresponding Societies were legal in those days, and the evidence for the outlandish charges against him was laughably weak. That didn’t stop the attorney general, Spencer Perceval, from putting him on trial, along with six coconspirators. Admiral Nelson himself testified in Despard’s behalf, but all seven were nevertheless convicted of high treason and sentenced to be hanged, cut down while still alive, disemboweled, beheaded, and quartered.

  At the last minute, fear of a public revolt caused the government to abandon the medieval ritual of torture and dismemberment they’d planned, and Despard was simply hanged and beheaded. But Sebastian had never believed the colonel guilty of anything more than admiration for the principles espoused by Thomas Paine and the American and French Revolutions.

  That, and marrying a beautiful young black woman descended from slaves.

  He said, “I’m told your husband was a member of the local Corresponding Society.”

  “He was. But so was lots of others, back then.” She stared off down the winding road, the features of her face held tight. “Alex dreamt of a day when every Englishman rich or poor would have the right to vote and run for Parliament. When every child could learn to read and write, and a man couldn’t be thrown in prison for the crime of speaking his mind. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t love his country. It was because he loved England so much that he wanted it made better for everyone—not just for the likes of George Irving or Lord Seaton.”

  “Who accused him?”

  “A nasty little weasel named Wat Jones. We learned later he was paid to do exactly what he did—worm his way into the local Corresponding Society so he could then denounce all his friends to the authorities with a pack of lies.”

  “Who paid him? George Irving?”

  “I always thought so. But it could even have been the high-and-mighty Earl of Powis himself, for all I know. Alex stirred up the whole county with his ideas. That’s why they knew they had to find a way to kill him.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  They’d reached the cottage, and she drew up to turn and face him. “Alex’s been dead twenty years, and nothing he dreamt of seeing has ever come to pass. The hamlet of Maplethorpe is little more than a memory, and now Jamie’s dead too.”

  “It will come to pass someday,” said Sebastian. “The things he fought for. They will.”

  She gave a sharp, disbelieving laugh. But there was a fragility, a bleakness about her that touched his heart. “So saith his lordship, son and heir to the great Earl of Hendon.”

  Rather than answer her, Sebastian said, “Jamie told me once that his father was either an English lord, a Welsh cavalryman, or a simple stable hand. Could the English lord he suspected have been Lord Seaton?”

  “Not his lordship, no. But he was some sort of relative of the Seatons. They both were—the English lord and the captain both.”

  “And the stable hand? Who was he?”

  “Just some good-looking lad m’mother fancied.”

  “From Northcott Abbey?”

  She tipped her head to one side, her gaze on his face. And he knew she both sensed and understood
the quiet desperation that drove his questions. “No, from Maplethorpe Hall.”

  He thought for a moment she meant to say something more—that she knew more.

  Then she turned and entered the cottage, closing the door behind her.

  Chapter 43

  Sebastian was headed back toward the Blue Boar when he noticed Reuben Dickie sitting on the pump house step, his head bowed over his carving.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” said Sebastian, walking over to him.

  Reuben froze, his eyes darting this way and that, as if he were thinking of bolting. “Mumma said you was. It’s ’cause of the book, ain’t it? But I already told the lady, I don’t remember where I found it.”

  “Do you remember when you found it?”

  Reuben shook his head slowly back and forth. “It’s been a while.”

  “Was it by the river? Or somewhere else?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Did you find anything with it?”

  Reuben’s nostrils flared on a suddenly indrawn breath. “What would I find with it?”

  “A satchel. Or a sketchbook, perhaps.”

  “No. Oh, no.”

  The man was an appallingly bad liar.

  Sebastian said, “You won’t get into trouble for it, you know. In fact, you’d be a hero, for finding something we’ve all been looking for.”

  Reuben dug the toe of one clog into the dirt. “You’re trying to trick me, aren’t you? You think I’m stupid. Well, I’m not stupid.”

  Sebastian tried a different tack. “I hear you like to go out at night.”

  “I ain’t supposed to go out at night.”