by C. S. Harris
It was a detail Sebastian had heard before, but he hadn’t paid any attention to it. Now it struck him as blindingly significant, as if Flanagan had gone out of his way to make certain the miller’s wife remembered the time.
She was still smiling broadly, eager to be of assistance and proud of her ability to tell him what he wanted to know. He said, “The village is lucky to have Mr. Flanagan.”
“Och, aren’t we just. He’s ever such a kind, scholarly man.”
“Exactly how long has he been here?”
“Well, let’s see. . . . Must be more’n two years now. He come right after poor old Mr. Coombs passed away.”
“Mr. Coombs was the previous schoolmaster?”
“He was, yes, milord.”
“And he died two summers ago?”
“More like that February or March, it was.”
In other words, thought Sebastian, just months after Lucien Bonaparte was sent to Shropshire. Aloud, he said, “How did he die?”
“Something hit his stomach, it did.”
Sebastian found himself wondering if what hit the unfortunate Mr. Coombs’s stomach had been poison. Someone had obviously been making Ayleswick-on-Teme an extraordinarily unhealthy place to live for quite some time now.
He bowed his head and touched his hand to his hat. “Thank you for your assistance, Mrs. Gibbs. You’ve been most helpful.”
“Anytime, milord. Anytime.”
He’d almost reached the curricle when a thought occurred to him, and he paused to turn back and ask, “Could you see Miss Chandler well enough to tell what she was wearing?”
Alice Gibbs laughed as she reached down to pick up the hoe she’d dropped. “I could see that, milord. Had on a light gray cloak, she did.”
There’d been a gray cloak hanging on one of the hooks in Emma’s room at the Blue Boar. But she hadn’t had it with her when she was found. She hadn’t even been wearing her spencer, which was folded up beside her. “Bit warm for a cloak, wouldn’t you say?”
“It was, indeed. I remember thinkin’ she must’ve put it on that morning, worryin’ meybe it was gonna come on to rain again.”
“That must be it,” said Sebastian.
She smiled at him again, totally oblivious to the fact that she hadn’t actually seen anything she claimed to have personally witnessed.
Chapter 54
Sebastian found the front door and windows of the schoolmaster’s cottage standing open to catch whatever breeze might chance to stir the close air of the sultry afternoon.
“Mr. Flanagan?”
He paused on the flagged stoop, his gaze drifting over the vaguely untidy, low-ceilinged front room, the massive bookcase stuffed with an assortment of tattered volumes, the battered, ink-stained table that looked ancient enough to have once graced the stately halls of the old priory.
“Mr. Flanagan?” he called again.
Through a doorway in the room’s rear wall he could see a section of the smoke-blackened kitchen hearth; a steep staircase to one side presumably led to a dormered sleeping chamber above. But the silence in the cottage was absolute.
“Flanagan?”
Sebastian hesitated, then walked around the outside of the cottage to the cobblestoned yard at the rear. In addition to the woodshed and other typical outbuildings, he was surprised to find a small but relatively new barn and fenced paddock. A neat black mare with powerful hindquarters and a deep chest thrust her head over the fence and whinnied at him expectantly.
“Aren’t you a fine girl?” said Sebastian, going to stroke the mare’s muzzle.
There weren’t many schoolmasters who could afford to keep such an elegant mount. True, Flanagan had neither wife nor children to feed, and he’d reportedly been riding through Ayleswick on his way to Wales when he learned of the recently vacated position of village schoolmaster. But a different explanation for the mare’s presence was forming in Sebastian’s mind.
A man carrying messages, first to Ludlow, then to Worcestershire, would need a good, reliable horse.
The mare butted her head against his chest. He said, “Where’s your master? Hmmm?”
With growing disquiet, Sebastian gave the mare a final pat and turned toward the open door of the hay barn. Stepping into the darkened interior, he listened to the telltale drone of flies, smelled the coppery stench of spilled blood.
And then, when his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he found what was left of Daray Flanagan.
“Maybe we’re making a mistake, trying to make sense of all this,” said Archie, his voice oddly hollow sounding as he stared down at the schoolmaster’s sprawled, bloody body. The flies were buzzing thick around them, but the Squire was making no attempt to bat them away from his face. “Whoever this killer is, he must simply be mad.”
Like Reuben Dickie, Flanagan lay facedown, the back of his head a pulpy mess. A bloodied length of firewood lay discarded nearby. Sebastian studied the marks on the barn’s dirt floor. From the looks of things, the Irishman had been struck elsewhere—probably in the cobbled yard—and dragged into the barn.
“I don’t think so,” said Sebastian, going to stand in the barn’s open doorway. “I think whoever’s doing this has a very deliberate, rational purpose for everything he’s done.”
Archie stayed where he was. “How did you happen to come here, anyway?”
“I had an interesting conversation this afternoon with Alice Gibbs. She tells me she’s myopic. Famously so, in fact.”
“She is, yes.” Archie gave a hoarse laugh. “I remember one time she thought a billy goat menacing a couple of m’father’s dogs was her own daughter Elizabeth.”
Sebastian narrowed his eyes against the light as he searched the yard for traces of blood. “So how do you suppose she was able to recognize Emma Chandler from a distance of two or three hundred feet?”
Archie opened his mouth, took a deep breath, and closed it. “I don’t know. I didn’t think about that.”
“She tells me it was actually Flanagan who identified the figure climbing over the stile that afternoon as Emma. Alice simply saw what she’d been led to believe she was seeing.”
“But what difference does it make if it was Flanagan or Alice Gibbs who saw Emma?”
“Because I don’t think the person they watched was actually Emma. According to Alice Gibbs, the figure she saw climbing over the stile was wearing a gray cloak. Now, it’s possible that at some point before Emma was killed, she went back to the Blue Boar and left the cloak in her room. But I doubt it. I think she was killed before five o’clock, and it was all just an elaborate ruse to disguise the actual time and place of her death.”
“But why? Why was it so important to cover up when and where she died?”
“It would be of vital importance if she was killed because she’d accidently stumbled upon a meeting between Lucien Bonaparte and someone delivering a message from France.”
Archie stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”
“I wish I weren’t.”
A dark smear on the cobbles near the woodshed caught Sebastian’s attention, and he went to have a closer look.
“Is that blood?” asked Archie, watching him.
“It is. From the looks of things, I’d say Flanagan was killed here, then dragged into the barn out of sight—probably either late last night or early this morning.” The blood had long since dried. “Hopefully Higginbottom will be able to give us a better idea—that is, if he ever gets around to it.” The last they’d heard, the old doctor had yet to begin the postmortem on Reuben Dickie, despite the inquest scheduled for that Thursday. He said his cow was still sick.
Archie watched Sebastian push to his feet. “But how do you know Flanagan didn’t simply think he saw Emma and got it wrong. I mean, how do you know he was deliberately misleading Alice Gibbs?”
“Because he’s dead.”
“Oh.” Archie went to sit on the mounting block in the corner of the yard, his head in his hands. He sat there for a long time; then he dropped his hands and lifted his head to stare at Sebastian. “So who was in the gray cloak?”
“The killer,” said Sebastian. “And he’s just eliminated his accomplice.”
Sebastian had no doubt that whoever killed Flanagan was clever enough to have removed anything from the dead schoolmaster’s cottage that might implicate him. But they searched the cottage anyway. Even clever people make mistakes.
Slowly and methodically, they went through every drawer and cupboard, checked each room for loose floorboards or chimney bricks, inspected the undersides and backs of each piece of furniture. As they searched, Sebastian told Archie of the previous day’s encounter at Maplethorpe’s carriage house. “I gave Weston my word as a gentleman I wouldn’t report him to the authorities unless I had reason to believe his smuggling operation had something to do with Emma Chandler’s death. But now I do.”
Archie looked up from searching the contents of a pantry shelf. “You think Weston is the killer?”
“He could be, although I doubt it. In all likelihood he’s just a greedy bastard taking advantage of the war to run contraband. He probably has no idea the French have been using his smuggling line to pass messages back and forth between Napoléon and his brother.”
“Through Flanagan?”
“He arrived shortly after Bonaparte was sent to Shropshire, didn’t he? March of 1811?”
“He did, yes. But . . . why would Paris send someone to Ayleswick, then? I mean, yes, Lucien is here this summer, but two years ago he was in Ludlow. And after that he moved to his estate in Worcestershire.”
Sebastian shifted his search to the front room. “How often would Flanagan go out of town?”
“Fairly often,” admitted Archie, hunkering down to peer beneath the desk. “He has a cousin keeps a tavern near Warwick he used to—” He broke off when he realized what he was saying and muttered, “Bloody hell.”
After that, he worked in silence for some minutes, obviously turning the information over in his head. Then he said, “What I don’t understand is, if Flanagan was the one delivering the messages, then who’s the killer?”
Sebastian pushed a chest back into place. “I don’t know.”
“Lucien Bonaparte must know,” said Archie, standing in the center of the front room, his hands dangling loosely at his sides. “Damn that bloody French bastard all to hell. He not only knows who’s doing this; he was probably there when Emma was killed.”
“Perhaps. But I doubt it.” Sebastian went to scan the titles in the sagging old bookcase. “In all likelihood, Bonaparte only dealt with Flanagan. It’s probably another reason Flanagan was brought in—to help protect the identity of whatever agent was already in place. I wouldn’t be surprised if Napoléon is more than a bit suspicious of his brother’s loyalties.”
“You’re saying the French have someone else here in Ayleswick? My God. Who?”
Rather than answer, Sebastian reached for a volume of eighteenth-century Scottish sermons and opened the flyleaf to a scrawled, nearly illegible signature. Alistair Coombs. He looked up. “These books belonged to the village’s previous schoolmaster?”
Archie nodded. “Most everything you see here was his. He had no heirs that we knew of, so we just left it all for Flanagan. He was happy enough to have it.”
Sebastian closed the book and slipped it back into place before pulling out another, then another.
“What are you looking for?” asked Archie, watching him.
Sebastian opened a volume of John Donne’s poetry and turned the flyleaf to face the young Squire.
“Well, I’ll be,” whispered Archie as he stared down at the familiar signature written in a tight, cramped hand.
The Reverend Benedict Ainsley Underwood.
Chapter 55
In the end, they found nearly half a dozen books from the vicar’s library tucked in amongst those left by Alistair Coombs.
“What the devil!” swore Archie as Sebastian opened yet another of the vicar’s volumes. “I want Underwood clapped in irons! The sanctimonious, traitorous, murdering bastard.”
Sebastian calmly set the volume aside. “A moment ago you were convinced the killer was Major Weston.”
Archie stared at him, breath coming hard and fast enough to visibly jerk his chest. “You’re saying you don’t think Underwood is the killer? But his books are here!”
Sebastian studied the titles of the small stack of volumes. Old Alistair Coombs’s reading tastes had run mainly to histories and sermons. But the books borrowed from the vicar’s library were all poetry. “Think about this: Why would Underwood go through the trouble of killing Flanagan, yet not bother to remove his books from Flanagan’s shelves?”
“Maybe he forgot they were here. Or—or maybe he was interrupted before he had the chance to gather them up.”
“Perhaps. By all means, I think you should ask the good Reverend for an explanation.”
Archie went to stand in the open doorway, his hands on his hips as he watched Constable Nash and one of the cottagers load Daray Flanagan’s body into a cart. “When is this killing going to end?” he said after a moment, his voice less angry now, more shaken.
“When anyone who could possibly identify the killer is dead.”
Archie turned to meet Sebastian’s gaze, resignation mingling with a wild look of lost innocence in the young Squire’s eyes.
While Archie stormed off to confront the vicar, Sebastian quietly called for his curricle and drove out to the Dower House. Except he didn’t expect to find Major Eugene Weston there.
There were times when one simple piece of evidence, read wrong, could throw a murder investigation entirely off course. In this case, that bit of evidence was a short line of poetry from an Elizabethan play.
The rest is silence. Those four words, tucked into Emma Chandler’s dead hand, had suggested a killer who was not simply literate, but erudite. A killer who, in casting about in his mind for one more clue that might point to suicide, was educated and well read enough to come up with a Shakespearean quote. That, combined with the revelation of Emma’s search for the gentleman who’d raped her mother, had inevitably led Sebastian to focus on a narrow segment of the parish’s residents.
He wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him before, that there might be more than one killer at work here. Was it simply too difficult to believe that this small, seemingly peaceful village harbored not one but two murderers, even though he already knew its bucolic atmosphere to be deceptive? Was it really that simple? Two killers: one a new arrival to Ayleswick, educated, and so fond of poetry that he occasionally helped himself to volumes from the vicar’s library. And the other . . .
Who?
Virtually any one of the district’s “better sort” could conceivably be involved with Major Weston in his smuggling venture, and each could likewise have had a reason to kill Sybil Moss and Hannah Grant all those years ago. But the death of Daray Flanagan opened up an entirely new possibility, one Sebastian pondered as he drove through fields ripe with golden grain. Because if it was Flanagan who had tucked that Shakespearean quote into Emma Chandler’s hand, then the field of other suspects had just been thrown wide-open. There was no need for the second killer to be literary. He need not even be literate.
It was a realization that produced a significant shift in how Sebastian viewed everything he’d learned that past week. It forced him to reevaluate every assumption he’d made and each conclusion he’d reached. And when he stepped back from all he’d thought he understood and looked at the village and its troubled history again with fresh eyes, a different pattern emerged.
A pattern that was as compelling as it was profoundly, personally troubling.
Liv Weston was pruning an overgrown hedge of roses
at the base of her garden when Sebastian turned his chestnuts into the Dower House’s narrow, weed-choked drive. Looking up, she paused with one heavily gloved hand clutching her secateurs, her eyes narrowing as she watched him rein in before the house’s modest portico. A large, battered basket rested on the turf at her feet. As Sebastian dropped from the high seat to the gravel sweep, she deliberately turned her back on him and resumed shaping her hedge.
Without bothering to mount the steps and knock on the front door, he turned and walked toward her.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Weston,” he called. “Is the major around?”
She kept her gaze on her work. “I’m afraid not, my lord.”
“Any idea where I might find him?”
“Sorry, no. As it happens, I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”
Sebastian drew up beside the lanky hedge. It should by rights have been cut back weeks ago, shortly after it had finished blooming. “Did he say when he would be home?”
Snip, snip, went Liv Weston’s secateurs. “Actually, we expected him for dinner last night. Mrs. Carmichael made braised pork. Always one of his favorites.”
Sebastian studied her half-averted face and saw there the faintest hint of a smile, a bubble of what might have been called suppressed hope if it hadn’t had such a nasty edge to it. “You’re not concerned?”
“Not really.”
He became aware of the almost unnatural silence around them, broken only by a single thrush chattering in the branches of a nearby maple. Despite the cloud cover, the heat of the day had become oppressively close and still.
He said, “Has something happened to your husband, Mrs. Weston?”
“I’ve no idea. But a woman can dream, can’t she?” She paused to glance over at him. “Does that shock you? You think I should feign concern? Truly? After you’ve spent the last week poking into all our lives, uncovering all our secrets?”