by C. S. Harris
“I figured maybe Miles Grant—the blacksmith—got him.”
“Was Hannah also carrying Seaton’s child?”
“I don’t know. But she was lying with him. That I do know.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because she told—” Jenny broke off, her nostrils flaring on a sudden intake of breath.
“She told—whom? You? Or someone else?”
“I don’t remember,” she said, staring boldly back at him, not caring that he knew she was lying.
“Was Hannah Grant your cousin as well?”
“No. Her people moved down here from Ludlow.” She lifted her chin. “So you see, there’s no connection between Sybil’s death and what’s happening in the village now.”
Sebastian wondered if she actually believed that, or if she was simply trying to convince him, the way she’d tried to convince the village that her cousin had fallen to her death. He said, “Did you know Daray Flanagan is dead?”
Her lips parted, the sinews of her throat tightening. “When?”
“Sometime last night or early this morning.”
He expected her to say, Why would anyone kill Daray Flanagan? He waited for her to say it, because it was the logical, inevitable response to such an announcement.
But she didn’t say it. Then he saw the stark bleakness in her eyes and knew with a sinking certainty that she didn’t ask because her mind was quick. She already knew why someone would kill Daray Flanagan, just as she had a pretty good idea as to who had done it.
It wasn’t obvious or easily discernible, the twisted, thin cord of anger and revenge that connected one untimely death to the next. But it was there, the passion and outrage of youth leading to a mature and ruthless instinct for self-preservation.
And Sebastian wondered, had it begun on that long-ago Midsummer’s Eve, when Jude Lowe watched the young niece he’d known and loved all his life step off a cliff into oblivion? Or had the origins of that murderous fury begun earlier, with the tarred, blackened body of a childhood friend hung up to rot in the cold embrace of a gibbet’s iron cage?
He wondered, too, if Hannah Grant really had drowned herself in that millpond, or if the last thing she’d known was the angry, brutal grasp of a jealous young man. A man who’d once loved her, only to be rejected when she turned from him to a wealthy lord he knew to be both selfish and cruel.
“I was more’n a bit sweet on Hannah myself when I was a lad,” Jude had told him. “More’n a bit . . .”
The wind gusted up, shivering the leaves of the elms edging the stream and bringing with it the scent of coming rain. It was all conjecture, of course. Sebastian knew only too well that just because an explanation fits neatly doesn’t mean it’s true. Never in his years of solving murders had he so desperately wished to be wrong. But he felt the rightness of it like a sick certitude deep in his gut.
He was aware of Jamie Knox’s twin staring at him, her fine, intelligent eyes flat and still, as if she could will from their depths any betraying glimmer of the truth. And he wanted to say to her, You know, don’t you? You might not have known it before, but you’ve figured it all out now. You know the secret, violent soul of the man who’s always been more like a second brother to you than an uncle. You know he swore to kill Leopold Seaton all those years ago. You know where he gets the fine brandy that he hides in his cellars and the inexplicable wealth he must be careful not to show to anyone he doesn’t trust. You know he was the one who supposedly urged Daray Flanagan to stay when the Irishman so conveniently came riding through town on the day of Alistair Coombs’s funeral, and you’ve always suspected why, even if you never admitted it to yourself. Just as you’ve always suspected that the flames that consumed Maplethorpe Hall had nothing to do with a candle and a windblown curtain and everything to do with that tar-soaked gibbet and a government informant brought in specifically to end the subversive protests against George Irving’s ruthless Bill of Enclosure.
“Whatever happened to him?” Sebastian asked, and she shook her head, not understanding his question. “Wat Jones, I mean. The squatter you told me lied at Alex Dalyrimple’s trial.”
“He went away.”
Which he undoubtedly did. Although Sebastian suspected he didn’t get far.
He stared across the stream at the stile Emma Chandler had climbed the afternoon of her death—but only once, not twice. And the irony of her fate struck him suddenly as both cruel and heartrendingly senseless. She had come to Ayleswick to uncover the truth about her parents in the hopes of better understanding who and what she was. And all she had found was her own death.
He said, “Is there another way to get to the priory ruins besides following the stream here?”
“You can come at it from Northcott. And there’s a footpath starts across from the village church and cuts through the wood.”
“Thank you,” he said, touching his hand to his hat.
“Did it never occur to you,” she said as he turned away, “that if you hadn’t interfered—if you’d let that young woman’s death be ruled a suicide—then Hannibal Pierce, Reuben Dickie, and Daray Flanagan would all still be alive today?”
He paused to look back at her. “Are you suggesting their deaths are my fault?”
“Death follows you,” she said, her hands coming up to grip her upper arms and hug them to her. “You brought it here.”
He forced himself to meet her gaze. “Ayleswick was no stranger to violent death long before I arrived, and you know it.”
He thought she might deny it.
But she didn’t.
Chapter 58
He found Hero and Simon watching the ducks on the village green.
She turned, the child in her arms, her brilliant smile of welcome fading when she saw his face. “Devlin. What is it?”
He stood beside her and watched as their son prattled gibberish at the quacking, waddling ducks. He wanted to say, I came to Shropshire because I can’t seem to let go of this need to know. To know the true identity of my father, to know if I lost a brother the day Jamie Knox died, to know why my eyes are yellow rather than a deep St. Cyr blue. Except, all I’ve found are more questions. More questions, and a murdered young woman on a painful quest so similar to my own. And now, in the process of solving her murder, I’m afraid I’m about to destroy what’s left of a family that has already suffered too much because of me.
But he didn’t say any of those things. Instead, he squinted up at the dark clouds building over the distant hills and said, “Think we can make it out to the priory before the storm hits?”
They left Simon with his nurse, then took the path that led from the ancient parish church of St. Thomas, through a dense wood of beech and elm.
As they walked, he told her of his conversations with Lucien Bonaparte and Jenny Dalyrimple, and of the long-ago, tragic death of Sybil Moss and everything he believed had followed it.
She said, “You think Lucien Bonaparte was lying when he claimed only Flanagan was at the priory that day?”
“I think he believed he told the truth. But that doesn’t mean Jude Lowe wasn’t there; only that Bonaparte didn’t know it.”
The wind was kicking up, thrashing the limbs of the trees overhead, and he saw her tilt back her head, her lips parting as she gazed up at the sky. “Could Jude Lowe really be that evil?”
“I doubt he sees himself as evil. I’m sure he thinks he had a good reason for everything he’s done.”
“He’s evil,” said Hero.
Sebastian shrugged. “As far as he’s concerned, he’s fighting a war—a war against centuries of oppression and exploitation by the likes of everyone from George Irving and Leopold Seaton to the English Crown. He looked at what the revolutionaries were trying to accomplish across the Channel in France, and he wanted those kinds of reforms here. I don’t know how long he’s been cooperating with the Fr
ench, but I doubt it was before the hangings of 1793. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was that spate of judicial murders that initially pushed him toward the French.”
They’d reached the stream at the edge of the wood, and she paused for a moment, her gaze on the ruins of the old priory thrusting up pale and somber against the roiling clouds in the west. “I can understand his killing Seaton and Irving,” she said, “even if I don’t condone it. But there is no possible justification for the murder of Emma Chandler. She was completely innocent of anything.”
“Yes. But that’s what happens when a man appoints himself as judge and executioner of his fellow beings. What begins as a moral, righteous impulse can all too quickly degenerate into what’s convenient for him.”
They crossed a rugged bridge to the meadow, the flock of sheep scattering before them as thunder rumbled in the distance. Following a passage through the monastery’s confused tumble of fallen stones and ruined walls, they came out in the central cloister. Hero had brought the satchel with Emma’s sketchbook, and she opened it now to the final drawing.
“Emma must have been standing about here when she drew this,” she said, positioning herself in the cloister by comparing the ruins of the chapter house to Emma’s sketch. Then she lowered the sketchbook, her face pinched as if with pain.
“What?” he asked.
“I don’t understand why Flanagan and Lowe felt they needed to kill her. I mean, if they found her here sketching, why not simply go away and arrange for Flanagan to pass the message from Paris to Bonaparte another time?”
“I suspect they didn’t realize she was here until she’d already seen or overheard something that betrayed what they were about. That’s why they killed her.”
“But surely they would have looked around when they first arrived, to make certain they were alone?”
“I’ve no doubt they did. Which tells us that by the time they arrived, Emma was no longer here in the cloisters.”
Hero turned in a slow circle, her gaze scanning the broken walls and weed-choked walks around them. “So where was she?”
He found himself staring at what was left of the refectory, the lacey sandstone tracery of its outer row of soaring, pointed-arch windows showing pale against the increasingly storm-darkened sky. Running nearly the entire length of the cloister’s south walk, the monk’s stately dining hall had been built above an undercroft, both to provide storage for foodstuffs and as a deliberate echo of the cenaculum, the upper room in Jerusalem where the Last Supper was said to have taken place. The grand portal that once marked the entrance to the refectory’s main stairs had long ago collapsed. But a second, narrower set of steps, its barrel vault still intact, led down to the chamber below.
Hero looked from Sebastian to the undercroft’s entrance and whispered, “Oh, my Lord.”
A growing wind buffeted their faces and flattened the lank grass as they crossed the cloister. The ancient stone steps were crumbling with age and littered with debris, and she was about to descend when he put out a hand, stopping her.
“Look,” he said.
Two distinct sets of men’s footprints showed in the dust of the centuries: one smaller, the other noticeably longer. The men had passed up and down the steps several times, nearly obliterating a third set of prints left by a woman’s half boots.
Dainty footprints that went down but did not come back up.
“She died down there, didn’t she?” said Hero, her voice hushed.
“I’m afraid so.”
They picked their way down the ancient stairs in silence, his stomach hollowing out with the implications of what they had found. He imagined Emma finishing her sketch of the chapter house and then turning, sketchbook still in hand, to notice the steps to the undercroft. Intrigued, she must have ventured down the steep steps, surely as awed as they were when the beauty of the ancient, vast chamber opened up before her, its sturdy stone vaulting and central row of stout Norman piers perfectly preserved, its outside range of round-headed windows echoing the Perpendicular windows of the refectory above.
Had she been planning to make a sketch of the undercroft? he wondered. Was that why she lingered? Or did she hear Flanagan’s and Lowe’s voices and decide to remain out of sight, lest she discomfit them by her unexpected appearance?
If so, it was a decision she surely came to regret.
“I wonder how they knew she was here,” said Hero.
“She may have accidently made some sound. Or Lowe could have decided to search down here and came upon her by chance.”
“And so he killed her,” said Hero, her words echoing eerily in the cavernous space. “He pinned her down against the rough flagstone floor and quietly smothered her.”
“Yes.”
A single lady’s glove lay beside one of the undercroft’s central octagonal piers, and Sebastian bent to pick it up.
He had no way of knowing for certain, but he suspected Flanagan had been horrified when he discovered what Lowe had done. They would have had to leave Emma’s body here, in the undercroft, until nightfall, using the remaining hours of daylight to trick Alice Gibbs into helping them obscure the time and place of Emma’s death. Then, under cover of darkness, they would have returned to shift the body to the water meadows, carefully staging the scene to look like a suicide.
But in the darkness, they had overlooked one dropped glove, and the telltale footprints on the stairs. Nor had they seen Reuben Dickie watching them from the undergrowth at the edge of the river.
“It all seems so pointless,” said Hero. Thrusting Emma’s sketchbook back into the satchel, she crossed the chamber to stand at one of the empty windows that looked out on the trickling stream and the wind-tossed wood beyond. After a moment, she said, “Do you ever think about the simple, seemingly inconsequential decisions people make in the course of going about their lives? Decisions that can inadvertently get them killed? If Emma had picked a different day to walk out here and sketch the ruins—or if she simply hadn’t noticed the stairs to this undercroft—she’d still be alive today.”
“As would the rest of them.” Thunder rumbled around them in a crashing crescendo of fury that rolled on and on, and he said, “We need to get back.”
A few scattered drops of rain pattered on the stones in the cloisters above, filling the air with the scent of wet dust as they turned toward the stairs. “What will you do next?” said Hero as he followed her up the steps.
“That depends on whether Major Weston is alive or dead.”
“And if he’s d—”
She broke off, and he saw her stiffen as she emerged from the barrel-vaulted stairwell into the growing fury of the storm.
“What is it?” he asked—or started to ask. Except by then he’d reached the top of the steps himself. In the gathering gloom he could plainly see the tall, lean figure of Jude Lowe.
And the long-barreled, flintlock pistol Jude held with the muzzle pressed against the side of Hero’s head.
Chapter 59
“Don’t move,” said Jude.
Sebastian froze, his gaze locking with Hero’s. He could feel his pulse racing in his neck, feel the wind buffeting his suddenly sweat-slicked face. “Let her go,” he said, even though he knew it was useless. “Your quarrel is with me. Not my wife.”
Jude tightened his grip on Hero’s upper arm, keeping her between them as he dragged her back one stumbling step. “Put your hands where I can see them and back away—slowly. Do it,” he snarled when Sebastian hesitated.
Overhead, the sky was a turmoil of roiling dark clouds rent by quick, bright flashes of lightning. Sebastian splayed his hands out at his sides and placed one foot behind the other, moving cautiously over the uneven, rubble-strewn ground. He knew that if he tried to rush Jude, Hero would be dead in an instant. But he knew, too, that while Jude might intend to kill Sebastian first, the innkeeper would never allow Her
o to leave the priory alive.
“That’s far enough,” said Jude, thumbing back the hammer on his flintlock. “I didn’t want to have to kill you.”
“Why? Because I look like Jamie?”
“That must be it.” Jude’s nostrils flared on a suddenly indrawn breath. They could smell rain in the wind, hear the roar of the storm descending on them. “You should have left well enough alone.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t have killed an innocent young woman.”
Jude shook his head. “She gave me no choice. Like you.”
Sebastian watched Jude’s hand. His only hope was to throw himself sideways at the last instant when the innkeeper fired, and he felt his body tensing as he waited for Jude’s finger to tighten on the pistol’s trigger.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hero shift her grip on Emma’s satchel. When Lowe shifted the muzzle of his pistol toward Sebastian, Hero swung the satchel up to send it smashing into Jude’s right hand. The pistol exploded into the air in a flash of flaming powder and went clattering across the fallen stones.
“You bloody bastard,” swore Sebastian and threw himself forward.
Jude shoved Hero aside as Sebastian rammed into him, hands fisting in the cloth of Jude’s coat, his momentum driving both men backward across the cloisters. Jude’s heel hit a loose stone and he lost his balance, grabbing Sebastian’s forearms to pull Sebastian over with him as he fell.
Sebastian came down hard on his knees, the two men breaking apart as Jude pivoted to take the impact on one shoulder and hip and kept rolling. Sebastian started to lurch up, but he’d made it only halfway when Jude jackknifed forward to wrap his arms around Sebastian’s legs and pull him down again.
Drawing back his arm, Sebastian slammed the heel of his hand into Jude’s face as they fell. The innkeeper’s nose smashed in a wet, hot smear of blood, the impact rocking Jude back, breaking his hold on Sebastian and sending the innkeeper sprawling on his back in the rubble-strewn grass. Then Jude’s fist closed over a chunk of stone and he pushed up to swing it at Sebastian’s head.