When Falcons Fall (12 page)

The gibbet stood just before the sad remnants of the small hamlet at the crossroads. Towering some twenty or more feet high, its base set in a massive stone sunk in the ground, the thick post had strong bars of iron running up its sides as reinforcement.

“Someone obviously wanted it to last,” said Hero, one hand holding her hat in place as she tipped back her head to stare up at the gibbet’s projecting crosspiece. In the distant past, men were sometimes gibbeted alive—hung up in close-fitted, specially forged iron cages and left to die of thirst and exposure. But more often it was used to display the bodies of executed criminals, both as a way to extend their punishment after death and as a warning to others. Murderers were sometimes gibbeted. So were traitors and pirates.

“Care to tell me why you were so eager to walk out here and look at this?” asked Devlin, watching her.

She told him of her interview that morning and her conversation with the vicar’s wife. “Mr. Flanagan says Major Weston rescued it from some anonymous arson attempt,” she said, her gaze on the rusty hook sunk deep into the underside of the tar-blackened arm. “I wonder why.”

“Who was gibbeted here?”

“Flanagan didn’t know precisely; only that it was someone executed near the end of the last century. But . . . have you noticed how everyone keeps bringing up the past? Everything from extinct families and house fires to riots and suicides and hangings. I suppose villagers do tend to be more acutely aware of those who have lived out their lives in the same place before them. And yet . . .” Her voice trailed off as she struggled but failed to put her thoughts into words.

Devlin followed her gaze. “Emma Chance was asking an extraordinary number of questions about the past herself. And I’m not convinced she was motivated entirely by a desire to know the history of the buildings she was drawing.”

Hero turned her head to look at him. “You think that could be why she was killed? Because she was asking questions someone didn’t want answered?”

“I think it’s certainly a possibility.”

Together, they stared up at the old, fire-charred pole as a gust of wind fluttered the brim of Hero’s hat and set the branches of a nearby elm to rubbing against each other. And though the air was warm, Hero found herself shivering, for it sounded exactly like the creak of rusty chains straining with the sway of a dead man’s weight.

T
hat afternoon, Sebastian drove out to Northcott Abbey in search of the one person on Emma Chance’s list of names he’d yet to meet: Samuel Atwater, the estate’s longtime steward.

He found Atwater at a row of tenants’ cottages on the far side of the estate. “Emma Chance?” said the steward in response to Sebastian’s question. “I met her when Lady Seaton had her to tea last Saturday—but only briefly. Why do you ask?”

“That was the only time you encountered her?”

Atwater stood beside his horse, the reins held loosely in one hand as he considered his answer. He was dressed plainly in serviceable boots, buckskin breeches, and a coat, with a black cravat knotted at his throat. Before driving out to the abbey, Sebastian had quietly asked several villagers their opinion of the steward. All tended to agree he was a fair man, willing to work with tenants who fell behind on their rents for reasons of misfortune rather than incompetence or sloth. He had come to Ayleswick not long after his cousin’s marriage, when Lord Seaton’s aging steward retired to live with a daughter in Ludlow. He was both plainspoken and quiet, with the manner of a devout vicar—which was what his father had been.

“Well, I noticed her painting the high street one day,” said Atwater. “But I didn’t stop and talk to her.”

“Did you know she’d drawn your portrait?”

“No. Did she now? Why would she do that?” he said in surprise. He was an ordinary-looking man in his middle years, with graying fair hair and typically Anglo-Saxon features, and it was obvious he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to draw his portrait.

Rather than answer, Sebastian said, “What did you think of her?”

“Can’t say I thought much about her, to be honest. Pretty little thing. Tragic, her being a widow and all. But then, England’s seen far too many widows and orphans these last twenty years and more.”

“Did Lord Seaton secure his Enclosure Act from Parliament at the same time as George Irving?”

“Nah. The present Lord Seaton’s grandfather did away with the old open-field system here at Northcott Abbey long before I came here. In the sixties or seventies, it must’ve been.”

Enclosures had been taking place since the thirteenth century, when the price of wool began to exceed the price of grain. Although the practice had increased under the Tudors, it was never popular with them, as it tended to expand the number of poor beggars and vagrants. As a result, the monarchy eventually turned against the practice. But everything had changed in the last fifty years, when cheap cotton from America and India brought down the price of wool just as the cost of grain was skyrocketing. Now enclosures were seen as a way to increase crop yields. And this time, the King and his supporters had embraced the movement with gusto.

“The thing is,” Atwater was saying, “the old Squire and his lordship’s grandfather weren’t greedy. Not like George Irving. The way Irving did it was naught but a giant swindle.”

“I suspect my wife would be interested in interviewing you, if you’re willing. She’s writing an article on the effects of the enclosure movement.”

“Is she, now? Well, there’s a story to be told, that’s for certain.”

“I understand there were some significant disturbances around Ayleswick fifteen or twenty years ago.”

Atwater’s pleasant face hardened. “That there were, thanks to bloody old George Irving. Fixed it so that not only did the commissioners give him the best land, but they also exempted both him and the vicar from paying their share of either legal fees or fencing costs. It all fell to the smaller landowners. Those who couldn’t pay—and that was most of them—were forced to sell. And Irving paid them next to nothing.”

“It created unrest?”

“Of course it created unrest.” The steward’s nostrils flared with the intensity of his emotions. “Irving never understood country people. He came from merchant stock, you see; bought Maplethorpe when the last of the Baldwyns died out. He couldn’t understand the centuries-old bonds that tie even the poorest Englishman to the land of his village. Take away people’s rights to graze their cows and geese on the commons and cut fuel from the wasteland, and how are they supposed to live?” He shook his head in disgust. “Just because you use Parliament to make something legal doesn’t mean it’s right.”

Sebastian looked at the steward with renewed interest. It was a fairly radical statement for anyone to make, let alone a man whose life had been dedicated to managing his wealthy employer’s estate. “Tell me about the men who were hanged.”

Atwater stared off across sunlit fields. “That was right ugly, it was.”

“When was it, exactly?”

“’Ninety-three.” He gave the date without hesitation or thought, as if it were painfully engraved in his memory.

“Why were they hanged? For pulling down fences and leveling ditches? Or did they fall afoul of the Black Act?” The Black Act had introduced the death penalty for more than fifty new offenses, most of which entailed countrymen trying to exercise the ancient communal rights of which they’d been deprived.

“Oh, they did all that and more. But they were actually charged with high treason—conspiring with the French, of all things. Crazy, it was.”

Sebastian became aware of the plaintive cry of a curlew from somewhere out of sight down the hill. “You don’t believe they were guilty?”

“No. Never did. The man accused them of it was a spy planted by the government. Ask me, he made it all up out of whole cloth.”

“How many were hanged?”

“Four, with another half dozen transported to Botany Bay and the youngest lads forced into the army. You can imagine what it did to the families around here—losing so many of their able-bodied men and boys all at once.” He shook his head. “Wives, mothers, sisters, children, all left behind to fend for themselves, just when prices were rising and they’d lost all their old common rights. Was an ugly time, it was.”

“How many were gibbeted?”

“Just one. The poor bugger identified as their leader.”

“What was his name?”

“Dalyrimple. Alex Dalyrimple.”

“Oh, my Lord,” said Hero later, when Sebastian told her of his conversation with the steward. “Wasn’t that Jenny Dalyrimple’s husband?”

“Yes.” He found it interesting that Jenny had identified herself as Alex Dalyrimple’s wife, as if the man were still alive. She would have been just sixteen when the Crown made her a widow. Yet she’d never remarried, never forsaken her first love.

Sebastian said, “I’ve been thinking about the timing. Jamie Knox was thirty-six when he died, and he told me once he took the King’s shilling when he was sixteen.”

“In other words, in 1793.” Hero tilted her head to slip the wire of a pearl drop through one earlobe. She had now changed into a scoop-necked evening gown of velvet-trimmed midnight blue silk in preparation for their dinner with Lady Seaton and her guests, the Lucien Bonapartes. “You think that’s why Knox left Ayleswick and never came back?”

“I think it likely, yes.”

She fit the second earring in place, then turned to face him. “I don’t see how any of this—as tragic as it was—could possibly have anything to do with the murders of Emma Chance and Hannibal Pierce.”

He touched the backs of his fingers to her cheeks. “I don’t know that it does. But . . . there are an extraordinary number of secrets buried beneath the seemingly peaceful veneer of this village.”

He was aware of her looking at him with quiet, thoughtful eyes. “Don’t you think that’s true of most villages?”

“Perhaps. But some secrets are more deadly than others.”

S
ebastian had journeyed to Ayleswick-on-Teme that summer for two reasons. The first and most important was to deliver Jamie Knox’s gift to his aged grandmother and, perhaps, learn from her some explanation for the uncanny resemblance between the two men. The second reason was more complicated and involved an ancient necklace with a mysterious past.

Cunningly wrought of silver and bluestone, the necklace had once belonged to Sebastian’s mother—the beautiful Countess of Hendon, who had played her lord false before staging her own death and absconding to Venice with her latest lover. According to legend, the necklace had been a gift from the ill-fated Stuart king James II to his natural daughter, Guinevere. And Sebastian had recently learned that a portrait of a woman wearing the necklace was said to hang in Northcott Abbey’s famous Long Gallery.

For the birthplace of Jamie Knox to be tied, somehow, to that hauntingly mysterious necklace seemed too coincidental not to be significant. Yet the problem was, what precisely did it signify?

Before they left for that evening’s dinner with Lady Seaton, Sebastian watched Hero slip the old necklace into her embroidered velvet reticule.

“It could all be a mistake,” he said. “The necklace in the painting could be similar but not the same.”

She looked over at him. “Two necklaces with the same legend attached to them?”

He shrugged, although he doubted she was fooled by his assumption of insouciance. She knew him too well. Knew how vitally important this quest for the truth about his parentage was.

She said, “What will we do if Lady Seaton doesn’t offer to show us the Long Gallery?”

He settled her cloak around her shoulders as a clatter of carriage wheels sounded outside the inn. “Then we’ll just have to give her a little nudge.”

Built of golden-hued sandstone late in the reign of Henry VIII, Northcott Abbey had something of the look of a medieval castle, with two square bays flanking the central entrance and a five-sided bay at each corner. But the rows of huge windows sparkling with myriad leaded panes showed that the massive pile had been built as a house, not a fortress; the mock parapet encircling its steeply pitched leaded roof was a sign of royal favor and purely for decoration.

“Impressive,” said Hero, one hand coming up to grasp the carriage strap as she leaned forward to catch glimpses of the house through gaps in the gently undulating park’s ornamental plantings of chestnut and lime, beech and oak. “I wonder what the man who built it did to receive such a choice allotment from his King’s plundering of the church’s wealth.”

Sebastian studied the house’s tall clusters of sixteenth-century twisting chimneys. “Well, amongst other services, he spent ten years as Good Ole King Henry’s ambassador to Spain—surely a tricky position to hold when your king is in the process of divorcing a daughter of Spain. Henry thanked him by making him the First Baron Seaton.”

She turned her head to stare at him. “However did you come to know that?”

“I looked it up before we left Brook Street.” He smiled at her expression of astonishment. “What? You think you’re the only one with research skills?”

“Huh. And the estate’s been in the same family ever since? Impressive.”

“Even more impressive when you consider that the Seatons have always been Catholic.” Until the passage of the Relief Act in 1778, Catholics had been forbidden to buy or inherit land or even own a horse. But a surprising number had somehow survived.

“One wonders how they managed to hold on to the place all those years,” said Hero.

“Extraordinary cleverness and lots of priests’ holes, one assumes.”

She stared up at the house’s stately, undulating facade as the carriage drew to a halt before the grand entrance. “Why do you suppose Lady Seaton went out of her way to invite us to dinner?”

“Perhaps she doesn’t want me to think she’s keeping Napoléon’s little brother hidden out here.”

A liveried footman jumped to open the carriage door as Hero turned her head to look at Sebastian. “You mean, because she fears he may be involved in these murders?”

His gaze met hers. “Something like that, yes.”

Northcott Abbey’s state drawing room was a splendid eighteenth-century confection with an ornately plastered ceiling picked out in shades of pale pink, cream, and gilt. The walls were of pale blue and decorated with swirling cascades of carved shells and billowing ribbons of cream and pink; a matching pale blue silk covered the numerous scattered fauteuils,
bergers en gondola
, and settees, their curved, delicately carved arms and legs adorned with more gilt.

So vast was the space that it seemed to swallow the four people assembled there: the Dowager Lady Seaton, her houseguests Lucien and Alexandrine Bonaparte, and Northcott’s steward, Samuel Atwater, who was looking decidedly uncomfortable at having been pressed into service to make an even six for dinner in such exalted company.

The resemblance between the Senator (as he liked to be called) and the Emperor Napoléon in his younger, slimmer days was as startling as Emma’s sketch had suggested. His wife, Alexandrine, was a Frenchwoman in her late thirties with a wide face, auburn hair, and a long nose. She was not unattractive, but neither was she a great beauty. This was a second marriage for both, a true love match that was said to have caused the final rift between the Bonaparte brothers when Lucien refused Napoléon’s demands that he divorce his aging, common-born wife and accept a dynastic marriage.

Standing together now side by side, both vaguely smiling but obviously ill at ease, they looked much like any ordinary, slightly dowdy couple more concerned with the happiness of their numerous offspring than with shifting strategic alliances and the movements of armies. But Sebastian had learned long ago that appearances could be deceptive.

“Lady Devlin,” exclaimed Lady Seaton, coming forward to greet her new guests with both hands outstretched. “And my lord.” Beside Hero’s tall, Junoesque proportions, Grace Seaton appeared tiny, almost childlike. But she performed the necessary social niceties with admirable aplomb, as if it were an everyday thing, introducing the brother of her nation’s greatest enemy to the daughter of the man who’d vowed to see the Bonaparte clan’s numerous upstart regimes destroyed.

“This is delightful,” said the Senator in heavily accented English, his smiling gaze fixed on Hero. “Your father is Lord Jarvis, yes? The Regent’s cousin?”

“He is, yes,” said Hero, settling on the tapestry-covered sofa indicated by their hostess. “Although his kinship to the King is not close.”

“Yet you remind me so much of our dear brother’s wife, Catharina of Württemberg,” said Alexandrine, with a friendly smile. “I believe she is your Regent’s niece, yes?”

A moment’s awkward silence followed her words, for it was a fact seldom mentioned in English drawing rooms that the granddaughter of an English princess had married the Beast’s brother Jérôme. The match was a dynastic alliance, of course, with the young couple then being made King and Queen of Westphalia. But by all reports Catharina was utterly besotted with her husband. Unfortunately, Jérôme was blatantly and repeatedly unfaithful to his long-suffering wife.

“She is, yes,” said Hero. “But my own kinship to the Queen of Westphalia is very distant indeed.”

“Tell me,” said the Senator, adjusting his tails as he took a chair near Hero, “what news do you hear of the war?”

“Only what we read in the papers, I’m afraid,” she said.

“It seems every day brings news of more fighting somewhere,” said Lady Seaton. “It must be an agony for those with sons, brothers, or fathers in either army.”

Sebastian spared a glance for the estate’s steward, who sat following the conversation yet contributing nothing to it himself. He had quietly arranged to be interviewed by Hero the following Monday. But beyond that, he seldom spoke. Atwater obviously believed it was not his place to put himself forward in any way. And Sebastian found himself wondering if Atwater’s beautiful, wealthy cousin felt the same way. Or not?

“It’s interesting Napoléon has pulled some of his men out of Spain,” Hero was saying.

“Yes, and Vitoria was the result.” Lucien Bonaparte flopped back in his chair. “Napoléon was a fool to entrust the defense of Spain to our brother Joseph. He knew Wellington was planning a major offensive. But what does Joseph do? Does he devote himself to drawing up a battle plan? No! He spends his days screwing women.”

Alexandrine Bonaparte’s eyes widened in alarm as her husband pressed on. “It’s a family affliction, I’m afraid. Although none are quite as bad as my sister Pauline. She once spent five days in bed with a lover. Imagine, five days! I’ve heard she even—”

Sebastian choked on his wine, while Lady Seaton cleared her throat and said rather loudly, “I understand you have a new baby, Lady Devlin.”

“Yes; Simon,” said Hero, valiantly trying to turn her own choking laugh into a cough. “He’s six months old.”

“And you have him with you?”

“We do—along with his nurse, my abigail, Devlin’s valet, the coachman, a footman, and Devlin’s tiger. Needless to say, we do not travel lightly.”

“Ah, yes,” said Lady Seaton. “I remember those days.” She turned her brilliant smile on her exalted guests. “Monsieur and Madame Bonaparte have a new wee one, as well. Born just this past January.”

“Louis Lucien,” said Bonaparte proudly. “Lady Seaton was gracious enough to allow us to baptize him in the private chapel she’s built here at Northcott Abbey.”

He then went on to tell a laughing tale about his youngest child’s tendency to crawl backward. And it occurred to Sebastian as he watched the Emperor’s brother glow with pride over his son’s antics that here was a side of Lucien Bonaparte—the loving paterfamilias—that he hadn’t expected to find. But then he reminded himself that this was a man who’d turned down a kingdom and risked his imperial brother’s wrath in order to keep his family together.

“How many children do you have?” asked Sebastian.

It was Alexandrine who answered. “Eight, all together. Lucien’s Charlotte and Lili are eighteen and fifteen; my Anna is fourteen, while our Charles is ten. The rest descend from there like organ pipes.” She sketched a profile of steps with one hand.

“I’ve met Charles,” said Hero. “He’s a very clever lad.”

Alexandrine smiled and shared a meaningful look with her husband. “We like to think so. Although I fear his sisters sometimes find him a bit tiresome.”

“The Bonapartes’ older girls have gone to the Lake District with my own daughters, Georgina and Louisa,” said Lady Seaton.

“Yes, and you would not
believe
what we had to go through to get permission from the commissioner for them to travel so far,” said Lucien. “Children!”

Sebastian took a slow sip of his wine as he studied the Corsican’s swarthy, now disgruntled face. Lucien Bonaparte had been living in exile for nearly three years, his wife and children as much prisoners of war as he himself. Oh, their lives were comfortable enough—by all accounts Thorngrove was a grand estate. But their travel was still restricted, their correspondence read, their every move watched by spies from both Paris and London. As long as the war continued, their lives would remain in limbo. And then what would become of eighteen-year-old Charlotte Bonaparte, of age now to be wed? Or her younger sisters coming up behind her? What did such a future hold for little Charles, with his grand ambitions of scientific study and travel?

Only an unlikely peace or the decisive defeat of Napoléon would bring freedom for Lucien and his growing, ambitious family. Yet Napoléon’s defeat would also mean the end of the closely knit Bonaparte clan’s phenomenal wealth and power. So for which did Lucien and his no-nonsense wife secretly pray? Sebastian wondered. For Napoléon to keep fighting? Or for the Emperor to go down in a final defeat? If given the opportunity, would they actively seek to prop up Napoléon’s fading fortunes?

Or would they work to bring their exile to an end, in any way possible?