When Falcons Fall (23 page)

T
he village pump house was empty, the green deserted except for a couple of fat, waddling ducks that quacked at Sebastian as he stood for a moment beside the weathered old building. Then he went to knock at the last of that line of half-timbered, thatched cottages overlooking the broad expanse of turf.

The door was opened by a slight, aging woman with a deeply lined face and white hair so thin it showed the pink scalp beneath. At the sight of Sebastian, she sucked in a startled breath and bobbed an awkward curtsy. The room behind her was small and low ceilinged, with dark, heavy beams and a vast, old-fashioned stone hearth from which rose the pleasant aroma of stewing mutton and onions.

“Mrs. Dickie?” said Sebastian with a smile as he politely doffed his hat. “Sorry for disturbing you, but I’m looking for your son Reuben.”

“Reuben?” She clutched the edge of the door with gnarled, arthritic hands. “What’s he done?”

“Nothing. I simply had some questions I wished to ask him.”

“He’s usually at the—” She broke off, her eyes narrowing as she gazed beyond him, to the pump house. “Oh.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know where he might have gone?”

Her gaze met his, then slid away. “He likes to wander, ye know. Always goin’ off, he is. But he should be back by dinnertime. He does like his dinner, our Reuben. Ye want I should tell him yer lookin’ for him, my lord?”

“That would be helpful. Thank you.”

She bobbed another curtsy. But her face was tight, her eyes pinched with a fear that was both furtive and telling.

Hiring a hack from Martin McBroom’s stables, Sebastian rode out to the former Dower House of Maplethorpe Hall.

He could see Liv Weston deadheading spent blooms in the long border when he reined in before the house’s simple portico. She had an unfashionable straw hat tied over her fair hair and an apron protecting her serviceable, faded gown of dark blue muslin; a deep, weathered basket hung by its handle on one crooked arm.

“My husband isn’t here,” she said when Sebastian left his horse in the groom’s care and walked up to her.

“Actually, I’d like to speak with you, if you don’t mind.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Why would I mind?”

Her face was faintly lined and browned from her days spent in the garden, her nose small and upturned, her cheeks rosy. She didn’t strike Sebastian as the type of woman who would succumb to a fit of the vapors if she chanced to overhear her husband discussing an unknown woman’s murder. So why had Weston been so anxious that first day to keep Sebastian away from his wife?

He said, “We’ve recently discovered that Emma Chance—or rather, Chandler—was the natural daughter of Lady Emily Turnstall. I understand you knew her.”

Liv Weston’s face went slack with surprise. “Emily? I knew her, yes. We were in school together for a year, in Hereford. I had no idea she—” She broke off, her breath hitching. “Dear God, is that how Emily died? In childbirth?”

Sebastian shook his head. “No. Although it wasn’t long afterward. When was the last time you saw her?”

“It must have been . . .” She paused, thoughtful. “Yes—it was at a house party my parents gave the autumn before she died.”

“Did she ever contact you after that?”

“She wrote to thank us, of course. But when I sent her a letter several weeks later, she never answered.” Liv Weston was silent a moment, obviously doing sums in her head. “When was her child born?”

“Late May. I’m told it came some weeks early.”

Sebastian watched as a strange hardness crept over her features. “Who fathered her child? Do you know?”

“No. It’s why Emma Chandler was here, in Ayleswick; she was trying to find out. Did you not recognize her? She resembled her mother quite strongly.”

Liv Weston shook her head. “No. To be honest, I have only the vaguest recollections of what Emily looked like. It’s been so long. But . . . good heavens. Are you suggesting that’s why the young woman was killed?”

He met her gaze squarely. “I think it a strong possibility, yes. How well do you remember that September? Do you have any idea who might have fathered Lady Emily’s child?”

“Honestly? No. I was seventeen and very much wrapped up in my own affairs, while Emily . . . She was quite pretty, you know. Pretty and fabulously wellborn as well as wealthy. I remember being rather envious of all the admiration and attention she attracted from everyone without even trying.” She paused. “It’s not something I’m proud of.”

“Yet you invited her.”

“I did, yes. We were friends at school. I liked her. But that didn’t stop me from being jealous once I saw how all the gentlemen reacted to her. When I heard that next summer that she had died, I felt . . . very small.”

It was a startlingly frank admission. Liv Weston was obviously one of those rare people who had no difficulty acknowledging her faults. In that, she was most unlike her husband.

Sebastian said, “Whoever fathered Lady Emily’s child forced her.”

“Please tell me it wasn’t someone at our house party.”

“Not a houseguest, no. She told her governess it was someone who lived in the area.”

Liv Weston was silent again, and he knew she was running through the possibilities in her mind. Had she noticed Major Weston’s long-ago flirtation with the pretty young earl’s daughter? Sebastian wondered.

Surely she had.

He said, “Do you remember anything—anything at all—from those days that might help make sense out of what is happening now?”

“Not really. You know what house parties are like. Lots of harmless flirting and some not-so-harmless affairs.” She let the basket slide down her arm to her hand and set it on the grass path at her feet, the secateurs resting atop the cuttings. She straightened slowly, the fingers of her hands knit together before her. “There is one thing. . . . Emily had what I thought at the time a rather strange fascination with a boy down at the Ship.”

“You mean, Jude Lowe?”

She shook her head. “No, not Lowe; his brother. He was slightly younger than she was, but so very attractive. It was as if she were obsessed with him. I remember he had the strangest yellow eyes; I’d never seen anything like them. I mean . . .” She stared at Sebastian, a faint touch of color riding high on her cheeks, then looked pointedly away.

He said, “You mean Jamie Knox?” Knox wasn’t actually Lowe’s brother. But the two had been raised together like brothers, and Sebastian could see Liv Weston making the mistake.

“Yes, that was his name. He went away a few years later, after the trouble we had. Frankly, I was glad to see the back of him. He may have been young, but he was dangerous. If anyone forced Emily, I’d say it was him. Jamie Knox.”

Sebastian was seated at a table near the front leaded window of the Ship’s public room, a tankard of ale before him, when Lowe came to pull out the opposite chair, turn it around, and straddle it.

“I hear you’ve been away for a few days,” said the publican, resting his forearms along the chair’s back.

Sebastian took a long swallow of his ale. “I have.”

“And did you discover what you were looking for?”

“Partially.” Sebastian set the tankard aside. “What can you tell me about the deaths of Sybil Moss and Hannah Grant?”

Lowe regarded him fixedly for a moment before answering. “Why are you asking about things that happened fifteen years ago?”

“Because I’m not convinced their deaths were suicides.”

Lowe blew out a long, harsh breath. “You and a fair number of other people.”

“Oh? How well did you know them?”

“Well enough. I was more than a bit sweet on Hannah when I was a lad, and Sybil was my niece.”

“Anne Moss is your sister?”

“My half sister, yes.”

Sebastian was reminded, again, of just how interwoven the relationships between the inhabitants of a small, isolated village like this could be. “Do you know who the girls were seeing?”

“Everybody knew. It wasn’t as if he ever tried to hide it.”

“He?”

“Seaton—the present lord’s father. Acted like he had some sort of medieval droit du seigneur over the prettiest girls in the village. Most of them lay with him willingly enough. But he wasn’t above forcing those who resisted.”

Sebastian studied the publican’s lean, dark face. “You think he could have killed them?”

Lowe shrugged. “Somebody did. I always figured he was as likely as anyone else.”

“What manner of man was he?”

“Leopold Seaton? Arrogant. Selfish. Thought the world owed him anything and everything he ever wanted. He was a rich lord—came into his inheritance when he was quite young. What do you suppose he was like?”

Sebastian sipped his ale. “You wouldn’t happen to recall a young gentlewoman named Lady Emily Turnstall? She was a guest at one of the Irvings’ house parties back in the early nineties.”

The publican’s mouth twisted in wry amusement. “Me and the Irvings, we were never exactly on visiting terms, you know.”

“I’m told she was rather taken with Jamie Knox.”

Lowe held himself very still. “Ah. I think maybe I do remember the lass, though I couldn’t have told you her name or even what she looked like. She wanted Jamie to let her draw his picture.”

“And did he?”

“He did, yes.”

“Was she a good artist?”

“Not bad. Nothing near as impressive as the young widow was killed last week, mind you. But not bad.”

Emma’s artistic ability obviously hadn’t come from her mother. So where had it come from? Sebastian wondered. Or had it been a gift, a talent that was uniquely her own?

“What’s she got to do with anything?” asked Lowe.

“Perhaps nothing.”

Lowe grunted. “Right. That’s why you’re asking about her, is it?”

Sebastian ran one finger up and down the side of his tankard. “Why did Knox leave Ayleswick?”

“M’mother told him to go. She was afraid he was gonna end up like Alex.”

“You mean Alex Dalyrimple?”

“Aye.”

“Who cut Dalyrimple down?”

Lowe’s hard gaze met Sebastian’s and held it. “He was Jenny’s husband. You think we were going to leave him up there to rot?” He looked around as two carters came into the public room, covered with dust from the road and calling loudly for ale.

Sebastian kept his gaze on the tavern keeper. “Is it true what they say? That he was conspiring with the French?”

“True?” Lowe gave a mirthless laugh. “Since when did the Crown ever care about the truth of their charges? Oh, Alex was a member of the local Corresponding Society; he never denied that. Thought every man should have the right to vote and even run for Parliament, if he wanted. That’s a far cry from ‘conspiring’ with the French. But a lot more dangerous when it comes right down to it, don’t you think?”

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.

A
fter 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.”