When Falcons Fall (7 page)

A
fter Archie and his band of volunteers had gone off to search the area around the old pack bridge, Sebastian lingered at the banks of the river, his gaze on the turgid, slow-moving water before him as he ran through everything they knew about Emma Chance and her death.

It wasn’t much.

The woman herself was an enigma. Young, beautiful, and wealthy enough to outfit herself with fine new clothes and a silver-backed hairbrush, she’d embarked on a sketching expedition through one of the more remote areas of the county, accompanied only by her abigail. An abigail she’d employed just days before arriving in Ayleswick.

It told them something of the kind of woman she was: independent minded, eccentric, and courageous enough to do what she wanted even if it meant braving the conventions of their day. Yet beyond that her identity remained essentially a mystery. Was she actually from London? Or had she simply claimed London as her residence because the capital’s enormous size made it a safe lie?

As he watched the pond skaters and water boatmen scuttling through the shallows at his feet, Sebastian couldn’t get past Peg Fletcher’s suggestion that Emma Chance might not even be the dead woman’s real name. If so, was it a ruse intended simply to protect her reputation from those who might be outraged at the idea of a young woman traveling alone? Or was it something more serious, more . . . nefarious in purpose?

Turning his back on the river, he walked to the stand of alders at the edge of the meadow where they’d found Emma’s body.
Why here?
he asked himself again. She obviously hadn’t walked all the way down to the river, and they’d found no evidence to suggest that she’d been attacked on the path through the wood. So why bring her body here?

Why?

What they’d learned thus far of her movements the day of her death helped little in their efforts to understand what had happened to her. After sketching Ayleswick’s ancient Norman church in the morning, she’d walked out to the old priory and spent several hours drawing the ruins. Then, shortly after five, she’d climbed back over the stile and disappeared toward the village.

As far as they knew, that was the last time anyone had seen her alive.

Listening to the hum of the insects hidden in the drying grass, Sebastian knew a rising sense of frustration. They still had no idea where she had been killed, or why, or by whom. All they knew was that her death had been brutally slow, her killer physically strong and ferociously cold-blooded.

And
educated
, Sebastian reminded himself. Her killer was obviously well educated. Which eliminated not only Reuben Dickie and his brother, Jeb, but also a considerable portion of the village population.

A glint of sunlight on glass in the grass at Sebastian’s feet caught his attention. Reaching down, he picked up the small laudanum bottle from where it must have fallen when Constable Nash removed Emma’s body. The bottle was too common to tell them anything about the killer. But the fact that it had simply been abandoned here disturbed Sebastian enough that he spent the next half hour crisscrossing the meadow, looking for anything else that might have been missed.

He found nothing.

That evening, as the sun slipped toward the western hills and the sky faded from a hard blue to a pink-tinged aquamarine, Hero left Simon with Claire and climbed the lane that wound gently past the ancient Norman church, to the top of the low, round hill that overlooked the village of Ayleswick. The air smelled fresh and clean, a cool breeze rippled through the long grass, and a hawk circled effortlessly overhead.

At the crest of the hill she came upon the crumbling remains of what looked like a medieval watchtower, the upper reaches of its once-massive sandstone walls now broken and tumbled across the daisy-strewn grass. She sat on a large block still warm from the heat of the dying day and let her gaze rove over the surrounding countryside.

From here she could see the ruins of the Priory of St. Hilary nestled in a green dale threaded by a sparkling stream. Beyond that stretched the extensive, carefully cultivated park of the vast estate known as Northcott Abbey, its grand Tudor house built by whichever ambitious nobleman had managed to acquire the monastery after the Dissolution. The Grange, home of the young Squire, lay at the base of the hill to the east. Half-timbered except for a single stone tower and still partially encircled by a moat, the Grange was both several centuries older and considerably more modest than the Seatons’ vast estate.

She had thought those the only two grand houses in the area. Now, as she gazed toward the river, she spotted the brick chimneys of another large house soaring above a clump of trees near the crossroads and closer to the river. Then she realized the chimneys were blackened, the brick walls broken; the house was a ruin.

Once, the fields surrounding the village would have been owned and worked in common, with common meadows for hay and livestock, and wasteland used by the villagers for collecting everything from furze and turf to berries and nuts. But the enclosure movement that had been under way in fits and starts for centuries had vastly accelerated in the past thirty or forty years. Now she could see only ghosts of the old medieval ridges and furrows, lost mementos of a past long since vanished. And she felt a wave of nostalgia sweep over her, as useless as it was sad.

The rattle of a dislodged pebble brought Hero’s head around, and she found that she was no longer alone. A boy stood near the entrance to the old watchtower. He looked to be about ten years old, dark haired and handsome beneath the fine layer of fresh dust that coated his face. He wore a brimmed hat, sturdy trousers, and a short coat, all of which were obviously both new and expensive, although the collar of his white shirt was awry and grimy, his stockings were falling down, and a large rent showed in one knee of his trousers. And even if she had not seen Emma Chance’s sketch, Hero would have guessed who he was, for the resemblance to his famous, feared uncle was inescapable.

“Hullo,” she said with a smile.

He came forward, leaping gracefully from one fallen stone to the next until he came to a halt some ten feet away. “You’re the Viscountess, aren’t you? The one whose lord is looking into that gentlewoman’s murder?”

“I am, yes. You’ve heard about that, have you?”

“I found her.”

He said it matter-of-factly, as if stumbling upon dead bodies were an everyday occurrence—although she noticed a muscle twitch along the side of his jaw.

“Ah,” she said. “Then I think I know who you are. Monsieur Charles Bonaparte, yes?”

He hopped off his stone and landed in a crouch before straightening slowly, his head tilted, his large brown eyes solemn as he regarded her fixedly. “It doesn’t bother you? That he’s my uncle, I mean.” There was no need to specify which
he
they were talking about.

“Of course not. Why should it? I hope no one would think to hold me responsible for the actions of all my relatives.”
Especially my father,
she thought.

He gave a delighted laugh. “Are they infamous?”

“Some. It’s inevitable, you know. We all have them.”
Some more than others.

He came to sit on one of the stones beside her, his dangling feet swinging back and forth, his gaze sweeping the skies. There was an alertness, a watchfulness about him that intrigued her.

She said, “Do you come here often?”

He nodded toward the peregrine circling overhead, its long, pointed wings blue-black now in the gloaming of the day. “It’s a grand place to see birds at sunset.”

“You’re interested in birds?”

“Oh, yes.” He tipped back his head, his expression rapt as he followed the falcon’s soaring flight. “It’s a female, I think. They’re bigger than the males, you know. I’ve read they can go over two hundred miles an hour when they dive. Can you imagine? Two hundred miles an hour!”

“However did anyone manage to time them?”

The boy laughed. “I haven’t the slightest idea.” Then he sat forward eagerly. “Look! There she goes.”

Together they watched as the falcon folded back its tail and wings, its yellow feet tucked up as it launched into its stoop. At first, Hero couldn’t see what it was after. Then she spied a single hapless dove flapping desperately toward the clump of birch on the side of the hill.

Oh, hurry, hurry,
she thought, even though she knew it was already too late.

The falcon hit the dove in midair, striking its prey with clenched feet and then neatly turning to catch the dove as it tumbled, dead, toward the earth.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” said Napoléon Bonaparte’s precocious nephew. “Although . . .” He hesitated. “I know the peregrine needs to eat, but I can’t help feeling sorry for the dove.”

They sat together in silence for a moment, contemplating the necessary cruelty of nature.

Then the boy went very still and nodded carefully toward one of the tower’s crumbling walls, “Look! It’s a pied flycatcher. Did you know you can tell an insectivore by its broad, pointed bill?”

“You know a lot about birds,” said Hero, watching him with a smile.

“I want to be an ornithologist when I grow up. I want to travel all over the world and discover new species no one has ever identified before.”

Hero studied his sun-browned, eager face. It was an endearing and oddly compelling ambition for a boy whose uncle dreamt of his family ruling the world.

“I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to,” she said.

He pulled a face. “My uncle says princes don’t become ornithologists.”

“I don’t know about that. Peter the Great of Russia was fascinated by everything from shipbuilding to clock making. And George III was always passionately interested in farming.”

“Yes. But he went mad,” said Charles Bonaparte.

“True.”

A flicker of movement near the stand of birch caught the boy’s attention. She saw his eyes narrow and thought at first he must have spied another bird; then she looked closer and saw the angular line of a top hat silhouetted against the shrubbery.

“Bah,”
said the boy under his breath. “It’s him again.”

The man’s face was still obscured by shadows cast by the overhead branches, but she could easily discern the fashionable, military-like cut of his coat and his carefully tied snowy white cravat. “Who is it?”

“He calls himself Hannibal Pierce. He followed us here from Thorngrove—our house in Worcestershire. He watches us. Mainly he watches my father, but sometimes he watches me. Follows me. Papa says he works for your government.”

“Was he following you this morning?” asked Hero as the man stepped out of the copse of trees into the fading light.

“I don’t think so. But I don’t always see him. Sometimes I throw rocks at him and tell him to go away, but Mama says I shouldn’t do that.”

The man called Hannibal Pierce paused, one hand coming up to adjust his hat. He was making no attempt to keep out of sight or to conceal his interest in his subject. Just quietly waiting.

Then he turned his head to stare directly at them, and Hero sucked in a quick breath.

She didn’t say anything. But the boy was watching her now, and Charles Bonaparte was a very observant young man.

He said, “You know him?”

“I believe I may have seen him before.” She hesitated, then added, “In London.”

What she didn’t say was,
He works for my father.

Half an hour later, Hero was in their private parlor at the Blue Boar, a branch of candles at her elbow and Emma Chance’s sketchbook open on the table before her, when Devlin walked in, bringing with him the scent of meadows and mud and country mist.

“Find what you were looking for?” she asked.

“No. Not a bloody thing.” He took off his hat and whacked at the leaves and twigs still clinging to his breeches. “What are you studying there?”

She turned the sketchbook around to face him. “This.”

He came to lean his outstretched arms on the table, his features intent as he gazed at the portrait of a man wearing a beaver hat and fashionably tied cravat. The face was rugged and big-boned, with a prominent jawline and a long, aquiline nose. Hero had seen the portrait before, when she first glanced at the sketchbook. But she hadn’t thought to associate this sketch with the man she’d occasionally seen in London. Now she realized that either Emma Chance had been an incredibly intuitive portraitist or she’d known the man. He was drawn as if staring at the viewer; yet there was something about his demeanor that struck one as secretive, almost furtive.