What Remains Of Heaven Part 16

"But the grays don't like Giles-"

"I'm not taking the curricle. I'll be riding out to Tanfield Hill on Leila. Alone." Sebastian had no intention of getting another groom shot. "And you are staying in bed until Gibson says otherwise."

"But-"

"No buts." It was said in the officer's voice that had once quelled the rebellious murmurings of a battle-hardened regiment.

Tom flushed scarlet and hung his head. "Aye, my lord."

Beneath the sullen, wind-tossed sky, the village of Tanfield Hill lay unnaturally quiet and somber. As Sebastian trotted his Arab up the high street, a woman with a dark shawl drawn over her head threw him a quick, anxious glance, her hand tightening its grip on the child beside her. Sebastian supposed having two clerics murdered in your church in less than a week might tend to make the locals nervous.

He found the Dog and Duck nestled in a curve of the millstream, just beyond the churchyard. A plain-fronted, two-story brick building dating back to the early eighteenth century, it had a cobbled rear courtyard sheltered on two sides by the attached livery and carriage house.

"Aye," said Jeb Cooper, happy to talk while he worked rubbing down the Arab just inside the livery's wide doors. "Time was, I was groom to Sir Nigel Prescott himself." A slim, wiry man somewhere in his late forties or fifties, just below average height, the ostler had a head of thick, short gray curls and a bony face shadowed by several days' growth of beard.

"I ain't surprised to hear he was lyin' dead all these years," said the ostler. "I figured somethin' bad musta happened to him, when they found Lady Jane."

Sebastian frowned, not understanding. "Lady Jane?"

"Sir Nigel's mare. Dapple gray, with four white stockings. The sweetest-goin' thing you ever did see. Trained her hisself, he did."

Sebastian propped his shoulders against the whitewashed wall, his arms crossed at his chest. "The mare was found running loose on the heath the next day?"

"That's right. The next mornin'."

"Did you think at the time Sir Nigel might have been set upon by highwaymen?"

The ostler looked at Sebastian over the mare's back. "Me? Nah. I never believed it for a minute."

"Why not?"

"Couldn't see Lady Jane boltin' and leavin' Sir Nigel. That horse was his baby. If he were hurt, she would'nta left him."

Sebastian studied the groom's rawboned, grizzled features and wondered if the man would have said the same thing a week ago, before the Baronet's mummified corpse had been discovered in the crypt of St. Margaret's. He said, "How long were you at Prescott Grange?"

"Near ten years."

"Why'd you leave?"

Jeb rubbed the side of his nose with one finger and winked. "I run into a spot o' trouble with one o' the housemaids, if ye know what I mean? Lady Prescott herself asked me t' leave. But then, she'd had it in for me, ever since that night."

Sebastian frowned, not understanding. "You mean the night Sir Nigel disappeared?"

"That's right." The ostler sniffed. "Big row they had, up at the house. Jist afore dinner."

"An argument? Between whom?"

"Why, Sir Nigel and Lady Prescott, of course."

"Did they quarrel often?"

Jeb paused to consider it. "Well, Sir Nigel had the devil of a temper. He was always shoutin' at somebody or t'other. But her ladyship didn't often stand up to him."

"Yet she did that night?"

"Aye. I could hear her pleadin' with him when he slammed out o' the house callin' for his horse." Jeb raised his voice into a falsetto and opened his eyes ridiculously wide. " 'Please don't do this!' "

Sebastian frowned. "Please don't do what?"

The ostler's voice returned to its normal pitch. "Leave, I suppose."

"But Sir Nigel left anyway? Despite her ladyship's pleadings?"

"Aye. I saddled Lady Jane for him, and he rode off toward London."

Sebastian stared out the open stable door, at the millstream flowing sluggishly past. The village of Tanfield Hill lay on the lane between the Grange and the main road to London. He said, "Did Sir Nigel actually tell you he was bound for London?"

Jeb Cooper screwed up his mouth with the effort of thought. "Can't rightly say, now, after all these years."

"You don't have any idea what Sir Nigel's quarrel with her ladyship was about?"

Jeb shook his head. "That I couldna say. But Bessie could maybe tell ye."

"Bessie?"

"Bessie Dunlop. Her ladyship's old nurse-and Sir Peter's, when he come along. Most folks'll tell ye she's a witch." He paused, a strange, faraway look coming into his eyes. "I'm not telling ye she ain't a witch, mind ye. I'm jist sayin', there ain't much Bessie misses. Course, whether she'll be willin' t'tell ye everythin' she knows, now, that's somethin' else agin."

"Where might I find this Bessie Dunlop?"

"She lives on up the millstream. Maybe half a mile. A place called Briar Cottage."

Sebastian straightened. "Thank you," he said, pressing a guinea into the ostler's hand. "You've been most helpful."

He was in the yard, tightening the girth on the Arab's saddle, when Jeb Cooper came up to him. "There's one other thing was queer about that night I was thinkin' ye might want to know about."

Sebastian lowered the stirrup and turned to face him. "Yes?"

"Weren't more'n five minutes after Sir Nigel left that Lady Prescott called for her horse to be brought 'round. Rode off without even a groom."

"Lady Prescott? Are you saying she rode after Sir Nigel?"

"I don't know about that. But she rode toward London, too; that I do know."

"When did she come back?"

Jeb Cooper pressed his lips together and shook his head. "That I couldn't say. When I awoke the next mornin', her ladyship's mare was back in her stall, still wearin' her saddle."

"Did it look as if it had been ridden hard?"

"Well, she didn't show signs of having worked up any kind of a sweat, that's fer sure. So I'd say, no, that horse hadn't been ridden far at all."

The witches' cottages of Sebastian's childhood imaginings had been dark, decrepit places, with mold-slimed walls and grimy, cobwebbed windows and broken shutters that creaked ominously in the wind. The witches themselves, of course, were all hideous creatures-bent, skeletal crones with wild hair and hooked noses and drooling, toothless grins.

But when he followed the dark, overgrown path that wound through the mingling willows and oaks that grew along the banks of the millstream, he came upon a tidy, recently whitewashed cottage with a newly thatched roof and a profusion of rambling roses in a riot of pink and scarlet. Chickens scratched in the well-swept yard. A snowy-white gander preened himself in the reeds beside the stream, and finches chirped cheerfully from the branches of a nearby willow. On a low stool beside the cottage's open door, a white-haired woman sat with a b.u.t.ter churn gripped between her knees. When Sebastian rode into the yard, she set aside her churn and rose gracefully to her feet.

"I was wondering when you'd get here," she said, then added with a smile, "My lord."

Chapter 28.

Sebastian swung out of the saddle, his gaze taking in the doe that grazed unconcernedly at the edge of the clearing, the rabbit foraging in the nearby undergrowth. "You knew I was coming, did you?"

Bessie Dunlop gave a soft chuckle. "They told you I'm a witch, didn't they?"

The woman's hair might be white, but her face was surprisingly unlined. If she'd served as nurse to both Sir Peter and Lady Prescott before him, Sebastian knew that Bessie Dunlop had to be at least in her seventies. Yet her cheeks still bloomed with good health and vigor. Small and plump, with a fan of laugh lines radiating out from merry black eyes, she looked far more like a jovial baker's wife than a witch.

She nodded to a little girl whose dark head peeked around the edge of the doorway. "Missy, take his lordship's mare and put her in the lean-to so she'll be out of this wind."

Sebastian handed the child his reins. "Thank you."

"My granddaughter," said Bessie Dunlop, studying Sebastian through suddenly narrowed eyes. And it occurred to him that while she might look like a jolly baker's wife, appearances could be deceiving.

"Do you know who I am?" he said.

She gave a soft cackle that sounded decidedly unjovial. "Oh, I know who you are, Lord Devlin." She dropped her voice and leaned forward to whisper, "The question is, do you know? And, more important, do you want to know?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She straightened. "When you're ready to understand, you will."

He cast a more searching gaze about the clearing. "I a.s.sume Jeb Cooper told you to expect me?" It occurred to him that a child like Missy, running along a more direct path, could conceivably have reached the cottage ahead of a horseman following the winding millstream.

"In a manner of speaking." She turned to pick up a bulky meal sack resting on a shelf built against the cottage wall.

"He says you were at Prescott Grange thirty years ago, the night Sir Nigel disappeared."

"That's right." Opening the meal sack, she thrust her hand inside and came up with a fistful of grain she tossed to the chickens in the yard. The wind caught the seed, scattering it unexpectedly far.

Clucking and jostling for position, a dozen chickens descended upon them, feathers ruffled by the brisk wind. Sebastian felt his initial spirit of goodwill toward this maddeningly smiling woman begin to wane. "He says Sir Nigel and Lady Prescott quarreled that night, and that you would know the subject of their quarrel."

She shrugged one shawl-draped shoulder. "I know what I heard. It's no different from what the others in the house that night heard."

Sebastian waited patiently. It was a moment before she continued. "Afterward, there was all sorts of wild talk, of course. Sir Nigel disappearing like that. Especially when it became known that her ladyship was with child."

Sebastian studied the woman's half-averted profile. "When was Sir Peter born?"

"Late February. He came early. He was expected in April."

Late February would have been seven months after Sir Nigel disappeared, Sebastian thought. And just over seven months after the Baronet had returned from America. No wonder Lady Prescott had been vague about the dates of her husband's return.

A scratching sound drew Sebastian's attention to a ratty brown hen pecking and clawing at the shiny surface of his Hessians. He shifted his feet, but the hen persisted. Careful, he thought, or you'll end up in a stew pot, my fine feathered friend.

"I keep the hens for their eggs," she said, as if he had spoken the thought aloud. "Not for the pot."

She laughed when he looked up at her, startled. "I eat no flesh of my fellow beings. It's why the creatures of the forest know they need have no fear in approaching me."

Sebastian glanced over to where he'd seen the doe, but the deer was gone. He said, "You still haven't told me the reason Sir Nigel quarreled with Lady Prescott that night."

"Nor will I." Tossing the last of the grain, she turned back toward the cottage. The loyal family retainer, loyal to the end.

Sebastian followed her. "Three men are dead."

"And you think it's because of that quarrel?"

"I don't know."

For the first time, she looked vaguely troubled. Seating herself on her stool again, she reached for the churn. "I haven't seen Lady Rosamond in some time," she said in an apparent non sequitur. "It was Sir Peter gave me this cottage."

"Lady Rosamond being Lady Prescott?"

The old nurse worked her churn. "She'll always be Lady Rosamond to me, just like she was when she was a little girl." She paused. "Now, Sir Peter, he comes to visit me regularly. Why, he was here just last week."

Sebastian watched her work her b.u.t.ter. He said, "You haven't actually told me anything. You know that, don't you?"

She stopped churning long enough to look up at him. "Oh, but I have." Lifting her head, she called to her granddaughter, "Missy, fetch his lordship's horse. He'll be wanting to make it to Prescott Grange before the rain starts."

The first raindrops began to fall just as Sebastian clattered into the centuries-old courtyard. It hadn't been his intention to call again at Prescott Grange. But too many questions about Sir Nigel's last, fatal night remained unanswered.

He found Lady Prescott even paler and more wan than he remembered her, her soft blue eyes huge with what looked very much like fear. She received him in the Grange's ancient hall, a graceful medieval chamber with tapestry-draped stone walls and a ma.s.sive fireplace and a decorated wooden ceiling supported by stone corbels carved into fanciful shapes.

"We've heard the dreadful news about Reverend Earnshaw," she said, gripping his hand tightly for a moment before turning away to order tea. "I do hope you're here to tell us there's been some progress in identifying this killer?"

"I'm afraid not." Adjusting the tails of his riding coat, Sebastian settled on a hard, stiff-backed settee covered in a faded tapestry worked in the style of the previous century. "But I had an interesting encounter this morning with your old nurse."

The widow sank into a low chair beside a work basket and a stand supporting an embroidery frame. "Bessie Dunlop?" she asked, drawing the frame to her.

"I understand she has something of a reputation as a witch."

Lady Prescott took up her needle. "Old women living alone in the wood often give rise to such speculation."

"She does seem uncannily prescient."

Lady Prescott bent her head to focus her attention on her st.i.tches. "Bessie is unusually observant, and a good student of human nature. That is enough to make her a witch in the eyes of the villagers."