Chapter 25

Archie arrived home from his expedition to Ludlow early that evening. He was hot, dusty, tired, and cranky.

“Two blasted days!” said the Squire, hunching forward on his bench to prop his elbows on the boards before him when he and Sebastian compared notes over a couple of tankards of ale in the Blue Boar’s taproom. “I spent the better part of two days interviewing everyone from the Feathers’ innkeeper to the ostlers and scullery maids. And I didn’t learn a blessed thing.”

“I take it Emma Chance left no permanent address with them either?”

“No. Which is strange, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“She was there five days. The chambermaids say she must have done a fair amount of shopping, for she had any number of boxes and parcels delivered from dressmakers and milliners and such. But beyond that, no one could tell me anything.”

“How did she arrive there? By the mail?”

“If only! That would at least have given us some indication of where she’d traveled from. But she came in a gig, and no one was familiar with the lad who drove her. He simply let her off and went away again.”

“And she traveled without her own abigail?”

“She did. Told some tale about the girl breaking her leg, which is why she needed to hire a new one.”

Sebastian swiped a thumb across the condensation on his tankard. “I’d say you learned something.”

Archie stared at him. “I did? What?”

“You learned that she went out of her way to disguise who she was and where she’d come from.”

“I suppose I did. But . . . why? Why would she do such a thing?”

Sebastian took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and slid it across the table to the young magistrate. “The chambermaid found this list of names when she was cleaning Emma Chance’s room.”

Archie frowned as he ran through the list. “Good God; I’m on here.” He looked up at Sebastian. “Why is my name here? And why has it been crossed out? Mine and Samuel Atwater’s. Samuel Atwater? What does it mean?”

“I’ve no idea. But it’s an interesting collection of individuals. The only one I’ve yet to speak with is young Lord Seaton, who isn’t here.”

Archie nodded. “He’s gone to Windermere.” He read through the names again, his frown deepening.

Sebastian said, “Tell me about him.”

“Crispin?” Archie looked up. “We were great friends as young lads. But the Seatons are Catholic, you know. So while my father was able to send me to Eton, Crispin had to go to Stonyhurst.” Catholics were forbidden to attend schools such as Eton and Winchester or Oxford and Cambridge. It was only in the last two decades that they’d been allowed to establish their own educational institutions; before that, they’d had to send their sons and daughters to the Continent. Archie shrugged. “We sort of went our separate ways after that.”

“What’s he like?”

“Well . . .” Archie shrugged again with all the discomfort of one little given to analyzing his fellow men. “My father always said he was an idealistic dreamer with more passion than sense. But then, my father could be a bit harsh in his judgments.” He set the list aside. “Crispin’s been gone for at least a fortnight. So why is his name on this list?”

Sebastian took a slow sip of his ale. “Have you spoken to Higginbottom?”

“About the postmortem, you mean?” Archie turned a bit pale. “I stopped by there on my way back from Ludlow. He’s a sadistic bastard, isn’t he? Showed me her heart and lungs and wanted me to see the rest of her, but those bits were enough for me, I’m afraid.”

Sebastian said, “I’d be interested to take a look at the clothes she was wearing when she was killed.”

“I can ask Nash to pick them up in the morning when he collects the body for the inquest.” Emma Chance’s inquest was scheduled to begin at ten the following morning. Because the coroner and a fair number of the jurors would be coming from Ludlow, the county was saving money by scheduling Hannibal Pierce’s inquest directly after hers.

As a witness to the death of Pierce, Sebastian had received an official summons from the coroner requiring him to give testimony. But without any suspects, neither inquest was likely to be more than a necessary formality to be gone through before the bodies could be released for burial.

Archie hesitated a moment, then said, “Why do you want to see her clothes?”

“They might tell us something. I doubt Higginbottom paid much attention to them.”

Archie chewed thoughtfully on the inside of one cheek. “Did Higginbottom tell you she was still a maiden?”

“He did.”

“It happens sometimes, I suppose. Doesn’t it? With a marriage of convenience or . . . or some sort of physical irregularity, perhaps?”

“Perhaps,” said Sebastian.

The young magistrate blinked. “But you don’t think so?”

“Very little about Emma Chance seems to add up.” Sebastian drained his tankard and set it aside. “I suspect if we could figure out why, we’d be a fair ways toward discovering who killed her—and Pierce.”

Archie scrubbed his hands down over his face. “I still can’t believe there’ve been two murders in the village in less than a week. What the devil is going on around here?” His gaze met Sebastian’s, and Sebastian read in his troubled gray eyes another question, one the young Squire couldn’t quite bring himself to voice:

Is it going to happen again?

That night, long after they made love, Hero was aware of Devlin still lying awake beside her.

After more than a year of sharing this man’s life, she knew how personally he took each murder, knew the way he came to live and breathe each investigation. But she’d never known him to be as troubled as he was by this one. She suspected it had something to do with his own reasons for coming to this village. But it also had something to do with the village itself.

“You need to sleep,” she said, resting her hand on his shoulder.

He slipped an arm beneath her and drew her closer to his warm, hard body. “I will.”

“When will you sleep? After you’ve caught this killer?”

“I’m flattered you think I’m going to catch him.”

“You will,” she said, and saw him smile in the darkness. “Will they bury Emma Chance tomorrow, do you think?” she asked. “After the inquest?”

“Probably. And Pierce as well.” Once Pierce’s family received notification of his death, they might choose to move the body later, come winter. But he needed to be buried now.

Hero raised herself on her elbow so she could see him better. “I’ve been thinking about what Archie Rawlins told you—that the chambermaids at the Feathers said Emma Chance had received a number of deliveries from dressmakers and milliners while she was there.”

Devlin speared his fingers through the fall of her hair, drawing it back from her face as he cradled her head. “And?”

“You said the gray gown she was wearing when she was killed looked new, and her gray traveling dress certainly was. So if she did all that shopping, it means she probably bought them both in Ludlow right before she came here. She had only one gown—a muslin she’d dyed black—that wasn’t new.”

“Yes,” said Devlin, still obviously not quite certain where she was going with this.

“I suppose it’s possible she decided to change from full to half mourning right before she came here. But I’ve also been thinking about what Higginbottom said—that she was still a maid, and seemed younger than she claimed to be. So what if she did all that shopping in Ludlow because she wasn’t actually a widow in mourning? What if she was in fact a maiden in her early twenties? What if she claimed to be a widow nearing thirty because it made what she was doing—embarking on a sketching trip around Shropshire with only her abigail—seem slightly less scandalous?”

Hero watched his eyes widen. “Lady Devlin, you are brilliant.”

She smiled. “No. I’m simply all too familiar with the constraints under which gentlewomen in our society must labor. And the ways we sometimes devise to get around them.”

She saw the flare of some nameless emotion in his eyes. Then he drew her back down into his arms and held her tight against him.

After a moment, he said, “If you’re right—and I think you very well may be—then the question becomes, Did she concoct the hoax because she wanted to go on a sketching expedition through Shropshire? Or was the sketching story only another part of the deception?”

Hero snuggled her head against his shoulder. “You’re thinking she was here because of Lucien Bonaparte, aren’t you?”

“Yes. The problem is, who sent her—and why?”