T hank you for agreeing to receive me at such an unfashionably early hour,” said Lady Forbes.
“We keep very unfashionable hours around here,” said Hero with a smile. “Please, have a seat.”
Lady Forbes did not sit. Instead, she stood just inside the entrance to the drawing room, her face abnormally pale, her breathing noticeably agitated. Once, this woman had loved Nicholas Hayes enough to run away and seek to marry him. But after almost nineteen years, people changed, thought Hero—particularly when their circumstances altered so radically. Looking at her now, Hero found herself wondering how much of the passionate, willful nineteen-year-old girl Kate had once been still lingered within this poised, awe-inspiringly composed woman. Or had that vulnerable girl been squashed and left behind long ago?
The woman who was now the wife of Sir Lindsey Forbes jerked at the ribbons of her hat as if suddenly finding them too tight. “I’ve just heard that Lord Seaforth was found dead this morning. Is it true?”
“Yes,” said Hero baldly.
“Dear God.” Katherine Forbes turned away, one hand coming up to press against her lips as if she was momentarily overwhelmed by what she’d just heard. And it came to Hero, watching her, that this was a woman who’d long ago learned to hide every wayward emotion and betraying thought. That what Hero had at first taken as calm self-possession was actually a painstakingly constructed facade.
And that facade was cracking.
She watched as Katherine Forbes carefully set about tucking away everything she didn’t want seen. When she turned to face Hero again, head held high, only her unnatural pallor betrayed her. “I ask that you and Lord Devlin keep what I have to tell you in the strictest confidence . . . if at all possible.”
“You have my word.”
“Thank you.”
She sat then, tensely, on the very front edge of the sofa facing the windows, her reticule gripped with both hands on her knees as if it could somehow protect her from the consequences of what she was about to say. “I’m here because Lord Seaforth’s death has led me to fear that my previous lack of honesty may in some way I don’t understand have contributed to the Earl’s death.”
She paused, as if unable to go on, and Hero said quietly, “You saw Nicholas, didn’t you?”
Kate sucked in a quick breath, then nodded. “We were just returning to St. James’s Square—Sir Lindsey and I. We’d been visiting acquaintances, and it was early evening, that time of day when the setting sun lends such a glorious golden light to everything. I looked across at the square, thinking how pretty it all was, and . . . I saw Nicholas standing there, by the fence around the water basin.”
“You recognized him?”
She nodded again. “Immediately. He was older than the young man I remembered and dressed like a tradesman, but the instant I saw him, I couldn’t look away. It was as if all the noise and color of the square faded and there were only the two of us.” She paused as if vaguely embarrassed by what she had just said. “I realize how fanciful that sounds.”
“No, please—” Hero’s throat suddenly felt so tight, she had to work to push out the words. “Go on.”
Kate’s voice was hushed, her chest jerking with each strained intake of air. “For a moment, I couldn’t look away. Then I remembered Sir Lindsey was beside me and I was terrified lest he turn and see Nicholas too.”
“Did he?”
“No.” She paused as if reconsidering this. “At least, I don’t think he did. Nicholas told me afterward that he hadn’t intended to approach me, that he was simply hoping to catch a glimpse of me from a distance. He hadn’t meant for me to see him.”
“But he did approach you?”
“Yes. Four days later. I was with my maid Molly at Hatchards, in Piccadilly. We spoke for only a few moments, but arranged to meet again. Someplace private.”
“Where?” said Hero, sharper than she’d intended. “Where were you to meet?”
Kate swallowed. “In Pennington’s Tea Gardens, on Thursday evening.”
“Dear Lord,” whispered Hero. “That’s why he went there.”
Kate pressed her lips together and nodded. “I knew Sir Lindsey would be busy with all the events surrounding the Allied Sovereigns’ visit. When the day came, I told him I wasn’t well and had decided to stay home. He was furious, of course—he likes having a wife with him at such events.” She said it as if any wife would have sufficed as long as she was attractive and presentable enough for Sir Lindsey to consider her an asset, and Hero suspected that was true enough. “But for once I didn’t give in to him. He grumbled, but in the end he went alone.”
For once I didn’t give in to him, thought Hero. What a miserable marriage. Aloud, she said, “You were with Nicholas in the gardens that night?”
“No. Just as I was about to leave the house, one of the kitchen maids scalded her arm quite badly. I had to deal with it, and it took so long that by the time I reached Pennington’s Gardens, they were closing.” Her face had acquired a pinched, haunted look. “All I could do was sit in the hackney and watch the stream of happy, laughing people leaving the gardens. I kept hoping I’d see Nicholas, but he never came.” She swallowed convulsively and bowed her head. “I was devastated. I was certain he must be thinking that I’d changed my mind, that I’d decided I didn’t want to see him after all. But by then he was already dead, wasn’t he?”
“Did you see anyone you recognized in the crowd?”
Her head came up, and it was obvious from the consternation in her face that it had never occurred to her that she might unknowingly have seen Nicholas’s killer. “No. No, I didn’t.”
“And then you went home?”
“Yes. I had the hackney stop by the apothecary’s so I could pick up a headache powder on the way. That was the excuse I’d given for going out, you see—and my explanation for having the footman call a hackney rather than go through all the bother of having the horses put to and the carriage brought ’round. Of course, I was gone a ridiculously long time for such a simple errand, and I could have sent one of the servants for it in the first place. But I didn’t expect anyone to inquire too closely. I mean, why would they?”
Why indeed? thought Hero. Servants were accustomed to accepting their employers’ little prevarications and obvious outright lies without a blink. “Did Nicholas have a child with him when you saw him—a little boy of perhaps eight or nine?”
“Not when I spoke with him in Piccadilly—or at any rate, I didn’t see the boy then. But I remember there was a child who seemed to be with him in the square. A pretty boy, with very dark hair.” She paused. “Why? Who is he?”
“His name is Ji. We don’t know for certain what his relationship is to Nicholas Hayes, but the two came together from China.”
“Is that where Nicholas has been? In China?”
“Yes. He didn’t tell you?”
“No. But we spoke so briefly. I was afraid someone might see us. Where is the child now?”
“We don’t know. He disappeared after Nicholas was killed. I saw him yesterday morning, but some men tried to grab him, and he ran off again.”
“Good heavens. Who would want to hurt a child?”
“Lord Seaforth, actually. He was afraid the boy might be Nicholas’s legitimate heir, and thus able to challenge the succession.”
Kate stared at her. “And is he? Nicholas’s child, I mean.”
“I think he probably is.”
Kate was silent, and Hero had the impression that all of her focus, all of her thoughts, had been drawn into herself. Eighteen years before, this woman had given birth to Nicholas Hayes’s child—her only child, a child who had died. Hero wondered how such a woman would react to the discovery that the man she’d once loved so desperately had fathered a child by another. But with Kate, such things were almost impossible to discern.
Hero said, “Nicholas didn’t say anything to you about the boy?”
“No.”
“Did he say anything—anything at all that might help explain his murder?”
“No. As I said, we spoke for only a moment or two.”
“Can you tell me what he said? It might help.”
Kate nodded, the skin of her face tight, the struggle to maintain her composure so obvious as to hardly be worth the effort. “When he first walked up to me in Hatchards, I said something like, ‘Dear Lord, it really is you.’ I think by then I had somehow managed to convince myself that I must have imagined seeing him. I said, ‘What are you doing in England? If they find you, they’ll kill you.’” She paused.
“And?” prodded Hero.
“And he said, ‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’ I remember I was suddenly furious with him. I said, ‘What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? It matters to me.’ And then he smiled this strange, crooked smile and said, ‘You still care? Even if it’s just a little?’” She paused again, her gaze dropping to where her fingers were playing aimlessly with the strings of her reticule.
It was a long moment before she could go on. “He said . . . he said, ‘You still care?’ and I told him I’d loved him with every breath I’ve taken for more than nineteen years.” She looked suddenly fierce, a challenge in her eyes when she glanced up as if daring Hero to judge her.
When Hero remained silent, Kate said, “I told him it was madness for us to be talking like that where anyone might see us. And then I suggested we meet at the tea gardens, because no one fashionable goes there anymore. I remembered there used to be a small clearing in the shrubbery, with a bench, near the access gate in the western wall. . . .”
Her voice trailed away, and in the silent, wounded depths of her gentle blue eyes, Hero could see hints of a pain and a heartache that would never go away.
Hero said, “Was anyone close enough that they might have heard you?”
Kate looked at her blankly. “I don’t believe so, but . . . Dear heaven, do you think it’s possible?”
“Perhaps,” said Hero as gently as she could. But there was no way to soften this woman’s realization that their planned meeting might somehow have inadvertently contributed to the death of the man she’d loved for so long. “Did he say anything else? Anything at all?”
Kate gazed out the open windows. The flat morning light was soaking the upper stories of the row of houses across the street and turning the small visible slice of sky an almost brilliant white. Then suddenly everything darkened, as if a heavier cloud had passed over the sun. “I don’t think so. Except . . .”
“Yes?”
She frowned with the effort of memory. “I don’t recall his exact words, but he said there was something he wanted to ask me. I said, ‘Ask. Ask me anything,’ and he smiled in a way that made him look so much like the boy he once was that it . . . it hurt. He said, ‘You don’t even know what it is yet,’ and I told him I didn’t care. Then the smile went out of his eyes and he said, ‘I thought I could count on Anne, but she let me down.’”
Hero sat forward. “Anne? Do you think he meant his sister, Lady Bradbury?”
“I assumed so. Why do you say it like that?”
“Because Lady Bradbury told Devlin she had no idea her brother was in England. She said she hadn’t seen him since their father banished him nineteen years ago.”