When Maidens Mourn (16 page)

Sebastian watched Rory Forster move on to the next trench. The man’s very name—Forster, a corruption of “forester”—harkened back to the days when this wood had been part of a vast royal hunting park. His ancestors would have been the kings’ foresters, charged with husbanding the royal game and protecting them from the encroachments of poachers. But those days were long gone, lost in the misty past.

Sebastian said, “Did Miss Tennyson tell Sir Stanley she suspected you were the one vandalizing the site in search of treasure?”

Forster straightened slowly, the outer corner of one eye twitching as if with a tic, the rough cloth of his smock dark with sweat across his shoulders and chest and under his arms. “Ye ain’t gonna pin this murder on me. Ye hear me?” he said, raising one beefy arm to stab a pointed finger at Sebastian. “I was home with me wife all that night. Never left the house, I didn’t.”

“Possibly,” said Sebastian. “However, we don’t know precisely when Miss Tennyson was murdered. She may well have met her death in the afternoon.”

The twitch beside the man’s eye intensified. “What ye want from me?”

“The truth.”

“The truth?” Forster gave a harsh laugh. “Ye don’t want the truth.”

“Try me.”

“Huh. Ye think I’m a fool?”

Sebastian studied the man’s handsome, dirt-streaked face. “You can say what you have to say to me, in confidence. Or you can tell your tale to Bow Street. The choice is yours.”

Forster licked his lower lip, then gave Sebastian a sly, sideways look. “Ye claim it was me what told ye, and I’ll deny it.”

“Fair enough. Now, tell me.”

Forster sniffed. “To my way o’ thinkin’, them Bow Street magistrates ought to be lookin’ into Sir Stanley’s lady.”

“You mean Lady Winthrop?”

“Aye. Come out here Saturday about noon, she did. In a real pelter.”

Sebastian frowned. Lady Winthrop had told him she’d never visited her husband’s controversial excavations. “Was Sir Stanley here?”

“Nah. He’d gone off by then. Somethin’ about a prize mare what was near her time. But Miss Tennyson was still here. She’s the one her ladyship come to see. A right royal row they had, and ye don’t haveta take me word for it. Ask any o’ the lads workin’ the trenches that day; they’ll tell ye.”

“What was the argument about?”

“I couldn’t catch the sense o’ most o’ it. Her ladyship asked to speak to Miss Tennyson in private and they walked off a ways, just there.” Forster nodded toward the northeastern edge of the island, where a faint path could be seen winding through the thicket of bushes and brambles.

“But you did hear something,” said Sebastian.

“Aye. Heard enough to know it was Sir Stanley they was fightin’ about. And as she was leavin’, I heard her ladyship say, ‘Cross me, young woman, and ye’ll be sorry!’”

“Y
ou’re certain you heard her right?” asked Sebastian.

The foreman sniffed. “Ye don’t believe me, ask some of the lads what was here that day. Or better yet, ask her ladyship herself. But like I said, if ye let on ’twas me what told ye, I’ll deny it. I’ll deny it to yer face.”

“Who are you afraid of?” asked Sebastian. “Sir Stanley? Or his wife?”

Forster huffed a scornful laugh. “Anybody ain’t afraid of them two is a fool. Oh, they’re grand and respectable, ain’t they? Livin’ in that big house and hobnobbin’ wit’ the King hisself. But I hear tell Sir Stanley, he started out as some clerk with little more’n a sixpence to scratch hisself with. How ye think he got all that money? Mmm? And how many bodies ye think he walked over to get it?”

“And Lady Winthrop?”

“She’s worse’n him, any day o’ the week. Sir Stanley, he’ll leave ye alone as long as yer not standin’ between him and somethin’ he wants. But Lady Winthrop, she’d destroy a man out o’ spite, just ’cause she’s mean.”

Some twenty minutes later, Sebastian’s knock at Trent House’s massive doors was answered by a stately, ruddy-faced butler of ample proportions who bowed and intoned with sepulchral detachment, “I fear Sir Stanley is not at present at home, my lord.”

“Actually, I’m here to see Lady Winthrop. And there’s no point in telling me she’s not at home either,” said Sebastian cheerfully when the butler opened his mouth to do just that, “because I spotted her in the gardens when I drove up. And I’m perfectly willing to do something vulgar like cut around the outside of the house and accost her directly, if you’re too timid to announce me.”

The butler’s nostrils quivered with righteous indignation. Then he bowed again and said, “This way, my lord.”

Lady Winthrop stood at the edge of the far terrace, the remnants of last night’s wind flapping the figured silks of her high-necked gown. She had been watching over the activities of the band of workmen tearing out the old wall of the terrace. But at Sebastian’s approach she turned, one hand coming up to straighten her plain, broad-brimmed hat as she shot the butler a tight-jawed glare that warned of dire future consequences.

“Don’t blame him,” said Sebastian, intercepting the look. “He denied you with commendable aplomb. But short of bowling me over, there really was no stopping me.”

She brought her icy gaze back to Sebastian’s face and said evenly to the red-faced butler, “Thank you, Huckabee; that will be all.”

The butler gave another of his flawless bows and withdrew.

“My husband is out with the men from the estate searching for the missing Tennyson children,” she said, her fingers still gripping the brim of her hat. “He’ll be sorry he missed you. And now you really must excuse me—”

“Why don’t you show me your gardens, Lady Winthrop?” said
Sebastian when she would have turned away. “No need to allow the interesting details of our conversation to distract these men from their work.”

She froze, then forced a stiff laugh. “Of course. Since you are here.”

She waited until they were out of earshot before saying evenly, “I resent the implication that I have something to hide from my servants.”

“Don’t you? You told me yesterday that you never visited the excavations at the moat. Except you did, just last Saturday. In fact, you had what’s been described as a ‘right royal row’ with Miss Tennyson herself.”

Lady Winthrop’s lips tightened into a disdainful smile. “I fear you misunderstood me, Lord Devlin. I said I did not make it a practice of visiting the site; I did not say I had never done so.”

Sebastian studied her proud, faintly contemptuous face, the weak chin pulled back against her neck in a scowl. As the plain but extraordinarily well-dowered only daughter of a wealthy merchant, she had married not once, but twice. Her first, brief marriage to a successful banker ended when her husband broke his neck on the hunting field and left his considerable holdings to her; her second marriage a few years later to Sir Stanley united two vast fortunes. But this second union, like her first, had remained childless, an economic merger without affection or shared interests or any real meeting of the minds.

It must be difficult,
Sebastian thought,
to be a wealthy but plain, dull woman married to a
handsome, virile, charismatic man.
And he understood then just how much this woman must have hated Gabrielle Tennyson, who was everything she, Lady Winthrop, was not: not only young and beautiful, but also brilliant and well educated and courageous enough to defy so many of the conventions that normally held her sisters in check.

He said, “And your argument?”

She drew her brows together in a pantomime of confusion. “Did we argue? Frankly, I don’t recall it. Have you been speaking to some of the workmen? You know how these yokels exaggerate.”

“Doing it a bit too brown, there, Lady Winthrop.”

Angry color mottled her cheeks. “I take it that must be one of those vulgar cant expressions gentlemen are so fond of affecting these days. Personally I find the tendency to model one’s speech on that of the lower orders beyond reprehensible.”

Sebastian let out his breath in a huff of laughter. “So why did you visit Camlet Moat last Saturday?”

“Years before the light of our Lord was shown upon this land, England was given over to a terrible superstition dominated by a caste of evil men bound in an unholy pact with the forces of darkness.”

“By which I take it you mean the Druids.”

She inclined her head. “I do. Unfortunately, there are those in our age who in their folly have romanticized the benighted days of the past. Rather than seek salvation through our Lord and wisdom in his word, they choose to dabble in the rituals and tarnished traditions of the ignorant.”

Sebastian stared off down the hill, to where a doe could be seen grazing beside a stretch of ornamental water. “I’ve heard that the locals consider the island to be a sacred site.”

“They do. Which is why I chose to visit Camlet Moat last Saturday. My concern was that the recent focus of attention on the area might inspire the ignorant to hold some bizarre ritual on the island.”

“Because Lammas began Saturday night at sunset?”

Again, the regal inclination of the head. “Precisely.”

“So why approach Miss Tennyson? Why not Sir Stanley?”

“I fear I have not made myself clear. I went to the site in search of my husband. But when I found him absent, I thought to mention my concerns to Miss Tennyson.” The thin lips pinched into a
tight downward curve. “Her response was predictably rude and arrogant.”

Those were two words Sebastian had yet to hear applied to Miss Tennyson. But he had been told she didn’t suffer fools lightly, and he suspected she might well have perceived Lady Winthrop as a very vain and foolish woman. He said, “She didn’t think you had anything to worry about?”

“On the contrary. She said she believed the island was a profoundly spiritual place of ancient significance.”

“Is that when you quarreled?”

She fixed him with an icy stare full of all the moral outrage of a woman long practiced in the art of self-deception, who had already comfortably convinced herself that the confrontation with Gabrielle had never occurred. “We did not quarrel,” she said evenly.

There were any number of things he could have said. But none of them would have penetrated that shield of righteous indignation, so he simply bowed and took his leave.

He did not believe for a moment that she had overcome her distaste for her husband’s excavations in order to drive out to the moat and have a conversation that could just as easily have been held over the breakfast table. Instead, she had deliberately chosen a time when she knew Sir Stanley to be elsewhere.

Jealousy could be a powerful motive for murder. He could imagine Lady Winthrop killing Gabrielle in a rage of jealousy and religious zeal. But he could not imagine her then murdering two children and disposing of their bodies somewhere in the wilds of the chase.

Yet as he drove away, he was aware of her standing at the edge of her garden watching him.

And he wondered why.

Sebastian was standing in the middle of his library and studying the new boxes of books and papers that had appeared since that morning when he heard the peal of the front bell. A moment later, Morey paused in the library’s entrance to clear his throat.

“Yes?” prompted Sebastian when the majordomo seemed temporarily at a loss for words.

“A personage to see you, my lord.”

“A personage?”

“Yes, my lord. I have taken the liberty of putting him in the drawing room.”

Sebastian studied the majordomo’s painfully wooden face. Morey normally left “personages” cooling their heels in the hall.

“I’ll be right up,” he said.