A Death in Norfolk

Chapter Sixteen

"Buckley?"

I stood, my chair sliding back on the flagstones. Thomas Buckley, the youthful-faced publican who'd welcomed me home as the "young master," remembered what I liked to drink, and offered me cheerful advice about Terrance Quinn-had been my mother's lover?

"You must be mistaken," I said. "Buckley would only have been in his twenties at the time."

"I am not mistaken, dear. I remember it well. You never knew, then?"

I scrubbed one hand through my hair as I paced. "Of course I did not know. What mother tells her child that she is going to run off with the publican's son?" I stopped. "Did my father know?" A horrible thought entered my head. Had he found out? Had he killed my mother in a jealous rage and then claimed she'd died of illness?

Mrs. Landon was shaking her head. "I do not believe your father ever tumbled to it. Your lady mother was most discreet, as was young Mr. Buckley. I know only because I came upon them by chance one day, but I promised my silence. The poor dear didn't have much joy in her life. Who was I to destroy that, even if she committed a mortal sin? When you have lived most of your life in a vicarage, you realize that there is sin, and there is sin."

I sat down, my legs suddenly weak. "But she did not go with Mr. Buckley in the end. He is still here, and my mother is dead."

"I know." Her voice was gentle. "I nursed your mother to the last. Such a sweet woman. You say that Mr. Buckley was in his twenties, and he was, but you must remember that she was not much older than he. Five or six years at most. And country boys grow up quicker, as much fancy schooling as the gentry have."

I balled my hands. "What made her decide not to leave? She wrote in her journal that she was prepared to go, but nothing after that."

"I cannot say. She never told me. But one day, when she was bringing flowers for the Easter service, your ma took me aside and said that the matter with Mr. Buckley was at an end. She apologized to me for having to bear the secret. She apologized to me, poor lamb."

"But she never said why."

"No, dear. And I did not ask her."

I rubbed a shaking hand over my face The idea that my mother and Buckley…

Was I outraged because he was a lowborn publican's son, or because she'd fallen so hard in love with him that she'd contemplated leaving me with my father? Or was I angry that Buckley hadn't taken her off, out of my father's reach, where she might have been happy?

I did not know. I knew only that I had to put my hands on him.

I rose. "Thank you, Mrs. Landon."

She saw what was in my face and got to her feet. "You leave him be, Captain. It was a long time ago. Water under the bridge. He's got a good wife and a fine son and grandson."

"I'm sorry," I said.

It was all that would come out of my mouth. I shook off her well-meaning hand and strode out of the house.

I was so angry that I walked all the way. Terrance looked up from his tankard as I entered the public house. "Lacey…"

I ignored him and made for Buckley, who'd come out from behind his hatch to talk to a handful of fishermen. The smell of frying fish came out of the back, where Buckley's wife was preparing whatever the fishermen had brought her.

"Captain." Buckley turned his publican's smile on me. "Your usual?"

"I want a word," I said. "Now."

Buckley lost the smile, but he looked puzzled rather than worried. He nodded to the fishermen and Terrance, who also eyed me curiously, then Buckley followed me out the front door.

The trouble with villages is that one can not have a chat in a corner without half the place overhearing. The pub sat at the end of a row of flint cottages, each built slap against the other. The space between the row of houses and the one behind it was tiny, dark, and full of slops. Anything said there would echo up and down and through the back windows.

I walked out of the high street until I was well away from houses, on the path that ran up to the marshes. Buckley caught up with me, puffing. "What is it? What's happened? Is it Robert?"

When I determined we could speak privately, I turned to him, my walking stick firmly in my hands. "Why did she decide not to go with you?"

Buckley stared at me, perplexed, then the skin about his eyes pinched. He did not pretend not to understand what I meant.

"Because of you," he said.

"I was only a child." I clenched my walking stick so hard I feared the casing would break. "I was away at school. What could it have mattered?"

"It mattered to her. She did not want you to always be known for her transgressions. She did not want you to grow up in shame."

"And so she told you to leave her alone?"

"That's about the brunt of it. Yes."

I stood there, unsure what to do. My first instinct was to hit him, the small boy in me wanting to pummel the man who'd tried to take away his mother. My second instinct was to hit him for not persuading her harder.

"You should have made her go with you," I said. "She was miserable. Bugger what I thought."

Buckley stood with his arms loose at his sides, a stance of surrender. "I understood once I had a boy of my own. The sins of the parents, and all that."

"My father was a demon," I said. "He made her life hell, and mine. She died here, in that hell. If you'd taken her away, she might still be alive, and happy."

Buckley was shaking his head before I finished. "She would have died anyway." His voice was full of sadness. "She was belly-full. She lost the child, and that made her take sick."

I stood still while shock spilled over me. "Your child?"

"Aye."

He said it without shame. Only vast sadness for what might have been.

I remembered the words of my mother's diary: I wish, I so wish, I could have another, a daughter such as she! But perhaps I will not have to wait so long. My limbs tremble as I think on it.

I'd suspected she'd meant she was carrying a child, and now Buckley confirmed it. She'd hoped that the child would be a girl, a daughter. But she'd decided to stay here, to pretend the child was my father's, to raise her as a Lacey. My sister. Then the child had died, killing my mother as well. Buckley's child had killed her.

"Dear God," I said.

"She broke my heart, young master. That she did."

To resist the impulse to pull the sword from my walking stick and strike him down, I clamped my arm across my stomach and turned away. Not, alas, because I thought he did not deserve to be struck down, but because I knew everyone in the village would see me if I killed him.

"Tell me," I said. "I want to know. Everything. How long were you her lover?"

I heard Buckley move uneasily behind me. "Two years. I know she was older than me, and a lady, but she were a beautiful, beautiful woman. And so kind. Not condescending at all. Talked to me like I was the same as her. She always did."

I turned back as he paused. "What began it? Or did she one day decide to come to the pub and ask you to take her to bed?"

He reddened. "Nothing like that. I was helping with repairs to the church. We all throw in for that, one way or another, or the thing would fall down on us of a Sunday morning. Your mum was always there, assisting Mrs. Landon. She and I were alone in the back of the church, and Mrs. Lacey was holding a bit of wood for me while I nailed it over a hole. We were talking and making jests, as we often did. And then.." He shrugged. "I do not know how it happened, I will tell you honest, Captain. All the sudden, I was kissing her. And it was like angels started to sing."

"Mrs. Landon caught you," I said.

"That she did. Not then. She caught us months later, kissing in the sacristy. Adultery in a church. Can you credit it?"

He spoke wistfully, an older man recalling the follies of youth. I turned away again, wanting to rail at him, and at the same time, hungering for this new view of my mother.

I'd barely known her, I realized. My father hadn't known her either, seeing her as a vessel for his seed, a woman to run his home and nothing more. Buckley had known her.

"Why did you not tell me?" I asked. "Why did you never tell me?"

"Well, it'd not be easy, would it? To explain to a young man something like that? And then you were off to war and foreign lands and then London, never to return, we all thought. It was the past. I married and I had children of my own."

I stood still, uncertain what to do. The desire to hit him and keep hitting had not left me. Though the reasonable part of me agreed that it had been long ago, that it scarcely mattered any longer, the rest of me was quivering from this new and painful wound.

I walked away from him. It was the best thing, under the circumstances. I strode up the path toward the marshes, my walking stick pressing into the mud. Buckley did not follow me. The wise man went back to his pub and left me alone with my thoughts.

I was never certain how long I wandered. The rain poured down, and my knee started to ache.

At least, I came across nothing gruesome-no severed hands, no bodies, no blood. Only me, the grasses, the rain, and sheep.

I found the shepherd under shelter of the bank that separated the salt marshes from the wet sands. He hunkered under a canvas tarp, taking nips from a flask while he kept one eye on his charges.

I sank to my heels, my game leg protesting, and he greeted me with a nod. "Now then, Captain."

I did not know the man, but I could not be surprised he knew who I was. Everyone in the area was aware of my return by now.

He offered me the flask but I declined, not because I did not want the gin or whatever was in it, but because the mouth of the flask was rust-stained and covered with sand.

"Are these Lord Southwick's sheep?" I asked. I did not much care, but I wanted to speak of anything to take my mind off my encounter with Buckley.

"Aye. And some from the villages. Parson's Point and Blakeney. We don't tell his lordship that we mix them together."

I watched the wet bundles of wool crop the marsh grasses, the aristocratic sheep unworried about being mixed with the common sheep. "How do you tell them apart?"

He shrugged. "Sheep are like people, Captain. They all have their little ways that make them different. I know which are which." He chuckled. "That and we mark them with a little dye."

His humor washed over me, unnoticed. "I suppose when you're out here all day long, you see more of the sheep than people."

"That I do." The shepherd grinned, showing broken teeth, and took another sip from his flask. "But I don't mind. Sheep know where they are and what's what, and they never mind it. It's people that fuss all the time."

"And hurt one another."

"Aye. Though the mamas can get protective of their babies."

"Do many people wander out here?" I asked. "Besides me, I mean."

"Not many. Saw you out here yesterday, with a horse."

"Yes." I rested my weight on my walking stick, my leg truly starting to hurt. "I'd lost it, and I found it grazing here. Did you happen to see it come out? Or a man with it?"

"Don't think so. But I move about, sometimes here, sometimes elsewhere. And this land looks flat, but it fools you. Little hills and ridges everywhere."

I'd noticed that. "He'd have been a large man, quite tall and broad. He might have had another man with him."

The shepherd rubbed his chin with the hand that held the flask. "Don't think so." He kept rubbing. "Did see a man, but not yesterday, and not with a horse. A few days ago. And he were alone. I think he were tall, though."

My moroseness fled. "Where?"

The shepherd pointed to his right, north along the ridgeline. "Up yonder. Walking away, heading westward. Not much out that way, but that's where he went. Didn't know who he were at this distance, and I never saw him again."

I stood up, my leg aching as I straightened it. I gazed down the ridge, shielding my eyes from the rain and the glare from the leaden sky.

"Thank you."

"If I see him again, should I tell him you're looking?"

I continued to study the direction he'd gone, the grasses bending under the wind. "No," I said. "No, do not mention it."

The shepherd touched his hand to his forehead in a mock salute. "Right you are, Captain. I'll keep your interest to meself. Can't speak for me sheep."

I looked down into his twinkling eyes and smiled with him. I was a native son; the man the shepherd had spotted, a stranger. He'd keep my secrets.

Now to find out whether the person he'd seen was Cooper, Cooper's killer, or someone else entirely.