A Death in Norfolk

Chapter Eighteen

Matthias and Bartholomew accompanied us, but on foot. Both had balked at riding horses-a gentleman's gentleman didn't ride with his master, Bartholomew argued. The brothers walked, but a five-mile hike across marshland to them was little more than an after-dinner stroll.

I found the spot where I'd met the shepherd. I saw sheep in the distance, but the shepherd had moved to another resting place.

From horseback, atop the ridge path, we had a fine view of the sea, which lay far out on the edge of the sands. The wind had pushed back the clouds, letting autumn blue sky arch overhead. The tall grasses bent, marshes stretching ahead and behind us. Lovely for a Sunday afternoon hack, but I was too impatient to enjoy it.

The path led into a hollow and the sea was lost to sight. Somewhere to the left of us was the coast road that went to Stifkey and on to Wells. Our way led straight through marshes that had yet to be drained, on a path that would be buried during high water. The tide was well out at the moment, but this path would be impassible at high tide.

"There," Grenville said.

He'd brought a small spyglass, which he'd been lifting to his eye from time to time. He stopped his horse now, pointed, and held the spyglass to me.

I peered through it, roving it around until I found what he'd seen. A windmill, standing alone on a headland. I nodded as I handed the glass back to him. It was worth investigating.

Grenville volunteered to ride back and tell Bartholomew and Matthias where we were going, while I went on. Generous of him, because I knew his curiosity was as whetted as mine.

Most windmills stood near villages, on streams that also served the village. This windmill stood by itself, probably at the end of a creek or fresh, with a house next to it. It was a large windmill, very modern, with glass windows, which meant the windmill keeper had probably set up lodgings inside it. Perhaps the house standing beside it belonged to a miller who used the windmill to grind grain.

As I drew closer, I saw, to my frustration that our path would not take us there. The windmill lay on the other side of a fairly wide river, and only by riding back to the coast road and finding a bridge could we cross, unless we had a boat. A scan along this side of the water showed me no handy rowboats, though I saw two tied up on the far bank.

I had no way of knowing how deep was the stream. It looked deep-the water was dark, and small eddies spoke of rocks a long way below the surface.

I put my hands around my mouth and called out to whoever might be in the house or windmill. The house looked abandoned, now that I was closer to it.

No one answered my call. Through Grenville's spyglass, I saw that the house had lost windows and shutters. Winters had been hard and harvests light of late-perhaps the miller had given up and moved on.

The windmill's windows, however, were whole and sound, the door and roof solid. The arms of the windmill cranked around, the pumps working.

I was still on the bank when Grenville returned on his horse, with Bartholomew and Matthias jogging behind him. I hadn't been able to get a rise out of the windmill keeper. Either he was hard of hearing, or he didn't like visitors.

"I could swim it," Matthias said, eyeing the water. "Grab one of the boats for you."

"You'd catch your death," Grenville said. "This wind is fierce, and the water will be cold. I don't have time to nurse you back to health."

Matthias shrugged, not ashamed of his idea.

"Nothing for it," I said. "We find a bridge. Keep an eye out, though, in case the keeper tries to leg it. A man who so guards his privacy will be worth speaking to."

We had to ride west beyond Wells until we found a bridge across the stream and another path that led to the windmill. A helpful farmer pointed the way-it was a fairly new windmill, he said, built about ten years ago. A miller tried to have a go grinding grain with it, but gave up and moved on. The windmill keeper, a man called Waller, was still up there. A taciturn man, but not a bad sort.

Grenville thanked him, sweetening the thanks with coin, and we rode on. The path petered out before we reached the windmill, but we were able to cut across a dry point in the marsh to the windmill's front door. The view from here was nothing but sky, grasses, and wet sands. When the tide was in, this place would be an island.

The windmill keeper wouldn't open his door, though I saw movement in an upper window. The miller's house next to it, two stories and made of brick and flint, had indeed been abandoned. I found a lone cow in the yard behind it, chewing hay and looking utterly uninterested in us.

I knocked again on the door, to no avail, so I asked Matthias and Bartholomew to break it open.

The keeper came barreling down the steps inside as the brothers slammed into the door. We heard locks scrape back, and then the door was flung open before the two could back away for another strike.

"Here," the keeper said in indignation. "What the devil be ye doing?"

His northern Norfolk dialect was decidedly pronounced, and Grenville and the town-bred brothers looked blank. I understood him but answered without bothering with the dialect.

"We're looking for a gentleman," I said. "He would have come here three, maybe four days ago. Possibly hurt."

"Don't have time of day for anyone." The man said, switching to common English, not to be polite, but so he could tell us we were bothering him. "Pumps don't keep themselves working."

"Then you won't mind if we have a look."

The windmill keeper growled. "I do mind. Who be you?"

"Captain Gabriel Lacey," I said, giving him a truncated version of a military bow. "From Parson's Point."

The man squinted up at me. "Lacey? Son of Mr. Roderick?"

No surprise that he had heard the name. "I have that distinction."

"You should have said right away. A fine man he was, old Mr. Lacey."

I hid my surprise. To me, the man had been a martinet and a bully. I'd been too young to notice what others had thought of him.

The keeper opened the door hospitably wide, and we squeezed into the foyer. A ladder-stair, much like the one in Easton's abandoned windmill, led upward, but this one was solid and fairly new. I introduced Grenville and the brothers, and the man told us he was Jonathan Waller. Born and bred in Stifkey, family going back generations.

"I'm looking for a man," I repeated, once we'd gotten the niceties out of the way. "He would have come this way in the last day or so."

"I'd have been here."

"And was he?"

Waller shook his head, pressing his lips together. "Do you see anybody here?"

"Perhaps I could…" I gestured to the ladder with my walking stick.

Mr. Waller, to my surprise, stepped out of the way. Bartholomew and Matthias seemed to make him nervous, so I told them to look through the miller's house next door while Grenville and I searched here.

The windmill was five stories high, the lower floors wider than the upper as the windmill tapered to its smooth roof. The huge paddles swung slowly past the windows, which looked out to the sea on one side, to green land and huddled villages on the other.

Grenville followed Mr. Waller into his living quarters, while I explored the mill rooms. I found a room in which gears would turn the huge wheels, but the millstones leaned against the walls, grain no longer being trundled here for grinding.

Back on the ground floor, I found a trapdoor. Pulling this open, I saw that it led down to a damp space beneath the windmill, and there I found the blood.

Not the huge quantity I'd seen on the marsh, but definite dribbles of it under the light of the lantern I'd borrowed from the keeper's kitchen. Enough blood to make me climb out and shout for Waller.

He came down, with Grenville, and I pointed at the blood, holding my lantern nearly on top of it. Waller at first looked blank then guilty.

"He begged me to keep quiet. Said someone was trying to find him, and to kill him." Waller shot me a frightened look. "Did he mean you?"

"No, I am a trying to help him." I flashed the light about, but the room was so dark, it seemed to drink in the lantern's flame. "You patched him up? Down here?"

Waller nodded. "He didn't want to risk being seen in a window. I told him we were a long way from God himself, but he insisted. Strong chap, to lose a hand like that and not be half dead."

"He rested here, how long?"

"A night and a day, then he was gone. He paid me good coin to say nothing, so nothing I said."

Waller's expression told me he expected more good coin from us for the information. Grenville, used to such things, already had a few crowns jingling in his hand.

"We agree that silence is best," he said, pressing them to Waller's palm. "We're the man's friends and are trying to help him. If you see him again, tell him to stay put. Send word to Lacey's house if you can."

Waller did not argue. "Are you going to be living there now?" he asked me. "Have a nephew who could help out with the grounds."

I was growing used to this refrain, but it stood to reason. The country people would consider it my duty to give them employment, and I agreed with them.

"Send him 'round," I said. "I am certain he will have plenty to do. To return to this man you patched up, where did he go after he left you?"

"Don't know, and that's the truth. He walked out into the storm and disappeared. He must have gone south, because he didn't take none of my boats. Never saw him again."

His words rang with sincerity. I imagined that Waller had been happy to see the alarming man vanish.

"You are certain he said that someone wanted to kill him?" I asked.

"He looked that frightened," Waller said. "Don't know who could make a big man like that so scared, but I don't want to meet such a one."

Grenville fed Waller another crown, and we took our leave. Bartholomew and Matthias joined us after coming out of the miller's house.

"Nothing there," Bartholomew said. "Plenty of birds' nests and animal tracks, but no Cooper, dead or alive."

"What now, Lacey?" Grenville asked as he let Matthias boost him onto his horse. "We search south? If Cooper worried about someone trying to kill him, would he not seek Denis's protection? Or at least get word to him?"

"I don't know," I said, not liking what I was thinking. "But I intend to ask Mr. Denis."

We rode back to Wells, and from there turned south, asking everyone we saw along the way about Cooper. No one had seen any man they didn't know, injured or otherwise, in the last few days.

I rose in my stirrups as the day started to darken. To the north was a line of gray that marked the marshes, to the east, west, and south, green farmland, much of it enclosed now.

Many of the commons and heaths I remembered from boyhood had vanished. Enclosures beggared people as much as bad harvests did, because the poorer tenant farmers and villagers could no longer run their sheep on the commons or raise food on part of it. Large landholders were squeezing out the small, the way of the world.

I sank to my saddle in frustration. Cooper could be anywhere. He might have taken a mail coach to London or north to Lincolnshire or south to Suffolk. Or he could have paid a fisherman to take him to Amsterdam in Easton's wake. Combing the countryside was producing nothing.

"At least we have discovered that he was alive a few days ago," Grenville said, moving his horse beside mine. "If he could walk away after losing his entire hand, then he is indeed strong. He'll turn up somewhere. He's probably lying low, nursing himself back to health."

If he did not die of fever first. The wounds from amputations had to be burned, or the remainder of the limb-indeed, the rest of the body-could fester. Men died even when it seemed they'd recovered from the injury.

I recalled the remains of the campfire I'd seen near the blood. Cooper could have built that fire and plunged the stump of his arm into it once he'd cut off the badly injured hand. If so, Cooper had vast strength of will and the bravery of a lion.

But he might have done it. Denis had known, even as a child, that throwing in his lot with Cooper was the way to survival. Denis was no fool.

"We should return to Easton's," I said. What I would do there, I kept to myself.

Grenville adjusted his hat and pulled his greatcoat closer against the wind. "I'm afraid I'll be traveling back to London in the morning, Lacey. I've had a letter from Marianne."

His tone was so somber that I looked at him quickly. "Bad news?"

"No, nothing like that. She has reached London again and says she wishes to consult with me. I can only imagine what that means."

With Marianne Simmons, one never knew. Her urgent need might mean life or death or a shortage of the snuff she liked so much.

"I am certain Denis will be pleased to have me to himself," I said.

"Not if you come with me. Not that I wish harm to come to Mr. Cooper, but now that we know he's alive, surely Denis has better resources to send after him than you. Evidence of Cooper at the windmill should be enough to point him in the right direction. Let us go to London and be finished with Denis and his band of thieves."

I wanted to agree. I was ready to meet up with Lady Breckenridge and move on to planning what we'd do in our married life. How much more satisfying to discuss renovations to my old house from the comfort of her warm sitting room-even better, from the comfort of her bedchamber.

Or perhaps we should not return to Norfolk at all. I could try to find a way to break the entail and sell the house, if even for pittance. I would marry Donata and bury myself at the Breckenridge estate until her son grew up and tossed us into the dower house. Viscount Breckenridge's lands were in Hampshire, a beautiful place in a serene valley. Donata would always want her Season in London, but I could be the stodgy husband who remained in the country all year, seeing to the farms and fishing. I knew that Donata had no such life in mind for us, but it was a pleasant fantasy.

"I'm afraid I must stay a little longer," I said with reluctance. "There is more to Cooper's disappearance than meets the eye, and I have a few other things to resolve."

"The missing vicar's daughter?" Grenville asked. "I can be as suspicious as you at times, Lacey, but all evidence points to the fact that she eloped. And now the publican's son has confirmed he helped her run away."

"No, I do not mean Miss Quinn."

Grenville eyed me in curiosity, but I could not answer him. I had personal conflicts to resolve-between myself and Buckley, between myself and Terrance Quinn, between myself and my mother's revelations.

"Go to London," I said. "Give Marianne my best wishes."

Grenville shot me a dark look, but we spoke no more about it.

Denis had shut himself away with other business, I was informed when I returned. I told the lackey who'd come out to meet me to report that I'd found trace of Cooper.

I washed and refreshed myself in my chamber, and Bartholomew brought me a glass of hock and a small, cold supper. After that, Denis sent for me.

Again he dismissed the man who stood guard and spoke with me alone in the study.

"The windmill keeper treated Cooper's injury," Denis said when I'd finished my tale. "And then Cooper vanished? You believed this?"

"I see no reason for Waller to lie about it. By all evidence he'd been happy to see the back of Cooper."

Denis's eyes went sharp. "I wager this Waller knows more than what he told you. Why did you not question him more closely?"

"I questioned him thoroughly, I assure you. Grenville's lavishness with coin loosened Waller's tongue."

"I disagree." Denis's voice was calm, but I heard rage behind it. "He told you what you wanted to hear. He would have told you nothing at all if you'd not seen the blood. Then you prompted him into the tale of patching up a man with a missing hand, and he agreed to it."

"If you believe him hiding Cooper, we searched. Cooper wasn't there."

"At first light, you will show me the way there, and I will search. And question the man. He will open up to me far quicker, no need for Grenville's coin."

"No," I said.

Denis's eyes widened, his anger no longer hidden. "What did you say?"

"I am finished with this search," I said. "Finished running about the countryside in all weather on your errands, while you lie to me. I have some private business to conclude, and then I will be returning to London."

"No, you will not."

"I say I will. Find Cooper on your own. Waller told me that Cooper was in fear for his life. I can imagine only one man Cooper would fear." I took a firmer grim on my walking stick. "That man is you. I refuse to hunt Cooper down and hand him over to you so that you can kill him."