What Remains of Heaven

Chapter 27

SUNDAY, 12 JULY 1812

The next morning dawned heavily overcast and blustery, with an unseasonably chill north wind that whistled in the chimneys and sent trash scuttling down the city streets.

Before leaving the house, Sebastian checked on Tom and found the boy sitting up in bed, pink-cheeked and cranky.

“ ’Tain’t nothin’ but a scratch,” he said. “If’n Morey’ll let me ’ave me breeches—”

Sebastian touched the boy’s forehead and found him hot. “You’re not going anywhere, and that’s an order.”

“But the grays don’t like Giles—”

“I’m not taking the curricle. I’ll be riding out to Tanfield Hill on Leila. Alone.” Sebastian had no intention of getting another groom shot. “And you are staying in bed until Gibson says otherwise.”

“But—”

“No buts.” It was said in the officer’s voice that had once quelled the rebellious murmurings of a battle-hardened regiment.

Tom flushed scarlet and hung his head. “Aye, my lord.”

Beneath the sullen, wind-tossed sky, the village of Tanfield Hill lay unnaturally quiet and somber. As Sebastian trotted his Arab up the high street, a woman with a dark shawl drawn over her head threw him a quick, anxious glance, her hand tightening its grip on the child beside her. Sebastian supposed having two clerics murdered in your church in less than a week might tend to make the locals nervous.

He found the Dog and Duck nestled in a curve of the millstream, just beyond the churchyard. A plain-fronted, two-story brick building dating back to the early eighteenth century, it had a cobbled rear courtyard sheltered on two sides by the attached livery and carriage house.

“Aye,” said Jeb Cooper, happy to talk while he worked rubbing down the Arab just inside the livery’s wide doors. “Time was, I was groom to Sir Nigel Prescott himself.” A slim, wiry man somewhere in his late forties or fifties, just below average height, the ostler had a head of thick, short gray curls and a bony face shadowed by several days’ growth of beard.

“I ain’t surprised to hear he was lyin’ dead all these years,” said the ostler. “I figured somethin’ bad musta happened to him, when they found Lady Jane.”

Sebastian frowned, not understanding. “Lady Jane?”

“Sir Nigel’s mare. Dapple gray, with four white stockings. The sweetest-goin’ thing you ever did see. Trained her hisself, he did.”

Sebastian propped his shoulders against the whitewashed wall, his arms crossed at his chest. “The mare was found running loose on the heath the next day?”

“That’s right. The next mornin’.”

“Did you think at the time Sir Nigel might have been set upon by highwaymen?”

The ostler looked at Sebastian over the mare’s back. “Me? Nah. I never believed it for a minute.”

“Why not?”

“Couldn’t see Lady Jane boltin’ and leavin’ Sir Nigel. That horse was his baby. If he were hurt, she would’nta left him.”

Sebastian studied the groom’s rawboned, grizzled features and wondered if the man would have said the same thing a week ago, before the Baronet’s mummified corpse had been discovered in the crypt of St. Margaret’s. He said, “How long were you at Prescott Grange?”

“Near ten years.”

“Why’d you leave?”

Jeb rubbed the side of his nose with one finger and winked. “I run into a spot o’ trouble with one o’ the housemaids, if ye know what I mean? Lady Prescott herself asked me t’ leave. But then, she’d had it in for me, ever since that night.”

Sebastian frowned, not understanding. “You mean the night Sir Nigel disappeared?”

“That’s right.” The ostler sniffed. “Big row they had, up at the house. Jist afore dinner.”

“An argument? Between whom?”

“Why, Sir Nigel and Lady Prescott, of course.”

“Did they quarrel often?”

Jeb paused to consider it. “Well, Sir Nigel had the devil of a temper. He was always shoutin’ at somebody or t’other. But her ladyship didn’t often stand up to him.”

“Yet she did that night?”

“Aye. I could hear her pleadin’ with him when he slammed out o’ the house callin’ for his horse.” Jeb raised his voice into a falsetto and opened his eyes ridiculously wide. “ ‘Please don’t do this!’ ”

Sebastian frowned. “Please don’t do what?”

The ostler’s voice returned to its normal pitch. “Leave, I suppose.”

“But Sir Nigel left anyway? Despite her ladyship’s pleadings?”

“Aye. I saddled Lady Jane for him, and he rode off toward London.”

Sebastian stared out the open stable door, at the millstream flowing sluggishly past. The village of Tanfield Hill lay on the lane between the Grange and the main road to London. He said, “Did Sir Nigel actually tell you he was bound for London?”

Jeb Cooper screwed up his mouth with the effort of thought. “Can’t rightly say, now, after all these years.”

“You don’t have any idea what Sir Nigel’s quarrel with her ladyship was about?”

Jeb shook his head. “That I couldna say. But Bessie could maybe tell ye.”

“Bessie?”

“Bessie Dunlop. Her ladyship’s old nurse—and Sir Peter’s, when he come along. Most folks’ll tell ye she’s a witch.” He paused, a strange, faraway look coming into his eyes. “I’m not telling ye she ain’t a witch, mind ye. I’m jist sayin’, there ain’t much Bessie misses. Course, whether she’ll be willin’ t’tell ye everythin’ she knows, now, that’s somethin’ else agin.”

“Where might I find this Bessie Dunlop?”

“She lives on up the millstream. Maybe half a mile. A place called Briar Cottage.”

Sebastian straightened. “Thank you,” he said, pressing a guinea into the ostler’s hand. “You’ve been most helpful.”

He was in the yard, tightening the girth on the Arab’s saddle, when Jeb Cooper came up to him. “There’s one other thing was queer about that night I was thinkin’ ye might want to know about.”

Sebastian lowered the stirrup and turned to face him. “Yes?”

“Weren’t more’n five minutes after Sir Nigel left that Lady Prescott called for her horse to be brought ’round. Rode off without even a groom.”

“Lady Prescott? Are you saying she rode after Sir Nigel?”

“I don’t know about that. But she rode toward London, too; that I do know.”

“When did she come back?”

Jeb Cooper pressed his lips together and shook his head. “That I couldn’t say. When I awoke the next mornin’, her ladyship’s mare was back in her stall, still wearin’ her saddle.”

“Did it look as if it had been ridden hard?”

“Well, she didn’t show signs of having worked up any kind of a sweat, that’s fer sure. So I’d say, no, that horse hadn’t been ridden far at all.”

The witches’ cottages of Sebastian’s childhood imaginings had been dark, decrepit places, with mold-slimed walls and grimy, cobwebbed windows and broken shutters that creaked ominously in the wind. The witches themselves, of course, were all hideous creatures—bent, skeletal crones with wild hair and hooked noses and drooling, toothless grins.

But when he followed the dark, overgrown path that wound through the mingling willows and oaks that grew along the banks of the millstream, he came upon a tidy, recently whitewashed cottage with a newly thatched roof and a profusion of rambling roses in a riot of pink and scarlet. Chickens scratched in the well-swept yard. A snowy-white gander preened himself in the reeds beside the stream, and finches chirped cheerfully from the branches of a nearby willow. On a low stool beside the cottage’s open door, a white-haired woman sat with a butter churn gripped between her knees. When Sebastian rode into the yard, she set aside her churn and rose gracefully to her feet.

“I was wondering when you’d get here,” she said, then added with a smile, “My lord.”