Why Mermaids Sing

Chapter 49

Later that afternoon, Sebastian drew up the curricle on the gravel sweep before a small Elizabethan sandstone manor. Lying to the north of London, near St. Albans, the childhood home of Gideon Forbes proved to be a pleasant, well-kept estate with fat-bellied cows and well-tended fields. As he swung down from the curricle, Sebastian could hear the sound of children’s laughter mingling with the barking of a dog in the distance.

“It’s funny,” said Tom, squinting up at the manor’s forest of chimneys. “But when you think about what musta happened to that lad, somehow you don’t expect ’im to ’ave grown up someplace that looks so ordinary.”

“I know what you mean,” said Sebastian. Acting on Kat’s message, he had found it easy enough to trace Gideon Forbes here, to this idyllic corner of the Hertfordshire countryside. Gideon’s father was a country squire named Brandon Forbes; the boy’s mother was some four years dead. But whatever Sebastian had been anticipating, it wasn’t this, this utterly English landscape of unpretentious gentility and bucolic peace.

A shout brought Sebastian’s head around. A sturdily built man in serviceable buckskin breeches was walking toward the house from across a park of oak trees and sun-spangled grass that waved gently in the breeze. He looked to be in his midforties, his dark hair newly touched by gray, the lines on his long face just beginning to settle and deepen with age. A liver-colored hound loped at his heels. “May I help you?” he called.

Sebastian went to meet him. “Mr. Forbes? I’m Viscount Devlin. I’d like to talk to you about your son Gideon.”

The man blinked several times, his eyes narrow and a bit wary. “All right,” he said at last. “Come walk with me.”

They followed a footpath that curled away toward a distant string of cottages, the hound racing ahead of them. “It’s because of these terrible murders, isn’t it?” he said after a moment. “That’s why you’re here. You think there’s some connection to the wreck of the Harmony.”

Sebastian studied the man’s sun-darkened face. “Did you attend the trial of the mutineers?”

“No.” Forbes stared off across the fields, to where two little girls played with a much younger boy still in leading strings. “I’m afraid Gideon’s mother was sickening by then. She’d never been well after the birth of our last daughter, you see, and I didn’t want to leave her. But I followed it in the papers.”

“Did you go to the hangings?”

Forbes shook his head, his lips twisting in a grimace. “Nah. What would be the point?”

“Revenge, perhaps?”

“It wouldn’t bring the boy back, now, would it?”

Sebastian nodded toward the laughing children in the distance. “Are they yours?”

Forbes’s features lightened into a proud smile. “That’s right. Catherine there is eleven; Jane is seven, while Michael has just turned two. And I’ve two older boys by my first wife: Roland, who helps me here at the manor, and his younger brother, Daniel. Daniel’s up at Cambridge.”

As Sebastian watched, the boy on the leading strings took a tumble and started to cry. His half sisters rushed to pick him up again. “You’ve remarried?”

“Aye.” He sighed. “I’ve buried two wives, God rest their souls. I pray to the good Lord I won’t bury the third.”

Sebastian brought his gaze back to the man’s plain, long face. “Do you think these murders have something to do with the Harmony?”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it? I mean, I didn’t think much about it after Carmichael’s and Stanton’s sons were killed. But now, with Captain Bellamy’s son, and what the papers are saying was done to young Thornton last Easter…” He hesitated. “Well, it makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“Did you ever talk to Captain Bellamy about what happened to your son?”

“Aye. Bellamy came to see me when it was all over. Brought me this.” He pulled a worn Spanish piece of eight from his pocket and held it out. “It was Gideon’s. He’d had it from the time he was a little one. Carried it with him everywhere.”

“Did he tell you how the boy died?”

“Spar fell on him during the storm. He didn’t die right away, though. Gideon was a plucky one, no doubt about it. Maybe if they’d been rescued sooner, he’d have made it. But without food or water…” The man’s voice trailed away. He hesitated, then blew out his breath in a long sigh. “I never should have let him go to sea. Not that young. But from the time he was a little tyke, it was all he could talk about. The sea and tall ships and all the foreign lands he wanted to visit. In the end, he wore us down. One of his mother’s cousins knew Captain Bellamy and arranged to have him take the lad on as cabin boy. Gideon was aiming to be a sea captain, you know. He’d have made it, too. If he’d lived.”

Sebastian studied the man’s pleasant, weathered face. “The young men who’ve been killed have all been found with various objects stuffed in their mouths—a papier-mâché star, a mandrake root, a page torn from a ship’s log, and the hoof of a goat. Do you have any idea what it could mean?”

As Sebastian watched, Forbes’s face became tight with an effort to control his emotions. “I didn’t read anything about that.”

“It does mean something, doesn’t it? What is it?”

Forbes swung away to stare out over the park, toward the laughing children. “Gideon had a poem he liked. You know the one? Something about mermaids singing?”

“‘Go and Catch a Falling Star,’” said Sebastian softly. “By John Donne?”

Forbes’s throat worked as he swallowed. “That’s it. ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star.’” He brought his gaze back to Sebastian’s face. “Bellamy told me they buried Gideon’s body at sea. But that’s not what you think happened to him, is it? Is it?” he said again, when Sebastian remained silent.

Sebastian met the other man’s intense gray eyes. “No. No, I don’t.”