“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.”
Chapter 28
Sebastian swung out of the saddle, his gaze taking in the doe that grazed unconcernedly at the edge of the clearing, the rabbit foraging in the nearby undergrowth. “You knew I was coming, did you?”
Bessie Dunlop gave a soft chuckle. “They told you I’m a witch, didn’t they?”
The woman’s hair might be white, but her face was surprisingly unlined. If she’d served as nurse to both Sir Peter and Lady Prescott before him, Sebastian knew that Bessie Dunlop had to be at least in her seventies. Yet her cheeks still bloomed with good health and vigor. Small and plump, with a fan of laugh lines radiating out from merry black eyes, she looked far more like a jovial baker’s wife than a witch.
She nodded to a little girl whose dark head peeked around the edge of the doorway. “Missy, take his lordship’s mare and put her in the lean-to so she’ll be out of this wind.”
Sebastian handed the child his reins. “Thank you.”
“My granddaughter,” said Bessie Dunlop, studying Sebastian through suddenly narrowed eyes. And it occurred to him that while she might look like a jolly baker’s wife, appearances could be deceiving.
“Do you know who I am?” he said.
She gave a soft cackle that sounded decidedly unjovial. “Oh, I know who you are, Lord Devlin.” She dropped her voice and leaned forward to whisper, “The question is, do you know? And, more important, do you want to know?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She straightened. “When you’re ready to understand, you will.”
He cast a more searching gaze about the clearing. “I assume Jeb Cooper told you to expect me?” It occurred to him that a child like Missy, running along a more direct path, could conceivably have reached the cottage ahead of a horseman following the winding millstream.
“In a manner of speaking.” She turned to pick up a bulky meal sack resting on a shelf built against the cottage wall.
“He says you were at Prescott Grange thirty years ago, the night Sir Nigel disappeared.”
“That’s right.” Opening the meal sack, she thrust her hand inside and came up with a fistful of grain she tossed to the chickens in the yard. The wind caught the seed, scattering it unexpectedly far.
Clucking and jostling for position, a dozen chickens descended upon them, feathers ruffled by the brisk wind. Sebastian felt his initial spirit of goodwill toward this maddeningly smiling woman begin to wane. “He says Sir Nigel and Lady Prescott quarreled that night, and that you would know the subject of their quarrel.”
She shrugged one shawl-draped shoulder. “I know what I heard. It’s no different from what the others in the house that night heard.”