“Good God. What sort of monster do you take me for?”
Rather than answer, Sebastian found his gaze drifting down to the picturesque, deceptively peaceful-looking village curled around the base of the hill. The wind was scuttling the clouds overhead in a way that sent shifting patterns of shadow and light chasing each other across the broad green and the ancient, half-timbered buildings that edged it. Fifteen years before, the Reverend had successfully convinced a coroner’s jury that Sybil Moss hadn’t been in her right mind when she supposedly killed herself. Had it been a gesture of disinterested kindness or of guilt?
He’d been unable to do the same for Hannah Grant.
“You’re wrong,” said Underwood. “You hear me? You’re wrong.”
Sebastian brought his gaze back to the pale, sweat-slicked face of the man beside him. “If you killed Emma Chandler and the others, I will see you hang for it; make no mistake about that.”
Underwood was shaking now, an odor of sour sweat rising from his cassock. “But I didn’t. I swear to God I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill any of them!”
“Then I suggest you pray to him for salvation—if you have any reason to believe he’ll listen to you,” said Sebastian, and turned to walk off and leave him there, standing rigid and unmoving in the tall, drying grass of the old orchard.
Chapter 53
For any man, let alone a man of God, to take advantage of his impoverished female relatives’ vulnerability to satisfy his lust was as despicable as it was repellent. There was no doubt that Benedict Underwood was a vile human being who conceivably had a motive to kill everyone from Sybil Moss to Reuben Dickie.
But that didn’t necessarily make him guilty.
What it did was explain why a killer would use Underwood’s edition of Hamlet, and why he wouldn’t destroy the book after cutting it up. Given Underwood’s rape of Rachel Timms and Rose Blount, there was little doubt that those four simple words sliced from the vicar’s book, The rest is silence, would be enough to see the Reverend hanged should he ever go on trial for Emma’s murder.
But for some reason he couldn’t have explained, Sebastian still wasn’t convinced. And the nagging certainty that he was still missing something drove him back to the private parlor at the Blue Boar. Opening Emma Chandler’s two sketchbooks on the room’s large, central table, he stood staring down at them, his fingers curling around the table’s edge. He kept coming back to the idea that the key to what had happened to Emma Chandler lay in the pattern of her movements on that last, fatal day. And as he turned the pages of her sketchbook for what must have been the hundredth time, he realized it wasn’t just one thing he’d been missing, but two.
Half an hour later, he was still staring at Emma’s last sketch when Hero came in from taking Simon for a walk. She brought with her the scent of fresh country breezes and sun-warmed ripe grain, and paused in the doorway to watch him in silence for a moment.
“You’ve figured something out,” she said.
“I have indeed.” He spun the sketchbook with the drawings of the priory around to face her. “I don’t know why I didn’t grasp the significance of it before, but think about this: Unless Emma’s killer took off her gloves for some inexplicable reason, then she must not have been wearing them when she was killed. So what does that tell us?”
When visiting, a gentlewoman generally removed her gloves only to eat. But according to Hiram Higginbottom, Emma had been killed several hours after her last meal.
Hero looked puzzled for a moment. Then enlightenment dawned. “She would have to take off her gloves to sketch! That means she was killed while she was drawing something. But . . . what?”
“Whatever it was,” said Sebastian, “she obviously never had a chance to actually begin sketching it. Nothing has been torn out, and the last drawing in her book is of the priory, and it looks finished to me.”
“You think she really did go back to draw Maplethorpe Hall again for some reason? And the smugglers killed her?”
“That’s what I was thinking, at first. Except—” He broke off to flip back through the sketchbook. “Look at this: she drew six pictures of the Grange, five of Northcott Abbey, but only three of St. Hilary’s Priory. Why?”
Hero came to stand at his side. “Perhaps she was more interested in the Grange and Northcott Abbey because either of them might have been her father’s home, whereas the priory was simply an attractive ruin.”
“Perhaps. Except I remember thinking when we were at the ruin what a beautiful, inspiring site someone with her talents must have found it. She’d already drawn one of these three pictures by the time Lady Seaton claims to have seen her at two o’clock. Yet according to the miller’s wife, Emma didn’t leave the priory and climb back over the stile until five. In other words, it took her three hours to do the last two sketches.”