“Anytime, milord. Anytime.”
He’d almost reached the curricle when a thought occurred to him, and he paused to turn back and ask, “Could you see Miss Chandler well enough to tell what she was wearing?”
Alice Gibbs laughed as she reached down to pick up the hoe she’d dropped. “I could see that, milord. Had on a light gray cloak, she did.”
There’d been a gray cloak hanging on one of the hooks in Emma’s room at the Blue Boar. But she hadn’t had it with her when she was found. She hadn’t even been wearing her spencer, which was folded up beside her. “Bit warm for a cloak, wouldn’t you say?”
“It was, indeed. I remember thinkin’ she must’ve put it on that morning, worryin’ meybe it was gonna come on to rain again.”
“That must be it,” said Sebastian.
She smiled at him again, totally oblivious to the fact that she hadn’t actually seen anything she claimed to have personally witnessed.
Chapter 54
Sebastian found the front door and windows of the schoolmaster’s cottage standing open to catch whatever breeze might chance to stir the close air of the sultry afternoon.
“Mr. Flanagan?”
He paused on the flagged stoop, his gaze drifting over the vaguely untidy, low-ceilinged front room, the massive bookcase stuffed with an assortment of tattered volumes, the battered, ink-stained table that looked ancient enough to have once graced the stately halls of the old priory.
“Mr. Flanagan?” he called again.
Through a doorway in the room’s rear wall he could see a section of the smoke-blackened kitchen hearth; a steep staircase to one side presumably led to a dormered sleeping chamber above. But the silence in the cottage was absolute.
“Flanagan?”
Sebastian hesitated, then walked around the outside of the cottage to the cobblestoned yard at the rear. In addition to the woodshed and other typical outbuildings, he was surprised to find a small but relatively new barn and fenced paddock. A neat black mare with powerful hindquarters and a deep chest thrust her head over the fence and whinnied at him expectantly.
“Aren’t you a fine girl?” said Sebastian, going to stroke the mare’s muzzle.
There weren’t many schoolmasters who could afford to keep such an elegant mount. True, Flanagan had neither wife nor children to feed, and he’d reportedly been riding through Ayleswick on his way to Wales when he learned of the recently vacated position of village schoolmaster. But a different explanation for the mare’s presence was forming in Sebastian’s mind.
A man carrying messages, first to Ludlow, then to Worcestershire, would need a good, reliable horse.
The mare butted her head against his chest. He said, “Where’s your master? Hmmm?”
With growing disquiet, Sebastian gave the mare a final pat and turned toward the open door of the hay barn. Stepping into the darkened interior, he listened to the telltale drone of flies, smelled the coppery stench of spilled blood.
And then, when his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he found what was left of Daray Flanagan.
“Maybe we’re making a mistake, trying to make sense of all this,” said Archie, his voice oddly hollow sounding as he stared down at the schoolmaster’s sprawled, bloody body. The flies were buzzing thick around them, but the Squire was making no attempt to bat them away from his face. “Whoever this killer is, he must simply be mad.”
Like Reuben Dickie, Flanagan lay facedown, the back of his head a pulpy mess. A bloodied length of firewood lay discarded nearby. Sebastian studied the marks on the barn’s dirt floor. From the looks of things, the Irishman had been struck elsewhere—probably in the cobbled yard—and dragged into the barn.
“I don’t think so,” said Sebastian, going to stand in the barn’s open doorway. “I think whoever’s doing this has a very deliberate, rational purpose for everything he’s done.”
Archie stayed where he was. “How did you happen to come here, anyway?”
“I had an interesting conversation this afternoon with Alice Gibbs. She tells me she’s myopic. Famously so, in fact.”
“She is, yes.” Archie gave a hoarse laugh. “I remember one time she thought a billy goat menacing a couple of m’father’s dogs was her own daughter Elizabeth.”
Sebastian narrowed his eyes against the light as he searched the yard for traces of blood. “So how do you suppose she was able to recognize Emma Chandler from a distance of two or three hundred feet?”
Archie opened his mouth, took a deep breath, and closed it. “I don’t know. I didn’t think about that.”
“She tells me it was actually Flanagan who identified the figure climbing over the stile that afternoon as Emma. Alice simply saw what she’d been led to believe she was seeing.”