Liv Weston was pruning an overgrown hedge of roses at the base of her garden when Sebastian turned his chestnuts into the Dower House’s narrow, weed-choked drive. Looking up, she paused with one heavily gloved hand clutching her secateurs, her eyes narrowing as she watched him rein in before the house’s modest portico. A large, battered basket rested on the turf at her feet. As Sebastian dropped from the high seat to the gravel sweep, she deliberately turned her back on him and resumed shaping her hedge.
Without bothering to mount the steps and knock on the front door, he turned and walked toward her.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Weston,” he called. “Is the major around?”
She kept her gaze on her work. “I’m afraid not, my lord.”
“Any idea where I might find him?”
“Sorry, no. As it happens, I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”
Sebastian drew up beside the lanky hedge. It should by rights have been cut back weeks ago, shortly after it had finished blooming. “Did he say when he would be home?”
Snip, snip, went Liv Weston’s secateurs. “Actually, we expected him for dinner last night. Mrs. Carmichael made braised pork. Always one of his favorites.”
Sebastian studied her half-averted face and saw there the faintest hint of a smile, a bubble of what might have been called suppressed hope if it hadn’t had such a nasty edge to it. “You’re not concerned?”
“Not really.”
He became aware of the almost unnatural silence around them, broken only by a single thrush chattering in the branches of a nearby maple. Despite the cloud cover, the heat of the day had become oppressively close and still.
He said, “Has something happened to your husband, Mrs. Weston?”
“I’ve no idea. But a woman can dream, can’t she?” She paused to glance over at him. “Does that shock you? You think I should feign concern? Truly? After you’ve spent the last week poking into all our lives, uncovering all our secrets?”
“Not quite all of them, I’m afraid.”
“I think you underestimate yourself, my lord.”
Sebastian watched her cut off a long cane with a quick snip. Until that moment, he’d had sympathy for this woman, or at least for the young and vulnerable girl he imagined she’d once been. Now he began to wonder if some of that sympathy hadn’t been misplaced.
He said, “How long has your husband been dabbling in smuggling?”
Her attention was all for her roses. “I am a woman. What would I know of such things?”
“You know.”
When she remained silent, he said, “Tell me this, Mrs. Weston: Why does your husband take such care to preserve the old gibbet that stands near the crossroads?”
Her hand momentarily faltered at its task. “Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
She shrugged. “He would tell you that gallows and gibbets, like whipping posts and stocks, play an invaluable role in reminding the lower orders of the folly of forgetting their proper place in the scheme of things. But the truth is, my husband is a nasty, vindictive man. He hated Alex Dalyrimple with the kind of passion not even death can satisfy, and he maintains that gibbet as a testament to what he sees as his victory over an enemy. If my husband had had his way, Dalyrimple’s body would still be moldering up there.”
“Why? Because Dalyrimple dared try to oppose your father’s Bill of Enclosure?”
“In part. But mainly because Dalyrimple was nothing more than a base-born, self-taught wheelwright, yet he was ten times the man Eugene Weston could ever hope to be—and Eugene knows it.”
Sebastian watched her step back to evaluate her work. He wondered when she had realized the folly of her marriage. Before her father’s death, obviously, given that she had successfully persuaded the enfeebled old man to tie up her inheritance in a way that kept what was left of it from Weston’s grasp. Was that truly when Weston had turned to smuggling? he wondered. Or had it started before? Perhaps even before the erection of that tar-blackened gibbet at the crossroads.
Sebastian touched his hat with a slight bow. “When your husband returns, if you would be so kind as to tell him I’d like to speak with him?”
“Of course,” said the major’s wife, that eerie little smile still curling her lips. “If he returns.”
“You think the major done run off after killin’ all them people?” asked Tom when Sebastian returned to the curricle.
Sebastian craned around to stare at his tiger. “How did you know Weston is missing?”
“Heard the cook talkin’ about it with the groom. They can’t think why else ’e ain’t come home.”