It fit with what Knox had once told Sebastian. But the disappointment was still intense. He said, “Jamie told me his mother worked at the Crown and Thorn, in Ludlow.”
“Aye. She had a row with her stepda and took off after he found out she was in the family way.” The old woman’s face tightened as if with pain. “Maybe if she’d ’ve stayed, she wouldn’t ’ve died.”
He watched Heddie’s fingers slide slowly over the now-silent bird, her face quivering with emotion. She said, “I’ve always loved nightingales. But I didn’t realize Jamie knew it. And to think he remembered it all these years.”
“He was planning to come see you,” said Sebastian. “He wanted to bring it to you himself.”
The old woman turned her face to the warm afternoon breeze gusting through the low, open windows. They could hear the scratching of the chickens in the yard, smell the fecund odor of the recently hoed garden mingling with the stale peat smoke from the cold hearth beside them. She said, “All them years he was in the army, I worried. Worried he was gonna die of fever in some godforsaken foreign outpost or get blown to bits in battle and lie forever in an unmarked grave. Never thought he’d get himself shot in London.”
“He died quickly,” said Sebastian, although it was a lie. The sucking wound in Knox’s chest had taken nearly an hour to kill him. “He didn’t suffer.”
The old woman nodded, her fingers finding the mechanical bird’s key. She wound it wordlessly, and the nightingale’s gilded wings lifted up and down again as it poured forth its sweetly haunting melody.
Sebastian drew an envelope from his pocket and laid it beside her. “He also wanted you to have this.” He pushed to his feet as her hand shifted to the envelope and the banknotes it contained. “If there’s anything else I can do,” he said, “please don’t hesitate to let me know.”
Jenny walked with him to the door but stopped him on the threshold by saying quietly, “Is it true? Did Jamie die quickly?”
He met her frank, level gaze. But all he said was, “Quick enough.”
She blinked. “Why did you come here? Truly?”
He glanced back at the old woman, who now sat unmoving, staring blindly into space. “The man who shot your brother mistook him for me. He died because he looked like me.”
Jenny’s nostrils flared on a quickly indrawn breath. “That’s why you gave my grandmother money? You think in some way it makes up for the death of my brother? Well, it doesn’t.”
“No,” agreed Sebastian.
The hostility emanating from her was as stark and powerful as it was inexplicable. And he wondered if her antagonism was provoked by him personally, or by everything he represented—socially, economically, and culturally.
He said, “Miss Knox—”
She shook her head. “It’s Jenny Dalyrimple. My husband’s Alex Dalyrimple.” She said it as if the name should mean something to him, although it did not.
She tipped her head to one side. “Jamie wrote to me about you. Said he’d met a grand lord who looked enough like him to be his brother. He thought maybe your father—the Earl of Hendon himself—might be our father. Only, then he got a look at Lord Hendon. And you know what he said? He said the Earl looked nothing like us. Or you.”
Sebastian studied her fine-boned face, flushed golden by the hours she spent working hard beneath the sun. He traced with fascination the ways in which she resembled her twin—and him—and the ways she did not. But all he said was, “I mean it; if there is anything else I can do, you’ve only to let me know.”
Her eyes flared. “We don’t need your help.”
“I didn’t intend to suggest that you do.” He ducked beneath the low lintel, then paused to settle his hat on his head. The day was bright and warm, the flox, lavender, and mulleins in her garden blooming a riot of yellow, pink, blue, and purple. He knew now that she was the one who tended them, just as she fed the chickens and milked the cow he could hear lowing in the shed. She was slender with a hard-muscled leanness that spoke of a life spent hoeing fields and kneading bread dough and hauling firewood. Yet there was a mental quickness about her, an instinctive intelligence that was impossible to miss. And she had, one way or another, managed to acquire something of an education, for her brother had regularly sent her letters, and she could read them.
“I saw her, you know,” she said, one hand coming up to brush the hair from her forehead as he started to leave. “That widow they’re saying someone killed.”
Sebastian turned to face her again. “When was this?”
“Early yesterday afternoon. I’d taken the cow to graze in the grass along the side of the road and that’s when I saw her, coming up from the village. She climbed over the stile by the stream and took the footpath that runs up to the old priory ruins.”
“Did you happen to notice if she was carrying a reticule?”
The question obviously puzzled her, but Jenny answered readily enough. “I don’t remember it. But she did have a canvas satchel with a leather strap over one shoulder.”