Sebastian found his interest quickening. “You’re saying she was planning to go down to the river that very evening?”
Lady Seaton gave an exaggerated grimace. “I think she meant later that evening. But I wouldn’t swear to it.” She paused, her gaze steady and intent, her head tilted slightly to one side as if she were puzzling out a problem that troubled her. “You’re quite certain the young woman didn’t take her own life?”
Sebastian was beginning to realize just how intense was the village’s need to believe that Emma Chance had killed herself. A comfortable verdict of suicide would mean no need to be afraid; no need for anyone to cast suspicious glances at their neighbors.
No need to confront the unpleasant truth that evil dwelt amongst them.
“She was smothered,” he said, perhaps more abruptly than he should have.
Lady Seaton pressed the fingers of one gloved hand to her mouth, her eyes going wide in a way that made him regret his harshness. “Oh, no. It’s too horrible to even think about.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded, her lips flattened into a painfully straight line. Then she gathered the reins and shrugged off her unpleasant thoughts with the ease of a hostess changing an uncomfortable conversation topic over dessert. “We keep country hours, so I fear dinner may be earlier than what you’re accustomed to: a most unfashionable six o’clock.”
“We’ll be there,” he said with a bow as he stepped back.
She drove off smartly up the street, the incorrigible mongrel at her side giving a happy woof as he lifted his muzzle to the breeze.
Sebastian stood for a moment, the sun warm on his face as he watched her nod pleasantly to Reuben Dickie by the pump house.
She had the careless charm and unthinking confidence of a woman born into wealth and privilege; a woman who had never known want or uncertainty and who had probably never questioned or even reflected on the brutal realities of the society of which she was a part. She showed the world a cheerful, complacent face, and so successful was her assumption of equanimity and goodwill that Sebastian could not have said with any certainty what true sentiments lay behind her pretty smile.
But he had a strong suspicion that she was neither as naive nor as uncalculating as she was at pains to appear.
Chapter 11
An hour later, Sebastian stood at the edge of the water meadows and watched as the dozen or so men organized by Archie Rawlins spread out along the banks of the Teme. The air was still hot despite the approach of evening and alive with the throbbing buzz of insects; the late-afternoon sun filtering down through the leafy canopy of willows and alders lining the river glinted off the slow-moving water in quick, bright flashes.
The men ranged from farmers and cottagers to stable hands and day laborers. Yet all wore the same vaguely disbelieving expression as they splashed through the shallows and beat thickets of gorse and stands of tall reeds. They were looking for Emma Chance’s sketchbook and the canvas satchel in which she had carried it. But so far they weren’t having any luck, and it was obvious that many of them were more than half-inclined to believe they were on a fool’s errand, that the beautiful widow had killed herself, after all.
“I suppose the killer could have thrown her things in the river,” said Rawlins, batting at a fly hovering around his face.
“Yes,” said Sebastian, his gaze on the darkly swirling waters in the center of the river.
He’d assumed that Emma Chance had been killed elsewhere and her body brought here, to the river, by her killer. But Lady Seaton’s information suggested that she might have been killed on her way to the river. And that meant that her sketchbook and anything else she’d carried might be here too.
“I’ve been asking around the village,” said the young justice of the peace, “trying to find people who saw her yesterday evening.”
“And?”
“So far the last person known to have seen her was Alice Gibbs, the miller’s wife. Says she saw Mrs. Chance climb back over the stile from the priory and turn toward the village.”
“When was this?”
“Just after five. She remembers the time because she’d just been talking to Daray Flanagan—that’s the village schoolmaster—about her oldest boy.”
Sebastian watched thoughtfully as one of the men poking at the brush beneath a beech tree suddenly jumped back, startled by the whirl of a flushed partridge; the man’s companions all laughed.
He said, “What time does the sun set these days?”