He hesitated, his attention caught by a young country gentleman in an unfashionable corduroy coat who was striding toward the inn’s door. “You don’t think a simple, aged countrywoman might find a visit from the two of us a bit overwhelming?”
“Probably,” she said, although he saw the faint frown that pinched her forehead. She knew that the nightingale was only part of what had brought him to this small Shropshire village, just as she knew that what quickened his pulse and tore at his gut was the possibility that the unknown elderly woman might possess the answer to a question that had shattered his world and forever altered his understanding of who—and what—he was.
An unexpected knock at the chamber door brought his head around. “Yes?”
A spry middle-aged chambermaid with a leprechaun’s face and wild iron gray hair imperfectly contained by a mobcap opened the door and bobbed a quick curtsy. “It’s young Squire Rawlins, milord. He says t’ beg yer lordship’s pardon, but he’s most anxious to meet with you, he is.” She dropped her voice and leaned forward as she added, “I’m thinkin’ it’s on account of the lady, milord. Heard Constable Nash tellin’ Cook about it, I did.”
“What lady?”
“Why, the one they done found down in the water meadows, just this mornin’. Dead, she is!”
He and Hero exchanged silent glances.
On the windowsill, the mechanical nightingale wound down and stopped.
“The young Squire’s a tad new to being justice of the peace, I’m afraid,” confided the chambermaid as she escorted Sebastian down the stairs. “Took over from his father just a few months back, he did. A real tragedy, that; the old Squire died on the lad’s twenty-first birthday.”
“Tragic indeed,” said Sebastian.
The chambermaid nodded. “Drank three bottles of port and then tried to jump his best hunter over the stone wall by the pond. The horse made it, but not the old Squire. Broke his neck.”
“At least the horse survived.”
“Aye. Would’ve been a shame to lose Black Jack. He’s a grand hunter, that Black Jack. Best in the Squire’s stables.” She tut-tutted and shook her head as they reached the inn’s old flagged entrance hall and turned toward the small parlor to the left of the stairs. “Here ye go, milord.”
He found the new Squire Rawlins standing before the parlor’s empty hearth, his hat twisting in his hands. He had a smooth, boyish face reddened across the tops of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose by the summer sun, and looked more like sixteen than twenty-one. Of medium height only, he was thin and bony, with a jerky way of moving, as if he’d yet to grow accustomed to the length of his own arms and legs.
“Lord Devlin,” he said, surging forward as the chambermaid dropped a curtsy and withdrew. “I’m Archibald—Archie—Rawlins, Ayleswick’s justice of the peace. I beg your pardon for intruding on you without a proper introduction, but there’s been a rather peculiar death in the village, and since I know you have experience dealing with these matters I was hoping you might be willing to advise me on how best to go about things. My constable thinks it’s suicide, but I . . . I . . .”
The young man’s rushing tumble of words suddenly dried up.
“You find the death suspicious?” suggested Sebastian.
Archie Rawlins swallowed hard enough to bob his Adam’s apple up and down, and nodded. But Sebastian noticed he didn’t say why he thought it suspicious.
Sebastian knew the urge to tell Squire Rawlins that what he asked was impossible, that Sebastian was in town for a few days only and would soon be gone. The last thing he wanted was to get involved in some village murder.
But then he saw the mingled uncertainty and earnestness in the young man’s eyes and remembered the good-humored derision in the chambermaid’s assessment of the village’s new justice of the peace. Which was how he found himself saying, “Hang on while I fetch my hat and gloves.”
Chapter 3
“Her name is—or I suppose I should say was—Emma Chance,” explained the Squire as they followed a shady path that led from the far end of the high street, down through a thick wood of oak and beech, to the river. “She’s a young widow—only arrived in the village last Friday.”
“She has family here?” asked Sebastian, treading carefully along a slippery stretch of the footpath deep in the shadow of the trees and still muddy from a recent rain.
Rawlins shook his head. “She was on a sketching expedition through Shropshire. You should see her drawings and watercolors; they’re quite out of the common.”
“How old did you say she was?”
“She told me she met Captain Chance when she was twenty, and was married seven years. So I suppose that would make her twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He died of fever in an American prison just six months ago.”
“Tragic. Who is traveling with her?”
“Well, she had her maid with her.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”