“Did Mrs. Chance ask about the Baldwyns?”
“Not so’s I remember, no.”
Sebastian gazed toward the brick stables and its attached coach house. “They were lucky the fire didn’t reach the stables.”
“Aye. Some sparks fell on the roof, but we was able to put ’em out.”
“They’re still maintained, I see.”
Silas shifted his posture, as if drawing into himself, his arms coming up to fold across his chest. “I live there now. Use the old stalls ’n’ carriage house for storage.”
Sebastian studied the rutted track leading to the old carriage house. But all he said was, “I’m surprised the house was never rebuilt.”
Silas hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and turned his head to spit downwind. “Old Mr. Irving, he was always right clever ’bout a heap of things. But he got sick near the end, and it made him foolish. Foolish as a child, he was, for a couple of years. Let the major do whatever he wanted.” The gardener’s jaw sagged, then tightened again as he clenched his teeth down hard on the stem of his unlit pipe.
Sebastian waited for the gardener to elaborate, but he simply stared out over the rows of quinces, plums, and apples in the orchard. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what would happen to an estate under the stewardship of a man such as Eugene Weston, however temporary it might have been. The wonder was that anything was left at all.
Sebastian squinted up at the gaping, empty windows of the house’s blackened facade, the broken tracery standing out stark against the blue sky. “I hear the place is haunted,” he said with a smile.
He expected the gardener to scoff at the notion. Instead, Silas simply shrugged, although there was a noticeable increase in the intensity of his breathing.
“Do you ever see her?” asked Sebastian. “Marie Baldwyn, I mean. That was her name, was it not?”
“Ain’t just her,” said Silas, his voice quiet and gruff. “The dead don’t rest when they been done wrong. And there’s a heap of folks been done wrong hereabouts. A heap of folks.” He turned back to his barrow. “Now you’ll have t’excuse me. Miss Liv don’t pay me t’stand about and natter.”
Sebastian watched the gardener wrap his strong, sun-darkened fists around the handles of his barrow and lean into it, the wheel squealing faintly as he pushed it away.
A light breeze kicked up, shifting one of the long tendrils of ivy that hung from the walls of the ruined house. On the surface, the tragedies suffered long ago by the ill-fated inhabitants of Maplethorpe Hall seemed to have nothing to do with Monday’s death of Emma Chance beside the River Teme. Yet Emma had expressed an unusual interest in the history of this house. And Sebastian understood enough about human nature to suspect that there was probably more to those stories than he’d been told.
Chapter 18
When people said the Blue Boar was Ayleswick’s only respectable inn, they didn’t mean it was the area’s only hostelry. For everyone who wasn’t respectable, there was the Ship.
It stood at the crossroads to the east of the village, where the main road to Ludlow intersected the lane that led to Maplethorpe Hall’s main gates before narrowing to a track that snaked south across the Teme. Once, this had been the site of a small hamlet. But only a few cottages were now left standing, the rest having long since collapsed into ivy – and thistle-covered mounds of rubble. It was a common enough sight in the English countryside these days, since the Enclosure Acts had squeezed an increasing number of small farmers and their even poorer neighbors off the land.
The Ship itself was a ramshackle, timber-framed affair with casement windows and a ratty thatched roof. Sebastian turned into its dusty yard to find a lean, dark-haired man currying a fine blood bay. He’d stripped down to his shirtsleeves, the muscles of his back and shoulders bunching and flexing with his work. As Sebastian reined in, the man looked up, his hand stilling at his task as he watched Sebastian hand the reins to Tom.
“You’re Jude Lowe?” said Sebastian, hopping down from the high seat.
The man rested his bent wrists on his hips. “I am.”
He had dark, almost black hair worn long over his collar, so that it gave him a faintly rakish look. His cheeks were cleanly shaven, his features rugged but handsome, his eyes a dark brown. Despite his task, he was dressed well, his linen clean and white, his boots worn but polished; the coat he’d taken off lay thrown over a nearby bench. And Sebastian found himself reminded again in some indefinable way of Jamie Knox.
“I’d like to ask you about Emma Chance,” said Sebastian.
Lowe let out his breath in an incredulous grunt. “What makes you think I know anything about her?”
“She drew your portrait.”
“Did she now? I didn’t know that.”