“When did you see her?”
Lowe tossed aside his currycomb and reached for a rag to wipe his hands. “Must’ve been Sunday, I guess. She was sittin’ there”—he nodded toward the grassy bank on the far side of the road, beside the mound of some vanished cottage—“drawing a picture. She looked hot, so I walked over and offered her some lemonade.”
“You knew who she was?”
Lowe’s dark eyes gleamed with quiet amusement. “Ain’t like we get a lot of strangers hereabouts, especially pretty young ladies drawing pictures. Of course I figured who she was. Everybody’s been talkin’ about her.”
“Did you speak with her?”
“A bit. She wanted to know about the tavern. How long I been here—that sort of thing.”
It struck Sebastian as a profoundly peculiar line of questioning for a young gentlewoman to have asked the owner of a wayside tavern. But then, Emma Chance had been asking a number of peculiar questions.
“So how long have you been here?”
Lowe shrugged. “Lived here my whole life. Took over from my father when he died back in ’ninety-seven.”
Sebastian stared off across the treetops, to where the blackened chimneys of the ruined great house showed dark against a puffy white cloud. “So you were here the night Maplethorpe Hall burned?”
“Aye. Lit up the whole sky, it did. Ain’t never seen nothin’ like it.”
Sebastian studied the tavern owner’s strong cleft chin and straight brows. The resemblance to both Jamie Knox and Jenny Dalyrimple was definitely there. Although in an area this sparsely populated, Sebastian supposed most people were related to one another to some degree.
He shifted his gaze to the tumbled ruins of a nearby cottage. “How long has the hamlet been like this?”
Lowe’s jaw hardened, a flinty look coming into his eyes. “Old George Irving pushed a Bill of Enclosure through Parliament in ’ninety-two. After that, those who could either left for London or immigrated to America. The rest died in the poorhouse. And then the old bastard howled when his poor rates went up.” Lowe turned his head and spat. “May his blackened soul burn in hell forevermore.”
“How long was he bedridden before the fire?”
“A year, maybe. I dunno. Why? What’s any of this to do with the dead lady?”
“I’m told she was asking about the Irvings.”
Lowe gave a soft laugh. “From what I hear, she was asking about anyone and everyone.”
“Any idea why?”
“Said she wanted to know about the places she was sketching. Said it helped her to understand them. Sounds right peculiar, if you ask me. But then, I’m no artist, now, am I?”
“What do you think happened to her?”
Lowe stared at him a moment, his features tight, his eyes hooded and unreadable. “Why you askin’ me?”
“You own a tavern. Men tend to talk in their cups.”
“Not about murder. Not if they don’t want to hang.” Lowe reached for his nearby coat and slipped it on, his gaze still fixed on Sebastian’s face as he carefully adjusted his cuffs. “Jenny tells me you knew Jamie.”
“I did.”
Sebastian waited for the tavern owner to remark on the resemblance between the two men. Instead, he said, “M’mother hasn’t been well since he died. Took it right hard, she did.”
My mother.
She buried three husbands, the Reverend had said of Heddie Kincaid. And Sebastian realized now that Heddie’s first husband must have been Jamie Knox’s grandfather; the second had fathered Jude Lowe, while the third was the unknown Mr. Kincaid.
“You’re saying Heddie Kincaid is your mother?”
“Aye. Eleanor Knox was my sister—half sister, anyway, for all she was sixteen years older than me. I was only a babe myself when Nellie died, and m’mother raised her babies as her own. So Jamie and me, we grew up like brothers.” Lowe tilted his head to one side. “I didn’t believe Jenny when she said you looked enough like Jamie to be his twin. But ’tis true. Course, it’s near twenty years since I seen him. Took the King’s shilling when he was barely sixteen.”
Sebastian was silent for a moment, his gaze drifting over the tavern’s sagging roof and ancient walls. He’d been imagining Knox growing up in Heddie Kincaid’s cottage beside the shady millstream. Now he realized the rifleman must have come of age here, in this tavern, in the midst of a dying hamlet strangled by the worst excesses of the enclosure movement.
It explained much.
Jude Lowe drew a deep breath that flared his nostrils. “I always meant to go up t’London and see him. Now it’s too late.”
“You know he left a son?”
“Aye. M’mother wants Pippa to bring the boy up here to her, but she won’t hear of it.”
“She may change her mind.”
“She may.”
Lowe watched in silence as Sebastian turned to leap up to his curricle’s high seat. He waited until Sebastian was gathering the reins before saying, “Everybody in the village thinks that widow killed herself. What makes you so certain she didn’t?”