The gibbet stood just before the sad remnants of the small hamlet at the crossroads. Towering some twenty or more feet high, its base set in a massive stone sunk in the ground, the thick post had strong bars of iron running up its sides as reinforcement.
“Someone obviously wanted it to last,” said Hero, one hand holding her hat in place as she tipped back her head to stare up at the gibbet’s projecting crosspiece. In the distant past, men were sometimes gibbeted alive—hung up in close-fitted, specially forged iron cages and left to die of thirst and exposure. But more often it was used to display the bodies of executed criminals, both as a way to extend their punishment after death and as a warning to others. Murderers were sometimes gibbeted. So were traitors and pirates.
“Care to tell me why you were so eager to walk out here and look at this?” asked Devlin, watching her.
She told him of her interview that morning and her conversation with the vicar’s wife. “Mr. Flanagan says Major Weston rescued it from some anonymous arson attempt,” she said, her gaze on the rusty hook sunk deep into the underside of the tar-blackened arm. “I wonder why.”
“Who was gibbeted here?”
“Flanagan didn’t know precisely; only that it was someone executed near the end of the last century. But . . . have you noticed how everyone keeps bringing up the past? Everything from extinct families and house fires to riots and suicides and hangings. I suppose villagers do tend to be more acutely aware of those who have lived out their lives in the same place before them. And yet . . .” Her voice trailed off as she struggled but failed to put her thoughts into words.
Devlin followed her gaze. “Emma Chance was asking an extraordinary number of questions about the past herself. And I’m not convinced she was motivated entirely by a desire to know the history of the buildings she was drawing.”
Hero turned her head to look at him. “You think that could be why she was killed? Because she was asking questions someone didn’t want answered?”
“I think it’s certainly a possibility.”
Together, they stared up at the old, fire-charred pole as a gust of wind fluttered the brim of Hero’s hat and set the branches of a nearby elm to rubbing against each other. And though the air was warm, Hero found herself shivering, for it sounded exactly like the creak of rusty chains straining with the sway of a dead man’s weight.
Chapter 21
That afternoon, Sebastian drove out to Northcott Abbey in search of the one person on Emma Chance’s list of names he’d yet to meet: Samuel Atwater, the estate’s longtime steward.
He found Atwater at a row of tenants’ cottages on the far side of the estate. “Emma Chance?” said the steward in response to Sebastian’s question. “I met her when Lady Seaton had her to tea last Saturday—but only briefly. Why do you ask?”
“That was the only time you encountered her?”
Atwater stood beside his horse, the reins held loosely in one hand as he considered his answer. He was dressed plainly in serviceable boots, buckskin breeches, and a coat, with a black cravat knotted at his throat. Before driving out to the abbey, Sebastian had quietly asked several villagers their opinion of the steward. All tended to agree he was a fair man, willing to work with tenants who fell behind on their rents for reasons of misfortune rather than incompetence or sloth. He had come to Ayleswick not long after his cousin’s marriage, when Lord Seaton’s aging steward retired to live with a daughter in Ludlow. He was both plainspoken and quiet, with the manner of a devout vicar—which was what his father had been.
“Well, I noticed her painting the high street one day,” said Atwater. “But I didn’t stop and talk to her.”
“Did you know she’d drawn your portrait?”
“No. Did she now? Why would she do that?” he said in surprise. He was an ordinary-looking man in his middle years, with graying fair hair and typically Anglo-Saxon features, and it was obvious he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to draw his portrait.
Rather than answer, Sebastian said, “What did you think of her?”
“Can’t say I thought much about her, to be honest. Pretty little thing. Tragic, her being a widow and all. But then, England’s seen far too many widows and orphans these last twenty years and more.”
“Did Lord Seaton secure his Enclosure Act from Parliament at the same time as George Irving?”