Hero remembered the steward’s quiet, intense focus on the pretty, petite dowager, and wondered why she hadn’t figured that out for herself. “Tell me what happened the day Sybil died.”
Anne Moss stared down at the cold ashes on the hearth beside them, her face drawn and suddenly much older looking, her fingers plucking at the cloth of her apron. “It was Midsummer’s Eve,” she said, as if that explained much, as indeed it did.
The pagan origins of the rites of the summer solstice might be lost in the darkness of millennia past, but the date was still an important one in country villages. It was a time of drinking and dancing, when bonfires were lit along the fields so that their herb-scented smoke might drift across the crops to ward off evil sprits and ensure a successful harvest. Young girls decked themselves in garlands of golden calendula and marigolds and Saint-John’s-wort, symbols of the sun and the light and life it gave.
Yet there was a marked undercurrent of darkness to this homage to the power of the sun. For on Midsummer’s Eve, the boundaries between this world and the next were said to be thin and weak, and fairies roamed the land. Even as one celebrated the warmth and light of the sun, there was an acknowledgment that on this day, the sun reached its zenith. In the days to come, the hours of light would shorten as the year cycled inexorably toward autumn and the cold, dark death of winter.
“When did you last see her?” Hero asked quietly.
Anne Moss lifted her gaze to the window. “She must have slipped away sometime after the bonfires were lit. I didn’t even realize she’d gone until the fires had all died and she still hadn’t come home. And even then, I only thought she was . . .” Sybil’s mother brought up a hand to press her fingertips to her lips, the sinews in her throat corded with an old, festering guilt that was never going to go away. “God help me, I was so angry with her. I went to bed and lay there thinking about how I was going to give her what for when she got home.”
“But she never came home?”
Anne Moss shook her head. “I knew the next morning something was wrong—knew she wouldn’t worry me like that. My John and some of the other cottagers went looking for her. One of his lordship’s shepherds said he’d seen her over by the gorge, so they . . .” Anne had to pause and swallow before she could go on. “They found her lying on the rocks beside the river. Her neck was broke.”
“Where in the gorge, exactly? Do you know?”
Hero was afraid the woman might find the question strange, but she answered readily enough. “She was lying at the base of a rocky outcropping called Monk’s Head. They say that years ago, one of the young monks from the priory fell in love with a village girl. He tried to get out of his vows, but they wouldn’t let him. So the two of them—the monk and the girl—jumped to their deaths there. Don’t know if it’s true, but it’s a popular trysting spot for the young.”
“Could she simply have fallen?”
“I suppose it’s possible. But I doubt it. What was she doin’ there all by her lonesome, anyway?” Sybil’s mother turned her head to stare defiantly at Hero. “I think she was pushed. I think she went there to meet whoever planted that babe in her belly, and he pushed her.”
“Did you tell that to the coroner?”
“I tried. He didn’t want to hear it. Of course he didn’t want to hear it.” She fell silent, her thoughts lost in the past.
In the sudden hush, Hero became aware of the sounds of a child’s laughter and the barking of a dog. Then Sybil’s mother drew a deep, shaky breath and said, “The vicar was kind. He convinced the jury she was so overset by findin’ herself in the family way that she wasn’t in her right mind when she killed herself. Gave her a good Christian burial, he did, although we had to do it after dark, and she’s lyin’ on the very edge of the churchyard. Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate what he done for us—truly, I do. But it weren’t true, what he said. She wasn’t out of her mind, and she didn’t jump off the cliffs of the gorge. I’ll believe that till the day I die myself.”
Hero found she had no difficulty imagining a scenario in which a pretty, naive young girl, oh so proud of the gentleman’s babe in her belly, might suddenly find her joy turned to despair when her wellborn seducer abruptly rejected her. But Hero wasn’t about to suggest that possibility to the grief-stricken mother before her.
She said instead, “Of all the men you named, who do you think killed your daughter?”
Anne Moss stared at her long and hard. “You truly want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I think it was Lord Seaton—his present lordship’s father.”
Hero was seated by the window and leafing thoughtfully through the portraits in Emma Chandler’s sketchbook when Archibald Rawlins knocked tentatively at the door of the private parlor.