“I got your message,” he said, standing awkwardly in the center of the room with his hat in his hands. “I asked both Nash and Dr. Higginbottom about the gloves. But neither could remember noticing if there was one or two.”
“So it was probably dropped somewhere along the way,” said Hero.
“I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m afraid Nash isn’t as careful as he should be.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “You haven’t heard from his lordship?”
“Not yet, no.”
Archie nodded. “I was thinking about driving over to Ludlow on Monday. Crispin says Miss Chandler dealt with a firm of solicitors there. He couldn’t remember their names, but if I can find them, they might be able to tell us more about her.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” said Hero, giving him an encouraging smile. “Tell me, how well do you remember Lord Seaton’s father, Leopold?”
“I don’t really. I was maybe six or seven when he died.”
Hero knew a quickening of interest. “He died around ’ninety-seven or ’ninety-eight?”
“Something like that, yes. Why?”
“Sybil Moss died in July of 1797.”
“Did she? I couldn’t have told you exactly. I barely remember it.”
“When did Hannah Grant die?”
“Around then sometime.”
“Her father is the village blacksmith?”
“He is, yes. I could talk to him—ask him about it, if you like.”
“Is Hannah’s mother still alive?”
“She is, yes.”
“Then I’ll talk to her instead.”
A vague shadow passed over the young Squire’s features. “If you’d prefer. Only, you might want to do it when the smith isn’t around. He has a tendency to get a bit agitated whenever anyone mentions his daughter.”
“Don’t worry,” said Hero. “I’ll be careful.”
Chapter 33
Later that afternoon, as a thick white band of clouds settled low over the village, Hero walked up the high street to the blacksmith’s shop and the slate-roofed, sandstone cottage that stood beside it. Remembering Archie Rawlins’s warning, she carried with her a large, unusually heavy reticule.
She could see Miles Grant still at his forge, the fire glowing red-hot as he worked the massive bellows, his sweat-gleamed face bent to his task. In the yard of the nearby cottage, his wife was taking down clothes from a line strung between a lean-to shed and a mulberry tree, her arms moving methodically as she unpinned and rolled her wash to stow it in the basket at her feet.
If Mary Grant had ever been as pretty as her long-dead daughter, Hannah, all traces of those days were gone. The passage of hard years had etched deep lines in her face, sagged her cheeks, and tugged down the corners of her mouth and eyes, so that she looked as if she were melting—as if life were dissolving her a little more every day.
“Good evening,” said Hero with a friendly smile.
The woman looked around and froze, and Hero saw the nasty bruise riding high on her left cheek, so purple it was almost black.
“God above,” whispered the blacksmith’s wife as she cast a wary glance toward her husband’s forge. “I know why you’re here, milady, but please—oh, please—just go away.”
Hero watched the nerves in the older woman’s face twitch with her distress. “I’m sorry, but I need to know about Hannah.”
Mary Grant’s pinched eyes widened with alarm at the sound of her daughter’s name. “Miles, he don’t like me talkin’ about her,” said the dead girl’s mother. “Won’t even let me mention her name in his hearing, he won’t. Says she shamed us.”
Hero was careful to keep her voice as bland as her expression. “You think she killed herself?”
Mary Grant jerked one of her husband’s shirts off the line, sending its pins flying. “It’s what they said at the inquest, ain’t it?”
“When exactly did she die?”
A painful spasm crumpled the mother’s face. “The twenty-fourth of January, 1798.”
“Do you know if she was seeing anyone in particular at the time?”
The smith’s wife paused, the shirt clutched forgotten in her arms, a faint, faraway light kindling in her eyes. “She was so pretty, all the lads in the village were in love with her—and more’n a few who weren’t lads, if you take my meaning? Even his lordship’s father fancied her, he did. I know because I saw him smiling at her once or twice. He always had an eye for a pretty face, he did. I told her not to make too much of it, that his lordship never meant well by any girl he smiled at. I think she listened to me. She weren’t one for being foolish.”
Hero studied the older woman’s tightly held, intense face and suspected she spoke as much to convince herself as to persuade Hero.
“So who was she in love with?” asked Hero.