The resemblance of both mother and daughter to the pallid young woman Sebastian had last seen being prepared for burial was unmistakable.
Sebastian felt a heavy weight of sadness as the implications of what he was seeing sank into him. He had assumed Emma Chandler must be the natural daughter of the Second Earl of Heyworth, carelessly begotten on some mistress or village girl. But he realized now that the actual truth was probably far more tragic, that Emma was in all likelihood the child of this laughing young girl whose exact name—and fate—were unknown to him.
He swung around to stare back at the stony-faced Dowager who still sat with her hands clenching the gilded arms of her chair. He’d thought her anger and cold indifference to Emma’s fate the product of a proud woman’s resentment of her husband’s bastard. But if his suppositions were correct, then Emma Chandler was this woman’s granddaughter.
He might have apologized for so callously breaking the news to her of her granddaughter’s death. Except that he had no doubt she’d already known.
And didn’t care.
Sebastian was waiting for Tom to bring the curricle round when Lord Heyworth’s butler came to stand beside him.
An aged, dignified man with thick white hair, a deeply lined, impassive face, and a fiercely upright carriage, the butler gazed out at the carriage sweep before the house and said, “You’ll be wishing to stop somewhere for the night, my lord?”
Sebastian studied the man’s stoic, unreadable profile. “Can you recommend something?”
The butler kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. “The Black Lion in Kirby is quite comfortable, my lord. The innkeeper’s wife once served as governess to Lord Heyworth and his sister, Lady Emily. A Miss Rice, she was then. Did you know Lady Emily, my lord? She died twenty-one years ago now, at the tender age of seventeen. Tragic, it was.”
Sebastian watched Tom bring the chestnuts to a stand before them with a cocky flourish. “Yes, it must have been. Thank you for the recommendation. My horses have already gone far enough for one day.”
The butler gave a stately bow and withdrew.
Chapter 35
The Black Lion proved to be a neat, eighteenth-century brick inn with white casement windows and a steep slate roof. It stood in the center of the village of Kirby, a small cluster of houses centered around a soaring fifteenth-century jewel of a church.
The innkeeper was a large, jolly-looking man named Will Hanson. In his late fifties with an ample girth, three chins, and ruddy cheeks, he bustled forward to greet Sebastian with a wide smile, his voice booming, “Welcome! Welcome!” But when he heard Sebastian’s name, the smile faded into something pained. “Ah,” he said with a heavy sigh. “You’re here about the poor lass was killed up Ayleswick way.”
Sebastian paused in the act of swinging off his driving coat in the inn’s flagged hall and looked over at his host in surprise. “How did you know?”
“Stayed with us some three or four weeks back, she did.” The innkeeper motioned over a lanky, half-grown lad. “Here, Richard, take his lordship’s portmanteau up to the best bedchamber while I have Bridget fetch some hot water.” To Sebastian, he said, “And then I reckon your lordship will be wishing to speak with my wife?”
“Yes, please.”
“I arrived at Pleasant Park when Lady Emily was eight and her brother, Albert, had just been breeched,” said Sarah Hanson. She was a plump woman a few years younger than her husband, with silvery gray hair framing a plain, kind face. “I was very young at the time myself. My father was a vicar in Worcestershire, but he died when I was nineteen, and I had no brothers. Fortunately, my father had seen that I was given a good education, and his successor was kind enough to assist me in locating a position.”
They were walking along a narrow, shady lane that wound around the village’s ancient churchyard, toward the fields beyond. The evening was as overcast and somber as the day, the air cool and damp and filled with birdsong from the rooks, jackdaws, and thrushes coming in to roost in the soaring tops of the chestnuts and beech overhead.
“I used to wonder what would have happened to Emily if I hadn’t come along,” said the former governess. “She was so very different from the other members of her family. She told me once that she felt like a changeling—although of course she was not. From what I’ve heard, I suspect she took after her grandfather, the First Earl, who was by all accounts a remarkable man. But he was dead by the time Lady Emily came along. She was a very unhappy child.”
“How long were you with the family?” Sebastian asked.
“Nearly ten years.”
“So until Lady Emily died?”
Sarah Hanson’s face pinched with an old but still raw grief. “She died in my arms.”
“In childbirth?”
“No. They killed her—her family, I mean. Oh, they could never be charged, of course. But they killed her, just as surely as if they’d run her through with a sword.”