“Of course he was. He couldn’t catch the protestors at what they were doing, so he hired someone to make things up. And it worked, didn’t it?”
“Do you believe the fire that killed him was an accident?”
Atwater glanced up at the dark shapes of swifts darting across the sky above. “You’ve heard about the Earl over in Oxfordshire who evicted all his cottagers and leveled their village so he could expand his park, only to go hunting one day and fall down the abandoned well of one of the cottages he’d leveled? His greed killed him, didn’t it? It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while people do get what they deserve in this life.”
He drew up then and turned to face her. “Never tell me you’re thinking there’s some connection between the events of fifteen and twenty years ago and what’s happening now?”
“Devlin thinks it a possibility, yes.”
He frowned. “You’ve read Goldsmith’s poem? ‘The Deserted Village’?”
“Yes.”
Atwater nodded. “It’s good you’re writing this article. Someone needs to explain what the enclosures are doing—someone besides the poets. A hundred years from now, their words will be dismissed as romantic sentimentalism—if they’re read at all.”
Hero studied the steward’s plain, earnest face and knew a whisper of disquiet. “We still read Shakespeare.”
“We do. So we do,” he said quickly, clearing his throat in a way that made her wonder if his thoughts had paralleled hers. “And now you must excuse me. I see another wagon coming in from the fields. Shall I send a man for your groom?”
Later, when the sun was high in the sky, Hero walked up the lane to the ruined medieval tower that overlooked Ayleswick and its surrounding countryside. She was sitting with her back to one of the crumbling walls, her gaze on the ghostly traces of the lost furrows and ridges of the past, when she noticed Sebastian climbing the hill toward her.
“It’s an impressive view,” he said, coming to sit beside her.
She shifted to lean gently against him. “I keep thinking that if I stare at it long and hard enough, everything will make sense.”
“Is it helping?”
“No,” she said with a laugh. “I had an interesting interview with Samuel Atwater this morning. He’s . . . very radical.”
“He is, indeed.”
“You think that might be significant?”
“I think it could be.” He told her then of his conversations with Liv Weston and Jude Lowe. When he had finished, she said, “Is it possible Leopold Seaton was Emma’s father?”
“I’m beginning to think he was. But we may never know for certain.”
She was silent a moment, her gaze on the rain clouds bunching over the Welsh mountains to the west. “While you were gone, I borrowed the Reverend Underwood’s copy of Debrett’s Peerage, along with a weighty history of Scotland and another of Wales.”
He turned his head to look at her. “And?”
“Guinevere Stuart did marry a Scottish laird, Malcolm Gordon. In addition to her seven ill-fated sons, she had a daughter she named Addienna after her mother.”
“So that part of the tale is true.”
“It is. Addienna married a Welsh nobleman, the Earl of Penlynn, and had two daughters and four sons.”
“And it was one of those daughters who married a Lord Seaton?”
Hero nodded. “Isabella. It was with Isabella Seaton that Guinevere first took refuge after her husband divorced her. But the Lord Seaton of the time wasn’t comfortable with her presence, so Guinevere lived the last years of her life in Wales with her daughter Addienna.”
Hero hesitated, and after a moment Devlin said, “There’s something else; what is it?”
She met his strange yellow gaze and held it. “It’s about Guinevere’s daughter, Addienna—the one who married the Earl of Penlynn.”
“Yes?”
“Three of her four sons joined the Jacobite cause along with her seven brothers and were all killed. But the eldest son, Edwyn, publicly repudiated his brothers and became, in time, the next Earl of Penlynn. By all accounts, he was a rather unpleasant fellow and eventually died without a son of his own. But he did have one daughter, Katherine, born late in his life. Katherine married unwisely, probably out of desperation to get away from her father.”
Devlin kept his gaze on her face, and she wondered what he saw there. “Hero, what are you trying to tell me?”
She sucked in a deep breath that did nothing to ease the strange pressure in her chest. “Katherine married the Earl of Atherstone and died giving birth to a daughter, also named Guinevere.”
Devlin stood up abruptly and went to stare out over the valley below. “I take it this daughter is the same Guinevere who married the Marquis of Anglessey several years ago?”