“Yes.” It was through Guinevere Anglessey that Devlin had recovered his mother’s necklace when it was found clasped around the beautiful young woman’s dead body.
It was a long moment before he spoke, his voice scratchy with the intensity of his emotions. “Someone told me once that Katherine Atherstone’s great-grandmother was burned as a witch. But that can’t be true if her great-grandmother was Guinevere Stuart.”
Hero went to stand beside him. “No; Guinevere Stuart lived to be a hundred and two. But such tales are often corrupted and twisted as they’re passed down through the generations. It could have been some earlier ancestor.”
“Perhaps. Yet none of this explains why my mother was given the necklace.”
“No.”
They watched as a tall, slender young woman with a basket over one arm left the cottage near the millstream and turned toward the village. After a moment, Sebastian said, “I sometimes wonder if the problem is that I keep trying to find connections where none actually exist—between my mother and the necklace and the women who once possessed it, and between the dark past of this village and these recent murders.”
“There’s a connection,” said Hero, slipping her hand into his. “In both cases. We simply haven’t discovered it yet.”
Chapter 42
Some twenty minutes later, Sebastian was waiting outside the village shop while Jenny Dalyrimple exchanged the two pounds of butter she’d made for a length of candlewicking and other supplies. She packed her purchases in her basket, then cast him a decidedly hostile look as she left the shop and turned toward home.
“What you want with me?” she asked as he fell into step beside her.
“I want to know how Alex Dalyrimple came to be accused of working with the French.”
She kept walking, her gaze on the road ahead. “What difference does it make to you?”
“It does. Isn’t that enough?”
For a long moment, he didn’t think she meant to answer him. Then she said, “You ever hear of Colonel Edward Despard?”
Sebastian suspected there were few in England who hadn’t heard of Colonel Despard. An army officer who had served with distinction from Jamaica and the American colonies to Honduras, Despard was accused by a government informant of plotting to seize control of the Bank of England and kill King George III. It was true that Despard had become a vocal member of one of the many Corresponding Societies that sprang up across Britain in the years after 1789. But the Corresponding Societies were legal in those days, and the evidence for the outlandish charges against him was laughably weak. That didn’t stop the attorney general, Spencer Perceval, from putting him on trial, along with six coconspirators. Admiral Nelson himself testified in Despard’s behalf, but all seven were nevertheless convicted of high treason and sentenced to be hanged, cut down while still alive, disemboweled, beheaded, and quartered.
At the last minute, fear of a public revolt caused the government to abandon the medieval ritual of torture and dismemberment they’d planned, and Despard was simply hanged and beheaded. But Sebastian had never believed the colonel guilty of anything more than admiration for the principles espoused by Thomas Paine and the American and French Revolutions.
That, and marrying a beautiful young black woman descended from slaves.
He said, “I’m told your husband was a member of the local Corresponding Society.”
“He was. But so was lots of others, back then.” She stared off down the winding road, the features of her face held tight. “Alex dreamt of a day when every Englishman rich or poor would have the right to vote and run for Parliament. When every child could learn to read and write, and a man couldn’t be thrown in prison for the crime of speaking his mind. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t love his country. It was because he loved England so much that he wanted it made better for everyone—not just for the likes of George Irving or Lord Seaton.”
“Who accused him?”
“A nasty little weasel named Wat Jones. We learned later he was paid to do exactly what he did—worm his way into the local Corresponding Society so he could then denounce all his friends to the authorities with a pack of lies.”
“Who paid him? George Irving?”
“I always thought so. But it could even have been the high-and-mighty Earl of Powis himself, for all I know. Alex stirred up the whole county with his ideas. That’s why they knew they had to find a way to kill him.”
“How old was he?”
“Twenty-two.”
They’d reached the cottage, and she drew up to turn and face him. “Alex’s been dead twenty years, and nothing he dreamt of seeing has ever come to pass. The hamlet of Maplethorpe is little more than a memory, and now Jamie’s dead too.”
“It will come to pass someday,” said Sebastian. “The things he fought for. They will.”