“Does it matter?”
“I rather think it does.”
The young Baron nodded and shifted to clasp his hands around his bent knees. “She told me she’d discovered her father was someone from Ayleswick, so she’d decided to come here posing as an officer’s widow on a sketching expedition so she could find out who he was. I wanted to know how the blazes she thought we could ever marry when everyone in the village now thought she was someone she wasn’t.”
“What did she say?”
He stared at the new grave before him. “She said, How could she marry me when there was a chance that my father was also her father?”
Sebastian held himself very still. He was finding it oddly difficult to draw his next breath, much less ask the questions he needed to ask in a calm, even voice. “Had she made any progress in discovering her father’s identity?”
Crispin shook his head. “She said she’d eliminated the old Squire because Archie told her his father was fair-haired, and Samuel Atwater for the same reason. But that was about it.”
“I’m not quite certain I understand how she thought she could possibly discover the truth.”
“I don’t know either. What was she going to do? Come right out and ask Major Weston if by chance he’d raped some earl’s sixteen-year-old daughter two decades ago? Ask the vicar, for Christ’s sake? I had the impression she thought she’d somehow recognize her father when she saw him.”
“Except that Emma looked like her mother,” said Sebastian. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
A faint hint of color crept into the younger man’s cheeks as his gaze drifted away. “I was afraid that if you knew I’d been here and then left—that we’d quarreled—then you might think I’d killed her.”
“Where did you go, after you came upon her on the road?”
“What do you think? My God! I’d just discovered that the woman I loved and wanted to marry thought there was a very good chance she was my sister! You can have no idea what that’s like. No idea at all.”
Sebastian stared out over the sun-soaked tombstones around them, conscious of a familiar pounding in his temples. Because the truth was that he understood only too well what Crispin Seaton was going through. He’d been through it himself.
“I turned my horse around and rode back to Ludlow,” Crispin was saying. “I took a room at the Angel and set about getting mind-numbingly drunk. I stayed that way for days. It’s . . . it’s all just a blur. I finally woke up on Friday determined to ride back here and have it out with her. Except, by then everyone was talking about the inquests being held down in Ayleswick. I heard the name Emma Chance and—” His shoulders shook and he dropped his face into his hands, muffling his voice. “I kept telling myself it had to be some kind of mistake. She couldn’t be dead. She just couldn’t.”
Sebastian understood now why Emma had told Reuben early Monday morning that she hadn’t been able to sleep. Upset by the previous evening’s confrontation with the man she loved, she’d finally given up even trying and left her bed before dawn to go down to the river to paint a pack bridge used by smugglers. She must have been exhausted all that day.
And by dawn the next morning she was dead.
He studied the younger man’s bowed head, the wind-ruffled fair hair gleaming golden in the sunlight. He believed Crispin Seaton’s grief was genuine. But he knew, too, that Crispin wouldn’t be the first murderer to weep at his victim’s graveside.
Chapter 49
Later that afternoon, as the sun sank toward the Welsh hills, Sebastian sat at the large central table in their private parlor with Emma Chandler’s two sketchbooks spread open before him. He was comparing the sequence of her landscape sketches with that of her portraits.
He stared at them a long time, trying to make sense of what he knew of this woman’s death and the others that had both flowed from it and preceded it. Finally he said, “I know why Emma named the subjects of some of these portraits but not others.”
Hero looked over at him from where she was mending one of Simon’s dresses in a chair beside the window. “Why?”
“Her main purpose was obviously to draw and name each of the men mentioned in her mother’s letter. But three were already dead, so she drew Archie in the hopes that he bore some resemblance to his dead father, and Jenny Dalyrimple because she must somehow have realized ‘the man at the Ship’ referred to in her mother’s letter was actually Jamie Knox, and Jenny is Knox’s twin.”
“So why did she draw Martin McBroom and Hannibal Pierce?”
“Because she was an artist, and both men have interesting faces. As does the chambermaid, Mary Beth. But she didn’t name them because their identities weren’t important.”
“She didn’t draw Crispin,” said Hero.