Before he left the churchyard himself, Sebastian turned to enter the old parish church.
The passage of the most recent Catholic Relief Act had enabled the Seatons to build a small, unobtrusive Catholic chapel on the grounds of Northcott Abbey. But for generations before that the family had had to hide their faith, attending services at the village church on Sunday and burying their dead in its crypt.
Built without aisles, the church of St. Thomas was the same age as the earliest construction of the priory that now lay in ruins to the west. Its sandstone walls were thick, its windows small and rounded, the air permeated with the odor of cold, dank stone and lost centuries of incense and blessed candles.
Memorials to those interred in the crypt below lined the worn sandstone walls and floor of the nave. The oldest were those dedicated to the first generations of Rawlinses; but the most elaborate were those of the Seaton family. It didn’t take Sebastian long to find the engraved marble slab of Lady Seaton’s lord. Leopold Seaton had died on the sixth of February 1798, less than two weeks after Hannah Grant was found floating in the millpond. A coincidence? Possibly. But Sebastian doubted it.
He was turning away when another memorial caught his eye, this one small and heartbreaking in its brevity:
SHELBY WILLIAM
BELOVED SON OF LEOPOLD AND GRACE SEATON
2 NOVEMBER 1797 TO 16 APRIL 1798
Sebastian stared at that pitiful memorial, conscious of an upwelling of empathy for the beautiful, self-contained woman who had buried her infant son within months of losing her husband.
He searched the surrounding memorials, wondering if she had lost other children, but found no evidence of any. In her seven years of marriage, Grace Seaton had given birth not to three, but to four children: Crispin, the son and heir, followed by two girls, Georgina and Louisa, and then, finally, a second son.
And three months later, Leopold Seaton was dead.
Sebastian tilted back his head, his gaze on the mellow blues, greens, and reds of the stained-glass window above the altar. The land and wealth of noble families were traditionally entailed, thus enabling the family’s fortune to pass virtually intact from eldest son to eldest son on down through the ages. Failing a son, both land and titles would pass instead to the nearest male in the paternal line, be he a brother, nephew, uncle, or distant cousin. Any noblewoman left widowed without a son was generally to be pitied, for her home and her husband’s wealth would all pass to some distant relative.
As a result, most wives were anxious to bear not just one healthy son, but two. “An heir and a spare,” they called it. And shortly after the birth of his “spare,” Lord Seaton had died.
A coincidence? Possibly. But a murderous woman unwilling to tolerate her lord’s philandering any longer might well wait until after the birth of a second son before putting an end to her husband’s straying once and for all.
It was past time, Sebastian realized, that he learn more about the death of Leopold, Lord Seaton.
Chapter 50
Wednesday, 11 August
T he next morning dawned cool and blustery, with thick clouds that hung low enough to obscure the mountains to the west. With Archie at his side, Sebastian rode out to the old stone bridge where Leopold, Lord Seaton had died.
“I was still a small boy when it happened,” said Archie, reining in at the edge of the weathered fieldstone bridge that spanned a small rivulet some hundred yards from Northcott Abbey’s gatehouse. “But I still remember listening to my father talk about how Lord Seaton’s brains were splattered all over the bridge. It made quite an impression on me.”
“I would imagine it did,” said Sebastian, his mount moving restlessly beneath him as he studied an ancient stand of oak thickly undergrown with witch hazel that encroached close to the road here.
Archie’s eyes crinkled with a faint smile of remembrance. “For years, I couldn’t pass the bridge without looking to see if I could spot some trace of all those splattered brains. Somehow I always managed to convince myself that I did.” Archie’s smile faded as he squinted up at the roiling clouds overhead. “You really think Seaton’s death could somehow be connected to what’s happening now?”
“The timing is interesting,” said Sebastian. “Sybil Moss died on Midsummer’s Eve in 1797. Less than seven months later, Hannah Grant was found floating in the millpond. And just two weeks after that, Lord Seaton falls off his horse at one of the few places between the Blue Boar and home where he’s guaranteed to do himself some serious damage. You don’t find that suspicious?”
“When you put it that way, yes. It’s damnably suspicious.”
Sebastian said, “Do you know if there was an autopsy?”