Sebastian brought his gaze back to her pretty, expressive face. “I understand you’re the one who told the magistrate what you’d found at the bridge. But someone else was with you, wasn’t he? Someone from the stables?”
“Cian O’Neal.” Her voice dripped scorn. “Took one look at that head sittin’ up there and started screamin’ like he weren’t never gonna stop. When I said, ‘We gotta go tell Sir Thomas,’ he took t’ shakin’ all over, and his eyes got so big I thought they was gonna pop right out of his head. I grabbed hold of his arm, but he jerked away and run off. Never even looked back.”
“Did you see anyone else near the bridge?”
She stared at him. “What’re you thinkin’? That there was two heads there?”
“I was wondering if you might have seen someone running away as you walked up the lane.”
“No. I remember laughin’ at Cian because it was so dark and quiet, he was scared even before we seen the head.”
“Can you think of any reason for Mr. Preston to have been at the bridge at that time of night?”
Her eyes widened slightly. “Never thought about that, but . . . Well, no. Truth is, most folks around here tend t’ avoid Bloody Bridge after dark.”
“Bloody Bridge?”
“That’s what it’s called, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
She sniffed, nearly as contemptuous of his ignorance as she was of poor Cian O’Neal’s terror. “Folks say it’s haunted by those who’ve died there over the years.”
“Yet you weren’t afraid to go there,” said Sebastian.
She shrugged. “It’s the quickest way t’ get t’ Five Fields, ain’t it?”
“And why would you want to go to Five Fields at night?”
She gave him an impish smile and raised her eyebrows in a knowing look. “I won’t be goin’ there with Cian again, that’s fer sure.”
“Tell me, what did you think of Mr. Preston?”
She shrugged. “He never give me no trouble, the way some of ’em do, if that’s what yer askin’.”
“Have you heard anyone speculating about what they think might have happened to him?”
“Most folks’re sayin’ footpads must’ve done it, which just goes t’ show what they know.”
“What makes you so certain it wasn’t footpads?”
She lifted her chin. “Why, I could see his pocket watch, couldn’t I? Danglin’ from its chain like he was just checkin’ the time. Ain’t no footpad gonna go t’ all the trouble of cuttin’ off a feller’s head and then leave his watch like that.”
“Mr. Preston’s greatcoat was unbuttoned when you saw him?”
She frowned. “Well, I guess it musta been. Didn’t really think about it, but, yeah, I reckon it was.”
Sebastian made inquiries at the stables, but Cian O’Neal hadn’t come to work that morning. He eventually tracked the lad to a tumbledown cottage off Wilderness Row, where he lived with his widowed mother and five younger siblings.
Sebastian’s knock was answered by the lad’s mother, a rail-thin, worn-down woman with gray-threaded hair who looked sixty but was probably younger than forty, judging by the squalling infant in her arms.
“Beggin’ your pardon, me lord,” she said, dropping a curtsy when Sebastian explained who he was and the purpose of his visit, “but I’m afraid you won’t be gettin’ much sense out of Cian. He didn’t sleep a wink all night—just sat in the corner by the fire and shivered. Some constable come by here from Bow Street and tried to talk to him a bit ago, and the poor lad started babblin’ all sorts of nonsense about havin’ seen the Dullahan.”
Sebastian had heard of the Dullahan. A figure in Irish folklore said to be a horseman dressed all in black and astride a black, fire-breathing stallion, he rode the darkened lanes and byways, carrying his own head in his hand. According to legend, whenever the Dullahan stops, a man, woman, or child dies.
Sebastian said, “I’d like to try talking to him.”
He knew by the worry pinching the woman’s face that she’d rather have denied him. But she belonged to a class whose members had been trained since birth to obey their “betters.”
She dropped a curtsy and stood back to let him enter.
The cottage was clean but wretchedly poor, with low, heavy beams, a swept dirt floor, and a worm-eaten old table with benches that looked as if they’d been knocked together from scrap wood picked up off the street. Of one room only, the place had a mattress in an alcove half-hidden behind a tattered curtain and a pegged, roughly hewn ladder that led up to a loft.
Cian O’Neal sat on a low, three-legged stool before the fire, his shoulders hunched forward, his hands thrust together between his tightly clasped knees. He was a fine-looking lad of seventeen or eighteen, big and strapping and startlingly handsome, with clear blue eyes and golden hair that curled softly against his lean cheeks. He kept his attention fixed on the fire, as if oblivious to Devlin’s approach. But when his mother touched him on the shoulder, he jerked violently and looked up at her with wide, terrified eyes.