“You didn’t tell anyone?”
Her features hardened. “Why would we? So they could bury her at the crossroads with a stake through her heart? That’s the last thing we wanted. We told anyone and everyone who’d listen to us that she was laughing the last time we’d seen her, that she was happy. That there was no way she’d deliberately kill herself. But the coroner’s jury didn’t believe us.”
“When Lord Seaton died a few months later, did you never think someone might have killed him?”
“I figured maybe Miles Grant—the blacksmith—got him.”
“Was Hannah also carrying Seaton’s child?”
“I don’t know. But she was lying with him. That I do know.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because she told—” Jenny broke off, her nostrils flaring on a sudden intake of breath.
“She told—whom? You? Or someone else?”
“I don’t remember,” she said, staring boldly back at him, not caring that he knew she was lying.
“Was Hannah Grant your cousin as well?”
“No. Her people moved down here from Ludlow.” She lifted her chin. “So you see, there’s no connection between Sybil’s death and what’s happening in the village now.”
Sebastian wondered if she actually believed that, or if she was simply trying to convince him, the way she’d tried to convince the village that her cousin had fallen to her death. He said, “Did you know Daray Flanagan is dead?”
Her lips parted, the sinews of her throat tightening. “When?”
“Sometime last night or early this morning.”
He expected her to say, Why would anyone kill Daray Flanagan? He waited for her to say it, because it was the logical, inevitable response to such an announcement.
But she didn’t say it. Then he saw the stark bleakness in her eyes and knew with a sinking certainty that she didn’t ask because her mind was quick. She already knew why someone would kill Daray Flanagan, just as she had a pretty good idea as to who had done it.
It wasn’t obvious or easily discernible, the twisted, thin cord of anger and revenge that connected one untimely death to the next. But it was there, the passion and outrage of youth leading to a mature and ruthless instinct for self-preservation.
And Sebastian wondered, had it begun on that long-ago Midsummer’s Eve, when Jude Lowe watched the young niece he’d known and loved all his life step off a cliff into oblivion? Or had the origins of that murderous fury begun earlier, with the tarred, blackened body of a childhood friend hung up to rot in the cold embrace of a gibbet’s iron cage?
He wondered, too, if Hannah Grant really had drowned herself in that millpond, or if the last thing she’d known was the angry, brutal grasp of a jealous young man. A man who’d once loved her, only to be rejected when she turned from him to a wealthy lord he knew to be both selfish and cruel.
“I was more’n a bit sweet on Hannah myself when I was a lad,” Jude had told him. “More’n a bit . . .”
The wind gusted up, shivering the leaves of the elms edging the stream and bringing with it the scent of coming rain. It was all conjecture, of course. Sebastian knew only too well that just because an explanation fits neatly doesn’t mean it’s true. Never in his years of solving murders had he so desperately wished to be wrong. But he felt the rightness of it like a sick certitude deep in his gut.
He was aware of Jamie Knox’s twin staring at him, her fine, intelligent eyes flat and still, as if she could will from their depths any betraying glimmer of the truth. And he wanted to say to her, You know, don’t you? You might not have known it before, but you’ve figured it all out now. You know the secret, violent soul of the man who’s always been more like a second brother to you than an uncle. You know he swore to kill Leopold Seaton all those years ago. You know where he gets the fine brandy that he hides in his cellars and the inexplicable wealth he must be careful not to show to anyone he doesn’t trust. You know he was the one who supposedly urged Daray Flanagan to stay when the Irishman so conveniently came riding through town on the day of Alistair Coombs’s funeral, and you’ve always suspected why, even if you never admitted it to yourself. Just as you’ve always suspected that the flames that consumed Maplethorpe Hall had nothing to do with a candle and a windblown curtain and everything to do with that tar-soaked gibbet and a government informant brought in specifically to end the subversive protests against George Irving’s ruthless Bill of Enclosure.
“Whatever happened to him?” Sebastian asked, and she shook her head, not understanding his question. “Wat Jones, I mean. The squatter you told me lied at Alex Dalyrimple’s trial.”
“He went away.”