Sebastian studied the unknown woman’s flaring high cheekbones and square chin. He had always assumed that Knox must resemble the unknown man who had fathered him—who had perhaps fathered them both. But now, looking at this woman, he found that assumption called into doubt. And the implications had him reeling.
Somehow, he managed to say, “I was with him when he died. I’ve brought something he wanted his grandmother to have.”
“Och, and look at me,” she said, taking a step back as she opened the door wide. “Leaving you standing on the step. I beg your pardon, my lord. Please, come in.”
Ducking through the low doorway, he found himself in a small room that served as a combination living area, dining room, and kitchen. A curtain half hid a bed in a small alcove, while steep stairs led up to an attic loft above. The ceiling was low, the room cramped. But the uneven, flagged floor was cleanly swept, the walls newly whitewashed. And it occurred to Sebastian that Knox must have been sending money back to Shropshire, to help the family he’d left behind.
An elderly woman sat on one of the old-fashioned high-backed benches at a trestle table drawn up before the smoke-blackened stone hearth. Her hair was snow-white, her weathered, aged face crisscrossed with deeply etched lines. But her frame was still robust, and though she stared straight ahead with milky white eyes, she was busy snapping peas in a bowl she balanced on her lap, her fingers moving easily with a lifetime of practice.
“Nana,” said the younger woman, raising her voice slightly as she went to crouch beside her grandmother and lay a hand on her arm. “Here’s a Lord Devlin to see you, from London. He knew Jamie.”
The woman’s fingers stilled at their task, her head turning toward Sebastian even though she could not see him. And he watched a breath of sadness waft across her features at the mere mention of her grandson’s name.
Once, Sebastian thought, she must have been a handsome woman. He could trace quite clearly in her strong-boned face and faintly cleft chin the image of her dead grandson. And it occurred to him that the ways in which Jamie Knox had differed from Sebastian, he had resembled these two women.
“You knew Jamie?” she said, her voice still strong and unquavering. And he found himself wondering how old she was, this woman who had buried three husbands and countless children and grandchildren.
“I did, yes,” said Sebastian, coming to take the seat indicated by the younger woman. “I have something he bought for you the very day he died.”
The younger woman lifted the bowl of peas from her grandmother’s lap so that Sebastian could place the box in her gnarled, work-roughened hands.
“For me?” she said in wonder as she lifted the box’s lid and reached inside.
He watched her fingers move deftly over the bird’s beak, its jeweled collar and gilded wings. “There’s a key hidden in the tail feathers,” he explained. “It’s mechanical.”
She lifted the nightingale clumsily from its box, feeling for the key as her granddaughter moved to help her.
“Here,” said the younger woman. She wound the key and set the bird on the table beside them. The familiar, joyous melody filled the small cottage. “It’s beautiful, Nana. And it looks just like a nightingale.”
The old woman sat motionless, listening to the gracefully flowing notes, moisture glistening in her sightless eyes as the bird slowly wound down. “I’ve always loved nightingales,” she said, her voice cracking as she reached up one bent knuckle to wipe away a tear that threatened to fall. “Did he truly buy it for me?”
“He did, yes.”
She nodded and swallowed, hard. “He was an amazing lad. So bright and quick. Had the eyesight of a hawk and the hearing of a bat. Never seen anything like it.”
Sebastian was aware of the younger woman’s gaze upon him but said nothing. The abnormal acuteness of their senses was something else he and Knox had had in common.
“He was a rifleman, you know,” said Heddie Kincaid proudly. “Best shot the army ever had, I reckon.”
“Yes,” said Sebastian. He cleared his throat, but his voice was still husky as he asked one of the questions he had come here hoping to have answered. “Did he get his eyesight and hearing from your daughter?”
“Och, no. No one else in our family has such gifts—not even Jenny here, and she’s his twin.”
Sebastian looked at the younger woman and felt the skin stretch oddly taut against the bones of his face. For if Jamie Knox had, in truth, been Sebastian’s half brother, then that would make this self-possessed, vaguely hostile woman Sebastian’s half sister.
“—must’ve come from his da, I always figured,” the old woman was saying. “Whoever he was. My girl Eleanor—his mama—she died not long after the babies was born, poor child. Was too much for her, carryin’ the two of ’em. Maybe if she’d lived, she could’ve said who their da was. But that weren’t the way it turned out.”