When Falcons Fall (33 page)

“I guess Jude decided he didn’t need him anymore,” said Sebastian. Weston and the caretaker, Silas Madden, had been found in one of the bays of the carriage house, their deaths staged to look like a murder-suicide. Jude had set it up so well that if he hadn’t decided to go after Sebastian, he might well have succeeded in blaming the long string of both recent and past killings on the major.

Jenny shifted her gaze to where her grandmother now sat quietly mourning another dead child. Sebastian saw a quiver of emotion pass over her features. “I know you won’t believe it, but there was much that was good in Jude. He was so loving. Loving and funny and kind.”

As long as you stayed on the right side of him,
thought Sebastian. And he wondered if they’d ever know how many people the innkeeper had murdered over the years.

He turned to leave, but she stopped him by saying, “You asked about Jamie’s and my father.”

He paused to look back at her.

She said, “Before my mother died, she told Nana that she’d laid with three men: an English lord, a Welsh cavalryman, and a stable hand named Ian from out at Maplethorpe Hall. But Ian was killed when Jamie and me was only two years old.” She tipped her head to one side, regarding him appraisingly. “I’m thirty-six now. How old’re you?”

“I’ll be thirty-one this October.”

“So I guess that narrows it down a bit, doesn’t it?” she said, her gaze meeting his as a tentative smile curled her lips.

A
yleswick, its historic homes, and its ruined priory are my own creations. I envision the village as lying near the River Teme between Bromfield and Downton Gorge.

Lucien Bonaparte (1775–1840), one of Napoléon’s troublesome younger brothers, did indeed spend years in England as a prisoner of war. A fervent revolutionary, he originally supported Robespierre during the Terror. But later, as president of the Council of Five Hundred, he was instrumental in assisting Napoléon’s coup d’état of 18 Brumaire. As a result, he always credited himself with his brother’s elevation to power.

Lucien’s wealth came from a stint as ambassador to Spain, during which he amassed huge bribes in diamonds that he sold and invested in England and the United States. His relations with his brother were always rocky and eventually deteriorated to the point of a split when Napoléon tried to pressure Lucien into divorcing his wife and contracting a dynastic marriage. Lucien’s flight from Italy is generally seen as an attempt to escape his brother’s wrath. The British, however, were convinced that Lucien’s “flight” to America in 1810 was a hoax, suspecting that his true intent was to fan the flames of what would eventually become the War of 1812.

Captured by the British navy, Lucien and his family (along with a huge retinue of servants and baggage) spent six months in Ludlow before purchasing the estate of Thorngrove in Worcestershire. During that time, they became quite friendly with several noble Catholic families in the area, one of which invited the Bonapartes to baptize their newborn child in their private chapel. Lucien did indeed publish both a novel and a heroic poem about Charlemagne, as well as his memoirs. Convinced that his brother had deliberately gone over to the British, Napoléon did send spies to watch Lucien—as did London, of course. And while Lucien was in Shropshire and Worcestershire, he remained in close, secret contact with Paris; at one point his mother even passed money to him, using the smugglers that plied the Channel.

Allowed to leave England and return to Italy after Napoléon’s banishment to Elba, Lucien rallied to his brother’s cause when the Emperor returned for his Hundred Days—a fact that suggests the break between the brothers was not exactly as it appeared. Despite the bizarre instability exhibited by so many of its members, the Bonaparte family remained extraordinarily close, something to remember when analyzing Lucien’s behavior, movements, and motivations.

For my portrayal of Lucien, I have relied mainly on Lucien’s own memoirs; Pietromarchi’s
Lucien Bonaparte: le frère insoumis
; and Desmond Seward’s
Napoleon’s Family: The Notorious Bonapartes and Their Ascent to the Thrones of Europe.

Lucien did indeed have a son, Charles (1803–1857), who became a biologist and ornithologist of some renown. A friend of James Audubon, he discovered the mustached warbler and a new species of storm petrel, and created the genus
Zenaida
, named after the mother of his twelve children.

For the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see, amongst many others, J. M. Neeson,
Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure, and Social Change in England, 1700–1820
; J. L. and Barbara Hammond’s landmark 1911 study,
The Village Labourer, 1760–1832
; Oliver Goldsmith’s haunting poem “The Deserted Village”; and Joseph Stromberg,
English Enclosures and Soviet Collectivization
.

Regency inquests were indeed held in taverns and inns. I have relied mainly on Joseph Baker Grindon’s
A Compendium of the Laws of Coroners, with Forms and Practical Instructions
, which provides a detailed and highly informative look at the practices of nineteenth-century coroners. The deodand was little used after the beginning of the nineteenth century, and formally abolished by Parliament in 1848 when people attempted to use the age-old tradition to hold the railroads financially responsible for those they killed.

The technique of smothering combined with chest compression used on Emma is today called “burking,” after its use by the infamous body snatchers William Burke and William Hare in 1828. Burke and Hare quickly realized it was much easier to obtain fresh bodies for medical schools via murder, rather than going through all the trouble of digging up the already dead. By sitting on their victims’ chests and putting a hand over their mouths and noses, they discovered they could kill without leaving any visible injuries.

The Corresponding Societies of Great Britain, founded in the early 1790s, were dedicated to parliamentary reform and drew their membership largely from the artisan classes. They were violently opposed by the government and their members driven underground by the end of the decade. For the history of Edward Despard, see Mike Jay’s
The Unfortunate Colonel Despard
.

Tenbury Wells was known simply as Tenbury until the middle of the nineteenth century.

For a fascinating look at the villages and historic houses of Shropshire in the late nineteenth century, see
Nooks and Corners of Shropshire
, by H. Thornhill Timmins. I am grateful to Jim Almond for his beautiful and informative Web site and blog on Shropshire birds, http://shropshirebirder.co.uk/index .html and http://shropshirebirder.blogspot.com, and to Katherine Swift for her lovely books on her Shropshire garden,
The Morville Hours
and
The Morville Year
.

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