When Maidens Mourn (22 page)

“Good afternoon,” Sebastian called.

Straightening with another large gray stone clutched in both hands, Forster threw a quizzing glance at Sebastian, then dropped the rock into the cart. “Wot ye doin’ here? Didn’t ye hear? The diggin’ at Camlet Moat is finished. I don’t work fer Sir Stanley no more and I got nothin’ else to say to ye.”

Sebastian brushed away a fly buzzing about his face. “When we spoke the other day, you forgot to mention your confrontation with Miss Tennyson a week ago last Sunday. Here, in Cockfosters. Outside the smithy’s.”

“Me brother’s the smithy—like our da was before him.”

“Which I suppose explains how Miss Tennyson knew where to find you.”

Forster turned away to stoop down and grasp another rock.

Sebastian said, “The incident was witnessed by half the village.”

Forster grunted. “Aye. She were a feisty thing, that woman. She could squawk all she wanted, but I knew that in the end she wasna gonna go to Sir Stanley. She’d no proof of anything.”

“Maybe she recently discovered something. Maybe that’s why you killed her.”

Forster heaved another rock up and over the side of the cart. “I told ye and the magistrate both: I was home with me wife Sunday.”

Sebastian stared off to where the field sloped gently toward a line of chestnuts growing along a small watershed to the west. The air was hot, the pasture a bright emerald green and scattered with small daisies. The scene was deceptively peaceful, with an air of bucolic innocence that seemed to have no place for passion and greed. Or murder.

He said, “Do you believe Sir Geoffrey de Mandeville hid his treasure on the island?”

Forster glanced over at him and smiled, the dimplelike slashes appearing in his tanned cheeks. “De Mandeville? Nah. But did ye never hear of Dick Turpin?”

“Dick Turpin? You mean, the highwayman?”

“Aye. Him as once worked Finchley Common. Used to hide out at the island, he did. His uncle Nott owned the Rose and Crown by the Brook, across the chase at Clay Hill. Seems to me, if there’s treasure on that island, it’s more likely Dick Turpin’s than some old knight what’s been dead and gone for who knows how many hundreds of years.”

“Is that what you were looking for? A highwayman’s gold?”

Forster reached for his mule’s reins. “Never claimed it were me. All I’m sayin’ is, Turpin’s story is well-known about here. Coulda been anyone lookin’ for what he mighta hid.”

“So why did Miss Tennyson accuse you?”

Forster urged the mule forward a few feet, then stopped to reach for another stone. “She didn’t like me much. Never did.”

“And you didn’t like her,” said Sebastian, keeping his eyes on the hefty rock in Forster’s hands.

“I won’t deny that. She threatened to tell Sir Stanley I was the one who tore apart the well. But she had no proof and she knew it.”

“So why did you threaten her?”

“I didn’t. Anyone who tells you different is either makin’ stuff up or jist repeatin’ crazy talk he heard.” Forster slammed the rock down on the growing pile, then paused with his fists propped on his lean hips, his breath coming hard, his handsome, sun-browned face and neck glistening with perspiration. “I been doin’ me some thinkin’. And it occurs to me that meybe Sir Stanley has more to do with what happened to the lady than I first suspicioned.”

“Odd, given that yesterday you seemed more intent on casting suspicion on Sir Stanley’s wife, Lady Winthrop, than on Sir Stanley himself.”

“I told ye, I been doing me some thinkin’. It occurs to me this might all have somethin’ to do with the way Sir Stanley likes to fancy himself one of them ancient Druids.”

“A Druid,” said Sebastian.

“That’s right. Dresses up in white robes and holds heathen rituals out at the island. I know for a fact Miss Tennyson seen him doin’ it just the other day. He coulda been afraid she’d give away his secret.”

“Couldn’t have been much of a secret if you knew about it.”

Forster’s eyes narrowed with unexpected amusement. He laid a finger beside his nose and winked, then turned away to stoop for another stone.

Sebastian said, “And how precisely do you know that Miss Tennyson saw Sir Stanley enacting these rituals?”

Forster hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and spit it into the
grass. “Because I was there meself. Last Saturday evening, it was, long after we’d finished work for the day. Sir Stanley was at the island in his robes when Miss Tennyson comes back—”

“How?” interjected Sebastian.

“What do ye mean, ‘how’?”

“You said Miss Tennyson came back. So was she walking? In a gig? Who was driving her?”

“She come in a gig, drivin’ herself.”

It was the first Sebastian had heard of Gabrielle Tennyson driving herself. It was not unusual for a woman to drive in the country without a groom. But Gabrielle would have driven out from London, which was something else entirely. He said, “Did she do that often? Drive herself, I mean.”

“Sometimes.”

“So you’re saying she arrived at the island and found Sir Stanley about to engage in some sort of ancient ritual?”

“That’s right. Just before sunset, it was.”

“Did either of them know you were there?”

“Nah. I was hid behind some bushes.”

“And what precisely were you doing at the island?”

“I’d forgot me pipe.”

“Your pipe.”

Forster stared at Sebastian owlishly, as if daring Sebastian to doubt him. “That’s right. Went back for it, I did. Only then I seen Sir Stanley in his strange getup, so I hid in the bushes to see what was goin’ on.”

“And you were still hiding in the bushes when you saw Miss Tennyson drive up?”

“I was, yes.” Forster turned away to reach down for a big, jagged rock. “I couldn’t hear what they was sayin’. But there’s no doubt in me mind she seen him and that rig he was wearin’.”

“And then what happened?”

“I don’t know. I left.”

“So you’re suggesting—what, precisely? That Sir Stanley was so chagrined by Miss Tennyson’s discovery of his rather unorthodox behavior and belief system that he lured her back to the island on Sunday and killed her?”

“I ain’t suggestin’ nothing. Just tellin’ ye what happened, that’s all.”

“I see. And have you told anyone else about this encounter?”

“No. Why would I?”

“Why, indeed?” Sebastian started to turn away, then paused as a thought occurred to him. “One more question: Did you discover anything unusual or interesting in the course of the excavations at the island last Saturday?”

Forster frowned. “No. Why?”

“I’m just wondering why Miss Tennyson would return to the island, first on Saturday evening, then again on Sunday.”

“That I couldn’t say.”

“You’ve no idea at all?”

“No.” Forster reached for his mule’s reins.

“What precisely did you discover Saturday?”

“Just an area of old cobblestones—like a courtyard or somethin’.”

“That’s all?”

“Ain’t nothin’ to kill a body over, is it? Well, is it?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so,” said Sebastian. “Except for one thing.”

Forster wrapped the reins around his fists. “What’s that?”

“Miss Tennyson is dead.”

“And them two nippers,” said Forster.

“Are they dead?” Sebastian asked, his gaze hard on the countryman’s beard-shadowed face.

“They ain’t been found, have they?”

“No,” said Sebastian. “No, they have not.”

“Ye think ’e’s tellin’ the truth?” Tom asked as Sebastian leapt up into the curricle’s high seat.

Sebastian glanced back at his tiger. “How much did you hear?”

“Most o’ it.”

Sebastian gathered his reins. “To be frank, I’m not convinced Forster has the imagination required to invent such a tale entirely out of whole cloth. But do I believe him? Hardly. I suspect he went out to the island that night on a treasure-hunting expedition. But he may indeed have seen something.” He turned the horses’ heads toward Enfield Chase. “I think I’d like to take a look at this sacred well.”

The island lay deserted, the afternoon sun filtering down through the leafy canopy of old-growth elms and beech to dapple the dark waters of the moat with rare glints of light.

“Ain’t nobody ’ere,” whispered Tom as Sebastian drew up at the top of Camlet Moat’s ancient embankment. “I thought they was still lookin’ for them two boys.”

“They are. But I suspect they’ve given up hope of finding any trace of them around here,” said Sebastian, his voice also low. Like Tom, he knew a reluctance to disturb the solemn peace of the site.

Without the scuffing sounds from Forster’s shovel or the distant shouts of the searchers they’d heard the day before, the silence of the place was as complete as if they had strayed deep into a forgotten, enchanted forest. Sebastian handed his reins to the tiger and jumped lightly to the ground, his boots sinking into the soft leaf mold beside the track. One of the chestnuts nickered, and he reached out to caress the horse’s soft muzzle. “Walk ’em a bit. I shouldn’t be long.”

“Aye, gov’nor.”

He crossed to the island by way of the narrow land bridge. The trenches dug by Sir Stanley’s workmen had all been filled in, leaving
long, narrow rows of mounded dark earth that struck Sebastian as bearing an unpleasant resemblance to the poor holes of churchyards. But he knew that in a year or so, the grass and brush of the island would cover them again, and it would be as if no one had ever disturbed the site.

Sebastian paused for a moment, his gaze drifting around the abandoned clearing. One of the more troublesome aspects of this murder had always been the question of how Gabrielle Tennyson—and presumably her cousins—had traveled up to the moat that fateful Sunday. The discovery that Gabrielle sometimes drove herself here in a gig opened up a host of new possibilities.

It was an unorthodox thing for a young woman to do, to drive herself into the countryside from London. Perhaps she thought that at the age of twenty-eight she was beyond those restrictions. Or perhaps she considered the presence of her nine-year-old cousin and his brother a sufficient sop to the proprieties. But if the Tennysons had driven themselves here that fatal day, the question then became, What the bloody hell happened to the horse and gig? And why had no liveryman come forward to say he had hired the equipment to them?

Sebastian turned to follow the path he’d noticed before, a faint trail that snaked through the brambles and brush to the northeastern corner of the island. It was there, in a small clearing not far from the moat’s edge, that he found what was left of the old well.

Once neatly lined with dressed sandstone blocks, the well now looked like a dirty, sunken wound. Ripped from the earth, the old lining stones lay jumbled together with wet clay and shattered tiles in a heap at the base of a gnarled hawthorn that spread its bleached branches over the muddy hole. From the tree’s branches fluttered dozens of strips of tattered cloth.

Sebastian drew up in surprise. They called them rag trees or, sometimes, clootie trees. Relics of an ancient belief whose origins were lost in the mists of time, the trees could be found at sacred
places to which suppliants with a problem—be it an illness, grief, hardship, or unrequited love—came to whisper a prayer and leave a strip of cloth as a token offering that they tied to the branches of the tree. As the cloths rotted in the wind and sun and rain, the suppliants’ believed their prayers would be answered, their illnesses cured, their problems solved. Rag trees were typically found beside sacred wells or springs, for dipping the cloth in holy water was said to increase the power of the charm.

He understood now why Tessa had ventured out to Camlet Moat by moonlight.

He watched as a hot breeze gusted up, flapping the worn, weathered strips of cloth. And he found himself wondering how many other villagers came here to visit the island’s sacred well.

Quite a few, from the look of things.

He went to hunker down beside the pile of muddy stones. The desecration of the well had obviously occurred quite recently. But it was impossible to tell if the man—or men—who’d done this had found what they were looking for.

A faint sound drew Sebastian’s head around as his acute hearing distinguished the distant clatter of approaching hooves, coming fast. He listened as the unseen horse and rider drew nearer, then checked. A man’s low voice, asking a question, drifted across the water, followed by Tom’s high-pitched reply.