C. Harris - Who Buries the Dead

“But. .” She shook her head, not understanding. He’d solved Guinevere’s murder, as he had solved so many. But that had been before Hero’s life became inextricably merged with his. “Where did she get it?”

“It seems my mother gave it to her years ago, when they met briefly in the South of France after the Peace of Amiens. Guinevere was still a child at the time, while my mother. .” He replaced the stopper in the decanter and set it aside. “My mother was the mistress of a French general.”

Hero studied his tightly held face. “Do you know where she is now? Lady Hendon, I mean.”

He shook his head. “I’ve hired men to look for her, but the war does rather complicate things.”

Why? Hero wanted to ask. Why are you so desperate to find the mother who sailed off and left you when you were so young? Left you with a man she knew was not your father?

But she realized she knew the answer: He searched for the beautiful, laughing Countess because he still loved her, despite the hurt and anger and sting of betrayal. And because he wanted to ask her which of her many unnamed lovers had fathered the man now known to the world as Viscount Devlin.

“I still don’t understand how Jarvis came to have the necklace,” said Hero.

“I gave it to him. I had no desire to see it again.”

Reaching up, she loosed the necklace’s clasp and held it out to him. “I’m sorry I wore it. I didn’t know.”

He made no move to take it from her. “The portrait Jane Austen told you about; did she mention where she’d seen it?”

“A place called Northcott Abbey, near Ludlow.”

“Ludlow?”

“Yes. Why?” she asked. And then, as soon as she said it, she realized why: Jamie Knox, the Bishopsgate tavern keeper who looked enough like Devlin to be his brother, was from Ludlow.

Devlin simply shook his head, obviously unwilling to put his thoughts into words. But when she laid the necklace on the table beside him, he picked it up.

Jamie Knox was stripped down to his shirtsleeves and chopping kindling in the ancient courtyard at the rear of the Black Devil when Sebastian walked up to him.

He glanced over at Sebastian but kept at his task, the muscles in his back bunching and flexing beneath the linen of his shirt as he swung the axe. “Still looking for your murderer, are you?”

“Yes. But that’s not why I’m here.”

“Oh?”

Sebastian held up the silver and bluestone necklace so that the pendant dangled from its chain. “Have you ever seen this before?”

Knox paused to swipe one forearm across his sweaty forehead, then reached out and cupped the pendant in his left palm, his yellow eyes narrowing. “Not to my knowledge. Why?”

“I’m told it can be seen in a seventeenth-century painting that hangs in the portrait gallery of Northcott Abbey, near Ludlow.”

Knox gave a soft grunt. “And you’re thinking that because I’m from Shropshire, I might’ve seen this painting? It’s a grand place, Northcott Abbey. Last I heard, Lord and Lady Seaton were more than a bit choosy about who they invited inside. Or do you suspect me of having prigged the bobble at some point in my long and varied career?”

“Actually, it once belonged to my mother. An old Welshwoman gave it to her before I was born.”

Knox reached for a pitcher of ale that rested atop a nearby stretch of stone wall, and drank heavily. Then he stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, his breath coming heavy from his labors, his gaze thoughtful on Sebastian’s face. “You ever been to Shropshire?”

Sebastian shook his head. “Not since I was quite young.”

“You have people there?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

A breeze gusted up, filled with the rattle of dead leaves across the ancient paving and the whisper of unanswered questions that had never been asked.

Knox wiped his sleeve across his forehead again. “When I was sixteen, I couldn’t get away from there fast enough. Took the King’s shilling and marched off to see the world, convinced I’d never want to go back. But lately I find myself thinking Shropshire wouldn’t be such a bad place to raise a family.”

“You could still go back. They have pubs in Shropshire.”

Knox’s teeth flashed in a smile as he hefted his axe. “So they do.”

Once, the tavern keeper had told Sebastian that his mother was a young barmaid who’d named three men as the possible father of her child: a Gypsy stable hand, an English lord, and a Welsh cavalry officer. But she died before she was able to tell anyone which of the three the boy resembled.

For Sebastian, the desire to know the truth-the truth about the mysterious man who may have sired them both, the truth about the shared blood that in all likelihood flowed through their veins-was like an open, festering wound. As a boy, he’d grown up with two brothers-or rather, two half brothers, sons of the Earl of Hendon and his unfaithful Countess. Both were long dead. Now Sebastian looked at Jamie Knox and wondered if he were looking at another brother, a third half brother he’d never known he had. It was, Sebastian knew, the real reason he kept coming back here. The real reason the two men kept circling around each other, for he didn’t need to be told to know that Jamie Knox was as puzzled and intrigued as he.

“I heard an interesting tale last night,” said Knox as he turned back to his work, his axe blade biting deep into a new length of wood.

Sebastian watched him free the axe and swing again. “Oh? What’s that?”

“Seems a month or so ago, your Stanley Preston bought a medieval reliquary from Priss Mulligan. Paid a pretty penny for it, he did, only to discover just last week that it’s a fake. And that Priss knew it all along.”

“So what did he do?”

“Went charging over to Houndsditch and demanded his money back. Even threatened to expose Priss to the authorities.”

“When was this?”

“Last Saturday.”

“The day before he was killed?”

“That’s right.”

“How reliable is your source?”

Knox paused to look at Sebastian over one shoulder, his lean face slick with sweat, his expression unreadable. “Very.”

“And how did Priss Mulligan respond to Preston’s threat?”

“She swore that if he so much as thought about going to the authorities, she’d send her lads to strangle Preston with his own intestines and feed what was left of him to the dogs.”

“Colorful,” said Sebastian.

Knox sank his axehead deep into the chopping block and straightened. “She is that-and more.”

Priss Mulligan was winding the key of a mechanical nightingale when Sebastian pushed open the battered door and walked into her shop.

Despite the brightness of the afternoon, the interior was gloomy, the small panes of the front windows thick with the accumulated grime, cobwebs, and entombed dead insects of centuries. Rather than look up, Priss simply kept winding the gilded, jewel-encrusted trinket, and he realized she must keep lookouts posted on the street outside, because she’d obviously known he was coming.

“Back again, are you?” she said, setting the trinket on the counter between them. The nightingale began to sing melodiously, its delicate, gilded wings beating slowly up and down, its tiny beak opening and closing, the jeweled collar around its neck glittering with simulated fire.

“Interesting,” said Sebastian, watching it.

“Ain’t it just? And the jewels are real rubies and sapphires too-no paste.”

“Of course they are,” said Sebastian.

Rather than take offense, she laughed out loud, her small beady eyes practically disappearing into her fat face.

He nodded to the mechanical bird between them. “Where does it come from?”