Page 2 of Loyalty (The Chaplain’s Legacy #5)

CORLAND CASTLE, NORTH RIDING: JUNE

M urder!

It was hard to believe. Such a thing had never happened in this remote part of Yorkshire, and to have such an occurrence here, in Corland Castle, in the very home of the Earl of Rennington, was too much to take in. The Honourable Kent Atherton, third and youngest son of the earl, was the most optimistic of men, always with a light-hearted quip and a smile on his lips, but even he was reduced to silence today.

Only the earl murmured incessantly. “Nicholson was an inoffensive man, would you not say? A chaplain, for heaven’s sake! Who would kill a chaplain, and in so brutal a fashion? An axe! Why an axe? Why would anyone come here with an axe and slaughter a man in his bed? Never anything wrong with Nicholson that would cause anyone to want him dead, one would have thought. Always very kind to my poor sister. Oh, dear God — Alice! Poor, poor Alice, to discover her husband like that. For once, I believe it to be a blessing that she is blind and did not see the worst of it, as we did. My poor sister!”

Kent listened in silence. They were in the earl’s study, one of the corner tower rooms of the castle, the three of them, Kent, his eldest brother, Walter, and the earl, gathered around a small table where the brandy decanter sat. Only the earl was drinking. Walter had abandoned his glass after a couple of sips, and Kent’s lay untouched. The matter was too serious even for brandy.

The afternoon drifted on, and even the earl had lapsed into silence when Eustace, the middle brother, walked in.

“Eustace? Were we expecting you?” the earl said, looking puzzled. Eustace had a modest estate of his own some twelve miles from Corland and rarely turned up without warning.

“No… no, I was just passing. The servants are all of a twitter… has something happened?”

“The most damnable thing,” the earl said. “Nicholson has been murdered in his bed.”

“Nicholson?”

“It is unaccountable, is it not?” Walter said. “Who under the sun would want to murder Nicholson?”

Walter poured Eustace a brandy and gave him all the details of the case. Eustace sat in silence, as stunned by the news as they had been early that morning when Aunt Alice’s screams had woken the household.

“But what is being done? Who is out looking for the murderer?” Eustace said, when Walter’s tale wound to its close.

“Strong and his brother are here, and the coroner fellow — I forget his name,” the earl said, rubbing his forehead tiredly.

“Ashbridge,” Walter said. “A Helmsley man. We have turned it over to Strong, as the magistrate, but he thinks we should bring in outsiders to investigate.”

“Bow Street Runners?” Eustace said with a bark of laughter. “Some ruffian from London?”

“Not Runners. Strong knows some people — clever but discreet,” the earl said. “From Hartlepool.”

“Well, ruffians from Hartlepool, then. It is all the same. The murderer will be long gone by the time they get here, and there will be nothing to investigate.”

“There is the weapon… the axe,” Kent said. “And someone might have heard something, or seen a stranger loitering in the village or staying at the White Horse. There might be traces of blood… there was a lot of blood, brother.”

“A pity I was not here,” Eustace said. “I am a light sleeper, so I might have heard something.”

“So is Kent a light sleeper, and Mother and Olivia,” Walter said sharply, “yet they heard nothing. Besides, if you had been here and heard something and gone to investigate, it would have been you lying in your own blood, brother.”

“That is the one bright spot in this whole dreadful affair,” the earl said. “Nicholson… losing Nicholson is a tragedy, of course, especially for your poor aunt, but it could have been a great deal worse. It could have been one of you, or one of the girls… or several of you, if this fellow had gone on a rampage. We could all have been slaughtered in our beds last night, so let us be grateful for that small mercy.”

No one had anything to say to that hideous thought. The earl reached for the brandy decanter, and the four remained wreathed in gloom, neither moving nor speaking until the dressing bell sounded.

***

T he last notes of the sonata died away. Katherine rested her hands in her lap, savouring the moment. There was always a satisfaction in completing a piece of such length, knowing that she had played it a little better than the previous time. For a few precious seconds, she could almost imagine herself home again, on one of those rare days when there were no immediate tasks requiring her attention and she could sit down to play for a while.

Almost as soon as the thought crossed her mind, she remembered the truth — that Papa was dead, the mill and her home were lost, and she lived now with her Aunt and Uncle Cathcart. She was not unhappy there, she reminded herself sternly, and she had a great deal to be thankful for, but even after three months there were still many days when she found herself in low spirits. On bad days, she could not bring herself to be cheerful at all, and might start or end the day with a few tears for dear Papa and her beloved Branton. On good days, there were no tears and perhaps an hour of solitude in the garden to cheer her.

The very best days, Katherine acknowledged in her heart, were those when she saw Mr Kent Atherton. He never said much to her and had distinguished her with no unusual attention, but his wide smile, mischievous eyes and perpetual good-humour endeared him to her as no one else had ever done. She had no hopes or aspirations there, for as the son of an earl he was far above her in rank, but merely to be in the same room as him was enough to lift her spirits to the point where she would almost call herself happy.

She had no expectation of seeing him that day, for it was usually when they dined out or entertained at Cathcart House, and he was one of those invited. Only twice had she seen him by chance during the day, once when he was riding and did not see her at all, and once as he bowled past in a curricle driven by his brother, when he touched his hand to his hat in acknowledgement of her. By the time she had risen from her curtsy, the vehicle was far down the road, barely visible in the cloud of dust it raised.

Even so, this was a good day, for Aunt Cathcart had taken her three daughters to Helmsley for some serious shopping. Katherine had escaped this fate by pleading that she would like to practise the Salieri, which she would be better able to do in an empty house. She was not fond of the piece, but she was working her way steadily through the small collection she found in the music room, and Salieri’s turn had arrived. Eventually, she would have played them all, and then she would have to dip into her modest allowance to buy more.

If only she could have brought her own collection, but the printed sheets were too valuable to escape the bailiffs’ notice. All she had kept was her own little notebook of Scottish and Irish airs, and very few of those. She wished now she had taken the trouble to transcribe more pieces from her friends’ collections, but there had never been enough time, or so it seemed. Now she had endless time, and only the rather haphazard collection at Cathcart House to sustain her.

Having completed the sonata to her own satisfaction, she donned one of her old pelisses, and a slightly misshapen bonnet, which showed the devastating effect of heavy rain on chip straw. She was not going anywhere which required the new, fashionable clothes Aunt Cathcart had insisted on, so it hardly mattered.

Davis opened the front door for her. “I am going to the rectory,” she said, pulling on her gloves. “I expect to be back by four.”

“Very good, madam,” the butler said, adding, as he always did, “Do you wish John to accompany you?”

“Heavens, no! Not for a ten-minute walk.”

Katherine knew she would be admonished by her aunt for walking alone, but these brief glimpses of freedom were precious to her. Sometimes, in a house that seemed to be constantly full of people and noise and bustle, she felt as if she were suffocating. It was glorious to walk through the gardens and woods, just coming into their summer finery, and enjoy the peace with no chatter from Susan and Lucinda, or Aveline’s slightly supercilious air, or even Miss Harkness’s well-meant remarks.

Katherine was perfectly aware of her status as the poor relation, and did not need to be reminded of it, but Miss Harkness seemed to think she was uneducated, too, and took every opportunity to inform her of the names of plants or insects, or aspects of society of which she might be unaware. It was useless to point out that she had been able to read at the age of four, and had had the run of her father’s extensive library. If she wanted to know of the world around her, she had had all the London newspapers and journals to choose from. How did Miss Harkness think she had spent her evenings? One could not always be darning stockings, after all.

With Aveline, it was money. There had been a tricky moment not long after Katherine’s arrival, when Uncle Cathcart had sat down at the breakfast table and informed them all that he intended to make the same provision for a dowry for her as for his own daughters. Since he was not quite flush enough in the pocket to find another five thousand, his own dear girls would, he was sure, be happy to have a little less. They would all have four thousand a year, he declared, and an allowance commensurate with that.

“That will be a sum of sixteen thousand set aside for you girls instead of fifteen, but I can afford the extra thousand easily. There now, is that not excellent news?”

There was a positive volley of voices disagreeing with him, Aveline’s the loudest. It was quite infamous, she declared, that his own daughters should suffer such an abominable slight in favour of a girl who had no claim on him.

“My own niece, have no claim on me? What are you thinking, Aveline?” he said, his brows ominously lowered. “Of course she has a claim on me when your own mother was sister to Katherine’s mother. Would you have her starve?”

“No, but nor would I have her take my dowry from me when her own father was so improvident as to leave her penniless,” she cried. “It is too bad, Papa, truly it is! You put her on the same level as your own children.”

“And why should I not? It is not Katherine’s fault that her father’s affairs were so perilous.”

“But Papa—!” she began again, but Katherine jumped to her feet in an agony of embarrassment.

“Please… you must not fall out over me,” she whispered. “Uncle, you are generous, but I cannot possibly take your money. A small allowance, perhaps, so that I can buy a new ribbon for my bonnet now and then, but I want no dowry from you. Certainly you must not deprive your own daughters on my account. I could not bear it!”

In the end, after a long family discussion, it had been agreed that Aveline, Susan and Lucinda would keep their five thousand pounds apiece, and Katherine would have the extra thousand pounds and pin money of fifty pounds a year. Even so, Aveline never lost an opportunity to mention the cost of this or that, usually with the added words, “But you cannot afford such items, cousin.”

Aveline had long ceased to trouble Katherine. She understood her own place in the family perfectly well. Uncle and Aunt Cathcart might cling to the pretence that she did not differ from her cousins, and buy her endless clothes and take her into society with them, but Katherine was under no such illusion. Her cousins would marry, and she would not, so in a few years she would be the spinster left at home, looking after her aunt and uncle as they descended into old age. Or perhaps she would act as an unpaid nursemaid or governess to one or other of her cousins when they married. But she herself would never marry.

The thought gave her no pain. She had met the only man she would ever want as a husband, and he was as far out of her reach as the moon. Mr Kent Atherton, for all his affable ways, was an earl’s son, and a younger son, at that. He would marry another scion of the nobility — someone like Lady Esther Franklyn, with centuries of good breeding infusing her veins. He would never marry a mill owner’s daughter, even if she had a substantial fortune to bestow on him, and certainly not for a mere thousand pounds. But his cheerful good humour and friendliness had become her ideal, and she cherished every precious moment in the same room as him. Even if he spoke not a word to her, it was enough to see his wide smile, to hear his light voice, always on the brink of laughter, and to breathe the same air as him. She never approached him — she would not dare! Yet every meeting was treasured and written up in detail in her diary.

Today, she hummed a little as she walked through the gardens. She stopped to admire a few early roses, the blooms heavy with droplets after rain in the night. Passing the gate into the woods, the path was overgrown with cow parsley, and peeping through the leaf litter, the last of the bluebells and primroses, with foxgloves reaching upwards, their lowest blossoms already unfurling.

She wondered who else would be at the rectory that day. Soon after her arrival at Birchall, she had approached Mrs Dewar, the rector’s wife, and asked what she might do to help. At Branton, it had been the Sunday school, but Mrs Dewar and the Miss Dewars had a sewing circle of spinsters and widows, making small garments for the children of the poor families in the parish. Such a project could easily be accomplished by the participants working quietly at home, sewing in odd moments during the day, or taking advantage of the long summer evenings to hem shirts or shifts for the labourers’ children after dinner, but that would be no fun at all. Instead, the ladies gathered in Mrs Dewar’s parlour most afternoons and exchanged the juiciest gossip.

Katherine rather enjoyed sitting quietly in a corner, learning a great deal about the village, both the lower orders and the higher, as she stitched. She was not much interested in the convoluted doings of the labourers, who was sweet on whom, and who was no better than she should be, whatever that meant, but she was endlessly fascinated by any talk of the earl’s family — his elderly mother, whose demise was daily expected, his blind sister, married to the chaplain, and his six children. Two of the daughters had married and left home, and the much-admired heir was betrothed, although there was some tut-tutting over his chosen bride, an heiress worth forty thousand pounds derived from iron foundries.

“Set her cap at him and no mistake,” Miss Dewar said with a disparaging sniff.

“Determined to be a countess,” Miss Bridget Dewar said.

The other ladies shook their lace-capped heads and agreed with it.

Katherine always hoped for some mention of Mr Kent Atherton, but it seemed he did little to attract the notice of the rectory sewing circle, for his name seldom arose. The ladies laughed at middle brother, Eustace, and his rumoured but unspecified misbehaviour, and sighed over the youngest daughter, Lady Olivia, her marital prospects affected by her grandmother’s illness. But it was the chaplain’s daughter, Miss Teresa Nicholson, who reduced the ladies to shocked whispers, for she had formed an attachment for one Tom Shapman, a woodworker in the village, and that was a misalliance that neither the nobility nor the commoners could approve.

There was no prospect of news from Corland Castle today, however, for two days ago there had been an altercation at the White Horse amongst the smith’s extensive family, which had almost resulted in violence. Such an event was likely to occupy the sewing circle for many days to come. Still, one never knew what snippets of information would be let fall, and Katherine knew her aunt would be glad to hear all that was said. She might, and often did, say that she disapproved of all the gossip that went on in Mrs Dewar’s rather shabby front parlour, but she invariably followed such comments with, “And so, has aught happened of interest in the village?”

The path emerged from the cool, damp air of the woods into the summer warmth of the glebe, where the rectory cattle grazed contentedly. There was a good path across the glebe, but cows were considerably larger and heavier than Katherine, and not to be meddled with when they had calves to protect, so she took the footpath which skirted the field, where yarrow, red campion and more cow parsley jostled for position, heads nodding as she brushed past them, dampening the skirts of her pelisse.

As she drew near the rectory, she saw a great crowd gathered outside the church, amongst them Mr Dewar, his wife and daughters. Mrs Dewar was weeping… several of the women were weeping. What on earth had happened?

“Oh, Miss Parish!” cried Miss Dewar, mopping her eyes with a frilly handkerchief. “Have you heard the dreadful news? The poor chaplain at the castle… poor, poor Mr Nicholson… and what he’s ever done to harm anyone I can’t imagine… the poor man!”

“Whatever has happened to him?” Katherine said, trying to remember the chaplain. A man of middle years, very genial… but nothing very distinctive about him.

“Murdered!” Miss Dewar cried, throwing out one arm as if she were on a stage. “Murdered in his bed in the night!”

“And him as blameless and innocent as a babe,” said Miss Bridget. “Such a dreadful thing!”

Dreadful indeed, but Katherine wondered a little just how innocent and blameless Mr Nicholson might be. Nothing justified murder, naturally, for ‘Thou shalt not kill’ was an inviolable law, but if someone had been riled enough to kill, then the blameless Mr Nicholson must have done something to provoke such an attack.