Page 12 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)

Later that afternoon, Hero drove out to Moss Grove, the modest eighteenth-century house that served as the refuge of Lady Tess Farnsworth and her lover.

Hero had been only casually acquainted with Tess at the time her scandalous escape from her unhappy marriage led to her banishment from Society. Thanks to their husbands’ friendship, the two women had come to know each other better in recent years. But Hero was still uncertain as to how Tess would react to her visit.

She found her in a corner of the old stone barn, seated cross-legged in a bed of hay with a litter of three gray-and-white kittens nestled in her lap. She wore a pale blue muslin gown with long sleeves and a simple high neck, and even as she looked up from the kittens with a smile, the expression in her eyes remained wary.

“I hope you won’t mind if I don’t disturb them by getting up,” she said as the housemaid who had showed Hero out to her mistress curtsied and withdrew. “Their mother disappeared a few days ago, so I’ve been bottle-feeding them. But the little hussy reappeared this morning acting for all the world as if she’d only been out for an extended stroll, so hopefully they’ll be all right now.”

“How old are they?” said Hero, coming to sit on a nearby three-legged milking stool as one of the kittens lifted its head and yawned.

“Five weeks, I think.”

An awkward silence fell as the two women watched the kittens. Then Hero said, “I came because I thought you might like some moral support. I don’t want you to think I’m here as Devlin’s emissary.”

“No?”

“No.”

The wakeful kitten scrambled off Tess’s lap and scampered toward Hero, who smiled and held out her hand. Tess said, “So tell me, has all of London decided that Hugh and I must be guilty?”

“Not quite all.”

“But most?”

Hero reached to pick up the kitten and cradle him in her arms. “The papers aren’t helping.”

Tess pressed her lips together, her nostrils flaring as she drew a deep breath. “We had Sir Nathaniel Conant out here this morning, you know. He insisted on speaking to Hugh first, alone, then me.”

Hero looked up from the kitten in her arms. “I thought Sir Henry Lovejoy was handling the investigation.”

“He is. But Sir Nathaniel said that as Chief Magistrate he felt it his duty to conduct the ‘most important’ interviews personally.” Tess’s jaw hardened. “In other words, so that he can take credit when he has Hugh arrested.”

“What a beastly man he is.”

Tess nodded. “He actually said he was shocked— deeply shocked— to find me not wearing mourning for Preston. As if I would drape myself in black crepe for a husband I loathed and from whom I’ve been officially separated for six years. I told him I’m not such a hypocrite, and I think that shocked him even more.”

“That I can believe.”

“Ironically, my brother said the same thing when he drove out here yesterday evening.”

“You mean Whitcombe?” Jasper James Haywood, the Fourth Earl of Whitcombe, had succeeded his father to the title shortly after Tess’s marriage to Farnsworth. The new Earl had always been inclined to be dull and stuffy, but since Tess’s fall from grace he’d become insufferably priggish and straitlaced, as if to counteract the opprobrium of his sister’s shameful conduct.

Tess nodded. “Julius is still in France with his regiment, but if he were here, I’ve no doubt he’d wholeheartedly agree with Whitcombe’s mission. They both completely disowned me after I left Preston—told me I could starve to death naked in a ditch as far as they were concerned. Neither one had spoken to me since.”

“So why did Whitcombe come?”

“To suggest—no, insist —that Hugh and I leave the country at once. Preferably by immigrating to America, but, failing that, then at least to take up residence in some out-of-the-way corner of the Continent where we would be unlikely to encounter any stray British tourists. He was quite enraged when Hugh said we were determined to stay and defend ourselves against whatever accusations might come our way. To hear Whitcombe talk, you’d think I’ve made it my sole mission in life to dishonor the Great House of Haywood.”

To Hero’s surprise, a tear welled up to trickle down Tess’s cheek, but she dashed at it angrily with one fist. “Sorry. I didn’t think my family still had the power to hurt me, but in that I was wrong. He even had the nerve to throw Aunt Jane up at me.”

“Aunt Jane?”

A ghost of a smile touched her lips. “My great-aunt, Jane Haywood. She wasn’t received by Society any more than I am, you know. At the age of twenty-eight, when everyone assumed she must have long ago resigned herself to the dull life of an old maid, she up and ran off with a most unsuitable lover and lived with him ‘in sin’ until the day he died. Moss Grove was his home, you see. He left it to her, and then she left it to me when she died. It was shortly after Preston had secured his separation of goods and successfully sued Hugh for all that money, and I don’t know what we’d have done otherwise. He’d had to sell everything, including the small estate he’d inherited from his grandfather, to pay Preston, so we were utterly destitute. I never could understand why Whitcombe simply assumed Aunt Jane would leave Moss Grove to him—I mean, it’s not as if he needed what is really little more than a farm. But he’d always taken it for granted that she would, so he was doubly furious when she left it to me.”

“Because in one fell swoop she deprived him of both the land’s income and the pleasure of seeing you starve to death in a ditch?”

“Basically, yes.” She fell silent, her attention all for the two remaining kittens in her lap, who were now stirring. Then she said, “It looks bad, doesn’t it? Tell me honestly.”

Hero could only nod. “You can’t think of anything—anything at all—that might explain why someone would hang Lord Preston upside down like that?”

“No. But whoever did it must have hated him, don’t you think? Which suggests it was an act of revenge.”

“Who could have hated him that much?”

“Besides Hugh and me?” said Tess, looking up with a soft laugh. Then she drew a ragged breath and looked away again, swallowing hard. “I’m frightened, Hero. I try not to let Hugh see it, but he’s no fool; he knows. And while he’s far better at hiding his thoughts and feelings than I am, the truth is, he’s frightened, too. That’s one of the dangers of ‘counting the world well lost for love,’ isn’t it? The world—or at any rate our own rarified corner of it—will never forgive you for the sin of scorning them. And that means that if an opportunity to make you pay comes along, they’ll seize it.”

Hero nuzzled the soft fur of the purring kitten in her arms, wishing she could reassure Tess; tell her she was wrong.

But they both knew their world.