A Lady of His Own (13 page)

He knew the track; it remained narrow for all its length, wending this way and that as it tacked between trees and the occasional thick bush. It led to the river mouth, then an even narrower spur angled north, following the river bank. The Smollet cottage had to be along there. He could vaguely remember a rough stone cottage, rather grim, glimpsed from the river through the trees.

Muttering resigned curses, he urged Domino forward, closing the gap, then settled to follow in Penny’s wake. She glanced back; realizing he wasn’t pressing to overtake her, she eased the mare to a safer pace.

Ahead, through a screen of trees, the river glimmered. Penny slowed even more as the track became steeper. It ended in a small clearing above the river; beyond lay lowlying, reed-infested marsh.

Penny swung left onto the even narrower path that followed the bank upriver. Lined on the landward side by a stand of thick trees, it was reasonably well surfaced but barely wide enough for a cart. She cantered along through the shadows, searching for a clearing.

She was almost past the cottage before she realized. Alerted by a glimmer of moonlight on stone, she abruptly drew rein, wrestling the mare to a halt, peering through the trees at a single-roomed cottage—more a hovel—gray and unwelcoming; any paint that might once have brightened the door and shutters had flaked away long ago.

Not a flicker of light shone through the shuttered windows, but it was after midnight.

Charles, coming up hard on the mare’s heels, swore, rearing and wheeling his big gray.

She glanced at him; for an instant, in the silvery moonlight with his curling black hair, he appeared a black pirate on a moon-kissed steed, performing a dramatic maneuver that should have demanded his full attention—yet his attention was fixed on the cottage.

His horse’s front hooves touched ground; Charles urged him under the trees screening the front of the cottage. She turned her mare and followed.

Charles halted under the trees between Penny and the cottage. His senses, honed by years of danger, had tensed, condensed; something was wrong.

He took a moment to work out what. Even at night, even if there was no human about, there were always insects, small animals, always a faint, discernible hum of life. He couldn’t detect any such hum in or around the cottage. Even the insects had deserted it.

He’d seen death too often not to recognize its pall.

He dismounted. “Stay here with the horses.” He tossed his reins to Penny, briefly met her eyes. “
Don’t
follow me. Wait until I call.”

He turned to the cottage, went forward silently even though he felt sure there was no one there. The door was ajar; his sense of foreboding increased.

Glancing back, he saw Penny, dismounted, tying the reins of both horses to a tree. Looking back at the cottage, he put out a hand, pushed the door wide, simultaneously stepping to the side. The door swung inward, almost fully open before it banged on something wooden.

No other sound came from within.

Charles glanced inside. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness, then he saw a form slumped unmoving on the floor.

He swore, scanned with his senses one last time, but there was no one else there, then stepped to the doorway. The smell told him what lay in the cottage wasn’t going to be a pretty sight. He sensed Penny drawing nearer. “Don’t come any closer—you don’t need to see this.”

“What?” Then, more weakly, “Is he
dead
?”

No point pretending. “Yes.”

He saw tinder and a candle on a rough wooden table. Hauling in a breath, he held it, then stepped over the threshold. The wick caught, flared; he shielded the flame until it was steady, then he lifted the candle and looked.

His senses hadn’t lied.

He heard Penny’s sharp, shocked gasp, heard her quit the doorway, slumping back against the cottage wall. His gaze locked on the body strewn like a broken puppet on the rough plank floor, he moved closer, holding the candle up so he could better see.

After a moment, he hunkered down, through narrowed eyes studied the young man’s face.

“What happened?”

He glanced at the doorway, saw Penny clutching the jamb, looking in.

“Is it Gimby?” she asked.

He looked again at the face. “I assume so—from what the old man told us, he’s the right age and build.”

Putting out a hand, he unfurled one of the youth’s slack, crumpled hands, and found the calluses and ridges marking him as one who earned his living from the sea. “Yes,” he said. “It’s Gimby Smollet.”

Again his gaze went to the youth’s face, noting the ugly weals and bruises. He recognized the pattern, could predict where on the youth’s body other brusies would be found—over his kidneys, covering his lower ribs, most of which would be broken. His hands and fingers had been methodically smashed, repeatedly, over some time, hours at least.

Someone had wanted information from Gimby, information Gimby either had refused to give or hadn’t known to give. He’d been beaten until his interrogator had been sure there was no more to learn, then Gimby had been dispatched, his throat cut with, it seemed, a single stroke.

Charles rose, his gaze going to Penny. “There’s nothing we can do, other than inform the authorities.”

Waving her back, he joined her, pulling the door closed on the dead youth, careful to keep buried all signs of the deep unease flooding him.

“He was murdered, wasn’t he?” Penny said. “How long ago?”

A good question. “At least yesterday, possibly the day before.”

She swallowed; her voice was thready. “After we started asking questions.”

He reached for her hand, gripped hard. “That may have nothing to do with it.”

She glanced at him; he saw in her eyes that she believed that no more than he. At least she didn’t look to be heading for hysterics.

“What now? Who should we tell?”

He paused, considering. “Culver’s the local magistrate—I’ll ride over and inform him first thing in the morning. There’s no sense in rousing him and his staff at this hour—there’s nothing anyone can do now that won’t be better done in daylight.” He looked at Penny, caught her eye. “Incidentally, you aren’t here.”

Her lips tightened, but she nodded. She glanced back at the cottage. “So we just leave him?”

He squeezed her hand again. “He’s not really there.” He drew in a breath, filling his lungs with cleaner air, noting the faint breeze rising off the estuary. “Before we go, I want to look at his boats.”

Leaving that to the morning was a risk he was no longer prepared to take. Someone else was there, someone with training similar to his own.

Someone with a background similar to his own.

He didn’t let go of Penny’s hand. Towing her with him, he checked she’d tied the horses securely, then crossed the track to the river. They were both local-born; they knew what they were searching for—a tiny inlet, a miniature cove, a narrow gorge cut by a minor stream—some such would be the Smollets’ mooring place.

They found it a hundred yards upriver, an inlet carved by a minor stream just wide enough for a boat and heavily overhung by the arching branches of the trees that at that spot marched down almost to the river’s edge.

The rowboat, moored to a heavy ring set in a tree trunk, bobbed on the rising tide. A quick glance inside revealed nothing more than the usual fisherman’s clutter—ropes, tackle, two rods, assorted nets, and two lobster pots.

Charles turned his attention to the second boat, hauled up out of the water and lashed to trees fore and aft. One glance and his eyes widened; the old sailor hadn’t been embellishing—the craft was a superb piece of work, sleek and trim. Under sail, it would fly.

Penny had already gone to it. When he came up, she was sitting on a log beside the prow; with one hand she was tracing, it seemed wonderingly, the name painted there.

Charles hunkered down beside her.
Julie Lea
. The name meant nothing to him.

“It’s my mother’s name.”

He glanced at Penny; he couldn’t see well enough to read her eyes. He reached for her hand, simply held it.

“Her name was Julie—everyone knew her as that, just Julie. Only my father ever called her by
both
her names—Julie Lea.”

He stayed beside her, let a few minutes tick by, then rose. “Stay there. I need to search inside.”

Not as easy as with the rowboat; the yacht, for it was that, just a very small one, had a canvas cover lashed over it. The knots were sailors’ knots; he unraveled those at the stern, then peeled the cover back.

Mast, rigging, sails, oars—all the necessary paraphernalia. But he suspected there would be more. Eventually, he found what he was looking for; leaning into the yacht, reaching beneath the forward bench, he pulled out a crumpled bundle of line and material, a set of signals.

Penny saw; she stood, dusting off her breeches as he strung out the line. She came around the boat to peer at the flags, colored squares carrying various designs. “What are they? I don’t recognize them.”

He hesitated, then said, “French naval signals.” He recognized enough to be sure. “Flying these, the yacht wouldn’t need to make actual contact with any French ship, just come within spyglass sight of them.”

Penny reached out and tapped one flag. “And this?”

Charles paused, then said, “You know what that is.”

She nodded. “The Selborne crest.” Drawing breath was suddenly difficult. “How
could
they?”

He regathered the flags, bundling them up. Evenly said, “We don’t yet know exactly what they did.”

She felt her face harden. “Yes, we do. Whenever Amberly gave Papa a secret worth selling, he sent Smollet out to sail close to the Isles, running these signals in sight of some French ship. The flags told the French when and where to send the lugger, and then Papa went out with one of the smuggling gangs and spoke with some Frenchman and gave our enemies English government secrets in exchange for pillboxes. Later, when it was Granville, he sent Gimby to fetch the French—and now Gimby’s been murdered.”

Disgust and revulsion colored her words, the emotions so strong she could almost taste them.

“Actually”—Charles’s voice, in contrast, was cool, his tones incisive—“while your mechanism is almost certainly correct, we don’t yet know what they were passing.”

“Something the French were willing to pay for with jeweled antiquities—you’ve seen the pillboxes.” She looked away.

“True, but—” He thrust the bundled flags into her hands, then caught her arms, forcing her to look at him. “Penny, I know this type of game—I’ve been playing it for the last thirteen years. Things are often not what they seem.”

She couldn’t read his eyes, but could feel his gaze on her face.

His grip gentled. “I need to send a messenger to London—there’s a possibility Dalziel might not have checked. You heard Dennis Gibbs. Your father might have been involved in something deeper than the obvious.”

He was trying to find excuses so she wouldn’t feel so devastated, so totally betrayed by her father and brother. It was an actual pain in her chest, quite acute. Charles was trying his best to ease it, but…numbly, she nodded.

She watched while he covered the yacht and lashed the canvas down. Grateful for the dark; grateful for the quiet. She felt dreadful. She’d had her suspicions, not just recently but for years; over the last months, it seemed every few weeks she’d discover something more, uncover something worse that painted her father and brother in ever-more-dastardly shades.

In some distant recess of her mind, she was aware that her deep-seated reaction to the whole notion of treason was tied up with what she’d felt—if she was truthful still felt—for Charles. The idea that her father and brother could, purely for their own gain, have done things that would have put Charles and those like him in danger—even more danger than they’d already faced—rocked her to her core, filled her with something far more violent than mere fury, something far more powerful and corrosive than disdain.

Charles straightened, checked his knots, then tested the ropes holding the yacht. She wondered vaguely at the fate that had landed her there, a hundred yards from her brother’s fishing friend who’d almost certainly been murdered for his part in their scheme, with the evidence of their perfidy in her hands—and it was Charles beside her in the night.

“Come on.” He lifted the signals from her, took her arm. “Let’s go home.”

He meant the Abbey, and she was glad of it. Wallingham Hall was her home, yet her thoughts of her father and Granville were presently so disturbing she doubted she’d find any peace there.

Reaching the horses, Charles tied the signals to his saddle, tossed her up to hers, then mounted and led the way, not back but on. A little farther along, the river path connected with another wider track leading back to the Lostwithiel road.

They clattered into the Abbey stable yard in the small hours. Again Charles waved his stableman back to his bed. Catching the mare’s reins, he led both horses in and turned them into their stalls.

Penny went to unsaddle, only then realized she was shaking. It was, apparently, one thing to speculate and wonder, even to acknowledge and investigate, but quite another to find a recently murdered henchman along with indisputable proof of her father and brother’s complicity in treason.

Her mind felt battered, oddly detached. Dragging in a breath, she held it, and forced her hands to work, to unsaddle the mare and rub her down.

Charles glanced her way, but said nothing.

When he finished with his horse, he came to help her, without a word taking over rubbing the mare down. She relinquished the task, checked the feed and water, then leaned against the side of the stall and waited.

He’d left the tangle of signal flags on top of the stall wall. From amid the jumble, the Selborne crest mocked her. She turned away.

Charles came out of the stall, shut the door, picked up the flags, with his other hand took hers. They walked up to the house and entered through the garden door; in the front hall, he tugged her away from the stairs. “Come into the library.”