‘You must find her a horse,’ Adam remarked. ‘Even for an indifferent rider, the skill can be useful in such remote holdings as ours.’
‘You are right, of course,’ Will said, thinking of the placid mare in the stables. He did not wish to see her cooped up in his house, afraid to ask the servants to harness the carriage horses. ‘If you do not wish to ride, I will teach you to handle a pony and cart.’ When she looked at him with trepidation, he added, ‘Then you might take your sister for rides to the village, whenever you want.’
That was the trick, he suspected. At the mention of her sister, her mood changed instantly. ‘Whenever I want,’ she repeated, with a marvelling smile.
‘But today, I hope you are enjoying your morning.’ He leaned forward to kiss her lightly on a cheek which was warm with the flush of embarrassment. ‘The trees are lovely this time of year, don’t you think?’
‘It is most glorious,’ she agreed.
‘The gardens are nice as well. I am surprised to find you here and not touring them.’ Nice as it was, this was hardly the most interesting spot on the property.
She paused for a moment, then admitted, ‘I was reading something, and it put me in a mood to explore.’
‘Really?’ He remembered the stack of old books that had been set out in the library and the probable contents of his mother’s diary. Then a thought struck him and he smiled. ‘Are you chasing ghost stories, my dear? For certainly, if there is a place on the property that is haunted, it must be here, where the murder occurred.’
Perhaps that had not been what she meant. At the mention of death, her face went white as a sheet. ‘Here?’ she said in a breathless squeak.
‘A murder here?’ Now it was his brother who was surprised. ‘I do not recall any such thing.’
‘You were away at school that year,’ Will said. ‘I was kept home. It was the year I had the fever. Mother told me later that she did not write to you for several months. They were dreadfully worried that, if you guessed how sick I was, you would want to come home and they would lose us all.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Adam said, remembering. ‘You could not have been more than eight at the time.’ He looked to Justine, filling in the details of the family history. ‘You are lucky to have your husband. I did not learn until much later that he was near death several times that year. We lost our baby sister as well. The details of that will be found in the family Bible, should you be interested.’
‘I looked,’ she admitted, as though it were some guilty secret. ‘But there was no mention of the other man. The murdered one, I mean.’ Then she added in a strangely cool voice, ‘I should have thought such a thing was worthy of more notice.’
‘The household was far too distraught to deal with the situation as it should have,’ Will admitted. ‘And our mother was an excellent woman, but scatterbrained in such things as record keeping and correspondence. I am not surprised that she did not tell Adam at all.’
‘But you knew of it,’ she said. ‘Even though you were sick.’ She was looking from one to the other of them intently. ‘I gather the robber was not caught.’
‘Robber?’ he said. He could not remember if he had mentioned the circumstances.
She glanced around her. ‘In a place such as this, the motive must have been robbery.’
‘Yes. Of course.’ After so much pretended apathy, it was a surprise that such a gruesome tale drew her interest. Or perhaps it was not so surprising. Will had to admit, this particular story was a mystery to him as well. There was something about it, itching and scratching at the back of his mind. Perhaps it was the effort of looking so far into the past that gave him a pain in his head. ‘I do not remember many of the details either,’ he admitted. ‘I heard only bits and pieces of the story myself and was far too sick to care for most of it.’ Then he smiled, for he was sure this would interest her. ‘But I will tell you one thing that I am sure the family did not write down. I was the one who found the body. I do not remember very clearly.’ He glanced at the others in apology. ‘That seems to be my excuse for so many things lately. But I was near to lost in the fever, the night the crime occurred. My nurse had fallen asleep and I wandered from bed, looking for something to cool me. The doctor had forbidden that I have ice in my water.’ He shook his head, trying to remember. ‘I went through the kitchen, down the hill towards the ice house to get some. It is lucky I did not fall into the river and drown myself, for we are very near to it now.’
‘And you found a dead man?’ Now Justine’s eyes were wide with shock.
‘Or near dead. I seem to remember him speaking to me.’ Will frowned again. ‘Although I cannot remember what it was he said. That was probably part of the delirium. He was quite cold when they found him. It took some time for me to get back to the house, and to persuade the family that there was, indeed, something to find here.’ He glanced around him, pacing off the space. ‘No. Here. Almost exactly. I remember standing beneath this tree and seeing a raven on the branch above me.’
‘A raven,’ Adam said sceptically.
Will shrugged. ‘It was probably another symptom of the fever. The raven screamed and dropped a crown at my feet, then it flew away.’ There was that moment of blankness again, where he felt that there was something important that he should remember, but could not.
Then Adam laughed, ‘You saw King Arthur? In our wood?’
Will looked to his wife again, who was watching him with round eyes, totally confused. ‘Wales is the land of Arthur, my love. If you like fanciful tales, I will read to you of him some night. But there is a legend that he was transformed when he died, and became a raven.’
‘Or was buried in a cave. Or taken to Avalon,’ Adam supplied unhelpfully. ‘There are many stories about what happened to him. But I think we can guess what my little brother was reading, on the night he went wandering in the woods.’
At this, Will laughed himself, then offered up a moment of silence for the poor lost man. ‘And here I am, twenty years later, with a head full of nonsense. But that is all I know of the story.
‘If you are worried, you needn’t be. Adam’s lands are quite safe. Even in my father’s time, such a crime was the exception, not the rule. This is the only instance I can recall where the perpetrator was not captured and dealt with.’
‘You can recall?’ she repeated. For a moment, the look of doubt in her eyes was replaced with a sceptical glint.
It was so out of character with her usual passive nature that he laughed. ‘We both know how well I can trust my memory. But you can trust me when I tell you that you may walk these paths in safety, day or night, and you will have nothing to fear. Now let me take you up into the saddle and I will give you a ride back to the house, so you do not ruin your slippers in the mud, or misstep and slip down the bank and into the pond. The water on this side is clear as glass and very deep. Perfect for swimming in summer, if you enter on the opposite bank, near Adam’s house. But here, it is better for cutting ice. At Christmastime, we will come with skates and you shall see.’
Then he mounted his horse again and scooped his wife up to ride in front of him, so he might point out other, less morbid landmarks of her new home.
* * *
Back in her room, Justine glanced down at the mess she had made of her day dress and slippers scuffling around in the leaves of the forest. She had been a fool to go out before ascertaining the location of her husband and the duke. But in his note, Montague had advised that he would meet her near the oak at the head of the village path, should there be news. Until she was sure that Margot was safe, she must at least pretend to obey and make a daily visit to the spot.
Did he know he was directing her to the very place were the murder had occurred? She shivered again. This had been the first morning in ages where her father’s