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“Yes, but that is hardly the same.”
“I think it is exactly the same. I intend to go over every letter my sister wrote before she died and look for clues.” Corrie glanced up, a fierce light coming into her eyes. “Then I shall leave for the country. I’m going to find out who fathered Laurel’s child, and then I will know where to start looking for the answers to how and why she died.”
Learning the name of the father was an important piece of the puzzle, the man her sister must have loved. Not even Aunt Agnes knew who he was. According to her, Laurel had adamantly refused to divulge his identity.
“You don’t need to worry about the gazette,” Corrie continued before Krista could speak. “I already have a temporary replacement in mind. Assuming you approve, I shall ask Lindsey Graham to fill in for me while I am away.” Lindsey was a school chum, a former classmate at Briarhill Academy, where Krista and Corrie had met.
“Lindsay is currently penning textbook articles,” Corrie said, “and extremely bored, I think. Her father is a baron and very well connected so she is able to move freely about in society. I believe she will handle my job very well.”
“I imagine she could, but—”
“Actually, I considered hiring Lindsey while you and Leif were gone off to his dreadful island.” Corrie smiled. “Running this place without you was a nearly impossible task. I have never been so happy in my life to see anyone return.”
Leif and Krista’s story was a well-guarded tale. That the big man and his brother had come from an uncharted island far north of Scotland where people still lived as Vikings was, at best, totally incredible and better left unsaid.
All that mattered was that Leif had found Krista and she had found him, and they loved each other desperately. Corrie wondered if the right man would ever come along for her.
Which returned her thoughts to her sister. In Laurel’s early letters from Selkirk, she had mentioned meeting a man. She had described his many virtues and said how much she enjoyed his company. Corrie intended to review the letters, see if there might be a description, something that might help her find out his name. Who had stolen Laurel’s heart, taken her virtue, then abandoned her?
Corrie wondered if the man who had fathered Laurel’s child would have gone so far as to murder them.
“You can’t be serious, Coralee. Tell me you do not intend to dredge up this painful affair all over again.” Agnes Hatfield sat on the rose velvet settee in a small salon near the back of the Whitmores’town mansion, a room done in white and rose, an elegant, feminine salon that overlooked the garden. Three days ago, the black crepe strung round the room had been removed after three long months of mourning.
“I realize it will take some doing, Aunt Agnes, but I have given the matter considerable thought and I have no choice but to act.”
Aunt Agnes, which Corrie had always called her though they were not actually blood-related, was a lady in her sixties, plump and silver-haired, and until the death of her beloved niece, always smiling. Seated next to her, Laurel’s cousin, Allison Hatfield, a thin young woman with a razor-straight nose and pointed chin, very dark hair and hazel eyes, listened to Corrie with obvious trepidation. Allison’s parents had died of cholera, leaving her in the care of her aging aunt.
At the viscount’s invitation, both of the women had elected to remain in the city rather than return to Selkirk Hall and the awful memories the place still held for them.
“So you intend to begin some sort of investigation?” Aunt Agnes asked.
“Yes.”
Allison made no comment. She was a shy, unobtrusive young woman rarely inclined to disagree with anything anyone said. Which was perhaps the reason she had agreed to leave East Dereham and accompany Laurel on her return to Selkirk Hall, pretending to be the baby’s mother.
Or perhaps it was because Allison was tired of scraping by on her aging aunt Gladys’s generosity, and Laurel had promised her a goodly sum and a better future in exchange for her help with the child.
“I do not believe for an instant the authorities’ version of what occurred,” Corrie said, “and after months of consideration, I have decided to act. I plan to take whatever steps are necessary to discover the truth of what happened to my sister. Aunt Agnes, you and Gladys helped Laurel. Now you must help me find out what happened to her and her baby.”
Allison pulled a lace-trimmed handkerchief from her reticule and dabbed at her eyes. She had been as fond of Laurel and her month-old infant, Joshua Michael, as Agnes, who also dug out an embroidered square of cotton and blew her powdered nose.
The older woman took a fortifying breath. “I will help in any way I can…though perhaps my helping your sister is what, in the end, got her killed.”
Corrie’s eyes widened. “So you do not believe it was suicide, either! And if she did not take her own life, someone must have killed her. Laurel and the child were victims of foul play. It is the only explanation.”
From her place on the rose velvet settee, Allison’s soft voice whispered across the room. “There is a chance… I cannot say for certain…but it is possible that Laurel may have been meeting someone the night she disappeared. She wouldn’t tell me where she was going, but she was excited. I didn’t realize she had taken the baby until later, when I went into the nursery and saw his cradle was empty.”
Corrie felt a rush of sadness that brought the sting of tears. She purposely leaned into the stiff bone stays of her corset, and the tiny jolt of discomfort set her back on course. “Please…we must try to stay focused.”
Agnes blew her nose. “You are right, of course. We have all cried more than enough. And we can hardly find justice for my dear, lost angel by sitting here weeping.”
Corrie’s gaze fixed on dark-haired Allison. “Did you tell the authorities that Laurel might have been meeting someone the night she died?”
“It didn’t seem important at the time. The constable said she had jumped into the river. The week before it happened, she had been a bit distraught, though she wouldn’t tell me why. When the constable arrived with the terrible news, I thought perhaps… I accepted the constable’s explanation for what had occurred.”
Corrie made a mental note to find out what had upset her sister the week before her death. “You’ve had three months to consider, Allison. Do you still believe Laurel killed herself?”
She shook her head. “At the time, I was so distressed I could scarcely think straight. Laurel and baby Joshua were gone and nothing else mattered.”
“Well, it matters to me,” Corrie said. “And it would matter to Laurel. Are you certain, Aunt Agnes, my sister gave no clue as to the name of the man who fathered her child?”
“None whatsoever. I’m an old woman. I paid little attention to my niece’s comings and goings.”
“What about men who might have paid calls at the house?”
“Oh, there were a few who stopped by now and then. Squire Morton’s son Thomas paid an occasional visit. The vicar’s son…oh, dear, what is his name? It will come to me in a moment…. At any rate, the boy stopped by on occasion, as well.”
“Anyone else?”
“Well, yes. Castle Tremaine is nearby.” In fact, it was the estate closest to Selkirk Hall. “Lord Tremaine paid his respects whenever he was in residence, occasionally accompanied by his cousin. His brother, Charles, and his sister-in-law, Rebecca, paid an occasional call, and they always stop by at Christmastime each year.”
Corrie frowned as bits of information came together in her head. “Lord Tremaine, you say?”
“Well, yes. He always calls at least once when he is in the country, but he never stays overly long.”
Grayson Forsythe, Earl of Tremaine. The name stirred memories of the man who had come into the Tremaine title five years ago. Corrie had never seen the earl, who seemed to keep a good deal to himself, but she had heard he was tall and incredibly handsome. The man had a wicked, extremely sordid reputation when it came to women, and in her gossip column, “Heartbeat,” Corrie had alluded more than once to rumors of his many affairs.
And if memory served, the earl was often in residence at Castle Tremaine, where his brother and sister-in-law made their home.
“I can see what you are thinking,” Agnes said. “I will admit the earl is attractive, but he is also a dark, rather brooding sort of fellow. I cannot imagine your sister would be interested in a man like that.” She glanced away. “Laurel was always so bright and fun-loving, such a warm-hearted, spirited young girl.” Her eyes teared up and she used her handkerchief again.
Corrie felt a crushing weight in her chest. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said, determined not to let her emotions rise to the surface. “But from the gossip I have heard, the man is quite ruthless when it comes to women. I imagine if he wanted to seduce an innocent young girl, it would be easy enough for him to do.”
“Perhaps.” Agnes fought to bring her own emotions under control. “But I just cannot…” She shook her head, her silver eyebrows drawing together. “His cousin, Jason, is quite dashing. He is also in residence much of the time. I suppose if I were to guess—” She broke off again. “I am sorry, Coralee, but I simply cannot imagine any of the young men who paid calls at the house murdering our dear, sweet Laurel and her innocent little baby. That is what you are thinking, is it not?”
“It’s a possibility. Perhaps the man she fell in love with did not love her in return. Perhaps he did not wish to be forced to marry her.”
“And perhaps she simply went for a walk that night and was waylaid by footpads. Perhaps they tried to rob her, but when they discovered she had no money, they tossed her and the child into the river.”
It was a notion Corrie had already considered. “I suppose that could have happened. Anything seems possible at this point in time, except that Laurel would kill herself and her child.”
“Coralee is right,” Allison said softly, from where she perched like a bird on the edge of the sofa. “Laurel loved little Joshua with every ounce of her being. She would never have done anything to hurt him. And she was so clearly determined that no one would find out the identity of the father. It does make one wonder….”
Corrie nodded. “It does indeed.”
Aunt Agnes eyed her warily. “I am loath to ask, but I suppose I must. Tell us, Coralee, what exactly is it you propose to do?”
She stiffened her spine. At the moment she wasn’t certain. But she was going to do something. Of that she was completely sure.
Excited at her discovery, Corrie climbed the steps of Heart to Heart and opened the heavy front door. As she walked into the long, narrow printing area, she spotted Krista coming out of the back room, heading for her office. Corrie followed her and hurriedly closed the door.
“Krista—you are not going to believe what I’ve found!”
Her friend whirled toward her, apparently not aware until then that Coralee had entered. “So you are still digging. I know you are determined to come up with something to validate your belief that Laurel was murdered, but are you sure your sister wouldn’t rather you simply accepted her death and got on with your life?”
“They say she killed her own child. Do you believe my sister would want the world to believe she did something as heinous as that?”
“The police found no sign of robbery, Corrie. There were no incriminating marks on the body.”
“She had been in the water for several days when she was found. The constable said it was impossible to tell exactly what had happened, and there was a bruise on the side of her head.”
“Yes, and if I recall, the constable believed she must have hit her skull when she fell into the river. The police believe the baby drowned and simply washed out to sea.”
“And I say the police are wrong. Laurel was killed by someone who didn’t want the secret of the child’s birth known, or had some other nefarious motive.”
Krista sighed. “Well, there have certainly been murders committed for far less reason than preventing some sort of scandal.”
“Yes, and when Agnes mentioned the Earl of Tremaine, I began to think. Some years back, I’d heard gossip about him. He was whispered about at a number of affairs, and I even made mention of his scandalous reputation once or twice in my column. I decided to go back through some of our older editions. Lady Charlotte Goodnight wrote the “Heartbeat” column in the days when your mother ran the paper. I took a look at those.”
For the first time, Krista appeared curious. “What did you find?”
“The articles mentioned the gossip I had heard, said the man was a complete and utter rogue where women were concerned. They called him a ‘sensualist,’ a master of the art of love. Apparently, Grayson Forsythe was a major in the army before he inherited the title. He spent several years in India before his older brother fell ill and he came back to assume his duties as earl.”
Krista smiled. “Sounds like an interesting man.”
“Yes, well, I suppose you might say that. But as I was reading about him, I remembered something else.”
“And that was…?”
“This morning I went down to the magistrate’s office and searched for records filed under his name and there it was—the certificate of his marriage to Lady Jillian Beecher three years past.”
“Now that you mention it, I remember hearing something about that. But Tremaine is a bachelor—one of the most eligible in London. What happened to his wife?”
“That is the point I am trying to make. I did some more digging, spoke to some of my sources, very quietly, of course. I discovered that the earl was married less than a year when Lady Tremaine died. The countess was the daughter of a wealthy baron, an heiress worth a good deal of money. She died leaving the earl with a sizable increase in his fortune—and he was free again, able to continue his sensual pursuits.”
“I don’t think I ever heard the story.”
“I believe the family kept the matter fairly quiet.” Corrie’s eyes gleamed. “And since that is the case, what you also don’t know is that Lady Tremaine drowned, Krista—right there in the Avon River!”
Three
A cool spring breeze floated through the open windows of the carriage as it rumbled toward the village of Castle-on-Avon, a small, picturesque market town surrounded by rolling green fields and thatch-roofed cottages. On a knoll near the edge of the village, Selkirk Hall loomed majestically over twelve hundred acres of rich grassy earth. A structure three stories high, it was built in the Georgian style, of golden Cotswold stone.
Coralee, Aunt Agnes and Allison were returning to the country in Agnes’s carriage, not the viscount’s fancy four-horse rig. Corrie couldn’t risk her father’s coachman telling him she had left the carriage before its arrival at Selkirk Hall. In fact, she meant to depart at the Hen and Raven, a nearby coaching inn, where she would hire a room for the night and continue to her destination as a different person in the morning.
It had been less than a week since Corrie had come up with her outrageous plan. Three days ago, she had presented it to Aunt Agnes and Allison.
“It will work—I know it will!”
Aunt Agnes had twisted her handkerchief in her plump hands. “I don’t know, Coralee…it sounds extremely dangerous.”
“To begin with, no one is going to know who I am,” Corrie explained. “I shall pretend to be Letty Moss, the wife of Lord Tremaine’s very distant cousin Cyrus. Letty is destitute in the wake of her husband’s abandonment, and desperately in need of the earl’s help.” A story that could likely be true.
Corrie had run across the information during her research on the earl and his family. Through a friend who knew a friend who knew one of the earl’s distant cousins—a man named Cyrus Moss—she had learned that Cyrus had left his much younger wife in residence in York and set off for America to make his fortune. After two years, Cyrus had not yet returned.
According to her source, Lord Tremaine had never met Letty Moss and knew little of his very distant cousin. The information gave Corrie the perfect means of getting into Castle Tremaine. Doing so, she believed, was the only way to discover if Lord Tremaine was the father of Laurel’s child, and if so, whether he might be responsible for her and little Joshua’s death.
“It will work, I tell you. It has to.”
Aunt Agnes had fretted and argued, but in the end she had agreed to the plan. If Corrie could discover the truth of what had happened to her beloved niece, then she would go along with her scheme.
Corrie watched the landscape passing outside the carriage window—rolling hills beneath shadowy clouds, an occasional barking dog, a merchant’s cart pulled by a tired-looking horse.
“I don’t see how this can possibly succeed,” Aunt Agnes grumbled from the opposite side of the carriage. “Surely someone from Selkirk Hall or someone in the village will recognize you.”
“I haven’t been to Selkirk since I was twelve years old. Mother and I both prefer London to the country. Whenever Laurel and I wished to visit, my sister always came to the city.”
To distance herself even further from events at Selkirk, Corrie had decided to come out of mourning. She didn’t want anyone connecting her to Laurel’s death, and wearing those dreadful black garments just might put the notion in someone’s head.
Corrie didn’t think her sister would mind. She believed Laurel would rather the truth be discovered than that her younger sister mope about in dismal black, doing nothing to clear her name.
Agnes cast Corrie an inquiring look. “You are determined to discover the truth, but what if that truth turns out to be something you do not wish to learn?”
There was certainly a chance facts would surface that Corrie would rather not know. She would have to trust that Laurel was an innocent seduced into the affair, as Corrie believed she was.
“I’ll deal with that circumstance should it arise.”
“And the danger?” Agnes pressed. “If the earl is truly a murderer, what will stop him from also killing you?”
Corrie waved her aunt’s worry away, though the thought had crossed her mind. “I told you, Tremaine will not know who I am. Besides, if he did murder his wife, he did it for money. And if he murdered Laurel and Joshua, he did it to keep his freedom, or perhaps to protect his family from scandal. As I am merely a destitute relative there for a visit, he would have no reason to murder me.”
“And I will be there with her,” Allison added softly, referring to the role she had agree to play: Corrie’s maid.
“That’s right. Allison will act as my liaison with you should any problem arise.”
Fortunately, during the time Allison had been at Selkirk with Laurel, she had been pretending to be a widow with a newborn child. She had been dressed in mourning clothes and had never gone into the village, which meant she was safe from recognition at Castle Tremaine.
Agnes released a deep sigh. “I hope you two know what you are doing.”
So did Corrie. At least she knew the Earl of Tremaine was in residence at Castle Tremaine, and had been for several weeks. Agnes had told her the man had been at the castle at the time of Laurel’s death, and for several months before that. Lately he seemed to be spending even more time in the country.
Perhaps he had found a new victim on whom to ply his seductive skills.
Ignoring her companions, Corrie turned to look out the window and caught sight of the inn up ahead, the Hen and Raven. A tremor of nervous anticipation flitted through her. She was still gowned in black, her face hidden beneath a veil of black tulle, and would be until she left the inn on the morrow.
Then she would be dressed in the clothes of a gently reared young woman fallen on hard times, clothes Allison had collected from the local rag merchant: several slightly worn traveling suits, well-worn muslin day dresses, and a number of unimpressive but serviceable dinner gowns with barely frayed cuffs and soiled hems.
Though the gowns were not at all the sort she was used to wearing, in a way Corrie didn’t mind.
