“Excuse me, but it’s Lady Quinlan, isn’t it?” Sebastian said, lifting his hat. “I was wondering if you could tell me the name of the gentleman undertaking today’s ascension.”
“The ‘gentleman’ is actually a woman,” said Lady Quinlan, indicating the tiny birdlike creature in a feathered cap and narrow skirts who was darting about the balloon’s wicker cage and inspecting the cables that held the apparatus moored to the ground. “The famous French aeronaut Madeleine-Sophie Blanchard. But you’ve no need to dissemble, my lord. I know you’re looking into the circumstances surrounding my half sister’s death.” She smiled with a grim kind of satisfaction at his temporary discomfiture before adding, “Lady Portland told me.”
Sebastian tipped back his head, his eyes narrowing against the sun as he watched the balloon swell with hot air from the fire, the red-and-yellow silk brilliant against a deep blue sky. Guinevere was a childhood friend of my wife, Claire, Portland had said. It made sense that Lady Portland would be in contact with Guinevere’s sister, as well.
“I can’t imagine how you might think I could help,” Lady Quinlan continued, her gaze, like Sebastian’s, on the billowing silk above them. “Guinevere and I were never close, even as children.”
He glanced over at her. “Were there so many years between you?”
She shrugged. “Three. Which can be significant when one is dealing with children. But even if we had been born nearer together, I doubt we would have been close. We had little in common. I was always interested in my studies, whereas Guinevere…” She hesitated, then ended dryly, “Guinevere was not.”
“What interested Lady Guinevere?”
“The cliffs above the sea. My father’s horses. The workings of the abandoned mines in the hills behind Athelstone Hall…in short, everything but the information that could be found between the covers of a schoolbook. She roamed the countryside as freely as if she were some cotter’s child.”
“Or a boy.”
Morgana turned her head to meet his gaze. “Or a boy. She was always headstrong. I suppose it was easier for our governesses to simply let her go than to try to fight with her.”
Of course it would be easier, Sebastian thought. But what of the Earl of Athelstone, her father? Hadn’t he cared that his eldest daughter was left to run wild? Or had he been content to delegate the rearing of his daughters to their governesses and to that sad procession of stepmothers doomed to die one after the other in childbirth?
“I’m afraid she grew accustomed to it,” Morgana was saying. “Accustomed to doing as she pleased and thinking she could order her life as she chose. Marry as she liked.”
“Whom did she wish to marry?”
Morgana let out a huff of scornful laughter. “Someone most unsuitable. Such a fit she threw, when she learned Papa meant to send her to spend the Season with our aunt here in London. Guinevere swore she’d never speak to him again, and she didn’t, either. Even when Papa lay dying and was asking for her, she refused to go to him.”
“Because he forced her into marriage with Anglessey?”
“No one forced her. Anglessey was her own choice.” Lady Quinlan gave the black skirt of her mantua walking dress a little shake. “She always claimed she couldn’t forgive Papa for refusing to allow her to marry where she wished. But if truth were told, I think what she really couldn’t forgive him for was favoring Gerard over her.”
“Gerard?”
“Our young brother.”
Sebastian studied the woman’s closed, hard face. “It didn’t trouble you?”
A confused frown creased her forehead. “Of course not. Why would it? All men favor their sons. It’s the way of the world. But Guinevere could never accept that. She was so naive, so idealistic.” Her lips quivered with disdain. “A fool.”
Sebastian glanced away again, across the crowded, sun-scorched clearing to where the cooling shimmer of a canal could just be seen in the distance. What had happened, he wondered, to produce such animosity, to make Morgana hate her sister so much that even now, in the aftermath of Guinevere’s violent death, there was no softening, no flicker of either affection or regret?
The balloon was nearly full, the silk stretched taut, lifting the wicker cage from the ground and straining at the moorings. The little Frenchwoman, Madame Blanchard, was in the basket, making last-minute adjustments to the flap that would allow some of the gas to be let off and help her control the balloon’s ascent.
Sebastian kept his gaze on the balloon. “This man your father refused to allow your sister to marry…who was he?”
Sebastian half expected Lady Quinlan to be reticent, but she answered him readily enough. “Alain, the Chevalier de Varden. He’s the son of Lady Audley from her first marriage. To a Frenchman.”
Sebastian had heard of the Chevalier, a dashing young man with a quick temper and a ready laugh who was well liked about Town. He turned to look at Morgana in surprise. “Varden was considered unsuitable?”
“Of course. The family’s good enough, to be sure. Better, actually, than that of Guinevere’s mother. But Varden himself is penniless. Everything he would have inherited was lost in the Revolution.”
There was something about the sneering tone of her reference to Guinevere’s mother that piqued Sebastian’s interest. “Tell me about Lady Anglessey’s mother.”
Again, that condescending little laugh. “Guinevere herself was quite proud of her mother’s family.”
“Why shouldn’t she be?”
Morgana sucked in her cheeks in a way that made her look older—and more disagreeable—than before. “Her mother, Katherine, was not from the best of families. They say her great-grandmother was burned at the stake as a witch.”
It was one of the dirty little secrets of Western Christendom, the witch-burning craze—an outpouring of hatred and suspicion that had twisted itself around until it found a safe target in society’s weakest members—women. He’d heard it said that before the witch-hunting frenzy died down, some five million women had been burned at the stake across Europe. There were some villages where the hysteria ran so high that when it was over, not a woman was left alive.
“If it’s true,” he said, staring out over the perspiring, sun-dappled crowd, hushed now with a mutual breathless anticipation as Madame Blanchard secured the door of her little wicker boat and snuggled into a warm coat, “then it’s an indictment of those responsible for her death, rather than of the poor woman herself.”
Someone shouted, “Let ’er go!” The balloon’s moorings were cut loose and a great cheer arose from the crowd as the silken ball lifted straight up, soaring high above the treetops.
“Perhaps,” said Morgana, her gaze, like his, on the rising sphere. “Although her grandmother was said to have been a witch, as well. They say she bewitched no less a person than the King’s son and contrived to have a child by him.”
Some six or seven hundred feet overhead, the balloon caught a current and began to drift rapidly away to the west, the sun bright on its taut silken skin, the basket with its little Frenchwoman growing so small as to become nearly indistinct. Watching it, Sebastian knew a strange sense of dislocation. There was a roaring in his ears and his cheeks suddenly felt flushed, as if he were hot. “Which prince?” he asked, although he knew the truth even before she answered him. Knew it, deep in his gut where all certainty lies.
“James Stuart. The one who later became James the Second.”
Chapter 18
“It must be a coincidence,” said Paul Gibson some half an hour later. “What can James the Second possibly have to do with that poor young woman’s murder?”