Free Black Heather by Virginia Coffman Page B

murdered. Or he had murdered someone whom he loved ...

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    Meg said c onfidentially, “Old Missus is pretty upset, ma’am. She’s a mind for making you known to her granddaughter. And then, seeing you with Sir Nicholas again, she’s that feared you’ll be stealing th e heart of him from Miss Elspeth. It did no good, me pointing up the feeling ’twixt you and Sir Nicholas.”
    I said, “Really? What did she say to that?”
    “She said any woman with eyes in her head would know good silver from dross.”
    “And which is the baronet?”
    Meg chuckled. “Miss Kate, you are the one! You’d not be knowing the thoughts hereabouts. If it wa’nt for the whispers, many’s the lass would throw her cap at Sir Nicholas. Him being that handsome! And rich, which is even better.”
    Fearing he would hear us, I paused and looked over my shoulder, but he was far up the street, already on the verge of great Heatherton Moor. In another few minutes even his formidable figure would be swallowed in that vast, dun-colored sea. “What are the whispers, Meg?”
    Her elbow jogged me painfully. “Could it be His Worship that popped Miss Megan on the head and then set fire at Hag’s Head?”
    This confirmation of Patrick Kelleher’s hint was rather horrible and lascivious. I wondered why people, especially women, got such wet-lipped pleasure out of reciting such stories.
    I said stiffly, “A silly tale, surely, if he loved Mrs. Kelleher. I should think he would more sensibly kill her husband, in order to win her.”
    Meg shook her head at my naive idea.
    “It wouldn’t be Sir Nicholas, to be doing such things the way of sensible folk. Him with his dark temper and his dark doings at the Hag’s Head.”
    I was fairly perishing to know what “dark doings” the magistrate and justice of the peace was about at the Hag’s Head, but I was ashamed to show my interest, and I departed on this tantalizing note and hurried up the stairs to Mrs. Sedley’s bed-sitting-room.
    My hostess was sitting up in her large white-testered and frilled bed, looking at me a trifle grimly, although she motioned me to a place at the little drum table beside the casement windows. The other place was taken by Elspeth Sedley, immaculate in her pink-sprigged round gown, her exquisite complexion enhanced by the ribbon of pink holding her high-piled curls. If I felt my reception by Mrs. Sedley was cool, the greeting from her granddaughter was indeed frigid.
    “Grandmama prefers to dine at correct hours, Miss Truro.”
    “Miss Bodmun,” I corrected with my largest and, I am sorry to confess, my falsest smile. “You have the wrong town.”
    “When a place is out of England, I take little interest in it,” Elspeth retorted, carefully buttering a scone with a precision that I might have envied in anyone else.
    Since Cornwall was at that time of my life a part of Britain, though yet separated from England, I could find nothing sufficiently biting to say in return and took seat opposite Elspeth, still smiling for all I was worth. Not from me would she learn how her words and manner stung me or that I had not been informed of the change in breakfast habits this morning.
    It was Mrs. Sedley who broke the difficult silence, with a soft, wistful glance at her granddaughter, by murmuring, “Now you have seen her, is she not worthy to be Lady Everett? She has all the femininity and all the careful rearing to support such a position at Everett Hall.”
    “Oh, Grandmama! You promised you would not mention him this morning,” Elspeth complained, but I saw her glance up the street after Sir Nicholas, and I suspected I had her to thank for the talebearing about my second walk to Sedley House with him. I could not guess whether she disliked and suspected him, as she seemed to, or whether this was a mask for a quite different emotion.
    “But dear,” Mrs. Sedley persisted, stiffly and absently rearranging the dishes of breakfast eggs, tea, and ginger moogin on