Chapter 24
“Isaw them,” the shepherd said. “Clear as I’m seeing you now.”
The cottage was low and dark, the fire doing more work than the window, and the shepherd sat across from Henry with his hands wrapped around a cup he had not drunk from in twenty minutes.
He was a solid man, gray at the temples, with the kind of face that had been weathered into honesty.
He had met Henry’s eyes when he opened the door.
He had answered the first four questions without flinching.
Henry sat forward. “What time was it?”
“Past midnight.” The shepherd set the cup down. “I was up the hill with two ewes that had gone off. I came back down the track—the one that runs above the road—and I saw the carriage below.”
“Stopped? Moving?”
“Stopped.” He frowned. “Or—nearly stopped. It was moving slowly. The horses were wrong, I thought. Not behaving right.”
“And the people?”
“Two. On the road beside it.”
“Can you describe them?”
The shepherd looked at the fire. Then he looked at Charlotte, who was sitting slightly back from the hearth, her hands in her lap, saying nothing. Then he looked at Henry again.
“A man,” he said. “And a woman.”
“The woman.” Henry kept his voice even. “Describe her.”
The shepherd picked up his cup then put it down. “Fine clothes,” he said. “Not—not working clothes. Quality.”
Henry went very still.
“She was walking away from the carriage,” the shepherd said. “Before it went over.” He stopped. “Before I thought it went over. I heard something later. Down in the gorge. I didn’t go to look.”
“Before the carriage went over,” Henry repeated. “You are certain of that?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“You did.” Henry leaned in another inch. “Which direction was she walking?”
The shepherd opened his mouth. Then he closed it.
“North? South? Toward the road or away from it?”
“I—” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Away, I think. Or it might have been—look, it was dark.”
“But you saw the clothes clearly?”
“I said fine clothes. I said that.”
“And the man? Was he with her?”
“He was—” A pause. “Near the carriage.”
“Near it how? Beside it? On the box?”
“I don’t—” The shepherd pushed back from the table slightly. “I don’t know. It was dark and I was—I was not—” He stopped.
Something in the hesitation told Henry everything. He waited.
“I was not entirely sober,” the shepherd said at last.
Silence.
“My wife died,” the man said, and the words were very flat, the way a man said things when he was past the crying stage and had arrived at something harder.
“Six weeks before. I was up the hill with the ewes because I couldn’t sleep, and I had had—” He put both hands flat on the table. “Considerably more than was wise.”
Henry sat back.
“I may have imagined some of it,” the shepherd said. “The details. I may have filled in what I couldn’t see.” He looked at his hands. “But there was a carriage. That much I know. And there was a woman. I did not imagine her.”
“The clothes,” Henry said. He could hear his own voice. Too flat, too controlled, the particular quality it took when he was holding something by the edges. “You said fine clothes. Quality clothes. A traveling gown? A pelisse? What color?”
“I can’t—"
“Dark or light?”
“Dark, I think. Or—” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You told the constable she was walking north.”
“Did I? I might have said—"
“You told him north.” Henry’s jaw was set. He pressed on. “You are now saying away from the carriage, which could be any direction. Which is it?”
The shepherd’s eyes went hard.
“I told you what I saw,” he said. “I am not a man to be called a liar under my own roof.”
“I am not calling you a liar. I am asking for accuracy.”
“I have given you accuracy. I have given you everything I have.” He stood. The chair scraped back. “I think you should go.”
Henry stood. He said nothing for a moment.
Then Charlotte said, “Sir.”
She had been so still that the shepherd looked slightly startled when she spoke.
She was on her feet, with one hand resting on the back of her chair, and she was looking at the shepherd the way she looked at Ian when the boy was on the edge of shutting down entirely and she had approximately ten seconds to reach him.
“We are very grateful,” she said. “I mean that sincerely.” She moved toward the door, drawing Henry with her without touching him.
“You have had a dreadful year, and we have come in here asking you to go back through a difficult night. You have answered us honestly and with more patience than we deserved.” She stopped at the threshold and looked back at the shepherd. “I am sorry about your wife.”
The shepherd looked at her. His jaw worked once.
“Thank you,” he said. “For saying so.”
Charlotte nodded. And then they were outside. The door closed behind them. The afternoon was cold and sharp and entirely without mercy.
They walked down the track toward the road. Henry said nothing. The hillside was grey and the wind came in off the moor at an angle that found every gap in a coat. He was aware of Charlotte half a step behind him, not hurrying, not filling the silence.
The constable’s report had said: possible sighting, a man and woman, on foot, western road. Henry had read it standing in his study. He had read it four times.
A woman in fine clothes walking away from the carriage before it went over. That was something. That was specific. That contradicted the assumption that Nathan and Eleanor had both been in the carriage when it went off the road. If Eleanor had been out of the carriage, walking away—
He turned the thought over in his mind.
The shepherd had been drunk. Had been grieving. Had been in the dark on a hillside with two missing ewes, and he had seen something he might have imagined and might not have.
The details shifted every time they pressed, and there was no way to know.
He had arrived at this cottage with the first genuine hope he had possessed in two months.
Henry was leaving with nothing.
Charlotte came up beside him on the road. The carriage was waiting fifty yards ahead, the horses still, the driver on the box.
She did not say it was all right. She did not offer anything that would have required him to answer.
He was grateful for it, and he was too tired to say so, but she seemed to already know that too.
“You almost had it,” Charlotte said.
Henry looked out of the window. The track gave way to road. The hills beyond were the particular grey green of late afternoon in Scotland, the kind of color that made everything look both beautiful and entirely bland.
“I had nothing,” he said.
“You had a woman in fine clothes walking away from the carriage before it went over.”
“From a drunk shepherd who may have imagined her.”
“He may have imagined the details. He did not imagine her.” Charlotte folded her hands in her lap. “He said so himself.”
“He said a great many things. Several of them contradicted each other.”
“Henry.”
He turned from the window.
“I know what it looks like when a man is telling the truth about the part he is certain of,” she said. “He was certain about the woman. Everything else shifted, but not that.”
Henry held her gaze for a moment. Then he looked back at the hills.
“It contradicts the accident report,” he said. “If Eleanor was out of the carriage before it went over—if she walked away—then she may not have been in the gorge at all.”
“Which means she may still be alive.”
“Which means the search has been looking in entirely the wrong place for two months.” His jaw was set. “Which means I should have found this shepherd six weeks ago.”
“You found him now.”
“With a story I cannot use.”
Charlotte said nothing for a moment. The carriage hit a rut and steadied.
“When I was seventeen,” she said, “I asked my father for my mother’s jewelry.
Just one piece. A ring she used to wear on her right hand.
He told me it wasn’t appropriate for the occasion, and I said, what occasion, and he said, any occasion, and I—” She stopped.
“I said nothing. I accepted it. I went upstairs and sat at my writing desk for an hour and did absolutely nothing about it.” She looked at her hands.
“That is not the only time I did that. I did it at sixteen, and eighteen, and twenty-one, and approximately forty times in between. Every time I tried to push back, I found a reason to stop. A reason that felt sensible at the time.”
Henry listened.
“I am telling you this,” Charlotte said, “because failure is not proof that the thing was not worth trying. I failed to stand up to my father for thirteen years and I was not wrong to eventually try. I was only wrong to stop before I had.”
He turned to look at her.
She was not offering comfort. She was offering something more useful than comfort, the plain accounting of a person who had been through a real thing and had come out the other side knowing what it had cost. He recognized it.
He had heard it from her before. He thought he would probably keep hearing it for the rest of his life and it would not get less true with repetition.
“The western road,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You want to pursue it.”
“I want to send men down it who know what to look for now.” She shifted to face him more directly. “Not the accident site. The woman. Where she went, after. If she was Eleanor—if she walked away from that carriage—someone saw her. A crofter, an innkeeper, a farmer. Someone.”
“That could take weeks.”
“Yes.”
“Ian needs us back.”
Charlotte was quiet for a beat. “I know that.”
“Not in four days. Now.” He said it plainly. “He is six years old, and his parents are missing and we have been gone three days and every day we do not return is a day he—” He stopped. His hand pressed flat on his knee. “He needs to see us. That comes before the western road.”
Charlotte looked at him. “You are right,” she said.
“I know I’m right.”
“And I am also right about the western road.”
“You are,” he said. “Which is why I intend to instruct someone else to take it.”
He leaned forward and knocked on the carriage ceiling. The driver opened the hatch above.
“The magistrate’s office,” Henry said. “Before we leave town.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
The hatch closed. Charlotte looked at him.
“The magistrate,” Henry said, “will organize the western road search. He will have local knowledge I do not have, connections I cannot use, and authority that a duke’s money alone cannot buy.” He straightened. “I intend to supply the money regardless.”
Charlotte said nothing. But the set of her shoulders had changed.
* * *
The magistrate was a careful man. He received Henry in his office with the wary attention of a local official who has just been presented with a duke and is deciding how much trouble this represents.
“The western road,” Henry said. “From the accident site to the next three parishes north. Every crofting community, every inn, every farmstead within a day’s walk of the road. I want people who know the terrain and know the locals. Not men from Edinburgh. People who live here.”
The magistrate made notes. “And you are looking for—”
“My cousin Nathan Drummond and his wife Eleanor Drummond. They might have been injured.” He paused.
“Very well, Your Grace.” The magistrate set down his pen. “This is a considerable undertaking.”
“I am aware of that.” Henry took the folded notes from his coat and set them on the desk. “The first sum covers the search. The second covers any reward for information that leads directly to the individuals. You will send word to my London address the moment anything is found.”
The magistrate looked at the notes. He did not reach for them immediately.
“You have my full confidence,” Henry said. “And my full backing. Whatever you need.”
The man reached for the notes.
* * *
They were two hours out of town before either of them spoke.
The hills had gone to shadow, the last of the light sitting on the ridgelines and nowhere else.
The carriage was warm. Charlotte had her head slightly bowed, her eyes on the dark window, and Henry sat across from her with the folded remnants of his London correspondence and nothing useful to do with any of it.
He looked at the hills.
A woman in fine clothes, walking away from the carriage before it went over.
He turned it over. He had been turning it over since the cottage.
The weight arrived without announcement.
Soft. Real. On his shoulder.
He turned his head.
Charlotte was asleep. Her head had dropped against his shoulder in the even, uncalculated way of someone who had been exhausted for three days and had finally run out of resistance. Her breathing was slow. One hand had fallen open on her lap.
Henry sat very still.
He thought about moving. He thought about the return journey and the magistrate and the western road and the woman in fine clothes. He thought about Ian, at Sappherton House, holding his wooden horse.
Henry stopped thinking. He lowered his head gently and rested it against hers.