“She?” She took another bite.
His little chin went up and down. “The lady. A…a countess, she were. Thrown off the cliff and murdered.”
Her blood surged. The bite of apple stuck in her throat and all around her the world stopped, only the crash of the distant waves and Chestnut’s earthy breath breaking through her consciousness. She steadied herself against the horse and managed enough saliva to swallow. “Murdered?” Her voice sounded hollow, even to her.
“Aye. ’Afore I was born.” The boy’s tension seemed to ease. “You’d not heard? You’re not from here.”
“No.”
“Everyone here knows. You didn’t know?” A cocky note had crept into his raspy voice, and all of his unease transferred to her.
Her mother had not died in a tragic accident. She’d been murdered.
Her pulse pounded in her ear. Who else knew of this? Surely her father did. And probably her brothers. And maybe Fox. And no one had bothered to tellher?
He cocked his head and eyed her speculatively. “Not going to keel over, are you?”
Keel over?This was a rude little man.
Well, she had weathered worse than this among theton, and she needed information. “You’ve startled me, boy.” She threw away her apple core and pulled out a cloth-wrapped stack of the biscuits that had dried out overnight. “Come along and have a biscuit with me, and tell me this ghost story, and then you may have my last apple, and perhaps Chestnut will feel comfortable enough to eat hers.”
Still holding the reins, she unwrapped her package, took a biscuit, and offered him one.
He came close enough to accept one. A little thing, he was, thin, but not starved, with a face strained with too much worry for a child. She wondered if it was all due to the fright she’d given him.
“Now. You may call me Lizzy. What shall I call you?”
His chewing stopped. He frowned, chewed some more, swallowed, and shrugged. “Pip.”
She handed him another biscuit. “Pip. Short for Phillip?”
The boy nodded solemnly.
“A lovely strong name. Tell me this ghost story.”
“There once was a lady who lived there in Gorse Cottage—not allus, only sommat time she visited, see. But on one of her stays, late one night, someone came and threw her over the cliff and bashed her brains out all over the rocks.”
Her stomach flipped again and a tingling started in her hands.
He finished his biscuit. “And not just her, her maid and her coachman too.”
Fire roared through her, followed by rivers of ice, spots dancing in her vision.
Must not faint, Perry. Must not.She made her voice calm. “Who would do such a horrible thing?”
He lifted a shoulder and eyed the napkin. She gave him another biscuit. “No one ever says who, least not around me.”
“But they know who?”
His brows drew together. “They’re scared.”
Her skin rippled. If they were scared, then the murderer was still alive and around. “I see. Do they know why she and her people were killed?”
“On account of the French, sommat said, but Gram says no Frenchies landed here and none ran around here without us knowing. No one comes through Clampton without us seeing.”
“I did.” But she’d taken a side road that skirted the town, and she’d made that stretch of the journey in early dawn.
He studied her. “Mayhap they thought you were her. She comes when there’s a tenant at Gorse Cottage.”
