More astonishing revelations. Her mind reeled with them. “She comes here,” she said woodenly.Shewas surely a living woman, and not a ghost.
Could Mama still be alive?
“Drives the tenants away. Will you be eatin’ that last one?”
She handed him the biscuit. Her mother’s ghost came here whenever there was a tenant.
“Is there often a tenant?”
“No. On account of her. And she keeps all the barrels out of her house. Don’t bother with the other buildings though so they—
His mouth clamped shut. Only a child, but he knew the free traders’ code.
“I see.” She stopped and pressed her eyes closed. This was just like one of her father’s schemes, resurrecting her mother to scare smugglers away. And did he know she’d been murdered, or was that merely the wild suspicion of unsophisticated rustics? The road was precarious enough that an accidental death was not out of the question.
“Where you be staying, Lizzy?”
When she opened her eyes, he was watching her, as savvy as any child of the London streets.
Unsophisticated rustics, indeed. The folk in these wild parts had engaged in the free trade for generations. They were cagey, and cool, and clever. Even this child was shrewd. And they were all good with secrets. She had merely frightened one out of him.
She could say she was a guest, at Scarborough perhaps, riding distance from here. And there was that baronet in the neighborhood who might host a guest.
“It is a secret,” she said, buying time. “Come. I’ve given you all my biscuits. Now you must give Chestnut a scratch.”
Distracted, he drew closer. The horse dipped its head, eyed the boy, and nosed him.
“It wants its apple,” he said.
Perry pulled it from her pocket and handed it to him to present, a smile blooming on his lips at the tickle of the horse’s mouth.
The smile warmed her. While Chestnut ate, he lifted a hand to stroke the horse, and Perry felt his delight all the way to her bones.
“I have an idea.” She tossed the reins over the horse’s head and took his hand. “Let’s have a ride.”
She tossed him up into the saddle, found a boulder to mount from, and hoisted herself up behind him. As Chestnut stepped out, the boy’s stiff, startled little body relaxed against her. She nudged the mare into a trot and the boy’s laugh sent a thrill through her.
When Fox entered the inn,the murmurs fell to a hush and then resumed again, more subdued. The groggy-eyed locals had crawled out after a few hours of sleep, done whatever chores their women had forced upon them, and found their way here to get orders from Scruggs.
Nodding a greeting all around, he ordered a pint and looked around for a place to settle. The benches and stools held scattered groups of two or three men. Four other men sat apart at a table, hands gripping their tankards, gazes locked on him.
Outsiders, he’d guess from the glances the locals darted. Carvelle’s reliable men, perhaps. Not likely to worry about a ghost, not likely to talk where locals or another outsider could hear.
No one invited him to join them. Not surprising, since last year a smuggler from this area named John Black had been transported based on the tales told by loose lips.
“May I?” He pulled a free chair from a table where two men sat and dragged it closer to the hearth, dead on this summer’s afternoon. From this vantage point, he could watch the room and the doors, and dip into the conversations bubbling around him. Carvelle was not here, at least, not in this room.
The two men whose chair he’d lifted whispered. One, a sandy-haired fellow, was already drunk. From the yellow tone of his skin, he’d been drunk since last night, or last week, or maybe even last month. The brown-haired friend made shushing noises.
His skin prickled. He recognized that shushing.
Fox nodded to them. “No rain today yet,” he said in his best Eton accent. He was playing a bereaved secretary who’d just come into an inheritance.
The sandy-haired one’s eyes widened. “Ye’re the tenant up at Gorse Cottage?”
“I am.”
Hair lifted along his neck, the ripple continuing down between his shoulder blades. For certain this was the ghost-believing Davy and his shushing friend, the men who knew who had killed Lady Shaldon.
Davy opened his mouth to say more, but the tap room door opened again and another man entered. Just like the others, Fox swung his gaze to him.
