“There you are,” he said, catching his breath. “I’ve been to the Historical Society. Tresham gave me a list of Bath solicitors who handle estate clearances. One shows on Celeste’s receipt: Jasper Pierce. He closed his practice last year. Rumor puts him at Lammer Cove.”
“Lammer Cove?” Leticia repeated. “That’s a mile from my aunt’s seaside cottage.”
Felix nodded. “He was seen at Lammer Inn two days ago.”
Gabriel looked from her to Felix. “We could be there by nightfall. We’ll tell Barrington on the way.”
Plans moved quickly. Lady Eastbury sent word to her staff at the cottage and began her own preparations for the journey. Leticia packed with brisk hands, her mind fixed on the road ahead and on the place she had vowed not to see again, the little cottage where her parents had spent their last summer before the accident. She had not been back in two years. The thought tightened her throat.
When her trunk was closed, her gaze fell to the small box on her dressing table. She did not open it. She only rested her hand on the lid.
“Not yet,” she whispered, and turned away.
Outside, the sky had cleared, clouds scudding over the blue. Leticia climbed into the carriage beside Gabriel, the space between them holding what neither had spoken. The wheels began to turn as the sunlight spilled across the drive. The road to the coast stretched ahead, and for now, it was enough that they faced it together.
Chapter Twenty-Three
They reached LammerCove at the hour when daylight thins and the sea begins to sound like a thought one cannot dismiss. The cottage stood a little above the road with its back to the wind, its slate roof dark with the promise of rain. Sea mist gathered in the hedgerows like smoke, and every gust carried salt and the faint cry of gulls. Lady Eastbury rapped on the door with the authority of an admiral returning to her ship.
It opened almost at once. Brian, the housekeeper’s boy, stood there taller than she remembered, his hair darkened by the damp and a smudge of ash on his sleeve. He blinked, then grinned, the expression pure memory.
“Lady Eastbury. Miss Letty,” he said, ducking his head. “We weren’t certain you’d come before the weather turned.”
“Still quicker than a London footman,” Lady Eastbury said, handing him her gloves.
He bowed and ushered them into the low-ceilinged warmth of the front room, where his mother, Mrs. Benson, was setting the last of the china on the hearth table. Her round face brightened at the sight of them, and she dried her hands on her apron before bobbing a curtsey.
“Fire on, tea coming,” Mrs. Benson declared. “Storm’s rolling in fast, my lady. Best not to linger in it.”
Leticia’s throat tightened. The familiar scent of peat smoke and lavender polish carried her back to summers when she’d run through this very room with seaweed in her pockets and Mrs. Benson chasingafter her with a towel.
Leticia stepped aside to allow Gabriel through. He filled the doorway, rain darkening the shoulders of his coat, the scent of wet wool mingling with smoke. He paused in the threshold a moment longer than necessary, his gaze sweeping the lane, the stubbled fields, the curling path toward the beach. The air carried that metallic tang before a downpour, and below, waves leaned hard into rock and fell back with a mutter.
Lady Eastbury shook the damp from her gloves. “I should like a look at the garden before it’s pummeled to bits,” she said briskly. “Ten minutes, Leticia. No longer. Lord Ashcombe, you may scowl at the horizon from the path like a proper baron if it pleases you.”
“It rarely does,” he said, but his mouth tugged faintly.
They stepped out together, three dark shapes against the paling sky. The cottage garden, tidy in summer, now looked like a creature bristling for weather. Leticia breathed the salt and the damp and experienced that curious steadiness that sometimes came to her before a crisis, when the world narrowed and every unnecessary thought fell away.
At the lane, she glanced back. A man stood where the road bent toward the dunes. His hat was pulled low, his coat collar high. Recognition pricked. She had seen him once before at the Historical Society, near the jewel cases. Tonight, he tipped his brim and turned away as if admiring the clouds.
“Do you know him?” she asked lightly.
Gabriel’s eyes flicked toward the bend and back. “No, but I know his type.”
“Which is?”
“The observant sort.” He offered his arm so Lady Eastbury could take the steadier portion of the path. “I prefer to let the observant feel unobserved.”
Lady Eastbury sniffed. “I prefer my observers invited to tea andmade to speak sensibly.”
A spit of rain pricked Leticia’s cheek. The path widened at the cliff’s shoulder, and the cove opened below, a scooped arc of shingle and black rock cleft by a ribbon of violent white water. Farther out, the sea wore a hard new color, blue hammered with iron. Wind hissed through the grasses, flattening them in uneasy unison.
“There,” Gabriel said quietly.
A figure moved swiftly across the lower stones, a dark smudge slipping behind a jut of rock. Even at this distance, she recognized the set of his shoulders, the same man from the bend, moving with deliberate urgency, as if late to an appointment.
“Fisherman?” Lady Eastbury offered.
