Heart of Fire

Excited at her discovery, Corrie climbed the steps of Heart to Heart and opened the heavy front door. As she walked into the long, narrow printing area, she spotted Krista coming out of the back room, heading for her office. Corrie followed her and hurriedly closed the door.

“Krista—you are not going to believe what I’ve found!”

Her friend whirled toward her, apparently not aware until then that Coralee had entered. “So you are still digging. I know you are determined to come up with something to validate your belief that Laurel was murdered, but are you sure your sister wouldn’t rather you simply accepted her death and got on with your life?”

“They say she killed her own child. Do you believe my sister would want the world to believe she did something as heinous as that?”

“The police found no sign of robbery, Corrie. There were no incriminating marks on the body.”

“She had been in the water for several days when she was found. The constable said it was impossible to tell exactly what had happened, and there was a bruise on the side of her head.”

“Yes, and if I recall, the constable believed she must have hit her skull when she fell into the river. The police believe the baby drowned and simply washed out to sea.”

“And I say the police are wrong. Laurel was killed by someone who didn’t want the secret of the child’s birth known, or had some other nefarious motive.”

Krista sighed. “Well, there have certainly been murders committed for far less reason than preventing some sort of scandal.”

“Yes, and when Agnes mentioned the Earl of Tremaine, I began to think. Some years back, I’d heard gossip about him. He was whispered about at a number of affairs, and I even made mention of his scandalous reputation once or twice in my column. I decided to go back through some of our older editions. Lady Charlotte Goodnight wrote the “Heartbeat” column in the days when your mother ran the paper. I took a look at those.”

For the first time, Krista appeared curious. “What did you find?”

“The articles mentioned the gossip I had heard, said the man was a complete and utter rogue where women were concerned. They called him a ‘sensualist,’ a master of the art of love. Apparently, Grayson Forsythe was a major in the army before he inherited the title. He spent several years in India before his older brother fell ill and he came back to assume his duties as earl.”

Krista smiled. “Sounds like an interesting man.”

“Yes, well, I suppose you might say that. But as I was reading about him, I remembered something else.”

“And that was…?”

“This morning I went down to the magistrate’s office and searched for records filed under his name and there it was—the certificate of his marriage to Lady Jillian Beecher three years past.”

“Now that you mention it, I remember hearing something about that. But Tremaine is a bachelor—one of the most eligible in London. What happened to his wife?”

“That is the point I am trying to make. I did some more digging, spoke to some of my sources, very quietly, of course. I discovered that the earl was married less than a year when Lady Tremaine died. The countess was the daughter of a wealthy baron, an heiress worth a good deal of money. She died leaving the earl with a sizable increase in his fortune—and he was free again, able to continue his sensual pursuits.”

“I don’t think I ever heard the story.”

“I believe the family kept the matter fairly quiet.” Corrie’s eyes gleamed. “And since that is the case, what you also don’t know is that Lady Tremaine drowned, Krista—right there in the Avon River!”

Three

A cool spring breeze floated through the open windows of the carriage as it rumbled toward the village of Castle-on-Avon, a small, picturesque market town surrounded by rolling green fields and thatch-roofed cottages. On a knoll near the edge of the village, Selkirk Hall loomed majestically over twelve hundred acres of rich grassy earth. A structure three stories high, it was built in the Georgian style, of golden Cotswold stone.

Coralee, Aunt Agnes and Allison were returning to the country in Agnes’s carriage, not the viscount’s fancy four-horse rig. Corrie couldn’t risk her father’s coachman telling him she had left the carriage before its arrival at Selkirk Hall. In fact, she meant to depart at the Hen and Raven, a nearby coaching inn, where she would hire a room for the night and continue to her destination as a different person in the morning.

It had been less than a week since Corrie had come up with her outrageous plan. Three days ago, she had presented it to Aunt Agnes and Allison.

“It will work—I know it will!”

Aunt Agnes had twisted her handkerchief in her plump hands. “I don’t know, Coralee…it sounds extremely dangerous.”

“To begin with, no one is going to know who I am,” Corrie explained. “I shall pretend to be Letty Moss, the wife of Lord Tremaine’s very distant cousin Cyrus. Letty is destitute in the wake of her husband’s abandonment, and desperately in need of the earl’s help.” A story that could likely be true.

Corrie had run across the information during her research on the earl and his family. Through a friend who knew a friend who knew one of the earl’s distant cousins—a man named Cyrus Moss—she had learned that Cyrus had left his much younger wife in residence in York and set off for America to make his fortune. After two years, Cyrus had not yet returned.

According to her source, Lord Tremaine had never met Letty Moss and knew little of his very distant cousin. The information gave Corrie the perfect means of getting into Castle Tremaine. Doing so, she believed, was the only way to discover if Lord Tremaine was the father of Laurel’s child, and if so, whether he might be responsible for her and little Joshua’s death.

“It will work, I tell you. It has to.”

Aunt Agnes had fretted and argued, but in the end she had agreed to the plan. If Corrie could discover the truth of what had happened to her beloved niece, then she would go along with her scheme.

Corrie watched the landscape passing outside the carriage window—rolling hills beneath shadowy clouds, an occasional barking dog, a merchant’s cart pulled by a tired-looking horse.

“I don’t see how this can possibly succeed,” Aunt Agnes grumbled from the opposite side of the carriage. “Surely someone from Selkirk Hall or someone in the village will recognize you.”

“I haven’t been to Selkirk since I was twelve years old. Mother and I both prefer London to the country. Whenever Laurel and I wished to visit, my sister always came to the city.”

To distance herself even further from events at Selkirk, Corrie had decided to come out of mourning. She didn’t want anyone connecting her to Laurel’s death, and wearing those dreadful black garments just might put the notion in someone’s head.

Corrie didn’t think her sister would mind. She believed Laurel would rather the truth be discovered than that her younger sister mope about in dismal black, doing nothing to clear her name.

Agnes cast Corrie an inquiring look. “You are determined to discover the truth, but what if that truth turns out to be something you do not wish to learn?”

There was certainly a chance facts would surface that Corrie would rather not know. She would have to trust that Laurel was an innocent seduced into the affair, as Corrie believed she was.

“I’ll deal with that circumstance should it arise.”

“And the danger?” Agnes pressed. “If the earl is truly a murderer, what will stop him from also killing you?”

Corrie waved her aunt’s worry away, though the thought had crossed her mind. “I told you, Tremaine will not know who I am. Besides, if he did murder his wife, he did it for money. And if he murdered Laurel and Joshua, he did it to keep his freedom, or perhaps to protect his family from scandal. As I am merely a destitute relative there for a visit, he would have no reason to murder me.”

“And I will be there with her,” Allison added softly, referring to the role she had agree to play: Corrie’s maid.

“That’s right. Allison will act as my liaison with you should any problem arise.”

Fortunately, during the time Allison had been at Selkirk with Laurel, she had been pretending to be a widow with a newborn child. She had been dressed in mourning clothes and had never gone into the village, which meant she was safe from recognition at Castle Tremaine.

Agnes released a deep sigh. “I hope you two know what you are doing.”

So did Corrie. At least she knew the Earl of Tremaine was in residence at Castle Tremaine, and had been for several weeks. Agnes had told her the man had been at the castle at the time of Laurel’s death, and for several months before that. Lately he seemed to be spending even more time in the country.

Perhaps he had found a new victim on whom to ply his seductive skills.

Ignoring her companions, Corrie turned to look out the window and caught sight of the inn up ahead, the Hen and Raven. A tremor of nervous anticipation flitted through her. She was still gowned in black, her face hidden beneath a veil of black tulle, and would be until she left the inn on the morrow.

Then she would be dressed in the clothes of a gently reared young woman fallen on hard times, clothes Allison had collected from the local rag merchant: several slightly worn traveling suits, well-worn muslin day dresses, and a number of unimpressive but serviceable dinner gowns with barely frayed cuffs and soiled hems.

Though the gowns were not at all the sort she was used to wearing, in a way Corrie didn’t mind.