Page 18 of Who Cries for the Lost

It wasn’t the “done thing” for one gentlewoman to call upon another in the morning hours. And so Hero waited until three o’clock that afternoon before setting out in her yellow-bodied town carriage to pay a formal call on Captain Miles Sedgewick’s widow, Eloisa. In place of the plain dark fustian she’d worn that morning for her interview with the wherryman, she chose an afternoon gown of white muslin with a tiny border of embroidered primroses and short puff sleeves of yellow tiffany that matched her yellow kid slippers and the bunch of silk flowers fixed to her jaunty cap. She had little expectation that a woman so recently widowed would actually agree to see someone who was, after all, a mere acquaintance, but it was worth a try.

Miles Sedgewick’s house in Mount Street, purchased at the time of his marriage by his bride’s father, Edward Platt, was impressive, with rusticated stonework on the ground floor, Ionic columns, and an elaborate entablature decorated with swagged garlands. Once simple Manchester mill owners, the Platt family owed their meteoric rise to the first American War, when Eloisa’s grandfather, also called Edward Platt, secured a contract to supply the Army with cloth. The long, interminable war with France provided the second Edward Platt with a similar opportunity to increase his fortune, and it was this younger Platt who had then embarked on an ambitious campaign to raise the family’s social standing. Purchasing first a sizable estate in Somerset, then an impressive London town house in Grosvenor Square, he’d determinedly set about marrying his two daughters and young son into the ranks of the nobility.

His son and heir—also imaginatively named Edward—had recently become betrothed to the only daughter of an earl whose massive debts had reduced him to marrying the girl off to the highest bidder, while Platt’s elder daughter, Jane, had managed to catch an equally impoverished baron and was now officially Lady Lewis. With Eloisa, Platt had been forced to settle for a mere younger son, although Sedgewick was at least the son of a marquis.

Hero found the house shrouded in an ostentatious display of mourning, with black crepe draping the windows and a massive black wreath hung on the door. But to her surprise, Eloisa Sedgewick immediately agreed to see her.

She received Hero in an opulent drawing room that looked like a stage set for a performance of Antony and Cleopatra, with a profusion of straw satin-covered chairs and settees with crocodile legs and what she suspected were genuine painted wooden mummy cases propped up in several of the corners. A small, plump woman with very fair hair, blue eyes, and pleasing, even features, the young widow wore unrelieved mourning, from the black lace cap that covered her curls to the somber black slippers on her feet. She had been sitting on one of the crocodile-legged settees, deep in conversation with a gentleman in a clerical collar, but at Hero’s entrance she rose to come toward her with both hands outstretched. “My dear Lady Devlin. It’s so good of you to come.”

Hero clasped the widow’s outstretched hands and held them for a moment. Eloisa’s eyes were puffy and glistening with unshed tears, her nose red. And Hero felt an upswelling of rage at the man who had been Miles Sedgewick. He didn’t deserve this woman, didn’t deserve her tears.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” said Hero. “What a terrible shock.”

“Thank you. You are so kind.” She gave Hero’s hands a squeeze, then turned to introduce the man in the clerical collar who was now rising to execute a neat bow. “May I present the Reverend Sinclair Palmer?”

“Lady Devlin,” he said with a charmingly slow, vaguely roguish smile.

A tall, broad-shouldered man of perhaps twenty-eight or thirty, he had exquisitely molded, even features and golden hair, and he looked enough like Eloisa Sedgewick’s dead husband to make Hero blink. Interesting, she thought, returning his smile. “How do you do, Reverend? My apologies for interrupting you.”

“No, not at all,” he said, reaching for the fashionable hat he had left resting on a nearby end table. “I truly was just on the verge of leaving.” To the widow he said quietly, “Don’t worry; everything will be all right. You’ll see.” Then he bowed again and took his leave.

“Sinclair and I grew up together,” said the widow as she and Hero settled beside the empty hearth. “I don’t know how I’d have made it through these last two days without him. My father and brother are both at present up in Manchester, and my sister—Lady Lewis, you know—is in Devon.”

“You are fortunate indeed to have such a good friend,” said Hero.

Eloisa nodded and produced a black lace-edged handkerchief she held for a moment to her trembling lips. “Sedgewick’s brother, the Marquis, has also been most supportive, of course. He tells me Lord Devlin has involved himself in the investigation of Miles’s death.”

“And did Lord Stamford also give you his decidedly less-than-favorable opinion of that fact?”

“Well, I’ll admit that he didn’t exactly sound pleased,” said the widow with a hint of amusement warming her soft blue eyes. “But he knows that Lord Devlin and Miles served together in the Peninsula, so he must surely understand why the Viscount has taken an interest in what happened.”

Do you know? Hero wanted to say. Do you know that your husband contracted a bigamous marriage with the woman who saved his life in Portugal, and then abandoned her after she’d served her purpose?

Do you know what manner of man he truly was?

But of course she couldn’t say any of those things to this sad-eyed, grieving woman. “I can assure you that Devlin is most concerned,” she said instead, then paused as a stately white-haired butler, assisted by a housemaid, entered bearing a massive silver tray loaded down with tea things. Hero waited until the servants had withdrawn, then said, “I understand Captain Sedgewick had only recently returned from the Continent?”

Eloisa lifted the heavy sterling teapot and began to pour. “Yes, just this past Saturday.”

“It seems as if everyone is visiting Belgium these days.”

“So true. My sister and her husband, Lord Lewis, returned from there just last week. Except that Miles wasn’t in Brussels, you know.”

Hero reached to take her cup. “He wasn’t?”

“No. I suppose he had other reasons for going, but I believe his main purpose was to look into something called the Zaubererjackl trials.”

Hero took a slow sip of her tea. “I’m not familiar with them.”

“I’m not surprised. They were an obscure series of witch burnings that took place back in the sixteenth century—or perhaps it was the seventeenth? I forget which. At any rate, they killed over a hundred witches, most of them children. Cut off their hands before killing them, and then afterwards they cut off their heads, too.”

Hero stared at her. “I didn’t know they did that sort of thing to people they thought were witches.”

“Oh, yes; it was a brutal time. I’ll never understand why it fascinated Miles so.”

“He was interested in folklore, was he not?”

“Obsessed with it, actually. He collected all sorts of disgusting objects. He was particularly excited because in addition to visiting the castle where those horrid burnings took place, he also somehow managed to obtain a witch’s ladder.”

---