Page 4 of What Cannot Be Said

“Not long, sir. Not long at all.”

“Yet you didn’t see anyone running away?”

“No, sir. But then we wouldn’t, would we? I mean, not if whoever did that had headed straight into the wood.”

“And you didn’t hear anything besides the pistol shots?”

“No, sir.”

“No voices? No screams?”

The young man pressed his lips together and shook his head. There was a bleakness to his expression that Sebastian had seen before, the look of someone whose safe, predictable existence has suddenly been touched by evil and horror. The world would never be quite the same for him again.

Harry said, “That girl—the one who’d been picking flowers down by the stream with her little brother. She didn’t scream. She opened her mouth, and I kept waiting and waiting for her to scream. But she never did.” He swallowed. “In a way, it was almost worse than if she had screamed.”

“I suspect she was in shock.”

“I should have tried to stop her from seeing it—the bodies and all that blood, I mean. I didn’t even think of it.”

“Not your fault,” said Sebastian, although he knew it would do no good, that this burden of guilt and regret, once picked up, would niggle at Harry Barrows forever. “Had you seen anyone else in the park before you heard the shots?”

Harry stared at him blankly. “I suppose we must have, but I don’t recall anyone in particular, if that’s what you’re asking. We weren’t really paying attention, if you know what I mean?”

“I understand.”

Harry stared off across the park, the westering sun shining through the branches overhead to dance a pattern of light and shadow across his face. “Who would do something like that? Shoot a woman and girl having themselves a picnic? And then do that weird thing with their bodies? It makes no sense.”

“No,” said Sebastian. “No, it doesn’t.”

?Miss Arabella Priestly was seated on a bench beside the sunny, whitewashed stone walls of the keeper’s cottage when Sebastian walked up to her some time later. She had her head bowed, one hand moving rhythmically over the purring gray-and-white kitten in her lap. She looked younger than her fifteen years, small and boyishly slim, with long golden hair, a thin face, and large gray eyes. According to Lovejoy, she was the second child and only daughter of Miles Priestly, Viscount Salinger, Lady McInnis’s brother, and she was holding herself together with a composure Sebastian found both awe-inspiring and worrisome.

“Do you mind if I ask you some questions?” he said after the keeper’s middle-aged wife had introduced them and then quietly withdrawn.

Arabella drew a ragged breath that shuddered her thin chest. “No, sir; I understand you need to. But I don’t really know anything.”

Sebastian gazed across the nearby duck pond to where her thirteen-year-old little brother, Percy, was chasing frogs. He hated like hell having to ask this young girl to relive the horror of what she’d been through. He said, “Did you hear the shots?”

She nodded. “We didn’t think anything of it, though.”

“You’d gone to pick flowers?”

“Yes, sir.” She hesitated, then added, “Well, I was picking flowers. Percy was looking for tadpoles.”

“How long would you say it was between when you left your aunt and when you heard the shots?”

“I don’t know. Not that long. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes?”

“Did you see anyone?”

“No, sir. No one except the two brothers.”

“Had you seen them before? Before you went to pick flowers, I mean.”

“No, sir.”

“How did your aunt seem before you and your brother left her?”

She stared at him, her eyes wide and still. He had the impression she was tamping down so many emotions right now that she was numb. She said, “What do you mean?”

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