Page 86 of What Cannot Be Said

Pitcairn pressed his lips together and nodded. “She did, yes—but only recently.”

“Any particular reason?”

“It came out when she was telling me about some big argument Lady McInnis had with Salinger over his children.”

Sebastian knew a flicker of surprise. Basil Rhodes had said something about a fight between Salinger and his sister, but Sebastian had dismissed it as one more of the royal bastard’s lies. “When was this? The fight between Lady McInnis and her brother, I mean.”

“I don’t know exactly, but it was a while ago—maybe a few weeks after Waterloo?”

Rhodes had claimed the argument took place right before the murders. But then, that was exactly the kind of subtle lie Prinny’s bastard would tell. Sebastian said, “Do you know precisely what about the children caused the argument?”

“I gathered Lady McInnis had been worried about Arabella and Percy for some time. But then they did something particularly awful. I can’t even remember now what it was, but it was bad enough that Lady McInnis decided she couldn’t put off talking to her brother any longer.”

“And it didn’t go well?”

“Hardly. I mean, how would you like to have your sister tell you that two of your children are on their way to being as mad as their mother?”

“That’s what Lady McInnis told Salinger? That she thought Arabella and Percy were... unstable?”

“I don’t know if she said it in so many words. But I gather it’s what she thought, yes.” They’d reached the street now, and Pitcairn paused to readjust his grip on the handle of his foils’ case. “Why are you asking all this anyway?” said Pitcairn. “You—” He broke off. “My God; you can’t think Salinger killed them? His own sister and niece?”

Sebastian met the other man’s suddenly stricken gaze. “No, that’s not what I’m thinking.”

Chapter 51

We bury the babies in the poor hole, of course,” said the Reverend Martin Shore, vicar of St. Mary’s, a quaint sandstone church dominated by a sturdy Norman tower that dated all the way back to the early twelfth century. “Poor, wee things. They don’t have much of a life, I’m afraid.”

Sir Henry Lovejoy stood beside the vicar in the midst of St. Mary’s ancient churchyard. The church had been built atop a small hill, and the wind was blowing stiffly, flattening the long grass between the crowded, lichen-covered gray headstones and worn tombs. From here, if he looked to the southeast, Lovejoy could see the tidy fields and expansive farmhouse of Pleasant Farm and, beyond that, the broad, gleaming ribbon of the river Thames.

“Precisely how many infants have you buried from Pleasant Farm?” asked Lovejoy, putting up a hand to grab his hat when a strong gust of wind threatened to carry it away.

The vicar frowned in a way that drew his dimpled chin back against his chest. He was a plump, full-faced man of medium height with pale eyes, fading sandy hair, and wind-chapped fair skin. “Too many, I’m afraid,” he said, letting out a sad sigh. “Far too many.”

“Are the deaths recorded?”

“Oh, yes; of course. But there’s not much to be learned from that, you know. It’s only ‘Baby John’ and ‘Baby Sarah’ and such.”

“Any idea how the little ones die?”

The vicar shrugged. If he’d ever found the steady stream of dead infants coming from Pleasant Farm a source of alarm, it didn’t show. “Not hard to tell, really. Waste away, they do.”

“Do you also bury many dead infants that have been pulled from the Thames?”

“Not here, thankfully, although I understand the villages down on the river get a fair number. Sad, isn’t it? The things people feel driven to do.”

A knifelike shadow fell across the churchyard’s tombstones and, looking up, Lovejoy spotted a hawk soaring overhead. “What can you tell me about Prudence and Joseph Blackadder?”

The question visibly shocked the vicar, as if it had only just occurred to him to wonder why this London magistrate had bothered to travel all the way out to his parish to stand here, in a fierce wind, asking questions about dead babies. “Oh, they’re regular churchgoers, to be sure, to be sure, Sir Henry. Rarely miss a Sunday, they do. Quite the upstanding members of our community, they are.”

“Commendable, no doubt,” said Lovejoy, his lips pressing into a grim line.

So far they had found three women who had worked at Pleasant Farm at various times in the past ten years. All three insisted that they had never observed any irregularities and that Mrs.Blackadder always took care of feeding the infants herself.

“Although they never seemed to eat much,” admitted one of the women, a rather slow-witted, buxom girl named Lily whom Lovejoy interviewed personally. “Slept all the time, they did. Never seen anything like it.”

“Did you ever see anyone give the babies laudanum?”

“Oh, no, sir. Never.”

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