He might have sent another messenger to make further inquiries. But he chose instead to go in person to Leavens-court in Leicestershire, where Thomas Doyle’s belongings had been sent after their return to England. Doyle’s father was a groom at the manor of Leavenscourt.
It was a long journey through weather that had turned wet and blustery and chilly. Neville was forced to travel in a closed carriage, something he always found tedious in the extreme. And he expected to find nothing at the end of the journey. But at least, he thought as he kicked his heels in the taproom of the rickety apology for an inn the weather had forced him to put up at one night—at least he wasdoingsomething. Newbury had become abhorrent to him, and so much there reminded him of Lily. He had even made the mistake of spending one night at the cottage, lying where they had lain on the bed, filled with such a vast emptiness that he had not even been able to force himself to move, to get out of there.
Leavenscourt was a small but prosperous-looking property. He looked about him with some curiosity as he approached the house. This was where Doyle had grown up? The family was not in residence and his appearance threw the housekeeper into consternation. She stared at him when he explained that he had come to speak with Mr. Doyle, one of the grooms, father of the late Sergeant Thomas Doyle of the Ninety-fifth. She even forgot to keep bobbing curtsies.
Henry Doyle, it seemed, had been dead these four years and more.
Neville felt a door slamming in his face. “I understand,” he said, “that the regiment returned Sergeant Doyle’s belongings here after his death more than eighteen months ago. Would you know anything about those, ma’am?”
“Oh.” She curtsied. “I daresay they were given to William Doyle, my lord. Henry Doyle’s son, that is.”
Ah. “And where may I find William Doyle?” he asked.
“He is dead, my lord,” she told him. “He died about a year ago in a nasty accident, my lord.”
“I am sorry to hear it,” Neville said. And he was too. Two men who would have been perhaps Lily’s only surviving relatives were both dead. “Would you know, ma’am, what happened tohisbelongings?”
“I daresay Bessie Doyle has them, my lord,” she said. “She is William’s widow. She still lives in the cottage. She has two growing lads and the master was too kind of heart to turn them out. She takes in laundry.”
Lily’s aunt—and her cousins.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you would direct me to the cottage, ma’am.”
The housekeeper, considerably flustered again, assured his lordship that she could have Bessie summoned to the house, but he declined her offer and was given the directions he needed.
Bessie Doyle was a stout, florid-faced woman of middle years. She kept an untidy home, though it looked clean enough. She greeted the sight of a fashionably dressed earl on her doorstep with an assessing head-to-toe glance and hands firmly planted on ample hips.
“If it is laundry you has for me,” she told him, “you have come to the right place. Though I do not answer for fancy boots like them there after they have tramped through the mud. You had better wipe your feet if you intends to come inside.”
Neville grinned at her. The tail of the army was full of Bessie Doyles, strong, capable, practical women who would have greeted the whole of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army with hands on hips and some tart remark on their lips.
Yes, Bessie remembered the letter that had come to tell them about Thomas’s getting killed—Will had taken it to the vicar to read. And yes, this was where his stuff had been sent—useless junk all of it. It had been in a heap over there—she pointed to a corner of the room in which they stood—when she came back from nursing her old mum, who had not died after all, as it happened, though Will had. She had been called back from her mother’s a few miles away with the news that he had fallen from his horse and knocked his brains out on a stone when he landed.
“I am very sorry,” Neville told her.
“Well,” she said philosophically, “at least it proved that he did have brains, didn’t it? Sometimes I wondered.”
Bessie Doyle, Neville gathered, was not an inconsolably grieving widow.
“I burned the stuff,” she told him before he could ask. “The whole bloody lot.”
Neville closed his eyes briefly. “Did you look through it carefully first?” he asked her. “Was there no letter, no package, no—no money, perhaps?”
The very idea of money drew a short bark of laughter from Mrs. Doyle. Will, in her wifely opinion, would have drunk it up in a hurry if there had been.
“P’raps that was what made him fall off,” she said, but it was not a serious suggestion. “No, course there weren’t no money. Tom wouldn’t have kept no money for the likes of Will to get his hands on after he croaked, would he now?”
“Thomas Doyle had a daughter,” Neville told her.
Well, Bessie Doyle did not know about that and showed no burning desire to learn anything about her long-lost niece. Her lads were going to be home from the stables soon, she told his lordship. They worked there. And they were going to be hungry enough to eat an ox apiece.
Neville took the remark as a hint to be on his way. But something caught his eye as he turned to leave—a military pack hanging from a nail beside the door.
“Was that Thomas Doyle’s?” he asked, pointing at it.
“I daresay it was,” she said. “It was the only useful thing out of the whole lot. But filthy? Had to scrub it to a thread, I did, before I could use it.” It was stuffed full of rags.
“May I have it?” Neville asked her. “May I buy it from you?” He took his purse out of his pocket and withdrew a ten-pound note from it. He held it out to her.
