“I found my own mother butchered and left for dead as a lad. I know what it is to have something taken from ye that ye can never get back.”
“No!” the man at my back screamed. “It has to be done. The sins of the fathers. An eye for an eye!”
Through the snow that had begun to fall once more, I saw shadows that moved through the trees. He must have seen as well as they moved closer.
I felt a sharp prick of pain as that blade pressed against my neck, the knife cold. And something far colder in the expression on Brodie’s face.
The sharp report of the revolver shattered the silence, smoke exploding in the air as he came toward us, then fired again, and again.
The man behind me staggered, then fell backwards and I was pulled down with him into the cold snow.
I fought and screamed, clawing to free myself of that arm and the weight of that body, those pale blue eyes of Mary Chastain’s son staring at me.
Brodie pulled me to my feet.
I was covered in mud, bloodied, and shaking.
“Bloody hell!”
There might have been another curse, but it was muffled by the front of his coat as Brodie pulled me against him.
“Is he dead?”
His beard was soft against my cheek, as those other shadows I had glimpsed only moments before emerged from the trees and rushed toward us.
“Aye.”
Epilogue
TWO DAYS LATER, THE STRAND, LONDON
“I am pleasedthat you were not seriously injured, Lady Forsythe.” Sir Avery rose from the chair across the desk from Brodie.
That could be subject to one’s perspective, I thought.
The cut I had received in that attack in the graveyard at St. Mary’s had been well bandaged by Mr. Brimley upon our return to London late that same night after we’d met with the local police. The bandage was bothersome, and I had since removed it.
The director of the Special Services Agency had received Brodie’s telegram and was responsible for the arrival of the Metropolitan Police at St. Mary’s, those “shadows”I had seen in the tree cover just beyond the graveyard.
A great deal had been learned in the past two days since the attack.
William Chastain, so named after his grandfather, Reverend William Chastain, was the man who had attacked me and was responsible for three murders and the attack on the Duke of York.
He had been born after Reverend Chastain and his daughter arrived in London. There was a record of it in the later entries at St. Pancras church where Reverend Chastain served as vicar.
From subsequent records that were found, Mary Chastain had never married, her son born out of wedlock.
She had lived with her father near St. Pancras and had continued to live with him until his death from illness. And near St. Mary’s Church, his final position, on the small pension he received and what she earned as a lady’s maid and at a local tavern.
The tall, heavyset man who had aided her son had been caught and arrested after the attack on the Duke of York. He had provided information about where he had met with William Chastain and where Chastain lived in a single room at a tenement in Spitalfields after the death of his mother.
Her son had no doubt eventually asked to know who his father was, as children were wont to do. There was no answer because she could not name him after that night at the tavern near Cambridge.
He had apparently been born with the lameness in one leg, noted by the physician in Hendon after the attack in the churchyard.
How he had learned the circumstances of his birth could only be speculated upon. Perhaps Mary Chastain had finally spoken of it on her deathbed to unburden herself. However, the two people who knew the truth of that were now both dead.
The neck scarf Lily had found was much like those worn by the vicars of the Church. Had Mary Chastain’s son attempted to wrap himself in the cloth of the righteous, as Brodie had suggested? That would remain unknown.
