Grey caught up with him and heard Rafe’s spiel. “I’ll buy,” he said, anger burned off. “I probably owe you a year’s wages after all this.”
“Priory pays me.” Rafe watched the last stragglers depart. “Probably ought to have a trained constable. Sutton is pushing through the petition for the village to be recognized so we can hire one. Everyone signed it—except the bank—but it don’t mean much with no money.”
“You need a population who can pay taxes, understood. And the bank doesn’t want to cough up a share of the rents they’re collecting. Do you know who the bearded fellow is still digging on the other side of the gate?” Grey stopped behind an overgrown, half-dead rhododendron.
“Seen him talking with my clerk.” Rafe studied the black-bearded, piratical-looking fellow. “That’s the fisherman they call Black Dick, I believe. New around here.” Now that Rafe noticed, gray grizzled the fellow’s thick hair and beard. Stout but well-muscled, he was older than he’d realized, but still able to wield a shovel as well as the young ones. Better than some.
“I don’t want to call Miss Leonard out here to identify him, but she described someone like that threatening her one evening, said this place belonged to him. He bears watching,” Greybourne warned.
Rafe’s clerk was an ex-convict from the penal colonies. If Parsons knew this stranger. . . Vaguely alarmed, Rafe didn’t mention that to the baron. “I’ll ask about. Go back inside and pacify the ladies before they form an army. I’ll get rid of the rest of this lot. Buy a barrel of my good ale, and we’ll be even.” Rafe strode off, hoping Grey heeded his warning about pacifying the women.
Worried females were damned dangerous. The professor was a scholarly sort who wouldn’t understand the machinations of the fairer sex.
Rafe sent a few more workers home on his way to the now-cleared pathway and broken gate. Leaning over the pillar, he examined the hole the burly Dick was digging. “Why would pirates bury anything in their neighbors’ yard?”
“Not stupid.” Blackbeard leaned on his shovel and eyed Rafe skeptically. “Would you bury victims in your own yard, eh?”
A chill ran down Rafe’s spine. The stranger’s accent was similar to that of Parsons, the clerk who had spent these last decades in the Australian colonies.
“These pirates buried victims in their own cellar,” Rafe countered. “You from around here?”
“Nope. Ain’t no treasure or the mongrels wouldn’t have moved away, eh?” He hefted his shovel to his shoulder and nodded at the vacant cottage on his side of the wall. “I’m bunking there as long as the bank’s stealing my land. You want me out, you get them toffs out.”
He stalked off before Rafe could even offer him a pint.
Well, swell, there was Miss Leonard’s pirate—and the man who hit Grey over the head?
Twenty-five
Eleanor
Sunday evening, Eleanor dragged her work table to the rear window of the hall, near her bedchamber door.
Greybourne had a view of the front from both his desk in the attic and from his bedchamber. She meant to keep an eye on the back now that there was a clear path directly into the village. The path saved a good deal of walking and made it easier for Andrew to get about, but the area was an overgrown jungle that might hide elephants. Or bears.
She didn’t want to believe the professor’s heir wished him dead. But it made far more sense for a hired rogue to mistake Comfrey for the professor, than that anyone might kill because their rent was too high. It wasn’t as if Comfrey owned the bank or had anything to do with ancient mortgages.
The bear trap and sawn branch. . . hard to say if they happened before Comfrey was dead, but they had certainly appeared after Grey’s arrival.
She heard the clatter of the professor’s boots on the stairs, coming down from the attic, but they hesitated as he realized she wasn’t where he’d placed her. El derived some satisfaction from that modicum of power.
Perverse, but playing the invisible female was wearing on her.
“Sunlight lasts longer on this end?” Grey concluded, locating her behind the stairs and dropping more scribbled pages on her desk.
While everyone had been digging, she’d had time to reach a few conclusions. Finding a murdered corpse and skeletons, watching Greybourne struck down not once, but twice, had frayed her last thread of docility. “I can’t decide whether a killer is more likely to shoot from the drive or a garden path,” she said dryly, stopping to sharpen her pen nib.
“Bloodthirsty wench,” Greybourne responded dismissively. “Don’t listen to Thea. She’s spent a lifetime looking for spooks under sheets. Life is much more mundane than her imagination.”
He picked up her freshly copied pages to review—and most likely mark up, again. At some point, she would have to hide them from him if he were to ever finish his book.
She was paid to endure his incessant editing—but not to be a target for killers. And that included everyone around her. That meant she must quit vanishing into the woodwork like a good assistant and make herself known as a person, not an instrument to be used. She was about to start testing his lordship’s patience.
“So, Thea is wrong and your heir is suitably grateful to you for allowing him to live on the family estate, even though you hold the reins?” She dipped the pen in ink rather than look at him.
Watching Lord Greybourne had become dangerous to her well-being. She couldn’t bear the notion that anyone might put a period to his existence. He had so much vitality, so much to offer. . .
She’d never thought of him like that back when she’d gone home every night. Now that they lived under the same roof, he’d become part of the fabric of her life. She didn’t know what she would do once he left.
