Eva looked over. “Oh, that. Nigel did that. There are a few others there. While first recovering, he proved too restless to handle. He did not even sleep well, but he could not walk far or rest enough to read. I suggested he try sketching. That was the sorry result. Still, it occupied him for several days at least.” She reached up for plates.
Gareth tucked the sketchbook under his arm, took the tray, and followed Eva out to the garden. They made their luncheon at a rustic table under a budding tree. He puzzled over Nigel’s odd drawings while he munched on ham and hard eggs.
“I think it is a view,” he said. “A primitive one. Old maps were done this way.”
She stretched to look. “Perhaps. He had no training. That is how a child would draw, mixing up perspectives like that. However, now that you mention it, I think that is the view out our back window. That would be the far garden wall there, and these must be the trees.”
He turned the page to see more of the same, only much more elaborate. This view had buildings. A memory, perhaps.
He paged on, to Eva’s recent work. She had been busy. While he studied her drawings, however, something about Nigel’s kept prodding at him. Suddenly he knew what it was. He went back to the second one.
He knew this place. He identified the house and walls and ponds and hills. The outbuildings lined up exactly as they should. Crude little horses even stood in their correct pasture up near the edge of the page.
“Eva, did your brother know someone connected to my father’s family?”
“I don’t think so.” She came and peered over his shoulder. “Why do you think he did?”
“Because this looks like Merrywood. Even the drawing of the house is a childlike rendering of it, with the hipped roof and rusticated basement level.”
“If you say so. I always assumed he was trying to replicate my views, with poor results.”
It was not the main house that had attracted Nigel’s best attention. Rather the rendering of the outbuildings showed great care in details and placement. He had included a few tenant cottages to the east as well, and had even drawn the roads leading to them. He had mapped the estate fairly well. One of the cottages showed no wagons or chickens near it. Vacant, then. Nigel had graced this cottage with a thick dark line beneath it. To the left of it on the same road another little cottage appeared, only with half a roof and darkened walls, as if a fire had destroyed it.
He stared at that cottage.
One of the gentlemen involved in the theft had died recently. The one who held great sway over the others. The one who hadprobably faked a fire to convince his comrades the paintings were gone and unavailable for sale.
The one who had a burned tenant cottage in view of his main house, that he had neglected to rebuild or repair for over five years? Gareth remembered noting just such an eyesore as he approached Merrywood.
Percy, you thievingblackguard.
No wonder Crawley thought it so amusing that he and Ives were the ones to be tracking down those pictures. How he would laugh when, after buying all he could by dangling the promise of more information, he finally took Ives to Ives’s own family home as the most likely place to find the rest of the collection.
Eva rose and strolled over to some shrubbery. Early bulbs had sent up flowers in front of the greenery. She bent over to pluck a few. Her chemise rose in back as she did, revealing the lower swells of her bottom. Gareth closed the sketchbook, far more interested now in his lover’s charming eroticism.
He would write to Ives and tell him to search Merrywood and its cottages for any pictures the family should not have. He would not have to tell Ives anything else. With a few inquiries it would probably be learned that Nigel and Crawley at times rode out to drink in country taverns with Percy, Duke of Aylesbury, a man known to cause pain and grief to others for no other reason than his own perverse amusement.
CHAPTER28
“You are very subdued, Eva. This journey is supposed to be fun for you, but you have been lost in your thoughts for long stretches, and are now again.”
Eva pulled herself out of her thoughts. She squeezed the hand of the man riding beside her in the coach. “I am sorry. I received a letter from Sarah right before you came by to get me.”
“Bad news?”
“Not really bad, although Sarah is beside herself. It appears Mr. Trenton has been calling frequently now that Rebecca is staying in Birmingham again.”
“The poet.”
“Yes. Worse, however, is that Mr. Mansfield has not been calling at all. Sarah is sure that Rebecca has ruined her chances there.”
“If she did not favor the man, you would not want her to marry him, would you? Life is long to be in a marriage one does not want.”
Very true. Eva could not fault that response. Besides, she would never want Rebecca to be one of those girls who finds herself merely tolerating the marriage bed. Not when she knew herself how wonderful that could be.
“ButMr. Trenton?” She sighed. “Am I too horrible for hoping my sister marries a man with at least a modest fortune and decent prospects?”
“She is young still. Eventually she will talk philosophy with Mr. Trenton, too, and that should end that flirtation.”
