Heart of Fire. Kat Martin

Perhaps he did not wish to be forced to marry her.”

      “And perhaps she simply went for a walk that night and was waylaid by footpads. Perhaps they tried to rob her, but when they discovered she had no money, they tossed her and the child into the river.”

      It was a notion Corrie had already considered. “I suppose that could have happened. Anything seems possible at this point in time, except that Laurel would kill herself and her child.”

      “Coralee is right,” Allison said softly, from where she perched like a bird on the edge of the sofa. “Laurel loved little Joshua with every ounce of her being. She would never have done anything to hurt him. And she was so clearly determined that no one would find out the identity of the father. It does make one wonder….”

      Corrie nodded. “It does indeed.”

      Aunt Agnes eyed her warily. “I am loath to ask, but I suppose I must. Tell us, Coralee, what exactly is it you propose to do?”

      She stiffened her spine. At the moment she wasn’t certain. But she was going to do something. Of that she was completely sure.

      Excited at her discovery, Corrie climbed the steps of Heart to Heart and opened the heavy front door. As she walked into the long, narrow printing area, she spotted Krista coming out of the back room, heading for her office. Corrie followed her and hurriedly closed the door.

      “Krista—you are not going to believe what I’ve found!”

      Her friend whirled toward her, apparently not aware until then that Coralee had entered. “So you are still digging. I know you are determined to come up with something to validate your belief that Laurel was murdered, but are you sure your sister wouldn’t rather you simply accepted her death and got on with your life?”

      “They say she killed her own child. Do you believe my sister would want the world to believe she did something as heinous as that?”

      “The police found no sign of robbery, Corrie. There were no incriminating marks on the body.”

      “She had been in the water for several days when she was found. The constable said it was impossible to tell exactly what had happened, and there was a bruise on the side of her head.”

      “Yes, and if I recall, the constable believed she must have hit her skull when she fell into the river. The police believe the baby drowned and simply washed out to sea.”

      “And I say the police are wrong. Laurel was killed by someone who didn’t want the secret of the child’s birth known, or had some other nefarious motive.”

      Krista sighed. “Well, there have certainly been murders committed for far less reason than preventing some sort of scandal.”

      “Yes, and when Agnes mentioned the Earl of Tremaine, I began to think. Some years back, I’d heard gossip about him. He was whispered about at a number of affairs, and I even made mention of his scandalous reputation once or twice in my column. I decided to go back through some of our older editions. Lady Charlotte Goodnight wrote the “Heartbeat” column in the days when your mother ran the paper. I took a look at those.”

      For the first time, Krista appeared curious. “What did you find?”

      “The articles mentioned the gossip I had heard, said the man was a complete and utter rogue where women were concerned. They called him a ‘sensualist,’ a master of the art of love. Apparently, Grayson Forsythe was a major in the army before he inherited the title. He spent several years in India before his older brother fell ill and he came back to assume his duties as earl.”

      Krista smiled. “Sounds like an interesting man.”

      “Yes, well, I suppose you might say that. But as I was reading about him, I remembered something else.”

      “And that was…?”

      “This morning I went down to the magistrate’s office and searched for records filed under his name and there it was—the certificate of his marriage to Lady Jillian Beecher three years past.”

      “Now that you mention it, I remember hearing something about that. But Tremaine is a bachelor—one of the most eligible in London. What happened to his wife?”

      “That is the point I am trying to make. I did some more digging, spoke to some of my sources, very quietly, of course. I discovered that the earl was married less than a year when Lady Tremaine died. The countess was the daughter of a wealthy baron, an heiress worth a good deal of money. She died leaving the earl with a sizable increase in his fortune—and he was free again, able to continue his sensual pursuits.”

      “I don’t think I ever heard the story.”

      “I believe the family kept the matter fairly quiet.” Corrie’s eyes gleamed. “And since that is the case, what you also don’t know is that Lady Tremaine drowned, Krista—right there in the Avon River!”

      Three

      A cool spring breeze floated through the open windows of the carriage as it rumbled toward the village of Castle-on-Avon, a small, picturesque market town surrounded by rolling green fields and thatch-roofed cottages. On a knoll near the edge of the village, Selkirk Hall loomed majestically over twelve hundred acres of rich grassy earth. A structure three stories high, it was built in the Georgian style, of golden Cotswold stone.

      Coralee, Aunt Agnes and Allison were returning to the country in Agnes’s carriage, not the viscount’s fancy four-horse rig. Corrie couldn’t risk her father’s coachman telling him she had left the carriage before its arrival at Selkirk Hall. In fact, she meant to depart at the Hen and Raven, a nearby coaching inn, where she would hire a room for the night and continue to her destination as a different person in the morning.

      It had been less than a week since Corrie had come up with her outrageous plan. Three days ago, she had presented it to Aunt Agnes and Allison.

      “It will work—I know it will!”

      Aunt Agnes had twisted her handkerchief in her plump hands. “I don’t know, Coralee…it sounds extremely dangerous.”

      “To begin with, no one is going to know who I am,” Corrie explained. “I shall pretend to be Letty Moss, the wife of Lord Tremaine’s very distant cousin Cyrus. Letty is destitute in the wake of her husband’s abandonment, and desperately in need of the earl’s help.” A story that could likely be true.

      Corrie had run across the information during her research on the earl and his family. Through a friend who knew a friend who knew one of the earl’s distant cousins—a man named Cyrus Moss—she had learned that Cyrus had left his much younger wife in residence in York and set off for America to make his fortune. After two years, Cyrus had not yet returned.

      According to her source, Lord Tremaine had never met Letty Moss and knew little of his very distant cousin. The information gave Corrie the perfect means of getting into Castle Tremaine. Doing so, she believed, was the only way to discover if Lord Tremaine was the father of Laurel’s child, and if so, whether he might be responsible for her and little Joshua’s death.

      “It will work, I tell you. It has to.”

      Aunt Agnes had fretted and argued, but in the end she had agreed to the plan. If Corrie could discover the truth of what had happened to her beloved niece, then she would go along with her scheme.

      Corrie watched the landscape passing outside the carriage window—rolling hills beneath shadowy clouds, an occasional barking dog, a merchant’s cart pulled by a tired-looking horse.

      “I don’t see how this can possibly succeed,” Aunt Agnes grumbled from the opposite side of the carriage. “Surely someone from Selkirk Hall or someone in the village will recognize you.”

      “I haven’t been to Selkirk since I was twelve years old. Mother and I both prefer London to the country. Whenever Laurel and I wished to visit, my sister always came to the city.”

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