Phones came out and cameras snapped, and Jill, an attractive young woman in her mid-twenties with curling brown hair and large, deceptively somber brown eyes, spoke for the group by asking, “But you don’t believe it?”
Katherine the Tour Guide hesitated, allowing a coy smile to tremble on her lips for a moment before answering, and Jill realized the woman went through this same spiel several times a day whenever the house, still a private residence, was open for tours. What would she have done if I hadn’t asked? she wondered. No doubt she would have had a backup plan. Even so, Jill didn’t regret playing into the woman’s hands, for her curiosity was genuinely roused.
“Let’s just say some of the details don’t quite fit,” Katherine said at last, having strung the suspense out until even the most avid photographer in the group had stopped clicking. “The needlework was certainly done by the duchess—you can see her initials stitched into the lower right-hand corner—but the timing is wrong, for one thing. It’s true that the eighth duke was deeply in debt at the turn of the nineteenth century, but by the time his son assumed the title, the family was solvent once again. In fact, he made numerous improvements to the estate that his father could never have afforded. Now, as we enter this next room, you can see . . .”
Jill kept to the rear of the group as they shuffled after their guide. As she reached the door, however, she didn’t pass through into the next room, but ducked back for a closer look at the framed needlework above the mantel. She found the light brown spots Katherine had described—too faint to see from a distance, especially when that distance had been filled with three generations of an American family in matching T-shirts, as well as a Japanese tourist with a camera as big as his head—and touched her finger to the museum-quality glass protecting the two-hundred-year-old fibers from, well, from people like her, who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves.
“If only you could talk, what secrets could you tell?” she murmured aloud.
“Probably ‘Please stay with your tour group,’ ” suggested an amused masculine voice somewhere behind her.
She spun around, and found a man regarding her quizzically, a very good-looking man in his late twenties, with bright green eyes and one blond curl drooping over his high forehead. She felt a sudden impulse to brush it back. Instead, she merely said, “Pot, meet kettle.”
He laughed and shook his head. “I’m not with the group.”
“Lucky you! Katherine the Tour Guide seems determined to rob it of any romance.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess.” His gaze shifted from Jill to the needlework and back again. “The bloodstains, right?”
“You know something about the family, then?”
He inclined his head in acknowledgement. “A little.”
“What do you think about it, then? The legend, I mean, not the family.”
He considered the matter as he crossed the room to stand next to her before the fireplace. “Most legends have some basis in fact. It’s true that the duchess was originally from Lancashire, not far from a cotton mill that was owned by the husband of the duke’s sister, so it’s quite possible that the duke might have visited the area at some point, perhaps even met his future duchess there.” He glanced back up at the framed piece over the mantel. “As for where this fits in—if it fits in at all—I’m afraid that part is lost to history.”
“It’s a shame, really. That’s the part of history that intrigues me—not what a few famous dead men did, but the daily lives of ordinary people.”
He grinned broadly, exposing a dimple in his left cheek. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard of a duke being referred to as an ‘ordinary’ person.”
“You know what I mean,” she said with a little huff of annoyance.
“Strangely enough, I do. Are you a historian, then?”
She shook her head. “Not in the sense you mean. I did try to trace my family tree—my father’s, that is, which sounds awfully sexist these days, but there’s something so—so constant about the surname, don’t you think? However much the world may change, that name continues on, from one generation to the next.”
“Did you have any luck in your search?”
“Yes—and no. You can’t believe half of what you see on those ‘find your ancestors’ websites, you know, but I did manage to trace it back two hundred years before hitting a brick wall.”
“A lot can happen in two hundred years,” he remarked. “Did you find anything interesting?”
“Nothing like this.” She made a little wave of her hand that took in the Georgian house and all its furnishings. “I found a branch of the family in Australia, of all places, and one ancestor—the one from two hundred years ago—who married an aristocratic woman suspected of stabbing her husband to death. Her first husband, that is, not my great-great-whatever-great grandfather.”
“Do tell!”
“I first found a mention of it on a genealogy website, but in this case, there was plenty of corroborating evidence: old Times articles that have been digitally preserved, as well as illustrations. They seem to have been parodied by all the famous caricaturists of their day. I even found a print for sale at an old book shop in Portobello Road. The thing cost thirty pounds, but I bought it and framed it, and now it’s hanging in my kitchen.”
“Right over the drawer where you keep your carving knives,” he said, drawing the flat of his hand across his throat in a menacing gesture.
“Very funny,” she retorted, laughing all the same. “Someone else was hanged for the murder, though, and according to the Times, my ancestor was the one who identified the real killer. In any case, they were married less than a year later. It must have been quite a scandal at the time, not only the fact that she married again so quickly, but that her second husband was so far
