Chapter 24

24

T he sun was creeping steadily towards the west, falling behind some low clouds on the horizon as Roland approached the Robson farm with Colonel Ellesmere.

The farm was cold and quiet, the stone walls dusted with frost, and the pastures a dull, wintry brown. A hundred or so head of sheep huddled together in the shelter of the dry-stone walls and sparse hedgerows, and the small nearby stream that bordered the property on one side before it joined the Aln was still trickling beneath a thin glaze of ice, still feeding the troughs.

The Robson family had leased this parcel of nearly 100 acres for generations. Roland knew that Bertram had assumed the lease when his father, the love of Hannah’s life, had himself passed a handful of years previously.

Did Bertram have Willa concealed in the walls of the farmhouse? When he had begun this journey, it had seemed a more certain thing. But now, he was riddled with doubt. The thick-walled stone cottage that sat near the front of the property seemed too quiet and small to hold Willa against her will.

Roland’s lip curled as he thought back to when they found the Sprouts and he had managed to capture the girl. She had been dressed as a boy, then, and had done her best to bite Roland.

His amusement faded quickly, because if they were wrong, and Willa was not here, then he feared they would not be able to find her at all.

“Are you most certain of Mr Robson’s involvement, Lord Percy?” the magistrate beside him asked, echoing his doubts.

“Yes,” Roland said with more firmness than he felt. He could not be certain that Bertram Robson himself was guilty of kidnapping Willa. “He is the child of Hannah Percy. If he was not the one who used the tunnel to trespass in Alnwick Castle, he would have been the one to tell the person who had.”

The magistrate nodded, accepting that logic as sound enough and, without further conversation, the two of them approached the farmhouse. Bertram answered to Ellesmere’s knock, his eyes widening as he saw who stood at his threshold.

“Lord Percy, Colonel Ellesmere!” Quickly, the man backed out of the doorway, throwing it wide enough to allow them to come inside. Roland’s hopes plummeted. If Willa truly was here, surely Bertram would not have been so quick to invite them unexpectedly into his home.

Colonel Ellesmere stepped across the threshold first, and Roland followed so that Bertram could shut his door. The inside of the rough cottage, he could not help but notice, showed no signs whatsoever of a woman’s touch. No festive boughs of greenery on the mantle, or even a simple wreath.

“I am surprised to find you here. What may I do for you? Shall I make some tea?” he asked the men.

The signs of Hannah’s influence upon the man’s life had always been there for the viewing, Roland realised. Mr Robson’s voice held the accent of the countryside, but it lacked the heavy burr of the rural farmers, his diction steady and clear. He had a body used to doing hard labour, but he held his back and shoulders straight, without slouching or leaning.

Roland shook his head, declining the offer of tea. “I wish to know, Mr Robson, whether you might have something to do with the kidnapping of the young girl who is my ward from Alnwick castle. I am prepared to offer a sum for her return and would be inclined to request clemency from the magistrate as long as she is hale and unharmed.”

Bertram’s mouth had parted in shock at Roland’s first words, but the man’s face quickly hardened into suspicion. “You must be jesting. Lord Percy, I can’t even begin to imagine why you would show up at my door and accuse me of such a thing.”

“Because your mother was a woman by the name of Hannah Percy, was she not?”

The man’s face paled, but he grew grimmer. “She wasn’t a Percy at all, my lord. My mother was Anna Robson, the wife of a sheep farmer.”

Soul-deep cracks lay beneath those simple words. Flaws in the man’s facade that stood brittle, threatening to shatter. Roland remembered how he had discovered the same cracks in Thorne only the week before, when he had told his brother he was still a man worthy.

Bertram straddled two worlds and found himself shut out from one. How close might Thorne’s life have been to Robson’s, had he never intervened between Thorne and Thaddius?

“She may not have been able to claim her name and heritage,” Roland agreed. “But you knew who she was.”

Unexpectedly, Bertram laughed, the sound bitter. “No, actually, I never truly did. My father and mother didn’t breathe a word of it. Not once. Can you imagine, Lord Percy, what it was like to find out the truth only once she was dead? To discover your whole life was a lie only once you couldn’t ask why she never told you?”

“I cannot. But I imagine it was even more shocking than me learning these last few days that my grandfather cast out his expecting sister.”

Bertram’s face creased. “You didn’t know either? How amusing. I wouldn’t have imagined we had so much in common, my lord.”

“It does seem that the last two Percy generations kept far too many secrets,” Roland agreed wryly. “Such as the hidden passage your mother used to meet with your father. I implore you, cousin. If you told anyone about it… if you know anything at all about Willa’s disappearance?—”

Bertram reared back as if slapped, and Roland knew that he had erred in extending that tentative, informal recognition. “How dare you mock the suffering my mother endured at the hands of the Percy family by calling me that. As if your small act of philanthropy with an orphan child forgives all of the sins of the Breaker.”

“Mr Robson—” the magistrate rumbled, trying to stave off an argument.

Bertram thrust out his hand, palm upwards, inviting Roland and Ellesmere to search his home. “You wish to look for yourself? Be my guest. You will not find your ward here. Look your fill at my three small rooms, and then go home to your castle, cousin .”

Roland opened his mouth to argue, but then closed it. He had promised both a reward and a modicum of grace if Bertram could reveal Willa. Either the man truly did not have her… or ransoming her back to Roland was never in the cards.

Stomach cold, he nodded slowly and traversed the rooms of the cottage, checking every cranny and listening for someone hidden beneath the floorboards. Ellesmere, conducting the same search, shook his head when both returned to the main room.

Willa was not there.

Frowning, Roland paused, buying time as he struggled to think about what to do next. Ellesmere was drawn to the window while Roland pondered, and as he pulled back the curtain, the sound of approaching hooves outside grew louder.

“Lord Percy!” a voice shouted, and Roland started as he discerned Thorne’s voice.

Roland did not even glance at the men to excuse himself. He found himself outside before he knew what he was about, nearly running to his brother and grabbing Horse’s bridle. “Thorne? Why are you here? Has something happened to Grace?”

“Be easy. She is fine,” Thorne told him, not throwing his leg over to dismount. “I am very glad, though, that we caught you before you and Ellesmere left, because your lady and I discovered more to the story.”

Mr Harding and one of the sturdier stableboys gave their greetings to Lord Percy from atop their horses, and the stableboy took the reins of Mr Harding’s mount, allowing the steward to get down.

“Is Mr Robson here?” Harding asked, a note of urgency in his voice.

“He is inside with the magistrate. Will one of you two tell me what the devil is going on?”

Thorne explained the barest bones of what he and Grace had learned from the reverend, and Harding withdrew the paper with Robson’s request to alter the terms of the lease from the case in his possession. Roland was so stunned and incensed, he took Mr Harding’s mount back from the boy, kicking the horse into a trot as he moved towards the distant outbuildings perched at the river’s edge on the back end of the property.

Thorne’s Horse quickly overtook Roland’s borrowed beast, and his brother managed to dismount and throw open the old barn doors just as Roland trotted up.

“Willa!” Thorne shouted. “Are you back here?”

There was a little silence that lasted a hundred years, and then a high-pitched, tentative, “ Mr Thorne ?”

Roland’s heart squeezed into his throat, and cursing, he and Thorne nearly tripped over one another to round a rather large bale of wool standing between them and Willa’s voice. As they did, they found a scared-looking but defiant Willa, holding a heavy carding paddle in one hand like a mace, and a boy who might have been six years old under her other arm.

Willa let out a small cry of relief when she saw them, dropping her makeshift weapon and throwing herself at Thorne. Thorne swept her up, letting her cling to him like a monkey for a long moment. Roland coughed, smiled faintly, and turned to count the other small faces that were staring at him, uncertain if he posed a threat.

“Are you all right?” Thorne asked the girl, finally setting her back on her feet. “Did Mr Robson hurt you—any of you?”

Willa reordered her face into a mulish scowl, as if annoyed to be caught looking frightened at all. “Naw. He kept us, but he didn’t hurt us. He fed us as long as we kept combing the wool, and didn’t even need to lock us up,” she said unhappily. “None of ‘em knew where we were and they ain’t dressed for the weather. I thought about trying to run off to find help, but I didn’t want to leave the tykes alone.”

She was the oldest of the seven children in Robson’s makeshift mill, and clearly she had taken charge of the sprats.

“That was very brave of you, staying and taking care of them,” Roland told her, and she pulled a face.

“It didn’t feel brave,” she admitted. “I bet Lady Grace would’ve found a way to get word to you.”

She didn’t see Thorne’s face as he goggled in disbelief at her, and that was fortunate, because Roland barely kept a straight face as it was. “The countess,” he reminded her gently, “is a woman grown, and you are not. Also, my lady has clearly neglected to mention the several times Sir Nathaniel and I have come to her rescue—without her help.”

Her lips curled at that. “Like you did for me!”

“Just so,” Thorne muttered behind her, but he ruffled her hair affectionately. “But what happened? Wes said you were trying to find whoever was making noise.”

“Aye, and I found ‘im. Mr Robson snuck into the duke’s office, looking for something in the drawers.”

“Grace thinks he was looking for your grandfather’s ring,” Thorne expanded.

“Guess he didn’t find it an’ that’s why he was so mad,” the girl remarked nonchalantly. “I saw him go back through the tunnel, and I followed, hoping I could get a better look at him. But I tripped on a rock and the geezer heard me.” Willa grimaced. “He grabbed me then and took me with ‘im so I wouldn’t be able to tell on him.”

Roland would have asked more, but he noticed one of the younger boys shivering. The barn door, thrown open with such haste, still stood open, letting the cold air in, and Roland was reminded about his anger towards Bertram. “Would you look after the gaggle for a few minutes more? Thorne and I have to settle matters with Mr Robson,” he told her.

Willa nodded solemnly, and Thorne took off his scarf, wrapping it around the shivering lad. “Huddle together and stay warm. We’ll be back shortly.”

By the time they crossed back to the cottage to the unhappy cluster of men waiting outside, Roland was considering the merits of abandoning propriety so he could punch Bertram squarely in the nose. Fortunately, Thorne felt no such inhibitions, and he laid Bertram Robson out in the winter-dead grass with a single blow across his jaw.

“Sir Nathaniel!” barked Roland. “I would like to be able to put some questions to Mr Robson before you spindle him a little too much.”

Colonel Ellesmere went to intervene between them, but Thorne was already stepping back, shaking out his right hand. Robson was a little dazed but not unconscious, and Roland could not be certain that would still have been the case if Thorne’s arm hadn’t been broken earlier that year.

“Yes, Mr Robson had the beginnings of a mill,” he explained to Harding and Ellesmere. “We found seven children there, including Willa, and a great deal of washed and raw wool.”

“ Why ?” Thorne asked the man. “Why would you take people’s children? You could have hired hands.”

Robson got to his feet a little unsteadily, and he gave Thorne the most venomous look Roland had ever seen turned upon his brother. “I know who you are, Sir Nathaniel. Bastard son of the late earl. Tell me, how does it feel to know that without this Lord Percy’s outstretched hand, you would have nothing at all?”

Thorne looked stricken, and Roland knew that Robson had cut straight through to the scabs of Thorne’s own half-healed wounds with those words. “You are wrong, Robson,” Roland said regretfully. “I did intervene in Sir Nathaniel’s life to spare him from my father’s persecution, but he was always free to make his life afterwards. What he has, he earned with his sweat and blood.”

“How fortunate for your brother,” choked Bertram Robson, sounding unconvinced. “I, too, wanted to make my own life. A better one than my father’s. I could have done so even without that outstretched hand.”

“The reverend told us he wanted to become a man of industry,” Thorne told Roland. “To stand on his own feet.”

“Aye, Lord Percy. And to afford to do so, I sold the last things I had of my mother. I suppose you might argue I had a helping hand from the Percy family after all,” Robson said, his voice grief-stricken. “All I needed was the duke’s seal, and we would have been at quits. But then your father died, and with him, all agreement to sign the request to change the lease. To build the mill. Not that I didn’t still try, but the requests went unanswered. My mother has been dead for fifteen years, and still the duke continues to punish me for her sins.”

Sudden understanding rippled up Roland’s spine. “So your next thought was to forge the approval yourself. The duke did not deny your request, Robson. The duke—” he stopped, before he could confess in front of everyone that his grandfather was mentally unsound.

“There was a regrettable lapse in paperwork, Mr Robson,” Mr Harding volunteered. “After the former Lord Percy passed, your request never found its way to the duke.”

A soft moan of comprehension tore itself from Robson’s throat, and he dropped his face into his hands. “Small comfort, that it wasn’t a personal slight. It ruined me nonetheless. All I had—every penny—trapped in the promises of wool and a mill that I couldn’t build. So to answer your question, Sir Nathaniel, I couldn’t afford to hire hands. I’ve merely been trying to recoup my funds before the wool rotted. As you doubtless might guess from the bales of wool remaining, I have not been turning a great deal of profit.”

“He was late on his last quarterly rent,” Mr Harding whispered in an undertone to Roland.

“We have a confession of guilt, it seems,” the magistrate said when the silence dragged on, wiping off the ice crystals forming on his moustache. “It’s regrettable that so much ill has come from what sounds like a misunderstanding and an unfortunate series of events. Housebreaking. Kidnapping. Attempted forgery and not to mention breaking your lease agreement. Usually, the punishment for such actions is severe, Robson. Lord Percy, since one of these children was your ward, what punishment do you think Robson merits?” Ellesmere asked him, giving Roland a say.

Robson wasn’t looking at the magistrate. He was holding Roland’s gaze.

The man’s face held all the same terrifying resignation that Roland had seen in his mentor, Sir David, when he was caught for his crimes. But unlike Sir David, Robson was not holding a knife to an innocent person's throat. No. This time, Roland felt like he was the one holding it.

And Robson, silent, waited for a third generation of the Percy family to change his life for the worse.

“I forgive any slight against the dukedom, but I cannot countenance the kidnapping of children.” Roland tore his gaze away, looking towards the sun setting on the horizon. “We are not discussing punishment. We need to consider the matter of justice. How do we serve justice here? For the moment, I shall freely admit it. I have no earthly idea.”