A Lady's Guide to Mischief and Mayhem - Manda Collins Page 0,102

not to in that house.”

“Yes, we met your grandfather today.” Kate thought that perhaps if she could keep him talking long enough, she’d be able to loosen her bonds. “He was quite unpleasant.”

She’d expected him to scowl, but to her surprise, the young man laughed, albeit bitterly. “Unpleasant, you say. It’s as if you’re talking about a visitor to afternoon tea who wouldn’t stop eating all the biscuits.”

“Hardly that.” Kate tried to infuse her voice with sympathy. “I thought he was horrible. And the way he treated you, your sister, and your mother was unconscionable.”

He made a sound of disgust. “He made our lives a misery. And for what? When Emily found the marriage lines, I thought it must be some sort of trick. I could never have imagined he could hate us enough to present us to the world as bastards when we were just as legitimate as any other poor fool in his congregation. I’d even absorbed enough of his Bible thumping to believe that we maybe even deserved his cruelty. But those lines told us everything we needed to know about the Reverend Simeon Hale.”

“Why didn’t you kill him?” As long as they were here and Bastian seemed willing to talk, Kate decided to ask the question that had been bothering her ever since they’d laid eyes on the twins’ grandfather that morning. “I should have thought that he would be the first you’d punish. Not strangers in London who’d never done you any harm.”

She shifted in her seat as the hard iron of the bench was beginning to make her back ache. As she moved, her hand caught on a sharp bit of scrollwork and she only just kept from showing her surprised pain to her captor.

But her question had distracted him enough that he didn’t notice the change in her expression. “I did consider it,” he said thoughtfully. “We both did. But once we’d thought a little, we realized that it would harm him more to see how we’d perverted his precious Commandments. So, we stole the purse he kept hidden away in his study and left that day for London.”

His expression darkened. “I was foolish enough to think that all we needed was to show the marriage lines in town and we’d be welcomed as the long-lost children of the great Sebastian Philbrick. But no one believed us. And a little research told me he’d died penniless. So we changed our plans. If we couldn’t go back to Crossmere triumphant as our true selves, we’d have to make sure that Grandfather saw tidings of our new lives in the newspaper.”

While he spoke, Kate had worked her hands in such a way that she was able to lift the coiled stocking around her wrists over the protruding piece of iron on the back of the bench. So slowly that her movements couldn’t be detected, she rubbed the binding across the iron in a sawing motion.

“How could he know that you were the ones responsible for the killings?” she asked, making a show of attention to his story, lest he figure out the reason for her distraction.

“He drilled the Ten Commandments into us from the moment we learned to speak.” Bastian’s smile was gleeful like a child’s, and Kate felt the chill right down to her bones. “I told him to look for us in the papers. I would have sent him a letter saying as much, of course, but that old brute would have given our names to the police without a backward glance.”

Kate knew intuitively that he had enjoyed sending messages to his sadistic grandfather with the bodies of his victims, but it was a testament to the insularity of Bastian’s thinking that he and Emily had assumed that Hale would be able to recognize their handiwork just from the use of the Ten Commandments, which were known the world over as tenets of the Christian faith.

“You were in London for the better part of a year. What made you decide to come to Lewiston?” She’d felt the stocking begin to give a little and had to keep him talking long enough for her to free her hands.

Now that he’d begun to tell his story, Bastian seemed in no hurry to stop. “That’s an interesting tale. You see, while we were in London, I spent every moment I could spare from my position as a clerk looking for information about my father. I was in the British Library one day and one of the