A Wicked Conceit (Lady Darby Mysteries #9) - Anna Lee Huber Page 0,120
make an escape. Not when he was still dressed in his nightclothes with a dark brown cotton banyan draped over top. A nightcap even covered his prematurely silver-white tresses; however, when he caught the direction of my gaze he removed it.
“I’ve told ye everythin’ I ken,” he protested.
“Really?” Gage asked in a leading voice, one whose lightness seemed to confound Heron.
So much so that he actually answered in a question. “Aye?”
Gage tilted his head, studying the man before he continued. “Do you recall that we told you we met Miss Maggie Kincaid on the road outside your home the last time we called?”
He blinked and then forced a laugh. “Oh, aye. But I’m sure many people traverse the North Back o’ the Canongate. ’Tis well trod.”
“Yes, but more pointedly, she emerged from the lane leading to your door.”
He shrugged. “More than a dozen sets o’ rooms lead off the same lane. She mighta visited any one o’ ’em.” His words were nonchalant, but the manner in which he was wringing the life out of his hat certainly was not.
“She might have,” Gage conceded. “But we’ve already spoken to Miss Kincaid.”
“You have?”
He nodded, and Heron’s eyes widened with dismay.
“She told us everything,” I said, growing tired of Heron’s stunned silence and Gage toying with him. I’d been unable to sleep much the night before from nerves, and now that the opportunity to speak with Heron was before us, I refused to waste any more time beating around the bush. I cut him off with a slice of my hand as he began to utter another nonsensical question in response. “About your meeting in the Physic Gardens, and her confiding in you about her and her brother’s past, and your telling the information to someone else.” I narrowed my eyes. “Or did you sell it?”
“Nay! Nay, I dinna sell it.”
“Then whom did you tell? And why?”
He lifted his hand to his head, scraping his fingers through his hair and then tugging on it.
“You betrayed her, you know?” I added, grinding the ax in further. “She trusted you.”
“I ken. I ken.” He sank down in a chair and cradled his head in his hands. “She says she’s forgiven me, but I dinna ken if I’ll ever forgive myself. Or if God will.”
“Or if Bonnie Brock will,” I replied, perhaps a trifle mean-spiritedly. But I didn’t come here to listen to him wallow in self-pity. That got us nowhere.
He sat upright in alarm. “Does he ken?”
“Yes. So out with it, before he comes to extract the answer from you himself.”
Heron shrank backward.
“Whom did you tell? And why?” I repeated more stridently.
His eyes darted between me and Gage, who now stood beyond my shoulder, his arms crossed over his chest, allowing me to take the lead. “Mr. Lennox. Our printer.”
I shared a speaking look with Gage, for he had been the name at the top of both of our lists of suspects.
“He . . . he told me he’d seen me wi’ Maggie. That he ken who she was. And then he invited me to have a drink.”
I frowned, not understanding where this was leading.
“He asked if he could take me into his confidence. Said he believed that Maggie was his cousin. Her brother, too. Through their mother. Said the family had been searchin’ for ’em because there was an inheritance owed to ’em. But given Kincaid’s reputation, he needed to be certain.” He gestured with his hand. “Many o’ the Kincaids are descended from the ancient Earls o’ Lennox.”
This was a piece of information I had not been aware of, but it helped fill in the larger picture.
“So it seemed feasible that they could be related. Lennox has always claimed his ancestors were more than tradesmen.”
“So you told him what you knew,” I surmised. “What Maggie had told you in confidence.”
“Aye. Wi’ the help o’ a few too many glasses o’ whisky.” His head hung in shame. “I dinna realize how much I’d actually told him until he brought The King o’ Grassmarket to Mr. Rookwood. When I read it, I wanted to put a pistol to my head.”
I scowled. “Spare us the dramatics. Did you confront Lennox?”
“Sure, I did. But he just laughed in my face. Told me there was nothin’ I could do aboot it wi’oot tellin’ the world, the lass I loved, and her blackguard o’ a brother what I’d done. That my only choice was to keep my gob shut.” He sighed. “So I did.”