Perry touched her arm where the blade was tied. She was alone, and the pale green of her gown offered no disguise and her skirts rucked up were an invitation to a cur. Given the chance, a number of Charley’s so-called gentlemen acquaintances wouldn’t hesitate to pull her off her horse if they didn’t recognize her as Shaldon’s daughter.

How much less restraint could she expect from a rough free trader or a soldier cut loose from the wars, homeless and hungry.

Shoosh, Perry. She was scaring herself needlessly. Shaldon’s daughter could be braver.

The dark spot held perfectly still, probably an animal, probably as startled as herself. She pressed the nervous mare nearer, not too close. With a proper start, Chestnut could outrun a two-legged pursuer, even on this unsteady ground.

“I say. Who is there?” she called.

The brush shivered.

She spotted a bit of brown drab, compact and curled in on itself. Her breath eased.

“Please come out. You’re frightening my horse.”

As if on cue, Chestnut snorted. The brown ball uncurled, crawled out and stood in the middle of the path, trembling, fists clenched, shoulders hunched.

It was a boy of about seven, if she was any judge of age. Light brown hair and pale skin peeked from under his cap.

“Good day to you.” She scanned the moorland. He was alone.

Perry dismounted, and the boy shied away. She pulled out an apple she had taken and held it up to the mare, who eyed the boy, too nervous to take the offering.

She forced a laugh. “This is Chestnut. She is wary of you. Will you come close so she can see you mean her no harm?”

He shook his head.

“You do not speak? Are you a ghost then, wandering the moor all alone?”

His eyes widened and she could see they were a light shade of brown. His skin paled even more under the freckles sprinkling his nose.

She took a step. A soft cry escaped his lips.

“What is it, boy?”

“Y-you b-be the gh-ghost.”

Another laugh bubbled up in her, this one real. “A ghost? Of course, I’m not a ghost. I’m but a lady, out for a ride. My name is…”

She should not give her true name. She did not want the locals to make note of her presence. The Justice of the Peace here, if he was in residence, would likely be an acquaintance of her father’s.

“My name is Felicity.” It was her middle name.

Too late, she remembered, it was also her mother’s name. The presence of a Felicity would be just as suspicious and ghost-invoking.

“But my friends call me…Lizzy, and you may also. What is your name?” She took another step.

He trembled more. She reached into her pocket and his little shoulders rose.

“Naught but another apple. You won’t want the one that Chestnut has lipped.” She dropped that into a different pocket. “Would you like this fresh one?”

He eyed it. Licked his lips. Shook his head. He had a mother or someone who had trained him not to take an apple from the stranger who might be the witch from the fairy tale.

“Truly, I am not a ghost. I’m but a woman. A mere woman, and the apples are good, brought from my brother’s tree.” She took a bite, chewed. Swallowed. “They’re sweet. I have another as well as some biscuits.”

His gaze went to her pocket and then darted back to her face. “They say you be she.”

“She?” She took another bite.

His little chin went up and down. “The lady. A…a countess, she were. Thrown off the cliff and murdered.”

Her blood surged. The bite of apple stuck in her throat and all around her the world stopped, only the crash of the distant waves and Chestnut’s earthy breath breaking through her consciousness. She steadied herself against the horse and managed enough saliva to swallow. “Murdered?” Her voice sounded hollow, even to her.

“Aye. ’Afore I was born.” The boy’s tension seemed to ease. “You’d not heard? You’re not from here.”

“No.”

“Everyone here knows. You didn’t know?” A cocky note had crept into his raspy voice, and all of his unease transferred to her.

Her mother had not died in a tragic accident. She’d been murdered.

Her pulse pounded in her ear. Who else knew of this? Surely her father did. And probably her brothers. And maybe Fox. And no one had bothered to tell her?

He cocked his head and eyed her speculatively. “Not going to keel over, are you?”

Keel over? This was a rude little man.

Well, she had weathered worse than this among the ton, and she needed information. “You’ve startled me, boy.” She threw away her apple core and pulled out a cloth-wrapped stack of the biscuits that had dried out overnight. “Come along and have a biscuit with me, and tell me this ghost story, and then you may have my last apple, and perhaps Chestnut will feel comfortable enough to eat hers.”

Still holding the reins, she unwrapped her package, took a biscuit, and offered him one.

He came close enough to accept one. A little thing, he was, thin, but not starved, with a face strained with too much worry for a child. She wondered if it was all due to the fright she’d given him.

“Now. You may call me Lizzy. What shall I call you?”

His chewing stopped. He frowned, chewed some more, swallowed, and shrugged. “Pip.”

She handed him another biscuit. “Pip. Short for Phillip?”

The boy nodded solemnly.

“A lovely strong name. Tell me this ghost story.”

“There once was a lady who lived there in Gorse Cottage—not allus, only sommat time she visited, see. But on one of her stays, late one night, someone came and threw her over the cliff and bashed her brains out all over the rocks.”

Her stomach flipped again and a tingling started in her hands.

He finished his biscuit. “And not just her, her maid and her coachman too.”

Fire roared through her, followed by rivers of ice, spots dancing in her vision.

Must not faint, Perry. Must not. She made her voice calm. “Who would do such a horrible thing?”

He lifted a shoulder and eyed the napkin. She gave him another biscuit. “No one ever says who, least not around me.”

“But they know who?”

His brows drew together. “They’re scared.”

Her skin rippled. If they were scared, then the murderer was still alive and around. “I see. Do they know why she and her people were killed?”

“On account of the French, sommat said, but Gram says no Frenchies landed here and none ran around here without us knowing. No one comes through Clampton without us seeing.”

“I did.” But she’d taken a side road that skirted the town, and she’d made that stretch of the journey in early dawn.

He studied her. “Mayhap they thought you were her. She comes when there’s a tenant at Gorse Cottage.”

More astonishing revelations. Her mind reeled with them. “She comes here,” she said woodenly. She was surely a living woman, and not a ghost.

Could Mama still be alive?

“Drives the tenants away. Will you be eatin’ that last one?”

She handed him the biscuit. Her mother’s ghost came here whenever there was a tenant.

“Is there often a tenant?”

“No. On account of her. And she keeps all the barrels out of her house. Don’t bother with the other buildings though so they—

His mouth clamped shut. Only a child, but he knew the free traders’ code.

“I see.” She stopped and pressed her eyes closed. This was just like one of her father’s schemes, resurrecting her mother to scare smugglers away. And did he know she’d been murdered, or was that merely the wild suspicion of unsophisticated rustics? The road was precarious enough that an accidental death was not out of the question.

“Where you be staying, Lizzy?”

When she opened her eyes, he was watching her, as savvy as any child of the London streets.

Unsophisticated rustics, indeed. The folk in these wild parts had engaged in the free trade for generations. They were cagey, and cool, and clever. Even this child was shrewd. And they were all good with secrets. She had merely frightened one out of him.

She could say she was a guest, at Scarborough perhaps, riding distance from here. And there was that baronet in the neighborhood who might host a guest.

“It is a secret,” she said, buying time. “Come. I’ve given you all my biscuits. Now you must give Chestnut a scratch.”

Distracted, he drew closer. The horse dipped its head, eyed the boy, and nosed him.

“It wants its apple,” he said.

Perry pulled it from her pocket and handed it to him to present, a smile blooming on his lips at the tickle of the horse’s mouth.

The smile warmed her. While Chestnut ate, he lifted a hand to stroke the horse, and Perry felt his delight all the way to her bones.

“I have an idea.” She tossed the reins over the horse’s head and took his hand. “Let’s have a ride.”

She tossed him up into the saddle, found a boulder to mount from, and hoisted herself up behind him. As Chestnut stepped out, the boy’s stiff, startled little body relaxed against her. She nudged the mare into a trot and the boy’s laugh sent a thrill through her.

When Fox entered the inn, the murmurs fell to a hush and then resumed again, more subdued. The groggy-eyed locals had crawled out after a few hours of sleep, done whatever chores their women had forced upon them, and found their way here to get orders from Scruggs.

Nodding a greeting all around, he ordered a pint and looked around for a place to settle. The benches and stools held scattered groups of two or three men. Four other men sat apart at a table, hands gripping their tankards, gazes locked on him.

Outsiders, he’d guess from the glances the locals darted. Carvelle’s reliable men, perhaps. Not likely to worry about a ghost, not likely to talk where locals or another outsider could hear.

No one invited him to join them. Not surprising, since last year a smuggler from this area named John Black had been transported based on the tales told by loose lips.

“May I?” He pulled a free chair from a table where two men sat and dragged it closer to the hearth, dead on this summer’s afternoon. From this vantage point, he could watch the room and the doors, and dip into the conversations bubbling around him. Carvelle was not here, at least, not in this room.

The two men whose chair he’d lifted whispered. One, a sandy-haired fellow, was already drunk. From the yellow tone of his skin, he’d been drunk since last night, or last week, or maybe even last month. The brown-haired friend made shushing noises.

His skin prickled. He recognized that shushing.

Fox nodded to them. “No rain today yet,” he said in his best Eton accent. He was playing a bereaved secretary who’d just come into an inheritance.

The sandy-haired one’s eyes widened. “Ye’re the tenant up at Gorse Cottage?”

“I am.”

Hair lifted along his neck, the ripple continuing down between his shoulder blades. For certain this was the ghost-believing Davy and his shushing friend, the men who knew who had killed Lady Shaldon.

Davy opened his mouth to say more, but the tap room door opened again and another man entered. Just like the others, Fox swung his gaze to him.