Page 55 of A Treacherous Treasure

They went inside, with Rebecca still walking in the lead, and as she cautiously made her way through the first floor, she saw a familiar figure coming toward her.

“Rebecca? Is that you?” Mrs. Heywood’s unmistakable tone matched the silhouette. “Is that a gun?” She cried out, as though frightened, but the cry sounded so fake, it turned Rebecca’s stomach.

“She won’t shoot you,” Margaret said, with a slightly disgusted tone in her voice, as she and Mother walked in behind Rebecca.

“Oh my! Oh, my heart! Oh, my nerves!” Mrs. Heywood started to fan her face with a handkerchief. “To be so greeted in the home where I lived for thirty years!”

“We didn’t know you were coming.” Rebecca purposely kept her voice quiet and devoid of emotion. “If we had known, we could have greeted you properly.” Then she went straight to the stairs and up to her room to put away the gun.

Meanwhile, her mother-in-law was gasping dramatically below. “Oh, my nerves! My heart is running away! My nerves! Oh!”

She should have known Mrs. Heywood would return, but the crushing disappointment told her that she’d hoped she wouldn’t. Arthur had made sure to provide for her, increasing her jointure and reiterating her right to live in the two-story cottage about a hundred feet from the main house. Well, if she lived in the cottage, perhaps Rebecca wouldn’t have to see her too often.

Seeing her at all was too often.

Her stomach churned and her head hurt. The last thing she wanted was to see Mrs. Heywood at all. Her cruel remarks still jumped into Rebecca’s thoughts daily, reminding her how much her husband’s mother had hated and resented her, when Rebecca had tried so hard, especially in the beginning, to make the woman like her.

“God, forgive me, but I wish her back with her brother, miles and miles from here.”

She placed the gun back in the drawer beside her bed and went downstairs to be polite—and to take the snide and sometimes vague verbal beating she would surely have to endure.

Chapter Sixteen

“It is so kind of you to visit your daughter out here in the country,” Mrs. Heywood said, as they were dining that night, “as I’m sure you must have many duties and responsibilities in town with your twelve other children.”

“Nine other children.”

“What?”

“I have nine other children, not twelve, and I—”

“I only had the one child, but he was the light of my life. A better child you never saw. And he doted on me as much as I doted on him.” She sniffed and dabbed at her eyes.

Rebecca stared down at her plate.Don’t react, she counseled herself. This is her way of getting sympathy, so let her have it, but you don’t have to say anything.

Mother, of course, made the appropriate remarks of condolence and compassion, and an awkward silence ensued, which was soon broken by Mrs. Heywood’s voice.

“Arthur was so good and liked by everyone. I don’t know who could have shot him. Only someone who was jealous of him.” She made the last statement with anger in her voice. “Jealous people are never satisfied, and they took my beautiful boy away from me. He was my only child. How could anyone be so cruel? No one but a mother could ever feel this much pain.”

Rebecca forced her own thoughts and feelings down, pushing them away as she focused her gaze on the food on her plate, and let her thoughts run to the last time she’d seen Thomas Westbrook, as well as the first time she’d seen him—it must have been at least a year ago—at a ball dancing with Penelope, the young widow of the Earl of Hampstead. She’d had a fleeting thought, even then, of how handsome Lieutenant Westbrook was and how he and Penelope made a handsome couple on the dance floor. She never imagined then that she would soon be the young widow, and that she would now be wishing she could attend a ball and dance with Lieutenant Westbrook.

How shameless was she? But no one could read her thoughts, at least.

“Rebecca, Mrs. Heywood asked you a question,” Mother’s soft voice came to her.

“Forgive me, I didn’t hear.”

Her eyes met Mrs. Heywood’s cold, hard stare. “Sometimes I don’t know where your mind goes when I’m talking to you.”

She seemed to be waiting for an answer, but Rebecca said nothing.

“I asked if they had caught Arthur’s murderer. You do remember that he was murdered? Surely there is someone who cares enough to be searching for the evil person who shot my son—your husband. Have they caught him?”

Her voice was hard and angry and there was no evidence of the sorrow she’d displayed just moments before.

“I don’t believe so.”

“You don’t believe so?”