by C. S. Harris
Sebastian took a long, slow swallow of his own brandy and felt it burn all the way down. “You don’t believe her?”
“I don’t know what to believe-although frankly I’m inclined to suspect it has something to do with this damned business about Yates.”
“If so, why wouldn’t she tell you?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping perhaps you knew the answer to that.”
Sebastian shook his head. “I’m afraid there’s far too much going on here that I don’t understand yet.”
Hendon stared down at his brandy. “She tells me you have undertaken to prove Yates’s innocence.”
When Sebastian remained silent, Hendon cleared his throat and said gruffly, “Thank you.”
“I’m not doing it for you.”
There was a long, pained pause. Then Hendon said, “No. Of course not.” He set aside the brandy untasted and reached for his hat. “Give my regards to your wife.” Then he bowed and left.
Sebastian sent at once for his carriage to be brought around. He was waiting with one arm propped against the mantel, his gaze on the cold hearth before him, his thoughts far away, when he felt the black cat brush against his leg and looked up to find Hero watching him.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, straightening. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“That’s a first.” She bent to scoop up the purring cat into her arms. “Has something happened?”
“Kat Boleyn was attacked this evening in Covent Garden. She’s unhurt, but it’s. . worrisome.”
A frown line appeared between Hero’s eyes. “You think it’s connected in some way to Eisler’s murder?”
“Yes.”
She said, “Why would Hendon bring you word of Kat Boleyn?”
His gaze met hers. And he found himself thinking, When enemies become friends and then lovers, at what point do the last barriers drop? When are the final secrets revealed? She had been his wife for six weeks; she shared his bed every night and was carrying his child. Yet there was so much they did not know about each other, so many things he’d never told her, so much of which they’d never spoken.
And neither had ever uttered those three simple but powerful words, I love you.
He said bluntly, “Kat is Hendon’s natural daughter. None of us knew it until last autumn. To say the discovery was distressing would be one of the year’s great understatements.”
He saw the shock of comprehension in her eyes, along with something else he hadn’t expected.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “Sebastian. I’m so sorry.”
He drained his brandy and set the empty glass aside. “If you’re imagining our quaint family circle as some grand tragedy, don’t. In the end, that discovery-as sordid and shocking as it was-turned out to be only the first act in what has since come to resemble nothing so much as a tawdry farce.”
“You don’t look to me as if you’re laughing.”
“Yes, well. .” He would have said more, for there was so much else he needed to tell her. Only, at that moment Morey appeared in the doorway to say, “Your carriage is ready, my lord.”
He hesitated.
She reached out to touch his arm lightly. “Go on, Sebastian. I understand.”
And so he left her there, the black cat held cradled in her arms like a child.
Chapter 40
He found Kat curled up on the sofa before a fire in her drawing room, her left arm resting in a sling.
“Please don’t get up,” Sebastian said, as she struggled to do so.
She sat up anyway, her small stockinged feet peeking out from beneath the hem of her muslin gown. “I asked Hendon not to carry this tale to you. But he obviously didn’t listen.”
Sebastian came to rest his hands on her shoulders and stare down into her upturned face. “How are you? Truly.”
“Gibson says it’s nothing serious-a sprain only. One of the men grabbed hold of my arm and I must have twisted it in my attempt to get away.”
“What the bloody hell happened? And why the devil did you go to Hendon rather than to me?”
“Stop glowering, Sebastian. I didn’t go to Hendon. He stopped by this evening by chance to see how I was doing, and I made the mistake of giving him an honest answer when he asked how I came to injure myself.”
“Did you give him an honest answer?”
She smiled. “For the most part. I have no idea who those two men were. But I don’t think their intent was to kill me-at least, not right away. They were trying to drag me to a cart they had waiting nearby.”
Sebastian walked away to stand at the window overlooking the darkened square below. “Did you act on the question I asked you this afternoon?”
“I did, yes. But I only sent a vague message to someone requesting a meeting. I didn’t go into detail on why.”
He glanced over at her. “They might know why.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe this individual would harm me.”
“So certain?”
She smoothed her free hand down over her lap and did not answer him.
He said, “I think Napoleon’s men are still looking for that diamond. If they didn’t kill Eisler but believe that Yates did, they might think he has it.”
“So why snatch me?”
“To use as a bargaining chip, perhaps?”
“As in, ‘You give us the diamond and we will give you your wife’?” She considered it a moment, then said, “I believe one of the men who tried to grab me may have been French.”
Sebastian frowned. “Thin? With a pockmarked face?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I tangled with him in Seven Dials last night.” He paused. “Did you have a chance to speak to Yates?”
She nodded. “You were right about Beresford and Tyson. They are mollies.” She kept her gaze on his face. “That’s significant; why?”
“Eisler liked to collect information on people.”
“You mean for blackmail?”
“I don’t think he extorted actual cash payments in return for his silence. He used what he knew to influence people, to force them to do what he wanted them to do.”
“I’d call that blackmail.”
“In a sense, I suppose it is.”
She frowned thoughtfully. “According to Yates, Blair Beresford is the younger son of a small Irish landowner. What could he possibly have that Eisler either wanted or could use?”
“I wasn’t thinking about Beresford.”
“You mean Tyson?” She was silent for a moment, as if considering this. Then she said, “He’s also a younger son.”
“He is. But he had gems he was selling to Eisler. Eisler may have tried to use the information he had to drive a hard bargain.”
“You’re suggesting this gives Tyson a motive for murder?”
“I’d say it does, yes. Although if Eisler tried to use threats to pressure Matt Tyson, he was a fool. Tyson is the kind of man who would as soon slit your throat as look at you.”
“Where does he say he was last Sunday evening?”
“Beresford claims they spent the evening in Tyson’s rooms in St. James’s Street.”
She raked the curls off her forehead with a hand Sebastian noticed was not quite steady. “We’re running out of time, Devlin. Yates’s trial has been scheduled for Saturday.”
He wanted to go to her, to take her in his arms and hold her in comfort. It occurred to him that if she were, in truth, his sister, then he could have done so and no one would have thought twice about it.
And that suddenly struck him as the cruelest irony of all.
He said, “The person you sent your message to-who was it?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Even to save your own life?”
But she only shook her head, a sad smile playing about her full, beautiful lips.
Leaving the house in Cavendish Square, Sebastian walked into a crisp night scented by a pungent mixture of coal smoke and damp stone a
nd the hot oil from the street lamps that flickered faintly, as if stirred by an unseen hand. He started to leap up into his waiting carriage, then changed his mind and sent his coachman home.
Turning toward Regents Park, he walked down wide, paved streets lined with stately brick and stucco houses that stood where just twenty-five years before he and his brothers had run through meadows golden with ripening hay. In those days, there’d been a small pond shaded by chestnuts-just about there, he decided, where that livery stable now stood. He remembered one time when his brother Cecil had found an old Roman coin buried in the mud while they were collecting tadpoles, and Richard, the eldest and therefore their father’s heir, had tried to claim it as his own in some twisted interpretation of the rules of primogeniture. Their mother had been there too, the sun warm on her fair hair, her voice gay with laughter as she separated the squabbling boys. And none of it-none of it-had really been as he’d thought it to be.
At what point? he thought again. At what point do the last barriers drop? When are the final secrets revealed?
But when he arrived back at Brook Street, it was to find Hero’s bedroom in darkness. He stood for a moment in the doorway and watched the gentle rise and fall of her breathing. Then he turned away.
By the time he awoke the next morning, she had already left for more of her interviews.
Thursday, 24 September
At precisely five minutes to eleven the next morning, Sebastian walked into the Lambeth Street Public Office to find Bertram Leigh-Jones bustling about with flapping robes, his wig askew as he sorted through a stack of files.
“We don’t open until eleven,” snapped the magistrate. “What do you want?”
“I’m wondering if you have a list of the people who owed Daniel Eisler money.”
Leigh-Jones grunted, his attention all for his files. “Now, why would I want something like that?”
“From what I’m hearing, Eisler dabbled in everything from blackmail to magic to sexual exploitation. A man like that accumulates a lot of enemies.”
The magistrate looked up. “Maybe. But that doesn’t alter the fact that Russell Yates is the one who actually killed him. He’ll be standing trial this Saturday.”
“Rather hasty, don’t you think?”
“As it happens, no, I don’t. The man is clearly guilty. Why keep him locked up at His Majesty’s expense when he could provide a spot of sport for the populace by dancing at the end of a rope?”
Sebastian studied the man’s overfed, self-confident face. “I’ve heard it said that when King George was still in his right mind, it was his habit to personally examine the cases of each and every prisoner condemned to death in London. They say he could frequently be found weighing the evidence against them in the small hours of the night, and that he would closet himself with his chaplain to pray at the time of their deaths.”
“Did he, now?” Leigh-Jones banged his files together and gathered them under one beefy arm. “Well, it’s no wonder he went mad, then, now, isn’t it? If you ask me, a morning spent watching a half dozen rascals hang is nearly as good a sport as a foxhunt.” He gave Sebastian a broad wink. “You could join us afterward at the keeper’s house for a breakfast of deviled kidneys. It’s quite the tradition, you know. Now, you’ll have to excuse me; I’ve a hearing to attend.” He put up a hand to straighten his wig. “Good day to you, m’lord.”
Chapter 41
Hero spent much of the morning in the shadow of Northumberland House, interviewing the gang of young sweepers who worked Charing Cross. An irregular open space at the end of the Strand where Whitechapel, Cockspur, and St. Martin’s Lane all came together, the intersection was heavily traveled. All agreed it was a “capital spot” with lots of “gentlefolk” passing to and fro. The problem was, there were simply too many of the lads for any of them to do well.
She was talking to a tall, gangly redhead named Murphy when she became aware of the sensation of being watched. She glanced around, her gaze assessing the intersection’s fenced-in bronze equestrian statue, the classical facade of the Royal Mews, the flock of ragged, barefoot boys clutching brooms. She had never considered herself a fanciful woman. But the unsettling conviction remained.
“It’s that feller over there,” said Murphy when she glanced around for the third or fourth time. “Be’ind the dustman’s cart just outside the coaching ’otel there. ’E’s been staring at ye fer a good long while.”
The dustman’s cart rolled forward, and she could see him now, an unkempt scarecrow of a man with sunken eyes and scarred cheeks and a madman’s fatuous grin.
Hero thrust her notebook into her reticule and paid the boy generously for his time. “Thank you.”
With one hand still in her reticule, she strode purposefully across the street toward Jud Foy. She half expected him to bolt. But he just stood there, grinning, while she walked up to him.
“Why are you watching me?” she demanded.
His mouth opened and his chest jerked as if he were laughing, only he made no sound. “Been watching you for days, I have. You only just now noticed it? Saw you talking t’ the little girl in Holburn.”
“Why?”
“Why?” he repeated, his eyes clouding as if the question confused him.
“Why are you watching me?”
“You can learn all kinds of int’resting things about a person by watching them.”
“Follow me again,” said Hero, “and I’ll have you taken up by the constables.”
He gave another of those strange, soundless laughs. “If you see me.”
She started to turn away but stopped when he added, “I noticed you got yourself a cat. Black cats are unlucky, you know.”
She pivoted slowly to face him again. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Time was, people’d drown a black cat. Or maybe-”
She drew the brass-mounted muff pistol from her reticule and pointed it squarely between his eyes. “You’d best hope my cat is very long-lived, because if anything happens to him-anything-you’re going to wish you died a hero’s death on the battlefields of Europe. Do I make myself clear?”
She was dimly aware of a whiskered man in an old-fashioned frock coat who turned to stare at her openmouthed; a dowager in a sedan chair let out a startled shriek. Foy held himself painfully still, his idiot’s grin wiped from his vapid face.
“You’d shoot a man over a cat?”
“Without compunction.”
“Mother of God. You’re as mad as your husband.”
She shook her head. “The difference between Devlin and me is that he probably wouldn’t actually shoot you. I would.” She pointed the pistol’s nozzle toward the sky and took a step back. “Stay away from my cat.”
Sebastian arrived back at Brook Street to find Hero seated on the steps of the terrace overlooking the parterred garden. She still wore her dove gray carriage dress trimmed in the palest pink. But she’d taken off her plumed pink velvet hat and kid gloves and laid them with her reticule on the paving stones beside her. She held the black cat in her lap and was stroking him under the chin when Sebastian walked up to her.
“The Member of Parliament from South Whitecliff tells me that my wife shot three men at Charing Cross this morning. But the baker’s boy swears it was only one.”
She buried her face in the cat’s soft black fur. “You should know better than to believe everything you hear. I found Jud Foy watching me again. He threatened the cat. I suggested that neither activity was a good idea. But with great restraint, I did not shoot him.”
Sebastian moved her reticule so that he could sit beside her and heard the heavy chink of her flintlock. “Was he impressed with your sincerity?”
“I believe he was.”
He reached out to caress her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “I’m sorry.”
She raised her head and looked at him. “I may perhaps have overreacted.”
“I don’t think so.”
She gave a soft chuckle. But her
smile faded quickly. “I don’t understand why he’s doing this-what he wants.”
“Matt Tyson says he was kicked in the head by a mule.”
“Tyson? Tyson knows him?”
“Foy testified for the defense at Tyson’s court-martial-he was a sergeant with Tyson’s regiment. A rifleman.”
She flipped the cat onto his back so that she could rub his belly. “Jamie Knox was a rifleman, wasn’t he?”
“Different regiment.”
She looked up then, her gaze meeting his. “You think there are so many ex-riflemen in London that they don’t know each other?”
Jamie Knox was seated at a rear table in an eating house off Houndsditch when Sebastian drew out the chair opposite him and sat down.
“Please, do have a seat,” said the tavern owner, cutting a slice of roast mutton.
“I’m looking for an ex-rifleman named Jud Foy.”
Knox waved his fork in an expansive gesture that took in the simple wainscoted room with its closely crowded tables and chairs, its cheerfully glowing fire. “Don’t see him here, do you?”
“But you do know him.”
“I know lots of people. It’s one of the hazards of running a tavern.”
Sebastian studied Knox’s lean, high-boned face. The likeness between Sebastian and this man was startling. Both had the same deep-set golden eyes beneath straight dark brows, and similarly molded lips. But it was the differences that intrigued Sebastian the most. In Knox’s case, the nose inclined more toward the aquiline, and there was a faint cleft in his chin. Characteristics he inherited from his barmaid mother? Sebastian wondered. Or from the unknown father both men probably shared?
“You still all fired up about Eisler?” asked Knox, stabbing his fork into a potato.
“I’m still looking into his death, yes.”
Knox chewed slowly, then swallowed. “What’s it got to do with Foy?”
“I don’t know that it has anything to do with him. But the man has been menacing my wife.”
A faint gleam of amusement deepened the gold in the other man’s eyes. “I heard about this morning’s incident at Charing Cross.”