What Angels Fear sscm-1

by C. S. Harris

  “Yes?”

  “If the laying-out woman had to break Rachel’s hand to get it open, then it must have been clenched. Like this.” Gibson held up his fist. “But we know Rachel was scratching at her attacker.” He uncurled his fingers into a clawing position. “Like this.” He relaxed his hand. “If she’d been raped before death, then I’d say perhaps she clenched her fists at the end, the way a person tends to do when they’re trying to endure something painful. But we know that’s not the case.”

  “So what are you saying? That she died clasping something in her hand?”

  Gibson nodded. “I suspect so. Of course it could have been something as innocuous as a clump of hair she’d torn from her attacker.”

  “Or it could have been something considerably more significant. There’s no way we’ll ever know now.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I’m trying to locate the woman who laid out the body. If I can convince her I don’t mean to prosecute her for theft, she might tell me.”

  Sebastian went to stand again beside the window overlooking the narrow, refuse-filled street. Dark gray clouds hung low over the city, promising rain. After a moment, the Irishman came to stand beside him, his gaze, like Sebastian’s, on the lowering sky. “Have you given any more thought to taking a little vacation in America?”

  Sebastian gave a soft laugh. “I’m not likely to have much luck finding Rachel York’s killer in some place like Baltimore or Philadelphia, now am I?”

  “It’s not Rachel York I’m thinking about. She’s dead. It’s Sebastian St. Cyr who’s worrying me.”

  Sebastian shook his head. “I can’t leave, Paul. There’s more involved in this than I realized at first. Far more.”

  Paul Gibson perched on a nearby stool while Sebastian outlined Rachel’s involvement with Leo Pierrepont. “So what do you think?” said the Irishman when Sebastian had finished. “That Pierrepont found out she’d taken the papers from him and killed her?”

  “Either him, or one of the men against whom the French were collecting damaging information. I doubt Lord Frederick and my father are the only men Rachel approached. Any one of them could have killed her.”

  The doctor nodded. “She was involved in dark doings, that girl. Dark doings with dangerous men.”

  “I suspect the pages torn from her appointment book are linked to Lord Frederick and Pierrepont, but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m ever going to know for sure.” He blew out a harsh breath. “It’s even possible Pierrepont’s documents have nothing to do with her death at all, beyond explaining why she was at that church so late at night.”

  Gibson studied him through narrowed eyes. “You’ve found something else, have you?”

  Sebastian met his friend’s gaze, and nodded. “My nephew, Bayard. He seems to have been infatuated with the woman. Followed her everywhere.”

  “A common enough occurrence, surely, when one is dealing with beautiful actresses and opera dancers, and callow young men newly on the town?”

  “Perhaps. Except that the Saturday before Rachel died, Bayard flew into a rage at Steven’s and threatened to kill her. Said he was going to rip her head off.”

  “Ah. Not so common. Is he capable of such a thing, do you think?”

  “I never liked him as a child. He could be cruel. Vicious even . . .” Sebastian let his voice trail off. “Yet it doesn’t seem possible that he could have done it, given that he spent the evening in a very public display of riotous excess before passing out in front of Cribb’s Parlor. His own father took him home.”

  Gibson sat silent for a moment, lost in thought. “No, it doesn’t seem possible, does it? And there’s that other woman, Mary Grant. Why would Bayard track her down and kill her?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “No reason I can think of. Although for that matter, the same could be said of Hugh Gordon. Rachel owed him money, and he’s badly dipped enough that he might well have killed her in a fit of temper if she refused to pay. But why the maid? It doesn’t make any sense. Unless—” Sebastian broke off suddenly.

  “Unless . . . what?”

  Sebastian sat forward suddenly. “Unless Gordon hunted Mary Grant down because he was looking for the papers Rachel had taken. Think about it: Gordon knew Rachel was involved with Pierrepont and the French. What if he also knew she’d stolen the documents and was planning to sell them? He might well have decided to get his hands on them and sell them himself.”

  “And where does Mr. Gordon say he was last Tuesday night?

  Sebastian pushed away from the stool. “He says he was at home, studying his lines. But according to a cranky old Irishman named Paddy O’Neal, Gordon went off in a hackney just before nine o’clock.”

  “Any idea where he went?”

  Sebastian smiled. “Westminster.”

  Sebastian found Hugh Gordon in a cloth warehouse in the Haymarket, where the actor was inspecting an array of Bath superfine on a shelf against the side wall.

  “Oh, God. It’s you again,” he said, when Sebastian came to stand beside him. “What the devil do you want now?”

  “How about the truth for a change?” Sebastian leaned against the nearby dark-paneled wall and smiled. “You followed Rachel to St. Matthew’s last Tuesday night. Didn’t you?”

  “What?” Gordon glanced nervously over his shoulder. “Of course not. I told you, I was home last Tuesday night, studying lines.”

  “That’s not what Paddy O’Neal says.”

  “Paddy? What the hell has that dotty old Irishman to do with this?”

  “He says you pinched the hackney he’d called that night. And took it to Westminster.”

  “He’s lying.”

  “Is he? You needed money—lots of money, more even than Rachel owed you. I think you found out about the documents Rachel took from Pierrepont and came up with the bright idea of scaring her into giving them to you. Only, she refused.” Sebastian leaned in close and lowered his voice. “That’s when you grabbed her, wasn’t it? Maybe even gave her a shake, just like you used to do. Only, this time Rachel fought back. Tried to claw your eyes out. So you backhanded her—”

  “This is crazy,” Gordon began.

  ”—across the face,” continued Sebastian without pause. “And when she came at you again, you pulled the blade from your walking stick and slit her throat. And then, because fighting with women always makes you hard, you raped her—”

  “What?” The word came out in a low-voiced explosion of shock. “What are you saying? That Rachel was raped after she was killed?”

  “That’s right,” said Sebastian. “I suppose it takes something out of a man, giving in to that kind of bloodlust and passion. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t until the next day that you finally made it around to Rachel’s rooms, hoping to find the papers there. Only, her maid had cleaned the place out by then, hadn’t she? So you had to track her down. And when you found her, you killed her, too. Why, I wonder. Because she didn’t want to let you take the papers? Or was it because by then you’d realized you’d acquired a taste for dead women?”

  Gordon’s Adam’s apple moved painfully up and down as he swallowed, hard. “I swear to God, it’s not what you think.”

  Sebastian pushed away from the wall, his hands hanging loose at his sides.

  Gordon took a quick step back and licked dry lips with a nervous dart of his tongue. “You’re right. I did go to Westminster that night. But I wasn’t anywhere near St. Matthew’s.” He hesitated, then said in a rush. “There’s this woman. Her . . . her family wouldn’t approve, if they knew she was seeing me, so we meet at an inn. A place near the Abbey. The Three Feathers, it’s called. We were there half the night. You can check with the innkeeper if you want.”

  Sebastian nodded. It would be easy enough, as the man said, to check. A flicker of movement in the street drew Sebastian’s attention to the shop’s bowed front window. It had begun to rain, a fine mist slowly turning the pavement dark and wet. He glanced back at the actor. Hugh Gordon, too, was watching the st
reet.

  Sebastian studied the man’s suddenly heightened color. It occurred to him that while Gordon had expressed shock at the idea that Rachel had been raped after death, he had shown no surprise when Sebastian mentioned the documents taken from Pierrepont. “And yet you did know about the papers Rachel took from Pierrepont.”

  Gordon jerked. “All right. Yes. I did know. Rachel let it slip when I was pressing her for the money. But I swear to God, I didn’t kill her.”

  Sebastian shifted so that the actor was between him and the shop’s front door. “Who else knew Rachel had those papers?”

  “I don’t know. How could I? Why don’t you ask her lover?” The actor’s lower lip protruded in a pronounced sneer. “He ought to know. After all, he helped her steal them.”

  A man hovered just outside the shop door. He had his head turned so that Sebastian could see little of his face. But there was something familiar about the set of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw. “Her lover?” said Sebastian sharply. “Who? What’s the man’s name?”

  “Donatelli. Giorgio Donatelli,” said the actor just as Edward Maitland, followed by another constable, came hurtling through the shop’s front door.

  Chapter 48

  Sebastian sprinted toward the back of the shop, the leather soles of his Hessians slipping on the highly polished wooden floorboards.

  “Halt!” shouted Edward Maitland from behind him. “Halt in the King’s name!”

  A trestle table piled high with bolts of silks and satins reared up before them. Sebastian careened into it, the board flying from its trestles to knock both constables off their feet behind him.

  “Stop him!” shouted Maitland, scrambling up onto his hands and knees in a shimmering sea of unfurling cloth.

  Someone grabbed a handful of Sebastian’s coat. Twisting around, Sebastian heaved a small case of notions into the ponderous gut of a middle-aged, red-faced man whose mouth opened, bleating air. He let go Sebastian’s coat.

  He could see the rear door through a workshop at the back. Praying the damn thing was unlocked, Sebastian raced toward it and smiled as he felt the latch give beneath his hand.

  He cleared the small back stoop in one leap to land in a narrow alleyway, his boots sending up sprays of muddy water as he fled past a pile of smashed wooden crates and barrels rimmed with rusting iron. He rounded the corner onto Panton Street just as Edward Maitland erupted out of the shop’s back door with a shout lost in a sudden, thundering downpour of rain.

  Sebastian fled west through Leicester Square, dodging between a high-perch phaeton and a scarlet-bodied barouche. The thong of a whip 4snapped close; wood splintered as horses drew up to a snorting, head-tossing stand. A woman screamed.

  Sebastian ran on, the wind whipping at his coat, the rain driving hard in his face. Shaking his head to clear the water from his eyes, he threw a quick glance over his shoulder to find Edward Maitland holding steady at about a hundred yards behind him, arms and knees pumping. The second constable had fallen away.

  They were in that part of town where the fashionable streets of Piccadilly and Pall Mall fell away quickly to the narrow byways and seedy alleys of Covent Garden. The paving beneath Sebastian’s boots grew rough, the streets increasingly crowded. A huddle of ragged urchins cheered as Maitland slipped on a pile of manure and almost went down; an old woman in a tattered shawl called out, “God save you, young man!” as Sebastian sprinted past.

  Then he heard Maitland shout, “Stop that man! He’s a murderer!” Looking up, Sebastian saw the top of the street blocked by a troop of Bow Street Horse Patrol on their way back from the city’s outskirts: three men in blue and red, mounted astride big bay hacks.

  They spurred their mounts forward, hooves thundering in the narrow space between the two rows of old half-timbered houses. A side street opened up beside him and Sebastian pelted down it, only to find himself caught up in an eddy of ragged paupers, bird-chested men with stooped shoulders, and dirty-faced women in tattered gowns, their bone-thin hands clutching squalling infants wrapped in shawls. There were children, too: mat-haired toddlers and half-grown youngsters dressed in rags, their bare arms and legs covered with running sores. Here were the poor and desperate of the city, who had descended on St. Martin’s Workhouse in search of outdoor assistance and been turned away.

  Sebastian fought to push his way through as the crowd swirled around the workhouse. Then a man at the end of the street seized an apple seller’s barrel and tossed it through the window of a nearby bakery. Shattered glass flew, setting off a roar that wavered through that pushing, seething sea of pinched faces and sunken eyes. “Bread! Free bread!”

  The mob surged forward, a starving tide that swelled around Sebastian, carrying him into Flemming’s Row. And there at the top of the Row stood Edward Maitland, the three riders in the familiar blue and red of the Bow Street House Patrol ranged behind him. The horses stood with feet braced, heads jerking, nostrils flaring as the Bow Street men held their mounts steady, forming a virtual sieve of horseflesh through which the crowd streamed, surging ever forward, carrying Sebastian with them.

  Twisting around, Sebastian fought to turn back, but the momentum of the mob was too great. He could see the flush of triumph in Maitland’s fair, handsome face, the wild exultation in his eyes as he and the Bow Street men simply waited for the crowd to drag Sebastian to them.

  He was reminded of the riptide in the cove where he often swam as a boy. It could be a deadly thing, that cold tide, pulling the unwary inexorably out to sea. They’d learned early, he and his brothers, that the only way to fight the tide was to go with it. And so Sebastian quit fighting now and simply allowed the mob to take him, only using his height and weight to inch his way deliberately to one side, first to the curb, then up onto the narrow footpath fronting the row of houses opposite St. Martin’s.

  Once the houses here had been grand, of three and more stories. But they had long since deteriorated into poor lodging houses, their sagging gutters sluicing rainwater, their broken windows stuffed with rags, their street doors either unlatched or missing entirely. He was careful to keep his gaze fixed on the men at the top of the street, lest some furtive glance betray his intent. And so Sebastian knew the instant it dawned upon Maitland what was about to happen.

  With a quickly shouted warning to the Bow Street men, Maitland started forward, just as Sebastian ducked through the dark doorway that opened up beside him.

  He found himself in a dimly lit hall stinking of urine and damp and rot. Once the walls had been covered in figured scarlet silk, which now hung in curling brown tatters from stained plaster fallen away in great patches to show the bare wood of the lath beneath. In an open doorway on his left stood a dark-haired little girl of about five, holding what looked like a newborn baby. The room behind her was empty.

  She just stood there, silent and wide-eyed, and watched as Sebastian sprinted down the hall, past the broken banisters and bare, sagging steps of what had once been a grand sweeping staircase. The back door stood half ajar and Sebastian slammed through it on a run. Leaping off the broken stoop, he crossed a small yard bordered on two sides by looming, high brick walls and strewn with broken tiles and staved-in barrels and molding, stinking piles of refuse. What had once been a coach house lay at the bottom of the yard, but when Sebastian pushed against its ironbound oak door, he found it locked.

  “Bloody hell,” he swore, pounding one fist against the stout panels. From the street on the far side of the house came shouts and the sudden, insistent ringing of the alarm bell. “Bloody hell,” he said again, swinging around, his shoulders pressing back against the door.

  Beside him, a set of outside steps curled up to the loft. Pushing off, he bolted up the stairs. The hutch door at the top was locked, too. Sebastian kicked out once, twice. Wood splintered beneath his boot and the door swung inward on creaking hinges.

  The loft was a crudely partitioned space. He crossed the room. Moldering piles of old hay crunched beneath his boots and se
nt up dust clouds to dance in the dim shaft of light filtering through the grime-and-cobweb-choked casement opposite. Throwing open the window, Sebastian swung first one leg, then the other over the sill and eased himself through the narrow space. The rain was coming down harder again, striking his bare face with cold, needlelike stabs. Lowering the weight of his body on his stretched arms, Sebastian sucked in a deep breath and let himself drop.

  He hit the slimy pavement below in a roll and came up at a run, his feet slipping and sliding on a sour-smelling sludge of rotten cabbage leaves and old straw and unidentifiable muck. Ahead, the broken arch of the old mews opened up onto a side lane, the crowd thin enough here that he could push his way through, heading away from the workhouse and Maitland and the Bow Street Horse Patrol. From somewhere behind him came a shout, then another, and the renewed ringing of the alarm bell. Sebastian ducked his head against the rain and walked on, just another ragged, wet, grime-smeared man, unremarkable except for his height and the lean good health of his frame.

  Chapter 49

  Ciorgio Donatelli hurried home through the early afternoon rain, a loaf of bread under one arm. Ducking beneath his front door’s shallow overhang, he was fumbling with his keys when Sebastian moved up behind him.

  “Here. Allow me,” said Sebastian, reaching past the stiffening Italian to push open the door.

  “Mother of God,” whispered Donatelli, his face paling as the bread started to slip from his grasp. “Not you again.”

  Sebastian caught the bread just before it hit the stoop, and gave the artist a wide smile. “Let’s have a little chat, shall we?”

  “You didn’t tell me you and Rachel were lovers,” said Sebastian.

  Donatelli sat in a worn, tapestry-covered armchair beside the parlor fire, his elbows on his knees, his dark curly head sunk into his hands. He lifted his head slowly, his jaw hardening. “I know this country of yours, the way you English are about foreigners.”