Where Serpents Sleep: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

by C. S. Harris

  Hero opened her mouth, then shut it.

  “Coachman John tells me you took the injured highwayman to Paul Gibson’s surgery near Tower Hill. Why?”

  “I doubted the practitioners of Harley Street would appreciate the delivery of a bloody highwayman at midnight. And if I’d simply taken him to Bow Street, he’d have died.”

  “The man still lives?”

  “Last I heard, yes.”

  “Good. Then he can be made to talk.”

  Hero felt a chill prickle down her spine. She’d heard dark rumors of the methods employed by Lord Jarvis’s henchmen to make people talk. “Papa—”

  Jarvis raised his hand, stopping her. “These men are connected to what happened last Monday, aren’t they?”

  “It would seem so, yes.”

  He was so good at hiding his thoughts and feelings that even Hero often had a difficult time reading him. She was both shocked and touched when he suddenly said, “I’m concerned about you, Hero. You’re all I have left.”

  “I’ll be careful,” she promised. Reaching up, she brushed her father’s cheek with a kiss and turned toward the stairs.

  But she was aware of him still standing in the hall, watching her.

  Jarvis was in the small chamber he reserved for mixing snuff when his butler ushered Colonel Epson-Smith into the room.

  “You wanted to see me, my lord?” asked the Colonel.

  “What I want is to see this unpleasantness brought to an end. Quickly.” Jarvis added a pinch of macouba to his mortar and began to grind it with a pestle. “You’ve had two days. What have you learned?”

  Epson-Smith stood in the center of the room, his legs braced wide, his hands clasped behind his back. “Indications so far are that we’re dealing with a simple tussle over merchandise. It’s not clear yet precisely who is involved, but we’re working on it.”

  Jarvis grunted. “Work faster.” Reaching for a small vial, he added three drops to his mixture. “You’ve heard of last night’s incident?”

  “Yes, my lord. I’m not convinced, however, that it’s related to Monday night’s—”

  “It is. The surviving individual is at a surgery near Tower Hill. Use whatever means necessary, but make him talk.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Jarvis looked up from shaking his mixture out over the sheet of parchment that he’d spread across the room’s table. “I also want one of your men watching over Miss Jarvis from now on. Discreetly, of course.”

  The Colonel kept his face perfectly composed. If he’d learned yet of Hero’s presence at the Magdalene House the night of the attack, he had more sense than to mention it. He bowed, said, “Yes, my lord,” and withdrew.

  Chapter 33

  Sebastian arrived at Paul Gibson’s surgery near the Tower to find Miss Jarvis’s town carriage drawn up in the street outside. The wind had turned cold, the team of matched off-white horses shifting restlessly in their traces, tails flicking away an endless buzz of flies.

  Tom studied the elegant equipage through narrowed eyes. “That’s ’er, ain’t it? The gentry mort what fooled me into leavin’ the chestnuts.”

  Sebastian handed him the reins. “I’d advise you to get over it, Tom. Miss Jarvis is like her father: brilliant and deadly. You don’t want to tangle with her.”

  But Tom simply thrust out his lower lip in a mulish scowl and stared straight ahead.

  Sebastian jumped down from the curricle and was halfway across the footpath when the door to the surgery was yanked open. “Oh. It’s you,” said Miss Jarvis, standing on the threshold, a formidable presence in a burgundy driving gown and matching velvet hat.

  Sebastian paused in midstride. “Whom were you expecting?”

  “The constables.” She stepped back to allow him to enter. “Dr. Gibson sent for them shortly before I arrived.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “No. He’s dead.”

  Sebastian knew a curious sensation, as if the blood had suddenly drained away from his head. It was only the appearance of Paul Gibson himself at the entrance to his front room that brought the blood pounding back to Sebastian’s temples when he realized she had spoken not of his friend but of her assailant from the night before.

  “I’m sorry,” said Gibson, drying his hands on a rough towel. “I was with him all night. I just stepped into the back to wash my face and grab something to eat. I couldn’t have been gone five minutes.”

  “It’s not your fault,” said Sebastian, glancing at the silent, shrouded form on the bed. “He was gravely wounded.”

  “True. But it wasn’t his wound that killed him.” Gibson went to flip back the sheet covering the dead man’s face and shoulders. “Someone came in here and broke his neck.”

  Sebastian stared down at the dead man’s pale features. “Bloody hell. Did he ever say anything?”

  “Nothing of any significance. He was delirious. In and out of consciousness. I couldn’t even get him to tell me his name.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Sebastian again, only softly this time, for he’d remembered Miss Jarvis’s presence.

  She said, “Your arrival here is fortuitous.”

  He looked around to find her still standing in the narrow hallway. “How is that, Miss Jarvis?”

  She retied the fluttering burgundy velvet ribbons of her hat with crisp, no-nonsense movements. The woman had been born without an ounce of coquetry or flirtation, Sebastian thought, just intellect and lethal purposefulness. She said, “I’ve arranged to meet the Cyprian from the Orchard Street Academy, Tasmin Poole, at Billingsgate this morning. It is my hope that she might have discovered something else of interest.”

  “Billingsgate? Why Billingsgate?”

  She raised one eyebrow in a gesture so reminiscent of Lord Jarvis himself that Sebastian felt a chill. “You think Berkeley Square would have been more appropriate?”

  Paul Gibson made a strangling noise in his throat and turned away.

  She looked Sebastian square in the eye and said, “It occurs to me that you may have questions you’d like to ask her yourself.”

  Sebastian met Miss Jarvis’s frank gaze and saw there a faint hint of mockery lightly tinged with resentment. She obviously knew full well he was not telling her all the sordid details he was learning of Rachel Fairchild’s life, and so she’d decided to listen to the questions he asked Tasmin Poole and learn from them.

  He smiled. “I have indeed, Miss Jarvis.”

  “Good.” She turned toward the door. “We’ll take your curricle.” To her maid she said, “Jenna, you will await me in the carriage.”

  The maid’s eyes widened, but she simply dropped a meek courtesy. “Yes, miss.”

  Gibson let out a half-smothered laugh he turned into an improbable cough. Sebastian said softly to his friend, “If I should disappear, you’ll know where to tell them to search for my body,” and followed Lord Jarvis’s daughter out into the blustery afternoon.

  “There’s a reason we’re taking my curricle,” said Sebastian, helping Miss Jarvis up into his carriage’s high seat. “Care to tell me what it is?”

  “You are very perceptive, aren’t you?” she said, arranging her burgundy skirts around her.

  Ignoring Tom’s fierce scowl, Sebastian hopped up beside her and gathered the reins. “I do occasionally have these rare moments of blinding insight.”

  A smile played about her lips. She opened her parasol.

  He said, “There’s no sun.”

  “It’s there. It’s just behind the clouds.”

  He hesitated a moment, his gaze on her aquiline profile, then gave his horses the office to start. “It’s your father, isn’t it?” he said when it was obvious she had no intention of answering his question. “Someone has tried to kill you twice in the past week, and so Lord Jarvis has set one of his men to watching you.”

  She turned her head to look at him. “How did you know?”

  “I know Lord Jarvis.” Sebastian deliberately swung his horses away from Bill
ingsgate and the river. Over his shoulder, he said to Tom, “Anyone following us?”

  “Aye. There’s a cove on a neat bay.”

  “Can you lose him?” she asked.

  “Probably,” said Sebastian. “Where precisely in Billingsgate are we going?”

  “St. Magnus.”

  Sebastian gave a sharp laugh. “No wonder you wished for me to accompany you.” The church was on the edge of the rough-and-tumble fish market that had made Billingsgate famous. It wouldn’t be as boisterous now as, say, at five o’clock on a Friday morning, but it was hardly the place for a lady. He glanced down at her fine burgundy skirt. “People generally wear their oldest clothes to Billingsgate.”

  “Then we’re both overdressed, aren’t we?” She threw a quick glance over her shoulder. “How do you intend to lose him?”

  Sebastian kept his attention on his horses. “Ever visit St. Olave’s in Seething Lane?”

  “St. Olave’s?” she repeated, not understanding.

  “The wife of Samuel Pepys is buried there. I think,” said Sebastian, guiding his horses between the vast warehouses of the East India Company, “that you’ve just been seized with an overwhelming desire to visit it.”

  The church and its neglected churchyard lay in the shadow of one East India Company warehouse and across the street from another. Sebastian drew up outside a gate adorned with five skulls.

  “Cheerful,” said Miss Jarvis, eyeing the ancient, moss-covered gateway.

  “More cheerful now than when Pepys described it overflowing with the high graves of hundreds of new plague victims.” He handed the reins to Tom. “There’s a cold wind blowing, so you’d best walk them. But don’t go far.”

  “Aye, gov’nor.”

  Sebastian helped Miss Jarvis to alight, and noticed approvingly that she was careful not to let her gaze stray toward the dark-haired man reining in his bay at the end of the lane.

  “Now what?” she asked, walking beside him into the churchyard.

  “I will discourse at length on windows and corbels and the quaint gallery that once adorned the south side of the church, and you will look fascinated.”

  “I’ll try.”

  They took a tour of the overgrown graveyard with its broken, lichen-covered tombstones and leaning iron picket fence, then entered the church through a squeaky transept door. Miss Jarvis admired the organ gallery, and the altar tomb of some obscure Elizabethan knight named Sir John Radcliffe, who lay recumbent with his dutiful wife kneeling beside him for all time.

  “I wonder where she is buried,” said Miss Jarvis, eyeing that devoted spouse. “Sir John seems to have forgotten to provide for her.”

  “Perhaps she remarried some gallant courtier who didn’t expect her to spend the rest of eternity praying on her knees.”

  Miss Jarvis fixed her gaze upon him. “I’m impressed with your knowledge of London’s obscure churches, but I must confess to a certain amount of confusion. What precisely have we accomplished by coming in here?”

  “That depends upon how close a watch your shadow was ordered to keep.”

  The sound of the church door opening echoed through the nave. A gust of wind entered the church, stirring up the scent of old incense and dank stones and long-dead knights.

  Miss Jarvis’s watchdog entered the church with his hat in his hands, his head turned away as he affected an intense study of the church’s peculiar flat-topped windows. Sebastian touched Miss Jarvis’s elbow, glanced toward the door, and whispered, “Quickly.”

  Side by side, they strode through the porch and down the church’s ancient, worn stone steps. The watchdog had left the reins of his horse looped over the iron railing of the churchyard. Walking up to the bay, Sebastian reached down and slipped his knife from the sheath in his boot.

  “Good heavens,” said Miss Jarvis, watching him.

  Throwing back the stirrup leather, Sebastian calmly sliced through the bay’s cinch as the horse nickered softly and swung its head to nose at Miss Jarvis’s reticule.

  A shout arose from the church porch. “Bloody ’ell! What the bloody ’ell ye think yer doin’?”

  “I don’t like being followed,” said Sebastian as Tom drew the curricle in beside them.

  “Bloody ’ell,” said the shadow again, hopping from one foot to the other, his face a study of anger and chagrin mingling now with a touch of consternation.

  Sebastian handed Miss Jarvis into the curricle and scrambled up behind her. “Your father will hear of this,” he warned her, giving his horses the office to start.

  The chestnuts sprang forward. Miss Jarvis unfurled her parasol and held it aloft. “I can deal with my father.”

  Sebastian steadied his horses. He was beginning to acquire a measure of sympathy for the King’s powerful cousin.

  Chapter 34

  Sebastian smelled the fish market long before he could see it. As they neared the steps, an increasingly sharp odor like seaweed filled the damp air, the cries of gulls mingling with a buzz of raucous voices and the shouts of white-aproned salesmen standing on their tables and roaring their prices.

  “There she is,” said Miss Jarvis, nodding to the long-necked Jamaican, who stood on the footpath. With the fingers of one hand, the Cyprian clutched together a drab cloak she wore to cover her Covent Garden finery. She glanced around nervously, her brown eyes open wide enough to show a rim of the dusky-blue whites surrounding her irises.

  “Walk ’em,” said Sebastian, handing the reins to Tom.

  The tiger threw Miss Jarvis a malevolent glare. “Aye, gov’nor.”

  “Was he really a pickpocket?” asked Miss Jarvis, accepting Sebastian’s arm to cross the raucous width of Lower Thames Street.

  “It was either that or starve,” said Sebastian.

  She released his arm the instant they reached the far footpath. “It’s a curious conceit,” she said, “hiring a pickpocket as your tiger.”

  “Tom’s good with horses.” The boy had also saved Sebastian’s life, but he saw no reason to add that.

  “I didn’t think ye was gonna come,” said Tasmin Poole as Hero walked up to her. Since the last time Sebastian had seen the Cyprian, someone had obviously worked her over with his fists, leaving her with a discolored cheek and a split lip. She threw a narrowed glance at Sebastian. “What’s he doin’ here?”

  “He is also interested in what happened to Rose.”

  The Cyprian sniffed and held out her hand, palm up, fingers crooked. “You said you’d give me five pounds, just for showing up here.”

  “With the promise of more,” said Miss Jarvis, passing the woman a small cloth purse, “if you can provide me with the information I seek.”

  The purse disappeared quickly amidst the woman’s clothes. Most whores cleared little or nothing from the long lines of customers they labored every night to service. These were earnings the girl wouldn’t need to share with her keepers. Precious indeed.

  Miss Jarvis said, “Have you learned anything more about Hannah Green?”

  “People are lookin’ at us queer,” said Tasmin, turning toward the fish market. “We need t’ keep moving.”