Where Serpents Sleep: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

by C. S. Harris

  Perceval gave a sharp bark of laughter. “What are you suggesting? That Napoleon wants to see me dead? What would he think to gain by such an action? If the Whigs were to come to power, they might seek to end this war. But the Whigs will never come to power. Not with Prinny as Regent.”

  “I don’t claim to understand the motivation at work here. But two of the three women hired that night are dead, along with an uncomfortable number of the people they’ve come into contact with since. The one woman who survives says they were overheard discussing plans to murder someone named Perceval. Now I could be mistaken. They could be planning to kill someone else entirely. But the lengths to which they’ve been willing to go to silence everyone who has any knowledge of their plot suggests that something more serious is afoot here.”

  Perceval was quiet a moment, his gaze like Sebastian’s following the troop of men as they wheeled to their right. “A man in my position makes enemies,” he said at last. “It’s inevitable. You saw that poor old sod Bellingham.”

  “Bellingham is an annoying gnat compared to these men. They’re ruthless and brutal.”

  Perceval scrubbed one hand across the lower part of his face. “If they killed those eight women—”

  “And that was only the beginning.”

  The Prime Minister turned to face him. “What would you have me do? Cower in Downing Street in fear? I can’t do that and still properly run this country.”

  Sebastian felt the cold wind buffet his face, bringing him the smell of dust and damp grass. “I don’t know what I’m suggesting you do. Only—be aware that someone wants you dead, and take whatever precautions you can.”

  The bells of the abbey began to strike the hour. “I must go,” said Perceval, turning toward Carlton House. “I’m to meet with the Prince Regent at half past.” He gripped Sebastian’s shoulder for a moment, then let him go. “Thank you for the warning.”

  Sebastian stood for a moment, watching the slim, middle-aged man hurry away. Then he turned toward his own waiting curricle. And it occurred to him as he crossed Whitehall that in the past hour he’d said essentially the same thing to three very different people—Hannah Green, Miss Jarvis, and Spencer Perceval. He had the disquieting feeling that time was running out for all three.

  “I can take her to my mum, no worries,” said Calhoun, when Sebastian returned to Brook Street for a quick consultation with his valet.

  “To the Blue Anchor?”

  Calhoun shook his head. “Grace spends most of her time these days at the Red Lion.”

  “Good Lord,” said Sebastian. If anything, the Red Lion had an even more shocking reputation than the Blue Anchor, but he couldn’t see how he had any choice. “I’ll order the town carriage for you.”

  Hannah Green caught her breath in shivering delight when she saw the carriage pull up before the door. “Gor,” she whispered. “It’s like somethin’ out of a fairy tale, it is.”

  “As good as a ride in the curricle?” Sebastian asked, giving her a hand up the steps.

  “Better!”

  He cast a glance at Jules Calhoun. “Think your mother can handle her?”

  The valet laughed and hopped up behind her. “My mum? Are you serious?”

  “You ain’t comin’ with us?” said Hannah.

  Sebastian shook his head and took a step back. He’d realized it was past time he paid another visit to the Orchard Street Academy.

  Chapter 50

  Leaving Tom and the curricle at Portman Square, Sebastian walked the length of Orchard Street, the weight of a double-barreled pistol heavy against his side. It was early yet, the footpath crowded with last-minute shoppers. As he approached the once grand old house, he pulled his hat low over his eyes and turned up the collar of his driving coat.

  If anyone could identify the men who’d hired Rose, Hessy, and Hannah off the floor last Tuesday and returned the next night to kill them, it was the abbess of the Orchard Street Academy, Miss Lil. The problem was going to be getting past the broken-nosed pugilist who guarded the brothel’s door to talk to her.

  The oil lamp mounted high on the Academy’s front had already been lit against the gathering gloom, the flame flickering in the evening breeze to throw patterns of light and shadow across the house’s stone facade. Sebastian mounted the shallow brown steps, his hand on the flintlock in his pocket as he prepared to either bluff or bully his way inside. But at the top of the steps, he hesitated. The door stood unlatched and slightly ajar.

  His hand tightening around the handle of the pistol, Sebastian drew it from his pocket, every sense coming to tingling alertness. Drawing back the flintlock’s first hammer, he used his shoulder to nudge the door open wider.

  The familiar tang of freshly spilled blood hit him first, overlaying the scents of candle wax and dry rot and decadence. The hall looked much as he remembered it, the once grand carpet and soaring plasterwork illuminated by bronze sconces with mottled mirrors. The dim golden light showed him the door-man, Thackery, half sitting, half lying in a huddled heap against the wall just inside the entrance.

  Stepping cautiously into the hall, Sebastian gave the man a nudge with the toe of one boot, which sent the pugilist flopping sideways in a heavy, slow-motion roll. His eyes were closed, his plump cheeks as soft and flushed as a sleeping babe’s. His pistol held at the alert, Sebastian reached down with his left hand and felt the man’s still-warm neck for a pulse. Then his gaze fell to the dark stain of blood visible beneath the edge of the man’s coat. Flipping back the brown corduroy, Sebastian studied the neatly sliced waistcoat. It was the kind of cut left by a dagger aimed well and deep.

  He straightened, aware of the unnatural quiet of the house around him. He threw a quick glance into the small room to his right but found it, mercifully, empty. He moved on, his heart pounding in his chest. How many women would a house like this one employ? he wondered. Two dozen? More? Add to that their customers . . .

  He paused at the heavy velvet curtain of the arch, the polished grip of the pistol slick with sweat in his hand. At his feet lay a stout man of perhaps fifty with heavy jowls and graying dark hair. A customer, by the looks of him, at the wrong place at the wrong time. He sprawled on his back, his arms flung wide like a crucifixion victim.

  Moving cautiously, Sebastian stepped past him, into the parlor with its fading emerald hangings, the tawdry splendor of moldering mirrors grand enough to have graced the halls of Versailles in an earlier, less decadent life. The light from the branches of candles on the chipped marble mantelpiece flared up warm and golden, showing him two more dead women.

  The Cyprian lying near the settee was unknown to him. Turning her over, he found himself staring into wide, vacant blue eyes. Her hair was the color of cornsilk, her teeth as small and white as a child’s. A spill of blood trickled from the corner of her open mouth to pool on the carpet like a misshapen black rose. Beyond her, near the base of the staircase, he found Miss Lil.

  Sebastian crouched down beside the Academy’s abbess. She lay curled on one side, her hands thrust out as if she’d sought to fend off her assailant. He touched her cheek and watched her head loll unnaturally against her shoulder. He didn’t need Paul Gibson to diagnose the cause of death.

  Four dead. Sitting back on his heels, Sebastian lifted his gaze toward the first floor above. Surely one of them had cried out in alarm or terror before they’d died. Had no one upstairs heard? Or were the inhabitants of this house so accustomed to the sound of screams and shouts that no one had paid any heed?

  Pushing to his feet, he was about to mount the steps when he became aware of another scent hanging in the air, mingling with the odor of blood and decay. The hot, pungent scent of a quickly extinguished candle.

  His gaze shifted to the lacy alcove to the right of the hearth. When he’d been here before, the alcove had been lit by a candle that had shown him the wraithlike silhouette of a woman and a harp. Now all was darkness and silence.

  He crossed the room with rapid strides to snatch back
the lace curtain. The alcove smelled of hot wax and charred candlewick and raw fear. The harp stood abandoned in the center of the alcove, the low stool beside it overturned. Just inside the curtain, a tall, gaunt-faced woman pressed her back to the wall, her hands splayed out beside her as if she could will herself to disappear into the paneling.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said gently. “You’re safe.”

  The woman’s thin chest jerked with her ragged breathing. “God have mercy on me,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “They’re dead, aren’t they? All dead.”

  Sebastian studied her pale face, the straight brown brows and sharply edged bones so obvious beneath the inadequate flesh of cheek and forehead. She looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties. Her speech was cultured, her gown rigorously high-necked and modest. And judging by the milky-white glaze that obscured her eyes, she was quite blind.

  He said, “How long ago did this happen?”

  “A minute. Maybe two. Not long.”

  Sebastian’s gaze lifted to the stairs. He had walked the length of Orchard Street, the Academy always in his line of sight. If anyone had left the house a minute or two before his arrival, he’d have seen them. He felt his body tense. “Where did they go? The men who did this, I mean. Upstairs?”

  Even as he asked the question, he heard a thump from overhead followed by a woman’s high-pitched laugh and the lower tones of a man’s voice.

  “No,” said the harpist, her spine still pressed flat to the wall. “Down the hall, toward the back of the house.”

  His gaze shifted to the darkened hall that ran along the back of the stairs. “What’s there?”

  “The kitchen,” she said. Her head lifted suddenly, her face turning as a more pungent scent of smoke overrode the lingering wisps from the candles. “Do you smell that?”

  He smelled it. He could hear it, too: the crackling of flames, the roar of ancient timbers catching, flaring up. “Bloody hell,” he swore, grabbing her wrist. “They’ve torched the place. Come on.” Jerking her from the alcove, he raised his voice to shout, “Fire! Everyone out! Quickly! Fire!”

  “No,” she said, squirming from his grasp to dart back behind the curtain. “My harp.”

  “Bloody hell,” he said again as she struggled beneath the instrument’s weight. “I’ll bring the bloody harp.” Already he could see the faint reddish glow from the rear of the house, hear the screams of the women, the excited shouts of the men, the thump of running feet on the stairs. “Just get out of here.”

  She refused to leave without him—or, more accurately, without her harp. “Be careful,” she cautioned as he staggered beneath its bulk. Squealing, half-naked women and men with bare pink flesh that glowed in the lamplight pushed past them in a scrambling rush for the door. A middle-aged man with a hairy, sunken white chest and flaccid phallus kept bleating, “I say, I say, I say.”

  The clanging of the firebell reverberated up and down the street. Already a crowd was forming at the base of the house’s front steps. Buckets appeared, passed hand to hand. Swearing softly beneath his load, Sebastian pushed their way through the shouting throng and turned toward Portman Square. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand, Miss—”

  “Driscoll,” she said, hovering protectively about her harp as the crush of men, women, and children rushing toward the fire increased. “Mary Driscoll.”

  “Miss Driscoll.” The sounding board of the harp was beginning to dig unpleasantly into his back. “Why didn’t those men kill you?”

  “They didn’t know I was there. I put out my candle and quit playing the instant I heard them in the hall with Thackery.”

  “You know who they were?”

  “No. But I recognized their voices. They came to the house the night Hessy Abrahams died.”

  Sebastian studied her gaunt, strained features. “You recognized their voices? How many times have you heard them?”

  “Only the once.” She must have caught the doubt in his own voice, because an unexpected smile curled her lips. “When you’re blind, you learn to listen very, very carefully.”

  He could see his curricle now, Tom at the chestnuts’ heads trying to quiet them as they sidled nervously, their manes tossing, nostrils flaring at the scent of the fire. Sebastian said, “Tell me about the men. How many were there?”

  “Only two,” she said. “The one was older, in his thirties, I’d say. He was the one in charge. The younger man listened to him, did what he was told without question or argument.”

  Like a good soldier, thought Sebastian. Aloud, he said, “What about their accents?”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell much, beyond the fact that they were gentlemen.”

  He put out his hand, stopping her when she would have kept walking. “We’re at my carriage.”

  “Gov’nor,” said Tom, his mouth falling open, “you ain’t never gonna fit that thing in the curricle.”

  “Yes, I am,” said Sebastian, temporarily setting the harp on the flagstones beside the carriage. “Miss Driscoll here is going to hold it on her lap.” He offered her a hand up and she took it without hesitation.

  With the Academy in flames, he supposed she had no place else to go. But as he watched her settle on the curricle’s high seat, another thought occurred to him. He said, “Do you know who I am?”

  Again, that faint smile. “Of course I know who you are. You’re Viscount Devlin. You came to the house last Tuesday. You had wine with Miss Lil, Tasmin, Becky, and Sarah. Then your questions made Miss Lil uncomfortable, and she asked you to leave.”

  “I never gave my name.”

  “No. But I heard Miss Lil and Mr. Kane talking about you later. People are strange in that way. If you can’t see, they often act as if you can’t hear, either. Or perhaps they simply assume I’m stupid.”

  She was far from stupid. He handed the harp up to her, grunting softly beneath its weight. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re willing to come with me.”

  She clutched the harp to her. “Those men were looking for Miss Lil. Once they’d killed her, they left.” He saw her delicate throat work as she swallowed. “I don’t want them to come for me.”

  Sebastian gazed up at her thin, plain face. Now that he had her in his curricle, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do with her. From the distance came a shout, followed by what sounded like a collective sigh as the walls of the Academy collapsed inward in a fiery inferno that sent sparks flying high into the night sky.

  “Gov’nor?” said Tom.

  Sebastian leapt up into the curricle and gathered the reins. “Stand away from their heads,” he said, and turned the chestnuts toward Covent Garden Theater.

  Chapter 51

  Kat Boleyn might have been the most celebrated young actress of the London stage, but her cramped dressing room at the Covent Garden Theater was not designed to accommodate Miss Boleyn in full costume as Beatrice, a tall nobleman in a many-caped driving coat, and a blind woman clutching a harp.

  She looked at Mary Driscoll’s pale, strained face and said to Sebastian, “Could I speak to you outside for a moment?”

  They crowded into a dimly lit corridor smelling strongly of grease paint and orange peels and dust. Kat whispered, “Sebastian, what are you going to do with her?”

  “I’m hoping she can identify the men who forced their way into the Academy tonight.”

  “She’s blind.”

  “Yes, but she heard their voices. She’ll be able to recognize them if she hears them again.”

  Kat looked at him. He knew what she was thinking, that while he might credit Miss Driscoll’s ability to identify voices, no one else would. But all she said was, “And afterward? What will you do with her then?”