Where Serpents Sleep: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

by C. S. Harris

  “Don’t worry. I won’t leave you lumbered with her forever.”

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  “I’m sorry, but I had no place else to take her where I knew she’d be safe.” He couldn’t see taking a woman like Mary Driscoll to the Red Lion.

  “Sebastian, truly, it’s all right.” She reached out to touch his arm. A simple enough gesture, yet it sent a rush of forbidden longing coursing through him. It had been a mistake to come here, he realized, a mistake to allow himself to stand this close to her, to breathe in all the old familiar scents of a tainted past.

  She dropped her hand and took a step back. “I heard someone has tried to kill you. Twice.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  She stood with her arms gripped across the stomach of her costume as if she were cold, although it was not cold in the theater. Instead of answering, she said, “You will be careful. Not just of this killer, but of Jarvis.”

  “I can handle Jarvis.”

  “No one can handle Jarvis.”

  To his surprise, Sebastian found himself smiling. “His daughter can.”

  Walking out of the theater a few minutes later, Sebastian found his tiger waiting patiently at the chestnuts’ heads. The night had fallen clear and cold, with just the hint of a breeze that carried with it the sound of music and laughter and men’s voices raised in a toast. Sebastian said, “Take them home, Tom. I won’t be needing you anymore tonight.”

  The tiger glanced at the door of the nearby music hall, then back at Sebastian’s face. “I can stay.”

  Sebastian’s gaze lifted, like Tom’s, to the music hall door. It was too well lit, too loud, too full of the exuberance of life. Sebastian intended to do his drinking someplace dark and earnest. He clapped the tiger on the shoulder and turned away. “Just go home, Tom. Now.”

  Chapter 52

  SUNDAY, 10 MAY 1812

  “My lord? My lord.” Sebastian opened one eye, tried to focus on the lean, serious face of his valet, then gave it up with a groan. “I don’t care if the entire city of London is afire. Just go away.”

  “Here,” said Calhoun, slipping what felt like a warm mug into Sebastian’s slack hand. “Drink this.”

  “What the devil is it?”

  “Tincture of milk thistle.”

  Sebastian opened the other eye, but it didn’t work any better than the first. “What the hell are you doing here? Go away.”

  “A message has arrived from Dr. Gibson.”

  “And?” Sebastian opened both eyes this time and clenched his teeth as the room spun unpleasantly around him.

  “It seems the authorities have recovered the body of a military gentleman by the name of Max Ludlow. Dr. Gibson will be performing the autopsy this morning, and he thought you might be interested.”

  Sebastian sat up so fast the hot liquid in the forgotten mug sloshed over the sides and burned his hand. “Bloody hell.”

  “Drink it, my lord,” said Calhoun, turning away toward the dressing room. “Nothing is better than milk thistle when you’ve got the devil of a head.”

  The milk thistle helped some, but not enough to encourage Sebastian to do more than glance at the dishes awaiting him in the breakfast room before turning away and calling for his town carriage. The day had dawned cool but clear and far too bright. He subsided into one corner of his carriage and closed his eyes. Gibson’s autopsies were never pleasant, but Sebastian didn’t want to even think about the kind of shape Max Ludlow’s body would be in after ten days.

  “ ’E’s in the room out the back,” said Gibson’s housekeeper when she opened the door to Sebastian. A short, stout woman with iron gray hair and a plain, ruddy face, she scowled at him with unabashed disapproval. “I’m to take you there. Not that I’m going any farther than halfway down the garden, mind you. It’s unnatural, what ’e does down there.”

  Sebastian followed Mrs. Federico’s broad back down the ancient, narrow hall and through the kitchen to the untidy yard that led to the small stone building where Gibson performed both his postmortems and his illicit dissections. True to her word, halfway across the yard Mrs. Federico drew up short. “Viscount or no viscount, I ain’t goin’ no farther,” she said, and headed back toward her kitchen.

  Sebastian had to quell the urge to follow her. He could already smell Max Ludlow.

  “There you are,” said Gibson, appearing at the building’s open doorway, his gore-stained hands held aloft. “I thought you’d be interested in this.”

  Sebastian tried breathing through his mouth. “Where did they find him?”

  “In Bethnal Green. Wrapped in canvas and dumped in a ditch along Jews Walk.”

  “I suppose it’s better than the Thames,” said Sebastian. He’d seen bodies pulled out of the river after a week. It wasn’t a sight he cared to see again.

  “There was water in the ditch.”

  “Good God,” said Sebastian. He should have had more of Calhoun’s milk thistle.

  Gibson ducked back into the building’s dank interior. After a brief hesitation, Sebastian followed.

  Naked and half eviscerated, the body on the room’s stone slab looked like something out of his worse nightmares. One glance at the bloated, waxy flesh and its resident insect population was enough. Sebastian stared at the ceiling. “Are they sure that’s Max Ludlow?” Sebastian asked when he was able.

  “Someone from the regiment identified him. In another day it probably would have been impossible. Parts of the body were already virtually reduced to bones, but thanks to the way he was lying, the face is actually fairly well preserved.”

  Sebastian held his handkerchief to his nose and resisted the impulse to take another look. “Any idea how he died?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” Gibson turned around to reach for a tin basin. “I found this in his heart.”

  Sebastian stared down at a bloody pair of strange, broken blades, handleless and oddly shaped. “What are they?”

  “It’s a broken pair of sewing scissors,” said Gibson, setting the bowl aside so that he could demonstrate an upthrusting, twisting motion. “Whoever killed him must have stabbed him with the scissors, then broken them off when they hit a rib.”

  “So he was killed by a woman,” said Sebastian.

  “Not necessarily, but more than likely. Did Hannah Green ever mention how Rachel Fairchild killed the man in her room?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “She may not have known.” He went to stand in the yard just outside the door to try to breathe. It didn’t help.

  Wiping his hands on a stained cloth, Gibson came out with him. “I heard about the fire at the Academy last night. That makes four more dead.” He brought up one splayed hand to rub his temples. “I thought I’d left carnage on this scale behind when I got out of the Army.”

  Sebastian jerked his head toward the dark, foul room behind them. “That body on your slab was once a hussar captain, remember?”

  Gibson’s hand slipped back to his side, his eyes widening. “What are you saying? That you think these killers are military men?”

  “It’s what war teaches us, isn’t it? Not just to kill, but to kill on a grand scale.”

  “There’s a difference between killing enemy soldiers on a battlefield and slaughtering unarmed Englishwomen in a London slum.”

  “You mean because one is sanctioned by authority and the other is not?”

  “Well, yes.”

  In the silence that followed, the endless drone of buzzing flies sounded both abnormally loud and oppressively familiar. It was the sound of death. Sebastian said, “Some men learn to like killing. Or at least, they learn not to shrink from it. And that can be just as dangerous.”

  Gibson squinted up at the clouds beginning to gather on the horizon, his face grim. Sebastian knew what he was remembering, the images that haunted both men’s dreams. The Portuguese peasants shot down in their fields along with their mules and their dogs. The Spanish families burned alive in their farm-house
s. Gibson said, “But for British soldiers—officers—to kill Englishwomen . . .” He shook his head. “I know that shouldn’t make a difference, yet to most people it does.”

  “It makes a difference because most people have a tendency to see anyone who speaks a different language or has darker skin as somehow less human than themselves. But a lot of people see prostitutes as less than human, too. Their lives are considered cheap. Expendable. If it hadn’t been for Miss Jarvis, the eight women who died at the Magdalene House would already be forgotten.”

  “But why would hussar officers want to kill the Prime Minister?”

  “I don’t know,” Sebastian admitted.

  Gibson jerked his head toward the dank room behind them. “If it’s true . . . if Max Ludlow was one of the three men Hannah Green was telling us about, then who were the other two?”

  “At this point, I’d put my money on Patrick Somerville being one of them.”

  “The hussar captain from Northamptonshire? Do you think Hannah could identify him?”

  “She might not be able to remember names, but women in her line of work learn to recognize faces.”

  “Yet it won’t be enough, will it?” said Gibson. “Even if Somerville was at the Academy the night Rachel Fairchild and Hannah Green fled, there’s still nothing to tie him to the Magdalene House killings. Or to last night’s attack.”

  “No. But Miss Driscoll might be able to do so.”

  Gibson looked confused. “Miss Driscoll. Who is she?”

  “The Academy’s blind harp player.”

  Gibson’s frown deepened. “If she’s blind, how can she identify him?”

  Sebastian thought about explaining, then gave it up. “Never mind. Just lend me some paper and a pen, would you?”

  Chapter 53

  The difficult part, Sebastian realized, would be finding a surreptitious way for Miss Driscoll to hear Patrick Somerville speak. Much easier to first show Patrick Somerville to Hannah Green, he decided, and see if she recognized him.

  Leaving Gibson’s surgery near Tower Hill, Sebastian directed his coachman to Grace Calhoun’s Red Lion Tavern in West Street. Lying just a few houses from Saffron Hill on the north side of one of the last uncovered stretches of Fleet Ditch, the Red Lion was well-known as the resort of thieves and the lowest grade of the frail sisterhood.

  He found Grace in the tavern’s back parlor, polishing pewter tankards. She was a tall woman, taller even than her son and just as lean, with a face that was all sharp planes and interesting angles accentuated rather than blurred by the passing of the years. At the sight of Sebastian, she turned the tankards over to a gnarled old man with a gray whiskered face and a wooden peg for a leg, and came out from behind the counter.

  She had bright, intelligent brown eyes and hair the color of storm clouds she wore neatly tucked beneath a fine lace cap. In her youth, she must have been striking. She was still handsome—and very, very astute. “So you’re the fine lord my Jules has been telling me about,” she said, looking Sebastian up and down without a smile. “It was never my intention to see the boy set up as a gentleman’s gentleman, you know. I hired that old fool of a valet to teach him how to talk and act and dress like a gentleman. Not to teach him to be a gentleman’s gentleman.”

  “He is a very good valet.”

  “It’s not what I’d intended.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “I s’pose you’re here to see that young trollop Jules asked me to mind.”

  “I hope Miss Green hasn’t been causing you any trouble.”

  Grace Calhoun gave a derisive snort. “That one. She’s a taking little thing—I’ll grant you that. Which is lucky, seein’ as how she ain’t got the sense God give a fencepost.” She cast him another assessing glance, then turned back to her tankards. “Last I saw her, she was in the yard.”

  He found Hannah Green sitting cross-legged in a corner of the cobbled yard near the dilapidated stables, the fitful sun on her bowed bare head, her arms full of three wiggling, squirming black-and-white kittens. “Do look, Lord Devlin,” she said merrily when she saw him. “Aren’t they just the sweetest things you’ve ever seen? I always wanted a kitten.”

  She was still wearing the spangled pink-and-white-striped gown, but without the rouge and the burgundy plumes, she looked even younger than before, no more than fifteen or sixteen at the most. Sebastian watched her laughingly peel one adventurous kitten off the top of her head, and it occurred to him that he was beginning to collect dependent females. He had no idea what he was going to do with either of them.

  “If you can tear yourself away from the kittens,” he said, “I thought you might like to take another carriage ride.”

  Hannah scrambled to her feet, her eyes going round. “Honest? Oooh. Let me just get my bonnet.”

  Sebastian rescued the tumbling kittens and barely had time to restore them to the mother cat sunning herself atop a nearby moldering bed of hay before Hannah was back, the bedraggled plumed hat once more atop her auburn head, her reticule swinging from its fraying strings.

  “Where we goin’?” she asked as she trustingly allowed herself to be handed up into Sebastian’s town carriage.

  He swung up to take the forward seat. “You said you recognized the man who came to your rooms in the Haymarket and strangled Tasmin Poole. That he was one of the men who also hired you off the floor last week?”

  “Y-yes,” she said, not sure where his questions were headed. “He was the tight-lipped one who picked us up from the Academy.”

  “Tight-lipped?” asked Sebastian, diverted.

  “Yeah. You know. He has those thin kinda lips he always keeps crimped together.” She held out both hands, thumbs pressed tightly to index fingers in what he supposed was meant to be an imitation of the killer’s mouth. “Like he was afraid a bug might crawl in there when he weren’t payin’ attention or somethin’.”

  It was more than she’d said before. “And the man Rose Fletcher killed the next night, when the men came back—he was with the tight-lipped gentleman when he picked you up in the hackney?”

  She nodded. She’d given up imitating the killer’s mouth and had taken to gnawing a fingernail instead, her gaze on the crowded streets and shop windows flashing past outside the carriage

  “I’m interested in the third gentleman,” said Sebastian.

  She craned her neck around to continue watching a hurdygurdy player with a monkey, who stood on a street corner. “You mean the birthday cove?”

  “That’s right. The one who chose you when the men returned to the Academy the next night. Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

  Hannah swung her head to look at him, her eyes huge in an uncharacteristically solemn face. “I don’t want to see him again. I don’t want to see any of them again.”

  “But you would recognize him.”

  “Yes,” said Hannah around the fingernail in her mouth.

  “That’s where we’re going now. To see if we can find him.”

  She gave a startled laugh. “Go on with you. I hear tell there’s a million or more people in London. How you going to find one cove in amongst a million people?”

  “There’s a coffeehouse in Cockspur Street called the Scarlet Man. Most officers in town—either active duty or half pay—wander in there at one point or another on a Sunday afternoon.”