by C. S. Harris
“Sir Nigel?” said Lady Jarvis to their hostess. “Why, I remember when he disappeared.”
Hero looked at her mother in surprise. “You do?”
“Oh, yes,” said Lady Jarvis as her friend turned away to greet a new arrival. “It was right after he returned from that dreadful mission to the Colonies with your father and Lord Hendon.”
Hero set her teacup down with enough force to rattle it dangerously. “What?”
“Mmm, yes.” Lady Jarvis lowered her voice. “There was quite a stir at the time in government circles. Seems Sir Nigel had discovered evidence of treason, in the form of letters written by someone styling himself ‘Alcibiades.’ The letters disappeared with Sir Nigel. It was all most mysterious. Not that your father told me about any of it, of course. But I overheard him talking to Lord North.”
Having chafed impatiently through the remainder of their social visits, Hero hurried home to find her father preparing to set forth for his clubs. “Your mission with Sir Nigel to the American Colonies,” she said, coming upon him in the library. “Tell me about it.”
Jarvis looked up from organizing some papers. “Wherever did you hear about that?”
“The whole town is talking about the discovery of Sir Nigel’s body,” she said vaguely.
Jarvis locked his papers in a desk drawer and straightened. “There’s not much to tell, really,” he said, and proceeded to give her a succinct rundown.
Listening to him, she found herself wondering, inevitably, what he was leaving out. She asked, “You never discovered the identity of this ‘Alcibiades’?”
“No.” He went to splash brandy in a glass. “What are you thinking? That Sir Nigel was killed by the traitor?”
“It’s possible, isn’t it?”
“I suspect it’s more than possible.” He set aside the crystal brandy decanter.
“Or you could have killed him.”
“Really, Hero, I am not responsible for every dead body that turns up in London.”
She gave an inelegant harrumph.
Her father said, “Why are you now interesting yourself in Sir Nigel’s death?”
“Perhaps I like puzzles.”
He took a slow sip of his brandy, his gaze on her face. “No. That’s not it.” When she remained silent, he said, “Do you plan to make a habit of this?”
She turned toward the door. “A habit of what?”
“Involving yourself in murder.”
She looked back at him. “Would you find that more or less objectionable than my more radical projects?”
He pulled a face. “I’m really not certain.”
The aged American rested on a weathered bench in a slice of sunshine that cut down through the ancient yews and elms of the vast churchyard of St. Pancras. He sat hunched forward, both hands wrapped around the handle of the walking stick he held upright between his knees, his eyes closed as if in sleep.
Sebastian had followed him here, to the sprawling burial ground on the outskirts of the city, after a conversation with the old man’s granddaughter. When Sebastian settled on the other end of the bench, Mr. William Franklin grunted and said, without appearing to open his eyes, “I figured you’d be back.”
Sebastian let his gaze wander over the jumble of moss-covered, ancient tombstones and sunken earth. The burial ground was actually the intersection of two churchyards, that of St. Giles adjoining that of St. Pancras, said by antiquarians to be one of the oldest churches in England.
“You told me you’d sailed from America with my father,” said Sebastian. “What you didn’t tell me was that the Bishop of London’s brother was on that ship, as well.”
Franklin opened his eyes. “Didn’t seem important at the time. How was I to know Sir Nigel’s body had been found in that crypt, along with the Bishop’s?”
“You wouldn’t have any idea what Sir Nigel was doing down in that crypt, would you?”
“Me? No. Why would I?”
Sebastian studied the old man’s florid, sagging face, creased with lines left by eighty-odd years of laughter and heartache. “I think you know far more than you’re letting on.”
Franklin chuckled at that, his protuberant belly in its snuff-stained, old-fashioned waistcoat shaking up and down. Fumbling in his pocket, he came up with a battered snuffbox he flipped open with the practiced grace of a Macaroni.
Sebastian said, “I understand you and Sir Nigel quarreled during the course of the voyage.”
“Of course we quarreled. Sir Nigel was an abrasive, arrogant man. He quarreled with everyone—including your father.”
“Over what?”
“The war, mainly. Sir Nigel was adamant that the only reason the King hadn’t managed to put down the rebellion was a lack of firm resolve on the part of Parliament. He was convinced that a sustained surge in the number of troops on the ground would be sufficient to subdue the rebels once and for all.”
“You didn’t think so?”
Franklin lifted a pinch of snuff to one nostril. His hands shook with age, dusting the fine grains over his knees as he leaned forward. “As punishment for my decision to remain loyal to my king, the Revolutionary government seized everything I owned. My home. My estates. Even my liberty for two years. You think I didn’t want to see the King prevail in reestablishing control over the Colonies? But what a man wants and what he recognizes as within the realm of possibility aren’t necessarily the same thing.”
A whirl of pigeons, their wings beating the air as they rose up from beside the church walls, drew Sebastian’s gaze to the massive old west tower of St. Pancras, with its crumbling thirteenth-century arches and broken weather vane. He said, “Lord Jarvis sailed with you, as well?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Did he ever quarrel with Sir Nigel?”
“Jarvis? Not within my hearing, no.”
Sebastian had to keep reminding himself that thirty years ago, Lord Jarvis would have been a young man in his twenties, while Hendon wouldn’t have been much older than Sebastian himself. Would they have been any different, then? he wondered. Somehow, Sebastian doubted it.
He said, “Your ship docked . . . where? Portsmouth?”
“London. Thirty years ago this month.” Franklin dropped the snuffbox back into the pocket of his frock coat. He was silent for a moment, gnawing thoughtfully on the flesh of his inner cheek. At last, he glanced over at Sebastian and said, “You do know about the papers Sir Nigel was bringing back with him?”
Sebastian shook his head. “What kind of papers are we talking about?”
“Letters, actually. Letters from London, written to a member of the Confederation Congress. They were passed to Sir Nigel by a Loyalist from Philadelphia. A woman.”
“What woman?”
“Her name isn’t important. She’s long dead. It was my understanding she stole the letters from their original recipient.”
“Who wrote the letters?”
“I never knew. They were simply signed ‘Alcibiades.’ But from their contents, it was obvious they were written by someone either in the Foreign Office, or else very close to the King.”
“Someone passing on sensitive information to the rebels?”
“Yes.”
The pigeons on the roof of the dilapidated church began to coo. Sebastian squinted up at them, his eyes narrowing against the glare of the late-afternoon sun. “Why did Sir Nigel tell you about the letters?”
Franklin gave a wry smile. “To my knowledge, he didn’t tell anyone. I only knew of the letters’ existence due to my acquaintance with the woman who gave them to him.”
“But someone else could have known about them?”
“I suppose so. Sir Nigel and I were hardly intimates, now, were we?”
Sebastian studied the old man’s aged, paper-thin skin, the watery, nearly lashless eyes. “When Sir Nigel disappeared, it didn’t occur to you that it might have something to do with the letters he brought back from America?”
“Of course it occurred to me
. Which is why I’m telling you about it now. Did I mention it to anyone at the time? No. Sir Nigel called me a traitor’s spawn and spat in my face. As far as I’m concerned, whoever killed him did the world a favor.”
“That seems to have been a common sentiment.”
Franklin grunted. “So why waste a perfectly fine July day sitting in a churchyard talking to an old man about long-ago events now best forgotten?”
“Because four nights ago, someone killed the Bishop of London in the exact same spot where his brother died thirty years ago. Unlike his brother, the Bishop was a man who accomplished much that was good in his life and would doubtless have accomplished more, had he lived. I don’t think the man who killed him did the world a favor.”
Franklin tightened his grip on the knobbed handle of his walking stick and pushed to his feet. “Yes, well . . . You know my opinion of the good Bishop.”
“We all have our faults.”
The aged, watery eyes blinked. “So we do. Perhaps when you know all the good Bishop’s faults, you’ll know who killed him.”
Sebastian watched the American walk away through the tumble of gray, moldering tombstones, his back still surprisingly straight, his gait solid and steady, despite his age. Then Sebastian’s gaze fell to the tombstone nearest the bench. Newer than all the others, its inscription was still crisp and easy to read:
HERE LYETH YE BODY OF
MARY FRANKLIN
BELOVED WIFE OF WILLIAM
DEPARTED THIS LIFE
SEPTEMBER 1811
Sebastian looked up. But the old man had gone.
Hendon sat with his chin propped on one fist, the scowl on his face deepening as he studied the chessboard before him.
“There is a way,” said Sebastian.
Hendon raised his brilliant blue eyes to his son’s face. “Don’t tell me that.”
Sebastian settled deeper into his seat and crossed his outstretched boots at the ankles. “It’s what you used to tell me.”
They were in the library of the vast St. Cyr townhouse on Grosvenor Square. It had become their habit of late to meet in the afternoons when both were free for a game of chess, as they had done so often when Sebastian was a boy. A warm breeze billowed the curtain at the open window, bringing them the clip-clop of horses’ hooves and the laughter of children at play in the square.
“I used to tell you that when you were four. By the time you were five, you were wiping the board with what was left of my pride.”
Sebastian smiled, but said nothing.
Hendon leaned forward to nudge his queen. “Take that.”
“There was a way,” said Sebastian, carefully relocating his knight. “But that wasn’t it. Checkmate.”
“Hell and the devil confound it,” said Hendon, but softly, as a man acknowledging the inevitable.
A knock sounded at the front door. A moment later, a footman appeared with a note on a tray.
“Message for Viscount Devlin, my lord. From Bow Street.”
Hendon let out a disapproving huff. Like Kat, he disliked his son’s involvement in cases of murder, only for a different reason. He simply found such activities sordid and unseemly. But since Sebastian’s involvement in this particular case had come about on the intervention of Hendon’s own sister, he really couldn’t say anything.
“Good God,” said Hendon, watching Sebastian’s face as he broke the seal and glanced through the magistrate’s hurried scrawl. “Not another murder?”
Sebastian pushed to his feet. “I’m afraid so.”
Chapter 25
“The Squire discovered the corpse himself,” said Lovejoy as they drove in Sebastian’s curricle toward the village, with Tom clinging to his perch at the rear. “Seems someone stuffed the Reverend’s remains in a cupboard in the vestry. One wonders how the searchers failed to find him sooner.”
“Not a likely place to look for a missing priest, I suppose,” observed Sebastian.
“There is that.”
The setting sun had sent the temperature dropping, and Lovejoy had wrapped himself in a greatcoat for the drive. As they crested a ridge, a brisk wind buffeted the carriage, and the magistrate settled deeper into his coat. “It makes one wonder if perhaps our investigation into the Bishop’s death has veered off in a faulty direction. Perhaps Bishop Prescott’s murder has less to do with events in the Bishop’s own life than with the ecclesiastical affairs of St. Margaret’s.”
“Perhaps,” said Sebastian, steadying his horses for the curve ahead.
Lovejoy glanced over at him. “What other explanation is there?”
Rounding the bend, Sebastian dropped his hands, giving the chestnuts their heads as they raced across the heath. Thick bands of clouds obscured the moon and cast the road into deep shadow. But Sebastian had the night vision of a cat or a wolf; even without the moon he could see quite clearly for miles.
He said, “Perhaps Reverend Earnshaw knew something he failed to disclose to us. Something that could have led us to Prescott’s killer.”
Lovejoy frowned. “But why would the man keep such information back?”
“He may not have realized the significance of what he knew. At least, not until it was too late.”
Sebastian stood just inside the door to the vestry, his arms crossed at his chest, and watched Sir Henry peer into the gloom, eyes narrowed to a squint, his candlestick held high.
The light flickered over a bloated, pale face and wide, sight-less eyes. “Good God,” exclaimed the magistrate, jerking back so violently that the candle splashed hot wax over his hand.
“It’s a ghoulish sight, no doubt about it,” agreed Squire Pyle, raising his own horn lantern high to better illuminate the scene before them.
The air in the vestry was chill and close, the stale scent of old incense overlaid by the pungent odors of dried blood and death. A small chamber built to one side of St. Margaret’s main altar, it was lined with cupboard doors and chests with wide, shallow drawers in which were stored the church’s vestments. At the narrow end of the room, a tall locker had been thrown open to expose its grisly contents.
Some five and a half feet high and perhaps four feet wide, the cupboard had a row of hooks that ran across the top. One of these hooks had been thrust through the back of the Reverend’s collar so that his body hung there, head squashed to one side. Sebastian found the effect disconcertingly similar to a side of beef hung up for display in a butcher shop.
“I thought it best to leave him like that till you got here,” said the Squire, wiping one hand across his lower face. “So’s you could see it yourself.”
“Yes . . . well . . . we’ve seen it.” Lovejoy took another step back, holding his candlestick more carefully. “Pray, take him down now.”
Pyle nodded to his constable, a big, burly man in a leather waistcoat, who hefted the Reverend’s body off its hook. Rigid with rigor mortis, the corpse thumped awkwardly against a nearby bench before crashing to the floor.
“Sorry,” mumbled the constable.
Lovejoy dabbed at his lips with a wadded-up handkerchief and swallowed.
Sebastian said, “Any indication as to how he was killed?”
Pyle jerked his chin toward the Reverend’s bloodstained waistcoat. “There’s a neat slice in his waistcoat and shirt, just above his heart. I’d say he was stabbed. But then, I’m no doctor.”
Lovejoy tucked away his handkerchief. “We’ll have the corpse conveyed to Paul Gibson, at Tower Hill, for a full postmortem.”
Pyle nodded to his constable. “Aye. I’ll get the lads on it right away.”
Sebastian glanced around the vestry. “A wound like that would have bled significantly. Any traces of blood elsewhere in the church?”
“The cleaning lady found a bit near the altar. Looks as if somebody took the trouble to try to clean it up, which is why we didn’t notice it sooner. You can see something of a trail from there to the vestry, although it was pretty much wiped up, too.”
“Show us,” said Lo
vejoy.
Lovejoy studied the smeared stains near the altar, his head bent, his hands clasped behind his back as he followed the smudges back to the vestry. Then he walked outside to stand beneath the aged porch and draw the cool air of the night deep into his lungs.
“Why hang up the Reverend’s corpse in his own vestry cupboard?” he asked when Sebastian walked up behind him.
Sebastian stared out over the shadowy churchyard, with its pale, tumbled tombstones glowing faintly beneath the darkened canopy of oaks that shifted in the growing wind. “To delay discovery, one presumes.”
“Yes, I suppose.” Lovejoy was silent a moment, huddled deep in his coat, lost in his own thoughts. The wind gusted up even stronger, banging a shutter someplace in the night. He shivered, and turned toward where Tom walked the chestnuts. “And people claim London is a dangerous place.”
By the time they dropped the magistrate at his house on Russell Square, the wind had grown increasingly violent, churning the heavy clouds overhead and bringing with it the smell of coming rain.
“Out with it,” Sebastian said to his tiger as the tired chestnuts turned toward Brook Street.
Tom made his eyes go round with innocence. “Gov’nor?”
“You’ve been looking smug ever since we left Tanfield Hill. What have you discovered?”
Tom grinned. “While you and Sir ’Enry was in the church, I got to talkin’ to one of the ostlers at the Dog ’n’ Duck.”
“The what?”
“The Dog ’n’ Duck. It’s the inn down by the millstream.”
“Ah. Go on.”
“This ostler—’is name is Jeb, by the way: Jeb Cooper. Anyway, it seems ’e was a groom in the stables at the Grange thirty years ago.”
Sebastian swung onto Bond Street. The footpaths and pavement were eerily dark and empty, the unpleasant wind having driven most of the city’s inhabitants indoors. “You mean when Sir Nigel was still alive?”