Where Serpents Sleep sscm-4

by C. S. Harris

  “Rose Fletcher ran away from him, didn’t she? She sounds as if she was a valuable commodity.”

  “Valuable, yes. But not exactly rare. This town is full of women ready to sell themselves to stay alive. And while Kane might have kept her in debt, you can be sure he never let the debt become excessively large.”

  “She could have been killed as an example to others,” said Gibson.

  “She could have been,” Sebastian agreed. “But to kill seven women just to get to one?” He shook his head. “No, I think whoever did this was desperate.”

  “Or very angry,” said Gibson. “How do you intend to find this man O’Brian?”

  Sebastian drained his brandy. “I’ll set Tom on it tomorrow.”

  Gibson lurched to his feet and reached for his friend’s empty glass. “A girl like that—educated, wellborn—how could she have come to such an end?”

  “Someone betrayed her,” said Sebastian, “and I’m not talking about whoever killed her. She was betrayed before that, by those whose duty it was to love her and care for her.”

  “I wonder if her family even know she’s dead.”

  Sebastian raised his gaze to the pig fetus on the mantelpiece. “I’d say that depends on whether or not they’re the ones who killed her.”

  Chapter 15

  WEDNESDAY, 6 MAY 1812

  Sebastian stood beside his bedroom window, his gaze on the still-sleeping city streets below, on the gleam of dew on the cobbles and the pigeons fluttering on the ridge of a nearby roofline. In the pale blush of early dawn, the chimneys of London loomed thick and dark, the spires of the city’s churches thrusting up against a slowly lightening sky. It was that hour between night and day when time seemed suspended and a man could get lost in the past, if he let himself.

  Grasping the sash, he thrust up the window and let the frigid air of the dying night bite his naked flesh. He’d been driven here from his bed by the dreams that still crept upon him far too often in the undefended hours of sleep. During the day, he could control his thoughts, even control the yearnings that still came upon him. But sleep made him vulnerable. Which is why he avoided it as much as possible.

  Some men could spend a lifetime in a soft, brandy-tinged blur, squinting through a smoky haze at cards that meant nothing. Win or lose, the deadness inside remained. But it was all an illusion, Sebastian had decided—both the sensation of inner deadness and the comfort of the blur. A trick a man played on himself.

  No one else was fooled.

  The day broke warm and sunny with all the golden promise of the long-delayed spring. Sebastian breakfasted early, then called his tiger, Tom, into the library.

  Tom came in dragging his feet. “I didn’t mean to do it,” he blurted out.

  Sebastian looked up from the estate agent’s report he’d been reading and frowned. “You didn’t mean to do what?”

  Tom hung his head, his tiger’s cap twisted between his hands. “I’m that sorry, gov’nor. Truly I am.”

  “If you set fire to the tails of Morey’s coat again—”

  Tom’s head jerked up. “I didn’t!”

  “Thank God for that, at least.” For all his disapproving ways, Morey ran Sebastian’s decidedly irregular household with the competence and efficiency of the gunnery sergeant he’d once been. Sebastian would be hard put to replace him. “Out with it then,” he said, his gaze steady on the tiger. “What have you been doing?”

  “I was down in the kitchen, see? Me and Adam—he’s the new footman. We was just playin’ around and—”

  Sebastian became aware of a disturbance emanating from the lower regions of the house, Madame LeClerc’s outraged cries punctuated by Calhoun’s soothing tones. “Explain it to me later. I want you to find someone for me. A man named Luke O’Brian.”

  Tom’s eyes flashed with anticipation. “You think ’e might ’ave somethin’ to do with the murder of them women?”

  “I think he might.”

  “What manner o’ man is ’e?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. The only thing I know about him is that he frequents a brothel near Portman Square called the Orchard Street Academy.”

  Tom jammed his cap back on his head. “I’ll find ’im, ne’er you fear.”

  “Oh, and, Tom—”

  Tom turned at the door.

  “Be careful.”

  Tom flashed a gap-toothed grin and took off.

  The noise level from the kitchen increased. Sebastian set aside his estate agent’s report and stood up. He was crossing toward the entry hall when he became aware of the sounds of a carriage drawing up outside his door. Glancing out the library’s bowed front window, he saw a smartly dressed young woman appear in the carriage’s open door.

  She was tall and striking, with glossy dark hair and a wide, laughing mouth. She stood for a moment, the sunlight soft on her face, and just the sight of her was enough to make his breath catch. He watched as she extended one hand elegantly gloved in yellow kid and accepted her footman’s assistance down the carriage steps. Memories of last night’s dreams came to him in a wash of shame, memories and desires that had driven him from his bed last night and that haunted him still.

  For eight months now she’d called herself Mrs. Russell Yates. But once, her name had been Kat Boleyn and she’d been the love of Sebastian’s life.

  Now he called her sister.

  Chapter 16

  Sebastian waited with his back to the empty hearth and let Morey usher his visitor into the library. She came in smelling of the cold morning air and herself, and the assault on his self-control was so great that he could only stand there with his hands gripped together behind his back and watch her.

  She paused just inside the door, her head turning as Morey bowed himself out. For a long moment, her gaze met Sebastian’s across the room. She said, “I didn’t expect you to be glad to see me.”

  His voice was a rusty, grating sound. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  She searched his face, her blue St. Cyr eyes narrowed with worry and her own pain. “You know I wouldn’t be here without good reason.”

  “Something’s wrong. What is it?”

  He watched her jerk off her fine kid gloves and loosen the velvet strings of her hat. Once, she had been the center of his existence, the only woman he’d ever wanted to take to wife. Then, eight months ago, his life had come tumbling down around him in a series of brutal revelations.

  The discovery that his father, the Earl of Hendon, once kept a beautiful Irish actress named Arabella as his mistress had come as no surprise. Many men of their station did so. Nor was it unusual that Hendon had fathered a child upon his mistress. Such matters were typically handled discreetly. After birth, the child would be taken from its mother and dispatched to some “good farm family” in the country, never to be seen or heard from again. Except in this instance, the mother of Hendon’s love child had balked at his determination to separate her from her baby and fled back to Ireland.

  That should have been the end of the story. Instead, Arabella’s child had, in her turn, come to London. Calling herself Kat Boleyn, she had become one of the most acclaimed actresses of the London stage and mistress to a young viscount—Hendon’s son, Sebastian.

  She stood before him now, her fine kid gloves held in a tight grip, her carefully schooled face inscrutable. She said, “Do you know Hendon is not well?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “He has said nothing to me.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t, would he? You don’t speak to him.”

  “You make it sound as if I cut him. I don’t.”

  “Of course not. That would be too vulgar, wouldn’t it? Odd that a curt hello in passing should wound more than the cut direct. That at least would betray some emotion.”

  “Has he sent you here to plead his case?”

  “You should know better than that.”

  She was right, of course; he did know better. “I beg your pardon.” He swung away to the collection of carafes and gl
asses that rested on a table near the window. “A glass of ratafia?”

  He glanced over to see a wry smile curve her lips. “I think we both need something stronger, don’t you?”

  He reached for the brandy. “Something stronger, definitely.”

  The tension in the room—the awareness of what had once been between them and could never be again—stretched taut. She said, “Hendon is not to blame for what happened. He did nothing that men of his station haven’t done for a thousand years or more. He took a mistress and begat a child upon her. How could he have foreseen what we would become to each other?”

  Sebastian glanced up from splashing brandy into two glasses. “You defend him? He would have taken you from your mother if she hadn’t fled him.”

  “He meant it for the best.”

  “For whom?”

  She didn’t answer him. Hendon always did what was best for the St. Cyr lineage and the St. Cyr legacy. Anything and anyone else was expendable. She said, “You’re not angry with Hendon because of what he would have done to my mother.”

  “I’ve been angry with Hendon for years. This is just one more lie on top of so many others.”

  “Not a lie, exactly, Sebastian. He didn’t know I was his child. None of us did.”

  “Yet he knew you existed, and he never said a word. It rather begs the question, doesn’t it? What else hasn’t he told me?”

  Sebastian held out her glass. She took it, being very careful not to allow her fingertips to brush his. She said, “You haven’t found your mother yet?”

  For half his life, Sebastian had believed his mother dead, the victim of a boating accident the summer he was eleven. In truth, she had merely fled her loveless marriage—and abandoned Sebastian, her only surviving son. Another lie his father had told him. He said, “I believe she’s in France somewhere. The war makes searching for her . . . awkward.” He took a slow sip of his brandy and felt it burn all the way down. “You have forgiven Hendon for what he did to your mother?”

  “I was angry with him at first. Yet I’ve come to believe his love for Arabella was genuine. I see it in his face when he speaks of her. His voice softens. His eyes come alive.”

  Some flicker of emotion must have shown on Sebastian’s own face because she said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,” and he knew she’d misunderstood entirely the pain and envy she’d glimpsed.

  “I’ve known most of my life that there was no love in my parents’ marriage,” he said. She went to stand beside the bowed window overlooking Brook Street, her head turned away, and for one stolen moment he lost himself in looking at her. “Do you see Hendon much?” he asked.

  She swung to face him again. “He comes to the theater. Sometimes we go for a drive in the park.”

  “I don’t imagine Amanda likes that,” said Sebastian. Amanda, Lady Wilcox, was Sebastian’s other sister—his legitimate sister.

  “She knows the truth,” said Kat.

  “And acknowledges you no more than he.”

  “How can either of them acknowledge the truth when all the world knows I was your mistress?”

  Painful words. Words that brought back the shame of all they had once done together. Yet with the shame came such a rush of every feeling Sebastian had spent the last eight months trying to ignore that he shuddered.

  She set aside her brandy untouched. “I can understand your anger. You think I am not angry? But to blame Hendon for it is not right. He did not do this to us.”

  He drained his own glass and set it down with a snap. “Yet he somehow managed to get what he wanted, didn’t he?” Sebastian had loved Kat since he was twenty-one and she just sixteen. For all those years Hendon had fought and schemed to prevent his son and heir from marrying beneath him. In a sense it was ironic that the key to the destruction of their love had been there all along, if only he’d known. “You think the fact that it is—” Sebastian realized what he’d been about to say and began again. “You think the fact that it was wrong for me to want you should somehow make the loss of you easier to bear? Well, it doesn’t.”

  He was surprised to see a sad smile light up her eyes. “Oh, Sebastian. You always think you should be able to change things, to make them right.”

  “Are you telling me I’m arrogant?”

  “You know you are.”

  They shared a smile that faded slowly. He said, “How are you? Truthfully?”

  “Truthfully?” She raised her chin in a gesture he remembered all too well. “Yates is not a demanding husband. We deal well together. He has his life and I have mine.”

  Sebastian had heard something of Russell Yates’s activities, the unorthodox but discreet liaisons that had continued since his marriage. He’d heard no such tales of Kat. “Do you?” he said.

  She twitched one shoulder in a shrug. “I have my work at the theater. It’s enough.”

  He walked up to her, close enough that he could have touched her although he did not. “More than I want anything else,” he said, “I want you to be happy.”

  She gazed up at him. “True happiness is rare.”

  “It shouldn’t be.”

  “Paul Gibson tells me you’ve involved yourself in the death of these women in Covent Garden.”

  “Yes.”

  He was aware of her searching his face, and he wondered what she saw there. The sleepless nights? The months of drinking and dissipation that had brought oblivion if no relief? She said, “In the past, I always worried whenever you found yourself drawn into murder investigations. But I suppose it’s preferable to watching you break your neck on a hunting field or drink yourself to death.”

  He swung abruptly away. “You say Hendon is not well. What is wrong with him?”

  “The doctors say it’s his heart. He eats too much, drinks too much.”

  “That’s not likely to stop.”

  “He’s been worse these last months. He misses you, Sebastian. The estrangement between you causes him much grief.”

  Sebastian paused beside his desk and looked back at her. It was a moment before he could answer. “I’m sorry. I’m not ready to speak to him yet.”

  She nodded briskly, then retied her bonnet strings and pulled on her fine kid gloves. “Just don’t wait until it’s too late, Sebastian.”

  Chapter 17

  At the highly unfashionable hour of half past nine in the morning, Miss Hero Jarvis was drinking a cup of tea A in the morning room when her father came upon her. “You’re up early,” she said.

  He sank into the chair opposite hers. “I wanted to catch you before you left the house.”

  “Oh? Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked, reaching for the teapot.

  “Yes, thank you.” He leaned forward, his frowning gaze hard on her face. “I thought we had an agreement.”

  She poured a measure of milk into his cup with a steady hand, then added the tea. “I haven’t violated it. I agreed not to approach the magistrates, and I have not done so.” Of course, their agreement had been more along the lines of an edict, to which she’d had little choice but to concur. He’d warned her that if she did attempt to approach the magistrates about the killings, he would let it be known that her claims to have been present in the house at the time of the attack were motivated by nothing more than a desire to draw attention to the plight of such women and should therefore be disregarded.

  She handed him the cup. “I take it you’ve received a report from one or more of your minions?”

  “You knew I would.”

  “Yes.”

  He pressed his lips together in a sour line. “It is you, isn’t it? The gentlewoman who has been asking questions about the Magdalene House?”

  “Did you think I would not?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “I know your main concern in all this is that my name not be bandied about in connection with the incident. You needn’t fear that I’ve been anything other than discreet. There is nothing to link my name to what happened that night.”

  Lord Jarvis
pushed aside his tea untasted, his gaze still on her face. “If I ordered you to stop, would you obey me?”

  She met his stare without flinching. “Yes. But I would resent it.”

  Jarvis nodded. “Then I won’t ask it of you.”

  Hero didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until she felt it easing out of her in a long sigh.