Where Serpents Sleep sscm-4

by C. S. Harris

  “But that’s not why you do it.”

  He felt a smile curve his lips. “No.”

  “It’s the victims, isn’t it? That’s why you do it. For them.”

  He said, “It’s why you involved yourself in this mess, isn’t it? For the woman who died in your arms?”

  She was silent for a moment. He could hear the distant drip of water, feel the weight of a thousand tons of earth pressing down on them. She said, “I’d like to think so. But I have the most lowering reflection that I’ve been doing it for myself.”

  “Yourself?”

  She shifted restlessly, edging ever so slightly closer to him. If she’d been any other woman, he would have offered her the warmth of his body—for his sake as well as hers. But one did not offer to hold Lord Jarvis’s daughter, even if she was freezing and about to die. She said, “My father thinks I involve myself in reform because I have a maudlin attraction to good works.”

  “He doesn’t know you well, does he?”

  She surprised him by letting out a soft huff of laughter. “In that way, no. I’m not a charitable person. I work for reform out of a sense of what’s right, a conviction that things ought to be different. It’s far more intellectual than emotional.”

  “I think you’re being too severe with yourself.”

  “No. I concern myself with the fate of the poor women and children of London the way I might concern myself with the well-being of cart horses. I empathize with them as fellow creatures, but I certainly never imagined I could ever find myself in their position. But then—”

  She broke off, swallowed, and tried again. “Then I met Rose—Rachel Fairchild. And I realized . . . there was a woman like me. A woman born into wealth and privilege who had danced at Almack’s and driven in her carriage in Hyde Park. And yet somehow she had ended up there, at the Magdalene House. That’s when I think for the first time I truly understood . . . there but for the grace of God go I.”

  He swung his head to look at her. The light from the lantern limned the proud lines of her face with a soft glow, touched her hair with a fire it lacked by the light of day. He said, “So that’s why you set yourself to discover who she was and why she was killed? Out of guilt? Because your life remained privileged and safe while hers . . . fell apart?”

  A trembling smile touched her lips. “I’m not exactly safe now, am I?” She shivered, and he reached awkwardly out to draw her against the heat of his body. He expected her to resist, but all she said was, “I am so scared.”

  He chaffed his hands up and down the cold flesh of her arms, rested his chin on the top of her head, and held her close. “So am I.”

  At one point, she said, “Tell me about your time in the Army.”

  And so he talked to her about the places he’d been, and about the War. He found himself telling her things he’d never told anyone, not even Kat. He talked to her about the things he’d seen, and the things he’d done, and why in the end he’d realized he had to leave it all behind or lose himself in a world where everything he believed in could be sacrificed for a chimera. When he fell silent after a time, she said, “Don’t stop. Please. Just . . . talk.”

  And so he did.

  She said to him, “If we die here today, what will you regret never having done?”

  He tightened his arms around her, holding her so that her back was against his bare chest. Holding her that way, he couldn’t see her face and she couldn’t see him. After a moment’s thought, he said, “I suppose I regret having failed my father. The one thing above all else he wanted of me was that I marry and sire an heir. I didn’t do that.” He hesitated. “Why? What do you regret?”

  She leaned her head back against his shoulder. “So many things. I’ve always wanted to travel. Sail up the Nile. Explore the jungles of Africa. Cross the deserts of Mesopotamia to the land of the Hindu Kush.”

  He found himself smiling. “I can see you doing that. What else?”

  She, too, was quiet for a moment. He felt her chest rise with a deeply drawn breath, then fall. “I regret never having known what it’s like to have a child of my own. Which is an odd thing to realize, since I never intended to marry.”

  “You didn’t? Why not?”

  “A woman who marries in England today consigns herself to a legal status little different from that occupied by slaves in America.”

  “Ah. You’re a student of Mary Wollstonecraft.”

  She twisted around to look up at him. “You know of her work?”

  “That surprises you?”

  “Yes.”

  He said, “She married.”

  “I know. I’ve never been able to figure out why.”

  He smiled against her hair. “You wouldn’t.”

  A silence stretched out, filled with awareness of things said and unsaid. And then the big bell of St. Clements began to toll the hour, followed by its echo. Five o’clock.

  “Oh, God.” She pushed away from him, thrusting up from the ledge to stalk across the shadowy chamber to where the pile of rubble separated them from the river. She stood with her back to him, her hands coming up to rake the loose hair from her face, her fingers clenching together behind her neck. When the chimes of St. Clements began to play “Lass o’ Glowrie,” she shifted her hands to cover her ears, as if to block out the sound. “I don’t want to die. Not yet. Not here. Not like this.”

  He went to her, drawing her back into the comfort of his arms. She turned toward him, her face lifting to his. Her kiss was a maiden’s kiss, driven by fear and desperation rather than lust. And he clung to her as fervently as she clung to him, because he knew her horror, and shared it.

  He heard her breath catch, felt her body arch against his as the bells of St. Clements echoed away into stillness. He knew a strange sense of wonder, like a man awakening from a long, drugged sleep. And he thought, This is what life feels like. This is what a woman feels like. Skin soft, heart pounding against his, her hand guiding his to all the secret places she’d never been touched. No restraints now. No strictures of society that could stand in the face of looming death.

  Picking her up, he carried her back to where the lantern cast a pool of golden warmth. He felt her eyes watching him as he eased her down beneath him. He said, “Tell me this is what you want.”

  In answer, she slid her hands up to his neck and wrapped her legs around his waist.

  She kept her eyes wide-open when he entered her. She cried out once, sharply, her breath coming in quick little pants. He tasted the tears spilling wetly down her cheeks. He said, “I can stop.”

  She said, “Don’t stop,” and closed her eyes.

  Fiercely, she held him to her as if she could in this last act of defiance and by sheer force of will hold on to life itself. He’d thought himself dead within. Had at times found himself wishing for death. Ironic that he should be so aware of the life coursing through him now, when he was about to lose it.

  “Hold me,” she whispered, her breath warm against his ear, her fingers curling into his shoulders.

  He’d known somehow that she would taste like this, feel like this. As he loomed over her in the flickering darkness, she said, “The French call it le petit mort. I’ve always wondered why.”

  And he said, “What could be more intimate than to die together?”

  Afterward, he smoothed the damp hair away from her high forehead. His hand shook, his breath still coming hard and fast. Then he stilled, his attention caught by a distant sound.

  She seemed to sense his tension. “What is it?” she asked, or started to ask. Except by then the sound was unmistakable. It was the relentless surge of rushing water.

  Chapter 42

  Thrusting up from the ledge where they had lain together, Sebastian scrambled into his breeches and reached for the lantern. The candle was nearly gone now, guttering in its socket as he held the lantern high. For a moment the light dimmed and almost went out.

  The water was a black torrent seeping through the rubble fill. He grabbed He
ro’s hand, dragging her with him to the iron gate. Already he could feel the water cold against his feet. “Climb up onto the crosspiece of the gate,” he shouted.

  She clung to the iron bars, her eyes huge in a pale face, her hair loose around her. She said, “Throw the lantern.”

  His gaze met hers.

  “Throw it,” she said. “It might ignite the clothes.”

  It was one last crazy gesture of defiance. He eased the battered tin and horn cylinder between the bars, transferring his grip to the base. It was awkward, throwing it that way, the hot metal burning his fingers. The lantern soared up the stair shaft, the light flickering over stone coffers and worn steps. Then it slammed against the wooden door in a rending of tin and horn and they were plunged into darkness.

  He moved to stand behind her, his body close to hers. The water was already lapping at their ankles. He said, “When the water gets too high, you must stand on my shoulders.”

  Her teeth were clenched so tightly against the numbing strain of cold and fear that she could barely push out the words. “To buy myself an extra minute? No.”

  He rested his cheek against her hair, his body bracketing hers, his grip on the iron bars tightening as he felt the tug of the water swirling around his legs.

  She said, “I never liked you. What an irony that we should die together.” And he laughed.

  The water was at his hips when he heard the scraping of a bolt being drawn back above. He stiffened, anger surging through him. “It seems our murderers have misjudged the tide,” he said softly against her ear.

  Her head came up, her body jerking as sunlight flooded in from above and a man’s puzzled voice echoed down to them. “Wot the bloody ’ell? There’s a pile o’ burned clothes ’ere! That musta been wot started the fire. Only wot the bloody ’ell—”

  “Help!” she screamed. “Help us, quickly!”

  Sebastian added his voice to hers. “We’re trapped down here behind a gate and the tide is coming in. Get a crowbar to break the padlocked chain. Quickly!”

  The stairwell filled with gruff voices and the clomp of heavy boots tramping down the steps to splash through the water that crept ever higher. A giant of a man with red hair and a full blond beard eased one end of a crowbar into the loops of the padlocked chain, his face purpling with strain as he broke the links.

  “Wot the ’ell ye doin’ down ’ere?” he asked as Hero Jarvis, her wet shift clinging to her skin, fell against him.

  Helping hands reached out to grip them, drag them up to light and fresh air and the blessed, unexpected warmth of the late-afternoon sun. A blanket appeared, passed from hand to hand. Miss Jarvis clenched it around her like a cloak, her face so pinched with cold her lips were blue.

  Sebastian took a deep gulp from a brandy flask pressed into his hands and said, “How did you know?”

  One of their rescuers—the red-haired giant with the bushy beard—said, “We smelled smoke. Ain’t nothing a lumberman fears more’n fire. So we come to investigate.”

  Sebastian’s gaze fell to the charred vegetation at his feet. And he realized some of the clothes they’d thrown to the top of the stairs must have wedged into the gap between the bottom of the old door and the worn lintel beneath. The fire might have gone out in the stairwell, but at some point it had obviously burned beneath the door enough to catch the long lank grass of the Duke of Somerset’s ruined, forgotten garden and set it alight.

  The crowd around them was growing. Smocked workmen from the timber wharf and ostlers from the livery jostled with barmaids from the Crow and Magpie. Sebastian noticed Miss Jarvis studying the sea of curious faces, searching the assembly for their would-be murderers.

  “Are they here?” he whispered, leaning in close to her. But she only shivered and shook her head.

  He found his purse in the pocket of his ruined coat amid the pile of charred clothes at the top of the stairs and stood for a round of drinks at the Crow and Magpie. A cheer went up as the crowd surged toward the inn. A strapping barmaid eyed the coins in Sebastian’s hand and offered to sell “the lady” her best spare dress.

  “An’ I got me a good stout cloak, too,” said the barmaid, “what you could buy.”

  “Get the lady out of this,” said Sebastian, pressing another coin into her hand. “And see that she has some hot water to wash.”

  The barmaid’s eyes widened. “We got a real nice chamber upstairs where she can clean up,” said the barmaid, shepherding Miss Jarvis toward the stairs. For one instant, Lord Jarvis’s daughter turned, her gaze meeting his over the heads of the noisy throng. Then she was gone.

  Half an hour later, he put her into a hackney carriage and gave the driver an address a block from her own home. It was the first private moment Sebastian had had with her, and before he shut the door on her, he managed to say, “I am prepared to do the honorable thing—”

  She snapped, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and told the jarvey to drive on.

  Alighting from the hackney a block from Berkeley Square, Hero drew the hood of her barmaid’s rough cloak up around her face and walked briskly toward her house.

  She expected to be stared at. Instead, no one paid her any heed. She was just one more cheaply dressed woman amidst a stream of housemaids and dairymaids, shopkeepers and traders’ wives. And she realized she’d caught a glimpse of the anonymity that Viscount Devlin sometimes employed so effectively in the course of his investigations. She’d never before understood what a heady sense of freedom it entailed.

  Her knock was answered by Grisham, the butler, his condescending attempts to redirect her to the area entrance cut short when she shoved back her hood and brushed past him. “Miss Jarvis!” he said with a gasp. “I do beg your par—”

  “That’s quite all right,” said Hero, heading for the stairs.

  She had the misfortune to meet her mother on the first-floor landing. But Lady Jarvis simply smiled at her vaguely and said, “I don’t recall that cloak, Hero.” The smile faded, her eyebrows puckering together. “We really must consider changing your modiste.”

  Hero gave a startled laugh. “I’m simply trying it on for a costume ball. I was thinking of going as a common barmaid.”

  Lady Jarvis pulled her chin back against her neck. “I suppose you could if you wanted to, dear. But don’t you think it’s rather, well, common?”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” said Hero, as if much struck. “Perhaps I’ll go as Jane Seymour.”

  She was halfway up the stairs to the second floor before Lady Jarvis said, “Is there a fancy-dress ball soon? I don’t recall hearing about it. Goodness, I’ve given no thought to a costume myself.”

  “Perhaps I simply heard someone talk about the possibility of giving one,” said Hero, terrified by a sudden vision of Lady Jarvis bringing up the topic of the nonexistent masquerade at her next soiree.

  “Oh,” said Lady Jarvis, and continued on her way down the stairs.

  Gaining the refuge of her own bedroom, Hero tore off her ragged clothes, and rang for her maid and a hot bath. She realized she was shivering again. Wrapped in a dressing gown, she went to sit on the window seat overlooking the Square below.

  The dying light of the day drenched the garden’s plane trees and yew hedges with a golden richness they usually lacked. Yet the scene was otherwise unaltered from the tableau she’d seen every other evening of her life in London. She could see milk-maids heading toward home, their empty pails swinging from their shoulder yokes. A lady’s carriage whirled up the street toward the east, the clip-clop of its horses’ hooves echoing up between the tall houses. Everything was the same as it had been before.

  Only Hero was different.

  Chapter 43

  “It’s fortunate you made your visit to Strand Lane dressed as a groom,” said Calhoun, picking up one sodden boot between a carefully extended thumb and forefinger. “From the looks of it, this lot’s good for naught else but the dustman.” His nose wrinkled. “And from the smell of it. Is it my imagination, or is t
he dressing room beginning to acquire a fishy odor?”

  Sebastian settled back in his copper hip bath and closed his eyes. “I’ve noticed I’m becoming decidedly popular with the stable cats.”

  “Tom tells me the horses are still missing.”

  “I’ve set the constables to scouring every livery in the area. They may yet turn up.”

  “What was your assailants’ plan, do you think?”

  Sebastian tipped his head forward so he could probe the tender area near the base of his skull with careful fingers. “They probably would have waited until after dark to remove our bodies and dump us in the river someplace. Make it look as if we’d drowned when a wherry boat overturned or some such thing.”