Where Serpents Sleep sscm-4

by C. S. Harris

  Hero’s voice came out in a broken, raspy croak. “When she ran away, where did you think she’d gone?”

  “I thought she’d gone to Ramsey. Secretly, to get away from Father. I just—” She broke off, swallowed, and began again. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t she come to me? Why didn’t she tell me what he’d been doing to her?”

  “Perhaps she thought you wouldn’t believe her,” Hero said softly.

  Lady Sewell gave a strange laugh that raised the hairs on the back of Hero’s neck. “I went there to kill him, you know. This morning.”

  Hero shook her head, not understanding. “Kill whom?”

  “Father. I should have done it all those years ago.” Yanking open her tapestry reticule, Lady Sewell drew forth a heavy carriage pistol. Hero stepped back, her gaze darting to the road, where her father’s watchdog lounged at his ease.

  “I held the gun right in his face. But then I thought, if I shoot him, they’ll hang me. And then what will become of Alice?”

  “Alice?”

  “My little sister. He swears he’s never touched her. But I don’t believe him. Not this time.”

  Hero felt a cool gust of wind caress her cheek, breathed in the familiar scents of long, wet grass and damp earth, and felt so fundamentally altered by what she was hearing that she wondered if she’d ever quite right herself again. In the last two weeks, she’d been touched by violence on a shocking scale; she’d killed, and very nearly been killed herself. And then there was that other incident—the one she was endeavoring to forget. Yet this . . . this was somehow worse. She’d known about violence and death and, vaguely, about what happened between a man and a woman. She hadn’t known about . . . this. How could any man be so depraved as to do such a thing to his own child? How could any child ever come to terms with such a monstrous betrayal?

  “So we made another bargain,” Lady Sewell was saying. “Father and I. I let him live, and he will send Alice to live with me.” She gave another of those wild laughs. “He worries people will think it strange. Can you imagine?” The laughter suddenly died, leaving her expression pinched. “I wish I could have killed him,” she whispered.

  “No,” said Hero, reaching out to take the gun from Lady Sewell’s hand. She expected the woman to resist, but she did not. “No. Your younger sister needs your comfort and support, and he’s not worth hanging for.”

  “Yet if I’d killed him before, Rachel wouldn’t be here.”

  Hero stared down at the row of unmarked graves. “Don’t blame yourself. You can’t be certain of that.”

  “You know it’s true,” said Rachel’s sister.

  Hero’s fist tightened around the gun in her hand. “You can’t blame yourself,” she said again, even though she knew there was nothing she could say, nothing anyone could do that would ever take away the crushing burden of this woman’s guilt.

  It was several hours later that a lad playing catch with his dog on Bethnal Green stumbled across the decomposing remains of another body.

  “Is it a woman?” asked Sir Henry Lovejoy, holding his folded handkerchief to his nose as he peered into the weed-filled ditch.

  “Looks like it, sir,” said one of the constables, standing ankle deep in the murky water, his hat pulled low against the drizzle. “What you want we should do with ’er?”

  “Take the body to the surgery of Paul Gibson, near Tower Hill,” said Lovejoy, his eyes watering from the stench. “And you—” He beckoned to the lad still hovering nearby with his dog. “I’ve a crown for you, if you’ll take a message to Brook Street.”

  Chapter 56

  When Sebastian arrived at Tower Hill, Paul Gibson was downing a tankard of ale in his kitchen. The surgeon had stripped down to his breeches and shirtsleeves, and even from across the room, Sebastian could smell the stench of rotting flesh that clung to him. Mrs. Federico was nowhere in sight.

  “Is it Hessy Abrahams?” Sebastian asked.

  “Could be,” said Gibson, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “She’s the right age. But she’s beyond identification, I’m afraid.”

  Sebastian knew a spurt of disappointment. “How did she die?”

  “Her neck’s broken. But it’s the way it’s broken that’s interesting. Come, I’ll show you.”

  Suppressing a groan, Sebastian followed the Irishman down to the end of the garden, through a swarm of buzzing flies, and into a room so thick with the reek of death it made his eyes water. “Good God,” said Sebastian, holding his handkerchief to his nose. “How do you stand it?”

  “You get used to it,” said Gibson, tying a stained apron over his clothes.

  After nearly two weeks, Hessy Abrahams’s body—if this was indeed Hessy Abrahams—was in an advanced state of decomposition, the flesh blistered and suppurating and hideously discolored. It took all of Sebastian’s concentration to keep from losing what little he’d eaten of Madame LeClerc’s delicate nuncheon.

  “Do you know what happens when someone dies of a broken neck?” Gibson asked, picking up a scalpel and what looked like a pair of pincers.

  “Not exactly, no.”

  Standing at the corpse’s throat, Gibson peeled back some of the decaying flesh to reveal the bone beneath. “The top seven bones in your spine form your neck. Basically, they’re part of your backbone, but they also serve to protect the spinal cord that runs through here—” He broke off, pointing. “You can break your neck and be all right as long as you don’t damage your spinal cord. If you break the lower part of your neck and do injure the cord, you lose the use of your legs and maybe your arms, too, depending on which vertebrae you break.”

  Sebastian nodded. He’d seen a lot of men crippled by their injuries in the war.

  “But if the neck breaks up here,” said Gibson, indicating the first several bones, “and the spinal cord is injured, then a person basically suffocates. They can’t breathe.”

  Sebastian took one look, then glanced away. “How long does that take?”

  “About two to four minutes.”

  “Is that what happened to this woman?”

  “No. You see, there’s another way to die from a broken neck. If the neck is twisted so sharply the spinal cord is torn in half, it affects your heart and the circulation of the blood.”

  “And you die?”

  “Almost instantly. You see it sometimes when a hanging goes well. Of course, they don’t often go well.”

  Sebastian forced himself to look, again, at the desiccated form on Gibson’s dissection table. “How was her neck broken?”

  “The spinal cord was snapped. The man I was treating after he stopped Miss Jarvis on the way back from Richmond had his neck snapped in exactly the same way. I didn’t attach much importance to it at the time, but after I saw this, I got to thinking. So I spoke to the surgeon at St. Thomas’s who performed the postmortem on Sir William Hadley. He was killed the same way. So was the Cyprian found in the Haymarket, Tasmin Poole.”

  Sebastian raised his gaze to his friend’s face. “This is significant. Why?”

  “It’s not an easy thing to do, to break a neck like this. It requires training.”

  “We already suspected these men were military.”

  “Yes. But learning how to kill silently with a quick snapping of the neck isn’t part of most officers’ training. The thing is,” said Gibson, laying aside his instruments, “I’ve seen necks snapped like this before. Over the last three or four years, we’ve probably had a dozen or more cases.”

  Sebastian studied his friend’s tight, worried face, not understanding at all. “And?”

  “No one investigates those deaths,” said Gibson. “Some are common people—government clerks, French émigrés. But some are more prominent. You recall when Sir Humphrey Carmichael and Lord Stanton were found dead last autumn? Their necks were broken. Just like this.”

  The realization of what Gibson was saying spread through Sebastian like a strange numbing sensation. Sir Humphrey Carmichael and Lord Stanton, alo
ng with an East India Company man named Atkinson, had all died for the same reason. “And Felix Atkinson? He was killed the same way?”

  “Yes.”

  Sebastian walked out of the dank, foul-smelling building into the sunlit garden. Last night’s rain had cleansed the dust from the air, leaving the sky scrubbed so clean and blue it nearly hurt the eyes to look at it. “It makes no sense,” said Sebastian, aware of Gibson coming to stand beside him.

  “I didn’t think so. But then I thought maybe I was missing something.”

  Sebastian shook his head. A hideous possibility dawned, that all of this—the attack on the Magdalene House, Miss Jarvis’s interest in solving the riddle of Rachel Fairchild’s fall from grace and subsequent murder, even that poignant brush with death beneath the ancient gardens of Somerset House—had all been a part of some diabolical charade designed by Jarvis to draw him into . . . what? And for what purpose?

  There was only one thing Sebastian did know: While their deaths had never been officially solved, the men Gibson had listed—Stanton, Carmichael, and Atkinson—had all been killed on the orders of the same man.

  Charles, Lord Jarvis.

  Chapter 57

  Sebastian slapped open the door to Lord Jarvis’s Carlton House antechamber and strode purposefully toward the inner sanctum. From behind the closed panel came the measured drone of the Baron’s voice.

  “Sir!” A pathetically thin clerk with bushy eyebrows and a cadaver’s pallor gasped and scrambled after him. “Lord Jarvis is dealing with important affairs of state. You can’t just go barging in there.”

  Ignoring him, Sebastian thrust open the door to the inner chamber.

  “As for the revenue—” Lord Jarvis broke off, frowning as his head turned toward the door. He sat at his ease on a settee with crocodile-shaped feet and plump cushions covered in brown-and-turquoise-striped silk. From a long table near the window overlooking the Mall, a second clerk occupied with the task of transcribing his lordship’s words looked up, his eyes widening in horror.

  “Just what the bloody hell did you do?” Sebastian demanded without preamble. “Get your daughter to lure me into one of your diabolical plots so you could use me as a stalking horse?”

  Jarvis cast a frozen stare first at one clerk, then the other. “Leave us. Both of you.”

  Bowing his head, the man at the table scuttled away, his papers clutched to his chest, the first clerk at his heels.

  Jarvis leaned back against the silk cushions, his arms comfortably spread out along the settee’s back, his big body relaxed. Far from being intimidated by Sebastian’s angry, looming presence, the Baron looked vaguely amused. “My daughter approached you on her own initiative,” he said. “If she employed some subterfuge to draw you into this investigation, it was not of my devising.”

  Sebastian felt the heat of an old rage course through him, blending with the new. “You expect me to believe that? When your henchmen have been killing everyone from Hessy Abrahams to Sir William Hadley?”

  With deliberate slowness, Jarvis extracted an enameled snuffbox from his coat pocket and flipped it open. “And who, precisely, is Hessy Abrahams?”

  “Don’t your men even bother to tell you the names of the people they kill?”

  “Only if they’re important.”

  Sebastian resisted with difficulty the urge to smash his fist into the big man’s fleshy, complacent face. “What precisely were their orders? To kill everyone connected with this incident in any way?”

  Rather than answer, Jarvis lifted a pinch of snuff to one nostril and sniffed. He looked utterly bored and uninterested, but Sebastian knew it was all for effect. “What gives you the impression my men were responsible for the death of Sir William Hadley?”

  “The manner of Hadley’s death—and Hessy Abrahams’s, and half a dozen others—is exactly the same as that employed to dispose of those individuals like Carmichael and Stanton who have displeased you in the past. It’s so unique it’s like a signature. There can’t be many men in England who know how to kill instantly with the simple snapping of a neck.”

  Jarvis closed his snuffbox with a soft click. He was no longer smiling. “If you want me to believe this accusation, you need to tell me what you have discovered.”

  “Why? So your henchmen can kill anyone they’ve missed?”

  “Have they missed anyone?”

  Sebastian thought of Hannah Green, and the blind harp player from the Academy, and realized the list was actually rather short.

  Jarvis pushed to his feet and went to stand at the window overlooking the Mall. Watching him, Sebastian realized that his anger might have led him to misinterpret the situation. It was possible the plot to kill Perceval was Jarvis’s own, but that the big man remained ignorant of both his hirelings’ indiscretion on the night of Somerville’s birthday celebration and their subsequent attempts to cover it up.

  Fixing his gaze on Jarvis’s face, Sebastian provided the King’s powerful cousin with a succinct version of the past two weeks’ events as he understood them.

  But Jarvis never gave anything away. In the end, he merely said calmly, “Why would my henchman, as you call him, want to kill the Prime Minister?” The use of the singular—henchman as opposed to henchmen—was not lost on Sebastian. “There are far less spectacular ways of getting rid of Spencer Perceval,” Jarvis was saying, “if that were indeed my wish. The Prince is easily persuadable. One need only whisper in the royal ear.”

  “You could intend to use Perceval’s death to inflame public opinion. Or as an excuse to move against an enemy.”

  “I could,” agreed Jarvis. “But I don’t.”

  The two men’s gazes met, and for one fleeting moment, Jarvis’s famed self-possession slipped. Sebastian saw swift comprehension mingled with horror and the dawning of a fury so white-hot it swept away whatever lingering doubts Sebastian might still have had. And he knew in that instant that Jarvis would never forgive him for this, never forgive him for having been privy to the enormity of his failure.

  “What are you saying? That your man is acting on his own for reasons neither one of us understands?” Sebastian gave a low laugh. “That’s rich. You think you know everything and control everything. Yet your agent has nearly killed your own daughter three times, and may yet succeed in assassinating the Prime Minister.”

  Jarvis frowned. “Three times?”

  Too late, Sebastian recalled the Baron’s ignorance of the third incident. He flattened his hands on the surface of the table between them and leaned forward. “Tell me the man’s name.”

  Jarvis’s fist clenched around his snuffbox so hard Sebastian heard the delicate metal crack. “Epson-Smith. Colonel Bryce Epson-Smith.”

  Chapter 58

  The rooms occupied by Colonel Bryce Epson-Smith were on the first floor of a genteel house just off Bedford Square. Sebastian arrived there shortly after four to find the former hussar colonel gone from home. A terse conversation with the Colonel’s majordomo elicited the information that the Colonel was spending the afternoon escorting the family of a Liverpudlian friend to the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art.

  Turning south toward the river, Sebastian dropped his hands and let the chestnuts shoot forward. “If’n ’e’s lookin’ at pictures, at least ’e ain’t killin’ the Prime Minister,” said Tom, clamping his hat down tighter on his head and tightening his hold on his perch.

  Sebastian kept his attention on his horses, feathering the corner as he swung onto Drury Lane. He had a niggling sense that he was still missing something. A connection he should have seen, perhaps, or an implication that continued to elude him.

  The Royal Academy of Art occupied rooms in the large neoclassical pile on the Thames that had replaced the Duke of Somerset’s original palace. Pulling up on the Strand, Sebastian tossed the reins to Tom and hit the footpath running. He sprinted toward the vestibule, heedless of the shocked expressions and muttered tut-tuts, and took the steep, winding staircase two steps at a time. The A
cademy, like all the other societies and governmental departments housed in the building, occupied a vertical slice of all six floors. To take advantage of the natural light provided by a skylight, the Academy had placed their Exhibition Room in the high-ceilinged, nearly square space at the very top of the stairs.

  Breathing hard, Sebastian burst into a chamber crowded with more than a thousand paintings, which climbed toward the ceiling in row after row hung together so closely that their heavy gilt frames nearly touched. At the sound of his hurried footsteps crossing the polished floor, the small party gathered beneath the central lantern turned. Sebastian had a vague impression of two wan-faced women in plain round bonnets and unfashionably cut pelisses, one clutching the hand of a half-grown girl, the other attempting to restrain a fidgety boy of perhaps eight. Beside them, Epson-Smith cut a dashing figure in his military-styled coat, shining top boots, and swooping side whiskers.