Who Buries the Dead: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

by C. S. Harris

  He said, “I’ll see that you come to no harm.”

  She gave a harsh laugh. “Why should I believe you?”

  “Do you have a choice?”

  She stared back at him, her hands fisting in her apron, her strangely hued eyes wide with fear and mistrust.

  “Tell me,” he said again.

  Slowly, haltingly, she began to talk. And as he listened, Sebastian came to realize that he had misjudged Knightly’s motives entirely, that the secrets the man had killed to protect were far more dangerous than Sebastian had ever imagined.

  When she finished, he said, “I want you and your boy to come away from here, come with me so that I can keep you safe until this is all over.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you understand—”

  “What you think?” She took a quick step toward him, one arm slashing through the air as she cut him off, her features stiff with an anger born of a lifetime of slights and insults. “That I’m a fool—or as much of an idiot as your Silas Nelson? No. I ain’t puttin’ our lives in your hands. This is our home. Here, we surrounded by people knows us. People we trusts. Costermongers always take care of their own. You got what you come for. Now, get out of here.”

  He drew a calling card from his pocket and held it out to her. “If you change your mind, or if anyone should threaten you in any way, come to me. Number forty-one Brook Street.”

  She made no move to take the card, and it occurred to him she probably couldn’t read it if she did. Hero had told him that fewer than one out of ten of the city’s costermongers were literate.

  He laid the card on the trestle tabletop. “I’m sorry about your mother,” he said.

  But she only stared back at him, her face hollow with grief and eyes cold with resentment.

  Sebastian’s next stop was Blackfriars Bridge, where he had a short conversation with the owner of Douglas Sterling’s favorite coffee shop. Then he drove to Park Lane, where he found his aunt Henrietta’s shiny carriage drawn up outside her town house and the Dowager Duchess herself smoothing on a pair of elegant kid gloves in the grand entrance hall.

  “I don’t have time to talk to you now, Devlin,” she told him, still busy with her gloves. “I’m on my way to Sally Jersey’s.”

  “This won’t take long. I want to know what you can tell me about the birth of Sir Galen Knightly.”

  “Knightly?” She looked up at him. “Good heavens. Has someone killed him now?”

  “No.”

  She stared at Sebastian, her blue St. Cyr eyes going wide and still with comprehension. Then she glanced at her wooden-faced butler and said, “Tell Coachman John I shan’t be but a moment.”

  She led Sebastian to a small withdrawing room.

  Sebastian said, “That bad, is it?”

  “Well, it’s certainly not a tale I’d care to relate in front of the servants. Sir Galen’s father was Beaumont Knightly, eldest son of the old baronet, Sir Maxwell Knightly, and as dissolute a young man as ever joined the Hellfire Club—which is truly saying something, I’m afraid. Gambling, drinking, women, dueling—the usual, only far, far worse. If even half the tales told of his conduct were true, he must have cost his father a fortune. In the end, old Sir Maxwell shipped him off to a maternal uncle who owned plantations in the West Indies.”

  “Jamaica?”

  “Yes. Most people thought old Sir Maxwell was hoping the yellow fever would carry the reprobate off, so that a younger brother could inherit.”

  “Only, no such luck?”

  “Not quickly enough, at any rate. The young man hadn’t been on the island a month before he seduced the daughter of a local plantation owner. As I understand it, the girl’s father was on the verge of shooting the ne’er-do-well when she announced she was with child. So Beau Knightly was allowed to live, on the condition he make an honest woman of the foolish chit.”

  “Doesn’t sound like anyone I’d want as a son-in-law,” said Sebastian.

  Henrietta shrugged. “Perhaps the girl’s father intended to shoot the rascal after the child was born. But in the end, he didn’t need to. Both Beau Knightly and his bride died of the fever less than a year later.”

  “What happened to the child?”

  “He also fell ill with the fever, but obviously survived. He was eventually brought to England to be raised by his grandfather. Carelessly conceived the boy may have been, but he was still old Sir Maxwell’s heir, after all.”

  Maybe, thought Sebastian. Or maybe not. “Tell me about this maternal uncle.”

  “Kitch McGill? Good heavens; why do you want to know about him?”

  “Humor me.”

  “Well, let’s see. He was a younger son, of course. The family sent him off to Jamaica after he half killed some constable with his bare hands. He did quite well for himself there, in the end. But he’s been dead twenty or thirty years now. Never did have any children of his own—leastways none he could acknowledge. His wife was barren, which is how he ended up making Sir Galen his heir.”

  “Did he ever come back to England?”

  Henrietta frowned. “Only once, if I remember correctly. I believe he brought the child and his nurse back to Sir Maxwell, after Beau Knightly’s death.” She fixed him with a hard glare. “And now, not another word do you get out of me until you tell me what this is all about.”

  But Sebastian simply gave her a resounding kiss on one powdered and rouged cheek and said, “Thank you, Aunt. Enjoy your visit with Lady Jersey.”

  Chapter 54

  T he bell towers of the city were striking four when Sebastian watched Sir Galen Knightly tuck a silver-headed walking stick up under one arm and pause to purchase a paper from one of the newsboys on St. James’s Street. A dark, angry storm was sweeping in on the city, the air heavy with the scent of coming rain.

  “Walk with me a ways, if you will, Sir Galen?” said Sebastian, stepping forward as the Baronet turned toward the entrance to White’s.

  The laugh lines beside the Baronet’s eyes creased as he seemed almost to wince at the suggestion he depart from his comfortable daily routine. “Well . . . I was just on my way to the reading room,” he said, his gaze drifting longingly toward his club’s stately facade.

  “I know; I’m sorry. But I’d like your opinion on a tale I’ve just been told, and to be frank, I’d rather not repeat it where we might be overheard.”

  Knightly hesitated, then shrugged. “As you wish.”

  They walked down the hill toward the high, soot-stained brick walls of St. James’s Palace and the Mall beyond it. Lightning flickered across the roiling underbelly of the clouds, and the air filled with dark, swirling flocks of birds coming in to roost.

  Sebastian said, “I had an interesting conversation this afternoon with the owner of a coffee shop frequented by Dr. Douglas Sterling. He tells me Sterling spent all of last year in Jamaica and returned only a few weeks ago.”

  “Oh?” said Knightly. “I had no notion it was so recently.”

  Sebastian studied the older man’s hard-boned profile. “I think I know why both he and Stanley Preston were killed.”

  Knightly glanced sideways at him. “Do you? Why is that?”

  “It all goes back to a deception carried out some forty years ago.”

  “Forty years?” Knightly gave a brittle, forced laugh. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m afraid I am. You see, forty-odd years ago, a certain Hertfordshire baronet shipped his young, excessively profligate heir off to a maternal uncle in Jamaica. The idea was to remove the heir from the influences of his boon companions, who by all accounts were a rather unsavory lot. Only, things didn’t go quite according to plan.”

  “They rarely do,” observed Knightly, swinging his walking stick back and forth.

  “True,” said Sebastian. “It seems that shortly after his arrival in Ja
maica, our young heir impregnated and was forced to marry the daughter of a prominent local landowner. Unfortunately, the young man barely lived long enough to see his son take his first steps before succumbing with his bride to a yellow fever epidemic.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid yellow jack has long been a terrible scourge in the warmer American colonies. But . . . is there a point to this tale?”

  “There is. You see, the father’s death meant the orphaned babe was now the Baronet’s new heir. The grandfather wanted the child raised in England, and the uncle finally agreed to bring him.”

  Knightly kept his gaze on the wind-tossed trees in the park beyond the palace, his jaw set hard, and said nothing.

  “The child had lost his wet nurse along with his parents,” said Sebastian, weaving together what he’d learned from Juba with what he’d been told by the Duchess of Claiborne, “and was being nursed by one of the uncle’s own slaves—a pale-skinned quadroon named Cally whose babe had died in the same epidemic. Cally was by all accounts a beautiful woman, so beautiful the uncle was rumored to have made her his mistress. When the uncle and the child set sail for England, Cally came with them.”

  Knightly pursed his lips in a way that sucked in his cheeks, his gaze fixed relentlessly straight ahead.

  “Now, here’s where it gets interesting,” said Sebastian. “Before he died, Douglas Sterling told Stanley Preston that he believed the real heir to the baronetcy had actually died in the epidemic along with his mother and father. That the child brought to England was in fact the child of the slave woman, Cally, and the uncle—”

  “It’s a lie!” Nostrils flaring with the agitation of his breathing and both fists tightening on the handle of his walking stick, Knightly drew up abruptly and swung to face Sebastian. “You hear me? It’s all a lie.”

  Thunder rumbled long and ominously close as Sebastian studied the older man’s rigid, angry face. “It may well be. But Dr. Douglas Sterling was a physician, which meant he was in a position to know if something irregular had occurred. I can’t explain why he kept silent all these years—perhaps he only suspected a switch had been made and was unable to prove it. But when he arrived back in London after a lengthy visit to his daughter to find Stanley Preston anxious to marry his daughter to that very child—long since grown to manhood and now in possession of a baronetcy to which he might actually have no real claim—I think Sterling decided to share his suspicions with Preston. Preston, of course, reacted to the tale with all the horror to be expected of a man obsessed with wealth and birth—not to mention a biblically inspired conviction in the superiority of the European race. It was you, after all, who told me of Preston’s aversion to miscegenation. Remember?”

  Knightly fingered the catch on his walking stick—a walking stick that in all likelihood concealed a long, thin sword.

  Watching him carefully, Sebastian said, “That morning, shortly after the doctor left, Preston called a hackney and went to Fish Street Hill. That’s where the old woman who’d once served as the child’s nurse now lives, you see; in Bucket Lane. When the child’s uncle returned to Jamaica, he left Cally behind to care for the boy. Only, when the lad was just three years old, Sir Maxwell dismissed her.” Sebastian paused. “If the child truly was hers, the separation must have caused her unimaginable agony. Although perhaps she consoled herself with the thought her son was growing up the heir to a baronet.”

  “It’s not true,” said Knightly, his features dark and twisted with rage. “You hear me? None of it is true.”

  “I hope not,” said Sebastian. “Because if it is true, then when you killed the old woman, Cally, you killed your own mother.”

  The twin rows of Pall Mall’s lampposts lent a golden cast to the strengthening rain. Knightly stared straight ahead, his jaw clenched tight.

  Sebastian said, “She denied it, you know. When Preston came to see her that day, Cally swore you were Beau Knightly’s son. That it was her own child who’d died in the yellow fever epidemic. And after Preston left, when the daughter she’d had by a London costermonger questioned her, she still denied it. So perhaps it is nothing more than an old doctor’s muddled suspicions. But three people are still dead because of it—four if you count the virger, Toop, who simply had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The rain was falling harder now, large drops that pinged on the iron handrail beside them and ran down the Baronet’s hard, sun-darkened cheeks. “You’re mad. Do you hear me? Utterly mad.”

  Sebastian shook his head. “When he left Bucket Lane, Stanley Preston went to confront you, didn’t he? I’ve no doubt you denied it all to him, just as you’re denying it to me now. Why didn’t you kill him then, I wonder? Did the conversation take place somewhere too public? Is that why you decided to wait and kill him later that night when he went to meet Rowan Toop at Bloody Bridge? You did know of that meeting, didn’t you?”

  Knightly gave a harsh, ringing laugh. “Try telling this tale to the magistrates and see how far you get without any proof. You have none. You hear me? You have nothing.” The laugh ended abruptly, his face twisting into something ugly as he brought up one hand to point a warning finger at Sebastian over the silver head of his swordstick. “But you breathe one word of this nonsense in the clubs—one word—and I swear to God, I’ll call you out for it.”

  Sebastian studied the other man’s angry, pinched face, looking for some trace of the elegant bone structure that the old slave woman, Cally, had bequeathed to her daughter and grandson. But he could see only the slablike Anglo-Saxon features of a typical Englishman. “You’re right; I don’t have any proof yet. But I will.”

  And then he walked away, leaving the Baronet staring after him, the silver-headed walking stick gripped tightly in his hands.

  “What precisely are you trying to do?” asked Hero, later, staring at him. “Provoke Knightly into killing you?”

  Sebastian walked over to where a carafe of brandy stood warming beside the library fire. “I’m hoping he’ll try. Because he’s right; I can’t prove he killed Preston. I can’t prove he killed any of them. The only thing I can do is rattle him enough that he does something stupid.”

  “And if he should by some strange, inexplicable chance succeed in killing you?”

  He looked over at her with a crooked smile. “Then you’ll know I was right.”

  She made an inelegant noise deep in her throat and rose from the library table where she’d been working on her article. “If you are right about Knightly—which at this point is still an if—then how do you explain Diggory Flynn?”

  Sebastian poured a measure of brandy into a glass and set aside the decanter. “I think Oliphant decided he needed to kill me as soon as he returned to London, and he hired Diggory Flynn to do the job.”

  “Because he thought you intended to kill him?”

  “Yes.” He went to stand at the library window, his brandy cradled in one hand as he stared out at the storm. “And if I had killed the bastard, Jamie Knox would still be alive today.”

  A jagged sizzle of lightning lit up the nearly deserted wet street and silhouetted the dark rooftops of the opposite houses against the roiling underbelly of the storm clouds overhead. He could see a workman struggling to lash down the tools in his handcart, the lightning limning a pale, rain-washed face cut by the strap of an eye patch as the old man squinted up at the sky. Then the flash subsided, leaving the scene in near total darkness, and Sebastian realized the gusting wind must have blown out most of the oil lamps on the street.

  Hero said, “Oliphant should have known that’s not your way.”

  “I think you give me too much credit.”

  “No.”

  Light footsteps sounded in the hall, and Hero turned toward the door as Claire came in carrying Simon. “Awake, little one?” she said with a smile. “And not screaming yet?”

  Sebastian watched her move to take the
child into her arms, saw the toothless grin that spread across his son’s face as she lifted him up. And he knew a jolting frisson of alarm as the significance of the workman’s eye patch suddenly hit him.

  “Hero,” he said, starting toward her. . . .

  Just as the windowpane beside him shattered and a roll of thunder mingled with the crack of a rifle.

  Chapter 55

  T he globe of the oil lamp on the table near the door exploded in a shower of glass.

  “Get down!” shouted Sebastian, lunging toward Hero and Simon as he saw her fall.

  “Hero . . .” Crouching low, he caught her up in his arms, ran his hands over her and felt the warm stickiness of blood. “Mother of God, you’re hit. Where? Simon—”

  “We’re all right,” said Hero, her eyes dark and wide, the now screaming child cradled close. “It’s just cuts from the flying glass.”

  He looked over at the Frenchwoman huddled behind a nearby chair. “Claire?”

  Claire’s terrified gaze met his, and she nodded.

  He pushed up. “Stay here.”

  “Devlin!” he heard Hero shout as he tore across the entry hall and wrenched open the front door.

  A cold, wind-driven rain stung his face and whipped at the tails of his coat as he pelted down the wet front steps. He could see the aged workman pushing his cart toward Bond Street, head down against the storm, the wheels of the cart bouncing over the paving stones. Then he must have heard Sebastian’s running footsteps, because he threw a quick glance over his shoulder. His hair had been liberally smeared with gray ashes, and the oddly lopsided grimace he’d once affected was gone, leaving him almost unrecognizable.

  “Flynn!” shouted Sebastian.

  The one-eyed man reached beneath his coat.

  Sebastian dove sideways behind the front steps of the house beside him as Diggory Flynn ripped off his eye patch and brought up a long-barreled pistol to fire. The shot ricocheted off the iron railing beside Sebastian’s head, sparks showering the night.