by C. S. Harris
“Miss Jarvis looked up the surname of the Marquess of Ripon in Burke’s Peerage and made the connection to the Bishop’s chaplain. When she discovered it was Dr. Ashley’s intention to drive out here this morning, she insisted we come after him. I personally thought she was overreacting. Obviously, I was mistaken.”
Sebastian let his head fall back against the wet grass and started to laugh.
Chapter 43
FRIDAY, 17 JULY 1812
Clad in a navy silk dressing gown, white linen shirt, and doeskin breeches, Sebastian descended to his breakfast parlor the next morning to find his aunt Henrietta seated at the table, awaiting him.
She was dressed in a splendid carriage gown of a fine mauve satin, with frog closures down the front and a towering turban of mauve and lemon silk perched on her head. As he paused on the threshold in surprise, she said, “I told your man not to announce me.” When he continued to stare at her, she added, “I’ve spoken to Hendon.”
“Ah.” He went to splash ale into a tankard and drank deeply. “Did you think I’d refuse to see you?”
“I thought you might.”
He reached for a plate and held it up in inquiry. “May I fix you something?”
She gave a genteel shudder. “It’s bad enough to be abroad at this hour. To actually consume sustenance would be barbaric.”
He gave a laugh and moved to the sideboard, where an array of dishes awaited his selection.
“I wanted to thank you for your assistance with this recent unpleasantness,” she said. “The Archbishop tells me you’ve solved the murders of both Francis Prescott and that reverend from Tanfield Hill. He also tells me you believe the murderer of Sir Nigel will never be found and is in all likelihood dead.” She paused. “He believed you, of course.”
Sebastian looked over at her. “You don’t?”
She met his gaze and held it. “I know you.”
He came to sit at the table. “Sometimes it’s better that the truth never be known.”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t argue with that. Although it’s not a sentiment I ever expected to hear coming from you.”
He picked up his fork and then paused, his gaze on her plump, shrewd face. “Have you always known?” he asked. There was no need to say more; one never knew when servants were listening.
“From the beginning, yes,” she said quietly. “My affections for you have nothing to do with the particulars of your birth. Your brother Richard was a fine young man, and his death grieved me as if I’d lost one of my own.” She sniffed. “I never cared much for Cecil. He was too much like his mother.”
“I rather liked my mother,” said Sebastian. “And Cecil.”
“I know you did. Hendon tells me you have agents in France, seeking news of her. Any success yet?”
“Not yet.”
She was silent for a moment, watching him. “I suppose you think the earldom should by rights go to that idiot cousin of yours up north?”
Like Hendon, Henrietta had never had anything except contempt for Delwin St. Cyr, the oafish, slow-witted distant cousin who lived in Yorkshire and stood next in line, behind Sebastian, to the earldom. Sebastian raised one eyebrow. “You don’t?”
“Hardly. Delwin’s grandfather—my father’s cousin—was impotent. His son was fathered by the local vicar.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Oh, but I can. So you see, if you think you are depriving Delwin of his ‘rightful’ inheritance, you’re wrong. Delwin is no more a St. Cyr than you are. Less so, in fact. Your mother had St. Cyr blood in her, after all, through her grandmother.”
Sebastian gave a wry smile. He should have known. The St. Cyr bloodline. The St. Cyr name. The St. Cyr legacy. As long as Sebastian could remember, nothing had mattered more to Hendon than preserving and continuing the St. Cyr heritage. Nothing.
She watched him struggle to eat with his left hand, his right resting carefully in his lap. “I am told you’ve injured your arm. Is it serious?”
“It will mend.”
She nodded. “Hendon will be pleased to hear,” she said, and he knew this was why she had come, to let his father—to let the Earl, he mentally corrected himself—know how he fared.
She heaved herself to her feet with a mighty grunt. “He’s the only father you have, Sebastian. And you are as dear to him as any son could be. The estrangement that arose between you this past winter grieved him seriously. Don’t let what Sophia did thirty years ago come between you now.”
“There’s far more to this than what Sophia did, as well you know.”
She sniffed again. “If you mean Kat Boleyn, I’ve never thought she was the wife for you. You can look daggers at me all you want, Sebastian, but it’s true—and I mean that quite apart from the less-than-desirable facts of her birth or her profession. You need someone to keep you in line.”
“The way Claiborne kept you in line?”
“Good heavens,” she said, affronted. “He never did any such thing.”
“My point exactly.”
“I’m not you.” She turned toward the door.
He stopped her by saying, “As a member of the King’s mission to the Colonies, Lord Jarvis . . .” Sebastian paused, choosing his words carefully. “Jarvis would have known the truth. Yet as much as he and Hendon have locked horns over the years, he has never used this knowledge to his advantage. Why?”
“Jarvis and Hendon are old, old adversaries. They each know secrets that the other would prefer be kept buried.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s often better that the truth never be known.”
He came upon Miss Jarvis in the sun-warmed gardens of Berkeley Square, as she strolled with her maid along carefully manicured paths of crushed shell. She had not attended the funeral of the Bishop and his brother, for burials were considered dangerous occasions from which women were excluded for health reasons.
She was so obviously lost in her own troubled thoughts that she did not see him, and he paused for a moment in the shadows of a clipped yew hedge to study her. She wore a very fetching sprigged muslin gown and a straw hat tied beneath her chin with a jaunty red ribbon. But her cheeks were unnaturally pale, her features strained. He knew why.
She was confronting with grace and courage what must be for any gentlewoman the most unimaginably catastrophic of developments. He remembered with bemusement those moments beneath the ruined gardens of old Somerset House, when they’d believed they faced death and had instead created a new life. The thought of a future with Miss Hero Jarvis as his wife—and Charles, Lord Jarvis, as his father-in-law—scared the hell out of Sebastian and tore at his gut. But as a man of honor, he could not allow her to suffer the consequences of that day alone. He took a deep breath and walked toward her.
At the sound of his footsteps, she looked around and froze. He said teasingly, “You’ve forgotten your parasol.”
She didn’t smile. “I was just going inside. Good day, my lord.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said, falling into step beside her when she would have turned away. “I’m not going to be a gentleman and let you run off. First of all, you must allow me to thank you for saving my life.”
“You’re welcome. Now I really must be—”
“No. I know the truth,” he said bluntly. “You can deny it all you want. Simon Ashley told me.”
“Ashley? But how did he—” She drew up sharply to throw a speaking glance at her maid. The woman dropped back out of earshot.
Miss Jarvis continued up the path, her arms crossed at her chest, her voice lowered. “What precisely are you saying, Lord Devlin?”
“I’m saying that in the midst of trying to kill me, Dr. Ashley made a rather interesting proposal. He suggested that if I agreed to remain silent about his recent murderous activities, then he would be willing to keep quiet about my unborn child.”
The air was heavy with the scent of damp earth and sun-baked stone and a faint breath of lavender. She had the gra
ce not to continue her denials. She simply walked on, her back held straight, her lips pressed into a tight line. But he could see her throat work as she swallowed.
He said, “I have in my pocket a special license. We can be wed this—”
“No.”
“Miss Jarvis—”
She swung to face him, her eyes dark with fear and anger and something else he couldn’t identify. “No. You know my opinion of the institution of marriage in England today.”
He was startled into giving a soft, shaky laugh. “Miss Jarvis, I can assure you that I will neither beat you nor force my unwelcome attentions upon you, nor risk whatever wealth you might bring to our union on the turn of a card. And I’m not asking you to take my word for it. I can have a marriage settlement drawn up guaranteeing—”
“No.” She brought one splayed hand to her forehead, shading her eyes. “What you are suggesting is madness. It’s madness for you, and it’s madness for me, and I won’t do it.”
“If you won’t do it for your sake, then think about the child.”
“I am thinking about the child.”
He cast a quick glance back at the maid, then leaned toward Miss Jarvis, his voice low and earnest. “You cannot mean to give this child to the likes of Dr. McCain to raise.”
“What’s wrong with Dr. McCain?”
In truth, there wasn’t anything wrong with the man except that he wanted to adopt Sebastian’s child. Sebastian said, “I suppose his wife’s harmless enough, but McCain himself is a stuffy, narrow-minded bore.”
“There are worse things than being a stuffy, narrow-minded bore.”
“That’s debatable. If you remain adamant in your opposition to marriage, then give me the child. I will raise it.”
Her nostrils flared on a quick breath. “No.”
“Why not?” He knew a powerful welling of frustration and anger, tinged with fear. “You must allow me to do something—”
“Believe me, Lord Devlin, there is no need. I have decided I shall simply go away to have the child. Travel for some years, to Arabia, or perhaps to the land of the Hindu Kush.”
“You mean have the child in Arabia? Are you mad?”
“No, I am not mad. Merely determined to keep both my child and my independence. When I return in a few years’ time, the exact age of the infant will be easily obscured. I can present the child as one I adopted during the course of my journeys, and no one will be any the wiser. Oh, there might be whispers, but so what?”
He searched her pale, strong face. “You would do that? Have him grow up believing he’s someone he’s not?” The thought of it tore at Sebastian, a painful rending of a raw wound he knew was never going to heal.
“There is no alternative.”
“Of course there is an alternative. You can marry me.”
“I will write,” she said. “Let you know the child is well. Now, you must excuse me, my lord. I have much to do.”
She made as if to brush past him, but he grabbed her arm, stopping her. “I can’t let you do this.”
She carefully withdrew her arm from his grasp. “And how, pray, do you intend to stop me?”
“I don’t know. Kidnap you, perhaps?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, and left him there, to the sun and the soft wind and the faint, lingering scent of lavender.
That night, Jarvis put in a rare appearance at his own dinner table.
He talked to Hero for a time of the war in the Peninsula, and the bellicose posturings of the young United States. As usual, Annabelle contributed little beyond the typical stray, inane remark.
They were just finishing up a nice cream of asparagus soup when Hero drew in a deep breath and said bluntly, “I’ve been thinking I might hire a companion and travel for a while.”
Annabelle dropped her spoon with a clatter. “Travel? But . . . travel where, Hero?”
“Arabia. India. Who knows?”
“Good God,” said Jarvis. “What put this idea in your head?”
She looked over at him, her face set in oddly stiff lines. “You know I’ve always wanted to see the world. I think I’ve finally reached the age that I can do so without exciting too much comment.”
“But . . .” Her mother groped for her wineglass. “Whatever will I do without you?”
“End your days in Bedlam, where you belong, no doubt,” suggested Jarvis maliciously.
“Papa,” said Hero in a low, tense voice. “You shouldn’t say that, even in jest.”
Jarvis raised one eyebrow. “What makes you think I’m jesting? Do you seriously expect me to put up with her nonsense without you here to coax and wheedle her into a semblance of normality?”
Jarvis considered himself a master at reading both men and women, but what he saw in his daughter’s drawn, troubled face confused him. She reminded him of a hunted fox backed into a corner.
“Hero?” said Annabelle in a weak, pleading voice.
Hero reached out to grip her mother’s hand, tightly, in her own. “It’s all right, Mama.” She forced her lips into an unconvincing smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “It was just a thought. Don’t worry. I won’t go.”
“If you’re that bored,” snapped Jarvis, “what you need to do is to find a husband and start having babies.”
Hero glanced over at him. He expected her to make one of her usual provocative remarks on the inequities of modern English marriage laws. Instead, she gave a strange, soft laugh and said, “Perhaps I shall.”
Author’s Note
While the church of St. Margaret’s and the village of Tanfield Hill are fictional, the crypt of St. Margaret’s was inspired in both its design and the details of its rediscovery by the very real crypt of St. Wystan’s in Repton, England.
For nineteenth-century burial customs and the condition of burials in crypts, see the fascinating material published both in print and on the Internet on the archaeological excavations of Christ Church, Spitalfields, London; of St. Pancras Church, Euston Road; and the recently rediscovered crypt of the former Dominican church in Vác, Hungary.
As surprising as it may seem, the incredibly long delay in the funeral of Bishop Prescott was quite common at the time, with the average being ten to twelve days; English gentlewomen did not attend funerals until Victorian times.
The fire that forms the climax of this tale is inspired by a real event: A fire in the crypt of St. Clements in London burned for days at the end of the nineteenth century, fueled solely by its jam-packed coffins and their contents.
The person of Bishop Francis Prescott is based, loosely, on the very real Bishop Beilby Porteus, who was for many years Bishop of London. An ardent reformer and abolitionist, Porteus was one of the leading supporters of the Slave Trade Act that passed Parliament in 1807. While a vocal opponent of both the French Revolution and the republican doctrines of Thomas Paine, he also penned the antiwar, antiempire poem quoted, in part, by Lord Jarvis. He died (peacefully) at the Bishop of London’s summer residence of Fulham Palace in 1809. John Moore was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1783 to 1805, when he was succeeded by the rather colorless Charles Manners-Sutton. My thanks to Ms. Janet Laws, personal secretary and assistant to the current Bishop of London, for answering some of my research queries on the bishops’ former London residence.
Numerous sites and buildings referred to in this series, such as the first church of St. Pancras and the Temple, have been renovated or rebuilt in the past two hundred years and therefore appear differently now than they would have in 1812. I have described them as Sebastian would have seen them.
The life of William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin, was much as I have portrayed it, although he actually sailed from New York in September of 1782, rather than at the beginning of June, as I have it here. Most of the comments my characters make about the American Revolution and the young United States are taken from actual letters, journals, and speeches made at the time. While they might strike some as having a modern, slightly satirical ring, they a
re actually very true to the period, with most gentlemen of the Regency era viewing the new American state and its radical new form of government as a serious threat to civilization.