by C. S. Harris
Kat reached long, naked arms over her head in a lazy stretch. “She’s not Friday faced with me.”
“Then what the devil does she have against me?”
Kat laughed. “You’re male.”
Sebastian knelt on the edge of the bed, one doeskin-clad knee sinking deep into the feather mattress. “How’s the new play?”
“Popular. Or maybe it’s just my Cleopatra costume that’s popular.” She brought her arms down to loop them around his neck and draw him to her. “I expected you yesterday.”
From any other woman the words might have been read as an expression of reproach. But not with Kat. With Kat, it was simply a statement, an observation.
She demanded no loverlike commitments from him. She had rebuffed his every attempt to make her his wife and refused even to be considered his mistress. He supposed there were men who might relish such an arrangement as a freedom from the ties that could bind; Sebastian lived with a quietly desperate fear that one day, for some reason he would never quite understand, she would leave him. Again.
He slid his hands down her naked back, heard her breath catch in that way it always did when he touched her. He nuzzled his face against her neck, breathed in the wonderful, heady fragrance of her skin and hair. “Forgive me?”
She bracketed his cheeks with her hands, drawing back so she could see his face. Her lips were smiling, her eyes shining with what looked very much like love. But her words were light, frivolous. “That depends on how good your excuse is.”
He took her mouth in a kiss of tender hello and subtle promises of want and need. Then, lifting his head, he brushed the ball of his thumb across her lips and saw her smile fade when he said, “How about murder?”
Chapter 13
She had been born with a different name, to a woman with laughing eyes and warmly whispered words of love who’d died degraded and afraid on a misty Irish morning.
Sometimes, especially in the early hours when darkness was only just giving way to dawn, Kat would imagine she could feel the soldiers’ rough hands upon her, feel the fibrous bite of the rope at her own throat, the breath of life slowly squeezing, squeezing from her. She would awake gasping, the terror in her mind dark and fierce. But she was not her mother. She would not die her mother’s death. And she would not live her life in fear.
For ten years now she’d been Kat Boleyn. There’d been a time when she’d known poverty and desperation, before the whimsies of fame and adoration had changed all of that. And for seven of those years she had loved this man, Sebastian St. Cyr.
She turned her head, a smile warming her heart at the sight of his familiar, beloved features and darkly disheveled hair framed by the crisp white linen of her pillow. She had loved him since she was sixteen and he was twenty-one, when they were both still young and naive enough to believe that love was more important than anything—anything at all. Before she’d understood that one made choices in life, and that some choices carry a price too grievous to bear.
She knew better now. She knew that love could be selfless as well as greedy. And that sometimes the greatest gift that one can give one’s beloved is to let him go.
She realized his eyes were open, watching her. In a few minutes he would leave her bed and she would send him into the afternoon sunshine with a careless caress and light words that asked and gave no promises.
She touched her fingertips to his bare shoulder and he reached for her, strong hands gliding up her back to draw her beneath him. She went to him with a sigh, her eyes closing as she allowed herself to pretend for one shining moment out of time that all those things that matter so much—like honor and loyalty, duty and betrayal—mattered not at all.
THE NECKLACE LAY COOL against Kat’s palm. It was an unusual piece, three interlocking, almond-shaped silver ovals set against a smooth bluestone disk.
Once, this necklace had belonged to Sebastian’s mother. Kat had heard stories about the beautiful countess with the golden hair and dancing green eyes who’d been lost at sea off the coast of Brighton one summer when Sebastian was a child. Now the necklace had reappeared—around the throat of a murdered woman.
Flipping the pendant over, Kat traced the old entwined initials. A. C. and J. S. As Devlin moved around her bedchamber, assembling his clothes and drawing on his breeches and shirt, he told her the legend he’d grown up hearing, about the mysterious Welshwoman who had once possessed the necklace but had given it away to the handsome, ill-fated prince she loved.
“I don’t understand,” said Kat. “If the necklace is supposed to choose its next guardian, then why did Addiena give it to James Stuart?”
Devlin looked up from where he sat on the edge of her bed, one gleaming Hessian in his hands. “You need to remember that at the time she knew him, James Stuart was a hunted man. Charles the First—his father, the King—had just been beheaded by Cromwell and the Roundheads, while his brother—the future Charles the Second—was a fugitive in exile.” Devlin thrust his foot into his boot and stood up. “According to the legend, the necklace is supposed to bring long life. That’s why Addiena gave it to James Stuart—to protect him. They say that when he first rode into London after the restoration of Charles the Second, he had that necklace in a special pouch he always wore around his neck.”
“She must have loved him very much,” said Kat softly, “to give him something so precious to her.”
Devlin went to tie his cravat in front of her dressing table mirror. “I think so, yes. Although he was hardly faithful to her. He went on to marry two different wives and have over a dozen children.”
Kat closed her fist around the triskelion. “He was destined to be king. He needed a wife the people would accept, not some wild Welshwoman from the fields of Cronwyn. If she loved him, she would understand that.”
His eyes met hers in the mirror. She turned away to pick up his coat of Bath superfine. “Only, it didn’t work, did it?” she said over her shoulder. “He didn’t know long life. He lost his throne and died in exile.”
“Ah, but by then he no longer possessed the necklace. According to the story, James the Second had a child by Addiena Cadel, a girl by the name of Guinevere. Guinevere Stuart.”
“Guinevere?” Kat swung around in surprise. “What a strange coincidence.”
“It is, isn’t it? As I understand it, Guinevere Stuart’s father acknowledged her. In addition to giving her his name, he arranged an advantageous marriage for her. And he gave her the necklace as a wedding present.”
“So how did your mother come to have it?”
Devlin shrugged his shoulders into the coat she held out for him. “It was given to her by an old crone she met in Wales one summer. The woman claimed to be the granddaughter of James the Second—said she was one hundred and one years old, and that her mother had given her the necklace shortly before dying at the age of one hundred and two.”
Kat studied his face. He seldom spoke of the Countess, although Kat knew the loss of his mother at such an early age had affected Sebastian deeply—particularly coming, as it did, so soon after the death of his last surviving brother. “But why give the necklace to your mother?”
A shadow shifted in the depths of his tawny eyes. He turned away abruptly. “She said it would keep my mother safe.”
Kat came to slip her arms around his waist and press her cheek against his broad back, hugging him close. “It didn’t keep Guinevere Anglessey safe, either, did it? She was wearing it when she died.”
His hands gripped hers where they lay entwined against his satin waistcoat. After a moment, he turned in her arms, and whatever she’d seen earlier in his eyes was gone—or carefully hidden away. “It seems a strange piece for a woman to wear with an evening gown, is it not?”
“I’d have said so, yes.” She held the necklace out to him. “What color was the gown?”
“Green.” He took the necklace and slipped it into his pocket.
“That makes it even more strange. How does Anglessey say his wife came to
have the necklace?”
“Somehow it didn’t seem the right time to ask.”
Kat nodded. “I remember when she married him. It caused quite a stir. She was so young and beautiful.”
Devlin’s lips curled up into an ironic smile. “Whereas he was simply very rich. And a Marquis, of course.”
“Do you think he killed her…or had her killed?”
“If she was playing him false with the Regent, it would seem to give him a motive—not only to murder his wife, but to leave her body in a way that would implicate the man who was cuckolding him.”
“If she was playing him false with the Regent.”
“Or if he thought she was.”
“Anglessey didn’t need to agree to allow Paul Gibson to perform an autopsy on his wife’s body,” Kat pointed out. “The fact that he did would seem to suggest that he has nothing to hide.”
“Perhaps. We’ll know more when Gibson’s had a chance to do a thorough postmortem.” Devlin went to pick up his driving coat. “Anglessey himself claims to suspect his nephew, Bevan Ellsworth.”
“Now, there’s a man who’s capable of murder.”
He glanced at her in surprise. “You know him?”
“He had one of the chorus girls from the theater in keeping last year. She found him charming—and unpredictably vicious.”
“That sounds like Ellsworth, all right.” He threw his coat over his arm, then hesitated in a way that was unusual for him.
Kat tipped her head, a smile playing about her lips as she studied his face. “Out with it.”
His eyes widened in a parody of innocence. “Out with what?”
She came to take his hat and set it at a rakish angle on his head. “Whatever it is you’re circling around to asking me to do.”
He smiled and caught her to him to nuzzle her neck in a way that made her laugh. “Well, there is one little thing….”
Chapter 14
They were called the Upper Ten Thousand, that small cadre of men and women of birth and fortune who formed the top crust of English society and occupied the manor houses and grand estates that were the sine qua non of English respectability. Bound to each other by ties of blood and marriage, they rode to hounds together, belonged to the same clubs and subscription rooms, and sent their sons to the same schools—to Winchester and Eton, Cambridge and Oxford.
Like Sebastian, the Marquis of Anglessey’s nephew and heir presumptive, Bevan Ellsworth, had been sent to Eton. Sebastian had vague memories of a sporting lad with a ready laugh and a well-hidden but savage will to get his own back at anyone he thought had wronged him. But the two years that separated them had been enough to limit their interaction at that age. And whereas Sebastian went to Oxford, Ellsworth had gone to Cambridge. He’d eventually become a barrister, although he was said to spend considerably more time in the gaming hells around Pickering Place than in court.
Being a barrister was considered a respectable occupation for a gentleman. Because barristers could only be engaged by solicitors rather than directly by clients, barristers were not considered to be in trade, with all the vulgar associations that entailed. Thus, a barrister’s wife could be presented in court, whereas the wife of a solicitor could not—a subtle but important distinction for a man who expected to become the next Earl of Anglessey.
Sebastian ran across the Marquis’s nephew sharing a glass of wine with a friend in Brooks’s late that afternoon. Pausing just inside the entrance to the club’s red drawing room, Sebastian took a moment to study the man Bevan Ellsworth had become.
He had the same open, pleasant countenance Sebastian remembered, his warm brown hair worn in the style of disarray favored by those who followed Beau Brummel’s set. Ellsworth had something of a reputation as a dandy himself, his coat of Bath superfine being of a fashionable cut and his cravat intricately tied without falling into the extremes affected by some. But the broad set of his shoulders showed that he also considered himself something of a Corinthian, boxing at Jackson’s and fencing at Angelo’s and shooting wafers at Menton’s.
The gentleman beside him, a fair-skinned man with flaxen hair and an exaggerated neckcloth, looked vaguely familiar, although Sebastian couldn’t quite place him. Snagging a glass of Madeira from a passing waiter, Sebastian went to slouch with deliberate insouciance into the empty seat opposite the two men. “I understand congratulations are in order,” he said, interrupting their conversation without preamble or apology.
Ellsworth stiffened and swung his head to fix Sebastian with a cold stare. “I beg your pardon?”
Sebastian smiled. “Surely you’re not going to pretend you haven’t heard about the death of your dear aunt Guinevere? Everything that threatened to stand between you and Anglessey’s title and fortune has now been removed. Hence”—Sebastian lifted his glass in a kind of toast—“congratulations.”
The unknown gentleman with the flaxen hair and monstrous neckcloth met Sebastian’s steely gaze for one fleeting instant, then slipped quietly away to go stand nervously at the far end of the room.
“That’s always assuming, of course,” Sebastian added as if in afterthought, “that you were nowhere near Brighton on Wednesday last?”
A faint but discernible line of color touched Ellsworth’s cheekbones. “Don’t be ridiculous. I spent most of last Wednesday at Gray’s Inn.”
“In court?”
The man’s color darkened. “I’ll be damned if I can see what business it is of yours.”
Sebastian met his angry stare with a bland smile. “Alibis are always such handy things to have, don’t you agree? If you’re lucky, it might not even occur to the authorities that you could easily have hired someone to do the dirty deed for you.”
Ellsworth brought his own glass to his lips and took a slow, thoughtful swallow before saying with commendable sangfroid, “Very true. But it does rather beg the question, does it not? I mean, why kill the lady in such a flamboyant and decidedly public way? Why not simply hire a couple of footpaths to attack her sedan chair one dark night?”
“Why not indeed?” agreed Sebastian. “Or a highwayman to hold up her carriage on Hampstead Heath? You’ve obviously given some thought to it.”
Ellsworth let out a short, sharp laugh before leaning forward to say, “My debts aren’t that pressing.” His lips were still smiling, but a hard-edged warning glittered in his gray eyes.
“Rumor has it otherwise.”
“Rumor has it wrong.”
Sebastian rested his head against the chair’s high upholstered back. “So what did you think of her? Your late aunt, I mean.” Anyone seeing them from across the room would assume they were having a nice, friendly conversation. “Strange to think of her as your aunt when she was—what? Nearly ten years your junior?”
“Not so strange in our world, is it? London is full of gently bred young ladies panting like bitches in heat after a title or a fortune. Or both.”
Bitter, ugly words. But then, the reality was harsh. Firstborn sons—men of wealth and title—were shamelessly pursued and fought over, while younger sons, and sons of younger sons such as Ellsworth, were seen as dangerous pariahs to be shunned, guarded against, despised.
“And the young Lady Guinevere wanted both?” said Sebastian.
“A prime article like her? Why should she settle for anything less?” Ellsworth’s lips curled into a sneer. “Surely you don’t think she married my uncle for love?”
Sebastian studied the brooding, angry lines of the other man’s face. He was remembering the time, years ago at Eton, when some baronet’s son had eased Ellsworth out of the captainship of his house’s football team. Two weeks later, in a rough and confused tumult of play, the boy’s arm had been broken so badly he had to be sent home for the rest of the year. There were whispers at the time that Ellsworth had deliberately snapped the boy’s arm, although of course nothing could ever be proved. Sebastian heard later that the boy’s arm never did heal right.
“And your uncle?” said Sebastia
n. “Did he have reason to regret his marriage, do you think?”
Ellsworth gave a harsh laugh. “What? Apart from the fact she was playing him false?”
Sebastian had half expected it, and still the words troubled him more than he could have explained. “You mean with the Regent?”
“I wouldn’t know about the Regent. But you don’t really believe Anglessey fathered that so-called heir his lady wife was carrying, do you?”
“Older men than he have succeeded in siring sons.”
“Perhaps.” Ellsworth tossed down the dregs of his wine and pushed to his feet. “But not this one.”
Chapter 15
The breeches were of the finest plush velvet, with a coat of satin-trimmed blue velvet to match. Together with the silk stockings and snowy white shirt, they formed a livery fit for the footman of a duke—or at least for the boards of the Covent Garden Theater, which is where the costume was normally seen.
Twitching uncomfortably in his starched shirt, Tom supposed there were some fellows who might find the ensemble attractive. But as far as he was concerned, the rig made him look like a popinjay.
“Stop fidgeting,” said Kat, her normally precise diction slurred by the need to speak around a mouthful of pins.
Tom fell obediently still. His back itched unmercifully, but he didn’t move. He had a sneaking suspicion Miss Kat wasn’t above sticking one of her pins into him, if he didn’t do what he was told.
They were in Miss Kat’s dressing room at the theater, and she was busy adapting to his small frame the page’s livery she had borrowed from the theater’s costume collection. “I don’t see why we’re doin’ this,” Tom grumbled. “I got me a bang-up livery already, what the Viscount give me when he made me his tiger.”
“Huh.” Miss Kat moved around to do something to a seam of the breeches. “One look at that yellow-and-black-striped waistcoat of yours, and Lord Anglessey’s servants would mark you down as coming from the household of a sporting gentleman. Those in service have very decided opinions on the subject of young sporting gentleman, and few of those opinions are charitable. You’d be lucky not to find yourself sent off with a flea in your ear.”