Where Serpents Sleep

by C. S. Harris

  “What do you mean, what man?” said Hannah scornfully. “Don’t you know nothin’? The same man what killed Hessy.”

  Lady Jarvis’s querulous voice could be heard raised in annoyance somewhere above stairs. Hero looked at Hannah’s burgundy-plumed hat, the plunging décolletage, the glory of spangles and pink-and-white Polonaise stripes and said, “Wait here.”

  Yanking open the door, she found James standing patiently in the hall. “Watch her,” Hero told him, then hurried upstairs to furnish herself with the reticule, hat, gloves, and parasol without which no respectable lady would be seen out of doors in London—no matter how nefarious her errand.

  With difficulty, Hero resisted the urge to shake the girl. “That’s not why we’re here. You need someplace safe to stay. There isn’t anyplace else.” Not that Paul Gibson’s surgery was exactly safe either, Hero thought, remembering the fate of the wounded assailant she’d brought here. But she kept that information to herself.

  Hannah Green cast her a doubtful glance. “No medical exam?”

  “No exam,” promised Hero.

  The girl consented to get out of the hackney. Hero paid off the driver, then had to practically pull the girl across the road.

  “Good God,” said Paul Gibson, his eyes widening when he opened the door to Hero’s knock.

  “Dr. Gibson, meet Hannah Green. I think,” she added as Hannah glared at the surgeon and Gibson continued to stare in awe at the lady’s burgundy plumed hat and spangled pink-and-white stripes. “I’m sorry, but I had no place else to take her,” said Hero, putting her hand in the small of the girl’s back and giving her a push that propelled her over the threshold and into the hall.

  Chapter 47

  Sebastian arrived back at his house in Brook Street to find a note from Paul Gibson awaiting him. The Irishman had written cryptically:

  I have an interesting guest I’m convinced you’ll want to meet. Do come. Quickly.

  “Why all the mystery?” Sebastian demanded when Gibson opened the door to him.

  “I was concerned my message might fall into the wrong hands,” said Gibson, turning to lead the way back down the hall.

  “So who’s your guest?”

  “I have two, actually.”

  Sebastian stopped on the threshold of Gibson’s parlor. Miss Jarvis stood beside the empty hearth, her gaze on the pickled pig’s fetus on the mantel. She was turned half away from him, her spine as rigid and uncompromising as ever, her brown hair once again pulled back as neatly as a schoolteacher’s, her forehead faintly crinkling as she stared with apparent fascination at the blob of purple-pink flesh in the jar. She looked as she had always looked and he wondered why that surprised him. As if that brief, desperate coupling in the dark should have transformed her and made her—what? Soft and winsome? Hero Jarvis? What an absurd conceit.

  She turned then and he had the satisfaction of seeing her lips part on a quickly indrawn breath. And he knew in that moment she, too, was remembering the touch of flesh against flesh, the taste of salt on a questing tongue. Then a woman’s voice said, “Bloody ’ell. You gonna make me say it all again?”

  Looking around, he beheld a vision in spangled pink-and-white stripes that made him blink.

  He was aware of Miss Jarvis’s lips curling into that malicious smile that was so much like her father’s. She said, “Lord Devlin, meet Hannah Green.”

  Sebastian studied the girl’s button nose and scattering of freckles. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t this—this exuberant bundle of irreverence. “Are you certain she really is Hannah Green?”

  “Are you bamming me?” said the girl. “I’d have to be daft to be claimin’ t’be me if’n I wasn’t me. I don’t want to be me right now.”

  “According to Hannah here, Tasmin Poole is dead,” said Miss Jarvis by way of explanation. “Someone snapped her neck two nights ago.”

  “It was the same cove,” said Hannah. “The one what come to the Academy and done for Hessy.”

  Sebastian went to pour himself a brandy. “Do you know who this cove is?” he asked, reaching for Gibson’s decanter.

  “Not exactly.” She threw a questioning glance toward Miss Jarvis.

  “Tell Lord Devlin what you told me. About the three men who hired you out of the house last week.”

  Sebastian looked up. “When was this?”

  “Tuesday,” said Hannah. “They was havin’ a party, you see. It was one of the coves’ birthday, and they hired Hessy, Rose, and me fer the whole night.”

  “Go on,” said Sebastian, splashing brandy into a glass. He silently offered some to Miss Jarvis and Gibson, but only Gibson took him up on it.

  “We’d done it before. I don’t mean fer them three,” Hannah hastened to add, her gaze on the brandy. “But fer other coves.” Her face shone with saucy glee. “It can get a bit naughty, if you know what I mean. But it’s a lot less work than spending the night traipsing up and down the stairs at the Academy.”

  Sebastian glanced at Miss Jarvis, with her primly knotted spinster’s hair and rigidly held spine. Did she have any inkling of the wild Dionysian scene conjured by Hannah Green’s words? Of the kinds of things three young men could demand of the compliant women they’d bought for the night? And then it occurred to him that she probably had a better idea now than she would have twenty-four hours ago.

  “What manner of men were they?” he asked.

  “Gentlemen,” said Hannah Green, as if that said it all.

  “Old? Young? Fat? Thin?”

  “Pretty old,” she said. Sebastian was picturing ponderous men with graying pates and drooping bellies until she added, “ ’Bout yer age.”

  “I’m twenty-nine.” He glanced over at Miss Jarvis in time to see her bring up her hand to hide a smile. He said, “Did they take you to a house, or to rooms?”

  “Rooms. Right fancy they were, too.” She cast a disparaging glance around Gibson’s unpretentious parlor. “More swell than this.”

  “Where were these rooms?”

  Hannah frowned in thought. “I don’t rightly know. They took us there in a carriage.”

  “A gentleman’s carriage?”

  “No. A hackney.” Then she frowned and added, “I think.”

  Sebastian blew out his breath in a long sigh. “Do you remember anything from that night at all?”

  She grinned. “Not much. I was that foxed, I was.”

  “But you say you saw one of them again?”

  “All three of ’em. They come to the Academy the very next night. Asked fer Rose, Hessy, and me again. Only, this time they weren’t hirin’ us off the floor. Just fer an hour.”

  “So what happened?”

  Hannah Green’s gaze returned again to Sebastian’s brandy. She licked her lips. “Can I ’ave one of them?”

  “When you’ve remembered everything. I want you clear-headed. Tell me what happened Wednesday night. Exactly.”

  “Exactly?” She screwed up her face with the effort of memory. “Well . . . I was takin’ off me dress when Rose comes bangin’ on me door, sayin’ she needs to talk to me. So I goes out into the hall to tell her to go away, and she grabs me arm and says them three gentlemen had come to kill us. At first I thought she was bamming me, but then she drags me down the hall and shows me poor Hessy layin’ there with her eyes wide-open and her neck bent all funny. And she tells me that she’s done gone and stabbed the gent what had paid fer her. I can tell you, we was that spooked. Rose give Tasmin Poole her bracelet to distract Thackery while we nipped down the back stairs and took off.”

  Sebastian studied the girl’s animated face, unsure how much—if any—of this wild tale to believe. “The man you say you saw going into your lodging house in Haymarket right before Tasmin Poole was killed—was he the man you were with Wednesday night?”

  Hannah shook her head, her eyes wide. “He’s the one went with Hessy.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I told you, he was a gentleman! Now can I have t
hat drink?”

  Sebastian poured her a brandy and held it out. “Dark hair, or light?”

  She took the brandy in both hands and gulped it. “Dark. I think. At least, pretty dark.”

  Paul Gibson made an incoherent sound, while Sebastian asked, “Tall or short?”

  Hannah’s eyes narrowed. “Neither.”

  “You don’t remember anything about him at all, do you?”

  “ ’Course I do. What I’m sayin’ is, he were an ordinary-lookin’ cove. I’d recognize ’im in a minute if’n I was to see ’im again. I recognized ’im when I seen ’im in the Haymarket, didn’t I?”

  “What about the gentleman you were with that Wednesday night. What did he look like?”

  “He were the same. Just an ordinary-lookin’ gentleman.” She twisted her mouth sideways in a thoughtful frown. “Though I think maybe he weren’t as dark. He was the birthday cove.”

  Sebastian moved to refill her glass. “Do you remember any of their names?”

  “I don’t pay no attention to names. In my experience, most men just make up the names they give me anyway.”

  “Yet that night of the birthday party, surely the men called one another by name?”

  She frowned. “Maybe. I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t pay no attention to names.”

  “Was one of them named Max?”

  She nibbled on a fingernail. “Coulda been. I can’t say fer sure, though.”

  He was aware of Miss Jarvis’s gaze upon him. He knew she was bursting to ask, And who is Max?

  “Do you have any idea at all,” Sebastian said to Hannah Green, “why those men came back to the Academy to kill you?”

  Hannah downed her second brandy in a long pull. “Rose said it was because she knew they was plannin’ to murder someone.”

  Sebastian was aware of Paul Gibson’s arrested expression, of Miss Jarvis sitting forward. This was evidently one part of her tale Hannah Green had not yet told. Sebastian said, “She knew but you didn’t? Why?”

  Hannah gave a ringing laugh. “Go on wit’ you. I don’t speak French!”

  Sebastian’s gaze met Miss Jarvis’s. “They were speaking French?”

  “Amongst themselves, yeah,” said Hannah. “At first. Till the other cove come.”

  Sebastian frowned. “The other cove? There were four men?”

  “No. Just the three. The birthday cove come later.”

  “Did Rose tell you exactly who they were planning to kill?”

  “Sure. But it didn’t mean nothing to me. Some guy named Perceval, or something like that.”

  Miss Jarvis’s eyes widened. “Spencer Perceval?”

  Hannah swung her head to look at Lord Jarvis’s daughter and say, “Who’s he?”

  Chapter 48

  Miss Jarvis pushed up from her chair. “If I might have a word with you, Lord Devlin?”

  “Of course, Miss Jarvis,” he said, following her down the hall to Gibson’s dining room.

  She stalked to the far side of the table before swinging to face him. “You know something you haven’t told me. What is it?”

  “Believe me, Miss Jarvis, this is the first I’ve heard of any link to the Prime Minister—if there is indeed any such link.”

  “So who is Max?”

  “Max Ludlow. He’s a hussar captain. Or he was. He’s been missing since last Wednesday. Until recently, I thought it an interesting coincidence that he disappeared the same night as Rachel Fairchild fled Orchard Street. It may still be nothing more than a coincidence. On the other hand, he might well be the man she killed.”

  Miss Jarvis brought one hand to her forehead. “My God. What is this? Some French plot to assassinate the Prime Minister?”

  “Hannah Green said the three men who hired them were gentlemen. She didn’t say anything about them being French.” Most men of their class could converse in French with ease, even after twenty years of war. But as the daughter of a French émigré, Rachel would have been fluent. “And we don’t know they were talking about Spencer Perceval, after all. Perceval is a given name as well as a family name.”

  “Then why did they come back to kill those women? And why are they trying to kill us?”

  “That I do not know, Miss Jarvis.” He searched her face, noting the subtle signs of strain, the brittle way she held herself. He said, “Miss Jarvis, there are things we must discuss.”

  “I see no need to discuss anything,” she said, gripping the back of the chair before her. “What passed between us was a bizarre aberration born of an unfortunate set of circumstances and best forgotten.”

  Only Hero Jarvis, he thought, could describe the loss of her virginity as a bizarre aberration. He said, “Nevertheless, I am honor bound to offer you my hand in—”

  “Thank you, my lord, but that will not be necessary.” Her cheeks darkened with what he first took for embarrassment, then realized was rage. “I have no intention of allowing a moment’s weakness to lead to a lifetime of regret.”

  Sebastian could think of nothing more horrifying than finding himself united in unholy matrimony with the daughter of Lord Jarvis. But the code of honor he lived by was rigid in such matters. He said, “If we had died on cue as expected, it would have been unnecessary. Since, however, we did not die, it is now—”

  “Lord Devlin. I told you before that I have no intention of ever marrying. What happened yesterday has not altered that.”

  She stared at him with her frank, faintly contemptuous gray eyes, and he found it virtually impossible to reconcile this icy, self-possessed gentlewoman with the frightened and very real woman he’d held in his arms less than twenty-four hours ago. He said, “There could be consequences.”

  Her head jerked up. “There is no reason anyone need ever know. My identity was never revealed to our rescuers. I was able to reenter my home without attracting undue attention. And I trust I may have full confidence in your honor as a gentleman that you will never speak of it to anyone.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Her eyes widened in a way that told him this aspect of yesterday’s interlude had yet to occur to her. She said, “Fate would not be so perverse.”

  “Nevertheless, you will tell me?”

  She brushed past him, headed for the door. He reached out and snagged her arm, pulling her back around. “Miss Jarvis, I must insist.”

  Fury and scorn blazed in her eyes. She dropped her gaze to his hand on her arm. He let her go.

  She said, “I have no desire to speak of this again. I trust that you, as a gentleman, will respect that wish.” She turned once more toward the door.

  “Nevertheless, you will tell me. If there are consequences.”

  She checked for the briefest instant, but kept walking.

  “What ’appened to ’im?” asked the irrepressible Hannah.

  “Someone broke his neck.”

  Hannah’s hand crept up to gently cradle her throat. For a moment, the animation seemed to drain out of her, leaving her bleak and frightened.