Where Serpents Sleep

by C. S. Harris

  “Why wouldn’t I? We were supposed to meet up later, at a tavern near Soho. I went there expecting to find him waiting for me. But he never showed up. At first I thought he’d simply changed his mind and gone home. It wasn’t until he was still missing the next day that I realized something had gone wrong. I thought he’d been jumped by footpads or something. I never imagined he hadn’t even left the Academy.”

  “Who else was with you that night?”

  “No one.” He pushed away from the balustrade. “What’s your interest in this, anyway?”

  From the ballroom behind them came the lilting chorus of an English country dance. Sebastian said, “I’m just doing a favor for an acquaintance.” He studied the man’s pale face, clammy with sweat despite the chill from the rain. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask: When’s your birthday?”

  “My birthday?” Somerville gave a shaky laugh. “Why do you ask?”

  “It was last week, was it?”

  A muscle jumped along the man’s tightened jaw as he considered his answer. “Yes,” he said slowly, realizing the futility of denying it. “Why?”

  “Happy birthday,” Sebastian said, and walked off into the night.

  Sebastian poured himself another cup of hot tea and said, “Hannah Green identified Patrick Somerville.”

  “As a customer. There’s no law against paying a woman for a moment’s physical gratification, however morally repugnant it might be. She didn’t see him kill anyone. And even if she had, who’d take the word of a soiled dove against that of a hussar captain wounded in the defense of his country?”

  “He wasn’t wounded. He has malaria.”

  “I think I’d rather be wounded.”

  “Frankly, so would I.” Sebastian took a sip of his tea and wished it were something stronger. “There’s still the harp player. She heard the men who attacked the Academy last night. If Somerville was one of them—and I strongly suspect he was—she would recognize his voice. If we can set up a situation in which she can hear him—”

  “No jury would convict a hussar captain on the strength of testimony given by a blind woman who played the harp in a brothel.”

  Sebastian knew a welling of frustration. Lovejoy was right, of course. But there had to be a way. . . . “The girl who worked in the cheesemonger’s shop across from the Magdalene House might recognize him. She noticed several gentlemen loitering in the street right before the fire.”

  “Did she actually see them go into the house?”

  “No.”

  Lovejoy thrust out his short legs and crossed them at the ankles. “It’s just all too convoluted and confused. Even I still don’t understand it properly.”

  Sebastian leaned forward, his elbows braced on his knees. “A week ago last Tuesday, two men—Max Ludlow and another gentleman I’ve yet to identify—hired Rose Fletcher, Hannah Green, and Hessy Abrahams off the floor of the Academy as part of a birthday surprise for one of their friends—Captain Patrick Somerville. The women were taken by hackney to rooms someplace, where Somerville later joined them. It must have been decidedly awkward when he realized one of the women his friends had hired for the night was Rachel Fairchild, the sister of his childhood playmate.”

  Lovejoy cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Decidedly awkward, I should think.”

  “So awkward that I get the impression neither one of them let on about it. But Somerville must have said something to his friends the next day. And when it came out that Rachel’s mother was French—that Rachel herself spoke French—they realized they’d been indiscreet. That she had overheard—and understood—a dangerous conversation the men had conducted in French, assuming none of the women could understand them.”

  “So they went back to the Academy the next night, planning to kill the women? Before they could tell anyone what they’d heard?”

  “Yes. Except, of course, it all went awry. The mysterious third gentleman made his kill quickly, breaking Hessy Abrahams’s neck. But Rachel Fairchild managed to stab Max Ludlow with a pair of sewing scissors, and then warn Hannah Green. I gather the three men were supposed to meet up at a tavern later. When Ludlow didn’t show up, the others had no way of knowing what had gone wrong. It must have taken them several days to figure it out, and to trace the two surviving women to the Magdalene House.”

  “By which time Hannah Green had already fled.” Lovejoy stared thoughtfully at the cold, blackened recesses of the hearth. “They killed an extraordinary number of people, simply to silence one woman.”

  “They’re soldiers. They’re trained to kill. And they’re on a mission.”

  “To kill the Prime Minister?” Lovejoy stirred his tea, his features pinched and troubled. “You’ve told Perceval of your theory?”

  “That someone is planning to assassinate him? Yes.”

  “And?”

  Sebastian smiled. “He didn’t believe me any more than you do.”

  Lovejoy laid aside his spoon with a soft clatter. “It just seems so absurd. No British prime minister has ever been assassinated. And by three of His Majesty’s own officers? What possible motive could they have for doing such a thing?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “I don’t know. What can you tell me about the man found this morning? Max Ludlow.”

  “Nothing to his discredit. He’s described as a model officer—loyal, brave, efficient.”

  “Which regiment?”

  “The Twentieth Hussars.”

  The same as Somerville, thought Sebastian. Aloud, he said, “Where did he serve?”

  “Italy, Jamaica, Egypt, the Sudan—just about everywhere. He even had a hand in the capture of Cape Town from the Dutch.”

  “Then he was sent to Argentina?”

  “That’s right.”

  Sebastian stared down at the dregs of his teacup. It had been nearly five years since the disastrous Argentinean campaign, when Britain had tried to wrest Spain’s wealthy South American colony for its own. The expedition had been ill conceived and undermanned. Thousands of men from England, Scotland, and Ireland had left their bones in the Rio de la Plata, while many of the survivors returned home ruined and bitter.

  “You’ve no idea who this third man is?” said Lovejoy.

  Sebastian set aside his empty cup and pushed to his feet. “No. If I could find out who Ludlow and Somerville’s associates are—who they served with in the past—it might tell me something.”

  Lovejoy nodded. “I’ll set one of the constables to look into it.”

  “You’ll—” Sebastian broke off as comprehension dawned. “So you’ve done it, have you? You’ve decided to accept the position at Bow Street.”

  Sir Henry permitted himself a small, proud smile. “It’s not official until tomorrow morning, of course. But, yes.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Sir Henry’s smile widened, then slowly began to dim.

  Chapter 55

  MONDAY, 11 MAY 1812

  She’d thought, once, that if she could only discover who killed the women of the Magdalene House, and why, then she’d understand how Rachel Fairchild had come to be there—how the granddaughter of a duke could ever have fallen so low as to make the sordid life of a woman of the streets her own. Once or twice Hero’d had the niggling suspicion that Devlin knew more than he was letting on. But she couldn’t begin to comprehend why he was refusing to tell her. Hero herself felt no closer, today, to understanding the riddle of Rachel’s life than she’d been a week ago. And she knew a growing sense of frustration, a fear that she was never going to know, never going to understand.

  Sometime before dawn she heard the rain begin again, pattering against the windowpanes. She thought of Rachel Fairchild lying in her cold, lonely grave beneath the pounding rain, and although she knew it was absurd, the rain unsettled her. When she finally drifted off to sleep, it was with the vague, half-formed intention of visiting the Friends’ burial ground the next day.

  She arose early that morning, little refreshed. The rain had stopp
ed sometime after dawn, although the clouds still hung low and heavy. Armed with a selection of lilacs and lilies from the corner flower stall, Hero set forth shortly after breakfast, accompanied by her maid and traveling in her own carriage. She was aware of her father’s servant discreetly shadowing her, but she had no need, today, to escape his watchful eye.

  He followed her north, past Oxford Road to Paddington and the small hamlet of Pentonville that lay beyond it. She located the Friends’ meetinghouse and burial grounds easily enough, for she had sought directions from Joshua Walden. Leaving her carriage beneath the arching canopy of an old elm growing at the side of the road, she entered the burial ground through a simple gate in its low rubble wall.

  The graves of the eight women were easy to find, a sad row of freshly turned earth beside the far western wall, slashes of dark brown contrasting starkly with the green of the wet grass. As Hero walked down the hill, her gaze narrowed at the sight of a tall woman who stood beside the graves with her head bowed, her shoulders hunched. She was dressed in black silk, with her hands fisted around the strings of a large traveling reticule. At the sound of Hero’s footfalls on the sodden grass, the woman turned, revealing the grief-ravaged face of Rachel’s sister Lady Sewell.

  “It’s you,” she said in a breathy whisper, one hand coming up to cover her trembling mouth.

  Hero’s step faltered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were here.” She made a vague gesture with the flowers she’d brought. “I’ll just leave these and go.”

  Lady Sewell nodded toward the row of unmarked graves. “I don’t even know which of these graves is hers. Do you?”

  Hero shook her head. “No. I’m sorry.”

  Lady Sewell’s breath caught on a sob. “She never told me what he was doing to her. You do believe me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Hero, although she hadn’t the slightest idea what the woman was talking about.

  “All those years and she never said a word. But I should have known, shouldn’t I?”

  “You should?”

  Lady Sewell clenched her jaw tight to keep it from shuddering. “We made a deal, Father and I. I would keep quiet about the shooting, and he in turn would let me marry Sewell.” Her lip curled. “I should have known I couldn’t trust him.”

  “The shooting?” said Hero.

  A muscle bunched along the woman’s jaw. “He killed her, you know. My mother. It was an accident. He was trying to take the gun away from her, and it went off. But he still killed her.”

  Hero remembered what Devlin had told her, about the death of Rachel’s mother. “You mean, in the pavilion?”

  Rachel’s sister nodded. “Mama found out what he was doing to me. She knew he was spending the afternoon by the lake, working on some speech he was to give. She went down there, intending to kill him. I ran after her, begging her not to do it. She just told me to go home.”

  Hero studied the other woman’s mottled, tear-streaked face. “Your mother was planning to shoot your father? But . . . why?”

  Lady Sewell gave a soft, scornful laugh. “You still don’t understand, do you? You have no idea what it’s like. Lying in bed at night, afraid. Listening for the creak of the stairs. Your stomach clenching with the dread of hearing his footsteps in the hall. Knowing what’s coming. The pain, the . . .” Her lip curled. “The shame.”

  Surely she didn’t mean . . . Comprehension warred with incredulity and Hero’s own ignorance. Did fathers do that to their own daughters?

  A wry smile curled the other woman’s lips, and Hero realized something of her horror and disbelief must have shown on her face. “See,” said Rachel’s sister. “You don’t believe it. After he killed Mama, I told him I was going to let everyone know what he did to me at night—what he’d been doing to me for years. He just laughed at me. He said no one would believe me. They’d think I made it all up.”

  Hero hunched her shoulders as a damp wind blowing off the surrounding fields buffeted her. It wasn’t cold, but she still shivered.

  “So we struck a bargain, he and I. He promised if I left he wouldn’t start doing to Rachel what he’d done to me all those years. But now that I look back on it, I realize . . .” She drew in a ragged breath. “He’d already started doing it to her, too. It’s why she stopped singing. Why she buried her dolls. I thought it was because of Mama, but it wasn’t. It was because of him.”

  Hero stared at the woman’s tall, elegant frame and pale features, not knowing what to say.

  Lady Sewell turned away to stare out over the surrounding fields. “I remember one morning not long after Rachel’s betrothal to Ramsey was announced, I came upon her in the garden. She was singing, and I thought she was happy because she was in love. Now I realize she was happy because she thought she was finally going to get away from him.”

  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.