by C. S. Harris
“Have you looked at what’s left?” he asked.
She nodded. “I’ve put notations beside the names I recognized. Most of them are people connected in some way with the play.”
“Any of them have a reason to wish Rachel harm?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Besides, we had a performance the night she died. We were all at the theater.”
Here was an aspect of Rachel York’s murder that hadn’t occurred to him. “All of you except for Rachel. Why wasn’t she there?”
“Her understudy went on in her place. Rachel sent word at the last minute, saying she was ill.”
“Did she do that often?”
“No. I can’t think of another instance. Rachel was never ill.”
Sebastian glanced quickly through the remaining pages. They mainly contained notations for meetings with the likes of hairdressers and seamstresses. But one name appeared on virtually every day. “Who’s Giorgio?”
“I think it might be Giorgio Donatelli. He helped design and paint the scenery when we did The School for Scandal last year. But he’s become increasingly popular as a portrait painter since then. He’s had commissions from the Lord Mayor and several members of the Prince of Wales’s inner circle. I don’t know why Rachel would be seeing him.”
“What do you know of him?”
“Not much, except that he’s young, and rather romantic-looking. He’s Italian.”
“Our young man with the key?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like Rachel to give any man the key to her rooms.”
Sebastian started to put the book in his pocket, but she reached out and touched his arm, stopping him.
“You didn’t look to see if she’d written down her Tuesday night appointment at St. Matthew of the Fields.”
Somewhere in the night, a tomcat howled, a deep throaty caterwaul of primal beastiality. Sebastian met the gaze of the woman beside him. “Did she?”
“Yes.”
There was a ribbon, stitched into the binding for use as a place marker. The book opened easily to its last entry.
At the top of the left-hand page, in a neat, well-schooled copperplate, Rachel York had written Tuesday, 29 January 1811. Sebastian scanned that day’s entries. She’d had a lesson with a dancing master at eleven that morning, another appointment near the theater at three. Then he saw the words St. Matthew’s and, beside that, a name.
St. Cyr.
Chapter 22
Later that night, alone in his small chamber at the Rose and Crown, Sebastian lit a candle, slipped the leather-bound book from his pocket, and settled down in the room’s single, straight-backed wooden chair to read.
All the pages containing Rachel’s entries prior to the afternoon of Friday, January 18, had been cut from the book. Sebastian stared at the date at the top of the first surviving page. It had been bitterly cold that week, he remembered, as he followed Rachel York’s fine copperplate through the mundane passage of the last days of her life, through the rehearsals and performances, the lessons and appointments with tradesmen. He leafed through each successive day, scanning the entries, not realizing until he reached the morning of Thursday the twenty-fourth that another page was missing, the page for Thursday evening—along with the following morning, which must have been on the overleaf of the same page.
Thoughtful, Sebastian thumbed back to the beginning. Was there a significance, he wondered, in the pattern of missing pages? What had happened in her life on those two successive Friday mornings or Thursday nights that Rachel hadn’t wanted anyone to know about?
Or that someone else hadn’t wanted Sebastian to know?
Sebastian returned to the afternoon of Friday, the twenty-fifth. After that, the pages continued without interruption up to Tuesday, the twenty-ninth, the evening Rachel died. The evening she had planned to meet someone named St. Cyr in St. Matthew of the Fields.
He went back again to that first page, paying more attention this time to each individual entry and to the notations Kat had made beside them, in pencil. There was little out of the ordinary: singing lessons and meetings with wardrobe; a reminder to pick up a pair of dancing slippers from the shoe repair man. Each appointment with each individual would need to be checked out, of course. But Sebastian found his attention focusing on two names.
The painter, Giorgio Donatelli, appeared frequently, each time with only the brief notation, Giorgio, and a time. But even more intriguing was an individual referred to simply as “F.” Kat had circled each appearance of the initial, along with a question mark.
Once more, Sebastian went back to the beginning and ran through the entries. Whoever “F” was, he—or she—appeared in the twelve days covered by the book’s surviving pages twice: on the evening of Wednesday, the twenty-third, and again on Monday, the twenty-eighth. In other words, Rachel had met with “F” the evening before the missing Thursday, and again the night before she died. A coincidence, Sebastian wondered, or not?
“F” could be a lover, of course—someone so familiar, so dear, that a simple initial sufficed. But he could also be a person whose involvement in her life Rachel had wanted to keep secret. Why? For the same reason she had kept her appointment book hidden?
Conspicuously absent from Rachel’s days was the name of the man who had been paying the rent on her rooms, Leo Pierrepont. If neither Pierrepont nor “F” had been Rachel York’s lover, then who had been? Sebastian found it difficult to believe that such a woman had not had one. Except, then, why didn’t the lover’s name appear in her book? Because she took his regular appearances for granted? Or because his visits were so erratic, she never knew when he might appear?
A wind had come up, rattling the shutters on the window and causing the flame of the candle to flare, then almost die in a sudden, cold draft. A distant burst of laughter sounded, muffled, from the common room below. Out in the hall, a board creaked.
Rising quietly from his chair, Sebastian snuffed the candle flame between thumb and forefinger, plunging the room into darkness. Slipping the small French pistol he’d bought that afternoon in the Strand from his greatcoat pocket, he flattened himself against the wall, then reached out to turn the handle and throw open the door to the hall.
“ ’Oly ’ell!” yelped Tom, looking up, wide-eyed, from where he sat cross-legged on the bare floorboards opposite Sebastian’s door. “Don’t shoot me.”
Sebastian lowered the pistol. “What the devil are you doing here?”
In the dim light cast by the oil lamp dangling from a chain at the top of the stairs, the boy’s face looked pinched, cold. “Fer such a sharp cove, you can be mortal wet, at times. It’s watchin’ yer back, I am.”
“My back,” said Sebastian.
Tom shrugged. “Well, yer door, at any rate.”
“Why?”
The boy’s jaw tightened. “You paid me fer a week, you did. I’m earning me wages.”
Sebastian dropped the flintlock into his coat pocket. “Let me get this straight. You don’t see a problem in lifting a stranger’s purse, but you refuse to be given wages you don’t feel you’ve earned?”
“That’s right,” said Tom, obviously glad to be understood. “I gots me pride.”
“And a highly original set of principles,” said Sebastian.
The boy simply looked up at him, puzzled.
A gust of wind slammed against the inn, whistling through the eaves and sending an icy drought sluicing down the corridor. Tom shivered, his thin arms creeping around his legs, hugging them closer to his body.
Sebastian sighed. “It’s a bit drafty out here for conversation. You’d best come in.”
For a brief instant, Tom hesitated. Then he scrambled to his feet.
“How did you find me, anyway?” Sebastian asked, closing the door against the cold as the boy scooted across the room to the fire.
One bony shoulder lifted in a shrug. “ ’Twern’t difficult. All’s I did was ask around ’til I cottoned on to a young mort named Kat.”
/> “You followed me here from Covent Garden?”
Tom stretched his chilblain-covered hands out to the glowing coals. A residual shiver racked his thin, ragged frame. “Aye.”
Sebastian studied the boy’s half-averted profile. He was bright and resourceful, and determined, it seemed, to earn his “wages.” Sebastian thought about all the names and appointments in that little red book, and an idea began to form in his mind.
Opening the door to the room’s ancient wardrobe, he rummaged around and came up with a quilt and an extra pillow. “Here,” he said, tossing the bedding toward the boy. “You can sleep by the fire. Tomorrow we’ll see about getting you a room over the stables.”
Tom caught first the pillow, then the quilt. “You mean yer keeping me on?”
“I’ve decided I can use an associate of your talents.”
A wide, toothy smile broke across the boy’s face. “You won’t be sorry, gov’nor. There won’t be any bung-nappers getting their dibs on yer cly or foggles whilst I’m around, I can tell you that. Nor any tripper-ups nor rampsmen thinkin’ yer easy pickin’s.”
“Get some sleep,” said Sebastian, turning away with a smile. “I have an early assignment for you tomorrow. I’d like you to discover the address of a certain Italian gentleman.”
“An Italian,” said Tom, in exactly the same tone of voice he might have used had Sebastian divulged a friendship with a cockroach.
“That’s right. An Italian.” Sebastian slipped the pistol from his pocket and placed it, along with his pocketbook, beneath his pillow. “A painter, to be exact. A man by the name of Giorgio Donatelli.”
The dreams are rarely the same. Sleep and time distort memory; events become disjointed. Fleetingly glimpsed faces and haunting images recombine with unrelated incidents to torture and taunt. In a mist-shrouded mountain village, simple stone walls rise up scorched and shattered. Reaching out, Sebastian turns over a woman’s flyblown body to find Kat’s lifeless blue eyes staring up at him. He cries out, and fresh red blood seeps from her gashed neck. Her lips move. “Aidez-moi,” she says: Help me. “Je suis mort.” I am dead. But the knife is in his hand and he is the one slashing, he is the one killing, and the bloodlust runs hot and sweet through his veins—
“Oie, gov’nor. You right there?”
Sebastian opened his eyes to find the boy, Tom, sitting up, his thin body silhouetted against the glowing embers of the fire.
“I’m fine. I was just . . . It was just a bad dream.” Sebastian rolled onto his back, one bent arm coming up to cover his eyes. “Go back to sleep.”
Chapter 23
The following morning, Sebastian sent the boy off with a full stomach and a suit of warm clothes that included a topcoat and new boots. He half expected the urchin to disappear back into the seething slums from which he’d come. But less than three hours later, Tom was back at the Rose and Crown with information that an Italian painter by the name of Giorgio Donatelli could be found at Number Thirty-two, Almonry Terrace, Westminster.
“What’s this, then?” said Tom, eyeing Sebastian as he wound a roll of padding around and around his torso.
Sebastian, who had made another visit that morning to Rosemary Lane and a variety of small shops, pinned the end of the padding and reached for his new, considerably larger shirt. “Today, I am Mr. Silas Beaumont, a plump, prosperous, but not particularly well-bred merchant from Hans Town who is interested in having his daughter’s portrait painted. While I am discussing the possibility of engaging Mr. Donatelli for this all-important task, you will poke around the area and discover what his neighbors have to say about our friend Giorgio.” He balanced a set of spectacles on the end of his nose, and affected an earnest, if somewhat vapid, look. “All in the most discreet fashion possible, of course.”
Tom sniffed. “Take me for a flat, do you?”
“Hardly.” By winding two cravats around his neck, Sebastian managed to make his neck look twice its normal size. His hair was as gray as an old man’s, and the judicious application of theatrical cosmetics had deepened the lines of age on his face. “While you’re at it, you might see what you can find out about a woman who used to visit Mr. Donatelli fairly regularly. A young, attractive woman with golden hair. Her name was Rachel York.”
Tom regarded him through narrowed, thoughtful eyes. “You mean, the mort what was cut up in St. Matthew’s Church a few nights back?”
Sebastian glanced over at the boy in surprise. “That’s right.”
“She the one the bolly dogs think you pushed off?”
“If by that impenetrable sentence you’re asking if she’s the woman the authorities have accused me of killing, then the answer is yes.” Sebastian shrugged into his new, very large coat.
“You think this Italian cove is the one what did for ’er?”
“I don’t know. He might be. Or he might be able to give me some idea as to where else to look.”
“That’s yer lay, is it? You figure if you cotton on to the one what did do for this Rachel, then the beaks’ll quit ’oundin’ you?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“So who else you thinkin’ mighta done for her?”
Sebastian, who was rapidly developing a healthy respect for Tom’s abilities and powers of perception, gave him a quick rundown of his conversations with Leo Pierrepont and Hugh Gordon.
“Huh,” said Tom, when Sebastian had finished. “Me, I’d put me money on one of them foreigners.”
“You might be right,” said Sebastian, reaching for his new walking stick. “But I think it best to keep an open mind.”
The neat, two-story brick building at Number Thirty-two, Almonry Terrace, didn’t fit Sebastian’s image of a struggling artist’s garret. The living quarters occupied the ground floor, while a small hand-lettered sign beside an external stair pointed upward to the studio. Donatelli was doing well indeed for a man who had been painting theatrical scenes just the year before.
Sebastian took the stairs with the ponderous effort one might expect of a fat, self-indulgent merchant. At the top of the steps, a door set with uncurtained small panes of glass showed him a large room lit with an unexpected flood of light by an abundance of large windows all, likewise, uncurtained. In the center of the room stood a young man, palette and brush in hand, his posture one of studied thought as he stared at a large canvas on an easel before him.
Sebastian knocked, then knocked again when the young man continued to stare at his canvas. After a third knock, Sebastian simply opened the door and walked into a blast of warm, turpentine- and oil-scented air.
“Hallooo there,” he said with hearty vulgarity, clapping his hands together in the manner of men coming in from the cold. “I did knock, but nobody answered.”
The young man swung around, a lock of dark hair falling across his brow as he looked up, distracted. “Yes?”
Romantic, Kat had called him. Sebastian had thought it an odd description at the time, but he understood it now. Tall and broad shouldered, the Italian was like a handsome shepherd, or a troubadour from a Venetian painting of two centuries before. Curly chestnut-colored hair framed a face with large, velvet brown eyes, a classical nose, and the full, bowed lips of a Botticelli angel.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Giorgio Donatelli,” said Sebastian. There were not one, but three braziers burning in the room, he realized. Donatelli obviously missed the warmth of Italy. Already Sebastian was beginning to regret the second neckcloth and the padding around his middle.
Reaching out, the painter rested his brush and palette on a nearby table. “I’m Donatelli.”
“Name is Beaumont.” Sebastian puffed out his exaggerated chest and struck a self-important pose. “Silas Beaumont. Of the Beaumont Transatlantic Shipping Company.” He fixed the artist with an expectant stare. “You’ve heard of us, of course.”
“I believe so,” said Donatelli slowly, obviously not willing to risk offending a potential patron with an affront to the man’s image of self-importance. “How may
I help you?”
The artist’s English was good, Sebastian noticed; very good, with just enough of an accent to increase that air of romance. He’d obviously been in England a very long time. “Well, it’s this way, you see. I was talking to the Lord Mayor the other day, about how I was wanting to find someone to paint my daughter Sukie’s portrait—she’s sixteen now, my Sukie—and, anyway, he suggested you.”
“You needn’t have put yourself to the trouble of coming here,” said Donatelli, casting an anxious glance around the studio, like a housewife flustered to have been caught behind on her cleaning.
Sebastian waved away the suggestion with one gloved hand. “I wanted to see some of your work—more than just the one or two pictures you might choose to trot out for my inspection. Never buy a horse without getting a good look at the stable, I always say.” He cast an inquiring eye about the room. “You do have more than this, I hope?”
Donatelli reached for a rag to wipe his hands. “Of course. Follow me.”
Still wiping his hands, he led the way through an open door to a large back room that was virtually empty except for the dozens and dozens of canvases, large and small, propped against the walls.
“Aha,” said Sebastian, rubbing his hands together. “This is more like what I was expecting.”
The painter was good, very good, Sebastian decided, making a slow tour of the room. Rather than the sentimental, flattering formality of a Lawrence or a Reynolds, here was vigor and iridescence of color. Sebastian’s steps slowed, his respect for the Italian’s talent increasing as he studied portraits and sketches, vast dramatic tableaus and small studies. Then he came to a stack of paintings, turned against the wall. Curious, he reached for the top canvas.