by C. S. Harris
“So he killed her in order to rape her?” Sebastian said. And he thought, What if Kat was right? What if Rachel York was killed by someone who didn’t even know her? What if her death had nothing at all to do with who she was, with the men who had moved through her life, or even with the mysterious rendezvous she had scheduled that night with the Earl of Hendon? How could Sebastian hope to find her killer, then?
“Perhaps,” said Paul Gibson. “Then again, some men are sexually stimulated by the act of killing.” His soft gray eyes grew troubled with the shadow of old, ugly memories, his voice dropping to a pained, torn whisper. “As we both know.”
Sebastian nodded, not meeting his gaze. It was something they’d both seen too many times during the war, the brutal lust of soldiers, still bloody from battle and turned loose on the hapless women and children of a conquered city, or a farm that simply happened to have the misfortune to lie in the army’s path. There was something about the act of killing that could bring out everything primitive and not quite human within a man. Or was that kind of thinking a misconception, Sebastian wondered, born of human arrogance? Because this particular brand of selfishly cruel destructiveness was all too peculiarly human. Many beasts in the wild killed for food, for survival, but there were none who killed for the sadistic, sexual pleasure of it.
“So he could have killed her for some other reason entirely, and found the whole experience so exciting that he felt compelled to ease his lust on her dead body.”
The doctor nodded. “The inner abrasions are slight. He must have already been very excited when he entered her.” He hesitated, then said, “There is one other thing, which may or may not be pertinent. Did you notice the scars on her wrists?”
Sebastian leaned forward to study the blurred, faded outline of old scars encircling each of her wrists like bracelets. Sebastian had scars like that himself, from his days in Portugal: a legacy of twelve painful, bloody hours spent twisting his wrists against the tight bite of a binding rope.
“And look at this.” Reaching beneath one shoulder, Gibson rolled the body so that Sebastian could see the faint lines of white scars crisscrossing her slim, beautiful back. “Someone took a whip to her.”
“How long ago, would you say?”
“I’m not sure.” Gibson eased the body back down. “At least several years ago, I’d say.” He was moving around the room now, assembling instruments on a tray. “I might have more to tell you in a day or two, when I’ve had a chance to do the actual autopsy.”
Sebastian nodded, his gaze caught by the still, beautiful features of the woman before him. Her skin had been pale, even in life; now in the cold morning light she looked nearly blue, her full lips a surprisingly dark purple. “I want to rebury her when you’re finished,” he said.
Gibson came to stand beside him. He had stopped clattering his surgical tools. “All right.”
Sebastian kept his gaze on all that was left of Rachel York. Less than a week ago, she had been nothing to him—a name on a playbill, a pretty face only. Even after he’d been accused of her killing, his thoughts had all been for his own survival, his desire to find her killer driven by his own needs, not hers.
But at some point in the last few days, he realized, that had changed. Rachel York had been less than nineteen years old when she died; a young woman, alone and defenseless, battling to survive in a society that used and discarded its weak and unfortunate as if they were somehow less than human. And yet she had stubbornly refused to allow herself to become a victim. She had struggled against the odds, fought back, brave and determined . . . until someone, some man, had cornered her in the Lady Chapel of an ancient, deserted church and done this to her.
The world was full of ugliness, Sebastian knew that; ugliness, and ugly people. But you couldn’t let them win, those men who took what they wanted with never a thought or care for the ones who suffered and died as a result. You could never stop fighting them, never let them think that what they did was right or somehow justified. Never let them triumph unchallenged.
“You’ll have justice,” he whispered, although the woman before him was long past hearing, and he’d lost his belief in an all-knowing, benevolently attentive God long ago, on some battlefield in central Spain. “Whoever did this to you won’t get away with it. I swear it.”
He was suddenly aware of Paul Gibson standing beside him, a strange expression quirking up one corner of his lips. “And here I thought you’d given up believing in either justice or righteous causes.”
“I have,” said Sebastian, turning toward the door.
But his friend only smiled.
Chapter 30
The snow began before midday.
Sebastian walked through crooked medieval streets. Ice filmed over the water standing in the open gutters. A ragged women hurried past him, her shawl-wrapped shoulders hunched against the weather, her breath white in the cold, dank air. He walked until the smell of the river was thick in his nostrils and seagulls cried overhead. Beneath his feet the cobblestones turned slippery with the snow that fell in great wet flakes from out of a yellow-white sky.
Cutting between a boarded-up warehouse and a high stone wall, he climbed down a short flight of ancient steps to where the Thames stretched out before him, thick and brown and wide, the wind strong enough now to kick up little whitecaps and fill the air with the scent of the distant sea. Even with the cold and the snow, the river teemed with boats, lighters and culls, and barges and hoys heading downriver to Gravesend and the open sea beyond. It was the lifeblood of the city, this river, and yet how often had he gone through the movements of his days within scant blocks of it and remained essentially oblivious to its existence for weeks on end.
He’d known it was there, of course, yet because it intruded so little on his life, it was easy to ignore, like the distant wailing of hungry children in the night, or the muffled rumble of the parish carts making their early morning rounds, collecting the endless supply of white-wrapped bundles that fed the poor holes of St. Stephen’s and St. Andrew’s, St. Pancreas and the Spitalfields Churchyard.
Easy to ignore, too, was the existence of those dark, unassuming houses in Field Lane and Covent Garden, where for a few coins a man could buy the right to unlock a room and do whatever he liked to the shivering, frightened child or sobbing woman he would find there; houses where whips cracked and bodies twisted in agony, where there was no hope, no God, only endurance and the ultimate deliverance of death. Whatever perversion a man lusted after, he could buy in this city, for a price.
The snow was falling harder now, and faster. Sebastian looked up, letting the small white pellets sting the cold skin of his face. What was becoming a recurrent fear swelled within him, the fear that he was never going to clear himself of this terrible crime of which he’d been accused. And what then? he wondered. What if Rachel York’s killing had been nothing more than a random act of violence? What if he could never find the man who had slashed her throat and sated his lust upon her dead, bleeding body? What then of his promise to see justice done, for her and for himself?
He’d told himself her killer must have been someone close to her, someone who knew she would be waiting alone and vulnerable in that church so late at night. And yet Sebastian realized now he’d been wrong, that her killer could simply have seen her in the streets and followed her, watched as she lit the holy candles on the altar and then come at her out of the darkness, a lethal and intimate stranger.
Sebastian rubbed a hand across his eyes, aching now from lack of sleep. After he’d left his father’s house in Grosvenor Square, he’d spent what was left of the night walking the slowly lightening alleys and byways of the city. He kept turning what his father had told him over and over again in his mind, trying to figure out what Rachel York could have been selling that his father would be so desperate to buy that he agreed to meet her in a deserted church in the dark of the night.
He’d sworn it wasn’t blackmail, but Sebastian had to acknowledge that that could be mere quibbling,
a question of semantics only. Whatever it was, Hendon wanted it badly enough that he’d forced himself to overcome his horror and search Rachel York’s bloody, mutilated body in hopes of finding it.
Yet he hadn’t found it. Which could mean either that her killer now had it, or that Rachel York had never brought it to St. Matthew’s in the first place.
Then again, Sebastian couldn’t discount the possibility that his father was lying, that Hendon had found it and taken it, after all.
An unexpected chill shook him. Sebastian turned up his collar against the cold. Hendon’s refusal to talk baffled him. After all these hours of walking the streets, of turning over one possibility after another in his mind, Sebastian was still no closer to understanding. It was only now, as he watched the snowflakes falling thick and fast from a lowering sky, that he was able to admit to himself that beneath the confusion and rage coursing through him every time he thought about his interview with his father, what he felt most powerfully was a deep and abiding sense of hurt. For try as he might, he found it impossible to imagine a secret so important that a father would place its preservation above the life and freedom of his only surviving son.
That afternoon, Sebastian paid an interesting visit to the small goldsmith’s shop across the street from Covent Garden Theater. He was just turning away when he spotted Tom, whittling on a block of wood with a small pocketknife as he waited in the protective lee of the theater’s wide porch.
“What are you doing here?” said Sebastian, walking up to him.
“Waitin’ for Miss Kat. She knows someone she reckons might be able to put me onto this Mary Grant’s whereabouts, but she figures it’d be better if’n she were to introduce me to the cove ’erself.”
“Ah,” said Sebastian, who knew something of the kind of “friends” Kat had from her early days in London. Leaning forward, he peered at the quadruped taking shape beneath the boy’s nimble fingers. “What is it?”
“A ’orse,” said the boy, proudly holding it aloft.
“Like horses, do you?”
Tom nodded. “I always thought it’d be just grand to be one o’ them tigers, sittin’ up behind some sportin’ gentleman in ’is curricle, watchin’ ’im tool a pair of prime ’igh steppers.”
Sebastian personally had little use for the current vogue for employing children as grooms. But as he looked down into the boy’s shining eyes, he found himself saying, “Once I fight my way clear of this wretched mess I’m in, I could take you on as a tiger. If you’re interested.”
Tom’s eyes narrowed. His face was wary and guarded against disappointment, but his breathing had quickened, his jaw going slack with awe. “You got a curricle?”
Sebastian laughed and stepped out into the street. “That I do.”
“Got a tiger?”
“Not yet.”
The boy nodded, struggling to contain a grin. “Where you off to, then?”
Sebastian turned up his collar against the snow. “To have another talk with Hamlet.”
Chapter 31
Darkness came early that day, settling over the city with a heavy fall of snow.
Across the street from the lodging house where Hugh Gordon had rooms, Sebastian stomped his numb feet and watched the stocky, gray-haired woman who came in daily to “do” for the actor close the street door behind her and set off toward the Strand, the snow blanketing her head and shoulders with white as she hurried through the gathering gloom.
Sebastian waited while a coal cart trundled by, followed by a brewer’s wagon. Then he crossed the street, with each step easing himself into the persona of Cousin Simon Taylor from Worcestershire. By the time he stood outside Gordon’s door, his shoulders had slumped and he was twisting his hat anxiously in his hands as he waited for Gordon to answer his knock.
“Oh, it’s you, is it?” said the actor, his lips pressing together in annoyance as he cast a distracted glance toward the ornate ormolu clock on his sitting room mantel. He kept the door open no more than a foot. “I don’t have a great deal of time at the moment—”
“It won’t take long,” said Sebastian, smiling hopefully.
Gordon hesitated, then pushed his breath out in a sigh and opened the door wider. “Very well. What is it?”
“I was wondering if perhaps you could clear up something for me,” said Sebastian, scooting through the door. “The thing is, you see, I was speaking with the very kind gentleman who owns the jewelry store across the street from Covent Garden Theater—you know the place, don’t you? The one with the new gaslights? Well, Mr. Touro was telling me—that’s the proprietor’s name, Mr. Jacob Touro?—he was telling me how Rachel was in his shop on the very afternoon she died. But what I find confusing, you see, is that while you told me that you hadn’t seen Rachel for the better part of six months, Mr. Touro says that you came in his shop that same afternoon and confronted Rachel.” Sebastian fixed the actor with an anxious gaze. “Actually, accosted is the word he used.”
Hugh Gordon returned Sebastian’s stare with a bland look. “Obviously, the man is mistaken.”
“Well, one might think so. Except, he’s a particular fan of yours, is Mr. Touro,” Sebastian continued, smiling amicably as he seated himself—without invitation—on a high-backed settee covered in burgundy brocade. “He says he hasn’t missed a one of your performances in the past five years. And I gather that Cousin Rachel was one of his best customers, if you know what I mean? So, of course, when he read the next day about what had happened to Rachel, he remembered the incident. Although I must assure you that he has no intention of telling the authorities about the argument, or the way you seized Rachel’s arm and threatened to kill her.”
Gordon stood in the middle of his ornate, burgundy, and lace-draped sitting room, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully, as if he were beginning to reassess his attitude toward Rachel’s Cousin Simon. “I never did any such thing.”
“You’re right: I exaggerate. According to Mr. Touro, the precise phrase you used was ‘Beat you within an inch of your life.’ ”
The actor was silent for a moment, as if considering whether to continue denying the meeting or to provide Sebastian with some abbreviated, distorted version of the truth. Abbreviated distortion won.
“Rachel owed me money,” he said, swinging away to pour himself a brandy from an ornate tray of heavy gold-rimmed glasses that looked as if it might have been part of the stage props for a production of the Arabian Nights. “She has owed it to me ever since she first started at the theater. She wasn’t making much in those days, so I provided her with everything she needed in the way of dresses and such. She always knew it was no gift.”
“I’m sure you were more than generous with her,” said Sebastian, his smile hard.
Gordon’s brows drew together in an exaggerated frown. Everything about the man was exaggerated, Sebastian decided, from the opulent, plush burgundy and gold trappings of his sitting room to his stentorian speech and theatrical gestures. One of the hazards, one might suppose, of always playing to a large, distant audience. “She used those dresses to sink her avaricious little talons into another man and leave me,” said the actor, his brandy-clutching hand waving expansively through the air. “What would you expect me to do? Just forget it?”
“You seem to have forgotten it for the better part of two years.”
Gordon shrugged. “A man has expenses.”
Sebastian studied the actor’s gaunt cheeks and shadowed, preoccupied eyes. It was a look one saw often these days in the gaming hells and clubs of London—the haunted look of a man who was badly dipped. “What’s your poison? Faro?”
A wry smile curved the actor’s full lips. “Actually, I’ve chosen hazard as my own particular road to perdition.”
Sebastian regarded the other man thoughtfully. Debt had a way of making people desperate. And a desperate man could be a dangerous man. “There are those who say you’ve a ready fist,” said Sebastian, “when it comes to women.”
Gordon drained his dr
ink with one practiced flick of the wrist, then pointed a finger at Sebastian over the rim of the empty glass. “Women like a strong man, a man who knows how to keep them in their place. Don’t ever let anyone tell you different.”
Sebastian nodded, as if in agreement. “I can see how a man with a heavy hand might get carried away, sometimes. Maybe set out to teach a woman a lesson and end up going too far.”
Gordon slammed the empty glass down on a nearby table, his nostrils flaring wide with a quickly indrawn breath. “What are you suggesting? That I killed Rachel? What kind of a bloody fool do you take me for? Rachel owed me money. When I saw her on Tuesday afternoon, she swore she’d have it to me by Wednesday noon.” He ran one hand through his dark hair, his fingers splaying wide, gripping, his voice dropping suddenly to almost a whisper. “You can’t get money out of a dead woman.”
Sebastian was remembering what Kat had told him, about the young man who’d been seen letting himself into Rachel’s rooms early Wednesday morning. Hugh Gordon was in his mid-thirties, but a woman in her eighties would surely describe him as young. “I’m not so sure about that,” said Sebastian. “If you know a woman has money and she’s refusing to pay what she owes, you can always go to her rooms and collect the debt yourself. If she’s dead.”
Gordon let his hand fall. “Good God. Now I’m a thief, as well as a murderer?”
Sebastian kept his gaze on the other man’s face. “Where were you Tuesday night?”
“I was here. At home. Studying my lines.”
“Alone?”
“I work best alone.” He glanced again at the ormolu clock on the ornate mantel. “Look, I have a performance that starts at seven. We just opened last night and I need to—”
“Relax.” Sebastian gave the man a slow, mean smile. “You’ve plenty of time.”
Gordon met Sebastian’s steady gaze. “You’re not Rachel’s cousin, are you?” His brows twitched together. “What are you? Some sort of Bow Street Runner?”