When Gods Die

by Harris, C. S.

  Sebastian leaned forward. “How did he kill the frog?”

  Aunt Henrietta drained her chocolate cup and set it aside. “Poison, I believe.”

  THE HOME SECRETARY, the Earl of Portland, was sitting in a coffeehouse just off the Mall, a steaming cup on the table before him, when Sebastian slid into the opposite seat.

  “I don’t recall inviting you to sit,” said Portland, regarding Sebastian through narrowed eyes.

  “You didn’t,” said Sebastian cheerfully.

  The air filled with the steady beat of a drum and the tramp of feet as a troop of soldiers marched past. Fresh cannon fodder, thought Sebastian, on their way to Portsmouth and the war on the other side of the Channel. No one in the coffee shop even looked up.

  Portland leaned back in his seat, a faint smile touching his lips. “My wife tells me she met you in Lady Quinlan’s drawing room yesterday.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were brother-in-law to the dead lady’s lover.”

  “You mean Varden?” Portland raised his cup to his lips and took a thoughtful sip. “I know there was an attachment of long standing between them, but I wouldn’t care to hazard on its present nature.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  Portland shrugged. “A likable enough lad, I suppose, if a bit too hotheaded and impulsive for my taste. But then he’s half-French, so I suppose that’s to be expected.”

  “What can you tell me about his politics?”

  Portland gave a sharp laugh and took another sip. “The pup is twenty-one years old. He’s interested in wine, women, and song. Not the composition of the Prince’s cabinet.”

  “How about dynastic disputes? Might they interest him?”

  Portland lowered his cup, his face suddenly drawn and serious. “What are you talking about?”

  Sebastian let the question slide past him. “The lady who asked you to convey the note to the Prince, what can you tell me about her?”

  Portland glanced down at his cup, his sandy red eyebrows drawing together in a thoughtful frown. “She was young, I would say. At least that’s the impression I had. If I could see the color of her hair, I don’t recall it.”

  “Definitely a lady?”

  “I would have said so, yes.” He hesitated. “I think she was tall, but I can’t be certain. Perhaps I simply imagined that afterward, when I assumed it was Lady Anglessey who had handed me the billet-doux.”

  Sebastian leaned back in his seat, his gaze on the other man’s face. It struck him as too much of a coincidence that the note used to lure the Prince to the Yellow Cabinet had been given to the Home Secretary, rather than to one of the sycophants with which the Prince typically surrounded himself. Then again, it was always possible that the woman in green had singled out Portland deliberately.

  Aloud, Sebastian said, “Do you remember the dagger that was in Lady Anglessey’s back?”

  Portland turned his head to stare out the shop’s bay window to the street beyond, empty now in the bright sun. His throat worked as if he had to fight to swallow, and his voice, when he spoke, was strained. “It’s not something I’m likely to forget, now, is it? The way it stuck out of her like a—”

  “Had you ever seen it before?”

  “The dagger?” He looked around again, his eyes opening wide as if in surprise. “Of course. It’s part of the collection of Stuart memorabilia that was in the possession of Henry Stuart when he died. I believe it belonged to his grandfather, James the Second.”

  The bell on the shop’s door jangled as two soldiers came in, bringing with them the smell of morning air and sun-warmed brick and a whiff of fresh manure. Sebastian kept his gaze on the Scotsman’s freckled face. “What happened to it?”

  “You mean after Henry’s death? Don’t you know? He willed the entire collection to the Prince of Wales—the Regent.”

  Chapter 38

  Kat spent a restless night. Her dreams were troubled by marching rows of dead soldiers and a bloodstained guillotine that creaked ominously in the wind.

  Rising early, she went to stand at the window overlooking the street below. In the clear dawn light she could see the milkmaids making their rounds, the buckets of fresh milk dangling from the yokes across their shoulders.

  She had no regrets for the things she had done. The tyranny the French soldiers had brought to the continent of Europe was nothing compared to the horrors Ireland had suffered under the English for hundreds of years now. She would still do whatever she could to hasten the day of Ireland’s liberation. But she could not, in all honesty, accept Sebastian’s love and continue to give aid to the enemy he had risked his life to fight.

  She had been torn for a while, but by now she had decided to keep tomorrow’s rendezvous in the Chelsea Physic Gardens with Napoléon’s new spymaster. She intended to tell him the French could no longer rely upon her as a source of information. Whether they would allow her to withdraw her services so easily remained to be seen.

  Too nervous to go back to sleep, she decided to get an early start in her search for the maker of Guinevere Anglessey’s death shroud. But in the end, the task was even easier then she expected. Setting out that morning shortly after breakfast, Kat found she had to visit only three fashionable modistes before hitting upon the establishment responsible for the creation of the green satin gown.

  “Mais oui, I remember it quite well, thees one,” said Madame de Blois, proprietor of an expensive little shop on Bond Street. “Lady Addison Peebles ordered it from me just thees last season.”

  Kat had to bite her lip to keep from saying, Are you certain? The young lady in question was a beautiful but excessively dim-witted heiress who had married Lord Addison Peebles, youngest son of the Duke of Farnham, some two years before. Lord Addison was every bit as vacuous as his bride, to the extent that some members of the ton had taken to calling the couple Lord and Lady Addled and Feeble. It was difficult to imagine either of them having anything to do with what had happened to Guinevere Anglessey.

  “Lovely, is it not?” Madame de Blois was saying. “Although hardly the shade of green for a young woman with Lady Addison’s coloring, hmm? I tried to discourage, but she would hear none of it.” The modiste shook her head and made a little tsking sound. “For you, I think, we shall do something in sapphire, yes? And a more daring décolleté, of course.”

  Kat gave the woman a wide smile. “Of course.”

  SEBASTIAN HAD NEVER UNDERSTOOD the Prince Regent’s fascination with the Stuarts.

  He was a prince who longed to be popular, who was genuinely troubled by the boos and hisses that greeted him everywhere. Yet despite mounting public fury over his never-ending debts and monstrous extravagance, he made no effort to reform his indulgent ways. While women and children starved in the streets, the Prince gave lavish banquets at which privileged guests had their choice of more than a hundred different hot dishes. England’s soldiers on the Continent shivered in their ragged uniforms, but the Regent continued to order breeches and waistcoats by the score in sizes so small he would never be able to wear them. The poor of England might be groaning under an ever-increasing, onerous weight of taxes, but that didn’t stop the Prince from petitioning Parliament to pay his gambling debts.

  Some believed the Prince was driven by an evil genius, but Sebastian thought the truth was probably far less flattering. Prinny longed to be loved, but he wanted to be loved as he was, without the need to reform the odious ways that made him hated. Given a choice between popularity and continuing his hedonistic, self-obsessed lifestyle, George the hedonist beat out George the prince every time.

  Yet with each passing year, his love affair with the Stuarts seemed only to grow. It was as if he both envied and identified with the Stuarts. Once so despised that they had lost the throne of England forever, the Stuarts had nevertheless managed to acquire a patina of romance. Figures of pathos and tragedy, they had become something Prinny himself would never be: the stuff of legends.

  But surely the fate of these doomed pr
inces hung over him. Sebastian suspected that mixed in with the fascination and the envy there was also a powerful element of fear: the haunting realization that what had happened to the Stuarts might someday happen to George, as well.

  The Prince Regent kept his growing collection of Stuart papers and memorabilia housed in a special room at Carlton House, a room he was only too happy to show off to anyone who happened to ask. Thus it was that Sebastian found himself, later that afternoon, in a room hung in red silk trimmed with gold tassels and carpeted with a rug woven in the Stuart plaid.

  “This was carried by Charles the First on his way to the battle of Naseby,” said the Prince, reverently lifting a heavy old-fashioned sword from one of the glass cases that lined the walls. The cases were unlocked, Sebastian noticed; anyone with access to the room could have removed any item at will.

  “And this,” said the Prince, his face glowing with pleasure and pride as he held up a faded collar of the Garter, “was worn by James the Second.” His beefy, clumsy fingers trembled as he smoothed the worn material, and for a moment it seemed as if he were lost in some private reverie. Then he roused himself and, padding across the room on his fat legs, he began to talk about the documents he was collecting for a biography of James II he intended to commission.

  Sebastian trailed behind him, pausing to admire a display of seventeenth-century jewelry before coming to a halt in front of a case lined with red velvet. There, nestled in a molded depression obviously created especially for it, lay the jeweled Highland dagger Sebastian had last seen embedded in Guinevere Anglessey’s back.

  “Ah, I see you’re admiring the dirk,” said the Prince, coming to stand beside him. “It’s a lovely piece, isn’t it? We know it was carried by James the Second, but some suggest it is much older, that it may even have belonged to his great-grandmother Mary, Queen of Scots.”

  His gaze lifting from the dagger to the man who owned it, Sebastian studied the Prince’s half-averted face. His features were animated but untroubled, his cheeks ruddy, his almost feminine mouth turned up in a half smile.

  That night in the Yellow Cabinet at the Pavilion, the Prince had held the limp body of Guinevere Anglessey in his arms. He must have seen the weapon thrust into her back, must surely have known it as one from his own prized collection. Yet there was no indication now that he remembered the incident at all.

  He had a talent, Sebastian had heard, for simply putting from his mind all memory of things he found unpleasant. The dirk had been returned to its proper place in his collection; as far as the Regent was concerned, that was all that really mattered.

  The Prince had moved on now, to a shelf of calf-bound books that had once belonged to Charles II. Sebastian watched him, watched the animation in that plump, self-satisfied face. And he couldn’t help but wonder if the Prince remembered the events of that night in the Yellow Cabinet at all.

  The room was stiflingly hot, as were the rooms in all of the Prince’s apartments. But at that moment Sebastian felt a chill. Because a man capable of such self-deception, such self-absorbed focus, must surely be capable of almost anything.

  Chapter 39

  “It’s a strange ability some have,” said Paul Gibson when Sebastian met him later that day for a pint of ale at a pub not far from the Tower. “It’s as if they somehow revise their memories of unpleasant or uncomplimentary incidents until they come up with something more self-flattering, or at least more palatable. In a sense you could say they aren’t exactly being untruthful when they lie, because they honestly believe their own twisted version of an event. Memories of particularly horrifying episodes can simply be wiped away completely.”

  Sebastian leaned his shoulders back against the old wooden partition, one hand cradled around his drink where it rested on the table’s worn surface. “It’s a good thing the Prince was in Brighton that day. Otherwise I’d be inclined to wonder if he hadn’t simply wiped away the unpleasant memory of murdering Lady Anglessey.”

  “At least the discovery of the dagger’s origins tells you the murderer must have been someone close to the Prince.”

  “Not necessarily. Those cases aren’t kept locked. Hundreds of people could have had access to that room.”

  “Perhaps. But I can’t see someone like Bevan Ellsworth prowling around Carlton House.”

  “No. But his good friend Fabian Fitzfrederick could certainly have taken it.”

  Gibson frowned. “Is he good friends with Fabian Fitzfrederick?”

  “It would appear so.”

  “But…why would a son of the Duke of York want to bring down the Hanovers?”

  Sebastian leaned forward. “Prinny has created a lot of discontent. Perhaps there are two different forces at work here—one aimed at bringing down the Hanovers, and another simply interested in replacing the Regent with his brother, York.”

  Gibson paused with his pint raised halfway to his lips. “Princess Charlotte stands next in line before York.”

  “Yes. But Princess Charlotte’s own father regularly calls her mother a whore. Charlotte might well be put aside. It’s happened before.”

  Gibson took a long, thoughtful swallow of his ale. “Have you considered the possibility that the person who killed Guinevere Anglessey might not be the same person or persons as set up that nasty little charade in the Pavilion?”

  “Yes.” Sebastian shifted his weight to thrust his legs out straight. “I keep thinking that if I could just understand why she went to the Norfolk Arms in Smithfield, then it would all begin to make sense.”

  “It does seem an unlikely place for a lover’s assignation,” said Gibson.

  Sebastian shook his head. “I don’t think it was a lover’s assignation.”

  The tramp of marching feet filled the air as part of the garrison from the Tower paraded past. His face solemn, Gibson turned his head to watch the men filling the street, the sun gleaming on their musket barrels. “I’ve been hearing a lot of grumbling about this fete the Prince has set for Thursday. Not just about the cost—which I gather is considerable. But it is rather unseemly, is it not, for a prince to celebrate his accession to the Regency when that elevation was necessitated by his father’s madness? I hear his mother and sisters are refusing to go.”

  Sebastian, too, watched the soldiers. They looked so young, some little more than boys. “I doubt they’ll be missed. It’s been announced that no woman lower in rank than an Earl’s daughter will be allowed to attend, which has naturally set every excluded but ambitious lady in London scrambling to be made an exception. They’ll never keep the guest list down to two thousand.”

  “When does the Prince return to Brighton?”

  “The day after the fete.” Sebastian stared thoughtfully at the passing ranks of red-coated soldiers. “Think about this: if you were to organize a coup, when would you plan to stage it?”

  Gibson’s gaze met Sebastian’s. “For a time when the Prince was out of London.”

  “Exactly,” said Sebastian, and drained his ale.

  Chapter 40

  “Lady Addison Peebles?” said Devlin, staring at Kat. They were in the drawing room of her house on Harwich Street. He could hear the distant shouts of children playing a counting game on the footpath outside, their laughter mingling with the birds’ evening song as the shadows lengthened. “What the devil could Lady Addled and Feeble possibly have to do with any of this?”

  Kat gave a soft laugh. “Nothing. It seems the modiste tried to talk her out of this particular shade of green satin, but she was so taken with it that in the end the woman could only let her have her way. I understand she was excessively pleased with it—until her mama-in-law, the Duchess, told her it made her look like a sick frog.”

  Devlin walked over to pour out two glasses of wine. “So what did she do?”

  “She gave the gown to her abigail, who sold it to a secondhand clothes dealer. The woman claims she can’t remember which one, probably because she actually sold it to her regular fence out of force of habit.”r />
  Devlin looked up, one eyebrow raised in incredulity. “The gown came from a secondhand dealer?”

  Kat came to lift her glass from his outstretched hand. “Evidently.”

  He took a long, thoughtful sip of his own wine. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. Someone kills Guinevere Anglessey by poisoning her with cyanide. The death is violent. So violent that the murderer finds it necessary to bathe the body and dress it in a fresh gown—a gown he buys from a secondhand dealer in someplace like Rosemary Lane. Only, our killer is so unfamiliar with his victim that he buys the wrong size so that it won’t close properly around her. Nor does he bother to assemble the underclothing, shoes, or stockings a lady would normally have been wearing. He loads her body in a—what? A cart or a carriage, we’ve no way of knowing which—and hauls her down to Brighton, where he somehow manages to sneak her body into the Pavilion. He sends his accomplice—wearing a similar green gown and a veil—into the Prince’s music room, where she hands a note to the Home Secretary, Lord Portland, and disappears. A note which for unspecified reasons no one wants me to see. Oh yes, and did I mention that after he has carefully arranged Guinevere’s body in the Yellow Cabinet, our killer stabs her with a Highland dirk which once belonged to James the Second, but now forms part of a collection owned by the Prince Regent himself that is normally kept in London?”

  “Well, I’m glad you’ve got it all figured out.”

  He went to stand at the windows overlooking the street below. The children had gone. “All except for the who and the why part.”