by C. S. Harris
For nine years. Nine years . . .
“Bloody hell,” said Sebastian. He was seeing a blond, green-eyed boy sailing two painted wooden boats across the water, while his sister watched him with a mother’s intense love and pride. “It’s Noël Durant, isn’t it? The boy isn’t Lady Peter’s ‘brother’; he’s her son. By Damion Pelletan.”
She turned to stare at him, her face slack with astonishment. “You knew?”
He shook his head. “No. I’d assumed Pelletan came to London because he’d somehow learned of Lord Peter’s treatment of his wife. But he came because of the boy, didn’t he? How did he ever happen to learn the truth?”
“From an old priest whose deathbed he attended in Paris. The priest was delirious. At first Damion thought he was only rambling nonsense. Except the more he heard, the more the old man’s words came to make sense.”
“Julia Durant knew she was with child before she left Paris?”
“She did, yes.”
“Then why the hell didn’t she tell the man she claimed to love?”
“Because she was sixteen. Because she was afraid. Because her father had assured her the family’s flight from France would be temporary. Only, it wasn’t.”
“And so she found herself a refugee in London,” Sebastian said softly. “Unwed, and growing increasingly heavy with child. The poor girl.”
Alexandrie Sauvage nodded. “Once the general and his wife realized what was happening, they kept Julia out of sight. They knew that if the truth ever became known, she would be hopelessly ruined. Madame Durant was young enough to pretend to be with child herself. I’m told she even went so far as to strap a pillow to her belly when she appeared in public. In due time, the child was born and presented as General Durant’s son.”
“He had no other children?”
“Two older sons. Both died fighting Napoléon.”
Sebastian had always wondered why the aging French general married his only daughter to a man like Lord Peter Radcliff. Yes, Radcliff was a duke’s son, handsome and brilliantly connected. But a general with Durant’s experience with men must surely have seen his son-in-law for the vain, self-absorbed dissolute he was.
Now it all made sense.
Sebastian said, “Does Radcliff know?”
“About Noël, you mean? I’m not certain.”
“Yet you knew.”
“Julia told me before she left Paris. She told me in confidence, and I swore I’d never tell anyone.”
“Did Pelletan know Radcliff beats her?”
“Before he came? No. But it didn’t take him long to figure it out. That’s when he tried to convince her to go back to Paris with him—for her sake, as well as for the boy’s.”
“How did he discover you’d been aware of the child all along?”
“Something Julia said to him. He was furious. I tried to make him understand that it was a secret told to me in confidence. How could I have betrayed it? But he wouldn’t listen.”
“Yet he went with you to St. Katharine’s, to see the sick child?”
“Damion was a physician. He would never put his own personal emotions ahead of the well-being of a patient. He went with me. But he was in a passion. We were still arguing about it after we left Hangman’s Court.”
Sebastian studied her tightly held features. It explained why, if someone were following them, they hadn’t heard the footsteps until it was too late. But while it might, believably, give Lord Peter Radcliff a stronger reason to kill his wife’s former lover, it did nothing to explain the deaths of either Karmele or Colonel Foucher.
He said, “Do you think Lady Peter was still in love with Damion?”
“I think she was, yes.”
“Yet she was reluctant to return with him to Paris?”
“She said she’d made a commitment to Lord Peter—a commitment she couldn’t go back on.”
“Despite the fact he beat her?”
“I’ve known women to make excuses for men who beat them so badly they died.”
“You mean like Abel Bullock’s wife?”
“Yes.”
Sebastian studied her calm, proud face. She was the kind of woman who had long ago turned her back on society’s expectations for one of her sex. She had studied medicine at an Italian university and joined her physician-husband in following Napoléon’s Grand Army. And when he died, she’d taken a lieutenant as her lover and continued ministering to the medical needs of the soldiers. How she had then ended up with an English captain as her husband, Sebastian could only guess. But the realization that Gibson was falling daily more and more under her spell twisted at Sebastian’s guts and made him want to shake some sense into his friend.
He said, “Why are you here? I mean here, at Gibson’s.”
He expected her to deliberately misunderstand his question, to make excuses and claim the need for a place of refuge. Instead, she said, “Someone needs to help him.”
“Gibson? He’s doing just fine. Or at least, he was.” Before you came into his life.
“If you mean he was doing a fine job of killing himself, you are right. Do you have any idea what long-term use of opium does to the human body? Especially at the levels at which he has been taking it.”
“He doesn’t go overboard that often.”
“How do you know?”
Sebastian opened his mouth, then closed it. The truth was, he’d seen little of Gibson these past four months or more.
He said, “The man is in pain. How do you expect him to live with that?”
“I can help him with the pain, if he will only let me.”
“The way you helped the children and nuns of Santa Iria?”
Her head jerked back as if he’d slapped her. “I didn’t know . . .”
“Yes, you did. You knew. And you let it happen.”
Her voice was a harsh tear. “If the blood of those children is on my hands, it’s on yours too.”
“Yes. The difference between you and me is that I’ve never denied it.”
She stared back at him, and the death-haunted memories of that long-ago Portuguese spring were like a hushed presence in the room with them.
He said, “Paul Gibson is my friend. I won’t let you destroy him.”
“Destroy him?” She gave a ringing laugh. “What in God’s name do you think I’m going to do to him? Pluck out his heart and his soul?”
“How many husbands and lovers have you had? How many are still alive?”
She didn’t answer, but the flesh of her face pulled taut across the bones and her eyes darkened with the power of some emotion he couldn’t quite define.
He settled his hat on his head and turned toward the door.
He was about to close it behind him when she took a quick step forward, one hand fisted in her grimy apron, the other coming up to thrust back the lock of vibrant hair that had tumbled onto her forehead. “Four. I’ve had four. Two lovers, two husbands. And you are right; all are dead. And all but the last were killed by Englishmen.” She practically spat the last word at him.
“What happened to the last one?” he asked. “What happened to Captain Miles Sauvage?”
But she simply wrenched the door from his grip and slammed it in his face.
Chapter 40
Gibson was leaning against the slab in the center of the small stone outbuilding at the base of the yard, his arms smeared with gore up to the elbows, when Sebastian came to stand in the entrance.
What was left of Colonel André Foucher lay faceup on the slab, his body naked and eviscerated, his ruined eyes hideous in the glare of the lantern Gibson had lit against the morning gloom.
“Ah, there you are,” said the surgeon, laying aside his scalpel and reaching for a rag to wipe his hands. “There’s something I wanted you to see. Here; help me turn him over.”
Between them, they eased the French colonel over to reveal the back of his long, slim torso. The purple slit low between his shoulder blades was clearly visible.
“So
he was stabbed,” said Sebastian.
“He was indeed. With a dagger. And here’s something interesting: Judging by the angle of the blade’s entry, I’d say it’s a good bet that the man who stabbed him is not right-handed. I could be wrong, mind you; it’s always possible the killer was standing in such a way as to have the same effect. But it’s far more likely you’re looking for a left-handed murderer. I just wish I’d had Pelletan’s body long enough to know if he was stabbed in the same way.”
“The man who tried to kill me—twice—is left-handed.” Sebastian studied the freshly healed scar running the length of the colonel’s right arm. “Doesn’t seem right, somehow, for him to have managed to survive Napoléon’s debacle in Russia, only to be stabbed in the back in London.”
“Bit ironic; that’s for sure. You can bet he didn’t see this as a dangerous assignment.” Gibson paused. “Know if he had any family?”
Sebastian shook his head. “I never asked.”
Together, they turned the corpse again, and Sebastian found he had to look away from that ravaged face. “What can you tell me about the damage to his eyes?”
“I suspect whoever knifed him in the back then took his dagger to the eyes. It’s very crudely done.”
“Like Pelletan’s heart.” Sebastian rubbed his own eyes with a splayed thumb and forefinger, then swiped his hand down over the lower part of his face.
“Any idea why he was killed?” Gibson asked.
“I have lots of ideas. The problem is figuring out which of them is right. He could have been killed by someone intent on disrupting the peace negotiations. Or he could have died because he knew something about what happened to Pelletan.”
Gibson wiped his hands again and reached for his scalpel. “I’m not quite finished here, but I’ll be surprised if there’s anything more to be learned.”
Sebastian started to turn toward the door, then paused to say, “I spoke to Alexi Sauvage just now.”
“Oh?” said Gibson without looking up.
“She tells me Lady Peter’s young ‘brother’ is actually her son—by Damion Pelletan. Did you know?”
Gibson shook his head. “No.”
“She says she was told about the child in confidence and felt honor bound to keep Lady Peter’s secret. But I think that’s not the only thing she’s still holding back from us.”
“She’s very frightened.”
She didn’t strike Sebastian as frightened, but all he said was, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Gibson looked up then, his green eyes glinting. “What the devil is that supposed to mean?”
“You know.”
But Gibson only ducked his head again, a flush of anger or chagrin riding high on his gaunt cheeks.
Chapter 41
Hero spent much of the morning in the offices of the Times, talking to John Walter, the editor who was publishing her series of articles on London’s working poor. She handed him her latest piece on the city’s brickmakers. And then she asked him, with studied casualness, if he’d ever heard of a convent in Portugal called Santa Iria.
He stared back at her, his face unusually grim, his eyes blinking several times before he said, “I have, yes. Why do you ask?”
“I want to know what happened there in 1810.”
He pushed up from his desk chair and went to stand at the somewhat grimy window overlooking the fog-choked street, the fingers of one hand worrying his watch chain. “It’s not pretty,” he warned her.
“Tell me.”
And so he did.
• • •
She arrived back at Brook Street to see Devlin standing outside, at the edge of the rear terrace. He had his back to the house, his gaze on the fog-shrouded, winter-browned garden that stretched down to the mews. He still wore his caped driving coat, and she suspected he’d only just walked up from the stables. But there was a brittle tautness to the tilt of his head that reminded her in some indefinable way of the nights she’d awakened in the hours before dawn to find him bedeviled by dreams of a time and place he could not forget.
He turned when she let herself out of the house and walked up to him, her arms wrapped across her chest for warmth. She could see the strain of too many sleepless nights in the hollowness of his cheeks and the dark, bruiselike quality of the flesh around his strange yellow eyes.
She said, “You’ve been talking to Alexi Sauvage again.”
A breath of amusement flickered across his features. “How did you know?”
She shook her head. “I wish to God that woman had never come back into your life.”
He stared out at the thick, killing fog. “It’s not her. She’s simply . . . a reminder.”
“I found out today what happened at Santa Iria. You went there, didn’t you?” She kept her gaze on his hard profile. “After you escaped from the French camp. You went there, and you saw what the French had done.”
He nodded, his jaw set hard, his gaze still fixed on the rain-trodden garden below. “I suppose I knew in my heart that I was too late, but . . . I kept hoping I might somehow be in time to warn them. To stop . . .”
She tried to say something, anything, only to find that she could not.
After a moment, he continued. “I was too late, of course. Major Rousseau and his men had already attacked the convent.” He wrapped his hands around the stone balustrade before him, the wind flapping the shoulder capes of his driving coat. Hero found she could not look at his face. “Santa Iria wasn’t just a convent; it was also an orphanage. The French killed everything that moved, then set fire to the buildings. There was nothing left alive. Not a goat, not a dog, not a babe in its cradle. Nothing.”
From the distance came the crack of a whip, the thunder of hooves from an unseen carriage driven up the street, fast.
“And Antonio Álvares Cabral’s daughter?” asked Hero. “The abbess?”
“Rousseau tried to make her talk, except . . . the poor woman knew nothing.” He swallowed. “You can imagine what they did to her.”
Hero suspected she probably could not imagine—did not want to imagine. The editor at the Times had been blessedly vague about the details. She said, “Your dreams . . . That’s what you see?”
“Not always. But often. Sometimes I see them not as I found them but as they would have been . . . before.”
She said, “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes, it was. I’m the one who carried those false dispatches into French hands. My ignorance in no way excuses either my gullibility or my culpability. I knew what sort of man Oliphant was.”
“But—how could anyone have known what he intended? He deliberately sent the French against that convent, hoping that their brutality would drive Álvares Cabral into the arms of the British.” She hesitated. “Did it work?”
Devlin shook his head. “No. When the old man saw what the French had done—to his daughter, to the children, to the other nuns—he collapsed and died.”
Hero felt a deep and powerful rage building within her. “And Oliphant? What happened to him?”
“I rode straight from the blood-soaked ruins of the convent to our camp. I was going to kill him. I knew I’d hang for it, but I didn’t care.” Devlin huffed a soft sound devoid of any trace of humor. “He’d been recalled to headquarters. His older brother had died, and he’s now Lord Oliphant. Last I heard, he’s been appointed Governor of Jamaica. I’ve never seen him again.”
“And then you sold out?”
“Yes. Although it wasn’t only because of Oliphant and Santa Iria. That was simply the culmination of so much that had gone before. We like to think we’re more civilized, more honorable, more righteous than our enemies, but we’re not. Just ask the dead women and children of Copenhagen, of Badajoz, of Dublin, of a thousand forgotten hamlets and farms. And once you realize that, it does rather beg the question: Why am I fighting? Why am I killing?”
She rested her hand on his arm, felt the fine tremors going through him. She thought of the memories
he carried with him always, the sights and smells and sounds, and the suffocating weight of guilt. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said again. “The deaths of those women and children are on Oliphant’s head. On Oliphant, and the French major, Rousseau, and the English and French officials who put two such men in positions of power.”
But he only pressed his lips into a tight, strange smile and gave a faint shake of his head.
She said, “What happened to Rousseau?”
“He’s dead,” said Devlin. And she knew without being told that, somehow, before Devlin left the Peninsula, he’d tracked down the French major and killed him.
“Good.”
She touched her hand to his cheek, and he turned toward her, his arms coming around her to draw her close, his cheek pressed to the side of her hair. She felt his chest lift against hers as he drew in a ragged breath and held her tight. And then he said the words she’d long thought she’d never hear.
“God, how I love you, Hero. So much. So much . . .”
Chapter 42
Paul Gibson spent the afternoon explaining the functions and structure of the human kidney to a full theater at St. Thomas’s Hospital. Normally, he would good-naturedly rap the knuckles of any dozing audience member with a boiled fibula and patiently field questions that showed a decided lack of attention on the part of confused students. But not today. Today, every sleepy student, every ridiculous question, filled him with an unholy rage. It took a while, but he finally admitted to himself the origins of his uncharacteristic irritation.
He wanted to get back to Tower Hill. To Alexi.
Sure, then, but you’re six kinds of a bloody fool, he told himself in disgust. What are you thinking? That a fine young woman such as her might be interested in you? That she might see you as a man—a real man, with all of a man’s needs and desires and dreams?
Laughing at himself, he determinedly refocused his attention on the task at hand and resolved to think no more about her.
Then he let his audience go half an hour early.