by C. S. Harris
He paused, his hands stilling as he stared off toward the end of the garden, his voice becoming hushed. “But I did love her, you know. Not because she was beautiful—although God knows she was. But she was so much more than that. She was…she was like a breath of fresh air that came into my life. So full of energy and passion. So bright, so determined to grasp life with both hands and make of it what she wanted—” He broke off and had to suck in a quick gasp of air before saying more quietly, “I can’t believe she’s dead.”
Sebastian waited a moment, then asked again, quietly, “Who do you think killed her, sir?”
Anglessey went to sink down on the weathered wooden bench sheltered by a nearby arbor, his hands in his lap. “Guinevere was my third wife,” he said, his voice once again firm, under control. “The first died within hours of presenting me with a stillborn son. The second was barren.”
Sebastian nodded. There was no need for the Marquis to explain further. He and Sebastian belonged to the same world, a world in which everyone understood only too clearly the need for a man in their position to produce a legitimate heir. Even at twenty-eight, Sebastian had already felt that pressure brought to bear upon himself, both by his father and by the weight of his own awareness of what he owed his house, his name.
“Ever since the death of my brother twenty years ago,” Anglessey was saying, “my heir has been my nephew. Bevan.”
The implications were inescapable. Sebastian studied the old man’s closed, angry face. “You think him capable of murder?”
“I think Bevan Ellsworth could kill someone who stood between him and what he considered his, yes. And as far as Bevan is concerned, my estates are essentially his. He took my marriage to Guinevere as a personal affront. He actually threatened to try to have the marriage set aside—as if he could.”
“Yet it’s been several years since your marriage. Why kill Lady Anglessey now?”
Anglessey let out a pained sigh. “Bevan’s expenses have always exceeded his income. Of course, as far as Bevan is concerned, the fault lies entirely with the inadequacy of his income rather than with the extravagance of his habits. He’s a very natty dresser, my nephew. He’s also sadly addicted to games of chance. As long as he was my heir, his creditors were willing to give him pretty much a free rein. I suspect things must have become rather uncomfortable when it became known that my wife was with child.”
“Yet the child might have been a girl,” Sebastian felt compelled to note, “in which case Bevan Ellsworth’s position as your heir would have remained secure.”
“The child might have been a girl,” Anglessey agreed. “But, frankly, I don’t think Bevan could afford to take that chance.”
Sebastian stood with the sun behind him, his own features thrown deliberately into shadow as he studied the older man’s face, set now in quiet thoughtfulness. The new lines scoured there by recent grief were easy to read, as was the vacant glaze of pain in the Marquis’s pale gray eyes and the heavy burden of sorrow that weighed down his slim, aged shoulders.
There was anger there, too, in the hard set of the jaw and the tight line of the thin lips. Rage at the sudden, unexpected loss of one so loved, at the selfish greed of the nephew he believed had stolen from him one held so dear. And yet…and yet Sebastian couldn’t shake the conviction that something else was going on here, too; something he was missing.
“When was the last time you saw your wife alive?” he asked suddenly.
Anglessey looked up, his eyes squinting as he stared into the sun. “Nearly ten days ago now.”
Sebastian drew a quick, sharp breath. “I don’t understand.”
“My wife hadn’t been well lately. Nothing serious, you understand.” A sad, wistful smile played around the old man’s lips. “It happens sometimes when a woman is in the family way. She was planning to come down to Brighton with me. She always enjoyed the weeks we spent here each summer. But in the end she decided she couldn’t face all those hours in a closed, swaying carriage. She stayed home.”
“Home?”
“That’s right.” The Marquis’s hand tightened around his secateurs as he pushed to his feet again. “The doctors thought the sea air would do me good, so she insisted I come without her. We were hoping she’d feel well enough to follow in a week or two. But until last night, I thought Guinevere was in London.”
Chapter 11
At first it seemed just one more bizarre twist in a tangled, incomprehensible string of imperfectly understood events, that Anglessey should have believed his wife to be in London at the time of her death. But the more Sebastian thought about it, the more it made sense.
According to Paul Gibson, Lady Guinevere had been killed some six to eight hours before the Regent was discovered clutching her body in the Yellow Cabinet. At some point during that long afternoon, she had lain for hours, faceup, so that the blood had congealed and darkened her flesh to a vivid purple. Only then had a dagger been driven into her bare back and her body positioned enticingly on its side in preparation for the Regent’s amorous approach.
All of which meant she might actually have been killed in London, and her body brought down to Brighton.
“That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard,” said Hendon, when Sebastian explained his reasoning to his father that evening over a glass of brandy in their private parlor at the Anchor. “And just how do you suppose this mythical killer managed to slip the lady’s corpse into the Yellow Cabinet? He could hardly have strolled through the Pavilion bearing her lifeless body in his arms, now, could he? Or do you imagine he smuggled her inside rolled up in a carpet, like some blackguard straight out of a circulating library romance?”
Sebastian watched his father walk over to the table beside the empty hearth and pour himself another brandy. “What are you suggesting? That she traveled down to Brighton unbeknownst to her husband, simply to commit suicide by some mysterious means after arranging to have her dead body fall on a dagger in the Regent’s Yellow Cabinet? Oh yes, and then lay there unnoticed for another six hours or so while the servants built up the fire and cleaned the room around her?”
Hendon set the brandy decanter down with a thump. “Don’t be ridiculous. What I’m suggesting is that your Irish friend doesn’t know what in the bloody hell he’s talking about!”
He broke off, his head turning at the sound of a discreet tap at the door. “Excuse me, my lord,” said the Earl’s valet, every inch of his body rigid with disapproval as he executed a short bow. “Viscount Devlin’s tiger is here to see him. He says he’s expected.”
Sebastian brought up a fist and coughed to hide his smile. Tom was not a favorite with the Earl’s staff. “That’s right. Please show him in.”
Not content to be left cooling his heels in the hall, Tom had already appeared in the open doorway, his face pinched and drawn with disappointment.
“Well?” said Sebastian as the manservant bowed himself out. “What did you discover?”
“Nothin’, gov’nor,” said the boy, his voice heavy. “Not a blessed thing. Nobody could remember seein’ nothin’ out of the ordinary. Not till all them nobs started screaming their heads off and running outta there like fleas off a dead dog.”
Hendon let out his breath in a self-satisfied humph and raised his brandy to his lips.
“Any speculation?” Sebastian asked the boy.
“Oh, aye. Lots o’ that. The kitchen maids, they’re all atwitter at the thought the Regent done the lady hisself, while the stable lads, they reckon Cumberland’s behind it somehow. And they’re all talkin’ about this Hanover C—”
Tom broke off to cast a quick glance at Hendon.
“Go on,” prompted Sebastian.
Tom sniffed and lowered his voice. “It’s said in whispers, of course. But there’s some as will have it the whole family isn’t just barny. They’re sayin’ the Hanovers is cursed. And that England will be cursed, too, as long as the Hanovers—”
“That’s rot nonsense,” roared Hendon, surging up from his ch
air.
The boy stood his ground, his eyes narrowed and wary. “It’s what they’re saying.”
Sebastian rested one hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave him a light squeeze. “Thank you, Tom. That will be all for now.”
“I’ll be damned if I’ll ever understand why you brought that boy into your household,” said Hendon, after Tom had taken himself off.
“You think my gratitude should have been sufficiently served by a simple thank-you and the gift of perhaps a gold watch? Tom saved my life, remember? Mine and Kat’s.”
Hendon’s jaw tightened in that way it always did whenever Sebastian did something of which Hendon disapproved—or that disappointed him. Once, the Earl of Hendon had boasted of three strong sons to succeed him. But fate had left him with only Sebastian, the youngest and least satisfactory. “I think most would have considered a small pension more than adequate,” said Hendon.
“The boy is useful.”
“Good God. And in what way might a pickpocket be of use to a gentleman of quality?”
“To survive on the streets requires agility, a talent for keen observation, and quick wits. All abilities I can use.” Besides, the boy always wanted to work with horses, Sebastian thought, although he didn’t say it. Hendon would only have scoffed. “He seems to have managed to control his larcenous activities these last four months.”
“Or so you think.”
Sebastian drained his brandy and set the glass aside. “I’d best say good night. I plan to start for London at dawn.”
“London?” Hendon’s lips pursed in disapproval. “I thought the business with this murder would at least keep you away from there for a while.” Of course, it wasn’t London itself Hendon found objectionable; what troubled the Earl was the beautiful young actress he knew Sebastian would be seeing there.
Refusing to be drawn into an argument on that score, Sebastian turned toward the door. “I don’t see what else I can do here. Anglessey has agreed to allow Paul Gibson to transfer the Marchioness’s body to his surgery for a postmortem. Even if Lady Guinevere wasn’t killed in London, someone there might be able to tell me where she went—and why.”
THE NEXT MORNING DAWNED COOL, with a fine mist that drifted in from the sea in heavy, salt-laden patches of white swirling dampness to collect between the rows of tall, stately town houses and in the narrow winding alleyways of the Lanes.
Sebastian held the chestnuts in check until they were clear of the last straggling hamlet. Then he gave the big blood geldings their heads and let them run with the wind before easing them down to an even trot that ate away at the miles. By the time they reached Ed-burton, the strengthening sun had begun to burn away what was left of the fog. On the far side of the village, the rolling expanses of the South Downs could be seen quite clearly, stretching out in all directions. It was there Sebastian’s growing conviction that he was being followed solidified into a certainty.
Chapter 12
Even in the thickness of the fog, Sebastian had been aware of a steady drumming of hoofbeats, staying always a comfortable distance behind them. One horse, he decided, ridden at a steady clip, never gaining, but not falling too far behind, either.
Then the mists began to thin to faint wisps of elusive white that hugged the deeply cut road’s stone walls and brambly hedgerows while laying bare the surrounding fields of green barley and flax. At that point, the shadowy horseman dropped back. But Sebastian’s eyesight was considerably keener than most others’. As the wide vistas of the South Downs opened up beneath a strengthening sun, he began to catch glimpses of a single, dark-clad rider mounted on a big bay, first seen in the distance through a tangle of hazel, then half-hidden by a copse of fine beech.
Thoughtful, Sebastian urged his chestnuts to a faster trot. The mysterious horseman quickened his pace, too. They continued on that way for a mile, two. Sebastian brought his pair down to a walk.
Their shadow dropped back.
“Don’t, whatever you do, look behind us,” Sebastian ordered his young tiger. “But I think…no, I am quite certain, actually, that we are being followed.”
Tom went visibly stiff with the effort of resisting the urge to turn around and look for himself. “Since when?”
“Since we left Brighton, it would seem.”
“What we gonna do?”
Sebastian held the chestnuts to a steady pace. They were winding up a gradual incline, the twisting road thrown into deep shade by a stand of poplars. But at the top of the slope the ground evened out, the road running across a broad common of vivid green pastureland dotted with a peacefully grazing herd of black-and-white milk cows.
Without looking behind, Sebastian whipped his team into an easy gallop so that the man behind them was forced to do the same. They streamed across the common, the sun shining on the chestnuts’ wet flanks, Sebastian urging his team on ever faster until the road crested a sudden rise and fell away rapidly before them in a long, steady sweep.
Sebastian immediately reined in his horses to a brisk walk. The rush of the wind and the thundering of hoofbeats gave way to a soft crunch of wheels and a relative silence in which Sebastian could hear the rapid soughing of Tom’s breath, quickened with excitement. They were only halfway down the slope when the rider on the bay crested the hill behind them at a loping canter.
At the sight of Sebastian, he checked for a moment, then urged his own horse forward at a easy walk.
Sebastian swung over to the verge and pulled up. At his signal, Tom hopped down to run to the horses’ heads.
“What’s he doing?” Sebastian asked, bending forward as if busying himself with something at his feet. In one hand, he clasped a neat little flintlock pistol.
Again the horseman had checked. But now he had no choice: he must either make his intentions obvious, or continue on and pass them. Pulling his hat low on his forehead, the dark-clad rider set his spurs to his horse’s flanks.
“Here he comes,” said Tom on a tense exhalation of breath.
The rider charged past them in a dust-swirling rush of creaking saddle leather and sweat-flecked prime horseflesh. Looking up, Sebastian had a quick vision of a bloodred bay, its head up, its eyes wide, and a man of medium build wearing a gentleman’s beaver hat and a greatcoat of respectable tailoring. Then the bay disappeared with a clatter around a bend in the road ahead. The hoofbeats retreated into the distance until all was silent except for the rush of the wind through the sweetly scented grass and the gentle lowing of a cow.
Tom stood with a hand on the team’s reins, his head twisted around as he stared off up the road. “Who was he, gov’nor?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Sebastian, collecting his whip. “Stand away, Tom.”
Tom obediently sprang back, then scrambled to resume his perch as the curricle once again bowled away toward London.
THEY REACHED TOWN just after midday. The greatcoated rider on the big bay was not seen again.
Sebastian’s own house lay on Brook Street, just off New Bond Street. But that was not his first destination. Drawing up before an elegant little town house in Harwich Street, Sebastian handed the reins to Tom and said, “Stable them.”
The maid who opened the door was a mousy creature with thin bony shoulders and pale, unsmiling features. At the sight of Sebastian, she sniffed and looked as if she’d shut the door in his face if she could. “Miss Boleyn is still abed.”
“Good,” Sebastian said cheerfully, already taking the steps two at a time. “No need to interrupt whatever you were doing, Elspeth,” he added, although she remained rooted in the entry hall, her head tipping back as she continued to glower up at him. “I’ll announce myself.”
The door to the front bedchamber on the second floor was closed but not latched. Sebastian pushed it open, the painted panels swinging into a room of blue satin hangings and heavy shadows. A woman lay in the bed, a beautiful young woman with rich brown hair that spread out over the pillows in a glossy wave. Her name was Kat Boleyn, and at the age of twenty-t
hree she had already been the toast of the London stage for several years now. She was also the love of Sebastian’s life.
As he drew nearer, he saw that she was awake, her blue eyes crinkling lightly at the corners with a subtle smile, her shoulders bare where they showed above the fine linen sheets. “Poor Elspeth,” she said.
Shrugging out of his many-caped driving coat, Sebastian swung it onto a nearby chair and tossed his hat, whip, and gloves after it. “Why on earth do you keep such a Friday-faced creature about the place?”
Kat reached long, naked arms over her head in a lazy stretch. “She’s not Friday faced with me.”
“Then what the devil does she have against me?”
Kat laughed. “You’re male.”
Sebastian knelt on the edge of the bed, one doeskin-clad knee sinking deep into the feather mattress. “How’s the new play?”
“Popular. Or maybe it’s just my Cleopatra costume that’s popular.” She brought her arms down to loop them around his neck and draw him to her. “I expected you yesterday.”
From any other woman the words might have been read as an expression of reproach. But not with Kat. With Kat, it was simply a statement, an observation.
She demanded no loverlike commitments from him. She had rebuffed his every attempt to make her his wife and refused even to be considered his mistress. He supposed there were men who might relish such an arrangement as a freedom from the ties that could bind; Sebastian lived with a quietly desperate fear that one day, for some reason he would never quite understand, she would leave him. Again.
He slid his hands down her naked back, heard her breath catch in that way it always did when he touched her. He nuzzled his face against her neck, breathed in the wonderful, heady fragrance of her skin and hair. “Forgive me?”
She bracketed his cheeks with her hands, drawing back so she could see his face. Her lips were smiling, her eyes shining with what looked very much like love. But her words were light, frivolous. “That depends on how good your excuse is.”