by C. S. Harris
He knew why she thought she couldn’t do that. They’d been through it all a thousand times before, yet he still couldn’t stop himself from saying, “Why? Because I am a viscount and you are an actress?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
He pushed out a harsh, frustrated breath. “You realize, don’t you, that if Guinevere had been allowed to marry the man she loved, she’d probably still be alive today.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know that I—”
She silenced him with her kiss, taking his face between her hands, her fingers digging into his cheeks as she moved her mouth over his in desperate gulps. “Don’t,” she said, her voice rough, her breath warm against his face.
He knew she loved him. It shone in her eyes, was there with each trembling breath. And it struck him as the cruelest of ironies that if she had loved him less, she would have married him.
Wordlessly, she threaded her fingers through his, drawing him away from the window toward the warm embrace of her bed. And he went with her, because the shadows in the darkened street below were simply the trees moving in the wind, and it was hours still until dawn.
He had time. Time to convince her that she was wrong, that far from ruining his life by marrying him, she was the only thing that could save him. He still had time.
He told himself they had all the time in the world.
HIS SLEEP WAS OFTEN TROUBLED by dreams, haunting recurrent images of red-coated phalanxes of soldiers, their faces coated with dust, their lips tightly set as they marched toward death. Of stone walls battered and blackened by the howling shriek of artillery. A child’s cry. A woman’s scream. The buzzing stench of death. The remains of men and horses so dismembered as to become indistinguishable.
But that night he dreamed of Kat. She lay upon his bed, dressed in her bridal finery. The golden light of the bedside candle cast flickering shadows across the pale perfection of her features, the delicate flesh of her closed eyelids. He knelt beside her, the silken hangings of his bed whispering softly around him. Yet he knew no joy, only the pain of tears that swelled his throat but refused to fall.
Confused, he reached out to close his hand over hers, and then he understood. Because her hands were cold beneath his, and when he kissed her, her lips did not respond; her eyes did not open. Her eyes would never open again. And he knew then that her wedding finery had become her shroud.
He awoke with a jerk, his breath coming hard and fast, his heart pounding uncomfortably in his chest. Turning his head, he found her asleep beside him, her hair spilling dark and beautiful about a cheek flushed with life, her breath sweet against his face. And still he had to touch her, to feel her body warm beneath his hands.
In the hushed light of dawn she stirred, reaching for him even before her eyelids fluttered open. She skimmed her palms down his arms to his bare hips. He buried his face in her hair, breathed in the familiar scents of rose water and the sweet essence of this woman, and felt his love for her like a throbbing ache in his heart.
She was warm with sleep but softly pliant against him, murmuring gentle words as his hand found her breast. She wrapped one leg around him, sliding her foot up his calf in invitation. He rolled on top of her, her hand guiding him inside her.
He closed his eyes, trailed a line of kisses down her neck as he moved gently within her. She was warm and alive and in his arms, and still he knew a deep and abiding fear that would not be stilled.
Chapter 21
Sebastian’s valet was an earnest, softly rounding man named Sedlow who had been in Sebastian’s employ for just over a year. The man was a genius at repairing the ravages a night on the town could wreak upon a gentleman’s coat, and could coax an enviable shine from top boots worn hard on the hunting field. But when Sebastian appeared later that morning with a brown-paper-wrapped package containing a pair of badly cut trousers and an old-fashioned greatcoat such as a Bow Street Runner might wear, Sedlow paled and recoiled with horror.
“My lord. You can’t seriously mean to appear in those rags in public.”
Pausing in the act of tying an unfashionably dark and coarse neckcloth, Sebastian glanced over at his valet. “They’re hardly rags. And I don’t intend to drop into White’s in this rig, if that’s what you fear.”
“But…someone could still see you.”
Sebastian raised one eyebrow. “Do you fear such a sighting might do irreparable damage to my reputation?”
Sedlow sniffed. “Your reputation? No, my lord. Noblemen are allowed to be eccentric.”
“Ah. I see. It’s the repercussions on your reputation that trouble you.”
Sedlow started to open his mouth, then closed it.
“Wise,” said Sebastian, and shrugged into his badly tailored coat.
THE RAIN HAD BEGUN EARLY THAT MORNING, a steady downpour that brought with it a bite of North Sea air and made the unseasonable heat of the past few days seem like a dim, distorted memory. Hailing a hackney carriage on New Bond Street, Sebastian directed the jarvey toward Mount Street. Then, slumping in one corner, he watched the raindrops chase each other down the windowpane, and slowly allowed himself to sink into the personage he’d chosen to assume.
It was an actor’s trick, something Kat had taught him to do in those early, heady days when he’d just come down from Oxford and she was still only beginning to make her mark upon the stage. He’d perfected the technique in the army, where his very survival had at times depended upon his ability to submerge himself in a character until he wore the assumed posture and mannerisms as comfortably and effortlessly as an old coat.
By the time he arrived at the service entrance of the house on Mount Street, the Earl’s son was gone and he had become Mr. Simon Taylor, one of Bow Street’s finest.
IT OCCURRED TO SEBASTIAN that you could tell a great deal about a woman by the abigail she chose to employ. Some lady’s maids were haughty, affected creatures as fashion conscious and condescending as their mistresses. Some were cheerful, fresh-cheeked country women who’d served their mistresses since they were in the schoolroom, while others were timid and apologetic things, forever quivering in terror of being dismissed.
Lady Anglessey’s abigail was a thin, slight woman in her late twenties or early thirties named Tess Bishop. She had straw-colored hair and a sallow complexion, and at first glance one might easily take her for the meek, browbeaten variety of abigail. But her gray eyes were clear and intelligent, her step firm as she entered the housekeeper’s room Sebastian had commandeered for their interview.
She wore black, as befitted the servant of a household in mourning. It was Sunday, her day off, but she had an apron tied over her bombazet dress. She had obviously been working, and it occurred to Sebastian that she might very well be packing up her own things. After all, a widower would have no need for a lady’s maid.
She paused in the doorway to eye Sebastian with undisguised suspicion. “I don’t see no baton,” she said, referring to the emblem of office traditionally carried by Runners.
A real Runner would probably have snapped, “We’ll have none of your impertinence, girl,” and ordered her to sit down. But in Sebastian’s experience, most people cooperated best when their dignity was respected. So he simply said, “Please, have a seat,” and steered her toward the ladder-backed chair he had placed beside the window overlooking the rain-drenched rear gardens.
She hesitated a moment, then sat, her hands folded in her lap, her spine as straight and uncompromising as a nun’s.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions about Lady Anglessey,” said Sebastian, leaning his shoulders against the wall. “We understand her ladyship left the house in a hackney on Wednesday afternoon, and we’re hoping you might know where she went.”
“No,” said the abigail baldly. “I don’t.”
Sebastian gave her a coaxing smile. “No idea whatsoever?”
There was no answering smile to lighten the woman’s pinched, unremarkable features. “No, sir. She di
dn’t say, and it’s not my place to pry into the activities of my employers, now, is it?”
Sebastian crossed his arms at his chest and rocked back on his heels. “Very commendable, I’m sure. But a lady’s maid often knows things about her employers without needing to be told—and without prying. Are you quite certain, for instance, that Lady Anglessey didn’t let drop some sort of a hint? Perhaps when she asked you to get out her gown for the afternoon?”
“She selected the gown herself—a simple walking dress with a matching pelisse, as would be suitable for a lady of fashion going out for the afternoon.”
Deciding to take another tack, Sebastian went to sit in the chair opposite her. “Tell me, Miss Bishop, how would you say his lordship and Lady Anglessey got along?”
Tess Bishop gave him a wooden stare. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do.” He rested his forearms on his thighs and leaned forward, as if inviting confidences. “Did they quarrel, for instance?”
“No.”
“Never?” Sebastian raised one eyebrow in a show of disbelief. “Man and wife for some four years, and no quarrels? No minor disagreements, even?”
“If they quarreled, sir, it wasn’t in my hearing.”
“Do you know if she ever met a man named Alain, the Chevalier de Varden?”
Something flared in her eyes, something she hid by staring down at hands now clasped so tightly they showed white. “I never heard the name, no.”
Sebastian studied the abigail’s stiff, hostile face. He supposed it said something about Guinevere Anglessey, if even after death she could inspire this kind of loyalty in a servant. “How long have you been with her ladyship?” Sebastian asked suddenly.
“Four years,” said Tess Bishop, relaxing slightly. “I came to her just before she married his lordship.”
Sebastian leaned back in his chair. “I suppose it’s natural for a young lady about to make such a brilliant alliance to want to provide herself with a more experienced abigail than the one she’d brought with her from the country.”
“That’s not the way it was at all. This was my first position.”
“Your first?”
“That’s right. I used to be a seamstress, while my David was a carpenter. But he was pressed into the navy, right before the bombardment of Copenhagen.” She paused. “He was killed.”
“I’m sorry,” said Sebastian, although it seemed a pathetically lame sop to offer her.
“After that, I supported us as best I could, but…” Her voice trailed off as if she regretted having said so much.
“Us?” Sebastian prompted.
“We had a baby. A girl.” Tess Bishop turned her face slightly toward the window so that she was no longer looking at him. “I took sick. When I couldn’t make my quota, they let me go. And then my baby took sick, too.”
Sebastian watched her slim throat work as she swallowed. It was a familiar enough story, a tragedy enacted a thousand times or more a year in London, Paris—in every city across Europe. Women barely eking out a subsistence wage, caught by illness or a downturn in the fashion industry and thrown onto the streets. Most turned to prostitution or theft, or both. They had no choice, but that didn’t stop the moralists from condemning them as sinful women and railing against them as the source of all corruption and decadence. As if any woman in her right mind would willingly embark upon a path certain to lead to disease and death and an unmarked grave in some noisome churchyard’s poor hole.
“I was desperate,” Tess Bishop said in little more than a whisper, a flush of remembered shame coloring her cheeks. “I finally took to begging in the streets. Lady Anglessey…she took pity on me. Brought us in and gave us something to eat. Even had in a doctor for my little one.”
Sebastian looked at the woman’s thin shoulders, at the starched white cap that covered her bowed head. “But it was too late,” she said after a moment. “My Sarah died that very night.”
Out in the garden, the rain had eased up, although the clouds still hung gray and heavy over the city. From here Sebastian could see the outlines of a large glass-and-frame conservatory, its panes steamy with moisture.
This was a side of Guinevere that no one had showed him before, and one he suspected wasn’t exactly typical. He wondered what had moved her to extend the hand of salvation to this woman. A chance meeting of the eyes, perhaps? Some intuitive recognition by the young, heartsick Earl’s daughter that this other woman, this widowed mother of a dying baby, knew a despair far, far greater than her own?
“I wanted to die, too,” said Tess Bishop, her voice little more than a whisper. “But Lady Guinevere, she said I mustn’t. She said if we’re given a hard road to walk in life, we just have to fight to find some way to make what we want out of what life has given us.”
“And she hired you as her lady’s maid? Even though you’d no experience?”
Tess Bishop’s head came up, her lips crimped together in stubborn pride. “I worked hard to learn, and I’m quick. I haven’t let her ladyship down. I’d do anything for her.”
“You’re letting her down right now,” said Sebastian, pressing his advantage. “If you were really willing to do anything for her, you’d help me figure out who murdered her.”
She leaned forward, her small gray eyes flashing with unexpected fire. “I can tell you who killed her. His name is Bevan Ellsworth. He’s Lord Anglessey’s nephew and he’s wanted her dead ever since the day she married his uncle four years ago.”
“Wanting someone dead and actually going so far as to kill them are two very different things.”
Tess Bishop shook her head, her nostrils flaring on a hastily indrawn breath. “You didn’t hear him. You didn’t hear him when he came here—”
“When was this?”
“Just last week. Monday, I think it was. He came storming into the house while her ladyship was at breakfast. Shouting so loud we all heard him, about how his creditors had learned she was with child and that he might not be the next Marquis of Anglessey after all. He said they were threatening him—threatening his life, even. And then he threatened her.”
“Threatened her? How was that?”
“He said he’d see her dead before he’d let her foist her bastard in his place.”
Chapter 22
A sampler hung on the wall just behind the abigail’s head, a sampler worked in silk thread against a linen background. Sebastian stared at it, at the neatly stitched flowers intricately entwined around the letters of the alphabet. But he wasn’t really seeing it. He was remembering the glitter of hatred in Bevan Ellsworth’s eyes, and the sound made by a boy’s arm breaking on the playing fields of Eton.
“What did her ladyship do?” Sebastian asked.
“She told him to get out. And when he said he’d go all right and tell everyone who’d listen that she’d been playing the whore, she…” The abigail’s voice trailed off.
“She what?”
Tess Bishop’s color was high. She hesitated, then said in a rush, “She laughed. She said he’d only show himself to be the fool he was, because her son would be the next marquis even if he’d been begotten by a hunchback in the gutters.”
It was a legal principle that had come down to them from the Romans, a doctrine known as Pater est quem nupitae demonstrant. As far as the law was concerned, a woman’s husband was the father of her child, whether the man actually sired the child or not. Guinevere’s statement didn’t necessarily mean anything, of course. Scornful words flung in anger. But still…
“You’ll have to excuse me now, sir,” said the abigail, pushing to her feet. “His lordship has asked me to help with organizing the staff’s mourning clothes.”
Sebastian rose with her. “Yes, of course.” He kept his voice casual, although deep within his breast, his heart had begun to beat uncommonly fast. “There’s just one other thing I wanted to ask. You wouldn’t happen to know where her ladyship got the necklace she was wearing the day she died, would you
?”
“Necklace?” Tess Bishop wrinkled her forehead in a frown. “What necklace?”
Slipping the bluestone triskelion from his pocket, Sebastian held it out in the palm of his hand. “This one.”
She studied it for a moment, then shook her head decisively. “That’s not her ladyship’s.”
For an instant, Sebastian imagined he could feel the necklace burning his flesh, although the stone was cold in the dreary light of the rainy day. “She died wearing it.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“How is that?”
“Because she was wearing the Pompeian that afternoon.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Sebastian, not understanding.
“The walking dress of Pompeian red. It’s made high at the neck, with an upstanding collar and raised epaulets, and worn with a goffered lawn fraise.”
“A what?”
“A fraise. It’s a kind of neck ruff with three tiers,” said Tess Bishop, impatient with his ignorance and anxious to be gone. “Her ladyship could never have worn a necklace with that dress.”
BEVAN ELLSWORTH, nephew of the Marquis of Anglessey and heir presumptive of all his lands and titles, kept a small suite of rooms two floors above an exclusive shop on St. James’s Street.
Using the skills he’d honed over five years in the army doing things no gentleman should ever do, Sebastian let himself in the main door from the hall. He found himself in a small parlor, opulently furnished if untidily kept, with riding boots left lying discarded across the Aubusson rug and a scattering of invitations and unpaid bills spilling off an ornate inlaid desk.
On the far side of the room, the door to the bedroom stood half-ajar. Sebastian went to push it open.
He found himself on the threshold of a room even more untidy than the last. An empty bottle of brandy stood on a side table near the door along with a scattering of dirty glasses; a tangle of dirty cravats and socks, waistcoats, and shirts lay strewn across the floor.