by C. S. Harris
“I was coming to see you. Tell you about the . . . about the letters.”
Vescovi’s eyes started to slide closed, and Sebastian tightened his grip on the man’s shoulders. “Hold on. As soon as we get you into the house, I’ll send—”
But Vescovi’s eyes were no longer sliding closed; they were still and staring, and Sebastian knew he was dead.
* * *
Sometime later, Sebastian stood with Sir Henry Lovejoy at the snowy intersection of Bond and Brook Streets.
“A second of Princess Charlotte’s music instructors found dead in the street?” said Lovejoy, his shoulders hunched against the cold as he stared down at the dead man in silence. “Why?”
“I wish I knew.”
Lovejoy shook his head in bewilderment. “The palace will never be able to quiet the speculation this time.”
“That doesn’t mean they won’t try.”
“No,” said Lovejoy with a sigh. “No, it doesn’t.”
* * *
They sent the harpist’s body off to Paul Gibson’s surgery. Then, at Sebastian’s suggestion, they took a couple of Lovejoy’s constables and went to search Valentino Vescovi’s room at the Percy Arms in Red Lion Square.
The innkeeper muttered and grumbled about being dragged from his fireside for something that could just as easily have waited until morning. He was still grousing about being disturbed when he threw open Vescovi’s room. Then he broke off to clutch at his nightcap as it started to slide. “Merciful heavens,” he said, his voice rising into a squeak. “What is this?”
The room had been ruthlessly searched, the mattress dragged from the bed and slit open, drawers emptied and their contents strewn about the floor. Even the Italian’s spare clothes had been slashed, as if the searcher thought something might have been hidden in their seams and linings.
“Whatever were they looking for?” said Lovejoy, pausing in the doorway.
Sebastian went right to the Italian’s harp. The instrument’s beautifully worked frame had been hopelessly smashed. “I’ve no idea.”
They searched the room themselves anyway, on the off chance Vescovi’s killer had missed something in his haste.
They found nothing.
* * *
Wednesday, 2 February
Dawn was spilling a weak golden light down the snowy canyon of Brook Street when Hero came to stand in the doorway to the library, a cup of tea held in one hand. “Did you sleep at all?” she asked Devlin.
He looked up from where he leaned against his desk, staring at something in his hand. “A bit.”
“Liar.”
He gave a lopsided smile and set aside whatever he’d been holding.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Jane Ambrose’s locket.”
“Ah.” She came to hand him the cup. “Here. This is for you. Drink it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can I talk you into some breakfast?”
He took a sip of the tea and grimaced. “Not hungry.” He pushed away from the desk and went to stand at the window, his gaze on the long icicles that glittered in the cold sunshine. “What in all of this am I missing?” He brought one clenched fist down on the windowsill. “Bloody hell! I still don’t know where she actually died, how or why she burnt her fingers, or even who raped her a day or two before she was killed. Something must tie it all together. And now Vescovi is dead, and it’s damnably hard not to hold myself in some measure responsible.”
“Why? Because you underestimated the importance of the communication between Princess Charlotte and her mother?”
Devlin nodded. “And yet I can’t think of anything that could be in the letters Vescovi carried that would motivate someone to kill over it. What could Charlotte have said? That she regrets allowing her father to trick her into this betrothal? That Caroline is working with her Whig friends to find a way to stop it? None of that is exactly a secret.”
“No,” she agreed. “But why else would someone kill Vescovi?”
Sebastian drained his tea and set it aside. “Damned if I know.”
An hour later, Sebastian received a note from Kat Boleyn telling him she had found Edward Ambrose’s mistress.
* * *
“Her name is Emma Carter,” said Kat as she and Sebastian walked along the stalls of Covent Market. The icy, ferocious cold still held the city in its grip, but the roads from the countryside were finally passable enough that some supplies were beginning to trickle in. “She used to be an opera dancer before Ambrose set her up in rooms in Tavistock Street. Almost no one knows about her. He must be extraordinarily discreet in his visits to her.”
“He couldn’t afford to have his wife find out,” said Sebastian, his gaze scanning the shivering, desperate crowd. “Not when she was the one actually writing his operas.”
“Was she really?”
“She was indeed. How long has Ambrose had this woman in keeping?”
“Three years.”
“Three years? He has been discreet.”
Kat put out a hand, stopping him as she lowered her voice. “That’s her there—in the cherry red pelisse.”
Sebastian studied the woman who stood at a stall mounded high with carrots and potatoes. She was a tiny thing, surely no more than nineteen or twenty, with a pretty round face and dusky curls that peeked from beneath a fur-trimmed hat. As she turned away from the stall, her pelisse flared open, exposing a heavily pregnant belly.
“Good God,” he said softly. “She’s with child.”
Chapter 39
Edward Ambrose buried his wife beside her sons in the crypt of their parish church of St. Anne’s, Soho.
He played the part of the grieving widower to perfection, Sebastian thought, watching him. The man’s features were drawn and pallid, his shoulders slumped as if beneath a crushing weight of pain and loss. He accepted the condolences of friends and colleagues with a graciousness that impressed everyone who saw him. But if Sebastian’s suspicions were correct, the show of grief was all for effect, all false.
Sebastian stood beneath the church’s west gallery and watched the funeral service. Built by Wren or one of his associates in the aftermath of the Great Fire, St. Anne’s was a classic basilica—broad and spacious and plain, although cluttered with the high, ornate box pews of the parish’s wealthier families. He noticed that Jane’s brother, Christian Somerset, came in just before the beginning of the service and left immediately afterward, slipping quietly away without attempting to join those who stayed to console his brother-in-law.
Women did not typically attend funerals. But it occurred to Sebastian as he watched Ambrose shake hands and speak quietly to the somber files of men who had come to pay their respects to Jane’s husband just how sad and lonely her life must have been. All the members of her family except for Christian Somerset were dead. The real genius behind the operas of “Edward Ambrose” was hers, yet with the exception of the social philosopher William Godwin, all those attending her funeral were her husband’s friends, associates, and admirers.
Sebastian waited while the church emptied of mourners and Ambrose paused to speak in low-voiced consultation with the rector. After a moment, Ambrose nodded to the vicar and walked over to Sebastian to say bluntly, “I take it you wish to speak to me?”
“It can wait until you’re finished here,” said Sebastian.
“No. If you’ve something you wish to say, say it to me now. Why not? It’s only my wife’s funeral.”
“All right,” said Sebastian. “I know about Emma Carter.”
It occurred to Sebastian, watching him, that Ambrose had as much control over his expression as any actor on the stage. Sebastian waited while the dramatist absorbed the implications of Sebastian’s words, considered denying all knowledge of the woman, then decided simply to say nothing. And none of those ruminations showed on
his face.
Sebastian said, “I’ll give you this: You’ve been extraordinarily careful in your dealings with her. But then, you had to be, didn’t you, given that your success depended on your wife?”
Ambrose threw an anxious glance over his shoulder at the waiting vicar. “Why here, for God’s sake?” he asked in an angry undertone. “Why now? You bring this up at my wife’s funeral? Have you no decency?”
“Decency?” Sebastian felt an absurd impulse to laugh. “You know what I think? I think Jane found out about your mistress—your pregnant mistress. I think she threatened to leave you, and you flew into a rage and killed her.”
“You son of a bitch,” hissed Ambrose. “I did not kill my wife.”
Sebastian studied the other man’s handsome, even-featured face. “I don’t believe you.”
Ambrose threw another worried glance in the direction of the vicar. “Jane did not know about Emma. She didn’t even suspect!”
Sebastian shook his head. “I keep thinking, what would it do to a woman who’d just lost both of her own children to then learn that her husband had got another woman quick with child?”
“I was always careful. Always.”
“Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean someone didn’t tell her. Someone who wished you harm—you, or her.”
“You’re wrong, I tell you. Do you understand me? Wrong!”
“Perhaps.” Sebastian turned to go, then paused to say, “Tell me this: Did your wife have a particular friend? Someone in whom she might have confided?” Someone who knows the shadowy recesses of her life, which might hold the secret to her tragic death?
Ambrose shook his head. “No, not really.”
“You’re certain?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“But then, how well did you actually know your wife?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Think about it,” said Sebastian, and walked away.
* * *
Sebastian sat for a time in the quiet of St. Anne’s churchyard and watched a few lazy snowflakes fall to earth, his thoughts drifting haphazardly from one aspect of Jane Ambrose’s death to the next.
He’d been coming around to thinking that the threat to Jane’s life had come from outside her home—from someone such as Rothschild, Jarvis, or van der Pals. But like so many women, Jane had lived with a man who had no hesitation in taking his frustration and anger out on her with his fists. Debt, infidelity, jealousy, and rage were a potent brew that all too often could lead to death. The problem was, if Ambrose had killed his wife, why that Thursday? And where? It seemed to make no sense.
Which meant Sebastian was still missing something.
* * *
Frustrated, Sebastian walked to Christian Somerset’s establishment on Paternoster Row, only to find the bookstore closed and the printing workshop deserted except for a sandy-haired, rosy-cheeked lad of perhaps fifteen who was cleaning dirty type, his arms black with ink up to the elbows.
“Mr. Somerset and the other lads are all at the Frost Fair,” said the young apprentice with a grin. “You ought to see our booth; it’s ever so grand!”
* * *
Christian Somerset had set up his booth midway between Blackfriars and London Bridge, on the Frost Fair’s main promenade. It was indeed an impressive structure, painted with craggy cliffs and fairyland castles beneath a pastel sky and stocked with a fine collection of romances, poetry volumes, and packets of feminine stationery. For a penny, fairgoers could also buy a souvenir memento that carried a crude image of the Frost Fair above the Lord’s Prayer, with PRINTED ON THE THAMES 1814 FROST FAIR emblazoned in large type below it. Christian Somerset himself was personally working the press.
“Somehow I didn’t expect to find you here,” said Sebastian, walking up to him.
Jane’s brother rotated the press’s handle to roll the bed under the platen and gave one of his slow, self-deprecating smiles. “This frozen river is minting money. A man would need to be a fool to miss this kind of opportunity.” He paused to turn the screw’s long handle. “I even dragged my old wooden press out of the basement for the occasion. I was afraid if I brought one of the new iron-framed Stanhopes out here it would crash through the ice and drown us all.” He nodded to a nearby apprentice to take his place at the press, his smile fading as they stepped away from the booth. “I saw you at Jane’s funeral.”
“Allow me to express my condolences again on the loss of your sister,” said Sebastian.
Somerset nodded and had to look away for a moment, blinking. “Have you learned something new?”
“I’ve discovered you were right: Ambrose does indeed have a mistress—an opera dancer he keeps in rooms in Tavistock Street.”
Somerset’s jaw tightened. “I knew it. The bloody bastard.”
“What would Jane have done, do you think, if she found out? Would she have left him?”
Somerset shook his head. “Not Jane.”
“Not even if she discovered his mistress was heavy with his child?”
“My God. Is she?”
“Yes.”
Somerset stared thoughtfully at a group of men drinking rum and grog around a nearby bonfire. “I still don’t think she’d leave him.”
“Even with both her children now dead?”
“She might threaten it in the heat of the moment. But she’d never actually do it.”
“The question is, would Ambrose know that?”
Somerset frowned. “Perhaps not.”
“Did you know Jane wrote the music for all of Ambrose’s operas?”
Somerset blinked. “I always suspected she helped him, although she would never admit it—at least, not to me.”
“She didn’t simply help; the music was hers.”
He blew out his breath in a long, pained sigh. “Poor Jane. To think of the acclaim that could have been hers, had she only been born a man.”
“Did she feel it, do you think?”
Jane’s brother rubbed his eyes with a splayed thumb and forefinger. “She must have. Growing up, we all knew she was actually more talented than her twin, James—even he acknowledged it. Our father tolerated her playing, but he never actually encouraged her the way he did James. People were always complimenting her for ‘playing like a man.’ I know that used to anger her. But she never said anything to me about Ambrose’s music, if that’s what you’re asking. She was a very private person, Jane.”
“Do you know if she had any close female friends?”
“Our sister, Jilly, was just a year older than Jane, and they were quite close. But Jilly died a couple of years ago. Consumption.”
“Is there no one else?”
“Not that I know of. Sorry.”
Sebastian watched one of the men drinking rum by the fire stagger to his feet, only to fall flat on the ice. “You say Jane would never have left Ambrose because of the way your father raised her. But even fiercely devout people can lose their faith, particularly after the deaths of two dearly beloved children. She might have changed her mind.”
Somerset shook his head. “Not Jane. Liam Maxwell begged her to leave Ambrose right after Lawrence died, and she wouldn’t do it. She said she’d made a vow before God, and just because she later realized it was a mistake didn’t give her the right to forsake that vow. I can’t see the discovery that Ambrose had a mistress—even an enceinte mistress—changing that.”
Sebastian felt the wind cold against his cheek. “Are you saying that your sister and Maxwell were lovers? Because just a few days ago you insisted Jane would never be unfaithful to her husband.”
Somerset looked troubled, as if he regretted what he’d said. “No; I didn’t mean to imply that at all. Jane would never have been unfaithful to Ambrose; I’m certain of that. But there’s no denying that Maxwell has been in love with her for years. And whi
le she never admitted as much to me, I’ve often thought Jane felt the same.”
“Did Ambrose know?”
“I suppose he might have suspected it, but I couldn’t say for certain. He’s so wrapped up in himself, it’s possible he never noticed. Although if he did—” Somerset broke off.
“If he did?” prompted Sebastian.
Somerset thrust his hands deep into his pockets and shivered, as if suddenly feeling the cold. “A man like Ambrose, I don’t imagine he’d take it well, knowing his wife was in love with another man. Even if he didn’t believe they were lovers.”
* * *
Sebastian kept turning Somerset’s words over and over in his mind as he worked his way through the Frost Fair’s surging crowds. It certainly provided an easy explanation for what had happened. It was an old, familiar tragedy: A woman discovers her husband is unfaithful; they argue; the husband, himself already suspicious of her infidelity, strikes her in anger and accidently kills her.
Could it really be that simple? Could all the dangerous undercurrents in Jane Ambrose’s life—her discovery of the financial maneuverings of the Rothschilds and the political machinations surrounding Princess Charlotte—simply be a distraction?
It was possible. It might even seem the inevitable solution if it weren’t for the questions raised by the murder of Valentino Vescovi. But if it was true, then why the devil had Liam Maxwell—a man who claimed he wanted to catch Jane’s killer—deliberately kept hidden from Sebastian such an important aspect of her life?
By the time Sebastian arrived at the upper end of the Frost Fair’s grand promenade, his feet were cold and he was in no mood to tolerate any more of the printer’s evasive games. But Maxwell’s booth was being manned by three apprentices; Maxwell himself was nowhere in sight.