Why Kill the Innocent

by C. S. Harris

“Why should I believe you?”

  “Why?” His smile turned into something cold and gritty. “It’s rather simple, actually: because if I had them, I would have used them by now to put an end to this ridiculous betrothal. As you so accurately observed the other day, I am more than willing to sacrifice one pampered eighteen-year-old girl for the good of the nation.”

  “I’m not sure anyone who knows the truth about Charlotte’s miserable upbringing could call it ‘pampered.’”

  “I seriously doubt she’s ever gone to bed hungry—which is more than one can say about millions of her grandfather’s subjects.”

  Sebastian watched the Baron cut another piece of his steak. “I can think of several reasons why you might not have used the letters yet.”

  “Oh? Do tell.”

  “Timing. Leverage. Second thoughts.”

  His lordship chewed thoughtfully and swallowed. “Mmm. I suppose all are possible—with the exception of ‘second thoughts.’” He paused to point the tines of his fork at Sebastian. “Are you seriously suggesting that I might have killed Jane Ambrose?”

  “I am.”

  Wallace gave a loud laugh. “Why on earth would I?”

  “Because the game you’re playing—and the individuals you are playing it against—are dangerous. Most men prefer to do their dirtiest work from the shadows.”

  Wallace was no longer laughing.

  Sebastian said, “It would give you a similar reason for killing the harpist Vescovi if he somehow knew you had the letters. And you could have killed Edward Ambrose in a futile attempt to convince me that Jane’s death was simply the result of a wretched lovers’ triangle.”

  “Oh? Was Jane Ambrose involved in a lovers’ triangle? That I did not know.”

  “No? In my experience, men like you have a tendency to keep abreast of such things.”

  “How . . . flattering.”

  “Someone stole those damned letters, and Jane seems to have suspected you. Why was that? I wonder.”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  Sebastian studied the older man’s faintly smiling face. “So who would you have me believe did take them?”

  “You credit me with far more knowledge than I possess.”

  “Then speculate. Surely you’ve given it some thought.”

  Wallace leaned back in his chair. “Well, given that they’ve never been published, suspicion must presumably fall on the Prince—or, rather, individuals close to him. If Brougham or Somerset or anyone else opposed to the betrothal had somehow managed to get their hands on them, the Princess’s folly would be splashed all over the newspapers by now.”

  Sebastian held himself very still. “Are you suggesting Christian Somerset knows about the Orange alliance?”

  Wallace gave a rude snort. “Of course he knows.”

  “You’re certain?”

  Wallace rested his knife and fork on the edge of his plate. “Given that we’ve discussed various possible ways to scuttle this damned alliance? Yes, quite certain.”

  “Does he know about the Hesse letters?”

  “As to that, I couldn’t say.” Then he pushed up and walked away, leaving the rest of his meal uneaten.

  Chapter 48

  Sebastian found Christian Somerset standing before the side altar in St. Anne’s, Soho, his head bowed, his hat in his hands. A weak winter sun had come out to stream a rich palette of green and gold light through the stained glass window above the main altar. But the stones of the church radiated a dank cold that was numbing.

  Jane’s brother stayed in prayer for several more minutes before heaving a heavy sigh, opening his eyes, and raising his head. His gaze focused on Sebastian standing quietly nearby, and he said, “I take it you’re looking for me?”

  Sebastian nodded. “Can we talk?”

  “Of course.”

  They left the church to walk along a well-packed path that wound through the churchyard’s snow-covered tombs and ancient headstones. Somerset said, “You’ve discovered something?”

  “Perhaps.” Sebastian paused, choosing his words carefully. “You said you didn’t know about Princess Charlotte’s betrothal to the Prince of Orange. But I’ve now discovered that’s not true.”

  Somerset glanced over at him. “Who told you that?”

  “Are you saying you didn’t know?”

  Somerset was silent for a moment, then shook his head. “No; I knew. I denied it before because—oh, I suppose out of loyalty to Jane. She shouldn’t have told me about it, but she was upset at the time and needed to talk. Afterward she begged me to forget she’d ever mentioned it, so it seemed wrong to betray her.”

  “Yet you discussed the Orange alliance with other Whigs?”

  “I did, yes—but without acknowledging that I’d also discussed it with Jane. It’s no secret in certain circles, you know. I’m sorry for misleading you, but . . . Are you suggesting this damned betrothal could have something to do with her death?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know for certain. When did you say was the last time you saw her?”

  “When she brought me the ballads I was going to publish.”

  “Do you remember what day that was, precisely?”

  Somerset frowned. “Let’s see . . . I’d been out of town visiting friends in Kent and returned home on a Sunday. I believe she came to see me the following afternoon.”

  “So, Monday the seventeenth?”

  “Yes, I suppose it must have been. Why?”

  Monday the seventeenth was the day Jane Ambrose learned from Princess Charlotte that the Hesse letters were missing and the day before she went out to Connaught House to see the Princess of Wales. Was that significant? Sebastian wondered. Or not?

  But all he said was “I’m simply trying to understand the sequence of events that occurred in the last several weeks of your sister’s life. Did she talk to you that day about Princess Charlotte?”

  “Not that I recall, no. But the truth is, I remember very little about our conversation that day. I don’t think it was in any way remarkable; we mainly spoke of music.”

  “Did she say anything to you about a packet of letters?”

  “Letters? I don’t believe so. From whom?”

  “The Princess.”

  “No.” Somerset gave Sebastian a hard look. “You obviously do think Jane’s death has something to do with the Princess.”

  “At the moment it’s simply one of several possibilities.”

  “And Edward Ambrose? How does his death fit into this?”

  “I wish I understood.”

  Somerset blew out a harsh breath. “I won’t pretend to feel sorrow at his passing, but I wouldn’t have wished death on the man—especially not murder.”

  Sebastian said, “I’ve discovered Jane did find out about Ambrose’s mistress—just two days before she died.”

  Somerset drew up and swung to face him. “My God. You think she confronted him and he killed her?”

  “You told me the other day you didn’t think she would confront him if she found out.”

  Somerset stared off across the snow-covered tombstones. “I know. But I’ve been thinking about it some more. There’s no doubt that at one time she never would have mentioned it to him—that she would have quietly accepted the pain, humiliation, and betrayal of a husband taking a mistress as one more of the many burdens women must bear. But lately . . . I don’t know quite how to put this, but ever since Lawrence’s death, I’ve sensed a change in Jane. As if she were rethinking her beliefs, challenging some of the old assumptions and rules by which she used to live.”

  “I’m told she’d recently read Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Rights of Women.”

  “Did she?” said Somerset with a shaky laugh. “That is radical reading, indeed. Although given her friendship with the Godwins, I’m surprised she hadn’t read it y
ears ago.”

  “Perhaps she was afraid to before, and somehow dealing with her children’s death gave her the courage.”

  “Perhaps.” Somerset pressed his lips together. “I still can’t believe she’s dead. I keep thinking . . . wondering if there wasn’t something I could have said—something I could have done—that might have kept her safe. Alive.”

  “I understand the impulse to believe you might have been able to save her,” Sebastian said quietly. “But you need to move beyond it.”

  “Perhaps.” Somerset brought up a hand to rub his eyes with a spread thumb and forefinger. “But still . . .”

  The bell in St. Anne’s tower began to ring out the hour, the dull clangs reverberating across the still graveyard. Sebastian said, “You know Liam Maxwell—have known him for years. If he found out Ambrose had murdered Jane, do you think he would be capable of killing Ambrose in revenge?”

  The church bell gave a final dong and then fell silent. In the sudden hush Sebastian could hear a street hawker’s distant shout and a melting clump of snow slide from a branch overhead to hit a nearby tomb with a sodden plop.

  Somerset’s face went slack, his nostrils flaring as he sucked in a quick, deep breath. “Surely you don’t expect me to answer that?”

  Sebastian said, “I think you just did.”

  * * *

  There was a freshening quality to the wind that surprised Sebastian as he walked the icy, winding streets of the Frost Fair. Now in its fourth day, the fair was more crowded than ever, the air filled with shrieks and laughter and the roar of thousands of voices. He caught the pungent scents of cinnamon and cloves as he passed a tent selling spices, its exotic odors mingling with the familiar smells of ale and tobacco and roasting meat. “Buy me pies,” called a roving pieman, his tin tray slung around his neck by a leather strap. “Eels! Get yer eels!” “Hot chestnuts!” The shouts of the vendors rose above the drone of a hurdy-gurdy and the distant wail of bagpipes. But for Sebastian it was all background noise. He walked on, lost in his thoughts.

  A sudden outburst of laughter drew his attention to a circle of spectators gathered around a circus comic in a red velvet doublet and blue hose. The clown’s improbable yellow hair was curling wildly in the damp air, his white face paint and frozen, exaggerated red grin lending a faintly menacing quality to his pantomimes and pratfalls. For a moment Sebastian paused, his gaze drifting over the laughing men, women, and children of the performer’s audience. Their eyes were sparkling with delight, their cheeks rosy with the cold. But for some reason he could not have named, Sebastian found himself noting the subtle differences in attitude and posture that distinguished the men from the women, the boys from the girls.

  He had never subscribed to the belief that women were by nature either less intelligent or less capable than men. Yet he now realized he’d never appreciated to what extent an Englishwoman’s sex determined essentially every aspect of her life—far more than her wealth or social status or perhaps even her skin color. Simply by virtue of having been born female, Jane had been raised by a father who tolerated rather than encouraged his girl child’s amazing talents. As a woman grown, she’d hidden her gifts as both a pianist and a composer in order to conform to the behavior considered proper for a modest gentlewoman of her station. And because of England’s civil and religious laws, she’d been forced to bear her husband’s unfaithfulness and physical abuse without complaint or possibility of redress.

  Yet in the last months of Jane’s life, that willingness to conform, to play by the rules, had shattered. Much of it, surely, came from the spiritual crisis provoked by the recent deaths of her children as well as by her growing anger over the Regent’s treatment of the young Princess. But Sebastian suspected that the breaking point had come in that fetid alley off Savile Row.

  Peter van der Pals had used all the advantages afforded by his privileged maleness to brutalize and hurt her, safe in the knowledge that she would never tell because, for a gentlewoman, the shame of others knowing what had been done to her was seen as worse than the rape itself.

  And van der Pals had been right; she hadn’t told anyone—with the exception of Lady Arabella, although that was in the form of reproach rather than a confidence. And it came to Sebastian now as he watched the clown pantomime slipping and falling on the ice that the rape had acted as a kind of catalyst in Jane’s life. Up until then she had faithfully adhered to all the stringent, unfair rules of their society. She had done what her religion and her class demanded of her. Yet this terrible thing had befallen her anyway, and as a result, something within her had snapped. He wondered if she would actually have broken free if she’d lived. He suspected she would have. Instead, she had died.

  How? Why?

  It would be all too easy to pin her death on her weak, abusive, conveniently dead husband. But another explanation was beginning to form in Sebastian’s mind.

  An explanation as troubling as it was tragic.

  * * *

  Liam Maxwell was helping one of his apprentices knock apart his stall on the Frost Fair’s grand promenade when Sebastian walked up to him.

  “Calling it quits?” said Sebastian, watching the lad pile wooden shingles into a handcart.

  The afternoon was warm enough that they’d worked up a sweat, and Maxwell paused to swipe a forearm across his face. “Feel that wind? It’s swinging around to the south. When I was a lad, I used to listen to my grandmother tell stories about how fast she’d seen the ice break up in the middle of a Frost Fair. I can’t afford to lose my press.” He grinned at the boy turning away from the cart. “Or any of my apprentices, for that matter.”

  The boy laughed and stooped to gather another armload of shingles.

  Sebastian nodded toward the growing throng of laughing, noisy fairgoers. “They don’t appear to share your concerns.”

  Maxwell shrugged and swung his hammer at a cross brace, knocking it loose. “Had a couple of constables from Bow Street here a bit ago. They’re thinking I killed Ambrose, aren’t they?”

  “Are they?”

  Maxwell let his hand drop, the hammer dangling by his side. “You know they are.”

  “Constables like simple explanations.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” said the printer, his voice low and earnest.

  Sebastian studied the other man’s haggard face. “Did you ever talk to Christian Somerset about the Orange betrothal?”

  Maxwell cast a quick glance at his apprentice, who was now loading the loose boards from the dismantled stall into the cart. “No. Why?”

  “Would Jane have told him about it?”

  Maxwell looked thoughtful for a moment. “She might have. I couldn’t say for certain.”

  “What about the Hesse letters? Would she have told him about those?”

  Maxwell started to say something, then stopped.

  “What?” asked Sebastian, watching him.

  Maxwell’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you asking me about Christian?”

  “I’m simply trying to get an idea of what happened in Jane’s life the last few weeks before her death.”

  Maxwell tossed his hammer aside. “I don’t think she ever told him about Hesse, no. I remember one time she was in my print shop, talking about the Princess’s attempts to retrieve the letters, when Christian came in without her realizing it. She was worried he might have overheard what she was saying. But when she carefully tried to find out if he had heard, he teased her about being involved in some deep, dark secret and laughingly asked if he needed to worry she’d taken to plotting nefarious deeds.”

  “So he didn’t hear?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “When was this?”

  The printer looked thoughtful. “Must’ve been three or four weeks ago now.”

  “Before Somerset left for Kent?”

  “Was he in Kent? I didn’t know that.
I remember Jane had stopped in to see me that day on her way back from one of her lessons at the palace. It was before the letters were stolen, at the time the Princess was still trying to get them back, which is how we came to be talking about it.” Maxwell’s brows drew together. “You can’t be suspecting Christian of all people.”

  Sebastian shook his head. “Would Jane have told her husband about the letters, do you think?”

  “Ambrose?” Maxwell gave a harsh snort. “Not hardly. To be frank, they rarely spoke. And I doubt he would have been interested.” He cast another anxious look at his apprentice and dropped his voice even lower. “I didn’t kill the bastard. I swear it.”

  “Unfortunately, you’re the only person who appears to have a motive.”

  “What about his bloody creditors?”

  “You know he was in debt?”

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  Maxwell twitched one shoulder.

  Sebastian said, “Did you tell Jane?”

  “I think she suspected it.”

  “But you never told her?”

  Maxwell shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “For the same reason I never told her about her husband’s philandering: because there was nothing she could do about it, and I knew it would only upset her.”

  When Sebastian simply remained silent, Maxwell’s nostrils flared on a quick, angry breath. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Should I?”

  “Someone is trying to set me up!”

  “It’s certainly possible. The question is, who?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “How many people were aware of your relationship with Jane?”

  “We’ve been friends for years. That at least was never a secret.”

  “All right, look at it another way: Who would want to do you harm?”

  The printer gave a low, humorless laugh. “Probably too many people to count—starting with your own damned father-in-law.”

  “Who else?”

  “Ambrose, maybe. But he was too selfish of a bastard to ever take his own life.”