by C. S. Harris
“Did many people visit the gardens in the afternoon?”
“Oh, we was right busy, that’s for sure. Not as busy as on Sundays, of course. But it’s been so hot lately, lots of folks’ve been coming out.”
“Did you get many gentlemen yesterday?”
“You mean, proper gentlemen? Like yourself?”
Sebastian smiled. “Yes, like that.”
“We don’t get too many fine ladies and gentlemen anymore. Time was, we did. But it’s mostly common folk these days.”
“But you did get some yesterday?”
“Well, probably one or two.”
“Do you remember them? If they were old or young? Tall or short? Thin or fat?”
She screwed up her face with the effort of memory. “I’m right sorry, your honor, but I don’t reckon I could say, for sure. One day just kinda blends into the next.”
“But you remember the man who was killed?”
“Oh, yes, your honor. On account of the boy he had with him. Prettiest little boy I ever did see. Like a porcelain doll, he was.”
Sebastian squinted against the sinking sun as he studied the garden’s eight-foot-high brick wall. “Is there another entrance to the tea gardens?”
“No, your honor. This is the only one.”
“I thought your father said something about a gate in the western boundary wall.”
“Well, there is a gate goes out to Cow Lane. The gardeners use it to haul in manure and such. But it’s kept locked otherwise.”
Sebastian fished in his pocket for a coin and paid his entry fee. “What time do you close?”
The girl handed him a ticket with another smile. “Not till midnight, your honor. We only close early on Thursdays.”
“Thank you.”
Walking up the tea garden’s main promenade, Sebastian was conscious of following in the footsteps of Nicholas Hayes and the missing child. He kept trying to imagine the dead man and Ji relaxing and enjoying these flowery walks and shady arbors, but he could not. A string quartet was playing chamber music in the great room, and the strains of Haydn drifted through the open windows to the horseshoe-shaped arrangement of booths, where a chattering, laughing crowd was eating syllabubs and cakes washed down with tea and ale. And all Sebastian could think was What an incongruous spot for murder.
Circling around a bowling green and skittles yard, he came upon an ornamental pond where he paused to watch the half dozen or so children gathered there sail toy boats. A splashing fountain played merrily; the children laughed and called to one another. And Sebastian found himself wondering, Why would Nicholas Hayes arrange to meet someone here of all places? Why Pennington’s Tea Gardens, a fading pleasure spot that had once attracted the “better sort” but now catered more to shopkeepers and apprentices? Was that the reason? Because it was so out of the way and unfashionable? It was, after all, why Hayes had chosen to stay at the Red Lion.
It made sense, Sebastian decided. But it did nothing to explain whom Hayes had come here to meet, or for what purpose.
“Bloody hell,” said Sebastian under his breath, and turned away.
He followed a narrow path through the shrubbery until he hit the brick wall that bounded the garden on its western side. Winding back around, he soon ran across the small clearing where Nicholas Hayes had died. His corpse might be gone, but his death was still an almost palpable presence here, the grass flattened by both his body and the boots of Lovejoy’s constables. A bare patch of earth showed dark from his blood.
Going to stand in the center of the clearing, Sebastian could hear the distant play of the fountain, the laughing voices of the children, the liquid crystal song of a robin lost somewhere in a nearby clump of holly. The evening sun filtering down through the leafy branches overhead felt hot on his shoulders, and he stood silently for some minutes, trying to understand what had happened here. Searching for answers that eluded him.
Frustrated, he was turning to leave when a flash of white caught his eye. Someone had spread a small square of white cloth in the shade of a peony. On the cloth rested a clutch of blossoms—foxglove and white lilacs and lady’s lace—along with two oranges and a pile of ash surrounding the remnants of what he realized was a joss stick. If he breathed deeply, Sebastian could just catch the faint scent of sandalwood hanging in the air.
He quickly crossed the clearing and crouched down beside the makeshift altar to touch the ash. It was still warm.
“Ji?” he said, rising to his feet. His gaze raked the surrounding shrubbery as he listened intently for the faintest footfall or hushed sound. “Are you there, Ji? I’m a friend—Calhoun’s friend. I won’t hurt you. I want to help you.”
He paused. For a moment he imagined he could feel the weight of the child’s grief still lingering in this death-haunted clearing as unmistakably as the scent of the wafting incense.
“Ji?” he called again.
But he was alone.
Chapter 16
T hat night, Sebastian watched his wife stand at their bedroom window, one hand on the heavy curtain at her side. She was staring at the darkened street below, but he knew her thoughts were far, far away.
“We’re trying,” he said, coming up behind her to slip his arms around her waist and hold her close. “That’s all we can do.”
She tipped her head back against his, her gaze on an elegant chaise dashing up the street below, a crest emblazed on its panel, the lamplight gleaming on the backs of its high-stepping team of matched bays. “And yet it’s not enough. That little boy must be so afraid—alone and afraid. I keep imagining Simon in a similar situation, and it’s unbearable.” She paused. “At least we know Ji’s still alive, thanks to the makeshift altar you found.”
“It’s possible the killer doesn’t know the boy exists.”
“Perhaps. Yet even then, he’s still alone and in danger.”
“I know.” He turned her in his arms to thread his fingers through the thick fall of her hair and lift her chin with his thumbs. Her eyes were dark and glittering with unshed tears, and he touched his lips to hers. He heard her breathy exhalation as her hands slid up his back to grasp his shoulders. He kissed her half-closed eyelids, her cheeks, the arch of her nose, then came back to capture her mouth again.
She clung to him, her fingers splaying over his bare flesh, her breath raspy as she pressed herself against him. Then she drew back, her hand finding his to tug him toward the curtained recesses of their bed.
They fell together, legs tangling, lips coming together again. He touched her breasts, kissed the tender flesh of her stomach. She gasped, arching against him, her palms cradling his face. “Now. Please,” she said, and he rose above her. There was an urgency to their lovemaking, a desperation he couldn’t quite define even as he understood its source. Then he felt her body convulse with her release, and he cried out as she pulled him over the edge with her.
Afterward they lay together, his hand caressing her bare arm. They shared a companionable silence for a time. Then he felt the tension begin to coil within her again, and he knew that while she had found some solace in their lovemaking, her thoughts had again returned to the missing child.
He said, “Ji is unusual enough that I think we have a good chance of finding him.”
She shifted her head against his shoulder. “I wish I knew where to look next.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say somewhere around either the tea gardens or the Red Lion.”
“Dear God. I hope he’s not sticking close to the Red Lion. That’s an appalling neighborhood. Although you’re right. It’s probably the part of London he’s most familiar with.”
She was silent a moment, then said, “I’ve been thinking about what Nicholas Hayes might have been doing in the days before he contacted Jules Calhoun. Grace told you he and the boy arrived in England at least two weeks ago, yet he didn’t see Calhoun to as
k for his help until last Sunday. What if he spent those days trying to do something but failed? That could be why he finally reached out to Calhoun, even though he doesn’t seem to have wanted to, at first.”
“Hmm. It’s an interesting theory. Although if you’re right, the question then becomes, what was he trying to do?” He pressed his cheek against the top of her head, breathed in the sweet fragrance of her hair. “Calhoun describes Nicholas Hayes as a headstrong and passionate but nonetheless honorable man, while everyone else talks about him as a scandalous son disowned by his father for abducting some heiress. And yet no one seems to know her name.”
“Well, it is the kind of thing her family would try to keep quiet, isn’t it?”
“It is. But I’d like to know who she was.”
She turned in his arms with a smile. “I can think of someone who might be able to tell you.”
* * *
Saturday, 11 June
The next morning, Sebastian paid a call on his aunt Henrietta, the Dowager Duchess of Claiborne. Born Lady Henrietta St. Cyr, she was Hendon’s elder sister and thus not actually Sebastian’s aunt, although they hadn’t allowed that truth to interfere in their relationship. Now in her seventies, she was one of the grandes dames of London society, famous for her ability to ferret out—and remember—every scandal and on-dit to have convulsed the ton over the past sixty or more years.
A blunt-faced, fleshy woman with the famous blue St. Cyr eyes, the Dowager was known to never leave her room before twelve or one o’clock. But when Sebastian arrived at her Park Lane town house early the next morning, he was surprised to find her not only up and dressed in a lilac gown trimmed with pink silk, but already breakfasting on toast and tea in her morning room.
“Good heavens, you’re up,” said Sebastian cheerfully when her butler, Humphrey, showed him in. “Why? It’s barely past nine.”
The Duchess groaned and brought up one hand to shade her eyes. “Don’t remind me, you unnatural child.”
He laughed and came to take the seat opposite her. “Never tell me you’re planning to join in the day’s festivities for the Allied Sovereigns? What’s on the schedule for today? A visit to the Tower? A balloon ascension? Or just another grand reception or two or three?”
She gave a faint shudder. “I’ve no idea. But whatever it is, I haven’t the slightest interest in attending. The way Prinny boasts and struts around in his ridiculous uniforms, you’d think all the credit for defeating Bonaparte is personally his and his alone, when everyone knows he’s never been anywhere near a battle in his life. It’s beyond mortifying. And nauseating.”
“So why are you up?”
“Emily. Her latest is being christened. You’d think at her age she’d be done with breeding, but she keeps popping them out. Claiborne says I’m being indelicate to speak of such things, but I’ve no patience with these modern missish ways. Calling breeches ‘unmentionables’ and blushing at the mere mention of a chicken thigh. What next?”
Claiborne was Aunt Henrietta’s middle-aged, straitlaced son and the current Duke, while Emily was her youngest child, forever in disgrace for having, as her mother always put it, “married badly.” Last time Sebastian counted, his cousin was the proud mother of thirteen offspring—and happily adored them all.
“Then I suppose I should be grateful to Emily’s fertility for saving me a scold.”
The Dowager gave a faint harrumph. “Hendon tells me you’ve involved yourself in another murder. He’s most put out, you know.”
“Yes, I do know.”
“Is that why you’re here? To ask me about Nicholas Hayes? I’m afraid I scarcely knew the young man—they packed him off to Botany Bay barely a year after he came down from Oxford. And all I know about that French countess’s murder is what was in the papers.”
“So tell me about the heiress Hayes was said to have abducted.”
Henrietta leaned back in her chair. “Oh, that.”
“It actually happened?”
“Well, yes and no. The bit about the ‘abduction’ was just a ridiculous tale put about to save the girl’s reputation.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They eloped, of course.”
“Ah. Who was she?”
The Duchess gave him a fierce look. “I trust you to use whatever information I give you discreetly.”
“Of course.”
“Very well. It was Theo Brownbeck’s daughter, Katherine.”
“Good Lord.” Few in London were unfamiliar with Theodore Brownbeck, a banker who’d made a vast fortune through adroit investments. He was still a powerful figure in the financial affairs of the City, but lately he’d taken to devoting more and more of his time to producing an endless outpouring of works on religion, morality, crime, and the poor. The theme that ran through them all was the conviction that any attempt to educate or improve the living standards of the lower classes was a crime against God and nature. According to Brownbeck, what he sneeringly called “the good intentions of the feebleminded” would only result in inculcating a “sense of entitlement and lethargy” amongst a class ordained by their Creator to be worthy of nothing more than a life of hard work and an early death. Unsurprisingly, he had a passionate and long-running feud with Hero, who had challenged the validity of both his statistics and his harsh prescriptions to cure society’s ills.
Sebastian stood up to fetch a teacup from the sideboard. “Why did they need to elope? Why couldn’t they simply have married?”
“Because they were under twenty-one, and their fathers refused to countenance the match.”
“Seaforth and Brownbeck both opposed the marriage?”
“That’s right. The old Earl was a pompous, arrogant ass who thought a Cit’s daughter—even a wealthy Cit’s daughter—wasn’t good enough for an earl’s son, even an earl’s youngest son. And Theodore Brownbeck had no intention of allowing his only child and sole heir to throw herself away on the untitled offspring of an upstart Irish peer and spend her life following the drum.”
Sebastian looked up from pouring himself a cup of tea. “Nicholas Hayes was in the Army?”
“No, but he was planning to buy a pair of colors. Of course, that became impossible when his father cut him off without a penny.”
“So what happened?”
“Once they realized there was no changing their parents’ minds, the young couple ran off. A foolish, woefully improper thing to do, of course, but it was no abduction. Didn’t make it halfway to Scotland before the old Earl caught up with them.”
“Who started the tale of the abduction?”
“That was Brownbeck. He thought it would reflect better on his daughter when the rumors leaked out. But word of the elopement never really got around. It was the ‘abduction’ story that people talked about, and it discredited Nicholas Hayes in a way he didn’t deserve.”
“That’s when Seaforth disowned him?”
Aunt Henrietta nodded. “Cut him off without a farthing.”
Sebastian came to sit again, the teacup in his hands. “What happened to the girl—Kate Brownbeck?”
“Her father married her off to Sir Lindsey Forbes.”
“Of the East India Company?”
“The same. Nasty man, but rich enough—there’s no doubt about that. And of course he’s even richer now, thanks to his marriage and subsequent years in India.”
Sebastian took a slow sip of his tea. “How do you know all this?”
“I knew the girl’s mother. She was an Osborne—much better born than Brownbeck, obviously. I understand he paid through the nose for the privilege of aligning himself with the family. She died about a year after her daughter married. Brownbeck is a pompous, self-righteous bore, but Kate was fortunate enough to take after her mother. I remember her as a lovely young woman, full of spirit and laughter. Quite charming.”
�
�She’s dead now?”
“Kate? Oh, no. She’s just not like that anymore. It’s as if marriage to Forbes sucked all the life and joy out of her. It’s quite sad.” Henrietta sighed. “I suspect Hero knows her; she’s part of the Annabelle Hershey set these days.”
Sebastian was familiar with Annabelle Hershey, thanks to Hero. A general’s daughter, Miss Hershey kept a salon for those with keen wits and sharp intellects and interests in everything from philosophy and literature to science and technology.
He took another sip of tea. “Do you think Nicholas Hayes did it? Killed the Countess de Compans, I mean.”
He expected his aunt to say, Of course he did. Instead she was silent for a moment, her lips pressing into a frown. “I honestly don’t know. The entire affair never rang true to me.”
“Why not?”
“Partially because he was so desperately in love with Kate just a few months before. But mainly because I remember Chantal de LaRivière.”
“I understand she was very beautiful.”
“She was indeed—utterly exquisite. But I always suspected she was a bit of a coquette.”
“Oh? And what do you think of Gilbert-Christophe de LaRivière?”
“I know everyone keeps referring to him as a close confidant of both the French King and his brother. But the truth is he’s far closer to the Count d’Artois than to Louis—which tells you all you need to know about him.”
“It does, indeed,” said Sebastian. Charles, the Count d’Artois, was the saturnine younger brother of the newly restored French King Louis XVIII and a man known as an ultraroyalist, ultrareligious reactionary. “So what do you think happened to Chantal de LaRivière?”
“I never could figure it out.” She was silent for a moment, her fingers reducing her toast to crumbs. Then she said, “What a tragedy Nicholas’s life was. An unnecessary tragedy. How differently it all would have turned out if the young couple had simply waited. In another few years, Kate would have been twenty-one, and Nicholas would have been his father’s heir.”