by C. S. Harris
LaRivière sipped his port. He was no longer smiling. “I see you judge us harshly—an easy thing to do, no doubt, when one has never seen their country ripped apart and destroyed by revolution. We did what we had to do to survive. Vulgar and otherwise.”
“You were living in this house at the time. It’s not as if you’d been forced to take refuge in a chicken coop.” Sebastian had seen French countesses and duchesses reduced to living in old barns.
“Believe me,” said LaRivière, “it was not nearly so well-appointed twenty years ago.”
“Your two masters have paid you well, have they?”
“Well enough. I also made some extraordinarily wise investments.”
“Based on tips passed to you by your two masters?”
“Perhaps.”
Sebastian resumed walking. “Unfortunately for you, the same sensibilities that made the first of the young men in question susceptible to Chantal’s seductive wiles also meant that playing the role of traitor to his own country preyed upon him to a disastrous extent. He quickly fell apart and was dismissed from the Foreign Office.”
“I presume you’re going someplace with this?”
“I am; bear with me. Your first victim having thus lost his usefulness, you then set your sights on Crispin Hayes. Except this time you chose poorly. Oh, he was every bit as susceptible as his friend to Chantal’s seductions—she must have been an extraordinarily talented woman. But when you came barging in and played your practiced role as the outraged husband, Crispin didn’t react quite the same way as his friend—perhaps because his friend had tried to warn him about Chantal.”
LaRivière gave a regretful sigh. “I should have killed McHenry as soon as he was dismissed from the Foreign Office.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t.”
“A miscalculation on my part. I feared his death might arouse unpleasant suspicions.”
“And yet that apprehension didn’t stop you from killing Crispin.”
LaRivière took a slow sip of his wine. “I didn’t, you know—kill him, I mean. I’m not saying I didn’t consider it. But he beat me to it by killing himself. The dupe was utterly besotted with Chantal, convinced that she loved him with a fervor to equal his own and was looking to him to save her from her evil husband—me. Then he discovered he’d been played for a rank fool and he couldn’t bear it. Some men find that sort of shame impossible to live with, I’m afraid. It was his own frailty and damaged sense of amour propre—combined I suppose with the pain of unrequited love—that drove him off that bridge.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Again, the shrug. “Believe as you wish. It makes no difference.”
“Was that why Nicholas came here that night? Because he thought you’d killed his brother? Or was the argument all about Chantal?”
“I really don’t recall.”
“Oh, you recall, all right. You argued, one of you pulled a pistol—I’m assuming that was you—and in the ensuing struggle the pistol went off and Chantal was killed.”
“That’s one theory.”
Sebastian came to rest his hands flat on the tabletop and leaned into them. “You’re lucky Nicholas Hayes didn’t shout the truth about your treason to anyone and everyone who would listen.”
“Ah, but by then your estimable father-in-law had already made his move. Jarvis convinced the noble young man to keep quiet for the sake of both his brother and king and country—and, presumably, for the sake of his own skin. I wonder when he realized his mistake. As they were loading him on the transport to Botany Bay? What a fool he was.”
“You’re suggesting, I take it, that Nicholas had reason to want to kill Jarvis as well?”
“I would, if I’d been treated so shabbily. Wouldn’t you?”
Sebastian pushed away from the table. “Perhaps. Except that I sincerely doubt Jarvis knew Nicholas Hayes had returned to England. But you knew.”
“I did. However, so did a number of other people.”
“Oh? Whom did you tell?”
“No one. But as you are doubtless already aware, neither the Earl of Seaforth nor Theodore Brownbeck was anywhere near so reticent.”
“So why didn’t you try to kill Nicholas?”
LaRivière gave what sounded like a genuinely startled laugh. “Perhaps I’ve mellowed in my old age.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“Oh, believe me, I have. Eighteen years ago I was desperate. You may consider yourself a moral, ethical, and honest man—loyal and true and all that rot, as you English like to say. But you have no idea how you would behave in adversity. No idea at all.”
“I spent six years at war. You think I haven’t faced adversity?”
LaRivière’s eyebrows arched. “Perhaps you have. And would you have me believe that you have done nothing of which you are ashamed? I’ve heard whispers of things that happened in Portugal . . . when was it? Four years ago?”
Four years before, Sebastian had beaten a French captain to death with his bare hands. The raw, surging bloodlust of that night—and the unspeakable events that had led up to it—still haunted Sebastian’s dreams. But all he said was “Did you kill Nicholas Hayes?”
“And if I said I did not, would you take me at my word?”
“No.”
“I thought not. But the truth is, I didn’t kill him. On the evening in question, I dined with the Regent before attending his Carlton House reception for the Allied Sovereigns.”
“You could have hired someone to do your killing for you.”
“I could have. But I did not.”
“Again, I don’t believe you.”
LaRivière made a soft tssking sound and shook his head. “Such an untrusting person you are. Tell me, my lord, do you fence?”
“Yes.”
“We must have a match sometime.”
“I think not.”
“No? A pity, but as you wish.” LaRivière drained his glass, then held the stem between two fingers and twisted it back and forth so that the fine-cut crystal caught the candlelight and danced it across his cold, dark eyes. “Why do you do it, anyway? Devote yourself with such indefatigable passion to this quest to catch the killer of someone you never even met.” He glanced over at Sebastian. “That’s an honest question, by the way. I genuinely would like to know.”
“For the same reason I would step in to stop a man from whipping a tired horse, or a cruel child from tormenting a stray dog. Because it’s the right thing to do.” And because I believe we are all connected, every living thing one to the other, so that I owe to each what I would owe to myself. But he didn’t say that.
LaRivière shook his head as Sebastian turned toward the door, obviously finding the concept too alien to comprehend. “What a waste of a life.”
But Sebastian only laughed.
* * *
That night, Sebastian lay awake long after the last gentleman’s carriage had rattled up the street, long after the creatures of the dark settled down into silence with a final furtive rustling and the wind died in the hours before dawn.
“You can’t stop thinking about it all, can you?” said Hero, rolling over to rest her hand on his chest.
He slipped his arm beneath her to gather her close. “No.” He had told her some but not all of what he had learned that day. Jarvis’s role in the events of eighteen years ago he had kept to himself.
She said, “I think Seaforth did it. I think he killed Nicholas but missed Ji, so the next morning he hired someone to find the boy and eliminate him.”
“Seaforth spent the afternoon at White’s. Lovejoy’s men confirmed it.”
“You don’t think he could somehow have left and come back without anyone noticing?”
“Possibly.” Sebastian buried his face in the heavy fall of her warm, soft hair. “I wish we could find that child.”
“We came so close today,” said Hero. “Thank God I was there, even if he did then slip away. Do you believe Seaforth has indeed called off those men?”
“Surely he knew I wasn’t making an idle threat. Although I plan to pay him another visit in the morning, just to impress the point.”
* * *
But by morning, the Third Earl of Seaforth was dead.
Chapter 49
Thursday, 16 June
W ho found him?” said Sebastian, staring down at what was left of the late Earl of Seaforth. His lordship sat slumped against a grimy brick wall just inside the arch to Leen Mews, less than half a block from his North Audley Street house. The early-morning air was cool, the light pale and diffuse, thanks to a cover of high white clouds. Around them, the exclusive streets of Mayfair were only just beginning to come awake.
“A dustman,” said Sir Henry Lovejoy. “Right before dawn. At first glance, he thought his lordship must have imbibed too freely last night and fallen asleep. Then he took a closer look.”
“That must have been a shock.”
“I daresay it was.”
Seaforth sat with his thin legs in their natty yellow nankeen trousers splayed out before him, his arms hanging limply at his sides, his bare head bowed. It wasn’t until Sebastian hunkered down beside the dead man that he could see the Earl’s wide, staring eyes. A trickle of blood had dried beside his lordship’s slack mouth; a larger, dark red rivulet stained the cobbles near the wall.
Lovejoy said, “According to Lady Seaforth, her husband went for a walk late last night and didn’t come back. She says he’s been troubled by something lately and hasn’t been sleeping well.”
“‘Something’ being the reappearance and murder of his cousin Nicholas?” suggested Sebastian, studying the blood pooled on the cobbles.
“Presumably.”
Sebastian rose to his feet. “From the looks of things, I suspect that when we move him, we’ll find he’s been stabbed in the back.”
“Lovely.” Lovejoy pushed out a long, pained breath. “The palace isn’t going to like this. They aren’t going to like it at all. The talk about Nicholas Hayes was finally beginning to die down. Now it’s all going to start up again, only it will be even worse. First an earl’s son, now an earl.”
Sebastian glanced around at a clatter of horses’ hooves. A groom was leading a pair of smart chestnuts out of the stables at the far end of the mews. For a moment the two men’s gazes met; then the groom looked away. “Perhaps we’ll be lucky and find someone who saw something.”
Lovejoy nodded. “I’ll have the lads talk to everyone in the area.” Yet even as he said it, both men knew it was unlikely to turn up anything. Nicholas Hayes’s death might have been messy, but the two killings since then were something else entirely.
Seaforth’s top hat lay upside down where it had fallen on the cobbles beside him, and Sebastian found himself staring down at the dead nobleman’s thinning, vaguely untidy hair. The Earl had been both selfish and scheming, an ugly combination of weak and vicious. And yet . . .
“Why Seaforth?” he said, thinking aloud.
Lovejoy looked over at him. “What do you mean?”
“I can see any one of four men—Forbes, LaRivière, Brownbeck, or even Seaforth himself—murdering Nicholas Hayes out of fear he’d come back to England to kill them. And I can see the same frightened killer then deciding to eliminate Pennington when he realized the gardens’ owner would be able identify him. But why the bloody hell kill Seaforth?”
Lovejoy’s lips pressed together in a frown. “Well, he is the one who told you they all knew Hayes was in London.”
“Revenge, you mean? For having too loose a tongue? I suppose it’s possible.”
“But you don’t think so?”
“I think it more likely that Seaforth knew who murdered Hayes and was panicking enough to begin talking about it, and that’s why he was killed.” Or perhaps because he was behind the attack on our carriage and Jarvis found out about it, thought Sebastian. But he decided not to say it.
“Perhaps someone is acting on a violent grudge they hold against the Hayes family,” suggested Lovejoy.
“Now, that’s a possibility I hadn’t considered.”
“Who’s the new Earl?”
Sebastian thought about the three eager, redheaded little boys he’d seen with their father and mother on Bond Street. And about another child, this one dark-haired and exotic, who might or might not have a claim to his murdered father’s titles and lands. “It’s one of two children, both about eight or nine.”
Lovejoy’s face had taken on a pinched look. “Let us hope I am wrong.”
* * *
Hero spent the first part of the morning in a chair by the drawing room windows, going over the notes from her various interviews. Yesterday’s near miss with Ji had been encouraging, frustrating, and frightening. They now knew Ji was still alive. But if Hero hadn’t been there . . .
“Was that the lad you was looking for?” Alice had said, coming up to Hero afterward as the crowds gathered round the ruffian’s broken body.
“Yes,” said Hero. “Why? Do you know him?”
“No,” said the old woman. “Sorry. I only play Clerkenwell on Wednesdays, you know. What was it you said you wanted him for?”
“Just to interview him.”
“Ah. Well, I’m right sorry you missed him, then.”
Hero was planning to move their search to Westminster next. But she had this niggling feeling she was missing something—something that would be obvious if she only knew where to look. Yet after several hours of reading and rereading the same scribbled notations from her talks with a dozen or more street performers, she was beginning to suspect that the vague, fanciful notion was nothing more than wishful thinking.
“’Orses,” said Simon, who’d been playing with a small wagon at her feet but now looked up at the sound of a carriage dashing down the street. Simon had trouble with his h’s—amongst other sounds—with the result that he had a disconcerting tendency to sound like a Cockney street urchin.
“’Orses,” he said again, scrambling up into the chair beside her to lean against the caned back and peer out the windows overlooking the street.
The clatter of hooves and the rattle of trace chains drew Hero’s attention to a smart barouche and team drawing up before their steps. As Hero watched, a gentlewoman in an elegant sapphire blue walking dress and broad-brimmed hat appeared in the carriage’s doorway, then paused to thank the footman who’d let down the steps. Even from this distance, she projected an aura of rare grace and self-possession. A pigeon taking flight with a whirl of wings from the pediment of a nearby house caused her to look up, the brim of her hat lifting so that the morning light fell full on her face.
“Come, Simon,” said Hero, setting aside her notebook to lift the child from the chair. “Let’s go find Claire, shall we?” And then she went to ring the bell and send word to Morey that she was at home to Lady Forbes.
Chapter 50
T hank you for agreeing to receive me at such an unfashionably early hour,” said Lady Forbes.
“We keep very unfashionable hours around here,” said Hero with a smile. “Please, have a seat.”
Lady Forbes did not sit. Instead, she stood just inside the entrance to the drawing room, her face abnormally pale, her breathing noticeably agitated. Once, this woman had loved Nicholas Hayes enough to run away and seek to marry him. But after almost nineteen years, people changed, thought Hero—particularly when their circumstances altered so radically. Looking at her now, Hero found herself wondering how much of the passionate, willful nineteen-year-old girl Kate had once been still lingered within this poised, awe-inspiringly composed woman. Or had that vulnerable girl been squashed and left behind long ago?
The woman who was now the wife of Sir Lindsey Forbes jerked at th
e ribbons of her hat as if suddenly finding them too tight. “I’ve just heard that Lord Seaforth was found dead this morning. Is it true?”
“Yes,” said Hero baldly.
“Dear God.” Katherine Forbes turned away, one hand coming up to press against her lips as if she was momentarily overwhelmed by what she’d just heard. And it came to Hero, watching her, that this was a woman who’d long ago learned to hide every wayward emotion and betraying thought. That what Hero had at first taken as calm self-possession was actually a painstakingly constructed facade.
And that facade was cracking.
She watched as Katherine Forbes carefully set about tucking away everything she didn’t want seen. When she turned to face Hero again, head held high, only her unnatural pallor betrayed her. “I ask that you and Lord Devlin keep what I have to tell you in the strictest confidence . . . if at all possible.”
“You have my word.”
“Thank you.”
She sat then, tensely, on the very front edge of the sofa facing the windows, her reticule gripped with both hands on her knees as if it could somehow protect her from the consequences of what she was about to say. “I’m here because Lord Seaforth’s death has led me to fear that my previous lack of honesty may in some way I don’t understand have contributed to the Earl’s death.”
She paused, as if unable to go on, and Hero said quietly, “You saw Nicholas, didn’t you?”
Kate sucked in a quick breath, then nodded. “We were just returning to St. James’s Square—Sir Lindsey and I. We’d been visiting acquaintances, and it was early evening, that time of day when the setting sun lends such a glorious golden light to everything. I looked across at the square, thinking how pretty it all was, and . . . I saw Nicholas standing there, by the fence around the water basin.”