Where Serpents Sleep

by Harris, C. S.

  He shook his head. “I don’t understand it.”

  “I know.”

  He hesitated, and she knew again the fear that he would forbid her to continue her inquiries. But all he said was, “I would ask you to be careful.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  He nodded. “You are unusually sensible for a woman . . . however ill advised your political ideas are.”

  She knew he had said it to provoke her. But she only smiled and refused to rise to the bait.

  That night, Hero and her mother were descending the steps of their Berkeley Square house toward the carriage that had been ordered to take them to a fashionable soiree when a malodorous little boy came pelting down the footpath toward them.

  “My goodness,” gasped Lady Jarvis, shrinking back in a cloud of pale azure satin as the boy slammed right into Hero.

  “You there,” shouted the butler, starting forward, “watch where you’re going.”

  But the boy was already off, feet flying, one hand held up to clamp his cap to his head as he disappeared around the corner.

  “Brazen guttersnipes,” muttered Grisham, staring after him. “Whatever is the world coming to? I trust you suffered no harm, Miss Jarvis?”

  “I’m fine,” said Hero, the folded missive slipped her by the boy carefully tucked out of sight.

  Chapter 39

  FRIDAY, 8 MAY 1812

  The next day Hero dressed in her plainest riding gown topped by a particularly ugly hat with a dense veil that made her grandmother tut-tut and prophesy she was destined to end her days as an old maid.

  “I sincerely hope so,” said Hero, then prudently whisked herself out of the room to avoid being sucked into an old and well-worn argument.

  She evaded the watchdog set by her father simply by descending into the kitchens to confer with the housekeeper and then slipping out by the area steps. Walking briskly to the corner of Davies Street, she caught a hackney and directed the driver to Number 41 Brook Street.

  It was most unseemly for a young unmarried woman to visit the house of an unmarried gentleman—particularly without her maid. Hero had given the situation considerable thought, but in the end decided there was no avoiding it. She had promised her father she would not put herself in danger, and Hero Jarvis kept her promises. Her major concern was that she might find Lord Devlin already gone from home.

  Paying off the hackney, she rang an imperious peal on the Viscount’s door. It was opened almost at once by a military-looking majordomo who regarded her with unconcealed suspicion.

  “Pray inform Lord Devlin that I am here to see him,” she said loftily.

  “And whom shall I say is calling?”

  “My good man,” said Hero at her most condescending, “if I wanted you to know my name, I would have given it to you.”

  The majordomo hesitated. Fear of giving offense to a veiled noblewoman warred with the horror of ushering some grasping harpy into his master’s presence. Fear of giving offense won. He bowed and let her in. “One moment while I see if his lordship is receiving.”

  He achieved a measure of revenge by leaving her in the hall rather than ushering her into a receiving room. He returned in a moment, his face giving nothing away, to lead her upstairs to the drawing room. “Tea will arrive shortly,” drawled the majordomo, and withdrew.

  Pushing back her veil, Hero prowled the room. She studied the curious, intricately incised brass platter on one wall, the carved wooden head that looked as if it had come from Africa on another. A tea tray arrived along with a plate of bread and butter, but she ignored it, her attention caught by a painting over the mantel. It was by Gainsborough, of a laughing young woman with unpowdered golden hair and a braid-trimmed riding costume in the style of the last century. Hero could trace the resemblance to the Viscount in the flare of the woman’s cheekbones, the curve of the lips. So this was Devlin’s mother, Hero thought. They still talked about the long-dead Countess of Hendon in scandalized whispers.

  She was so absorbed in her study of the painting that she failed to hear the door open behind her.

  “I suspected it was you,” said an amused voice, “from my majordomo’s description. I don’t know that many tall, haughty gentlewomen with the manner of a Turkish pasha.”

  She swung to face him. “I don’t know any Turkish pashas.”

  “Which is probably a good thing,” he said, leaving the door open behind him. “They like their women obsequious and agreeable.”

  “Like most Englishmen.”

  “Like most men,” he agreed, advancing into the room.

  He was dressed in doeskin breeches and a well-tailored dark coat, but his hair still curled damply away from his face. She said, “I’ve caught you at your bath.”

  “Actually, you caught me still abed.” He glanced at the tea, which she hadn’t touched. “Join me?” he asked, pouring a cup.

  She took it from his outstretched hand. “You haven’t asked why I’m here.”

  He poured himself a cup and lifted one of the pieces of buttered bread from the plate. “I have no doubt it is your intention to enlighten me.”

  He had a nearly limitless capacity for irritating her, and it did no good to remind herself that he provoked her intentionally. The urge to simply set down her tea and leave was overcome with difficulty; a promise was a promise. She said, “I’ve received a note from Tasmin Poole. A boy passed it to me as I was about to enter my carriage last night.”

  He selected another slice of buttered bread. “She has located the missing Hannah Green?”

  “So it seems. The woman is hiding in a cottage just off Strand Lane, and she has agreed to meet me there.”

  The Viscount swallowed his bread and took a sip of tea. “You’re suspicious. Why?”

  “I am to go there at midday with only one servant to accompany me. According to the note, these precautions are necessary because Hannah Green is frightened. I believe the note to be genuine, but I am aware of the possibility that it could be a trap.”

  “It certainly sounds like one to me.”

  “Yet if it’s not and I fail to go, the chance to meet Hannah Green will be lost.”

  He reached for another slice of bread. “Are you certain you don’t want some of this?” he asked, nudging the plate toward her. “It’s really quite good.”

  “Thank you, but I breakfasted hours ago.”

  “Is that an insult? I wonder.”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed and finished the last of the bread. “I think I begin to understand. If you were anyone else, I might assume you had come to ask for my advice. On the strength of our limited acquaintance, however, I suspect you have already made up your mind to go and have simply come here to request that I accompany you”—his gaze took in her riding costume—“posing, I take it, as your groom?”

  “And to beg the loan of a horse. I was forced to slip out the basement to avoid my watchdog.”

  “We could take a hackney.”

  “Then I would need a lady’s maid, not a groom,” she pointed out.

  “True. Unfortunately, I don’t own any ladies’ horses.”

  “Neither do I.” She glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantel. “If you have finished your tea and bread?”

  “It’s a trap, you know,” he said, suddenly serious.

  “Will you do it?”

  “Drink your tea,” he told her, “while I transfer myself into a more humble attire.”

  Lying just to the west of St. Clements, Strand Lane proved to be a narrow cobbled passage that wound a torturous path down toward the river.

  The day was overcast and cold, with the kind of biting wind more typical of March than May. Pausing his gelding at the head of the lane, Sebastian let his gaze flick to the watch house and church of St. Mary’s that had been left marooned in the center of the Strand by the widening of the street. “It seems an unlikely place for a frightened prostitute to go to ground,” he said.

  “Perhaps she grew up around here,” s
aid Miss Jarvis, reining in her mount beside him.

  He kneed his horse forward between aged gabled houses of timber and whitewashed daub that nearly met overhead. The buildings might be old, but they were well kept, the cobbles and worn doorsteps swept clean. A little girl dashed past, laughing as she chased a kitten through flowers tumbling out of green-painted window boxes. They passed a ramshackle old inn, the Cock and Magpie, and a livery. But within a hundred yards or so, the lane unexpectedly opened up to their right and Sebastian found himself staring out over a tumbledown stone wall at a stretch of open land.

  “It’s a curious place for a meeting,” he said, reining in. He could see, scattered amidst rioting wisteria and lilacs, the broken, ivy-covered statues and rusted iron gates of an abandoned garden that stretched all the way to the terrace and neoclassical side elevation of Somerset House in the distance.

  “It’s the ruins of the eastern gardens of the original Somerset House,” said Miss Jarvis. “When they tore down the old palace, the plan was to construct an eastern wing on the new building that would stretch nearly to Surrey Street. But the government ran out of money. My father is always raging about it. He thinks the capital of a great nation needs impressive government buildings, and London is woefully lacking in anything majestic or monumental.”

  Sebastian narrowed his eyes against the glint of the light reflected off the Thames. Down near the river’s edge, to their left, stood a lumberyard, its great stacks of drying timber towering twenty to thirty feet in the air. But a strange air of quiet hung over the area. “I don’t like it,” he said, thankful for the weight of the small, double-barreled flintlock pistol he’d slipped into the pocket of his groom’s coat before leaving Brook Street.

  “Surely if it were a trap,” she said, “the rendezvous would have been set for tonight. What are they going to do? Cosh me—and my servant—over the head in broad daylight? It’s not exactly a disreputable neighborhood.”

  “Would you have come here at night?”

  “Of course not.”

  Sebastian studied the expanse of overgrown gravel paths and untamed shrubbery. “Where exactly is this Hannah Green supposed to be?”

  “There,” said Miss Jarvis, nodding to what looked like a caretaker’s cottage at the base of the garden near the water’s edge.

  Sebastian swung out of the saddle. “Wait here,” he told her. “Your groom is going to knock on the door.”

  He expected her to argue. Instead, she took his reins in her strong gloved hand, a frown line forming between her eyes as she studied the small stone house.

  The original Somerset House had been built in the mid- sixteenth century by the Duke of Somerset, uncle and Lord Protector of the boy king Edward VI. A vast Renaissance palace, it had been pulled down late in the previous century and replaced by the current Somerset House, now used by various Royal societies and government offices. Only this stretch of the old gardens had survived. Once, the sandstone cottage near the river might have been a part of the ancient Tudor palace itself. A retainer’s lodge, perhaps, or a delightful garden retreat for the dowager queens who had once used the old palace as their Dower House. The echoes of the original house’s renaissance glory were there, in the crumbling stone steps, in the sweet-scented damask rose blooming stubbornly from amidst a thicket of thistles.

  Sebastian walked up the neglected path, the gravel crunching beneath his feet, his senses alert to any movement, any sound. The garden appeared deserted.

  Studying the cobwebs draping the delicately carved tracery of the windows and the leaded panes, Sebastian knocked on the warped old door and listened to the sound fade away into nothing. He was raising his fist to knock again when he heard a furtive whisper of sound from the far side of the thick panels. The scrape of a slipper over stone flagging, perhaps, or the brush of cloth against cloth.

  He waited, aware of a sense of being watched. Tilting back his head, he scanned the crenulated decoration at the wall’s edge, then heard the rasp of a bolt being drawn back.

  The door creaked inward a foot and stopped. He had a glimpse of a young woman’s pale face, her brown eyes widening in fear. Behind her stretched an empty stone-flagged passageway with thick whitewashed walls.

  “Miss Jarvis sent me to inquire—” he began, only to have the woman let out a little mewl of terror. Her hands slipping off the door’s latch, she whirled, her fists clenching in her skirts, her brown hair flying as she pelted back down the passageway.

  Thrusting open the door with one outflung hand, Sebastian sprinted after her. He took two steps, three, then felt a blinding pain that crashed down upon the back of his head and brought with it the bright darkness of oblivion.

  Chapter 40

  The pain was still there. He realized he was lying on something cold and hard. That confused him. He considered opening his eyes to investigate, but at the moment, that seemed more effort than it was worth. He lay still, trying to recall where he was and what he was doing here. He remembered handing the reins of his horse to Hero Jarvis. He remembered walking through the abandoned garden. Stone steps. A warped door. A brown-eyed woman running.

  He shifted his weight, wincing as a jagged agony arced around the side of his head. From somewhere quite close, he heard Miss Jarvis say, “You were right. It was a trap.”

  He opened his eyes.

  He found himself staring at a stone groined vault high above where he lay. The stones were old and worn, and stained with damp. Turning his head ever so carefully, he was able to see a row of thick, crude pillars holding up the roof and the no-nonsense face of Miss Jarvis.

  He groaned again and closed his eyes. “Where the hell are we?”

  “I’m not entirely certain what this place was originally. At first I thought it might be the crypt of one of the churches or chapels Somerset pulled down to build his palace. But more likely it’s simply a storeroom or cellar from one of the medieval bishops’ palaces he also tore down.”

  Sebastian brought up a hand to probe gingerly at the back of his head. “And why precisely are we here?”

  “I am told the vault floods when the tide comes in.”

  He opened his eyes again, his hand falling. He realized he was lying on a wide, elevated stone ledge some three feet off the ground that ran along as much of the crypt wall as he could see. She sat perched on the edge of the ledge beside him. She was hunched forward, her arms crossed at her waist, her hands hugging her elbows in close. From the way she had her jaw set, he suspected she was having to try very, very hard to keep control of herself. He realized her veiled hat was gone, her sleeve torn. However she had come to be here with him, she obviously had not come without a fight.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  She rocked gently back and forth in a movement so subtle he doubted that she even knew she was doing it. “I waited for you for about five minutes, but you never came back. Just as I was trying to decide what to do, a gentleman walked out of the Cock and Magpie and asked if I needed help.”

  “A gentleman?”

  “Most definitely a gentleman. He was both well dressed and well spoken. Just like the gentleman with the gig on the road from Richmond.”

  “And?” he prompted.

  “I wheeled my horse, meaning to flee. But he reached up and grabbed my reins just above the bit. And then he pulled a pistol on me.”

  “In a respectable neighborhood in broad daylight.”