Where Serpents Sleep

by Harris, C. S.

  The realization of what Gibson was saying spread through Sebastian like a strange numbing sensation. Sir Humphrey Carmichael and Lord Stanton, along with an East India Company man named Atkinson, had all died for the same reason. “And Felix Atkinson? He was killed the same way?”

  “Yes.”

  Sebastian walked out of the dank, foul-smelling building into the sunlit garden. Last night’s rain had cleansed the dust from the air, leaving the sky scrubbed so clean and blue it nearly hurt the eyes to look at it. “It makes no sense,” said Sebastian, aware of Gibson coming to stand beside him.

  “I didn’t think so. But then I thought maybe I was missing something.”

  Sebastian shook his head. A hideous possibility dawned, that all of this—the attack on the Magdalene House, Miss Jarvis’s interest in solving the riddle of Rachel Fairchild’s fall from grace and subsequent murder, even that poignant brush with death beneath the ancient gardens of Somerset House—had all been a part of some diabolical charade designed by Jarvis to draw him into . . . what? And for what purpose?

  There was only one thing Sebastian did know: While their deaths had never been officially solved, the men Gibson had listed—Stanton, Carmichael, and Atkinson—had all been killed on the orders of the same man.

  Charles, Lord Jarvis.

  Chapter 57

  Sebastian slapped open the door to Lord Jarvis’s Carlton House antechamber and strode purposefully toward the inner sanctum. From behind the closed panel came the measured drone of the Baron’s voice.

  “Sir!” A pathetically thin clerk with bushy eyebrows and a cadaver’s pallor gasped and scrambled after him. “Lord Jarvis is dealing with important affairs of state. You can’t just go barging in there.”

  Ignoring him, Sebastian thrust open the door to the inner chamber.

  “As for the revenue—” Lord Jarvis broke off, frowning as his head turned toward the door. He sat at his ease on a settee with crocodile-shaped feet and plump cushions covered in brown-and-turquoise-striped silk. From a long table near the window overlooking the Mall, a second clerk occupied with the task of transcribing his lordship’s words looked up, his eyes widening in horror.

  “Just what the bloody hell did you do?” Sebastian demanded without preamble. “Get your daughter to lure me into one of your diabolical plots so you could use me as a stalking horse?”

  Jarvis cast a frozen stare first at one clerk, then the other. “Leave us. Both of you.”

  Bowing his head, the man at the table scuttled away, his papers clutched to his chest, the first clerk at his heels.

  Jarvis leaned back against the silk cushions, his arms comfortably spread out along the settee’s back, his big body relaxed. Far from being intimidated by Sebastian’s angry, looming presence, the Baron looked vaguely amused. “My daughter approached you on her own initiative,” he said. “If she employed some subterfuge to draw you into this investigation, it was not of my devising.”

  Sebastian felt the heat of an old rage course through him, blending with the new. “You expect me to believe that? When your henchmen have been killing everyone from Hessy Abrahams to Sir William Hadley?”

  With deliberate slowness, Jarvis extracted an enameled snuffbox from his coat pocket and flipped it open. “And who, precisely, is Hessy Abrahams?”

  “Don’t your men even bother to tell you the names of the people they kill?”

  “Only if they’re important.”

  Sebastian resisted with difficulty the urge to smash his fist into the big man’s fleshy, complacent face. “What precisely were their orders? To kill everyone connected with this incident in any way?”

  Rather than answer, Jarvis lifted a pinch of snuff to one nostril and sniffed. He looked utterly bored and uninterested, but Sebastian knew it was all for effect. “What gives you the impression my men were responsible for the death of Sir William Hadley?”

  “The manner of Hadley’s death—and Hessy Abrahams’s, and half a dozen others—is exactly the same as that employed to dispose of those individuals like Carmichael and Stanton who have displeased you in the past. It’s so unique it’s like a signature. There can’t be many men in England who know how to kill instantly with the simple snapping of a neck.”

  Jarvis closed his snuffbox with a soft click. He was no longer smiling. “If you want me to believe this accusation, you need to tell me what you have discovered.”

  “Why? So your henchmen can kill anyone they’ve missed?”

  “Have they missed anyone?”

  Sebastian thought of Hannah Green, and the blind harp player from the Academy, and realized the list was actually rather short.

  Jarvis pushed to his feet and went to stand at the window overlooking the Mall. Watching him, Sebastian realized that his anger might have led him to misinterpret the situation. It was possible the plot to kill Perceval was Jarvis’s own, but that the big man remained ignorant of both his hirelings’ indiscretion on the night of Somerville’s birthday celebration and their subsequent attempts to cover it up.

  Fixing his gaze on Jarvis’s face, Sebastian provided the King’s powerful cousin with a succinct version of the past two weeks’ events as he understood them.

  But Jarvis never gave anything away. In the end, he merely said calmly, “Why would my henchman, as you call him, want to kill the Prime Minister?” The use of the singular—henchman as opposed to henchmen—was not lost on Sebastian. “There are far less spectacular ways of getting rid of Spencer Perceval,” Jarvis was saying, “if that were indeed my wish. The Prince is easily persuadable. One need only whisper in the royal ear.”

  “You could intend to use Perceval’s death to inflame public opinion. Or as an excuse to move against an enemy.”

  “I could,” agreed Jarvis. “But I don’t.”

  The two men’s gazes met, and for one fleeting moment, Jarvis’s famed self-possession slipped. Sebastian saw swift comprehension mingled with horror and the dawning of a fury so white-hot it swept away whatever lingering doubts Sebastian might still have had. And he knew in that instant that Jarvis would never forgive him for this, never forgive him for having been privy to the enormity of his failure.

  “What are you saying? That your man is acting on his own for reasons neither one of us understands?” Sebastian gave a low laugh. “That’s rich. You think you know everything and control everything. Yet your agent has nearly killed your own daughter three times, and may yet succeed in assassinating the Prime Minister.”

  Jarvis frowned. “Three times?”

  Too late, Sebastian recalled the Baron’s ignorance of the third incident. He flattened his hands on the surface of the table between them and leaned forward. “Tell me the man’s name.”

  Jarvis’s fist clenched around his snuffbox so hard Sebastian heard the delicate metal crack. “Epson-Smith. Colonel Bryce Epson-Smith.”

  Chapter 58

  The rooms occupied by Colonel Bryce Epson-Smith were on the first floor of a genteel house just off Bedford Square. Sebastian arrived there shortly after four to find the former hussar colonel gone from home. A terse conversation with the Colonel’s majordomo elicited the information that the Colonel was spending the afternoon escorting the family of a Liverpudlian friend to the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art.

  Turning south toward the river, Sebastian dropped his hands and let the chestnuts shoot forward. “If’n ’e’s lookin’ at pictures, at least ’e ain’t killin’ the Prime Minister,” said Tom, clamping his hat down tighter on his head and tightening his hold on his perch.

  Sebastian kept his attention on his horses, feathering the corner as he swung onto Drury Lane. He had a niggling sense that he was still missing something. A connection he should have seen, perhaps, or an implication that continued to elude him.

  The Royal Academy of Art occupied rooms in the large neoclassical pile on the Thames that had replaced the Duke of Somerset’s original palace. Pulling up on the Strand, Sebastian tossed the reins to Tom and hit the footpath
running. He sprinted toward the vestibule, heedless of the shocked expressions and muttered tut-tuts, and took the steep, winding staircase two steps at a time. The Academy, like all the other societies and governmental departments housed in the building, occupied a vertical slice of all six floors. To take advantage of the natural light provided by a skylight, the Academy had placed their Exhibition Room in the high-ceilinged, nearly square space at the very top of the stairs.

  Breathing hard, Sebastian burst into a chamber crowded with more than a thousand paintings, which climbed toward the ceiling in row after row hung together so closely that their heavy gilt frames nearly touched. At the sound of his hurried footsteps crossing the polished floor, the small party gathered beneath the central lantern turned. Sebastian had a vague impression of two wan-faced women in plain round bonnets and unfashionably cut pelisses, one clutching the hand of a half-grown girl, the other attempting to restrain a fidgety boy of perhaps eight. Beside them, Epson-Smith cut a dashing figure in his military-styled coat, shining top boots, and swooping side whiskers.

  His gaze fixed firmly on the former hussar officer, Sebastian walked up to the small group and executed a short bow. “Ladies, if you’ll excuse us? The Colonel and I have something to discuss.”

  The men’s gazes met, clashed. “This won’t take but a moment,” said Epson-Smith to his companions. “Some friends of one of my acquaintances from Liverpool,” he told Sebastian as they moved away from the ladies. “I thought it would make a nice outing.”

  Sebastian kept his own tone low, conversational. “Lord Jarvis might be a powerful protector, but he also makes a powerful enemy. I’ve no doubt he’d be willing to overlook the murder of any number of unimportant people, but he’s not at all pleased with your little plot to kill the Prime Minister. And as for your attempts on the life of his daughter . . . I’d say you’ve signed your own death warrant.”

  The man’s complacent arrogance never faltered. “You’ve no proof tying me to any of this,” he said, still faintly smiling.

  “Not enough to convict you in a court of law,” Sebastian conceded. “But then, you’ll never see the inside of a courtroom. The only thing that matters is what Jarvis believes.”

  “True. Only, why should he believe you? You’ve threatened to kill him—several times, whereas I have served him faithfully for nearly four years now.”

  “Faithfully and efficiently,” said Sebastian, dodging one of the pedestals topped with a particularly hideous set of bronzes that littered the Exhibition Room’s floor. “It’s a distinctive way of killing—just a quick snap of the neck. Where’d you learn it?”

  The Colonel’s smile hardened. “The Sudan.”

  Through the glass of the skylight, Sebastian could see the afternoon clouds building overhead, bunching masses of angry black turmoil. The room grew perceptibly darker. “What precisely is your argument with Perceval?” he asked.

  Epson-Smith’s lips pressed into a thin, tight line. “Thanks to the incompetence of his government, my regiment went through hell in Argentina. We were promised compensation, but Perceval deemed it an extravagant and unnecessary expense, and canceled the arrangements. Thanks to his damnable interference, the ambitions of the few men who survived have been shattered, while the widows of those who died are ruined.”

  “You would kill him over that?”

  Epson-Smith pivoted to look back at the small party of women and children now clustered at the far end of the room. “Not me,” he said calmly. “Perceval has made many enemies. A man driven by passion can sometimes be goaded to act in ways not precisely in his own best interest. Particularly when he’s not in his right mind.”

  “Bellingham,” said Sebastian, remembering the half-mad Liverpudlian he and Perceval had encountered on the footpath outside Almack’s.

  “You know him? Then what a pity you’ve just missed him. He was here with us, you know, but he had to leave early. Some business to attend to, I believe he said. At the House of Commons.”

  Sebastian swung toward the steps, but Epson-Smith put out a hand that closed on Sebastian’s forearm in a surprisingly strong grip. “You’re too late,” said the Colonel.

  Sebastian lunged toward him, trying to break the man’s hold on his arm. But in a maneuver Sebastian didn’t see coming, the ex-hussar spun Sebastian around, one arm clamping across Sebastian’s chest to grip him by his right arm and draw him back into Epson-Smith’s deadly embrace.

  “You kill me here, now, and you’ll never get away with it,” said Sebastian.

  The Colonel’s free hand came up to grasp Sebastian’s chin in an unexpectedly iron hold. “If Jarvis knows I tried to kill his daughter, I’m a dead man anyway.”

  One quick twist, Sebastian realized, and his neck would snap. Bucking against the man’s hold, Sebastian slammed his head back into Epson-Smith’s face, bone crunching cartilage. With a startled grunt, Epson-Smith loosened his grip on Sebastian just long enough for Sebastian to grasp the arm clamped across his chest and spin around, smashing the back of his fist into Epson-Smith’s bloody face. Still holding the man’s arm, Sebastian twisted it in and down, forcing Epson-Smith to pivot enough that Sebastian could stomp the heel of his right boot into the back of the man’s left knee.

  Epson-Smith went down on his knees, his left arm still held in Sebastian’s grasp. Too late, Sebastian saw the flash of the blade that had appeared in the man’s right hand. Slashing upward, he laid open Sebastian’s forearm to the bone.

  Sebastian stumbled back, slipping in his own blood, bumping into one of the Exhibition Room’s pedestals. Whirling, he caught up the bronze statue of a satyr and hurled it. As Epson-Smith ducked sideways, Sebastian yanked his own knife from his boot and charged. With a sweep of his forearm, Sebastian knocked the wrist of the hand holding the blade aside and drove his own dagger deep into Epson-Smith’s chest.

  He became aware, suddenly, of a woman screaming, a man’s harsh shout, running footsteps. Yanking his knife free, sliding in the spreading pool of blood, Sebastian hurtled back down the steep winding stairs. Sprinting across the vestibule, he set up a call for his curricle. If only Tom hadn’t gone far—

  “ ’Oly ’ell, gov’nor!” Wide-eyed, Tom reined the chestnuts in hard before the vestibule’s entrance. “You’re bleedin’ worse’n a leaky bucket.”

  Sebastian scrambled into the curricle. “You drive,” he said, yanking off his cravat to wind the long strip of linen around his throbbing arm. “The House of Commons. Quickly!”

  Chapter 59

  “What’s all this then?” Tom demanded, struggling to thread the curricle through the tangle of chaises, sedan chairs, gigs, and hackneys that clogged Parliament Street from Whitehall to far beyond the houses of Parliament and the Abbey.

  “There’s to be an inquiry this evening into the Orders in Council,” Sebastian said as the bells of the Abbey began to toll five o’clock. Men shouted and whips cracked. A donkey brayed. Ragged urchins and barking dogs darted past, the boys whooping and laughing. “Looks like it’s attracting the devil of a crowd.”

  “What time’s the Prime Minister s’posed to arrive?”

  “Five o’clock.” From up ahead came the crash of splintering wood as a landau hooked one of its wheels with a coal cart. “Bloody hell,” said Sebastian, grasping the seat rail with his good hand. “Pull up here. I can make better time on foot.”

  He leapt from the curricle and started running. Pushing his way up Margaret Street, he cut across Old Palace Yard to the small former chapel that stood at right angles to Westminster Hall and served as the House of Commons. Bursting through the double doors, he found himself in a dark, low-ceilinged lobby crowded with a throng of spectators queuing patiently for a spot in the galleries. He knew a surge of relief. He wasn’t too late.

  Glancing around, Sebastian snagged the arm of a self-important clerk bustling past and hauled him back. “Where is Perceval? Is he here yet? Tell me quickly, man.”