by C. S. Harris
Where Shadows Dance
( Sebastian St Cyr Mystery - 6 )
C.S. Harris
Regency London: July 1812. How do you set about solving a murder no one can reveal has been committed?
That’s the challenge confronting C.S. Harris’s aristocratic soldier-turned-sleuth Sebastian St. Cyr when his friend, surgeon and “anatomist” Paul Gibson, illegally buys the cadaver of a young man from London’s infamous body snatchers. A rising star at the Foreign Office, Mr. Alexander Ross was reported to have died of a weak heart. But when Gibson discovers a stiletto wound at the base of Ross’s skull, he can turn only to Sebastian for help in catching the killer.
Described by all who knew him as an amiable young man, Ross at first seems an unlikely candidate for murder. But as Sebastian’s search takes him from the Queen’s drawing rooms in St. James’s Palace to the embassies of Russia, the United States, and the Turkish Empire, he plunges into a dangerous shadow land of diplomatic maneuvering and international intrigue, where truth is an elusive commodity and nothing is as it seems.
Meanwhile, Sebastian must confront the turmoil of his personal life. Hero Jarvis, daughter of his powerful nemesis Lord Jarvis, finally agrees to become his wife. But as their wedding approaches, Sebastian can’t escape the growing realization that not only Lord Jarvis but Hero herself knows far more about the events surrounding Ross’s death than they would have him believe.
Then a second body is found, badly decomposed but bearing the same fatal stiletto wound. And Sebastian must race to unmask a ruthless killer who is now threatening the life of his reluctant bride and their unborn child.
To my mother,
Bernadine Wegmann Proctor,
1917-2010
The old tree groans to the blast; The falling branch resounds. The wind drives the clung thorn Along the sighing grass; He shakes amid the night. Dark, dusky, howling is night, Cloudy, windy, full of ghosts; The dead are abroad; my friends Receive me from the night.
—from “The Six Bards,”
James MacPherson, 1736—1796
Chapter 1
Friday, 24 July 1812
A cool wind gusted up, rustling the branches of the trees overhead and bringing with it the unmistakable clatter of wooden wheels approaching over cobblestones. Standing just outside the open gate to the alley, Paul Gibson doused his lantern, his eyes straining as he peered into the fog-swirled darkness. Thick clouds bunched overhead, obscuring the moon and stars and promising more rain. He could see nothing but high, rough stone walls and a refuse-choked muddy lane curving away into the mist.
A dog barked somewhere in the night. In spite of himself, Gibson shivered. It was a dirty business, this. But until the government revised its laws on human dissection, anatomists like Gibson could either resign themselves to ignorance or meet the resurrection men in the darkest hours before dawn.
Paul Gibson was not fond of ignorance.
He was a slim, dark-haired man of medium height, Irish born and in his thirty-second year. Trained as a surgeon, he’d honed his skills on the battlefields of Europe. But a French cannonball that shattered the lower part of one leg had left him with recurring pain and a weakness for the sweet relief to be found in poppies. Now he shared his knowledge of anatomy by teaching at hospitals like St. Thomas’s and St. Bartholomew’s, as well as working out of his small surgery here at the base of Tower Hill.
The dog barked again, followed this time by a man’s low curse. A two-wheeled cart loomed out of the mist, the rawboned mule between the poles snorting and jibing at the bit when the driver drew up with a guttural, “Whoa there, ye bloomin’ idiot. Where ye think yer goin’? We got one more delivery t’ make before ye can head home t’ yer barn.”
A tall, skeletally thin man in striped trousers and a natty coat jumped from the cart and tipped his top hat in a flourishing bow. As he straightened, a waft of gin underlaid with the sweet scent of decay carried on the wind. “We got him fer ye, Doctor,” said Jumpin’ Jack Cochran with a broad wink. “Mind ye, he’s not as fresh as I like me merchandise t’ be, but ye did say ye wanted this particular gentleman.”
Gibson peered over the cart’s side at the bulky, man-sized burlap sack that lay within. Another name for the resurrection men was the sack-’em-up boys. “You’re certain you’ve got the right one?”
“It’s him, all right.” Cochran motioned at the sturdy lad who accompanied him. “Grab the other end there, Ben.”
Grunting softly, the two men slung the burlap-wrapped merchandise off the back of the cart. It landed heavily in the rank grass beside the gate.
“Careful,” said Gibson.
Cochran grinned, displaying long tobacco-stained teeth. “I can guarantee he didn’t feel a thing, Doctor.”
Hefting the heavy sack between them, the two men carried the merchandise into the stone outbuilding at the base of Gibson’s overgrown garden and heaved it up onto the granite slab table that stood in the center of the room. Working quickly, they peeled away the mud-encrusted sack to reveal the limp body of a young man, his dark hair fashionably cut, his hands soft and well manicured, as befitted a gentleman. His pale, naked flesh was liberally streaked with dirt, for the body snatchers had stripped off his shroud and grave clothes and stuffed them back into his coffin before refilling the tomb. There was no law against carting a dead body through the streets of London. But stealing a cadaver and its grave clothes could earn a man seven years in Botany Bay.
“Sorry about the mud,” said Cochran. “We’ve had a mite o’ rain today.”
“I understand. Thank you, gentlemen,” said Gibson. “Here’s your twenty guineas.”
It was the going price for an adult male; adult females generally went for fifteen, with children being sold by the foot. Cochran shook his head and hawked up a mouthful of phlegm he shot out the door. “Nah. Make it eighteen. I got me professional pride, and he’s not as fresh as I like ’em t’ be, even if he was kept on ice afore he was planted. But ye would have this one.”
Gibson stared at the pallid, handsome face of the body lying on his dissection table. “It’s not often a healthy young man succumbs to a weak heart. This gentleman’s body has much to teach us about diseases of the circulation system.”
“Weery interestin’, I’m sure,” said Cochran, scooping up his muddy sack. “Thank ye kindly fer the business, and a weery good night t’ ye, sir.”
After the men had left, Gibson relit his lantern and hung it from the chain suspended above the table. The lantern swayed gently back and forth, the golden light playing over the pale flesh of the body below. In life, his name had been Alexander Ross. A well-formed gentleman in his mid-twenties, he’d had long, leanly muscled arms and legs and a broad chest tapering to a slim waist and hips. He looked as if he should have been the epitome of health. Yet five days ago, his heart had stopped as he slept peacefully in his own bed.
The delicate dissection of the defective heart would need to wait until daylight. But Gibson set to work with a bowl of warm water and a cloth, sponging off the mud of the graveyard and casting a preliminary practiced eye over the corpse.
It was when he was washing the soil from the back of the man’s neck that he found it: a short purple slit at the base of the skull. Frowning, Gibson reached for a probe and watched in horror as it slid in four inches, easily following the path previously cut through living flesh by a stiletto.
Taking a step back, he set aside the probe with a soft clatter, his teeth sinking into his lower lip as he brought his gaze back to the young man’s alabaster face. “Mother of God,” he whispered. “You didn’t die of a defective heart. You were murdered.”
Chapter 2
T he first rays of the rising sun caught the
heavy mist off the river and turned it into shimmering wisps of gold and pink that hugged the wet rooftops and church spires of the city. Standing beside his bedroom window, Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, cradled a glass of brandy in one hand. Behind him lay the tangled, abandoned ruin of his bed. He had not slept.
He was a tall man, leanly built. Not yet thirty years of age, he had dark hair and strange yellow eyes with an unnatural ability to see clearly at great distances or at night, when reality was reduced for most men to vague shadows of gray. Now, as the world outside the window brightened, he brought the brandy to his lips only to hesitate and set it aside untasted.
There were times when memories of the past tormented his sleep and drove him from his bed, times when his dreams echoed with the crash of cannonballs and the screams of mangled men, when the cloying scent of death haunted him and would not go away. But not this night. This night, he was troubled more by the present than by the past. By a life-altering truth revealed too late and a future he did not want but was honor bound to seek.
He reached again for his brandy, only to pause as the sound of frantic knocking reverberated though the house. Jerking up the sash, he leaned out, the cool air of morning biting his bare flesh as he shouted down at the figure on the steps below, “What the bloody hell do you want?”
The man’s head fell back, revealing familiar features. “That you, Devlin?”
“Gibson?” Sebastian was suddenly, painfully sober. “I’ll be right down.”
Pausing only to throw on a pair of breeches and a silk dressing gown, he hurried downstairs. He found his majordomo, Morey, dressed in a paisley gown of astonishingly lurid reds and blues, and clutching a flickering candle that tipped dangerously as he worked at drawing back the bolts on the front door.
“Go back to bed, Morey,” said Sebastian. “I’ll deal with this.”
“Yes, my lord.” A former gunnery sergeant, the majordomo gave a dignified bow and withdrew.
Sebastian yanked open the front door. His friend practically fell into the marble-floored entrance hall. “What the devil’s happened, Gibson? What is it?”
Gibson leaned against the wall. He was breathing heavily, his normally jaunty face haggard and streaked with sweat. From the look of things, he hadn’t been able to find a hackney and had simply hurried the distance from the Tower to Mayfair on foot—not an easy journey for a man with a wooden leg.
He swallowed hard and said, “I have a wee bit of a problem.”
Sebastian stared down at the pale body stretched out on his friend’s granite slab and tried to avoid breathing too deeply.
The sun was up by now. The wind had blown away the clouds and the last of the mist to leave the sky scrubbed blue and empty. Already, the day promised to be warm. From the corpse before him rose a sickly sweet odor of decay.
“You know,” said Sebastian, rubbing his nose, “if you’d left the man in his grave where he belonged, you wouldn’t have a problem.”
Gibson stood on the far side of the table, his arms folded at his chest. “It’s a little late now.”
Sebastian grunted. To some, they might seem unlikely friends, this Earl’s heir and the Irish surgeon with a passion for unraveling the secrets of the human body. But there had been a time when both had worn the King’s colors, when they’d fought together from the West Indies and Italy to the mountains of Portugal. Theirs was a friendship forged in all the horrors of blood and mud and looming death. Now they shared a dedication to truth and a passionate anger at the wanton, selfish destruction of one human being by another.
Gibson scrubbed a hand across his lower face. “It’s not like I can walk into Bow Street and say, ‘By the way, mates, I thought you might be interested to hear that I bought a body filched from St. George’s churchyard last night. Yes, I know it’s illegal, but here’s the thing: It appears this gentleman—whose friends all think died in his sleep—was actually murdered.’”
Sebastian huffed a soft, humorless laugh. “Not if you value your life.”
The authorities tended to turn a blind eye to the activities of body snatchers, unless they were caught red-handed. But the inhabitants of London were considerably less sanguine about the unauthorized dissection of their nearest and dearest. When word spread of a body snatching, hordes of hysterical relatives had a nasty habit of descending on the city’s churchyards to dig up the remains of their loved ones. Since they frequently discovered only empty coffins and torn grave clothes, the resultant mobs then turned their fury on the city’s hospitals and the homes of known anatomists, smashing and burning, and savaging any medical men unlucky enough to fall into their clutches.
Gibson was well-known as an anatomist.
Sebastian said, “Perhaps Jumpin’ Jack dug up the wrong body.”
Gibson shook his head. “I plan to check the Bills of Mortality later today to make certain, but my money’s on Jumpin’ Jack. If he says this is Alexander Ross, then this is Alexander Ross.”
Sebastian walked around the table, his gaze on the pale corpse.
Gibson said, “Do you recognize him?”
“No. But then, to my knowledge I’ve never met anyone named Alexander Ross.”
“I’m told he had lodgings in St. James’s Street, above the Je Reviens coffeehouse.”
Sebastian nodded. St. James’s was a popular locale for young gentlemen. “Who told you he died of a defective heart?”
“A colleague of mine at St. Thomas’s—Dr. Astley Cooper. He was called in to examine the body. Swore there were no signs of any violence or illness; the man was simply lying dead in his bed when his valet came to rouse him that morning. Cooper was convinced he must have had a weak heart. That’s why I was so eager to dissect the body—to observe whatever malformation or damage might be present.”
Sebastian hunkered down to study the telltale slit at the base of the man’s skull. “Your Dr. Cooper obviously didn’t think to look at the back of his patient’s neck. But surely a wound like this would bleed. Wouldn’t the pillow and sheets have been covered in blood?”
“If Mr. Ross were killed in his bed. Obviously, he wasn’t. Someone must have gone through a great deal of trouble to make this death look natural.”
“And if not for you, he would have succeeded.” Sebastian straightened and went to stand in the open doorway overlooking the unkempt garden that stretched from the stone outbuilding to the surgery beyond.
Gibson came to stand beside him. After a moment, the Irishman said, “Looks like a professional’s work, doesn’t it?”
“It could well be.”
“I can’t pretend I didn’t see this.”
Sebastian blew out a long breath. “It’s not going to be easy, investigating a murder no one knows occurred.”
“But you’ll do it?”
Sebastian glanced back at the pallid corpse on Gibson’s dissection table.
The man looked to be much the same age as Sebastian, perhaps a few years younger. He should have had decades of rewarding life ahead of him. Instead he was reduced to this, a murdered cadaver on a surgeon’s slab. And Sebastian knew a deep and abiding fury directed toward whoever had brought Ross to this end.
“I’ll do it.”
Chapter 3
T he milkmaids were still making their rounds, heavy pails swinging from yokes slung across their shoulders, when Sebastian climbed the shallow front steps of his elegant, bow-fronted establishment on Brook Street.
“A note arrived a few moments ago from the Earl of Hendon,” said Morey, meeting Sebastian at the door with a silver tray bearing a missive sealed with the St. Cyr crest.
Sebastian made no move to pick it up. Until a week ago, he had called Hendon father. Sebastian supposed that he might eventually adjust to the brutal realization that he was not in truth the person the world still believed him to be, that far from being the legitimate son of the Earl of Hendon he was in fact the by-blow of the Earl’s beautiful, errant Countess and some unnamed lover. Perhaps in time he would learn to
understand and forgive the lies Hendon had told him over the years. But Sebastian knew he could never forgive Hendon for allowing him to believe that the love of his life was his own sister. For that lie had turned their love into something sordid and wicked and driven the woman Sebastian had hoped to make his wife into a loveless marriage with another man.
“Send Calhoun to me,” said Sebastian, leaving the note on the tray as he headed for the stairs.
The shadow of some emotion quickly suppressed flickered across the majordomo’s face. “Yes, my lord.”
Sebastian took the steps two at a time, stripping off his coat of dark blue superfine as he went. He was in his dressing room, pulling a clean shirt over his head, when Jules Calhoun, his valet, appeared in the doorway.
“I’d like you to find out what you can about a gentleman named Mr. Alexander Ross,” said Sebastian. “I understand he had lodgings in St. James’s Street.”
A small, slim man with even features, Calhoun was a genius of a valet, uncomplainingly cheerful and skilled in all manner of refined arts. And since he had begun life in one of London’s most notorious flash houses, some of his more unusual talents were of considerable use to a gentleman who had made solving murders his life’s passion.
Calhoun picked up Sebastian’s discarded coat and sniffed. The faint but unmistakable odor of decay lingered. “I take it Mr. Ross has been murdered?”
“By a stiletto thrust to the base of his skull.”
“Unusual,” said Calhoun.
“Very. Unfortunately, the world believes he died peacefully in his sleep, so this one’s going to be rather delicate.”
Calhoun handed Sebastian a fresh cravat and bowed. “I shall be the model of discretion.”
Lifting his chin, Sebastian looped the cravat around his neck and grunted.