by C. S. Harris
Sebastian studied the other man’s hard, sun-darkened face. He didn’t doubt for a moment that Knox had a damned good reason for showing him the manuscript, although he suspected friendship wasn’t part of it. But all he said was, “Who do you think killed Eisler?”
Knox leaned back in his seat and crossed his outthrust boots at the ankles. “I’d say there’s probably somewhere between five hundred and a thousand men—and women—in this town who wanted to see that bastard dead. With odds like that, it’s inevitable that he was eventually going to run up against someone willing to do more than just wish. But if you’re asking me for names . . . I haven’t any.”
“Except for Señor Ferdinand Arroyo?”
Knox brought his tankard to his lips and drank. “Last I heard, Arroyo was in Caen.”
Sebastian closed the aged manuscript’s fragile cover and rose to his feet. “Thank you.”
“Take it,” said Knox, leaning forward to push the manuscript across the table toward him. “I’ve no use for it. It’s not like I read Hebrew.”
“You could sell it.”
“The old-book business never appealed to me. Take it. If you can find someone to read it for you, you might find it . . . useful.”
Sebastian wondered what a three-hundred-year-old manuscript could tell him about last night’s murder of a diamond merchant. But he wrapped the aged volume in its oilcloth covering again and tucked it beneath his arm. “I’ll see it’s returned to you.”
Knox shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Sebastian had almost reached the door when Knox stopped him. “You said Eisler’s butler remembered me.”
Sebastian paused to look back at him. “That’s right.”
“I never gave him my name.”
“He didn’t know your name. But he remembered what you looked like.”
Knox widened his eyes. “His powers of description must be something to be wondered at.”
“He said you looked enough like me to be my brother.”
“Ah.”
The two men’s gazes met and held. Neither spoke, for there was no need. One might be the son of the beautiful, faithless Countess of Hendon, while the other was the bastard child of a Ludlow barmaid, but the resemblance between them was as undeniable as it was inexplicable.
Chapter 11
S
ebastian walked out of the Black Devil to find a woman waiting for him in a fashionable high-perch phaeton drawn by a dainty white mare. She had her famous auburn-shot hair tucked up beneath a shako-style hat, and a veil hid most of her face. But he would have recognized Kat Boleyn anywhere.
He paused for a moment, aware of an unpleasant tightening in his chest. Then he stepped up to the kerb. “How did you know where to find me?” he asked.
Rather than answer, she turned to the liveried groom at her side. “Wait for me here, Patrick.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, yielding his place to Sebastian.
“Yates told me you’d been to see him this morning,” she said as Sebastian vaulted up into the high seat beside her. “I wanted to thank you for offering to help.”
“For God’s sake, Kat. As if I wouldn’t? Why the bloody hell didn’t you come to me instead of Hendon?”
She gave her horses the office to start, her gaze on the lane ahead. “You know why.”
“If you’re worried about Hero, I think you underestimate her.”
She remained silent, her attention all for the task of guiding the mare between a brewer’s wagon and a coal cart.
He said, “You didn’t tell me how you knew where to find me.”
“It was more in the order of a good guess. Yates says Knox was involved in smuggling goods into the country for Eisler. Only, he doesn’t know what.”
Sebastian shifted his grip on the oilcloth bundle in his hands. “According to Knox, it was books. Strange old manuscripts written mainly in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.”
She threw him a quick, incredulous glance. “Old books? But . . . why?”
“He seems to have been something of a collector, our Mr. Eisler.”
“The man was a bastard.”
“That too.”
She swung sharply around the corner. “Does Knox know anything about Eisler’s death?”
“He says he doesn’t.”
“But you don’t believe him?”
“He’s not exactly a pillar of rectitude and responsibility.”
“True.”
Sebastian let his gaze travel over her exquisite, familiar features. He had fallen in love with her when she was sixteen and he barely twenty-one. So long ago now, long before Hendon’s machinations had driven them apart not once, but twice. Before Sebastian joined the army and saw death, destruction, and savage cruelty on a scale that had come close to expunging his humanity and withering his soul. Before Kat began feeding information to the French in an effort to aid Ireland, the land of her birth. Before she’d married Russell Yates in a desperate maneuver to save herself from the vindictive wrath of Charles, Lord Jarvis, who’d promised her torture and an ugly death.
Sebastian knew her marriage to Yates had never been—could never be—more than one of convenience. Yates’s association with the most beautiful, most desirable woman of the London stage was for him a tactic to quiet the whispers about his sexuality, while Kat, in exchange, gained the protection of whatever damaging information Yates held against Jarvis. It was a marriage devoid of both sexual attraction and romantic love. But Sebastian knew that over the past year the two had nevertheless become friends—good friends. And Kat had always been fiercely loyal to her friends.
Yet Sebastian couldn’t shake the feeling there was something more to her concern, a subtle nuance that eluded him.
He said, “You told me once that Yates has evidence against Jarvis—evidence of something that would ruin him if it became known.”
“Yes.”
“It should be in Jarvis’s best interest to see that no harm comes to Yates. If anyone has the power to get the charges against him dropped, it’s Jarvis. So why hasn’t he done it?”
She drew in a deep, troubled breath, a subtle betrayal that was unusual for her.
“What?” he asked, watching her.
“Jarvis visited Yates in his cell last night. Yates says he came to reassure him that he was in no danger.”
“But you don’t believe him?”
She shook her head, her lips pressed into a tight line as she turned her horse back onto Bishopsgate. “Yates used to think the evidence he has against Jarvis could protect us both. Only, I’m not so sure.”
Sebastian knew a sense of profound disquiet. If given a choice between saving Kat and saving himself, he had little doubt which Yates would choose.
But all he said was, “How well did you know Eisler?”
“I didn’t. But I’ve been asking around. Word on the street has it he was killed by a Parisian named Jacques Collot. Collot likes to claim he fled France during the Revolution because his monarchist principles were revolted by the excesses of republican and democratic fervor. But from what I’m hearing, the truth is probably considerably less flattering.”
Sebastian frowned. “What was his connection to Eisler?”
“Let’s just say Eisler wasn’t exactly careful about the origins of the jewels he bought. He also had a tendency to cheat the people he did business with.”
“You think he cheated Collot?”
She drew up outside the Black Devil again, where her groom was rushing to finish eating a paper-wrapped sausage he’d bought from a nearby cart. “They say Collot was heard raging about Eisler in a tavern just two nights ago—swore next time he saw the man he was going to kill him.”
“Drunken talk is cheap.”
“True. But it’s a place to start, isn’t it?”
“It is, yes. Do you know where I can find this man?”
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
He dropped lightly to the paving, then paused with one hand on the seat�
�s high railing. He had the unsettling sense that there were unseen but powerful forces at work behind all this. Powerful and dangerous. He glanced over at her groom. “Is your man armed?”
She pressed her lips into a thin, tight line and shook her head. “I refuse to allow Jarvis to frighten me.”
“Jarvis frightens me, Kat. Please, just . . . be careful.”
Returning to Brook Street, Sebastian sent for his valet and asked without preamble, “Ever hear of a somewhat unsavory Frenchman named Jacques Collot?”
Most gentlemen’s gentlemen would be outraged by their employer’s suggestion that they consorted with or were in any way familiar with the members of London’s vast criminal class. But Jules Calhoun was not your ordinary gentleman’s gentleman. Small and lithe, with a boyish shock of flaxen hair and a roguish smile, he was a genius at repairing the ravages the pursuit of murderers could at times inflict on Sebastian’s wardrobe. But he also possessed certain other skills useful to a man with Sebastian’s interests—skills that had their origins in the fact that he began life in one of the worst flash houses in London.
“I have heard of him, my lord,” said Calhoun. “I believe he arrived in London some ten or fifteen years ago. But I can’t say I know much about him.”
“Know where he lives?”
“No. But I can find out.”
Several hours later, Sebastian was seated at the desk in his library with Knox’s manuscript open before him when Hero came in.
She still wore her emerald green carriage dress, although the plume in her jaunty hat was now sadly drooping, for it had come on to rain. “Ah, there you are,” she said, taking off her hat to frown down at the bedraggled feather.
“So, did your crossing sweep talk to you?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.
“He did. And you would not believe some of the things he told me.” She came to peer over his shoulder at the manuscript. “I didn’t know you read Hebrew.”
“I don’t. I’m looking at the pictures. They’re . . . strange.”
She let her gaze run over the page, her eyes widening slightly at the illustration of what looked like a spinning wheel surrounded by odd symbols. “Where did this come from?”
“I’m told it was smuggled into the country for Daniel Eisler, although he died before he could take delivery. And I haven’t the slightest idea what it is.”
She turned the pages, pausing to stare at an illustration of a fanged demon with the wings of an eagle. “I could be wrong, but it looks as if your Mr. Eisler was interested in the occult.”
“What makes you think—” He broke off as Calhoun appeared in the doorway.
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” said the valet, beginning to back away. “I’d no notion her ladyship—”
“That’s quite all right,” said Sebastian. “Did you find Collot?”
“I did, my lord. I’m told he keeps a room at the Pilgrim in White Lyon Street.”
“Good God.”
The valet’s eyes danced with amusement. “I take it you’re familiar with the establishment?”
“I am.”
Calhoun cast a significant glance at Hero, who was busy thumbing through the tattered old manuscript. “Shall I have Tom bring the curricle around, my lord?”
“No; after last night, I told him I wanted him to rest today. Send Giles.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Who’s Collot?” Hero asked after Calhoun had gone. “And what is so nasty about the Pilgrim that neither you nor Calhoun care to sully my lady’s delicate ears with it?”
Sebastian gave a soft laugh. “Collot is a reputedly unsavory Frenchman who may have had something to do with Eisler’s death, while the Pilgrim is a den of vice and iniquity in Seven Dials.”
“Hmm. You’ll take a pistol with you, of course?”
“My dear Lady Devlin, are you perhaps worried about my safety?”
“Not really,” she said, a smile flickering around her lips as she turned back to the book. “Do you mind if I look at this while you’re gone?”
“You don’t by any chance read Hebrew?”
“Sadly, no. But I know someone who does.”
Chapter 12
A
quarter of an hour later, Sebastian walked down the steps of his house to find the curricle waiting, with Tom standing at the grays’ heads.
“What the devil are you doing here? I told you to take the day off and rest. Where’s Giles?”
“Giles is feeling peakish. And I done rested—for hours.”
Sebastian leapt up to take the reins. “I don’t recall hearing anything about Giles feeling ‘peakish.’”
Tom scrambled onto his perch. “Well, he is.”
Sebastian cast the tiger a suspicious glance.
But Tom only grinned.
Lying just to the northwest of Covent Garden, the nest of fetid alleys and dark courts known as Seven Dials had once been a prosperous area favored by poets and ambassadors and favorites of Good Ole Queen Bess. Those days were long gone. The once grand houses of brick and stone lining the main thoroughfares were now falling into ruin, their pleasure gardens and parks vanished beneath a warren of squalid hovels built of wood and given over to beggars and thieves and costermongers of the meanest sort.
The Pilgrim, on a narrow lane just off Castle Street, was technically licensed to sell beer as well as spirits but appeared to cater mainly to those who preferred their alcohol in the form of cheap gin.
“A go of Cork,” said Sebastian, walking up to the counter.
The gin slinger, a stout, aging woman with a massive bosom swelling out of the bodice of her ragged, dirty dress, looked at him through narrowed, suspicious eyes as she splashed gin into a smudged glass. “Wot ye doin’ ’ere? We don’t need yer kind ’ere. Yer kind is always trouble.”
“I’m looking for Jacques Collot. Know where I might find him?”
“Collot?” She sniffed and shook her head. “Never ’eard o’ ’im.”
Sebastian laid a half crown on the stained countertop. “If you do happen to see him, tell him I have a job he might be interested in, would you?”
“I told ye, I ain’t never ’eard o’ ’im.” But the coin disappeared.
Sebastian went to settle at one of the rickety tables at the rear of the room, the glass of pungent gin twirling back and forth between his fingertips. He even raised it as if to drink a few times, although he was careful not to let it touch his lips.
A sluggish fire burned on the shallow hearth, filling the room with a bitter smoke that didn’t encourage many of the patrons to linger. Sebastian watched a steady stream of men file into the low-ceilinged chamber, throw down a shot of gin at a penny a glass, then leave again. As far as he could tell, the glasses were never washed.
After some five or ten minutes, a stocky, middle-aged man with graying side-whiskers and one strangely wayward eye walked through the door. Bypassing the counter, he came straight to pull out the chair opposite Sebastian and sit.
They say Collot’s got a wandering eye, can’t control which way it looks, Calhoun had told Sebastian before he left Brook Street. He’s maybe forty or forty-five; about my height but carrying more flesh.
“I hear that you search for Collot,” the man with the faulty eye said in a heavy French accent. “I am not he, mais je puis—er, I can perhaps find him for you, if you wish. Yes?”
Sebastian nodded to the slatternly barmaid, who slapped a shot of gin down in front of the Frenchman, exchanged a veiled glance with him, and went away again.
The man downed his gin in one long pull and licked his lips. “You have a job, yes?”
“For Collot.”
“Collot, he is my good friend since many years. You tell me, I tell him.”
“You knew him in Paris, did you?”
“Mais oui. We were the children together. In Montmartre. You know Paris?”
“I heard Collot was a jewel thief in Paris.”
The man leaned back in his seat, his mou
th hanging open in a parody of shock. “A thief? Non. Who says such a thing?”
“The same people who say the nob in Newgate didn’t kill Daniel Eisler. They say Collot did it.”
The man shoved up from his chair, ready to run, his wandering eye rolling wildly. “Monsieur!”
“I suggest you sit down,” said Sebastian quietly. “There are two Bow Street runners waiting out the front for you, and two more out the back.” He punctuated the lie with a smile. “You can talk to them if you prefer, but I suspect you might find it more pleasant to deal with me.”
Collot sank back down into his seat, his voice hoarse. “What do you want from me?”
“How did you know Eisler?”
“But I didn’t say I—”
“You knew him. Tell me how.”
Collot licked his lips again, and Sebastian signaled the barmaid for another shot of gin.
“How?” Sebastian repeated after the woman left.
“I knew him years ago.”
“In Paris?”
Collot downed the second gin and shook his head. “Amsterdam.”
“When was this?”
“’Ninety-two.”
“You sold him jewels?”
The Frenchman’s lip curled, his nose wrinkling like that of a man who has just smelled something foul. “He was scum. The worst kind of scum. He’d as soon cheat you as look at you, and then he’d laugh in your face and call you a fool.”
“Did he cheat you?”
As if aware of the pit yawning before him, Collot drew himself up straighter in his chair. “Me? Mais non. Not me.”
Sebastian tilted his gin back and forth between his fingertips, aware of the Frenchman’s eyes upon it. “The jewels you sold to Eisler in Amsterdam in ’ninety-two, where did you get them?”
“My family. For generations, the Collots have been lapidaries. Ask anyone who knew Paris, before. They’ll tell you. But by the autumn of ’ninety-two, things were bad—very bad. We could not stay. We took refuge in Amsterdam.”
“And sold Eisler your jewels?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve had no dealings with him here in London?”