Sebastien St. Cyr 08 - What Darkness Brings

by C. S. Harris

  “No.”

  “That’s not what I’m hearing.”

  “Perhaps people have me confused with someone else. Some other émigré.”

  “Perhaps.” Sebastian shifted in his seat so that he could cross his outthrust boots at the ankles. “Who do you think killed Eisler?”

  Collot touched the back of one hand to his nose and sniffed. “What you trying to do to me, hmm? People see me talking to a Bow Street runner, what are they to think? You try to get me killed?”

  “I’m not a runner, and everyone in here thinks I’m offering you a job. What kind of jobs do you do, exactly?”

  Collot sniffed again. “This and that.”

  Sebastian shoved his own untouched gin across the table. After a moment’s hesitation, Collot picked it up and raised the glass to his lips, his hand shaking so badly he almost spilled it.

  “You’re afraid of something,” said Sebastian, watching him. “What is it?

  Collot drained the glass, then leaned forward, his lips wet, the veins in his forehead bulging against his sweat-slicked skin. Sebastian could smell the fear roiling off him, mingling with the stench of stale sweat and cheap gin. The Frenchman threw a quick glance around, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Eisler was peddling a big diamond. A big blue diamond.”

  “How large of a diamond are we talking about?”

  “Forty-five or fifty carats. Perhaps more.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “Only one big blue diamond I know about, and that’s the one belongs to the banker, Hope.”

  “Henry Philip Hope?”

  “No. The other one. His brother, Thomas.”

  “I haven’t heard anything about a big blue diamond being associated with Eisler’s death.”

  “That’s my point. No one has heard about it. So I ask you, where is it? Hmm?” He wiped a trembling hand across his mouth and said it again. “Where is it?”

  Chapter 13

  S

  ebastian figured he could automatically discount upward of ninety percent of what Jacques Collot had told him. But the Frenchman’s fear, at least, had been real. And his reference to the Hopes was so unexpected, so outrageous, that Sebastian decided it just might be worth looking into.

  A respectable old family of Scottish merchant bankers, the Hopes had settled in Amsterdam in the previous century and prospered there for generations. The family business, Hope and Company, was the kind of financial establishment that lent money to kings. Just ten years before, they had put together the financial package that enabled the fledgling United States to purchase the Louisiana Territory from Napoléon’s France—thus, coincidentally, helping to fund the continuing French war effort.

  But the Hopes were, predictably enough, not particularly anxious to experience republican principles firsthand. When the French armies marched on Amsterdam and The Hague, the Hopes packed up their vast collection of paintings and sculptures and gems and scurried back across the Channel to England.

  Sebastian’s acquaintance with the Hopes was limited to desultory state dinner parties and crowded ballrooms and various similar functions of the kind he generally preferred to avoid. If he had been in Thomas Hope’s vast museum-like house in Duchess Street, he didn’t recall it. But when Sebastian sent up his card, the Hopes’ very proper English butler quickly showed him in. One did not turn away the heir of Alistair St. Cyr, Earl of Hendon and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  Thomas Hope greeted him with a wide smile and firm handshake. But his small eyes were hooded and wary, and Sebastian found himself wondering why.

  “Devlin! Good to see you. This is a surprise. Please, have a seat.” A short, ungainly man in his forties with a craggy, almost brutish-looking face, he stretched out a hand toward a yellow satin-covered settee that looked like something Cleopatra might have reclined upon while awaiting Mark Antony. “And how is your father?”

  To a casual observer, the remark might have seemed innocent; it was not. Everyone who was anyone in London knew that a deep and lasting estrangement had grown up between the Earl of Hendon and his heir.

  “He is well, thank you.” Sebastian returned the banker’s practiced smile. “And you?”

  As they exchanged the customary polite nothings, Sebastian let his gaze drift around the room, taking in the mummy cases painted on the ceiling, the alabaster vases, the regal, Egyptian-style cats, the life-sized portrait of a beautiful, dark-haired, sloe-eyed woman painted on worn boards that looked very much like part of an ancient sarcophagus.

  “Is that from a Ptolemaic tomb?” Sebastian asked, staring at it.

  Hope appeared delighted. “You recognize it! It is, yes. This is what I call my Egyptian Room. The piece you’re sitting on was manufactured to my own design, based on drawings I did of a similar relic discovered in a tomb near the Nile while I was there.”

  Sebastian glanced down at the settee’s black wooden frame, which was decorated with paintings of the jackal-headed god Anubis and had bronze scarabs for feet. Thomas, he now remembered, was the Hope brother with little interest in the actual business that generated the family’s fortune. Leaving his relatives to mind the bank and mercantile empire, he’d spent much of his youth on an extended Grand Tour, visiting not only Europe but Africa and Asia, as well. Now confined to Britain by the disruptions of war, he devoted himself largely to increasing his stature as a patron of the arts. Lately he’d also taken to his pen, publishing a folio volume entitled Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, followed shortly by Costumes of the Ancients. His newest project was reportedly a grandly ambitious philosophical work on the origins and prospects of man, although he was said to despair of ever finishing it.

  “Have you been to Egypt?” he asked eagerly, nodding discreetly to the butler, who moved to open a bottle of wine.

  “Once, although quite a few years ago.”

  “Splendid! And Istanbul? Damascus? Baghdad?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Hope’s face fell. “Ah. What a pity. I once spent an entire year in Istanbul, sketching the ruins and palaces. If you ever find yourself presented with an opportunity to visit the city, you must seize it. There is no place quite like it.”

  “My wife has always been anxious to travel, so perhaps one day we shall make it there.” Sebastian paused to accept a glass of wine from the butler’s tray, then said casually, “I wonder, were you acquainted with Daniel Eisler?”

  Thomas Hope was no fool. He took his time accepting his own wine, using the delay as a cover for thought. He had a big mouth, loose and wet, and a habit of flexing it in a peculiar way right before he began to speak. He flexed it now, like a sleek, wily fish considering and then rejecting a juicily baited hook.

  “Eisler? Of course. He was in Amsterdam with us, you know.” He sipped his wine, his eyes above the glass downcast. “His death is shocking, is it not? I do believe that one of these days the English simply must agree to the formation of a proper police force, lest we all find ourselves murdered in our beds.”

  “Did you ever buy jewels from him?” Sebastian asked, refusing to be distracted by what was a popular, perennial topic.

  “From Eisler? You must be thinking of my brother, Henry Philip. He’s the family jewel collector, not I. You really must ask to see his collection sometime. He keeps it in a great mahogany cabinet with sixteen drawers, one for each category of specimen. He has a pearl that is said to be the largest saltwater pearl in existence—nearly two hundred grams, and two inches long. It’s lovely—quite spectacularly so.”

  “What about big blue diamonds? Do they interest him?”

  “Blue?” Thomas Hope sipped his wine and pursed his lips so that he now resembled nothing so much as a frog. “I couldn’t say, actually. I know the red ones are the rarest. And of course, the ladies generally like the pink ones.”

  “Daniel Eisler wasn’t trying to sell a large blue diamond for your family?”

  Hope laughed out loud. “Good heavens, no. Now is the time to be
buying jewels, not selling them. The prices are quite depressed. It’s all these émigrés, you know. Henry Philip was telling me about a twenty-five-carat square white table-cut diamond he bought recently from some old Frenchwoman who was so desperate, she was willing to part with it for a song.”

  A light step sounded in the hall. Hope turned his head, his mouth puckering feverishly as a woman appeared in the doorway. She was considerably younger than Hope, perhaps by as many as fifteen or twenty years. She wore her dark hair styled short, so that it curled fashionably around her face and showed off her long neck and sloping white shoulders. Her eyes were dark and luminous, her nose perfectly straight, her mouth full lipped and rosebud pink.

  “Ah, Louisa, dear,” said Hope, working his mouth into a smile. “How kind of you to join us. I believe you’ve met Lord Devlin? Devlin, this is my wife.”

  “Mrs. Hope.” Sebastian rose to his feet and sketched a bow.

  La Belle et la Bête, society called them. Beauty and the Beast. It wasn’t hard to see why. Beauty extended her hand for Sebastian to kiss, her face glowing with the kind of smile that inspired poets and painters. “Lord Devlin. What a pleasant surprise.”

  She wore a simple gown of white muslin caught up beneath her full breasts with a pink satin ribbon; a simple gold chain and locket encircled her neck. She was one of those women who had about her an air of gentle repose and serenity that made one think of Evensong and incense and sunlight streaming through stained-glass windows. But Sebastian knew the impression of gentle beatitude was deceptive. A professional killjoy in the mold of Hannah More and the Clapham Saints, she was an active member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a nasty organization dedicated to stamping out dancing, singing, card playing, and just about any other pleasure and amusement that might gladden the hearts and ease the sorrows of the city’s laboring poor.

  She did not urge him to sit again, so that Sebastian found himself wondering with some amusement if she’d been lurking outside the drawing room door, ready to rush in and put an end to any conversation that threatened to stray into unwanted channels.

  “You must come see us again, with Lady Devlin,” she said, her laced fingers coming up to rest charmingly against her chin, her gentle smile never slipping.

  The thought of the two women together—Hero with her forthright, radical principles and Louisa Hope with her self-satisfied, sanctimonious moralizing—threatened to overset Sebastian’s gravity. He reached for his hat. “I will, yes. In the meantime, I won’t intrude on you any longer.” He bowed again. “Servant, Mrs. Hope. Don’t bother ringing; I can see myself out.”

  “I’ll walk with you to the door,” said Hope, as if vaguely embarrassed by his wife’s maneuvers. “You really must come back with Lady Devlin and see the rest of the house. I’m doing each room in the style of a different country, one for each of the various places I’ve visited.”

  They descended the grand wide staircase, their footsteps echoing as if in a vault. Sebastian said, “If Eisler were trying to sell a large blue diamond, where do you think it might have come from?”

  Hope paused at the base of the stairs, his mouth puckering as if it were a necessary prelude to thought. “Hmm. Difficult to say, really. The provenance of so many of these large specimens is . . . well, shall we say shaky at best?”

  “You’re not familiar with such a gem?”

  “I am not, no. But then, as I said, my brother is the family’s amateur lapidary. He might have heard of such a piece. Unfortunately, he’s in the country at the moment.” Hope nodded to the butler, who moved to open the front door.

  “When was the last time you saw Eisler?”

  “Good heavens, I’m not certain I can answer that. It’s been some time, though; that I do know.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill him?”

  Thomas Hope’s rubbery lips twisted. “Russell Yates, from what the papers tell us. Dreadfully bad ton, that man. I always thought he’d make a sorry end.”

  The butler stood, wooden, beside the still open door. A wind had kicked up, sending a loose handbill down the street and carrying the sharp, biting promise of more rain.

  “They haven’t hanged him yet,” said Sebastian.

  “No, but they will soon enough.”

  A man’s ringing laughter sounded on the footpath outside, his voice cultured but tinged with a vague Irish lilt as he said, “The devil fly away with you, Tyson! I tell you, the horse is sound—as sound as the Bank of England.”

  Another man answered, his tones those of Hereford and Eton rather than Irish, and so familiar that Sebastian found himself stiffening.

  “This is supposed to reassure me, is it?”

  Sebastian could see him now. Tall and broad shouldered, the man filled the doorway. He was half-turned, still looking back at the unseen Irishman on the footpath below him. In his mid-twenties, he wore the typical rig of a town beau: dark blue, carefully tailored coat by Schultz, boots by Hobbs, hat by Lock. But his powerful build and military bearing told their own story. He turned, still smiling as he reached the top step. Then his gaze fell on Sebastian, and the laughter died on his lips.

  “Ah, how fortuitous,” said Hope. “Devlin, do allow me to introduce Lieutenant Matt Tyson and my wife’s young cousin, Blair Beresford.”

  Tyson’s clear gray eyes met Sebastian’s. His hair was chestnut brown, his cheeks strong boned, his jaw square and marked by a rakish scar across his chin that enhanced rather than detracted from his rugged good looks.

  “The lieutenant and I have met,” said Sebastian evenly.

  “Excellent, excellent,” said Hope, beaming and utterly oblivious to the powerful undercurrents of animosity that crackled between the two men.

  Tyson’s companion—considerably younger and fairer—took off his hat and shook Sebastian’s hand with boyish enthusiasm. From the looks of things, Louisa’s Irish cousin couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-two, with a head of soft golden curls, merry blue eyes, and the face of an angel. “Devlin?” said Blair Beresford. “Oh, by Jove. This is an honor, my lord, an honor indeed. Did you know Matt in the Peninsula, then?” He glanced laughingly at his friend. “And here Matt never told me.”

  “Our acquaintance was . . . brief,” said Tyson, a muscle bunching along his powerful jaw.

  Sebastian was aware of Tom, waiting with the curricle below, his slight form motionless as he stood at the grays’ heads, his face a mask as his gaze traveled from one man to the other.

  “Gentlemen,” said Sebastian, tipping his hat.

  Without looking back, he descended the stairs to vault up to the curricle’s high seat and gather his reins. “Let ’em go,” he told Tom.

  The grays sprang forward, the boy scrambling to take his perch at the rear of the carriage. “You know that cove from somewhere?” Tom asked as Sebastian sent the grays dashing up the street at a shocking pace. “The big one, I mean.”

  “Spain. He was with the 114th Foot, although from the looks of things, he’s sold out.”

  “’Peared to me ’e weren’t exactly pleased to see you,” observed Tom. “In fact, I’d say ’e weren’t weery pleased to see you atall.”

  “Perhaps that’s because the last time he saw me, I was sitting on his court-martial board.”

  “What ’ad ’e done?”

  “According to the decision of my fellow officers, nothing. He was found innocent. But he was accused of robbing and killing a young Spanish woman and her two children.”

  Chapter 14

  H

  e’d been avoiding it all day. But the time had come, Sebastian knew, to visit the Tower Hill surgery of his old friend Paul Gibson.

  Once a regimental surgeon with the Twenty-fifth Light Dragoons, Gibson had learned many of the secrets of life and death from his close observation of the countless shattered, slashed, burned, and maimed bodies strewn across the world’s battlefields. Then a French cannonball took off the lower half of one of his own legs, leaving h
im racked by phantom pains and with a weakness for the sweet relief to be found in an elixir of poppies. He now divided his time between sharing his knowledge of anatomy at the teaching hospitals of St. Thomas’s and St. Bartholomew’s, and tending his own small surgery near the looming bastions of the Tower of London.

  Leaving the curricle in Tom’s care, Sebastian cut through the narrow passage that ran alongside the surgeon’s ancient stone house to the small outbuilding at the base of the unkempt yard where Gibson performed his autopsies. It was here that he also practiced surreptitious dissections on bodies filched from London’s churchyards by gangs of unsavory characters known as resurrection men. By law, the dissection of any human corpse except that of an executed felon was forbidden, which meant that if a surgeon wanted to perfect a new technique or further expand his understanding of human anatomy or physiology, he had little choice but to trade with the body snatchers.

  Sebastian was aware of thunder rumbling in the distance and a patter of scattered raindrops as he followed the beaten path through the rank grass. The air filled with the smell of damp earth and death. Gibson had left the outbuilding’s door open; through it, Sebastian could see the pale body of a man stretched out on the surgeon’s granite slab. It was Rhys Wilkinson, and from the looks of things, Gibson was only getting started.

  “There you are, me lad,” said Gibson, looking up with a grin as Sebastian paused in the doorway.

  “Find anything?” he asked, careful not to look too closely at what Gibson was doing to the cadaver before him. Sebastian had spent six years fighting the King’s wars from Italy to Spain to the West Indies; he had seen death in all its ugliest, most heartbreaking and stomach-churning manifestations. He had even killed men himself, more times than he cared to remember. But none of that had left him with Gibson’s calm insouciance when it came to viewing the dissected, mangled, or decomposing bodies of the dead. . . . Particularly when the body belonged to someone he’d called friend.

  “We-ell,” said Gibson, drawing out the word into two syllables, “I’ve only just begun, I’m afraid. Had a coroner’s inquest that lasted far longer than it ought to have. About all I can tell you at this point is the liver and spleen are enlarged. But then, that’s typical for someone with Walcheren fever.”