by C. S. Harris
“What time did this happen?”
“About half past eight.”
“So it was dark?”
“It was, yes. He’d left one measly candlestick burning on a table in the entry, but I could see more light coming from the parlor just to the right of the stairs. That’s where I found him, sprawled some eight or ten feet inside the room. His chest was a bloody mess, but I went to see if by some chance he still lived. I was just leaning over him when a man came barreling in behind me and started screeching, ‘What have you done? Good God, you’ve killed him!’ I said, ‘What the devil are you talking about? I found him like this.’ But the bloody idiot was already rushing off yelling ‘murder’ and calling loudly for the watch. So then I did the second stupid thing of the evening: Rather than stick around to explain myself to the constables, I ran. I didn’t realize the bastard knew who I was.”
“And who was he?”
“Turns out he’s Eisler’s nephew—a man by the name of Samuel Perlman.”
Sebastian went to stare thoughtfully out the small, high window.
After a moment, Yates said, “It doesn’t look good, does it?”
Sebastian glanced back at him. “To be frank? No, it doesn’t. Can you think of anyone who might have had reason to kill Eisler?”
Yates laughed. “Are you serious? You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who ever did business with Eisler and didn’t want to kill the bastard. He was a mean, nasty son of a bitch who enjoyed taking advantage of other people’s misfortune. Frankly, it’s amazing the man managed to live as long as he did—and I suspect that was only because people were afraid of him.”
“Afraid of him? Why?”
Yates twitched one shoulder in a shrug and glanced away. “He had a bad reputation for being vindictive. I told you: He was an ugly bastard.”
“And did you have a reason to want to kill him?”
Yates was silent a moment, worrying his lower lip between his teeth. Then he turned his head to look straight at Sebastian. And Sebastian knew even before the man opened his mouth that he was lying. “No. No, I didn’t.”
Chapter 5
S
ebastian studied Yates’s strained, beard-shadowed face. “You know, unless you’ve a hankering to dance the hempen measure to the toll of St. Sepulchre’s bell, you’re going to need to be honest with me.”
Yates’s jaw hardened. “I told you: I’d no reason to kill the bastard. I didn’t like him, but if we all took to killing people we don’t particularly fancy, London would soon be mighty thin of company.”
Sebastian pushed away from the window and went to signal the turnkey. “If you think of anything useful, let me know.”
Yates stopped him by saying, “Why are you doing this?”
Sebastian paused to look back at him. “You know why.”
The two men’s gazes met and held. Then Yates looked away, and Sebastian knew a moment of deep disquiet.
Sebastian said, “Any chance Jarvis could be behind this?”
Sebastian might not know the cause of the animosity between the two men, but he knew it ran deep and deadly. Thus far, Yates had managed to survive the enmity of the King’s powerful cousin only because he had in his possession evidence that would destroy Jarvis if it ever came to light. What that evidence was, Sebastian had never discovered. But because of it, the two men lived in an uneasy state of check, neither able to make a move to destroy the other without destroying himself.
It was a situation that Sebastian suspected could not persist indefinitely. And although it troubled him to admit it, if Sebastian were a betting man, he would put his money on Jarvis.
Yates said, “The last thing Jarvis wants is to see me hanged. He knows the consequences.”
“So I would have thought. In which case the question then becomes, why isn’t he doing something to prevent it?” If anyone had the power to see the charges against Yates dropped, it was the King’s Machiavellian cousin.
But Yates only shook his head and shrugged, as if the answer escaped him.
Pushing his way back through the prison’s crowded Press Yard and labyrinth of corridors, Sebastian found he had to close his mind to the sea of pale, desperate faces, to the endless, plaintive chorus of, “Have pity on poor little Jack!” and “Gov’nor, can ye spare a farthing? Only a farthing!”
Once, just twenty months before, he had found himself in much the same desperate position as Russell Yates. Accused of murder, he’d chosen the life of a fugitive in a desperate attempt to catch a twisted killer and clear his own name. Sebastian knew only too well how British “justice” worked.
Yates’s chances of being declared innocent were slim.
The heavy, ironbound main door of the prison slammed shut behind him, and Sebastian paused on the pavement outside to suck a breath of clean air deep into his lungs. All the turmoil of the street known as the Old Bailey swirled around him: Axles creaked as wagon drivers cursed and whipped their teams; a pie man shouted, “Fresh and hot. Hot! Hot!” The scent of ale wafted from a nearby tavern. And still the smell of the prison seemed to cling to him, a foul, oily stench of decay, hopelessness, and looming death.
The relentless pounding of hammers drew his attention to the spot outside the Debtors’ Door where a crew of workmen were knocking together the scaffold and viewing platform that would be used for the execution of two highwaymen scheduled for tomorrow morning. Until recently, London had hung her condemned prisoners at Tyburn, to the west of the city, with the doomed men, women, and children drawn through the streets in open carts surrounded by a raucous, drunken mob. But as the fields around Hyde Park filled with the elegant homes of the wealthy, Mayfair’s aristocratic inhabitants took exception to that endless, malodorous parade. And so the exhibition was shifted here, to the street outside Newgate Prison. Sebastian had heard that when a notorious murderer—or a woman—was hanged, choice viewing spots at the windows of the surrounding buildings could rent for as much as two or three guineas.
Someone with Russell Yates’s colorful background could easily attract a crowd of twenty thousand or more.
Sebastian became aware of Tom sitting motionless on the curricle’s high seat, his solemn gaze on a workman who was climbing up on the platform to lever into place a stout beam studded with massive iron hooks. Tom’s own brother had been hanged here for theft at the age of just thirteen.
It had been Sebastian’s intention to drive to St. Botolph-Aldgate and take a look at the scene of Mr. Daniel Eisler’s murder. But he was suddenly aware of a profound exhaustion he saw mirrored in his tiger’s face, of his rumpled clothing and day’s growth of beard, and of the need to offer his condolences to the grieving widow of an old friend.
He ran a hand down the nearest chestnut’s sweat-darkened neck and told Tom, “Go home, see the chestnuts put up, and then take the day off to rest.”
Tom’s face fell. “Ne’er tell me ye’ll be takin’ a hackney?” That peerless arbiter of taste and deportment, Beau Brummell himself, had decreed that no gentleman should ever be seen riding in a hackney carriage, and Tom had taken the Beau’s strictures to heart.
“I am indeed. To drive this pair back out to Kensington again, after all they’ve been through, would be beyond cruel.”
“Aye, but . . . gov’nor. A hackney?”
Sebastian laughed and turned away.
Sebastian had known Annie Wilkinson for as long as he’d known Rhys—except that when he’d first met her, she’d been Annie Beaumont, the plucky, freckle-nosed, seventeen-year-old wife of a dashing cavalry captain named Jake Beaumont. Few officers’ wives chose to “follow the drum” with their husbands, for the life could be both brutal and deadly. But Annie, the daughter of a colonel, had grown up in army camps from India to Canada. She took the hardships and dangers of a campaign in stride, without ever losing her ready laugh or chee
rful disposition. He remembered once, in Italy, when a brigand caught her in the hills outside of camp and she coolly shot her would-be assailant in the face. When her first husband died from a saber wound complicated by sepsis, she married again, to a big, rawboned Scotsman who succumbed to yellow fever in the West Indies just months after their wedding.
Rhys Wilkinson might have been Annie’s third husband, but Sebastian had never doubted the strength of her love for the easygoing Welshman. And of her three husbands, only Wilkinson had succeeded in giving Annie a child. Now, as Sebastian mounted the steps to the couple’s cramped lodgings in a narrow street called Yeoman’s Row, just off Kensington Square, he found himself wondering if that made this husband’s death easier or harder for Annie to bear.
He had intended only to send up his card along with a note of condolence. But he was met at the door by a breathless, half-grown housemaid who dropped a quick curtsy and said, “Lord Devlin? Mrs. Wilkinson says to tell you she’d be most pleased to see you, if’n you was wantin’ to step upstairs?”
And so he found himself following the housemaid up the bare, narrow set of stairs that led to the shabby apartment to which Rhys Wilkinson’s continued illness had reduced his young family.
“Devlin,” said Annie Wilkinson, both hands extended as she came forward to greet him. “I was hoping you’d come. I wanted to thank you again for trying to—for looking—” Her voice cracked.
“Annie. I’m so sorry.” He took her hands in his, his gaze hard on her face. The freckles were still there, although faded to a sprinkling of cinnamon dust across the pale flesh of her high cheekbones and the thin arch of her nose. As a girl, she’d been awkward and almost funny-looking, all skinny arms and legs and a wide, toothy grin. But she’d grown into a delicate beauty, her form tall and willowy, her features unusual but exquisite, her hair a rich strawberry blond. “Tell me what you need me to do,” he said, “and I’ll do it.”
He felt her hands tremble in his. “Sit and just talk to me, will you? Most of my acquaintances seem to assume that I’ve either dosed myself senseless with laudanum, or that since this is my third experience with widowhood then I must be taking it comfortably in stride. I can’t decide which is most insulting.”
She led him to a sagging, aged sofa near where a curly-headed little girl was playing with a scattering of toy horses. “Come and make your curtsy to his lordship, Emma,” she told the child.
Pushing to her feet, the little girl carefully positioned one foot behind the other and bobbed up and down with a mischievous giggle. She was tall for her age, and skinny like her mother, with her father’s dark hair and gray eyes, and a roguish dimple that was all her own.
“Hello there,” said Sebastian, hunkering down beside her. “Remember me?”
Emma nodded her head vigorously. “You gave me my Aes-hop’s Fables,” she said, stumbling over the pronunciation of the name. “Daddy tells me a story every night.” A faint frown tugged at her gently arched eyebrows. “Only, he didn’t come home in time last night.”
Sebastian glanced up at Annie’s stricken face. He had brought the child the book some months before, when Rhys invited him to dinner one evening. “I could read you a story now,” he said, “if you’d like.”
“That’s all right,” said Emma with a wide smile that was more like Annie’s than that of her dead father. “But thank you.” She dropped another curtsy and went back to her horses.
Sebastian rose slowly.
Annie said, “I told her, but I don’t think she really grasps what has happened. How much of death do we understand at the age of four?” Her voice quavered again, and Sebastian reached out to recapture one of her hands.
They sat for a time in silence, their gazes on the child, who was now whispering, “Clippity-cloppity, clippity-cloppity,” as she pushed a small bronze toy horse mounted on wheels along the pattern of the threadbare carpet. Then Annie said, her voice low, “Did he kill himself, Devlin? Tell me honestly. I wouldn’t blame him if he did—he’s been so dreadfully unwell. I don’t know how he stood it so long.”
Sebastian knew a moment of deep disquiet. It was one thing to harbor such suspicions himself, and something else again to hear them voiced by Wilkinson’s own wife. “I didn’t see anything to suggest it, but it’s impossible at this stage to tell.”
Her freckles stood out, stark, against the pallor of her face. “There’ll be a postmortem?”
“Gibson is doing it. I can stop by his surgery and let you know what he’s found, if you like.”
Nodding, she swallowed hard before answering. “Yes. Please. I’d like to hear it from you . . . if it’s true.”
“Annie . . .” He hesitated a moment, then pressed on. “I know things have been hard for you, since Wilkinson was invalided out. I wish you’d let me—”
“No,” she said forcefully, cutting him off. “Thank you, but no. I’ve a grandmother in Norfolk who offered years ago to take me in, should I ever find myself homeless. When this is all over, Emma and I will go to her.”
He studied her tightly held face. “All right. But promise me that should you ever find yourself in need, you’ll let me know.”
“I’ll be fine, Devlin; don’t worry.”
He stayed talking to her for some time, of happier days with the regiment in Italy and the Peninsula. But when he was leaving, he touched his fingertips gently to her cheek and said, “You didn’t promise me, Annie.”
She crinkled her nose in a way that reminded him of the near child she’d been when they first met. “I’ll be fine, Devlin. Truly. “
He forbore to press her further. Yet as he hailed a hackney and headed toward home, he could not shake the conviction that he was somehow failing both her and his dead friend.
Chapter 6
S
ebastian lived in a bow-fronted town house on Brook Street, near the corner of Davies. The house was elegant but small. Once, it had suited him just fine. But since his marriage six weeks before to Miss Hero Jarvis, he’d been thinking he ought perhaps to consider moving to something larger, grander. Only, when he’d mentioned it to Hero, she’d simply looked at him steadily in that way she had and said, “I like our house.”
He found her now seated sideways at the bench before her dressing table. She wore a very fetching emerald green walking dress trimmed with navy braid and had her head bowed as she worked at closing the fastenings of a smart pair of navy half boots. He paused for a moment, one shoulder propped against the doorframe, and watched her. Just for the pleasure of it.
She was a woman in her twenty-sixth year, generally described as more handsome than pretty and taller than most people thought a woman ought to be. She had inherited her aquiline profile, fierce intelligence, and a certain chilling ruthlessness from her powerful father, Charles, Lord Jarvis. But her Enlightenment-inspired beliefs—and her conviction that with affluence and privilege came an obligation to fight for the rights of society’s underdogs—were unique to her.
Sebastian hadn’t liked Hero much when they first met. Since he’d been holding a gun to her head at the time, he suspected the antipathy had been mutual. Respect had come gradually, even grudgingly; the intense physical attraction that accompanied it had surprised—and dismayed—them both.
Their marriage was as complicated as the reasons that had brought it about, and they were still working their way toward understanding and something else, something deep and powerful that both beckoned and scared the hell out of him. Passion came easily; trust and openness took time and effort and a leap of faith he wasn’t certain either of them was yet ready to make. There was still so much she didn’t know about him, or he about her. And it occurred to him now that he was about to jeopardize all that they had so far managed to build between them by what he was about to do.
Just as he knew he had no real choice.
She looked up, caught him
watching her, and smiled.
“It’s a nasty habit you have,” she said, “sneaking around, spying on people.”
“I wasn’t sneaking. I made quite a bit of noise, actually.”
She let out a genteel huff. “We don’t all have the eyes and ears of a bird of prey.” Still smiling, she rose to her feet and came to rest her hands on his shoulders, her gaze on his face. Her smile faded, and it occurred to him that perhaps she knew him better than he thought she did, because she said, “Your friend is dead, isn’t he?”
“A keeper found the body this morning in Hyde Park.”
“Oh, Devlin; I’m so sorry.”
He bracketed her face with his palms and kissed her once, long and hard. Then he rested his forehead against hers and took a deep breath before letting her go. “More interviews today?” he asked lightly.
She nodded, turning away to tuck a small clothbound notebook into her reticule. “I’ve found another crossing sweep who’s agreed to talk to me.”
“I should think they’d all be eager to talk, given that you pay them handsomely for nothing more than the privilege of listening to them natter on about themselves.”
“You’d be surprised how many of these children are afraid to open up,” she said, hunting for something amidst the litter of hair clips and books on her dressing table. “And I don’t blame them. From what I’m hearing, their distrust of authority figures is more than justified.”
Sebastian found himself smiling. After working on everything from Catholic emancipation and the slave trade to labor laws and the economic causes of the current proliferation in the number of prostitutes in London, Hero was now writing an article on the poor children who eked out a meager living by sweeping London’s street crossings. She was so taken with the project that she was thinking about doing a collection of such articles to be gathered into a book entitled London’s Working Poor.
“Ah, here it is,” she said, coming up with a pencil. She straightened, caught him smiling, and said, “You’re laughing at me.”