Why Mermaids Sing: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

by C. S. Harris

  On this particular Sunday, he returned from chapel to find the reports of several of his agents awaiting his attention on his desk. Devlin’s interference with his plans to use the actress Kat Boleyn to ferret out the identity of Napoleon’s new spymaster had forced Jarvis to fall back on more traditional means, but so far his agents had proved unsuccessful. He was glancing through their reports when he was interrupted by a cautious knock.

  “Yes, what is it?” he said without looking up.

  “A Mr. Russell Yates to see you, my lord.”

  Jarvis’s head came up. “What the bloody hell does he want?”

  “Shall I tell him you are not at home, my lord?”

  Jarvis tightened his jaw. “No. Send him in.”

  Russell Yates came in, bringing with him the scent of well-bred horses and a cool morning rain. From his manly chest and powerful shoulders to the glint of pirate’s gold in his left ear, he exuded an aggressive form of masculinity not often seen amongst the members of the ton. And it was all for show.

  Jarvis had dedicated his life to reading people and manipulating them. He was good at it, and he rarely made mistakes. Yet once Jarvis had underestimated this man. It would not happen again.

  Very deliberately, Jarvis leaned back in his chair, but did not rise. “Have a seat, Mr. Yates.”

  Yates adjusted the tails of his dark blue morning coat and settled in a leather chair beside the empty hearth. “Please accept my apologies for interrupting you on the Sabbath day, my lord.”

  Jarvis merely inclined his head. It was flowery flummery and they both knew it.

  “I am here, first of all,” continued Yates, “to share with you the news of my good fortune. The lovely Miss Kat Boleyn has consented to become my wife.”

  Jarvis drew a gold snuffbox from his pocket and flipped it open. “Indeed? It was my understanding that Miss Boleyn had consented to become the Viscountess Devlin.”

  “Things changed.”

  “So it seems.” Jarvis lifted a pinch of snuff to one nostril. “You understand, I assume, that Miss Boleyn has some…shall we say, unfortunate associations in her past?”

  “Actually, that is my primary purpose for coming to see you today. While it’s true Miss Boleyn has in the past engaged in certain activities that are better forgotten, the same could be said of many of us.” Yates’s smile widened to show his teeth. “Even you, my lord, have been involved in episodes that would be best left unknown.”

  Jarvis closed his snuffbox with a snap. He was not one to bluster or rage, for he had learned long ago to control his emotions. He did at times give vent to anger, but only when it served his purpose. It would not serve his purpose now.

  He tucked his snuffbox away and said calmly, “The understanding we reached on these matters still stands. I assume you are here merely to reassure me that as long as Miss Boleyn’s secrets are safe, others are safe?”

  “That’s a fair representation of the situation, yes.”

  “Good. Then we understand each other.”

  Yates rose to his feet. Jarvis waited until he was at the door to add, “It does seem a waste.”

  Yates turned. “How’s that, my lord?”

  “Such a beautiful woman, married to a man uninterested in women.”

  If he’d been hoping for a rise, Jarvis was disappointed. Yates merely smiled and said, “Good day, my lord.”

  Some twenty minutes later, Jarvis was still sitting at his desk when his daughter, Hero, appeared at the door.

  “The most vexatious thing, Papa. Grandmama has thrown her chamber pot at the upstairs parlor maid, and now both the maid and Cook have quit.”

  “The cook?” Jarvis looked around, his attention caught. “Why the cook?”

  “Cook is Emily’s aunt.”

  “Emily? Who the deuce is Emily?”

  “The upstairs parlor maid.”

  “Good God,” roared Jarvis. “And what would you have me do about it? The petty affairs of this household are not in my province.”

  “I don’t expect you to do anything about it,” said Hero. “I have simply come to warn you that dinner will be delayed.”

  “Dinner? But…who is cooking it?”

  “I am,” said his daughter with unruffled equanimity, and closed the door behind her.

  Jarvis stared at the closed panel for a moment, then rose to pour himself a brandy. It had been a trying week.

  The day might have been overcast, but the light streaming in through Paul Gibson’s kitchen windows was still bright enough to hurt Sebastian’s eyes. He squeezed them shut and ran a hand across his beard-roughened chin. “Remind me why I stayed here, rather than going home? I need a shave. And a bath. And clean clothes.”

  Paul Gibson answered him from across the room. “You needed to talk.”

  Sebastian opened one eye. “I did? How much did I say?”

  “Enough.” Gibson came to stand on the far side of the battered kitchen table. “I’m sorry, Sebastian.”

  Sebastian looked away.

  “Here.” Gibson plunked a tankard of ale on the boards before him. “This will help your head. You’d best drink it before you hear this morning’s news.”

  Sebastian brought his gaze back to his friend’s face. “Why? What’s happened?”

  “It’s Felix Atkinson’s twelve-year-old son, Anthony. He’s missing.”

  Chapter 57

  Sebastian found Felix Atkinson in the drawing room of his prosperous West End home. The East India Company man stood with his back to the room, his gaze fixed on the scene outside the window overlooking Portland Place. In a damask-covered chair off to one side, a pale-haired woman in her early thirties wept quietly into a handkerchief. As far as Sebastian could see, her husband was making no attempt to comfort her.

  “I’d like a word with you,” Sebastian told Atkinson. “Alone.”

  Atkinson swung to face him, all bluster and trembling affront. “Really, my lord. Now is hardly the time—”

  Sebastian cut him off. “I don’t think you want Mrs. Atkinson to hear what I have to say.”

  A rush of color darkened the other man’s cheeks. He cast a quick glance at his wife, then looked away. “We can speak in the morning room.”

  They had barely crossed into the morning room before Sebastian’s hands closed over Atkinson’s shoulders and spun him around to slam his spine up against the nearest wall.

  “You bloody, self-obsessed, lying son of a bitch,” said Sebastian, spitting out each word through gritted teeth.

  Atkinson gasped and made as if to pull away. “How dare you? How dare you lay hands upon me in my own h—”

  Sebastian pressed his forearm against the man’s throat, pinning him to the wall. “I know what happened on that ship. I know about Gideon Forbes, and I know what really happened to David Jarvis.”

  Atkinson went utterly still. “You can’t.”

  “I read the log.”

  “The log? But the log was lost. Bellamy said the log was lost.”

  “He lied.” Sebastian shoved his forearm up under the man’s chin harder. “You all lied. What did you do? Get together after Thornton’s and Carmichael’s sons were killed and swear one another to secrecy?”

  “What choice did we have?”

  “You could have told the truth.”

  Atkinson’s tongue darted out to moisten his lips. “How could we? No one would have understood about the boy. You have no idea what it was like on that ship. The fear. The endless days and nights of hunger. That kind of hunger, it’s like a yawning pit of fire in your belly, consuming you. You’ll do anything when you’re hungry like that.”

  “You might. Yet people starve to death on the streets of London all the time. They don’t kill and eat each other.”

  Atkinson sucked in a breath that shook his entire frame. “The boy was dying. All we did was hasten the hour of his death. David Jarvis should never have tried to stop us.”

  “Is that what you tell yourself? What about the Sovereign?”<
br />
  “We didn’t know the frigate was out there! We thought we would die without seeing another ship. How could we have known?”

  “That’s why men shouldn’t take it upon themselves to play God.” Sebastian shifted his grip. “I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to think very hard before answering. After the crew mutinied and abandoned ship, were any of the men left aboard?”

  “Crewmen, you mean? No. Only Bellamy, the three ship’s officers, and the boy. Why? Who do you think is doing this? You have some idea, don’t you? Who is it?” His voice rose. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Sebastian simply shook his head. “It hasn’t struck you as peculiar that this killer knows exactly which lots you each drew after the boy’s murder?”

  The tic began to play at the edge of Atkinson’s mouth. “Peculiar? It’s terrifying! It’s as if he were there on the ship with us. But that’s impossible, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  Sebastian gave the man a nasty smile. “You tell me.”

  “I told you before. I don’t know who’s doing this. I don’t know.”

  “It’s too late to save yourself. When Jarvis hears you murdered his son, you’re going to wish you did die on that ship.”

  “It wasn’t me! I didn’t have a cutlass! It was one of the others.”

  “You think that will make a difference to Jarvis?”

  Atkinson’s entire face convulsed. “No. I know it won’t. We all know it won’t. Why else do you think we’ve kept silent?”

  “Why? Because you value your own lives more than you value the lives of your sons.” Sebastian let the man go and stepped back. “When was your boy taken?”

  Atkinson adjusted his cravat and gave the lapels of his coat a twitch. “This morning, early. He was gone from his bed when the household awakened.”

  “He was taken from the house? I thought you had Bow Street Runners watching him.”

  “Two of them. Someone broke the lock on the back door.”

  “And where were your Runners while all this was happening?”

  “One was watching the front of the house from across the street.”

  “And the other?”

  “Was found insensible in the garden.”

  Sebastian suppressed an oath. If the killer followed his established pattern, the boy’s butchered body would be discovered in some prominent spot early tomorrow morning. It was still possible that the boy was alive someplace. But their chances of finding him before he was killed diminished with each passing minute.

  “Let me see the boy’s room,” said Sebastian.

  Atkinson stared at him. “What?”

  “You heard me. I want to see the room from which the boy was taken. Quickly.”

  Anthony Atkinson had occupied a chamber on the third floor, just off the schoolroom. It was a typical boy’s bedroom, its shelves crammed with books and birds’ nests and all manner of wondrous and special things.

  Standing on the braided hearthrug, Sebastian thought about the towheaded lad he’d glimpsed in the Square, his cheeks flushed, his eyes bright with merriment. The boy might have been younger than the other victims, Sebastian realized, but he was a sturdy, healthy lad; he would not have been easy to subdue. Especially without waking either his family or the servants.

  A small girl’s voice came from the doorway to the schoolroom. “Are you looking for Anthony? He’s not here.”

  Sebastian turned to find young Miss Atkinson watching him with wide, solemn eyes. He went to hunker down before her.

  “Did you hear Anthony leave this morning?”

  She shook her head. “No. I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Have you noticed anyone watching you the last few days? A man, perhaps? Or maybe a woman?”

  Again, she shook her head.

  Frustrated, Sebastian shoved to his feet. It was when he was turning to leave that he saw it: a glint of blue-and-white porcelain peeking out from beneath the counterpane. He knew what it was even before he stooped to pick it up.

  It was a Chinese vial. An opium vial.

  Chapter 58

  Sebastian was paying off his hackney outside Newgate Prison when he heard a man’s high-pitched voice calling his name.

  “Lord Devlin.”

  Sebastian turned to find Sir Henry Lovejoy coming out of the prison’s formidable gates.

  “I stopped by your house this morning, my lord, but was told you were not in. I assume you’ve heard the news about young Anthony Atkinson? Dreadful business this. Just dreadful.”

  Sebastian stepped out of the path of a passing ironmonger’s wagon. “Who was it pushed for the arrest of Brandon Forbes?”

  “Sir James Read and Sir William both. Lord Jarvis has brought considerable pressure to bear on Bow Street to solve this case, and the magistrates are always anxious to curry favor with the Palace.”

  Sebastian squinted up at the prison’s dark, oppressive facade. “And now that Anthony Atkinson is missing? Will Mr. Forbes be released?”

  Sir Henry sighed. “I fear not. Sir James in particular contends that the disappearance of the young Atkinson boy in no way absolves Mr. Forbes of the earlier murders.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “That’s the law. Thanks to your admirable detective work, it appears that Mr. Forbes possesses a powerful motive to have committed the murders, and I fear the gentleman has no verifiable alibi for the nights in question.”

  Sebastian swore long and hard. “So what exactly is being done to find Anthony Atkinson?”

  “As I understand it, Bow Street has some twenty men combing the countryside around Forbes’s estate.”

  “Bloody hell. The boy’s not there.”

  “So it would seem.”

  Sebastian found Brandon Forbes seated at a writing desk in one corner of a surprisingly large room overlooking the street. The rattle of the jailer’s keys brought the gentleman’s head around. At the sight of Sebastian, he grunted.

  “It’s you I’ve to thank for my being here, I take it.”

  Sebastian ducked his head through the doorway and waited while the jailer locked the door behind him. Newgate could be relatively comfortable for those with a few extra pounds to buy themselves a private cell, some furniture and bedding, and food. But the dank air still reeked of excrement and despair, and the threat of the hangman’s noose was like an unseen presence in the room.

  “Indirectly,” Sebastian admitted.

  Forbes laid aside his pen. The bluff, good-humored country squire who’d walked the fields of his Hertfordshire estate was gone. The man before Sebastian now was pale and anxious. “You think I did it?” he asked. “You think I butchered all those young men?”

  “No.”

  Forbes grunted. “Why not? Everyone else does. My arrest ties it all up in a neat package.”

  “Except for this morning’s disappearance of young Anthony Atkinson.”

  “Yes, well, I could have an accomplice, couldn’t I? That’s what they’re saying. Someone who nabbed young Atkinson to confound the authorities and make it appear that I’m innocent.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Forbes pushed up from his desk and went to stand at the window overlooking the front of the prison. “That’s where they hang them, you know. Those who have been condemned to death. Right there in front of the prison. You ever see a hanging?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw one once. In St. Albans when I was a boy. My father took me to see it over my mother’s objections. Some lad who’d pinched a bolt of cloth from a shop. I was ten at the time, and I don’t think the boy was much older. They botched his hanging something terrible. Took him fifteen or twenty minutes to die. In the end, the hangman wrapped his own arms around the poor lad’s legs and pulled in an attempt to break the boy’s neck, but even that didn’t work. He suffocated slowly. Very slowly.”

  “I won’t let you hang for this,” said Sebastian.

  A wry smile touched the man’s lips. “Pardon me if I�
�m not comforted.”

  Sebastian searched the other man’s plain, weather-darkened face. “Is there anything else you can tell me about your son—anything at all—that might help?”

  “No.”

  “No one you know who might have felt compelled to avenge the boy’s death?”

  The man’s face paled, and Sebastian knew he was worrying about the suspicion that would now also fall on his surviving sons, the boy studying at Cambridge and his older brother. “No!”

  “I didn’t mean your older sons,” said Sebastian.

  Forbes went to sit on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped between his knees, his head bowed. After a moment, he said, “It is possible that someone…” He hesitated, then swallowed hard. “You see, Gideon wasn’t actually my own child. Oh, I raised him as my son, and God knows I loved him like a son. But he was not the issue of my loins.”

  “What?”

  Forbes kept his gaze on the stone paving beneath his feet, a tide of color staining his cheeks. “It’s not the sort of thing a man speaks of ordinarily. But…My second wife—Gideon’s mother—she was already some three months gone with child when I married her.”

  Sebastian leaned forward. “The father—who was he?”

  “I don’t know. She never told me and I never asked. Her parents never knew she was with child. I gather they had objected to the match because of the man’s religion.”

  “Where was your wife raised? In Hertfordshire?”

  “No. She was from a village called Hollingbourne, in Kent.”

  Sebastian thrust up from his seat. “Is that near Avery?”

  Forbes’s head came up, his mouth slack with surprise. “How did you know?”

  Chapter 59

  Sebastian could hear thunder rumbling in the distance by the time he reached Brook Street. He set his groom, Giles, scrambling to saddle the Arab, then sent for Tom.

  Sebastian was in his library, loading a small pistol, when Tom scooted into the room. “I want you to find Sir Henry,” said Sebastian, slipping the flintlock into his pocket as he briefly ran through the conversation with Forbes. “Tell him what I’ve discovered and where I’ve gone.” He squinted up at the leaden sky and paused to throw a cloak over his shoulders. It was going to be a wet ride.