by C. S. Harris
Sebastian supposed it was possible the killer had lured Toby to Brook Street or somehow hauled the boy across London at knifepoint. But he doubted it. He had heard no hesitation in the footsteps coming toward them down Brook Street. So that meant—what? That Toby had known his killer? Had come willingly to Brook Street in his company? Why?
Sebastian brought his gaze, again, to the pale, still face of the boy who lay dead beside him, honey-colored hair curling softly in the humid air. “Was it you, Toby?” he asked softly. “Were you the lad Rory Inchbald interrupted digging Benji’s grave?”
But Toby simply stared unseeingly at the white, starless sky above. And Sebastian reached out a gentle hand to close the boy’s eyes.
• • •
Sebastian leaned against the rough stone wall of the outbuilding at the base of Gibson’s yard. He doubted the surgeon could tell him anything about the boy’s death that he didn’t already know. But it had seemed somehow negligent not to exhaust every possibility.
After a time, Gibson came to stand in the building’s doorway. His haunted gaze met Sebastian’s. “Please tell me you know who’s doing this.”
Sebastian pushed his breath out in a ragged sigh. “I’m becoming more and more convinced it’s Sir Francis Rowe and Lord Ashworth, working together. But I don’t know for certain and I can’t begin to prove it.”
“Christ,” said Gibson. “Come look at this.”
Sebastian suspected he didn’t want to see what he was about to see, but he pushed away from the wall and followed his friend into that dank, death-haunted room. What was left of Toby Dancing lay naked on the stone slab.
“He was stabbed in the back,” said Gibson. “Probably with the same swordstick that killed Les Jenkins since the blade was long enough for the tip to come out his chest.”
“This killer seems to make it a habit of stabbing his confederates in the back.”
Gibson nodded. “And look at this—” He broke off to roll the boy to one side, revealing a thin, bony back crisscrossed with old flogging scars.
“My God,” whispered Sebastian.
Gibson eased the boy back down. “From the looks of things, I’d say your killer—or I suppose I should say ‘killers’—had their hands on this boy maybe a year ago and abused him much the same way they abused Benji. Only for some reason they didn’t kill him.”
Sebastian shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Gibson stood with his hands braced against the stone table’s edge. “It might. When I was in India, I knew a colonel who abused a little Hindu boy something terrible. For the longest time, I could never understand why the boy didn’t run off. That boy would do anything the colonel ordered him to do, without hesitation or complaint. I finally realized that the colonel used the boy’s fear to control him. The boy was afraid that if he didn’t do what the colonel told him or if he tried to run off and got caught, then the colonel would hurt him that way again—only worse.”
Sebastian went to stand looking out at the darkened yard. Already the sky was turning a golden pink on the eastern horizon, and he could hear the hungry roar of the lions in the Tower looking for their breakfast. He felt his own exhaustion settle over him like a heavy blanket, weighing him down. After a moment he said, “I knew Toby was afraid. When I talked to him yesterday, any idiot could have seen he was terrified.”
“But you didn’t know why.”
Sebastian shook his head. “I should have.”
Gibson scrubbed a hand across his unshaven face. “There is one other thing.”
Sebastian turned. “What?”
The surgeon held out a folded sheet of expensive parchment paper. “I found this in his pocket.”
Sebastian had to force himself to open the page. The writing was the same carefully disguised block printing as before: bold, black, and mocking.
ANOTHER GIFT FOR YOU, DEVLIN. CHEERS.
• • •
Tuesday, 21 September
Sebastian arrived at the Professor’s Attic in Clerkenwell in the pale dawn light to find the shutters still up and no smoke rising from the chimney. He banged on the door with his fist and kept banging until Icarus Cantrell stuck his upper body out an upstairs window. He wore a ruffled nightshirt and a nightcap with a pointed tip that dangled in front of his gray-beard-grizzled face as he shouted, “For the love of—Oh; it’s you. What are you doing here? I thought your lot didn’t even roll out of bed until noon.”
“I need to talk to Hamish McCormick.”
“He’s not here.”
“I know. I’ll wait while you get him.”
• • •
Hamish sat on the low stool beside the Professor’s kitchen fire, one fist wrapped around the handle of a spoon as he shoveled hot porridge into his mouth. Every once in a while he cast a look toward where Sebastian stood, watching him. But Sebastian waited until the boy was halfway through his second bowl before saying, “You told me you were walking by Charterhouse Square with another lad when the gentleman pulled you into his carriage.”
Hamish shoved another spoonful of porridge into his mouth and nodded.
“Why were you there? By the Charterhouse, I mean.”
“Paddy said he had somethin’ he wanted me t’ see.”
“Do you know what?”
“No.”
“And afterward, when you went looking for Paddy Gantry, you say you couldn’t find him?”
Hamish nodded and swallowed. “Never seen him again. Far as I know, nobody ever did.”
“Is it possible that Paddy deliberately led you to a place where the gentleman was waiting, and that’s why he ran?”
Hamish’s spoon clattered against the earthenware bowl as he stopped eating, and his gaze darted to where Icarus Cantrell sat at the trestle table.
“Tell him,” said the Professor, leaning forward.
Hamish swiped the back of one hand across his mouth. His gaze dropped to the bowl in his hands.
“Hamish?”
The boy nodded, his face tight and pinched.
Sebastian said, “How long had you known Paddy?”
Hamish rolled one shoulder with the indifference of one to whom the passage of time meant little. “I dunno. Forever.”
“Did Paddy ever disappear for a few days?”
Hamish frowned as if with thought. “Once, yeah. He was gone a good week or more and then he come back walkin’ kinda stiff. Said he fell and hurt hisself. Why?”
Rather than answer, Sebastian said, “You told me the man who abducted you had red eyes and soft hands and a gentleman’s voice. Is there any chance there could have been two gentlemen that night? Not necessarily when you were pulled into the carriage, but later. At the house.”
The boy’s gaze shifted from Sebastian to the Professor.
“Is it possible?” said Icarus Cantrell, leaning forward.
Hamish set his empty porridge bowl aside and hunched over with his hands thrust between his knees and his gaze on the floor. “I was never sure. There was times I thought I could hear two of ’em talkin’ to each other. But then I’d think it was me head playin’ tricks on me, dividin’ one man into two and then meltin’ them back into one again.”
“Do you remember anything they said to each other?”
He shook his head.
“What about names? Did you ever hear them address each other by name?”
Hamish looked up, his eyes bleak with an old, old fear. “I thought they was callin’ each other ‘Duke’ and ‘Bishop.’ But that don’t make no sense, does it?”
And then, when Sebastian could only stare at him, the boy said it again. “Does it?”
Chapter 53
Sebastian sat before his library fire. The day was wretchedly gloomy, with a light rain pattering against the windowpanes. He was so absorbed by his thoughts that he wasn’t
aware of Hero coming up behind his chair until her hands settled on his shoulders.
“You need to rest,” she said, kneading his tight muscles. “You didn’t sleep last night at all. Or the night before.”
Sebastian tipped back his head so that he could look up at her. “You think I can rest?”
She gave him a crooked smile. “No. But just because you don’t think you can doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.”
“I keep thinking I should have seen it sooner.”
She shook her head. “Seen what?”
“The killers were always careful to abduct street children who had either been orphaned or abandoned—those without a parent or grandparent or other adult relative who might cause an uproar or demand action when they disappeared. That Bethnal Green magistrate—Alexander Robbins—was unusual in that he actually did notice when the area’s street children complained of friends or siblings who went missing. But he still didn’t do anything about it, did he?”
Hero shifted to massage his sore neck. “So what do you think you should have seen?”
He bent his head forward, exposing more of his neck to her soothing hands. He hadn’t realized just how tight and sore his muscles were. “Someone like Sir Francis or Ashworth—or de Brienne or Kneebone—would have no way of knowing which of the tens of thousands of ragged children running the streets of London have parents and which don’t. I should have realized that the killers must be using someone to select their targets.”
“You mean, someone like Toby?”
He nodded. “I think they used Toby—and Hamish’s friend Paddy Gantry before him, and doubtless others before that—first to select their targets and then to lure the victims to places where they could be easily abducted.”
“And to bury them,” said Hero quietly.
“Yes. God knows how long they’ve been doing this, moving from one area of the city to the next, selecting and grooming a child in each new location to use as their tool. I suspect they killed Paddy Gantry after Hamish escaped, both because they blamed Paddy for picking the ‘wrong’ boy and because they were worried that Paddy might identify them. They replaced him with Toby.”
“But why would Toby help gentlemen abduct and kill his own friends?”
“It has something to do with being vulnerable—and very afraid. But I’m not convinced I entirely understand it myself.”
Her hands stilled. “Whoever these men are, they must be stopped.”
He reached up to close his hands over hers and draw her around to face him. “How well do you know Sir Francis?”
“Not all that well. I never liked him, even when we were children. And there’s a nearly ten-year difference in our ages. Why?”
“I keep thinking Sir Francis and Ashworth are the most likely combination of killers, except the two men don’t run in the same set. Ashworth is a Corinthian, while Sir Francis is not.”
“True. But they were at Cambridge together.”
“They were? Sir Francis is several years Ashworth’s senior, is he not?”
“He is. Francis’s mother doted on him quite shamelessly, though, and didn’t like him to be away from her for long. He didn’t go up to Cambridge until after her death, with the result that he and Ashworth were there at the same time. I remember because he brought Ashworth on a visit to Glenside one summer when I was something like thirteen or fourteen.” Glenside Castle was Jarvis’s Scottish estate.
“In other words,” said Sebastian, “they could have been doing this for ten or twelve years.”
“Surely not.”
He squeezed her hands and rose to his feet. “I think I need to find someone who knew them at Cambridge.”
• • •
While Hero went to sit with her convalescing mother, Sebastian spent what was left of the day in discreet conversation with men he knew who had been at Cambridge around the turn of the century. He heard a number of sordid tales, of abuse of innkeepers’ daughters and poor girls picked up off the streets and brutalized—all hushed up at the time by the Marquis of Lindley and the old Baronet.
At Cambridge, Ashworth and Rowe had mainly limited themselves to rape and flagellation, although Rowe had also used a knife to cut a few of the girls. Sebastian wondered when they had moved on to murder. At the same time they expanded their victims to include young boys as well as girls? Or before?
More disturbed than ever, he donned evening dress and went in search of his beautiful, troubled young niece.
• • •
Miss Stephanie Wilcox was sipping a glass of lemonade at Lady Mary Jessup’s fashionable soirée when Sebastian walked up to her. She wore a high-waisted gown of virginal white, with small puff sleeves and a V-necked bodice laced up the front à la grecque. A white satin ribbon beaded with crystals and tiny pearls threaded her golden curls. She looked both utterly lovely and frighteningly fragile.
“Uncle,” she said, flashing him a wide smile that did nothing to dislodge the storm clouds lurking in her pretty blue eyes. “If you’re looking for Ashworth, he’s spending the evening with the Marquis in a show of filial devotion.”
“Actually, I was looking for you.”
“Oh? I noticed you skulking about at Lady Farningham’s last night. Mother tells me you think my betrothed guilty of a string of horrific murders. Is that true?”
“Yes,” he said baldly.
Stephanie threw a telling glance toward where Amanda stood, her back to them, in conversation with one of her cronies. “She’s here, you know—Mother, I mean. She’s left strict orders with the staff that you are to be turned away, should you venture to show your face in St. James’s Square. And I’ve been instructed to cut you dead if you should chance to speak to me.”
“And yet here we are.”
“Yes.” She smiled in a mischievous way that reminded him of the little girl she’d once been. “But then, as you know, I don’t generally make it a habit of doing what I’m told.”
“No,” he agreed. She had the same disastrous, rebellious defiance that had characterized her grandmother Sophia—along with Sophia’s tragic air of vulnerability. And he felt a helpless rush of affection for this vibrant, doomed girl. He said, “How friendly is Ashworth with Sir Francis Rowe? Do you know?”
“Quite friendly, actually. He’s asked Rowe to stand with him at our wedding. Why?”
Something about the tight way she said it told him much that he needed to know. “You don’t like him, do you?”
“Rowe? No.”
“Any particular reason why?”
She tilted her head to one side. “Do you like him?”
“No. Yet Ashworth obviously does.”
“Yes.”
“Would you happen to know Ashworth’s opinion of the Marquis de Sade?”
“Oh, Uncle; and what do you know of the Divine Marquis?”
He’d been hoping she’d say simply, Who is de Sade? “More than I’d care to, actually,” he said. “I take it Ashworth is familiar with his works?”
“Familiar? You could say that. Although it would be more accurate to say he’s obsessed with the man. He has a complete collection of de Sade’s work, including one volume magnificently bound in black leather that he claims is so rare only five copies were ever smuggled into England.”
It was a troubling thought, that Ashworth had discussed de Sade with his virginal future wife. For a long moment, Sebastian found it difficult to breathe. “You’ve seen it?”
“No. He only boasted of it to me. I understand Sir Francis gave it to him. They each have a copy.” Her eyes narrowed, and he wondered what she had seen in his expression. “Why?”
Sebastian looked into her pretty young face and saw for one stolen moment all the tension and despair she had been keeping so well hidden.
“You don’t need to marry him, Stephanie,” he said, his voice low and roug
h with urgency. “A broken betrothal might give the Beau Monde something to tut-tut about for a week or two. But the chatter would die down eventually.”
He saw something flare in her eyes, something that looked almost like amusement but was not. “Oh, Uncle,” she said with a forced laugh. “A baby born ‘early’ a scant seven months after the wedding will be bad enough. I don’t think I could live with the alternative.”
And with that she moved away toward her mother, leaving him hollowed out by consternation and regret and a raw, sharp twist of fear.
• • •
“You’re certain Ashworth is the killer?” said the Earl of Hendon, standing before his library fire, his hands clasped behind his back and his broad, familiar face set in grim lines.
Sebastian sat in a nearby leather armchair, a glass of brandy cradled in one hand. “One of them, yes. But can I prove it? No.”
Hendon drew his pipe from his pocket and then paused with the bowl cupped in his hand, his gaze on nothing. “And Stephanie is with child by this monster?”
“Yes.”
“Dear God. Do you suppose Amanda knows about the child?”
“I doubt it. Would you tell Amanda if you were her daughter?”
Hendon shook his head.
Sebastian watched the Earl open his tobacco pouch and begin to load his pipe with studied care.
“Stephanie can’t be allowed to marry him,” said Hendon after a moment. “I shall tell Amanda she must move to end the betrothal.”
“Amanda won’t listen to you. She knows I suspect Ashworth; they both do. Amanda doesn’t care and Stephanie is too desperate and afraid to listen to reason.”
Hendon let out his breath in a weary sigh. “Amanda reminds me sometimes of my mother. She was a hard woman. Angry and resentful and never satisfied.”
“I doubt my grandmother would have married one of her daughters to a killer—even if he were the heir to a marquis.”
Hendon tamped the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe and reached for a spill. “The wedding is this Thursday. If you don’t think Amanda or Stephanie will listen to reason, then what is to be done?”