by C. S. Harris
“Always wise advice in a murder investigation.”
At that she did look up. “You make light of what I tell you. You should not.” She turned her attention to the last row, to an image of an ancient illuminated manuscript resting half open at the entrance to an enchanted grotto. “The book represents a secret of great importance.” Her eyes narrowed as if she were seeing something unexpected. “A secret that relates not to the murder of Ashworth but to you, monsieur le vicomte. It is an old secret that has long lain hidden despite your attempts to unveil it. But the unmasking of deceptions can be dangerous. You must understand well the perils of this personal quest upon which you have embarked.”
Sebastian felt his face grow hot with what he knew was an old, old shame. It mattered not that the originating sin was of others’ making; the resultant shame was still his to bear, and it always would be. He told himself she didn’t know—she could not know. He told himself that all men have secrets. Easy enough to hint at one, watch for a betraying reaction, and then move in closer for the killing thrust.
He schooled his features into a mask of calm insouciance. And yet he knew by the flare of awareness in her eyes that she saw right through him. She might not grasp the ugly details of the deepest, darkest secret of his existence, but she now knew he hid a torment with the power to drive him from his bed in the darkest hours of night in search of an elusive peace that never came.
For one intense moment, she held his gaze. Then she dropped her attention again to the cards, her fingertips skimming over an image of a Spanish galleon in full sail, the winds billowing its sun-struck canvas as it cut through a raging sea. She frowned but kept going, her hand coming to rest on an image of two soaring birds, their dark wings silhouetted against a stormy sky. “Birds were once considered messengers from the gods to mankind,” she said softly. “They can represent wisdom and freedom of the spirit. But as with so many cards, their meaning can alter depending on where they fall. Here they mean . . . adversity. Your life is approaching a period of great strife that will test you. Whether you survive without permanent loss or damage is up to you.” She leaned back on her stool, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at him.
He had to fight a powerful urge to ask whether the looming “adversity” came from his attempts to reveal Ashworth’s murderer or arose in some way from his quest to unravel the secret to which she had just alluded. He wanted to ask her if he would ever know the truths now hidden from him. Except of course he did no such thing because she was a charlatan, a fraud, a trickster, and he believed in none of this.
None of it.
She said, “I don’t know if you will discover the truth you seek. But I can warn you that you must be certain you can accept whatever you will learn. Otherwise you must not seek it.”
He stared at her. “Why are you doing this?”
She gave a small shake of her head, as if not understanding the question. “Doing what?”
He wafted one hand over the cards on the table. “This.”
“Perhaps for the same reason you seek justice for those deprived of their lives through murder. We feel driven, you and I, to help those who need it most.” She nodded toward the skeleton that stood in one corner of the red-shrouded room. “Much of what I do is for show—for the amusement and titillation of bored, wealthy men and women who like to play at touching the mysterious unknown from the safety of their drawing rooms.” Again, that little shrug. “Francesca and I must eat and have a roof over our heads.”
“Francesca?”
“The girl who met you at the door.” She paused, and he thought she meant to say something more about the strange child. Instead, she said, “You have a gift for discerning patterns, for understanding motives and piercing deceptions.” She began collecting her cards. “My gift is for this. When I can help, I do.”
“You think it helps? Foretelling the future? It seems to me it could have unintended consequences.”
“It can. I try to be careful with what I relay. What I see is only a possibility. Unfortunate outcomes can sometimes be averted if one is forewarned and wise.”
“But not always.”
For one brief instant her hands trembled, and he found himself thinking of an innocent young woman desperate enough to throw herself and her unborn child into the Thames. All the knowledge and foresight Madame Blanchette claimed to find in her cards hadn’t been enough to save her own daughter.
He said, “Where did you learn to use the cards?”
She assembled the deck into a neat stack and set it aside. “My father was a minor government functionary in the Rouergue. When I was twelve, my parents sent me to a convent in Conques where the nuns were perhaps not as vigilant as they should have been. I befriended an old Gypsy woman. It was she who introduced me to the tarot.”
He found himself wondering about the years in between, all the dangerous years of revolution and war that had taken a young girl from a convent on the Dourdou to the gilded halls of the Tuileries and then exile. Had the cards helped her navigate those treacherous times? Or had they provided her with only an illusion of control?
“Sometimes even illusions are helpful,” she said, and he felt a chill pass over him that had nothing to do with his wet clothes.
He pushed to his feet, not surprised to realize that Francesca had silently appeared in the doorway, ready to show him out. But at the entrance, he looked back at the woman, who remained seated on her stool. He said, “You still haven’t told me everything you know.”
For a moment her gaze met his. And he saw in the dark depths of her eyes a lifetime of pain and fear and sorrow without end. “If the tarot has taught me anything,” she said quietly, “it is the dangerous limitations of what I think I know.”
* * *
He was tempted to pay a visit next to Vincent’s, the Bond Street jeweler in whose shop Ashworth was said to have raped Giselle Blanchette. But it was Sunday, and raining, and he remembered he was still dressed to blend in with the riffraff of Seven Dials rather than the exalted residents of Mayfair.
He hailed a hackney and headed home.
* * *
He turned in to Brook Street to find a gentleman in a caped greatcoat and fashionable beaver hat standing at the base of the front steps of Sebastian’s house. The slowing hackney briefly drew the man’s attention. But he evidently failed to recognize the scruffy individual paying off the jarvey, because he started to turn away, only to stop, swing back toward the front steps, and hesitate again.
“Looking for me?” said Sebastian.
“Devlin. Good heavens.” Russell Firth blinked against the rain. “Why are you dressed like that?”
“It’s complicated.” Sebastian squinted up at the weeping sky. “Shall we go inside? Or did you plan to keep pacing back and forth on the flagway all afternoon?”
A faint flush crept into the architect’s cheeks. “I was trying to decide precisely what to say to you.”
“You’ve seen Stephanie, I take it?”
Firth nodded.
“Then please, let’s continue this conversation over a brandy in my library. I don’t know about you, but I’m damnedably wet.”
Sebastian led the way into the house and poured two generous measures of brandy. “Have a seat,” he said as he turned to throw more coal on the fire. “I appreciate your coming, and I’ll give you credit for being more honest than my niece. Or perhaps you’re simply clever enough to realize that the jig is up.”
Firth perched uncomfortably on the edge of one of the chairs facing the hearth. “It’s not what you think.”
“Oh?” Sebastian stood and turned to look at him. “Then tell me what it is.”
Firth thrust up from the chair and went to gaze out the front window at the rain. “It happened much as I told you: I met her when she came to a presentation I gave on Sounion. For some reason, the temple captured her imagination in a w
ay that I think caught even her by surprise. She came up to speak to me afterward, and—” He broke off and shook his head. “I knew it was hopeless from the beginning. We both did. But we were helpless to stop what was happening.”
“Hopeless because of the disparity in your stations, you mean?”
Firth blew out a long breath. “That probably should have made a difference, but it didn’t. The thing is, my wife was still alive then.”
Sebastian stared at him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were married.”
“To my cousin, Elizabeth. She . . . she found herself in difficulty several years ago. We’d always been close, ever since we were children—more like brother and sister, actually. I couldn’t simply leave her to suffer alone the consequences of what she’d done.”
“She was with child?”
Firth nodded. “The father was long gone by the time she realized she was in trouble. Her own father, my aunt’s husband, disowned her. She had no one else to turn to. So I married her.”
He paused for a moment, and Sebastian waited until the Welshman was ready to continue. “Elizabeth was never well, and the emotional turmoil combined with bearing the child took a terrible toll on her. The little boy died within hours of birth, and she never really recovered. The doctors said sea air might do her good, so I hired a house for her down in Brighton and engaged a companion to keep her company and take care of her while I continued with my work here in London.”
“When did she die?”
“Last October.” Firth drew a crooked elbow across his rain-soaked face. “I don’t mean to imply that the circumstances of my marriage excuse my allowing my affections to stray elsewhere, because they do not. But it may perhaps explain it. Elizabeth and I were never more than dear friends.”
“When did you and Stephanie become lovers?”
“We didn’t. Never.”
Sebastian took a slow sip of his brandy. Firth might be marginally more honest than Stephanie, Sebastian decided, but it was still only a matter of degree. “A man like Ashworth wouldn’t take it lightly if he found out his wife was in love with another man—even if he could somehow be convinced that the affair remained unconsummated.”
Firth shook his head. “He didn’t love her. He never did. He only married her because his father refused to give him another groat until he set about providing a legitimate heir for the succession.”
“Perhaps. Except that even if he didn’t care for her, she was still his wife. And as far as most men are concerned, that makes a woman his possession. Something meant for him and him alone.”
Firth started to say something, then simply raised his glass to his lips with an unsteady hand and drank deeply.
Sebastian said, “You realize the damage it will do if knowledge of the friendship between you gets out? People are already speculating that she might have killed him.”
“But she didn’t do it!”
So, what about you? thought Sebastian, his gaze hard on the younger man’s face. Did you kill Ashworth for her? Ashworth, or at least Digby? He didn’t voice the accusation aloud, but then, he didn’t need to. It hung there in the tense atmosphere between them.
Firth swung away to look out the window again at the gray, wet street. “Ashworth made her existence a living hell. You . . . You’ve no idea what he was like.”
“Actually, I have a pretty good idea. I’m not surprised she refused to live with him.”
“He didn’t want her there. He was always bringing home women, everything from titled ladies to whores hired off the street. If you ask me, that’s who killed him—some poor woman who didn’t understand the abuse she was letting herself in for and fought back.”
“Except that Ashworth was the one tied to the bed.”
Firth turned to stare at him for a long, unblinking moment. Then he set his drink aside unfinished. “The inquest is tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps something will come out then.”
“I doubt it. But I suppose it’s always possible.”
For one intense moment, the two men’s gazes met. “She didn’t do it,” said the architect again, his jaw set at a stubborn angle.
Sebastian drained his own glass and gave an unexpected shudder. I hope to God you’re right, he thought.
But he remained unconvinced.
Chapter 23
That night, Sebastian dreamed of ancient manuscripts written in blood, of shadowy caverns beckoning him with dangerous promises of secrets to be revealed. He saw a ship, its sun-struck sails billowing in a fair wind, and a familiar, golden-haired woman, ever young, her head thrown back in joyous laughter.
He awoke with his throat tight, his breath coming hard and fast. He was aware of a heavy ache of yearning in his chest and eyes so dry they hurt. Beside him, Hero shifted, murmuring in her sleep.
Gently so as not to wake her, he drew her to him and buried his face in the sweet warmth of her hair.
* * *
Monday, 4 April
The inquest into the murder of Lord Ashworth was held at the White Hart in Clarges Street. Because no official venue for such inquiries existed, inquests were typically convened in whatever nearby pub or inn was large enough to accommodate the crowds so often attracted by the titillating opportunity to view a bloody, mutilated corpse.
Viscount Ashworth, his skin beginning to take on a waxy, greenish hue, lay faceup on a battered table in the center of the room. The bodies of murder victims were typically displayed naked. At the insistence of his lordship’s father, the Marquis of Lindley, a folded sheet had been draped over the victim’s groin. But his lordship’s savagely hacked chest was in full view of anyone who cared to wander in out of the rain and gawk at it.
“I never thought I’d be attending my own son’s inquest,” Lindley told Sebastian as the two men stood together waiting for the coroner to arrive. It seemed to Sebastian, looking at him, that the Marquis had aged a decade in just three days. He’d always been thin, but there was now an air of increased fragility about him, a slowness to his movements that hadn’t been there before. It was as if his sorrow over his son’s death were a brutal weight bearing down upon him. And it was visibly crushing him.
“Look at them,” said Lindley, staring out over the pushing, malodorous crowd, all vying for a chance to peer at the dead man. The air was thick with a foul stench of wet wool, sweat, tobacco, and ale. “It’s a rare day’s entertainment for them, like a cockfight or a bearbaiting—with my son’s mutilated body as the central spectacle.”
“You don’t need to stay for this,” Sebastian said quietly.
“Yes, I do. I owe him that. And then—” The old man’s voice broke, and he had to swallow and start again. “And then I’ll take him home.” He cleared his throat. “Lovejoy tells me you’ve agreed to help try to find the killer. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that. Are you making any progress at all?”
Sebastian shook his head. “I wish I could say I was, but . . . not really. I’m sorry.”
“‘For this child I prayed,’” quoted the old man softly. “‘And the Lord hath given me my petition that which I asked of him. Therefore I have lent him to the Lord.’” Lindley sighed. “Samuel 1:27 to 28.” He paused again, then said, “If there’s anything I can do—anything—you’ll let me know? I keep going over and over everything I can recall him saying these last few weeks, hoping I’ll come up with something that might explain this. But I can’t.”
“He didn’t seem nervous or upset or preoccupied in any way?”
“Anthony? No. He wasn’t the type, actually. They don’t come any cooler or steadier.”
Sebastian wasn’t convinced such a characteristic was entirely admirable. In his experience, men who lacked the capacity to feel fear or nervousness were all too often missing other emotions, valuable attributes such as empathy, compassion, and remorse. He said,
“Do you know if he’d quarreled with anyone recently? Or if there was someone he might have angered or frightened?”
The old Marquis thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “Not that I’m aware. Although to be honest, I didn’t see much of him. I’d hoped marriage to your niece might settle him down. Change him. A wife and children typically have that effect, don’t they? But not with Anthony.” A quiver passed over his aged face. “I’ve outlived them all now—my wife, all but one of my sisters, and all four of my children. A man dedicates his life to preserving the proud heritage entrusted to him by his father—building up the family estates, protecting the honor of the family name—thinking one day he will pass on the sacred obligation to his own son . . .” His voice trailed off; then he swallowed hard and said, “Thank God for the birth of those two little boys.”
“They must be a source of great comfort to you.”
A faint spark of joy glimmered through the pain shadowing the old man’s eyes. “Have you seen them? They’re fine lads, as lusty and strong as you could wish. My only regret is that they’ll never have the opportunity to know the man who was their father.”
Personally, Sebastian thought that was just as well for the children’s sake. But he kept that opinion to himself.
There was a stirring near the door that suggested the imminent arrival of the coroner. The Marquis glanced over at the commotion and said, “We had someone from Bow Street at Lindley House this morning, talking to the servants. Do you know anything about that?”
“No. Sorry.”
Lindley fixed him with a hard stare. “Please tell me they don’t suspect Stephanie.”