by C. S. Harris
Sebastian had his head turned, his gaze on the woman now standing in the cottage garden with her arms looped around her child—a child who would probably never know the real identity of either her mother or her father. “Yes. Although perhaps not all of it.”
“What do you make of this ‘letter’ Digby claimed to have?”
He brought his gaze back to Hero’s. “Seems out of character for Ashworth, doesn’t it? He wasn’t a man who scared easily—if at all. That type don’t usually contemplate their own possible death.”
“Yet both the timing and the murder of Digby are suggestive.”
“They are, indeed.”
She was silent a moment, then surprised him by reaching out to take his hand. “That poor little girl.”
“Yes,” said Sebastian. “In more ways than one.”
* * *
Viscount Ashworth’s aged butler, Fullerton, stared at Sebastian through bloodshot, watery eyes. “Edward Digby’s things? You want to see his things?”
Sebastian studied the old man’s haggard face and reddened nose. He looked like someone who still belonged in front of a fire with a nice warm bowl of chicken soup. “Do you have them?”
“Yes, yes. One of the footmen packed them up in case his family should come asking for them. But nobody’s contacted us. Don’t imagine they will, frankly.”
Sebastian waited a moment, but when the butler continued to simply stare at him, he said, “May I see them, please?”
Fullerton gave a creaky bow. “Yes, yes, of course, my lord. I’ll have George show you the way. The knees object to all those stairs these days, I’m afraid.”
As befitted his status as the master’s valet, Digby had had the privilege of a private room in the servants’ quarters in the attic. But whatever personal touches he might have added to that Spartan space were now gone. There was only a stripped bed, an ugly chest of drawers, and a washstand. A ridiculously small bundle rested on the bare mattress.
“That will be all, thank you,” Sebastian said to the footman, George. George hesitated a moment, then withdrew.
As he stared at that diminished pile of belongings, Sebastian found himself wondering whether George had been the footman assigned to assemble the dead valet’s effects. Whoever it was had obviously helped himself to anything useful. Little remained beyond a few pairs of drawers, a silk stocking with a rent in it, a slim, well-worn book entitled Helpful Hints, and a broken pocket watch.
A more conscientious butler would have supervised the project and kept the dead man’s room locked. Yet because it was of no apparent value and had been tucked out of sight inside the book, the letter Sebastian sought was still there, unaddressed but bearing Ashworth’s seal in red wax.
Sebastian broke the seal, unfolded the single heavy parchment sheet, and began to read.
* * *
Charles, Lord Jarvis, was in Sotheby’s auction rooms, studying a lot of particularly fine ancient Egyptian artifacts to be offered for sale, when Devlin came to stand beside him.
The auction rooms were otherwise empty, as they always were whenever Jarvis chose to patronize them. He frowned. “This is supposed to be a private showing.”
Devlin kept his gaze on the ka statue before them. “Good. Because I suspect the palace wouldn’t want anyone to overhear what I have to say.”
Jarvis let his breath out in a pained sigh. “What now?”
“Last Thursday afternoon, Viscount Ashworth paid a visit to the Pulteney Hotel. The original reason for his visit is probably irrelevant. But the timing is important because he somehow chanced to overhear a discussion between Grand Duchess Catherine of Oldenburg and her lady-in-waiting, Princess Ivanna Gagarin. A discussion they assumed was private.”
“You think this conversation should interest me, do you?”
“Considering the fact they were discussing the Russians’ new scheme for scuttling the Anglo-Dutch alliance, I would think so, yes.”
“I do hope in your naïveté you don’t assume you have stumbled across something of which I am ignorant.”
“Not entirely.”
Jarvis studied the younger man’s impassive features. “I see. So, tell me this: What have you discovered?”
“The Tsar’s original plan was to set up a match between his sister and the Prince Regent—with the inconvenient current Princess of Wales presumably to be eliminated by either fair means or foul. But when that option was crushed by the two royals taking each other in instant and mutual dislike, the Russians moved on to their next alternative.”
“By which I take it you mean their hopes of breaking Princess Charlotte’s betrothal to the Prince of Orange by flinging some obscure but handsome and charming European prince into the girl’s path?”
“So you do know.”
“Very little of importance goes on in London of which I am unaware,” said Jarvis, shifting to the next display, a particularly fine sculpted head of Amenhotep III. “Do I take it you think I should be alarmed? The Russians won’t succeed, you know. The marriage will take place.”
A faint smile curled the younger man’s lips. “Have you met the two princes I understand they consider the most promising? Prince August of Prussia and Leopold of Saxe-Coburg?”
“I have not.”
“August is debonair, handsome, and charming, while Leopold cuts a most romantic figure. And while I myself don’t care for either man, I can see them having a devastating effect on a young, impressionable girl who has been kept dangerously isolated. Both have apparently agreed to come to London with the Allied Sovereigns.”
“The Princess is already betrothed. These machinations come too late.”
“I’m told the marriage contract has yet to be signed.”
“It will be. The Princess can only drag out the negotiations for so long.”
Devlin let his gaze rove over a selection of wooden tomb models from the Eleventh Dynasty. “When are the Tsar and his entourage expected to arrive in London? June?” Devlin smiled and started to turn away.
Jarvis put out a hand, stopping him. “The Grand Duchess had nothing to do with Ashworth’s death.”
Devlin paused to look back at him. “So certain?”
“Yes.”
Jarvis was aware of Devlin studying him with an intensity and level of understanding he didn’t like. Then the younger man shook his head and said, “I think you’re wrong.”
Chapter 39
Sebastian drove next to the Pulteney Hotel, only to discover that the Grand Duchess and her entourage were spending the day visiting some of London’s most celebrated tourist attractions. He wasted a frustrating amount of time tracking the royal party from the wild beasts at the Exchange to the Tower and the Royal Mint before finally running them down in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey.
It was a large party, with the Grand Duchess accompanied by her lady-in-waiting, Princess Ivanna Gagarin, as well as half a dozen or so other ladies, including the older, hatchet-faced woman no one ever bothered to introduce. Colonel Nikolai Demidov and two tall, imposing members of the Imperial Guard stood nearby. When Sebastian came upon them, all were gathered around a tattered, life-sized figure in faded robes of the Garter that Sebastian recognized as the funeral effigy of Charles II.
Posed upright, with eyes open wide, the effigy had been made to the King’s exact measurements and with his facial features modeled in carefully tinted wax. The result was eerily lifelike and easily recognizable, with fine blue veins etching the monarch’s familiar straight, prominent nose, the eyes pouched by years of excess, the long dark hair flowing about his shoulders. But the ermine edging the once-grand velvet was noticeably grimy, the point lace at the royal neck and wrists yellowed with age and nibbled by silverfish. A clump of bedraggled, dusty feathers drooped from the long-dead King’s limp hat.
A living but obviously nervous young cleric in a
rusty black cassock stood beside the effigy with a lamp, his voice high-pitched and shaky as he tried to explain Charles’s history to the royal visitors.
“Ah, good,” said the Grand Duchess, interrupting the cleric without apology when she spotted Sebastian walking toward them. “You.”
“Your Imperial Highness,” said Sebastian, bowing low.
“Vraiment, your arrival is most opportune. Perhaps you can explain to us why these things are here.” She waved a hand in the direction of the Stuart King and turned her back on her guide. “This personage has been unable to do so.”
“They’re funeral effigies,” said Sebastian with an apologetic glance at the cleric. “There was a time when the actual bodies of royals and great nobles were displayed in funeral processions. But when the death ceremonies became too long and elaborate for that to be practical, effigies were substituted.”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently. “I have heard of such things in France and Italy. But why are they here?”
Sebastian himself had always found the effigies’ presence in the Abbey vaguely troubling. Meticulously life-sized images of the dead, they’d been modeled as if still alive. The heads of the earliest examples were of wood and plaster rather than wax, but all had been dressed in the dead’s own extravagant clothing and decked out with paste jewels and fake pearls now blackened with age. A few of the oldest effigies were lying down, but most were posed upright like giant articulated dolls, their painted or glass eyes wide and staring.
He took a moment to answer. “I suppose because they were set up here when the bodies were interred.”
“Yes, yes. But why are they still here? I’m told the common people are allowed to view them for the price of a few pennies. It’s like a—a puppet show, with these great kings and queens serving as entertainment for the vulgar to gawk at. It makes them appear worse than ridiculous; it makes them seem ordinary. And such a thing should never be allowed.”
“We don’t do it anymore,” said Sebastian, although that wasn’t strictly true. Somewhere in the Abbey was an effigy of Nelson dressed in the admiral’s own uniform, complete with eye patch and sword—although it wasn’t technically a funeral effigy since Nelson had been buried at St. Paul’s. The Abbey had commissioned the figure in an attempt to compete with the Cathedral as a tourist attraction.
“Yet they are still here,” said the Grand Duchess, as if the ragged royal effigies were a personal affront to her own exalted status. And he supposed that in a sense they were.
Up to this point, Princess Ivanna Gagarin had been silently listening to the exchange with a faint smile on her lips. Now she said, “Perhaps it became a matter of who was going to order them taken down once they’d been set up. And what would they do with them? Throw them out with the rubbish? Burn them?”
“Heaven forbid,” said the Grand Duchess. Dark eyes smoldering with vicarious outrage, she moved to study a nearby effigy of a woman. This one was obviously older than Charles, her head made of wood and plaster. Once she must have been an imposing figure, standing almost as tall as Sebastian, her limbs gracefully composed. Now her once-fine clothes were mostly gone, her torso ripped and losing straw, her legs exposed. Even her head was bald, with only peg holes to show where a wig and perhaps a crown had once been attached. There was something almost obscene about seeing her like this—as if they were staring at the long-dead lady herself, stripped of all her finery and bared for all to see.
“Mon Dieu,” said the Tsar’s sister. “Who is this?”
Sebastian cast a helpless glance at the cleric, who cleared his throat and said, “Elizabeth of York, Your Imperial Highness. Wife of Henry the Seventh.”
“A queen? This is a queen? And the riffraff are allowed in to see her? Looking like this?”
“If they pay their pennies,” said Sebastian, who found himself thinking, inevitably, of the ancient Egyptian funerary statues and tomb models Jarvis had been viewing.
“I have seen enough,” announced the Grand Duchess, and turned away with an affronted flounce.
“I assume you’ve taken the trouble to track us down for a reason?” said Princess Ivanna, falling in beside Sebastian as the party of Russians filed out of the chapel.
“As a matter of fact, yes. Two men tried to kill me last night. Two Russian men.”
“Oh? Surely you aren’t suggesting they were in any way connected to the Grand Duchess?”
“The Grand Duchess? Not exactly.”
“Then what? ‘Exactly’?”
Rather than answer, he said, “So, when do you expect Prince August to arrive in London? Or has the Tsar decided to place his hopes on Leopold instead?”
She gave Sebastian that wry, amused smile she did so well. “I fear I’ve not the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Surely you haven’t forgotten the handsome princes you and the Grand Duchess suggested the Tsar bring with him to London? With the Grand Duchess having abandoned her original scheme of marrying the Regent herself, I suppose sabotaging Princess Charlotte’s proposed Dutch marriage is a rather obvious alternative. It’s hardly a secret that the Princess is unhappy with this match her father is pressing on her.”
Ivanna kept her gaze on the ornate carvings along the ambulatory as she considered her response. “Have you met Orange? Are you saying you’d like to see that poor girl married to him?”
“I have met him. And no, I would not like to see Charlotte married to him. Nevertheless, I find interference by a foreign power in such matters highly offensive.”
She glanced over at Sebastian. “Why? If it achieves an objective you yourself desire?”
“I think most Englishmen would find the idea of St. Petersburg handpicking our future queen’s prince consort an affront to our sovereignty.”
“And the young Princess herself? Do you spare not a thought for her?”
Sebastian gave a soft huff of amusement. “You would have me think your pity for her sincere? When the Tsar hopes to subsequently marry Orange to the Grand Duchess’s own younger sister? I wonder, will she be given any say in the matter? Somehow I doubt it.”
Ivanna was no longer smiling. “Who told you of this?”
“Ashworth, actually.”
She stared at him a moment, their footsteps echoing with those of the others as they moved up the ancient stone nave. Then she went off in what sounded like a genuine peal of laughter. “You mean to say he did write a letter?”
“You find that amusing?”
“I do, yes. He warned me he intended to do so, but I never believed he actually would.”
“Why not?”
“Because, unlike you, Ashworth couldn’t have cared less about violations of British sovereignty or the happiness of your silly little Princess.”
“Yet presumably he did have a healthy interest in his own self-preservation.”
She threw a thoughtful, telling glance back at the fiercely glowering colonel walking silently behind them.
Sebastian said, “Let me guess: The colonel threatened him, did he?”
“Perhaps. But men such as Ashworth are fearless.”
“Then perhaps the letter was written more in anger and a desire for revenge than out of fear. So that if, in the unlikely possibility you did succeed in killing him, he’d still have the last laugh—even if it was from beyond the grave.”
She looked thoughtful. “Yes, I can see that.” Her eyes narrowed. “I gather you now think we killed him?”
Her use of the word “we” rather than “I” was not lost on him. “Yes.”
“And yet you have the letter. Its existence does rather prove that we weren’t responsible, wouldn’t you say? Why would we deliberately do something that might provoke the publication of the very thing we desired to keep secret?”
“As you say, you didn’t believe he’d actually write the letter.”
She gave a negligent shrug he found chilling. “Pain is a very effective persuader. Believe me, if we had killed him, we would have ascertained the truth of the letter’s existence before we allowed him to die.”
“You mean you would have tortured him into giving it up?”
“Colonel Demidov is very talented.”
“I’ve no doubt he is. Except that Ashworth didn’t have the letter; his valet did—the same valet who coincidentally died the same night as the Viscount.”
“But without giving up the letter?”
“Obviously.”
“Once more I remind you of the marvelous uses of pain as a persuader.”
Sebastian let his gaze travel over her full, seductive mouth and strange, wintry eyes. How many men and women, he wondered, had died screaming in soul-destroying agony on this woman’s orders? It was an effort to keep his voice even and unemotional as he said, “I am curious about one thing.”
They’d reached the abbey’s soaring west doors, and she turned to face him. “Oh? What’s that?”
After the dim interior of the old church, the daylight was blinding. “Where were you Friday night?”
Her lips curled into one of her faintly derisive smiles. “With the Grand Duchess, of course.” She nodded toward the Tsar’s sister, who was allowing one of her ladies to fuss with the adjustment of her massive bonnet. “You can ask her, if you like. Although do you seriously think I’d do my own killing?”
“Of Edward Digby and Sissy Jordan? Probably not. But Ashworth?” He paused. “I think you might have enjoyed it.”
Her smile never slipped. It was the confident, serene smile of a woman born to privilege and utterly convinced of the superiority of her own intellect and will; a woman who could lie without compunction and face danger or even death without flinching because she knew neither fear nor remorse.
A woman who was basically the female version of Ashworth.
She said, “Even if you came to the conclusion that we had killed him, you could never touch us. You know that, don’t you?”