What Angels Fear (14 page)

She halted abruptly, her chin jerking up, her eyes flashing. She would have swung away, back toward the theater, if he hadn’t caught her arm.

“I’m sorry. That was an unforgivable thing to say.”

She met his gaze. He couldn’t begin to interpret the dark shift of emotions he could see in her eyes. “Yes. It was.” She removed her arm from his unresisting grip and walked on again. A silence fell between them, filled only with the soft swish of the soles of her half-boots gliding over wet pavement and the whisper of old, old memories.

He let his gaze travel over the achingly familiar line of her profile, the arch of her neck. Her nose was small and turned up at the end like a child’s, her mouth wide, too wide, her lips full and sensuous. A seductive combination of innocence and sin.

There had been other women in his life since Kat Boleyn; beautiful, intelligent women, including one in Portugal he might even have fallen in love with if Kat Boleyn hadn’t always been there, like a shadow across his heart. And he wondered suddenly if he’d approached her this morning because she’d known Rachel York and could give him the information he needed, or if he had turned to her now for some other reason entirely, a reason his mind sheered away from.

She said, “You haven’t asked if I had a chance to speak with Rachel’s maid.”

A carriage dashed past, the coronet on its panels glistening with wet, the air filling with the scent of hot pitch from the linkboys’ torches. Sebastian watched it disappear into the distance, flames wavering against a black sky. “Did you?”

“No. She’s gone. Vanished—along with virtually everything in Rachel’s rooms that was movable.”

He brought his gaze back to her face. “I thought you said the constables were watching the house?”

“Only through the night, according to the elderly Scotswoman who lives upstairs. She also told me a young man came to Rachel’s rooms the morning after she was killed.”

“A young man?”

“A young man with a key. Looking for something, or so it seems. He went through Rachel’s rooms, then popped upstairs to ask our inquisitive neighbor if she knew where Mary Grant had gone.”

“Searching for what, I wonder?

“This, perhaps.” Pausing beneath the flickering light of a streetlamp, she drew something from her reticule and held it out to him.

It was a small book, bound in red calfskin and tied up with a leather thong. “I thought her rooms had been emptied,” he said, taking the book and loosening the knot in the leather.

“She kept it in a secret compartment in the mantelpiece.”

She didn’t say how she’d known about that compartment. He glanced up at her, then down at the book. It was fairly new, less than a fifth of its pages having been used.

And most of those first pages were now missing.

“The front pages have been cut out,” he said, running one finger along the ragged edges.

The clouds overhead shifted fitfully with the wind. The rain had cleared away the city’s nearly perpetual blanket of yellow fog, allowing rare glimpses of a distant full moon. In the shimmer of moonlight, her face appeared pale and faintly troubled. “It’s almost as if she knew something might happen to her.”

“Assuming it was Rachel who did it.” Sebastian thumbed through the dozen or so pages that were left. They covered little more than the previous week. “You think she was protecting someone?”

“I don’t know. It seems a reasonable explanation, doesn’t it?”

There was another explanation, of course: that Kat Boleyn had cut the pages out herself. Only, if there’d been something here she hadn’t wanted Sebastian to know about, why bother to give him the book at all? Why not simply destroy the thing and claim it had never been found? Why even offer to go to Rachel York’s rooms in the first place? To keep him from discovering whatever secret had been written on those missing pages? But why?
Why?

“Have you looked at what’s left?” he asked.

She nodded. “I’ve put notations beside the names I recognized. Most of them are people connected in some way with the play.”

“Any of them have a reason to wish Rachel harm?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Besides, we had a performance the night she died. We were all at the theater.”

Here was an aspect of Rachel York’s murder that hadn’t occurred to him. “All of you except for Rachel. Why wasn’t she there?”

“Her understudy went on in her place. Rachel sent word at the last minute, saying she was ill.”

“Did she do that often?”

“No. I can’t think of another instance. Rachel was never ill.”

Sebastian glanced quickly through the remaining pages. They mainly contained notations for meetings with the likes of hairdressers and seamstresses. But one name appeared on virtually every day. “Who’s Giorgio?”

“I think it might be Giorgio Donatelli. He helped design and paint the scenery when we did
The School for Scandal
last year. But he’s become increasingly popular as a portrait painter since then. He’s had commissions from the Lord Mayor and several members of the Prince of Wales’s inner circle. I don’t know why Rachel would be seeing him.”

“What do you know of him?”

“Not much, except that he’s young, and rather romantic-looking. He’s Italian.”

“Our young man with the key?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like Rachel to give any man the key to her rooms.”

Sebastian started to put the book in his pocket, but she reached out and touched his arm, stopping him.

“You didn’t look to see if she’d written down her Tuesday night appointment at St. Matthew of the Fields.”

Somewhere in the night, a tomcat howled, a deep throaty caterwaul of primal beastiality. Sebastian met the gaze of the woman beside him. “Did she?”

“Yes.”

There was a ribbon, stitched into the binding for use as a place marker. The book opened easily to its last entry.

At the top of the left-hand page, in a neat, well-schooled copperplate, Rachel York had written
Tuesday, 29 January 1811
. Sebastian scanned that day’s entries. She’d had a lesson with a dancing master at eleven that morning, another appointment near the theater at three. Then he saw the words
St. Matthew’s
and, beside that, a name.

St. Cyr.

Chapter 22

L
ater that night, alone in his small chamber at the Rose and Crown, Sebastian lit a candle, slipped the leather-bound book from his pocket, and settled down in the room’s single, straight-backed wooden chair to read.

All the pages containing Rachel’s entries prior to the afternoon of Friday, January 18, had been cut from the book. Sebastian stared at the date at the top of the first surviving page. It had been bitterly cold that week, he remembered, as he followed Rachel York’s fine copperplate through the mundane passage of the last days of her life, through the rehearsals and performances, the lessons and appointments with tradesmen. He leafed through each successive day, scanning the entries, not realizing until he reached the morning of Thursday the twenty-fourth that another page was missing, the page for Thursday evening—along with the following morning, which must have been on the overleaf of the same page.

Thoughtful, Sebastian thumbed back to the beginning. Was there a significance, he wondered, in the pattern of missing pages? What had happened in her life on those two successive Friday mornings or Thursday nights that Rachel hadn’t wanted anyone to know about?

Or that someone else hadn’t wanted Sebastian to know?

Sebastian returned to the afternoon of Friday, the twenty-fifth. After that, the pages continued without interruption up to Tuesday, the twenty-ninth, the evening Rachel died. The evening she had planned to meet someone named St. Cyr in St. Matthew of the Fields.

He went back again to that first page, paying more attention this time to each individual entry and to the notations Kat had made beside them, in pencil. There was little out of the ordinary: singing lessons and meetings with wardrobe; a reminder to pick up a pair of dancing slippers from the shoe repair man. Each appointment with each individual would need to be checked out, of course. But Sebastian found his attention focusing on two names.

The painter, Giorgio Donatelli, appeared frequently, each time with only the brief notation,
Giorgio
, and a time. But even more intriguing was an individual referred to simply as “F.” Kat had circled each appearance of the initial, along with a question mark.

Once more, Sebastian went back to the beginning and ran through the entries. Whoever “F” was, he—or she—appeared in the twelve days covered by the book’s surviving pages twice: on the evening of Wednesday, the twenty-third, and again on Monday, the twenty-eighth. In other words, Rachel had met with “F” the evening before the missing Thursday, and again the night before she died. A coincidence, Sebastian wondered, or not?

“F” could be a lover, of course—someone so familiar, so dear, that a simple initial sufficed. But he could also be a person whose involvement in her life Rachel had wanted to keep secret. Why? For the same reason she had kept her appointment book hidden?

Conspicuously absent from Rachel’s days was the name of the man who had been paying the rent on her rooms, Leo Pierrepont. If neither Pierrepont nor “F” had been Rachel York’s lover, then who had been? Sebastian found it difficult to believe that such a woman had not had one. Except, then, why didn’t the lover’s name appear in her book? Because she took his regular appearances for granted? Or because his visits were so erratic, she never knew when he might appear?

A wind had come up, rattling the shutters on the window and causing the flame of the candle to flare, then almost die in a sudden, cold draft. A distant burst of laughter sounded, muffled, from the common room below. Out in the hall, a board creaked.

Rising quietly from his chair, Sebastian snuffed the candle flame between thumb and forefinger, plunging the room into darkness. Slipping the small French pistol he’d bought that afternoon in the Strand from his greatcoat pocket, he flattened himself against the wall, then reached out to turn the handle and throw open the door to the hall.

“ ’Oly ’ell!” yelped Tom, looking up, wide-eyed, from where he sat cross-legged on the bare floorboards opposite Sebastian’s door. “Don’t shoot me.”

Sebastian lowered the pistol. “What the devil are you doing here?”

In the dim light cast by the oil lamp dangling from a chain at the top of the stairs, the boy’s face looked pinched, cold. “Fer such a sharp cove, you can be mortal wet, at times. It’s watchin’ yer back, I am.”

“My back,” said Sebastian.

Tom shrugged. “Well, yer door, at any rate.”

“Why?”

The boy’s jaw tightened. “You paid me fer a week, you did. I’m earning me wages.”

Sebastian dropped the flintlock into his coat pocket. “Let me get this straight. You don’t see a problem in lifting a stranger’s purse, but you refuse to be given wages you don’t feel you’ve earned?”

“That’s right,” said Tom, obviously glad to be understood. “I gots me pride.”

“And a highly original set of principles,” said Sebastian.

The boy simply looked up at him, puzzled.

A gust of wind slammed against the inn, whistling through the eaves and sending an icy drought sluicing down the corridor. Tom shivered, his thin arms creeping around his legs, hugging them closer to his body.

Sebastian sighed. “It’s a bit drafty out here for conversation. You’d best come in.”

For a brief instant, Tom hesitated. Then he scrambled to his feet.

“How did you find me, anyway?” Sebastian asked, closing the door against the cold as the boy scooted across the room to the fire.

One bony shoulder lifted in a shrug. “ ’Twern’t difficult. All’s I did was ask around ’til I cottoned on to a young mort named Kat.”

“You followed me here from Covent Garden?”

Tom stretched his chilblain-covered hands out to the glowing coals. A residual shiver racked his thin, ragged frame. “Aye.”

Sebastian studied the boy’s half-averted profile. He was bright and resourceful, and determined, it seemed, to earn his “wages.” Sebastian thought about all the names and appointments in that little red book, and an idea began to form in his mind.

Opening the door to the room’s ancient wardrobe, he rummaged around and came up with a quilt and an extra pillow. “Here,” he said, tossing the bedding toward the boy. “You can sleep by the fire. Tomorrow we’ll see about getting you a room over the stables.”

Tom caught first the pillow, then the quilt. “You mean yer keeping me on?”

“I’ve decided I can use an associate of your talents.”

A wide, toothy smile broke across the boy’s face. “You won’t be sorry, gov’nor. There won’t be any bung-nappers getting their dibs on yer cly or foggles whilst I’m around, I can tell you that. Nor any tripper-ups nor rampsmen thinkin’ yer easy pickin’s.”

“Get some sleep,” said Sebastian, turning away with a smile. “I have an early assignment for you tomorrow. I’d like you to discover the address of a certain Italian gentleman.”

“An
Italian
,” said Tom, in exactly the same tone of voice he might have used had Sebastian divulged a friendship with a cockroach.

“That’s right. An Italian.” Sebastian slipped the pistol from his pocket and placed it, along with his pocketbook, beneath his pillow. “A painter, to be exact. A man by the name of Giorgio Donatelli.”

The dreams are rarely the same. Sleep and time distort memory; events become disjointed. Fleetingly glimpsed faces and haunting images recombine with unrelated incidents to torture and taunt. In a mist-shrouded mountain village, simple stone walls rise up scorched and shattered. Reaching out, Sebastian turns over a woman’s flyblown body to find Kat’s lifeless blue eyes staring up at him. He cries out, and fresh red blood seeps from her gashed neck. Her lips move. “Aidez-moi,” she says: Help me. “Je suis mort.” I am dead. But the knife is in his hand and he is the one slashing, he is the one killing, and the bloodlust runs hot and sweet through his veins—