What Angels Fear (19 page)
Authors: C.S. Harris
Sebastian watched her walk over to straighten one of the drapes at the front windows. It was a fussy thing to do, not at all like her. “Why not? He was involved with her. For some men, that’s all the reason they need, if the woman decides to try to walk away from them. Or if she should suddenly become infatuated with a beautiful Italian painter.”
Kat turned to face him again. “When I was at Rachel’s lodging house, the Scotswoman who lives upstairs told me she thought Rachel was planning to leave London.”
“You think it’s true?”
“I don’t know. Rachel certainly never said anything about it. But this woman seems to have the impression Rachel was about to get her hands on a lot of money.”
“Money?” Sebastian set aside his empty cup. “I wonder if she was blackmailing someone.”
Hardly had the words left his mouth when a thought occurred to him, a thought at once inevitable and so terrible as to take his breath. And he knew by the way Kat’s eyes flared wide that the possibility had come to her at almost exactly the same time. “No,” he said, before she could give voice to it.
“But—”
“No,” he said again, walking up to her. “You’re wrong. I know my father. He might be able to kill, given the right provocation, but not like that. He could never kill like that.”
Her head fell back, her wide, beautiful eyes dark and troubled as she looked up into his face.
It wasn’t simply something Sebastian was saying; he truly believed Hendon could never have raped Rachel York on those altar steps, or left her dying in a sea of her own blood. And yet . . .
And yet the name St. Cyr had been there, in the dead woman’s small red leather book. And the gentleman who’d been stalking her for so many months wasn’t only Sebastian’s nephew.
Bayard Wilcox was also the Earl of Hendon’s grandson.
S
ebastian met Jumpin’ Jack Cochran and his two-man crew in a dark byway just off Highfield Lane. A cold wind had come up, tossing the bare branches of the elm trees and silhouetting against a storm-swirled sky the church’s spire just visible above the slate roofs of the nearby row of houses.
“Don’t kin why yer so feverish to tag along,” said Jumpin’ Jack, hawking up a mouthful of spittle that he shot downwind. “ ’Tain’t as if the good doctor’s affeared we cain’t be relied on t’ deliver the goods.”
The grave robber was an incredibly tall, lean man somewhere between forty and sixty, with deep-set, narrowed eyes and rawboned features and a good two weeks’ of graying beard grizzling his cheeks and chin. But he was a natty dresser, with a bright red kerchief tied around his neck and striped trousers that showed only a hint of mud around the cuffs. The resurrection business was a lucrative one.
Sebastian simply returned the man’s quizzical stare and made no attempt to put his reasons into words. This man made his living stealing dead bodies from churchyards. He would never be able to understand the compulsion that had brought Sebastian here, the belief that his responsibility for the desecration of Rachel York’s grave somehow obligated him to be there to witness it.
They left the resurrection men’s cart and horse in the care of one of the lads and set off down a narrowed, darkened alley. They walked softly, their long-handled tools wrapped in sacking to prevent them from clanking together. In a nearby yard, a dog began to bark, deep, throaty howls that blew away with the wind. They kept walking.
Rachel York had been laid to rest in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s, an ancient sandstone pile that rose up suddenly before them. Hundreds of years of internments had raised the level of its graveyard so far above the street that the swelling soil had to be contained by a stone wall some three feet high. And still it bulged out, pestilent and seemingly filled to bursting.
Along the top of the wall ran a high iron fence topped with a menacing row of spikes. But at the end of the alley lay a narrow side gate, half-overgrown with ivy, which someone had been paid to leave unlocked. The same person had obviously been compensated for oiling the gate’s hinges. No telltale squeak shrieked out into the stillness of the night as they slipped quietly inside.
A foul stench hung in the air, dank and vaguely, sickeningly sweet. The other men moved as if blind, only risking an occasional flash of their shuttered lantern as they crept through the dark, moonless night. But Sebastian could see almost too well the scattered gray headstones and looming arches of tombs, the occasional pale glow of a skull or long bone protruding here and there from the muddy earth. The cold night air filled with sounds, the wind rising through the bare branches of the trees, the stealthy, muffled padding of feet on a muddy path and the hushed, strained breathing of nervous men.
“Here ’tis,” whispered Jumpin’ Jack, his lantern flashing for an instant on a mound of naked, freshly turned soil. Unwrapping their tools, the two men set to digging, shovels scraping softly as they sank deeper and deeper into the earth.
The stench was stronger here. Lifting his head, Sebastian realized it came from the long, half-filled trench of the poor hole, half-lost in the gloomy shadows of the far corner. In the distance, the dog was still barking. From somewhere nearer at hand came the slow, steady drip, drip of water.
The
thwunk
of metal striking wood echoed around the yard. Jumpin’ Jack let out a grunt of satisfaction and said, “Got it.”
Sebastian forced himself to look down into that dark hole. The resurrection men were experts at their business. Rather than exhuming the entire coffin, they’d simply dug down to the head. Using one of the shovels as a pry, Jumpin’ Jack levered open the top of the casket. Then the young boy with them—a stocky lad of about sixteen named Ben—jumped down into the hole. Wheezing a string of curses under his breath, he slowly eased what was left of Rachel York from the coffin, the still, white-clad body showing ghostly pale against the darkness of the turned earth.
Squatting down beside the corpse, Jumpin’ Jack slipped a knife from the sheath at his side and began with swift, practiced strokes to cut away her shroud.
Sebastian’s hand reached out to grip the man’s arm, stopping him. “What are you doing?”
Jumpin’ Jack hawked another mouthful of spittle, his pale eyes glittering in the darkness as he spat into the gaping hole beside them. “Ain’t no law agin cartin’ a dead body through the streets. But ye can win yerself seven years in Botany Bay, if’n yer caught with a stiff in graveclothes.”
Sebastian nodded and took a step back.
They stripped the body of everything except the band wound lengthwise around her head to hold her jaw closed. Then, leaving the naked body lying in the muddy path, they shoved the grave clothes back into the coffin, closed the lid, and quickly shoveled the earth back onto the empty grave.
“You there, Ben,” said Jumpin’ Jack, squatting down to grasp the body’s bare white shoulders. “Grab her feet.”
Sebastian collected the shovels and the lantern, while the other two men lifted the body between them, one bare arm flopping down to drag limply in the mud as they set off toward the gate.
From somewhere in the distance came the cry of the watch,
One o’clock and all is well
.
They carried Rachel York’s body into the small stone outbuilding behind Paul Gibson’s surgery and laid her on a flat granite slab with drains cut around the outer edges in a way that reminded Sebastian, uncomfortably, of an ancient sacrificial altar he’d once seen in the mountains of Anatolia.
He paid Jumpin’ Jack fifteen pounds, which was the going price for a “half-long” and more than a good housemaid could earn in a year. As the resurrection men’s cart rattled off into the night, Paul Gibson thrust home the bolt on the outside door, then limped over to hang his oil lamp from the chain suspended above the table.
Golden light flooded the room, throwing the two men’s shadows tall and unnaturally thin across the rough plaster of the wall behind them. “Nasty piece of work, this,” he said after a moment.
Sebastian had to force himself to look down at what lay on the slab before them. Rachel York had been a beautiful woman, her body long limbed and gracefully made, slim of waist and hip, with full, ripe breasts. Now her soft flesh was deadly pale, and smeared with the mud from her grave. But he could see other marks, bruises left by hard fingers digging into her wrists. More bruises, on her arms, her cheeks. And ugly slashes across her neck so deep that one might almost imagine her attacker’s objective had been to sever her neck. Reaching out, Paul Gibson untied the band around her head and her jaw fell open. Sebastian looked away.
“It would have been better if I could have examined her before she was bathed and laid out and dumped in the mud,” Paul said. “Much will have been lost.”
Sebastian didn’t like the way the small, stone-walled outbuilding smelled. Or the way it felt. He knew a sudden, driving urge to get away. “How long will it take?”
Paul Gibson reached for what looked like a butcher’s apron and tied it around his neck and waist. “I might be able to tell you something in the morning, although, of course, the full postmortem will take longer.”
Sebastian nodded, the smell of death so thick in his nostrils that each breath became a labor. He realized that Paul Gibson was looking at him strangely. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard?” said the doctor.
“Heard what?”
“This afternoon, your father walked into the Queen Square Public Office and confessed to the murder of Rachel York.”
S
ebastian had been about nine years old when he’d begun to realize that there was something different about him, that most people couldn’t overhear whispered conversations held in distant rooms, or read the titles of the books on the shelves of the library in the dark of the night, or from across the room.
Sometimes he wondered if most people experienced the world around them a little bit differently from their fellows, if the assumption of commonality was simply an illusion. Once he’d met a man who thought a yellow dog was the same color as the swath of vivid green spring grass in which the dog played, and who swore the gray cloth of his suit was blue. It had been a stray remark made by Sebastian’s sister, Amanda, that had first made Sebastian aware of the fact that most people couldn’t see colors at night, that for them, darkness reduced the world to a shading of grays through which they moved almost blind.
He’d found his ability to see in the dark particularly useful when he’d undertaken special assignments for the army during the war. He found it useful now as he slipped over the garden wall of St. Cyr House on Grosvenor Square, and crept toward the terrace.
Alistair St. Cyr, the Fifth Earl of Hendon, slept in a massive Tudor tester bed that had once belonged to the First Earl’s great-grandfather. He came awake slowly, lips pursing in his sleep, eyelids fluttering open, closed. Open.
He sat up with a rasping gasp, jaw slack, eyes flaring wide as he took in the clusters of candles burning on the bedside table and along the mantel. His gaze lifted to where Sebastian leaned against the bedpost with his arms folded across his chest, and he let out a sigh of relief. “
Sebastian
. Thank God. I’ve been hoping you’d come to me.”
Sebastian shoved away from the bedpost to stand with his arms at his side, anger thrumming through him. “What the bloody
hell
did you think you were about, walking into that Public Office and trying to convince people that you’re the one who killed Rachel York?”
The expression on Hendon’s face was one Sebastian had never seen before, a strange mingling of grief and worry and what looked very much like guilt. “Because I’m the one she went to meet that night.”
Tuesday, St. Matthew’s, St. Cyr.
“Oh, Jesus,” whispered Sebastian, one hand coming up to shade his eyes.
Hendon thrust aside the bedclothes and stood up, a powerful figure of dignity despite nightshirt and cap. “But I swear to you, she was already dead when I found her.”
Sebastian huffed a laugh, his hand falling back, loosely, to his side. “What do you think? That I’m going to believe you’ve taken to rape and murder in your old age?”
Turning, he went to crouch before the fire and stir up the coals on the hearth. He felt the heat fan his cheeks, lick at the graveyard chill left deep within his being. A whirl of disparate, incomprehensible facts suddenly clicked into place, making perfect, awful sense. “So it was your pistol they found,” he said, his gaze on the flames before him.
A cough rumbled deep in the older man’s chest. “I took it with me, just in case. I didn’t even realize I’d dropped it until I arrived home and found it missing. I thought about going back, looking for it, but . . .” He hesitated. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I guess I was hoping I’d lost it someplace else.”
Sebastian threw another shovelful of coal on the fire and watched it lay there, dark and smoldering. “And why, precisely, were you meeting Rachel York alone in a Westminster church in the dead of the night?”
