What Angels Fear (26 page)
Authors: C.S. Harris
Mrs. Snyder’s mouth pursed again. Obviously, she didn’t approve of Reverend Finley, either. “If you hurry, you might find him in the courtyard. He often visits with the children there on Sunday mornings, before services.”
The courtyard was a cheerless, windswept place of cracked walks and patchy grass showing brown beneath the dirty remnants of last night’s snow. Turning up his collar against the cold, Sebastian walked across the neglected quadrangle, toward the group of pinch-faced children he could see clustered at the far end in a rare slice of thin winter sunshine. As he neared the group, he realized they were gathered around a man who was telling them a story about a lion and a rabbit; a thin, stoop-shouldered old man, his balding pink pate fringed with white hair, a pair of thick spectacles perched on the end of his long, thin nose.
Sebastian hung back, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his cheap greatcoat, a smile tugging at his lips as he watched the old reverend hold that band of ragged charity children enthralled with the simple power of his words. Whatever had been the nature of Rachel’s relationship with this man, it obviously wasn’t romantic.
“Terrible business, what happened to Rachel,” said Reverend Finley when, his story ended, he hurried the children toward the chapel and turned to listen to Sebastian’s introduction. “Such a tragedy.”
“Had she volunteered here for long?” Sebastian asked as the two men turned to walk together.
The old reverend peeled the wire-rimmed glasses off his face and rubbed his reddened eyes. “Nearly three years. Which is more than most women can take around here. They always start out full of such determination and good intentions, but it gets to them after a while. So many of the wee ones die, you see. I’ve never quite been able to understand it myself. But Rachel, she had this theory, that they died from a lack of love. And so she’d come every Monday afternoon and spend time holding each of the poor babes in turn. Just hold them. Sing to them.”
Sebastian stared off across the snowy courtyard to where the Matron Snyder was bustling about, getting the children lined up two by two at the chapel doors. “An unusual activity for such a woman, surely?”
“You mean, for a successful actress?” The old reverend lifted one thin shoulder in a shrug. “Rachel was an unusual woman. Most people, when they have the good fortune to pull themselves up from a bad situation, they soon forget where they came from. Rachel didn’t.”
“But Rachel was never a foundling.”
“No. But she knew what it was like to be a child alone and friendless in this world.” The reverend paused, his features pinched and troubled. “I sometimes wonder . . .”
“Wonder what?”
At the end of the quadrangle, the chapel’s lone bell began to ring, a solemn, steady toll. The old man’s eyes narrowed as he stared up at the small spire above them. “This past month or so, Rachel seemed different somehow. Preoccupied. It was almost as if she were afraid of something. But I never said anything to her about it. These last few days, after what happened . . . Well, I can’t help but wonder if I made a mistake. If perhaps I could have helped her in some way, if I had only asked.”
“You don’t have any idea what she was afraid of?”
Finley shook his head. “No. I wish she had confided in me, but she didn’t.”
“Did you know she was planning to leave London?”
The old man glanced around in surprise. “No. I’d no notion.”
“Any thoughts as to where she might have been planning to go?”
He considered this for a moment, but shook his head. “No. I could hardly see her going back to Worcestershire.”
No, Sebastian thought; she wouldn’t have gone back to Worcestershire. “Was there a man in her life, do you think? A man she maybe was afraid of?”
Most of the children were in the chapel now. Only three or four stragglers remained, hurried along by Matron Snyder, who cast a quick, disapproving glance at the two men.
The Reverend Finley turned toward the open chapel doors. “We never spoke of such things, of course, but I’d have said yes, Rachel was in love with someone—although I don’t think it was anyone she was afraid of. She had that look a woman gets when she’s happy in love.” A sad, almost wistful smile touched the old man’s lips. “You might think I’m too old to recognize that look, but we were all young once, you know.”
Sebastian walked through the cold, windblown streets of Lambeth to the banks of the Thames, where he took a scull that carried him across the river to the steps just below Tower Hill. From there it was but a short distance to Paul Gibson’s surgery.
He found his friend wrapped in a tattered quilt and sitting in a cracked leather armchair beside the parlor fire, his staring gaze fixed on the glowing coals.
“Leg bad, is it?” said Sebastian, sinking onto the ragged chair opposite.
“A wee bit.” Gibson looked up, his eyes bright with the unholy fires of the opium eater. It was an addiction far too many wounded men carried home with them from the war. Normally the Irishman could keep his compulsion under control, but there were times when memories of what he’d seen in the war would loom unbearable or the remnants of shrapnel in his leg would twist and bleed, and he would disappear for days into a drug-induced fog. “But I’ve finished your postmortem, never fear.”
“And?”
Gibson shook his head. “Nothing more, I’m afraid. If she’d been brought to me directly, there might have been some sort of evidence. But as it is. . .”
Sebastian nodded, swallowing his disappointment. He’d known it was a long shot. “I was wondering if you could get in touch with Jumpin’ Jack for me.”
“Cochran?” Gibson huffed a soft laugh. “Looking to steal another body, are you?”
Sebastian grinned and shook his head. “It’s information I’m interested in this time. I’m wondering if those in the resurrection trade have heard of anyone expressing a specific interest in female corpses.”
Paul Gibson nodded thoughtfully. “Think to come at your man from that angle, do you?”
“It’s worth a try.” Sebastian pushed to his feet, his hand grasping his friend’s shoulder for a moment before he turned toward the door. “I’ll drop by again in a few days. See how you’re getting on.”
He was reaching for the knob when Gibson stopped him by saying, “There is one thing my more complete examination of the body did reveal. It may or may not have a bearing on your investigation.”
Sebastian swung back around. “What was that?”
“Rachel York was in what the ladies refer to as a
delicate situation
.”
Sebastian felt a sudden twist, deep down in his gut. He thought about what the Reverend Finley had told him, about Rachel York coming to St. Jude’s Foundling Home every Monday afternoon to hold the babies and sing to them, so that they wouldn’t die from lack of love. Had she known? And if she had known, what must her last thoughts have been, when she felt her killer’s knife slash across her throat, again and again?
“How far along was she?” Sebastian asked, his voice oddly hoarse.
“Almost three months, I’d say. Enough that she would surely have known she was carrying a child.”
S
ebastian was nursing a tankard of ale in the public room at the Rose and Crown when Tom burst in from the street, bringing with him a blast of icy air scented with coal smoke.
“I found ’er,” he said, his voice high and tight with exaltation. “I found yer Mary Grant. And she musta done weery well with that stuff she lifted from her old mistress, weery well indeed, ’cause she’s livin’ as high as you please—in Bloomsbury, no less.”
Rachel York’s erstwhile maid had taken rooms in a lodging house facing a respectable street just south of Russell Square. By the time Sebastian got there, the sky was a flat white that promised more snow before nightfall.
Conscious of a surge of anticipation and hope he tried to damp down, Sebastian climbed the neat staircase to the first floor. The door was to his left, as Tom had said it would be. But when Sebastian rapped sharply on the freshly painted panels, it creaked open beneath his touch.
“Miss Grant?” he called, his voice echoing in the stillness. He pushed the door open wider and stepped inside.
He was standing in a parlor filled with the cherrywood furniture and gilt-framed mirrors and expensive oddities that had once belonged to Rachel York. All had been thoroughly, savagely ransacked.
Mirrors and pictures had been torn from the walls and smashed; chairs lay overturned, their stuffing spilled out across the rumpled rug. Drawers had been pulled from bureaus, their contents strewn about in what appeared to have been a wild, frantic search.
Sebastian closed the door behind him with a snap that sounded unnaturally loud in the early afternoon hush. He walked from one room to the next. Impossible to know what the intruder had been searching for, or if he had found it. But when Sebastian entered the bedroom, he thought he knew at least part of the answer to that question. For here, only half the room lay in disarray; the rest had not been touched.
Sebastian walked to the chest of drawers that stood on the far side of the room, its bottom four drawers still intact. Lacy, feminine things spilled from the top drawer where it lay broken on the carpet. It was the logical place to have begun a search of this kind; women were always tucking secret things away amongst their undergarments. Whoever Mary Grant’s intruder was, he was obviously new to this game.
Sebastian hunkered down beside the broken drawer, his attention caught by the corner of what looked like a piece of blue paper that had fallen or been kicked so that it lay almost completely hidden beneath the chest’s frame. Easing the edge of the paper from beneath the wood, Sebastian found himself holding a blue envelope across which someone had written in a bold, masculine-looking scrawl,
Lord Frederick Fairchild
.
He was one of the most prominent, articulate Whigs in the House, Lord Frederick, urbane and witty and—unlike most of the Prince of Wale’s set—remarkably temperate. When the Prince was sworn in as Regent in a few days’ time, it was commonly assumed that Fairchild would be selected to help form the new Whig government.
Sebastian stared thoughtfully at the blue envelope in his hands. Here, surely, was the “F” referred to in Rachel York’s red leather-covered book. Could Lord Frederick even be the father of her unborn child? And maybe her murderer?
The room was cold, the fire on the hearth having been allowed to burn itself out. The sweet scent of lilac water hung heavy in the air, but beneath it Sebastian caught a hint of another odor, a sharp, metallic stench only too familiar to any man who’d ever gone to war.
With a sense of profound foreboding, he tucked the envelope into an inner pocket and stood up. The door to the dressing room stood half ajar. One hand on the pistol in his greatcoat pocket, Sebastian crossed the room to push the door open wider. . . .
And found himself looking at what was left of Mary Grant.
S
he lay sprawled on her back, her eyes wide and sightless, her torn, bloodied clothes shoved up to reveal flesh gleaming pale and naked in the fading light. Her throat had been hacked so savagely that her head had nearly come off.
Sebastian stood just inside the doorway, his gaze traveling around the small, wainscoted room. He hadn’t seen the Lady Chapel at St. Matthew of the Fields after Rachel York’s killer had left her there, but he imagined it must have looked much like this, the blood splattered high and wide across the surrounding walls until it ran down the paneling in thin rivulets, the killer’s bloody handprints standing out stark and damning on the bare white flesh of the dead woman’s spread thighs.
There was nothing Sebastian could do for this woman now, but he crouched beside her anyway and touched his fingertips to her bloodstained cheek. She was still faintly warm.
He sat back on his heels, his hands gripping his knees as he gazed down into those pale, unseeing eyes. She was younger than he’d expected her to be, probably no more than twenty-five or thirty, with flaxen hair and a sallow complexion and the kind of sharp, small features one saw often on the streets of London. She must have thought she was a downy one, awake on every suit. She’d seen a chance to take everything that had once belonged to her mistress—the fine furniture, the expensive clothes and jewels—and she’d seized it. She must have thought she’d hit upon a way to set herself up for a good long while.
