What Angels Fear (35 page)
Authors: C.S. Harris
Once the houses here had been grand, of three and more stories. But they had long since deteriorated into poor lodging houses, their sagging gutters sluicing rainwater, their broken windows stuffed with rags, their street doors either unlatched or missing entirely. He was careful to keep his gaze fixed on the men at the top of the street, lest some furtive glance betray his intent. And so Sebastian knew the instant it dawned upon Maitland what was about to happen.
With a quickly shouted warning to the Bow Street men, Maitland started forward, just as Sebastian ducked through the dark doorway that opened up beside him.
He found himself in a dimly lit hall stinking of urine and damp and rot. Once the walls had been covered in figured scarlet silk, which now hung in curling brown tatters from stained plaster fallen away in great patches to show the bare wood of the lath beneath. In an open doorway on his left stood a dark-haired little girl of about five, holding what looked like a newborn baby. The room behind her was empty.
She just stood there, silent and wide-eyed, and watched as Sebastian sprinted down the hall, past the broken banisters and bare, sagging steps of what had once been a grand sweeping staircase. The back door stood half ajar and Sebastian slammed through it on a run. Leaping off the broken stoop, he crossed a small yard bordered on two sides by looming, high brick walls and strewn with broken tiles and staved-in barrels and molding, stinking piles of refuse. What had once been a coach house lay at the bottom of the yard, but when Sebastian pushed against its ironbound oak door, he found it locked.
“
Bloody hell
,” he swore, pounding one fist against the stout panels. From the street on the far side of the house came shouts and the sudden, insistent ringing of the alarm bell. “Bloody hell,” he said again, swinging around, his shoulders pressing back against the door.
Beside him, a set of outside steps curled up to the loft. Pushing off, he bolted up the stairs. The hutch door at the top was locked, too. Sebastian kicked out once, twice. Wood splintered beneath his boot and the door swung inward on creaking hinges.
The loft was a crudely partitioned space. He crossed the room. Moldering piles of old hay crunched beneath his boots and sent up dust clouds to dance in the dim shaft of light filtering through the grime-and-cobweb-choked casement opposite. Throwing open the window, Sebastian swung first one leg, then the other over the sill and eased himself through the narrow space. The rain was coming down harder again, striking his bare face with cold, needlelike stabs. Lowering the weight of his body on his stretched arms, Sebastian sucked in a deep breath and let himself drop.
He hit the slimy pavement below in a roll and came up at a run, his feet slipping and sliding on a sour-smelling sludge of rotten cabbage leaves and old straw and unidentifiable muck. Ahead, the broken arch of the old mews opened up onto a side lane, the crowd thin enough here that he could push his way through, heading away from the workhouse and Maitland and the Bow Street Horse Patrol. From somewhere behind him came a shout, then another, and the renewed ringing of the alarm bell. Sebastian ducked his head against the rain and walked on, just another ragged, wet, grime-smeared man, unremarkable except for his height and the lean good health of his frame.
C
iorgio Donatelli hurried home through the early afternoon rain, a loaf of bread under one arm. Ducking beneath his front door’s shallow overhang, he was fumbling with his keys when Sebastian moved up behind him.
“Here. Allow me,” said Sebastian, reaching past the stiffening Italian to push open the door.
“Mother of God,” whispered Donatelli, his face paling as the bread started to slip from his grasp. “Not you again.”
Sebastian caught the bread just before it hit the stoop, and gave the artist a wide smile. “Let’s have a little chat, shall we?”
“You didn’t tell me you and Rachel were lovers,” said Sebastian.
Donatelli sat in a worn, tapestry-covered armchair beside the parlor fire, his elbows on his knees, his dark curly head sunk into his hands. He lifted his head slowly, his jaw hardening. “I know this country of yours, the way you English are about foreigners.”
Sebastian stood on the far side of the room, his shoulders against the wall, his arms crossed at his chest. He knew his nation, too, knew its arrogance and its fears and its willingness to blame anyone foreign, without due process or anything even vaguely approaching rational thought. Donatelli was right; if the authorities had known the Italian was Rachel’s lover, it would have been Donatelli they’d have moved to arrest, however much the evidence might have pointed to Sebastian.
“I’ve heard Rachel was planning to leave London,” said Sebastian. “Did you know?”
Donatelli surged to his feet, his dark eyes flashing. “What are you suggesting? That she was planning to leave
me
? That I flew into a jealous rage when I found out and killed her? Mother of God, of course I knew. She was carrying my baby!”
Sebastian held himself very still. “So you were both planning to leave? Is that it? Why? After years of struggling you’re finally being offered more commissions than you can handle, while Rachel had a promising career ahead of her on the London stage. Why would either of you want to throw all that away?”
Donatelli went to stand beside the hearth, one hand resting on the mantel, his gaze on the fire. After a moment, he let his breath out in a long sigh, and it was as if he let go all his rage with it. “We were going to Italy. To Rome. Rachel . . . Rachel was afraid of something. I don’t know what. She wouldn’t tell me what it was. She said it was better I didn’t know.”
“But you knew she was passing whatever information she picked up from her lovers to the French via Pierrepont.”
Donatelli nodded, his lip curling in disdain. “It’s amazing the things men will let slip in an effort to impress a beautiful woman.”
Sebastian studied the other man’s strong profile. He wondered at the sanguinity with which the painter could discuss the woman he loved flirting with other men, perhaps even coaxing them into her bed in her quest for information. “Did you know she stole a collection of documents from Pierrepont?”
Donatelli nodded, his gaze still fixed on the glowing goals. “God forgive me, I even helped her. Last Sunday, while Pierrepont was in the country, I distracted the butler while she slipped into Pierrepont’s library. She knew right where he kept them, in a secret compartment in the mantelpiece. He’d had just such a hiding place contrived for her, you see, in her rooms in Dorset Court.”
“Exactly how many documents did she take?”
Donatelli shrugged. “I know there was an envelope containing some half dozen of Lord Frederick’s letters, but that wasn’t all. I think she was planning to contact three or four different people. I don’t know for sure. I didn’t want any part of it. I told her it was dangerous, what she was doing, that it was like blackmail. But she said it wasn’t, that the people she was selling those papers to would be glad to get them.” His voice trailed away into a tortured whisper. “I was afraid something like this would happen.”
“And yet you went looking for the papers yourself, when you knew she was dead,” said Sebastian. He was remembering what Kat had told him, about the young man who’d searched Rachel’s rooms the morning after her death. The young man with a key.
Donatelli glanced around, dark color staining his high cheekbones. “I was afraid—afraid that whoever had killed Rachel would come after me, too. I thought maybe if I had the documents, if I could give them to him . . .”
“Give them to whom?” said Sebastian sharply. “Pierrepont? Do you think he knew it was Rachel who took the papers from his house?”
“Perhaps. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d noticed something was wrong these last few weeks. She wasn’t herself.”
“Because of what she was doing for Pierrepont?”
“I don’t think so. She was proud of what she did, of the part she was playing in the fight to bring republicanism and social justice to this country. But then . . .”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. It was as if someone was making her do something she didn’t want to do, something that frightened her. When she found out about the baby . . .” His voice broke and he had to swallow. “She decided we needed to leave. That’s when she came up with the idea of taking the documents from Pierrepont and selling them, so we’d have money to start over in Rome.”
“Do you think someone discovered she was passing secrets to the French?”
Donatelli swung away from the fireplace, his clenched hands coming up to press against his lips. “I’m not sure. Perhaps. It might have had something to do with that Whig—the one they were saying would be named Prime Minister when the Prince becomes Regent tomorrow.”
“You mean Lord Frederick?”
“Yes, that’s the one,” said Donatelli. “Lord Frederick Fairchild. Pierrepont was using Rachel in a scheme to try to control him.” He let his hands fall to his sides. “You have heard, haven’t you? About Pierrepont?”
Sebastian shook his head, aware of a deep tremor of disquiet. “What about Pierrepont?”
“The government has moved against him. He’s been denounced as a spy, his house raided.”
Sebastian shoved away from the wall. “And Pierrepont himself? Is he under arrest?”
“No. Either he’s very lucky, or someone warned him in advance, because he fled. They say he’s already left London.” Donatelli’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? All that scheming to entrap a man who won’t even be Prime Minister.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“You are very poorly informed, are you not? It was announced this morning. The Prince has decided not to ask the Whigs to form a government. The Tories will remain in power.”
By the time Sebastian reached Lord Frederick’s townhouse on George Street, the rain had slowed to a light drizzle.
A pattern was beginning to emerge, he thought, a tangled web of plot and counterplot. The key features might still be blurred and indistinct, but they were coming more and more into focus.
Raising his hand, Sebastian beat a sharp tattoo on the townhouse door. “A Mr. Simon Taylor,” he said when the door swung inward to reveal a somber butler with ruddy cheeks, an impressive girth, and the requisite expression of haughty disdain, “to see Lord Frederick.”
The man’s features remained admirably bland as he took in the full insult of Sebastian’s Rosemary Lane breeches and coat, now soaking wet from the rain, and smeared here and there with malodorous muck from his run through the back alleys and stews of the city. The butler’s first instinct, obviously, was to send such a visitor to the service entrance. But there must have been something about Sebastian’s demeanor and calm self-confidence that gave the butler pause. He hesitated, then said, “Is his lordship expecting you?”
“He should be. I am Rachel York’s cousin.”
The man gave a rarified sniff. “Wait here,” he said, and turned toward the hall. . . .
Just as the sharp
boom
of a pistol shot reverberated on the far side of the closed library door.
S
ir Henry Lovejoy was at his desk, dozing lightly after a pleasant meal of steak and kidney pie at the corner tavern, when he was jerked awake by his clerk’s apologetic hiss.
“Sir Henry?” said Collins, his bald head appearing around the door frame. “There’s a lady here to see you. A lady who refuses to give her name.”
Lovejoy could see her now, a delicately built young woman fashionably dressed in a redingote of soft blue with a matching, heavily veiled round hat. She waited until the clerk had reluctantly withdrawn, then lifted her veil to reveal the pale, troubled features of Melanie Talbot.
“Mrs. Talbot.” Lovejoy pushed hastily to his feet. “You need not have put yourself to the trouble of coming here. If you’d sent a message—”
“No,” she said with more force then he would have expected. She looked fragile, this woman, with her fine bone structure and slight frame and sad eyes, but she was not. “I’ve waited too long as it is. I should have told the truth from the very beginning.” She sucked in a deep breath, then said in a rush, “Devlin was with me the night that girl was killed.”
