Authors: C.S. Harris
What Angels Fear (8 page)
“That’s it.” He gave her a wide-eyed look and she knew he was playing with her, had recalled Sebastian’s name all along. “Ah. I remember now,” he said, his head tipping to one side as he smiled up at her. “Devlin was one of your protectors, once. Is that not so? Before he went off to the wars to fight for King and country against the forces of evil and the Emperor Napoleon.”
“It was a long time ago.” Kat swung away and reached for her pelisse. She felt a sudden need to get away. To be alone.
Pushing back his chair, Leo came to his feet in one smooth motion, his hand reaching out to close on her upper arm, stopping her, forcing her back around so that he could look searchingly into her face. He was so languid, so slender and effete-looking, that one sometimes forgot both how swiftly he could move and what strength those long, thin fingers possessed.
She stared blandly back at him, calling upon all her training as an actress to keep her features inscrutable and willing the rapid, betraying beat of her heart to calm.
But he knew her well, Leo. He knew her talents and he knew, too, this one weakness she refused to admit, even to herself. A wry smile twitched one corner of his lips, then stilled. “When you’re only twenty-three,” he whispered, his hand coming up to touch her cheek in a movement that was not quite a caress, “nothing in your life was so long ago.”
S
ebastian spent what was left of the night in a small chamber above the Black Hart’s rear court. After one glance at the bed, he took off his boots, spread his greatcoat on a narrow wooden bench, and lay down upon it. He’d known worse, in the war: watchful nights spent on a cold, stony ground or listening to the scuttling of cockroaches across a dirt floor.
He did not sleep.
When dawn came, he rose from his makeshift bed and crossed to the window overlooking the rubbish-strewn yard below. The morning was raw and bitter cold, but he swung the casement open wide and drew the acrid air deep into his lungs, his thoughts on the events of the evening before.
It had always seemed to Sebastian that such moments came in every man’s life; pivotal instants when a chance occurrence or seemingly trifling decision could wrench a man away from what had appeared to be an inevitable future and send him hurtling in a different direction entirely. Yet it was difficult now to determine precisely when that moment in Sebastian’s life had come. With his own flash of quick anger and the constable’s misstep? Or had it come before that, the night before, with a promise given to a frantic, fearful woman?
Sebastian pursed his lips and blew out a long sigh. Despite everything that had happened, he couldn’t regret that promise, nor could he betray the woman to whom it had been made.
Drawing a small notebook from his pocket, he tore out a sheet of paper and scrawled quickly,
Please give Melanie my assurances I shan’t betray her. No matter what happens, she mustn’t say anything to give herself away. Her life depends upon it. D.
Folding the page once, twice, he wrote the name and address of Melanie’s sister on the outside, then thrust the note deep into a pocket.
He had calmly considered, during the long night, the options now open to him and decided these came down to three. He could surrender himself to Sir Henry Lovejoy at Queen Square and place his faith in a system better known for delivering summary judgments than for ferreting out the truth. He could flee abroad, hoping someone might clear his name in his absence but resigning himself to a life in exile if that failed to happen.
Or he could lose himself in the shadows of the city and set to work discovering, on his own, who had killed Rachel York.
She’d been an unusually attractive woman, Rachel. He’d seen her often at the city’s various theaters—both on stage and at those select gatherings attended exclusively by such women and the wealthy, highborn men they sought to attract. He’d seen her and, he had to admit, admired her. But he’d never taken her as his mistress, never even sampled what she had, on several occasions, made more than obvious she was willing to give.
He couldn’t begin to fathom why or how he had come to be named as her murderer. Yet he could place no reliance on the authorities bothering to discover the truth behind what had happened. When a city’s detectives were paid a forty-pound reward for each conviction, true justice was more often than not a victim of avarice.
And so at some point during the long night Sebastian had decided that he would not escape abroad, nor would he surrender himself, trustingly, foolishly, to the dubious expedience of British justice. Out there, somewhere, was the man who had killed Rachel York; Sebastian’s only hope lay in discovering precisely who that killer was.
Five years in army intelligence had taught Sebastian that the first thing he needed was information. He needed to talk to someone who’d known Rachel; someone who could identify her enemies, someone who might know why she had gone on a cold winter’s night, alone, to meet her death in a small, out-of-the-way Westminster church.
He’d already decided against making any attempt to contact either his own family or friends; they would undoubtedly be watched, and he would do nothing that might endanger them. But no one would think to set a watch upon the actress who’d been playing Rosalind to Rachel’s Celia in the Covent Garden production of
As You Like It
. The woman who’d broken Sebastian’s heart six long years ago. . . .
The sun was rising higher in the sky, but only a faint hint of lightness showed through the inevitable mantle of dirty fog. He could hear the rumble of wagons and market carts on their way to Covent Garden, and the whirl of a knife grinder’s wheel in the yard below.
And, nearer at hand, the sound of quick footsteps in the corridor outside his room.
Flattening himself against the wall beside the door, Sebastian stood tense, waiting. Then he heard a furtive scratching and a boy’s whisper. “Oi, gov’nor. ’Tis me, Tom.”
It was the urchin from last night. “Tom?” said Sebastian with malicious amusement. “I don’t believe I’m acquainted with a Tom.”
From the far side of the panel came an impatient oath. “The figger what tried to prig your purse last night.”
“Ah. And you expect me to open the door to you, do you, my larcenous friend?”
“Lord love you, gov’nor. Now’s no time to be funnin’. There’s Bow Street men downstairs right this weery minute. Asking for you, they are—leastways, if’n you’re the cove what knifed a constable over Mayfair way and—”
Sebastian opened the door so fast that Tom, who’d been leaning against it, half fell into the room. In the pale light, the boy looked thinner, and dirtier, than Sebastian remembered him. He fixed Sebastian with dark, assessing eyes. “They also say you cut up some mort in a church off Great Peter Street.” There was a pause. “Did you?”
Sebastian met the boy’s hard gaze. “No.”
Tom nodded his head in quick, silent affirmation. “Thought I smelled a rum ’un. But there’s two beaks in the common room right this weery minute, askin’ about you, and another forty-pounder out the front.”
Perching on the edge of the bench, Sebastian pulled on first one boot, then the other. “I take it you’re suggesting I might find it advisable to depart through the window?”
“Aye, gov’nor. And pretty soon, too, if’n you’re not anxious to dance the Newgate hornpipe.”
Sweeping up his greatcoat, Sebastian crossed to the open window and surveyed the yard below. The casement opened above a low, lean-to roof of what he thought might be the kitchen. But the only exit from the yard was through the front arch. He would have to make his way along the slant of the lean-to roof to where it abutted a jutting brick extension of the inn’s second story, and somehow climb from there up onto the main roof.
“Why, precisely, did you come to warn me?” Sebastian asked, pausing with one leg over the windowsill to look back at the boy.
“Gor. If ever a cove needed help, it’s you, gov’nor.”
“Huh. Your altruism, while inspiring, is somehow less than convincing,” Sebastian said, and dropped to the sloping roof below.
Light and agile as a cat, Tom landed beside him. “I don’t know what you means by that, exactly. But my offer still stands: for a shilling a day, I’m your man. I know these parts weery well, I do. If’n you’re set on ’idin’ out around ’ere, you couldn’t find a better snapper.”
“I thought the price was ten pence?” Sebastian said, running along the lean-to roof in a low crouch.
“It was. Only, now that I know the China Street pigs is after you, the price ’as gone up.”
Sebastian laughed—just as a shout went up from the yard below.
S
ebastian cast a swift glance toward the yard, where a burly, black-bearded man in a voluminous greatcoat stood with his head tipped back and one extended finger pointing damningly toward the roof.
“Look! That’s ’im, fer sure. Stop, I say.
Stop in the King’s name
.”
“Bloody hell,” swore Sebastian. Straightening, he sprinted across the slope of the lean-to, the leather soles of his boots sliding dangerously on the wet slates, the boy two paces behind him.
At the intersection of the kitchen roof and the brick wall of the inn’s ell-shaped wing, Sebastian swung around. “Here,” he said, reaching down to bracket Tom’s slim, bony frame with his hands and lift the boy high. “Grab the edge of the roof and pull yourself up.”
Tom’s bare, cold-numbed fingers fumbled for a hold, found one. “How you gonna get up?” he panted, heaving his legs up in a grunting rush that rolled him onto his stomach, then his back.
The brickwork of the wall was uneven, offering a handhold here, a foothold there. Sebastian scrambled up beside the boy and held out a hand to help Tom to his feet.
“Gor.” Tom let out his breath in a rush of wide-eyed admiration. “You’d make a first-rate second-story dancer, you would.”
Sebastian laughed, his gaze narrowing as he surveyed the tumble-down roofscape spread out around them. A freezing rain had begun to fall, mist-fine and bone-chilling. Blackbeard had disappeared from the courtyard. They could hear more shouts, and the muffled sound of running feet on uncarpeted stairs.
Sebastian glanced down at the boy beside him. In coming to warn Sebastian, Tom had placed himself squarely on the wrong side of the law. Sebastian nodded toward the span of three or four feet separating the Black Hart’s rain-slicked roof from the crumbling tenement beside it. “Can you jump that?”
To Sebastian’s surprise, the boy’s dirty face split into a toothy grin. “Aye. You jist watch.”
His fists clenched with determination, Tom took off at a dead run toward the edge of the roof, launching at only the last possible instant into a leap that carried him easily across the gaping distance. He landed lightly, his body wavering, his feet slipping for only a moment before he caught his balance on the steep wet tiles.
“I think you must have some training as a second-story dancer yourself,” said Sebastian, springing after him. Tom crowed with delight.
Together, they crossed from one sagging rooftop to the next, skirting crumbling chimney pots and dodging broken eaves, their breath little puffs of steam in the cold air. At the end of the block, they found a drainpipe festooned with a tangle of bare wet wisteria branches down which they slithered. They were off and running before the first of the Bow Street men, wheezing and swearing, had emerged onto the Black Hart’s mossy roof.
An early morning crowd of market women and milkmaids, piemen and butchers’ boys filled the narrow lanes. Rounding the corner onto Great Leicester Street, Tom and Sebastian slowed to a walk, heading toward Charing Cross.
“Where we goin’ now?” asked Tom, skipping a little to keep up with Sebastian’s long-legged stride.
Sebastian hesitated, then drew from his pocket the folded note he’d written to Melanie’s sister that morning. “I have a message I’d like you to deliver to a lady. Cecilia Wainwright, in Berkeley Square.” Reaching for his purse, Sebastian counted out a handful of coins. “Here’s a shilling for the letter, and a week’s wages, besides.” There was no way to guarantee that the boy would actually deliver the message, of course. It was a chance Sebastian was going to have to take.
Tom’s unsmiling gaze dropped to the money in Sebastian’s hand, then lifted. He made no move to take the coins. “You givin’ me the heave-ho?”
Sebastian met the boy’s dark, inscrutable gaze. “I don’t think you understand. Continued association with me could very well get you hanged.”
“Naw,” said Tom with a negligent sniff. “Transported, more like. I’m scrawny enough I could let on I’m only nine and they’d believe me. They don’t send little ’uns to the nubbing cheat.” His face darkened as if clouded by a sudden, unpleasant memory. “Leastways, not usually.”
“You’ve a fancy to visit Botany Bay, do you?”
Tom shrugged. “It’s where they sent me mum.”
It was probably the complete lack of emotion in the boy’s voice that got to Sebastian more then anything else. He blew out a long, slow breath. It was an ugly practice, this business of transporting mothers and leaving their children behind to starve on the streets of London. Sebastian held out the money. “Take it.”
For an instant longer, the boy wavered, his jaw held tight. Then he took the coins and slipped the letter inside his shirt. “Where you off to?”
“There’s someone I need to see.”
Tom nodded and turned without another word, his feet dragging, his head bowed. But at the corner he paused, his head lifting as he swung back around. “What’s ’er name, then? This lady what yer so all fired anxious to meet?”
Sebastian huffed a low, startled laugh. “What makes you think it’s a lady?”
Tom grinned. “I saw it in yer face. She must be a rare looker.” He paused, his head tilting sideways. “So what’s ’er name?”
Sebastian hesitated, then shrugged. “Kat. Her name is Kat.”
“Kat? That’s no name fer a lady.”
“I never said she was a lady.”
