What Remains of Heaven (5 page)

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Authors: C. S. Harris

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General

BOOK: What Remains of Heaven
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Sebastian nodded. “I gather the combination of a murdered Bishop and legions of old, half-decayed corpses was too much for the man’s delicate sensi—What?” he said, breaking off when Tom leaned forward to give an audible sniff. “What is it?”
Tom’s nose wrinkled. “What’s that smell?”
“The crypt. I’m told the odor is rather pervasive.”
“Per-what?”
“Pervasive. It sinks in and doesn’t go away.”
“I don’t know about that, but there’s no denying it stinks.” He cast a wistful gaze over his shoulder as they started on the road back to London. “I’d like to ’ave seen it.”
“Would you indeed? Frankly, I think it’s the best argument in favor of cremation I’ve ever encountered.”
“Cre-what?”
“Cremation. It’s a method of body disposal practiced by the Hindus in India. The deceased is placed on a pile of wood, and burned.”
“
Burned?
But that’s ’orrible. Why, it’s . . . it’s unchristian, it is.”
Sebastian laughed. “You think that’s horrible, you should see what thirty or forty years in a crypt will do to you.” As they reached the outskirts of the village, he dropped his hands and let the chestnuts spring forward. “I tell you what: When we get to Paul Gibson’s surgery, you can have a look at the mummified body they brought out of that crypt. Make up your own mind.”
Tom stared at him. “I can?”
“You can.”
“Gor,” said Tom, and gave a little shiver of anticipatory delight.
But by the time they reached the narrow winding lanes and ancient stone shops of Tower Hill, the sun was high in the sky and the coats of the horses gleamed dark with sweat.
“If you’re gonna be ’ere long, I reckon I should take the chestnuts back to Brook Street,” said Tom, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
Sebastian hopped down to the lane’s worn footpath. “Yes, take them home. They’ve had a good run. See them put up, and then bring the curricle back with the grays.”
Tom’s face cleared. “And then can I see the mummy?”
“And then you can see the mummy.”
“Thank you, my lord!”
Sebastian stood for a moment, watching the former street urchin negotiate his way through the lane’s traffic with admirable skill. Then Sebastian turned to cut through the noisome alley that ran along one side of the surgery to a neglected rear garden and the low stone building where Paul Gibson performed his autopsies. It was also here where the surgeon expanded his understanding of the human body with surreptitious dissections performed on a covert supply of cadavers, culled from the city’s churchyards and sold by masked, dangerous men who did their best work on dark and moonless nights.
Chapter 6
 
Charles, Lord Jarvis, was in the library of his house on Berkeley Square, perusing the latest report from one of his French agents, when his daughter, Hero, came to stand in the doorway and said without preamble, “Did you kill the Bishop of London?”
He looked up at her. Since the death of his son, David, at sea several years before, she was his only surviving child. In some ways she was a handsome woman, with a Junoesque build and strong features. But she looked too much like Jarvis himself—and had far too forceful a personality—to ever be considered
pretty
. He said, “I won’t deny I’m glad Prescott’s dead. But it’s not my work.”
She met his gaze and held it. “Would you lie to me?”
“I might. But not in this instance.”
At that, she gave a soft laugh. “I must say, I am glad to hear it.”
Jarvis settled back in his chair. “The Bishop was something of a favorite of yours, was he not?”
“We were friends, yes. We worked on several projects together.”
Jarvis made a face. “
Projects.
You’re five-and-twenty, Hero. Isn’t it time you gave up this unnatural penchant for good works and found yourself a husband?”
“I might.” She came to lean over the back of his chair. “If English law didn’t grant a man the powers of a despot over his wife.”
“A
despot
, Hero?”
“A despot.” She placed an affectionate hand on his shoulder. “But as for good works, you must be thinking of Mama. She’s always been far better at that sort of thing than I.”
At the mention of his wife, Jarvis turned down the ends of his mouth in a grimace. He had no patience for Annabelle, a silly, half-mad imbecile who belonged in Bedlam. He grunted. “Women like Annabelle dispense soup to the poor and shed tears over the plight of orphans in the streets because it’s an easy sop to their consciences. Nauseating, perhaps, yet ultimately harmless. But you—you spend your days with your nose stuck in books, researching theories and advocating schemes that could almost be described as radical.”
Hero’s fine gray eyes narrowed with a hint of a smile. “Oh, believe me, some of my schemes are most definitely radical.”
Jarvis pushed to his feet and turned to face her. “The most powerful men in London quake in terror at the thought of annoying me. Yet my own daughter openly behaves in ways she knows full well displease me. Why is that?”
“Because I’m too much like you.”
He grunted. If she were a son, he would be proud of her intellect and her force of character—if not her political notions. But she was not a son; she was a woman, and lately she’d been looking strained. He studied her pale, unusually thin face. “You’ve not been looking your best these past few weeks, Hero.”
“Dear Papa.” She leaned forward to kiss his cheek. She was tall enough to do it without standing on tiptoe. “Surely you know better than to tell a woman she’s off her looks?”
He allowed himself to be coaxed into a smile, and pressed her shoulder in a rare gesture of affection. But all he said was, “I didn’t kill your meddlesome bishop.”
“Then who did?”
“That, I don’t know. And neither, to be frank, do I care.”
 
 
Leaving her father in the library, Hero hurried up the stairs to her bedroom, yanked her chamber pot from its cupboard, and was wretchedly sick.
She’d learned the sickness normally came upon her first thing in the morning, although it could strike unexpectedly at any time. She was not a woman accustomed to feeling either fear or vulnerability. But as she settled on the floor, her eyes squeezed shut, her damp forehead pressed against the cupboard door, Hero found herself perilously close to succumbing to both.
For a young Englishwoman of her station to bear a child out of wedlock was the ultimate, unforgivable disgrace. It mattered not how powerful or wealthy her family, or how bizarre the circumstances that had led her to such a fate; the result could only be social ostracism, complete and everlasting. Hero had always considered herself an independent-minded woman. But even she could not contemplate such a fate with equanimity.
Her options were depressing, and limited. She could contract a quick, convenient marriage; she could give birth in secret and give the child away; or she could eliminate herself in a decorous act of self-destruction. Since Hero had no patience with suicides and refused under any circumstances to submit herself to the power of a husband, she was left with only one real option: a secret birth.
The results of such births were typically dumped, anonymously, on the parish or some desperate peasant family, either of which could generally be relied upon to kill the unwanted infant within a year. But Hero had no intention of abandoning the child growing within her to such a short, brutal life. And so she had approached her friend Bishop Prescott for his assistance in locating a good, loving family. Such arrangements were dangerous, since they could be difficult to keep hidden. But she had found Prescott both supportive and blessedly nonjudgmental.
Now Prescott was dead, and all her plans were in disarray.
At the thought, she felt a new surge of nausea, but suppressed it resolutely. Pushing to her feet, she smoothed her gown, washed her face, and walked down the hall to her mother’s chambers.
She found Lady Jarvis stretched out upon the daybed in her dressing room with the drapes closed. She still wore her wrapper, and the left side of her face drooped in that way it had when she was tired.
“Didn’t you sleep well, Mama?” asked Hero, bending to kiss her mother’s cheek. Her hand dropped to Lady Jarvis’s shoulder, and she felt so thin and frail that Hero experienced a new leap of fear.
Never well, Lady Jarvis had been especially listless lately. She was nearing fifty, a fading shadow of the beautiful, vivacious woman she had once been. Worn-out by an endless series of miscarriages and stillbirths, she had succeeded in presenting her lord with only one sickly son and a hale daughter before suffering a seizure that put an end to her childbearing days and left her weak of mind and body.
Now, she gripped her daughter’s hand and said, “Troublesome dreams. Always troublesome dreams.” Her soft blue eyes came into focus on Hero’s face. “You’ve been looking tired yourself, Hero; is something wrong? Are you ill?”
Hero felt an unexpected lump in her throat. She had no doubt of her mother’s love and devotion. But Lady Jarvis lacked the mental or emotional strength to deal with her own problems, let alone her daughter’s. Hero forced a smile. “You know I’m never ill. It’s such a lovely day; shall we go for a walk around the square?”
“I don’t know if I can, dear.”
“Of course you can. Let me ring for your woman to help you dress.” Disengaging her hand from her mother’s grasp, Hero went to open the curtains and give the bell a sharp tug. “It will do you good. I’ve a quick errand to run, but I should be back by the time you’re ready.”
Lady Jarvis frowned and struggled to sit up. “An errand? What type of errand?”
“Oh, nothing of importance,” said Hero, who was in fact bound on a very important errand, to the official chambers of the late Bishop Francis Prescott, in St. James’s Square.
Chapter 7
 
Pale and naked, the body of the Bishop of London lay stretched out upon the slab table in Paul Gibson’s secluded outbuilding. Thanks to the thickness of the stone walls, the atmosphere in the low-ceilinged, windowless space was cold and dark and thickly scented with death. Sebastian paused in the open doorway and took one last gulp of fresh air.
“Ah, there you are,” said the surgeon, laying aside a bloody scalpel. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist this one.”
Of medium height, with the dark hair and ready smile of an Irishman, Paul Gibson had known Sebastian for years. Once, they’d worn the King’s colors and fought together from the mountains of Italy and the Peninsula to the West Indies. They might come from different worlds and speak the King’s English with markedly different accents, but theirs was a friendship forged in blood and guts and fear.
“Nice to be predictable,” said Sebastian, eyes blinking at the room’s rank air. After only some fourteen to sixteen hours of death—and most of that during the cool hours of the night—the Bishop’s corpse was still relatively fresh. The sheet-covered form that rested on a stretcher in the room’s far corner was anything but fresh.
Limping over to where a chipped enamel basin and pitcher stood on the wooden shelf that ran across the room’s back wall, the surgeon splashed water into the basin and rinsed his hands. “There’s no denying it’s an interesting puzzle. Two men murdered decades apart in the same place? Not often we see that.”
“Judging from the smell, I’d say that’s fortunate. Have you found anything yet that might link the two?”
“Not yet. But then, I’ve only just started on the Bishop. It’s definitely the blow to his head that killed him . . . not that that’ll come as a surprise to anyone who’s had a good look at him.”
Sebastian studied the corpse before them. The Bishop of London had been a tall man, and thin, with long, sinewy arms and legs. In his late fifties or early sixties, he had a high forehead and a strong nose, his cheekbones prominent and knifelike beneath the flesh of his face. His hair was completely white, worn straight and unusually long. Even in death, something both scholarly and gentle lingered in his expression.
“Did you know him?” said Gibson.
“I met him once or twice.” Sebastian examined the gash that disfigured the left side of the Bishop’s head. “Sir Henry said they found an iron bar near the body. Do you think it was the murder weapon?”
Gibson nodded to a stout bar, one end gently curved and notched, that lay on the nearby bench. “I’d say so, yes. It fits the size and shape of the wound very neatly. The blow shattered his skull, tearing the lining of the brain and leaving it exposed. He probably died almost immediately, although it is possible he lived as much as half an hour after he was hit. I doubt he ever regained consciousness, though.”
Sebastian glanced up in surprise. “So he might still have been alive when Reverend Earnshaw found him?”
“Possibly. Not that it matters. Even if the Reverend had gone for a doctor rather than the magistrate, there’s nothing anyone could have done for him.”
Sebastian studied the Bishop’s long fingers, the nails meticulously manicured and unbroken. “No sign of a struggle?”

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