When Gods Die (11 page)

“James Stuart. The one who later became James the Second.”

Chapter 18

“I
t must be a coincidence,” said Paul Gibson some half an hour later. “What can James the Second possibly have to do with that poor young woman’s murder?”

They were in the weed-choked yard that stretched between Gibson’s house and surgery to the front, and the small stone building at the rear he used for dissections and autopsies. Sebastian sat on a nearby stone bench, a pint of ale in hand, while the surgeon busied himself with something boiling in a large pot of water over an open fire pit.

“When it comes to murder, I’m not sure I believe in coincidences,” said Sebastian, dubiously eyeing the contents of that iron cauldron. Gibson gave the pot a brisk turn with a ladle and something surfaced, something that looked suspiciously like a human arm bone. “Please tell me that’s not—”

Gibson looked up and laughed. “Good God, no! This is a sheep’s skeleton I’m rendering for a lecture in comparative anatomy. What did you think? That I’m boiling your murder victim? Anglessey came early this morning to claim his wife’s body. I think he was planning to bury her today, rather than wait for this evening.” Gibson reached to throw another scuttleful of coals on the fire, then wiped his sleeve across his forehead. “And none too soon. It’s bloody hot for June. Too bad you didn’t get here sooner. There were several things I’d like to have shown you.”

Sebastian had seen enough dead bodies during the war. Given a choice, he decided he’d rather try to remember Guinevere Anglessey as the beautiful, vibrant woman she’d once been, without having to reconcile that with images of a dissected cadaver some seventy-two hours dead.

The fire began to smoke and Gibson knelt awkwardly beside it to poke at it with a stick. “If, as you say, the Marchioness left her house in Mount Street by hackney just after nuncheon on Wednesday, then she must have been killed here in London—or someplace very near. There simply wouldn’t have been time for her to have driven all the way down to Brighton.”

“You’re certain she died in the early afternoon?”

Gibson nodded. “Or that morning. No later. My guess is that after she was killed, someone packed her body in ice and loaded it in a cart or carriage and hauled her down to Brighton. After death, the blood in a body responds to the pull of gravity. If a body is left lying on its back for hours immediately after death, then all the blood will pool in the back and on the undersides of the arms and legs, making them appear purple.”

“As happened with Guinevere.”

“Yes.”

Sebastian stared across the yard to where a neglected old rose was blooming its heart out in a sun-spangled froth of delicate pink. The sound of bees could be heard, a low hum that mingled with the whisper of the wind through the chestnut tree overhead. “Was she with child?” he asked.

“I’m afraid so. The child would have been born sometime in November.” Gibson sat back on his heels. “It was a boy, incidentally.”

Sebastian nodded. “And the dagger in her back?”

“Was placed there some hours after she was poisoned.”

Sebastian drew in a quick breath. “Poisoned?”

“I think so. We’ve no test to detect it after death, but I suspect cyanide. Her skin was very pink, if you’ll remember. There is sometimes a lingering bitter-almond scent, but not after so many hours. It acts very quickly—in five or ten minutes with a sufficient dose. The death it produces is quite painful. And very messy.”

“You mean it induces vomiting?”

“Yes. Among other things.”

“But there was no trace of any of that.”

“That’s because after she died, her body was bathed and then redressed—in someone else’s gown.”

Sebastian shook his head, not understanding. “How do you know it wasn’t her gown?”

“That’s easy. It was too small.” Laying aside his stick, Gibson rose with a lurch to disappear into the small stone building. He reappeared again a moment later with the gown in his hands. “Guinevere Anglessey was an unusually tall woman—five-foot-eight at least.” He shook out the folds of green satin and held it up. “This dress was made for a slightly smaller woman—still tall, but probably no more than five-foot-five or -six and less buxom. That’s why the tapes were undone and the sleeves shoved down on her shoulders. It simply didn’t fit.”

Sebastian reached to take the evening gown into his hands. “And her undergarments?”

“There weren’t any.”

Sebastian looked up at his friend. It wasn’t unknown for courtesans—or even ladies such as the scandalous Caroline Lamb—to dispense with the light stays and thin chemise typically worn beneath their filmy gowns. But Lady Anglessey was not of that set.

“When you saw the body Wednesday night,” said Gibson, “was it barefoot?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Did you notice any evening slippers nearby on the floor? Perhaps pushed beneath the settee?”

Sebastian thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “No. But I didn’t look for them.”

Gibson nodded, his lips pressed into a thoughtful line. “I did. There weren’t any in the room. No shoes. No stockings.”

“So what are you saying? Someone poisoned Guinevere with cyanide, waited until she’d succumbed to her death throes, and then bathed her body and dressed it in a green silk evening gown that belonged to someone else?”

“It would seem that way, yes. And they either failed to bring along the necessary undergarments and stockings and slippers, or the ones they brought were too hopelessly small to use.”

“Which would seem to argue either that the murderer was unfamiliar with the size of his victim, or that he failed to think through what he needed.”

Paul Gibson made a face. “I’m not sure which I find the most gruesome. Is it possible that poor woman was killed simply to provide her murderer with a body to be used to embarrass the Regent?”

Sebastian hesitated. “I must admit I find it difficult to credit. Yet I suppose it is possible.”

“But…why? Why kill the wife of a Marquis? Why not simply take some common woman off the streets?”

“Which do you think would cause the greater scandal?”

“There is that, of course.”

Sebastian slid the fine satin of the dress between his gloved fingers. “What I don’t understand is how the devil did our killer manage to get the body into the Pavilion that night?”

“Aye. That’s the rub, isn’t it?”

From the narrow street outside came the lilting cry of a costermonger,
Ripe cher-ries! Buy my ripe cher-ries
. Sebastian folded the green satin gown into a small package to take away with him. “What have you done with the dagger that was in her back?” he asked.

Gibson went to crouch beside his iron pot. “I don’t have it.”

Sebastian swung around.
“What?”

The surgeon looked up, his eyes narrowing against the smoke. “By the time I had made arrangements for the transportation of the body and came back to collect it, the dagger was gone.”

Chapter 19

U
pon consideration, it seemed to Sebastian that there were only two likely explanations for the disappearance of the dagger: either Guinevere’s murderer had contrived in some inexplicable way and for some unknown purpose to return to the Yellow Cabinet and retrieve a weapon he had deliberately left behind, or else—which seemed far more likely—Lord Jarvis himself had removed the dagger. Sebastian could come up with several reasons why the Regent’s unofficial minder might have done so; none reflected well on the man in whose arms Guinevere’s body had been found.

Determined to confront Lord Jarvis, Sebastian drove to Carlton House, where Jarvis’s frightened, pale-skinned clerk insisted his lordship was at home. But when Sebastian arrived at Grosvenor Square, it was to be told by the fey, half-mad Lady Jarvis that she rather thought her lord might be at Watiers. Watiers was still under the impression his lordship was out of town.

Temporarily balked of his quarry, Sebastian decided to pay a visit to the Chevalier de Varden.

A
LAIN, THE
C
HEVALIER DE
V
ARDEN,
was a young man of twenty-two not long down from Oxford. He was well liked about Town, although his dashing good looks and tragic history were enough to cause considerable trepidation in the breasts of the mothers of young ladies of a marriageable age. A foreign title was all well and good, but only if there were extensive lands to go with it. The vast estates the young Chevalier was to have inherited from his dead father had all been lost in the Revolution.

Lacking an appreciable income of his own, the Chevalier lived with his mother, Isolde, Lady Audley, in Lady Audley’s town house on Curzon Street. A widow now for the second time, she spent most of the year in London rather than at the isolated Welsh castle that had passed upon the death of her second husband to their son, the new Lord Audley.

Asking for the Chevalier, Sebastian was shown into a small but elegantly furnished withdrawing room filled with afternoon light. There, a slim, fine-boned woman with fiery auburn hair barely touched with gray knelt on the carpet in a secluded corner. Beside her lay a panting, very pregnant collie bitch that looked to be in the final stages of labor.

“I beg your pardon,” Sebastian began, “there must be some mistake—”

“No mistake,” said Lady Audley, looking up. Sebastian supposed she must be somewhere in her midforties, although she appeared younger, with clear, translucent skin and the kind of bone structure that ages well. “I asked that you be brought here. You must forgive me for receiving you like this, but poor Cloe is very near her time and I didn’t want to leave her. Please, have a seat.”

Declining the offer, Sebastian went to stand beside the open windows, his back to the sun.

“I know why you have come,” said Lady Audley, her attention all for the laboring collie. “You think my son had something to do with Guinevere’s death. But you are wrong.”

He watched her slender hands move with gentle compassion over the collie’s sweat-darkened shoulders and quivering flanks. “Let me guess,” he said, remembering how Guinevere’s sister, Morgana, had also known of his interest in the Marchioness’s death. “You, too, are an intimate of Lady Portland.”

“Lady Portland is my daughter, Claire.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Are you familiar, I wonder, with Wales?”

“Not especially, no.”

The collie let out a soft whimper. Lady Audley rested her hand on the dog’s head. “There, there, sweetheart. You’re going to do just fine.” To Sebastian, she said, “Athelstone Hall lies on the northern coast, not far from Audley Castle. Traveling by road the distance between them is some three or four miles. But if one follows the path along the sea cliffs, it’s a journey of only fifteen minutes. Less for a running child.”

“You mean, for a girl child who frequently escaped her governess’s care to run wild about the countryside?”

Lady Audley nodded. “Guinevere’s mother, Katherine, was very kind to me when I first came to live there. When Katherine died…the poor child was nearly inconsolable. No one can take a mother’s place, of course, but I did what I could.”

“I thought Athelstone remarried?”

“Yes. But I’m afraid the new Countess took little interest in her predecessors’ daughters.”

Sebastian studied the elegant woman on the floor beside the birthing bitch. She had narrow shoulders and fine-boned hands, and an air of fragility that he suspected was entirely misleading. “I must confess,” he said, “I expected you to be French.”

“Oh, no,” she said without looking up. “I was born and raised in Devonshire. When I was eighteen, I went to spend the spring of 1786 with my aunt in Paris. You can’t imagine what Paris was like in those days, the endless round of balls and gaiety, music and laughter. I suppose we should have known it couldn’t last.” She gave a little sigh. “But one never does.”

“That was where you met the Chevalier de Varden?”

She sat back on her heels, an unexpectedly soft, sad smile playing about her lips. “Yes. At a banquet at Versailles. We were married within six weeks. I considered myself an extraordinarily fortunate woman—and then, just weeks after the birth of our son, Alain, came the fall of the Bastille.”

Sebastian watched as that haunted smile faded. The year 1789 would not have been an easy one for a gently born Englishwoman married to a French aristocrat.

“It was in the autumn that a mob attacked the château. I managed to escape with Alain through the cellars, but Varden was out riding through the vineyards at the time and…’’ She paused to take a deep, soul-shaking sigh. “They pulled him from his horse and tore him to pieces.”

A shudder convulsed the collie’s swollen belly, her body jackknifing up as the first of her puppies slipped into the world, wet and shining with blood. Lady Audley stared down at it, but Sebastian thought she was seeing something else, a memory she would never forget.

Once, in the Peninsula, Sebastian’s colonel had ordered a Portuguese peasant tied between two horses and then had the horses whipped in opposite directions. Just for fun. He blinked away the memory. “You were fortunate to make it back to England.”

“Fortunate? Yes, I suppose we were. One does what one must.”

At their feet, Cloe went about the task of severing the umbilical cord and cleaning her pup. Lady Audley was silent for a moment, stroking the bitch’s head. Then she said, her voice flat, “I married Audley the following year.”

Sebastian watched the elegant woman before him help with the collie’s birthing. Lady Audley was beautiful even now in middle age. Twenty years ago she must have been stunning as a young, grieving widow. Did marrying the late Lord Audley fall into the category of things one did because one must?

“Tell me about Lady Anglessey’s mother,” he said aloud.

“Katherine?” The question seemed to surprise her. “She looked much like Guinevere, although she was a tiny thing, whereas Guinevere was tall, like her father. They had the same blue-black hair, and those eyes that made you think of a fern-filled mountain glen in spring.” She smiled softly. “And the same passionate, not always wise nature.”