When Gods Die (15 page)

“I didn’t see it. She sent it back to him—along with a note stating in no uncertain terms that his advances were unwelcome.”

“And Anglessey? Did he know any of this?”

A strange flush darkened the other man’s pale, gaunt cheeks. “It’s hardly the sort of thing a woman would tell her husband, now, is it?”

“Yet she told you,” said Sebastian, and watched the color drain slowly from the Chevalier’s face.

C
HARLES
, L
ORD
J
ARVIS,
maintained a fervent respect for the institution of the Church of England.

The Church, like the monarchy, was a valuable bastion of defense against the dangerous alliance of atheistical philosophy with political radicalism. The Bible taught the poorer orders that their lowly path had been allotted to them by the hand of God, and the Church was there to make quite certain they understood that. And so Jarvis took pains to be seen at church every week.

That Sunday, his head bowed in due respect for his Maker, Jarvis attended services at the Chapel Royal in the company of his aged mother, his half-mad wife, Annabelle, and his tiresome daughter, Hero, whom he believed to be in serious need of remembering what the Bible and St. Paul had to say about a number of things, particularly the role of women in society.

During the second reading, when the clergyman loudly proclaimed, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law,” Jarvis emphasized the point by quietly elbowing Hero in the side.

Her gaze fixed oh-so-properly on the pulpit, she leaned toward him to whisper maliciously, “Careful, Papa. You’re setting a bad example for the ignorant masses.”

She was always saying that sort of thing, as if the canker of social discontent spreading across the country were a subject for jest. Yet he knew she took what she referred to as “the dreadful situation of the nation’s poor” very seriously indeed. There were times when he almost suspected his daughter of harboring radical principles herself. But it was an idea too disconcerting to be entertained for long, and he quickly dismissed it.

After the service, they walked out of the palace into a gray day still dripping rain. A man stood across the street; a tall young man whose rough greatcoat and round hat did nothing to disguise his aristocratic bearing or the dangerous glitter in his strange yellow eyes.

Jarvis rested one hand on his daughter’s arm. “See your mother and grandmother home in the carriage,” he said, keeping his voice low.

He expected her to argue with him. She was always arguing with him. Instead, she followed his gaze across the street. For one oddly intense moment, Hero’s frank gray eyes met Devlin’s feral stare. Then she deliberately turned her back on him to shepherd her mindlessly babbling mother and frowning grandmother toward the carriage.

Stepping wide to avoid the filthy rushing gutter, Jarvis crossed the street to the waiting Viscount.

Chapter 24

D
evlin leaned against the low iron railing that fronted the street, his hands in his pockets. “You made a mistake. Two, actually.”

Jarvis paused a prudent distance before him. “I rarely make mistakes.”

The younger man gazed down at the toes of his boots, a strange smile playing about his lips before his head came up again, his eyes narrowing against the rain. “The trinket Prinny sent to the Marchioness of Anglessey. What was it?”

At Jarvis’s continuing silence, the Viscount pushed away from the fence to take a significant step forward. “
What was it, damn it?
And don’t even think of pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“A brooch of rubies,” said Jarvis in a calm, unhurried tone, “pierced by a diamond arrow.”

The Viscount’s reaction was difficult to decipher, even for a man skilled in reading the thoughts and emotions of others. “An expensive trifle, surely,” said the Viscount, “for a woman His Highness claims he barely knew?”

It had begun to rain harder. Jarvis opened his umbrella and held it aloft. “There are times when His Highness has difficulty with the truth. Particularly when the repercussions from the truth might prove…unpleasant.”

“So what’s your excuse?”

Jarvis maintained a studied silence.

“That’s why you had the note destroyed, isn’t it? Because whoever wrote it referred to her previous rejections of his advances. Suggested in some way that she’d changed her mind.”

Again, Jarvis kept his own counsel.

With a violent oath, the Viscount took a hasty step away, only to swing back again. “He was making advances on her. Rude, unwelcome advances. And he wasn’t taking no for an answer.”

“Are you so certain they were unwelcome?”

Devlin brought up a warning hand to slash the air between them. “Don’t. That woman was poisoned, stabbed, and robbed of her life and the life of her unborn child. Don’t you even think of trying to take away her honor with your lies.”

“Poisoned? Really? How interesting.”

Devlin stared across the street to where the soot-darkened redbrick gatehouse of St. James’s Palace thrust up against the cloud-laden skies. And it came to Jarvis, watching him, that for Devlin, this investigation into the circumstances of Guinevere Anglessey’s death was more than an intellectual puzzle, more than just an escape from boredom. The Viscount actually
cared
about what had happened to that young woman. It was an unexpected element of emotion that made him both easier to manipulate and yet, at the same time, unpredictable and dangerous.

“Where was Prinny early Wednesday afternoon?” the Viscount asked suddenly.

“In Brighton, of course.” Jarvis let out a low, deliberate laugh. “Good God. You surely aren’t entertaining the notion that His Highness actually had something to do with this death, are you?”

“It seems less improbable now than it did.”

“Why? Because the woman repulsed his advances? Don’t be ridiculous. England is full of women panting for the opportunity to copulate with a future king. He need only look at one and smile.”

“Yet what would happen, I wonder, should such a vain, sensitive prince encounter a woman with the courage to rebuff his advances?”

“No woman has ever accused His Highness of forcing himself upon her.” The words were crisp, carefully enunciated, just bordering on anger. “Ever.”

“Perhaps. Yet his father—a model of domestic fidelity if ever there was one—dropped his breeches and attacked his own daughter-in-law just last year.”

Jarvis’s hand tightened around the handle of his umbrella, although he managed to keep his voice calm, his face serene. “The Prince Regent is not going mad.”

Devlin’s lean face remained impassive. Unreadable. “Tell me about the dagger. The one you took from Guinevere Anglessey’s body.”

Jarvis gave the Viscount a warm, reassuring smile. “Now, why would I do that?”

Devlin’s smile was just as calculated and decidedly chilling. “I keep asking myself that same question. You might not like it when I come up with the answer.”

S
EBASTIAN ARRIVED BACK AT HIS HOUSE
on Brook Street to discover Sir Henry Lovejoy there before him.

“Sir Henry,” said Sebastian, opening the door to the library, where the chief magistrate of Queen Square was reading the
Morning Gazette
in one of the caned chairs beside the front bow window. “I trust you’ve not been waiting long?”

Lovejoy folded the
Gazette
into a neat rectangle and stood up. “Not long, no.” He was a tiny man, barely five feet tall, with a high-pitched voice, thick eyeglasses, and a serious demeanor. He was also, Sebastian knew, passionately devoted to what he did.

Tossing aside his greatcoat, hat, and gloves, Sebastian crossed to the brandy decanter on the table beside the empty hearth. “A glass of wine with me?”

“Thank you, but no.” The little magistrate clasped his hands behind his back, cleared his throat, and said, “I heard the strangest story this morning, about some fellow impersonating a Bow Street Officer. A handsome young man with what were described as almost animalistic eyes.”

“How odd.” His face deliberately bland, Sebastian flicked an imaginary speck of dust from his rough-cut coat. “Is that why you’ve come? Did you think this fellow might be a relative of mine?”

The faintest hint of a smile lifted the little magistrate’s thin mouth. “No, actually. I’ve come because we’ve discovered your Yorkshire jarvey.”

Chapter 25

“H
e remembered the fare quite clearly,” said Lovejoy. “It’s not often a lady takes a hackney to the East End.”

Sebastian lowered his glass in surprise. “The East End?”

“That’s right. Giltspur Street, in Smithfield.”

“Where exactly on Giltspur?”

“The jarvey couldn’t say. It seems Lady Anglessey had the fellow let her off at the top of the lane. The last he saw of her, she was walking toward the market.” Lovejoy cleared his throat again. “I sent one of the lads over there. Had him ask around. No one remembers having seen her.”

That was hardly likely, Sebastian decided, going to pour himself another drink. The sight of a young lady as beautiful as the Marchioness of Anglessey in a walking dress of Pompeian red was not something to be forgotten so quickly. Yet even the most respectable citizens of London were often reluctant to be overly cooperative with the constables. An unassuming man asking more subtle questions might well learn something of interest.

B
Y THE TIME
S
EBASTIAN PAID OFF HIS HACKNEY
at the bottom of Giltspur Street, the rain had stopped again, although the clouds still hung low and oppressive over the open, death-haunted grounds of Smithfield Market.

It was a meat market now. But once, two hundred years before, in the days of the Tudors, they had burned people here at Smithfield. The Catholics had burned the Protestants to save their souls from the everlasting fires of hell, while the Protestants had burned the Catholics because that’s what one did with people whose vision of God didn’t exactly match one’s own. It’d always struck Sebastian as a strange thing to do in the name of a Christ who’d taught his followers to turn the other cheek and love their neighbors as themselves. But then, Christ’s followers had frequently been slack in their application of that part of His teachings, massacring in His name everyone from the olive-skinned inhabitants of Jerusalem to the Irish of Dublin.

Clad in the unfashionably cut greatcoat and serviceable leather breeches of a country gentleman of modest means, Sebastian pushed his way through the throngs of people crowding the streets, many of them drovers in town for Market Monday. They came from as far away as the north of England and Scotland, driving the great herds of cattle and oxen needed to feed the million or so inhabitants of the city. But there were local people here, too, journeymen and apprentices, servants and shopkeepers, for Sunday was the only day most people had off work.

The atmosphere was relaxed, jovial, the street filled with glad voices and laughter, the rich aromas of broiling meat and fermenting ale mingling with the ever-present smells of mud and unwashed bodies and urine. At the first cross street, Sebastian paused, his gaze scanning the signs of the various shops fronting the lane: tanners and chandlers mixed in with coal merchants and distillers, button sellers, and woolen drapers. All were humble establishments, not the kind of businesses typically frequented by a marchioness. What was Guinevere Anglessey doing here?

He walked on, past the shuttered windows of a tea dealer and the haberdasher beyond. All were closed now for the Sabbath. On Monday, he would send Tom to go into each shop in turn. But something told him Lady Anglessey had not come here in search of tea or buttons.

Halfway up the street he came upon an ancient, half-timbered inn called the Norfolk Arms. Tall and well kept, it had somehow survived the Great Fire of 1666. From the looks of it, it had been here since the days of Edward and Mary Tudor and the martyrs’ pyres of Smithfield.

Sebastian started toward the inn. A couple of half-grown boys ran past, careening into him before darting off again with a shouted apology. A one-legged soldier, his face hideously deformed by a saber slash across his cheek, leaned on a rag-wrapped stick and rattled his cup with softly murmured pleadings.

Sebastian dropped a coin into the outstretched receptacle. “Where’d you serve?”

Drawing in a deep breath, the beggar squared his shoulders proudly and said, “Antwerp, sir,” in a heavy Scots brogue. Beneath his unkempt beard and matted hair and sallow, scarred skin, he was actually quite young, Sebastian realized, probably no more than five-and-twenty.

“You here every day, are you?”

A grin stretched the Scotsman’s scarred cheek and deepened the lines prematurely fanning out from his pain-filled gray eyes. “Aye. This be me spot.”

“There was a young woman came past here, last Wednesday afternoon. Dark haired. Pretty. A lady, actually. Wearing a red gown and pelisse. Did you see her?”

The man gave a breathy laugh. “There be nothing wrong with me eyes. Very fetching she was, too, to be sure. She gave me five shillings, she did.”

“Did you happen to see where she went?”

The soldier jerked his head toward the ancient inn behind him. “Aye. She went in the Norfolk Arms here.”

Sebastian knew a rush of triumph and expectation quickly dampened down. “How long was she in there? Do you know?”

The man thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “Can’t rightly say. I don’t recollect I saw her come out.”

Chapter 26

S
ebastian stayed talking to the ex-soldier for some time. He bought some beef roasted on a spit and some ale, and they ate it together and discussed in soldierlike detail the Portuguese campaign and the hardships of the last winter and Colonel Trant’s daring exploits in Coimbra. It was another ten minutes or more before Sebastian slowly brought the conversation around, again, to the dark-haired beauty in the red pelisse.