When Gods Die (25 page)

“You’re quite certain it wasn’t?”

“Oh yes. I checked the locks very carefully.”

Sebastian went to stand at the long window overlooking the street below. The morning had dawned clear and still, promising another hot day.

He had no reason to doubt the abigail’s story. Yet if it were true, it suggested that whoever killed the young marchioness had believed he had cause to fear something in her rooms. Something that might have incriminated him.

“There’s something else,” said the abigail, her voice a frightened whisper.

Sebastian looked around. “What’s that?”

Tess Bishop’s tongue darted nervously across her lower lip. “You asked if I knew where her ladyship had gone that afternoon. The afternoon she was killed.”

“You mean to say you do know?”

“Not exactly, my lord. But I know who she went to see.” She hesitated, then swallowed hard. “It was a gentleman.”

“Do you know his name?”

Her thin chest jerked with her suddenly labored breathing. “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. Her ladyship would never have been untrue to the Marquis. Only…his lordship, he was that desperate for an heir. And when it become obvious he couldn’t have one…” Her voice trailed away in embarrassment.

“I know about their arrangement,” said Sebastian. “Do you mean to say she discussed it with you?”

The abigail shook her head. “But she was so upset when his lordship first suggested it, I couldn’t help but overhear things.”

“Do you know what happened to change her mind?”

A faint tinge of color touched the abigail’s pale cheeks. “There was this young gentleman come to town. A gentleman she’d known before, from when she was a girl in Wales.”

“What was his name?” Sebastian asked again, knowing already what the answer would be.

Tess Bishop’s hands shook so badly her teacup rattled against the saucer and she set it aside. “It couldn’t have been him what killed her,” she said, hunching forward, her hands clenched together, her head bowed. “It couldn’t.”

Sebastian looked down at her bowed head, at the bones of her neck showing prominently against the pale flesh. “When her ladyship didn’t come home that Wednesday night, did you think she might have run away with this man?”

“No! Of course not.” The abigail’s head came up, her gray eyes flashing with indignation. “Her ladyship would never have done such a thing to the Marquis.”

But then Sebastian saw her eyes slide away, and he knew that at some point in those long, anxious hours as the abigail waited for a mistress who would never return, the thought
had
occurred to her, however briefly.

“You don’t understand,” she said, leaning forward. “No one understands. They look at a beautiful young woman married to an old man and they see a marriage of convenience.” She pushed her thin, colorless hair off her forehead in a distracted gesture. “Oh, it began that way, to be sure. But they were well suited to one another—truly they were. They could spend hours together, just talking and laughing. You don’t see many couples like that amongst the nobs.”

She hadn’t used the word
love,
but it hung there unacknowledged in the air between them.

“Yet even after she conceived the child, she continued to see her young gentleman,” said Sebastian softly.

Tess Bishop bit her lip and looked away.

“Is it possible she tried to break off with the young man?” Sebastian suggested. It would hardly be the first time a passionate, rejected young lover had killed the object of his affection.

The abigail shook her head. “No. But they did quarrel.”

“When was this?”

“The Saturday before she died.”

“Do you know what the quarrel was about?”

“No. But it was…it was as if she’d found out something about him. Something that…” She hesitated, searching for the right word.

“Something that disappointed her?”

Tess Bishop shook her head. “It was worse than that. She and the Marquis, they were good friends. But that young gentleman, he was like a god to her.”

Sebastian turned to stare out the window. Only, he wasn’t seeing the sun-warmed bricks of the houses across the street, or the baker’s mule trotting past with a slow
clip-clop
below. He was remembering a time when he had loved like that. When he had known the bitter, soul-destroying shock of disillusionment.

For Sebastian, the disillusionment had been false, a carefully crafted charade played by a woman who loved him enough to want to drive him away from her for his own good—although he hadn’t known that at the time.

He was like a god to her
. What happens when your god dies? Sebastian wondered. When someone is your sun and moon and stars, and then you discover something, something that reveals a hitherto unknown weakness so fundamental, so shattering that it destroys not only your trust in the other person, but your respect, too.

Some people never recover from that kind of disillusionment. Sebastian had taken up a commission and gone off to war. What would Guinevere Anglessey have done?

Sebastian glanced over to where Tess Bishop sat watching him with a pale, almost frightened face. “His name,” Sebastian asked again, pressing her. He needed to have her say it, needed to have every suspicion confirmed. “What was his name?”

For a moment he thought she meant to keep the man’s identity to herself in some final act of loyalty to the mistress who had once loved him. Then she hung her head and said in a torn whisper, “Varden. It was the Chevalier de Varden.”

Chapter 43

T
he screams were starting to get to him. The screams and the never-ending
drip, drip, drip
of water.

Tom drew his knees up against his chest and hugged them close, his teeth gritted against the shivers that ripped through his body. Outside, the sun might shine warm and golden from a clear June sky, but here within the dank, filth-encrusted walls of Newgate, all was darkness and damp and the bone-chilling cold of perpetual winter.

“You there. Boy.”

The seductive whisper was close. Tom turned his face away and pretended not to hear.

“The offer’s still open. Tonight. Five shillings.”

The man had never exactly said what he wanted Tom to do for those five shillings, but Tom was no flat. He knew. His empty stomach heaved.

He had no blanket, not even a thin pallet to absorb some of the cold rising up from the stone floor. Here in Newgate, such luxuries as food and bedding had to be purchased. If it weren’t for the hap-hazard charity of benevolent societies and various philanthropically minded individuals, the poorer prisoners would starve. Many did.

Pushing up from the vermin-ridden straw, Tom stood and walked away from the crooning temptation of that voice. The room was no more than twelve by fourteen feet, and crowded with some fifteen to twenty men and boys. One of the boys couldn’t have been more than six. He lay curled on his side in a corner, his fair hair matted and dirty, his grimy face streaked with tears. Every once in a while he’d start crying for his mother until one of the men would kick him and tell him to be still.

Tom went to press his face against the bars. For a moment, he squeezed his eyes shut and felt himself sway on his feet.

He hadn’t dared close his eyes through all the long, dark hours of the night. Not that he could have slept, anyway, what with the fear and the rustling of the rats and the cold that seemed to sink all the way to his bones. And then there were the screams. The screams of the despairing, the mad, the sick and dying, mingled with the plaintive cries of women being taken by force.

The turnkey rented them out by the hour, one of the other boys had told Tom. Some of the women were probably willing enough—they’d learned long ago to sell their bodies to survive. But even when they weren’t willing, they were given no choice.

He’d seen them dragging one girl across the yard. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, her flailing arms showing pale and thin in the sputtering light of a torch, her dark eyes wild in a small, tight face.

“Psst. Boy…”

Tom kept walking.

He’d tried to get the beadle who’d hauled him here to send word of what had happened to Viscount Devlin, but the big man had only laughed at him and called him Captain Bounce. Then the gaoler had emptied Tom’s pockets so he couldn’t even pay someone to take a message to Brook Street.

He paused again beside the bars looking out onto the yard. He kept trying to imagine what his lordship would think when Tom never showed up. Would he assume Tom had simply run off? He wouldn’t really think that, would he?

Surely he would know something had happened to Tom. He’d go looking for him. But he would never think to look here. At least not at first. Tom had heard some of the other prisoners talking. They said there was a session scheduled for tomorrow. A boy could be condemned one day and hanged the next. It didn’t happen all that often. Mostly the sentences were commuted to transportation. But it did happen. Tom knew.

He felt the walls begin to close in on him, pressing close and heavy. He sucked in a deep breath and the smells of the place overwhelmed him, the stench of excrement and sweat, sickness, and fear. Fear of gaol fever, fear of the whip and the hulls on the Thames. Fear of the hangman’s noose and the surgeon’s knife.

“Help me, Huey,” Tom said softly, sinking to his knees. It was a kind of a prayer, he supposed, although he wasn’t sure Huey was any place he could hear, let alone help. Did all thieves go to hell, even if they were only thirteen years old? “How did you stand it? Oh, God, Huey. I’m so sorry.”

And he pressed his face against his knees and wept.

Chapter 44

T
he Physic Garden lay just north of the Thames at Chelsea. It was an old apothecary garden, said to date back to the seventeenth century, if not before. Kat herself had never been there, but she could understand how its gently curving walks and nearly deserted order beds would make an ideal meeting place, where spymaster and spy could come together and linger without arousing suspicion.

Once, she might have looked forward to this rendezvous with a certain flush of anticipation. She’d enjoyed it, that tingling sense of exhilaration that comes from living always on the jagged edge of danger. Once, she’d had nothing to lose but her life. That was no longer true.

She drove herself to the gardens in her phaeton and pair, with her groom, George, sitting up beside her. “It’s hot today,” she told him as she reined in at the West Gate. “Do what you can to keep them cool.”

Holding a sapphire blue silk parasol aloft to shade her complexion from the sun, she entered through the West Gate and turned toward the pond rock garden. It was cooler here. A faint breeze rustled the leaves of the lime trees overhead, bringing her a medley of sweet scents, of sunbaked rosemary and exotic jasmine and freshly scythed grass.

She wandered for a time between neat beds of roses. At one point she spotted an aged gentleman, his back hunched, his weathered skin darkened by years beneath a tropical sun. But he made no move to approach her, and in the end she lost sight of him admidst a planting of distant shrubs.

She walked on, her sandaled toes kicking out the skirts of her gown with each step. She wondered who he would be, this new spymaster. Would he be a French émigré, like Pierrepont? Or perhaps an Englishman, someone who’d been unwise—or unlucky—enough to enable the French to gain an indestructible hold over him. Or maybe someone who’d become disaffected from his own country, who nourished a determined admiration for the French and what they were doing across the Channel.

Kat herself owed no allegiance to France. As much as the ideology of the Revolution appealed to her, its savagery and excesses repelled her. And in the end the French had betrayed their own ideology, surrendering all to a military dictator who seduced them with visions of world supremacy.

But she accepted that old maxim “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Kat’s enemy was England. It always had been, even before that misty morning in Dublin, when her world had been shattered by the tramp of soldiers’ boots and a woman’s screams and the shadows cast by two bodies swaying in the breeze.

She became aware of another visitor to the gardens, a tall man clad in fawn-colored doeskin breeches and a well-tailored olive coat, his figure lean but powerful. She recognized him, of course. His name was Aiden O’Connell, and he was the younger son of Lord Rathkeale of Tyrawley.

She felt herself stiffen. When the rest of the Irish were being hounded from their lands, the Tyrawley O’Connells had embraced both the conquering English and their religion. As a result, the O’Connells had not only kept their estates, but prospered.

Pausing beside the pond’s edge, she waited for him to walk up to her. He was a handsome man, with sparkling green eyes and two dimples that appeared often in his lean, tanned cheeks.

“Top o’ the morning to you,” he said cheerfully, dimples deepening. “Lovely gardens, don’t you think?”

She kept her gaze on the sun-spangled expanse of water before her. She found it difficult to believe that such a man could be Napoléon’s new spymaster in London, and she certainly had no desire to encourage his attentions if he were here simply by chance.

“Reminds me of some gardens I saw in Palestine once,” he said when she didn’t answer, “not far from Jerusalem. The cedars and sycamores were shining like silver and gold in the sunlight, so grand you’d swear they scraped the sky.”

She swung slowly to face him. He was older than he looked, she realized, probably more like thirty than twenty-five. And there was a sharp gleam of intelligence to his gaze that the beguiling effect of those dimples tended to disguise.

“I came here to meet you as a courtesy,” she said, although that wasn’t strictly true. She was here because she knew that if she hadn’t shown, he would simply have contacted her again. “I don’t want to do this. Not anymore.”

Aiden O’Connell’s smile widened, crinkling the skin beside his eyes. “It’s because of Lord Devlin, is it? I did wonder.”