When Gods Die (6 page)

“Thank you for agreeing to see me at such a time,” said Sebastian, pausing in a bright patch of June sunlight. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about what has happened.”

The Marquis went back to clipping the spent blooms of a pale pink rose that twined around a stout pillar at the edge of the path. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”

The directness of the question took Sebastian by surprise. “No,” he answered with equal bluntness. “Lord Jarvis has asked me to look into the circumstances surrounding your wife’s death.”

The Marquis’s fist tightened around his secateurs. “To protect the Prince, of course.” He said it as a statement, rather than a question.

“That’s their motive, yes.”

The Marquis looked around, one eyebrow arched. “But not yours?”

“No.” Sebastian met the old man’s steady, intelligent gaze. “Do you think he did it?”

“The Prince?” Anglessey shook his head and went back to pruning the rose. “Prinny might be a drunken, overindulged, self-coddling idiot, but he’s not violent. Not like his brother Cumberland.” He paused to subject his handiwork to a critical assessment, his jaw hardening in a way that belied both age and infirmity. “But make no mistake about this: if I’m wrong—if I should discover Prinny did have something to do with Guin’s death—I won’t let him get away with it. Prince Regent or not.”

Sebastian studied that angry, grief-stricken face. The Marquis might be old, but there was nothing weak or feeble about either his determination or his powers of understanding. “So who do you think killed your wife, sir?”

An odd half smile touched the old man’s lips. “Do you realize you’re the first person who’s asked me that? I suppose it’s because everyone who doesn’t think the Prince killed Guinevere naturally assumes I did it.”

The Marquis moved on to the next rose. Sebastian waited, the sun warm on his shoulders, and after a moment the Marquis said, “They’ve refused to let me have Guinevere’s body. Did you know that? They say there’s some surgeon coming down from London. Someone they want to take a look at her.”

“Paul Gibson. He’s very good at this sort of thing. He’d like your permission to do a complete autopsy.”

Anglessey glanced around. “Why?”

Sebastian met the old man’s pained, haggard gaze. “Because Lady Anglessey wasn’t killed last night. She was killed sometime yesterday afternoon and her body moved to the Yellow Cabinet in time for the Prince to find her.”

An angry light flared in the old man’s eyes. “What is this? Some trick to throw suspicion away from the Prince?”

“No. As a matter of fact, the Prince’s physicians have given it as their opinion that Lady Guinevere committed suicide.”

“
Suicide!
With a dagger sticking out of her back?”

“Exactly.” Sebastian hesitated, then added, “Except that the dagger isn’t what killed her. According to Gibson, she was probably dead several hours before she was stabbed.”

“Good God. What are you suggesting?”

Sebastian shook his head. “We don’t know how she died, sir. That’s why Gibson wants your permission to do a postmortem. Without one, it’s going to be difficult to ever understand what happened to your wife.”

There was a moment of silence, filled with the
click-click
of the Marquis’s secateurs and the distant cry of the gulls. Then he said, “Very well. Your Dr. Gibson has my permission.” He cast Sebastian a fierce glance over one shoulder. “But I want to be informed of everything. Do you hear me? No holding back out of consideration for my age or my health or any of that nonsense.”

“No holding back.”

Anglessey pressed his lips together, his nostrils flaring as he sucked in a quick, deep breath. “I know what people think of my marriage to Guinevere. An old man like me, taking to wife a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. They act like it was something disgraceful, something sordid. As if the forty-five-year difference in our ages made it somehow impossible for me to love her.”

He paused, his hands stilling as he stared off toward the end of the garden, his voice becoming hushed. “But I did love her, you know. Not because she was beautiful—although God knows she was. But she was so much more than that. She was…she was like a breath of fresh air that came into my life. So full of energy and passion. So bright, so determined to grasp life with both hands and make of it what she wanted—” He broke off and had to suck in a quick gasp of air before saying more quietly, “I can’t believe she’s dead.”

Sebastian waited a moment, then asked again, quietly, “Who do you think killed her, sir?”

Anglessey went to sink down on the weathered wooden bench sheltered by a nearby arbor, his hands in his lap. “Guinevere was my third wife,” he said, his voice once again firm, under control. “The first died within hours of presenting me with a stillborn son. The second was barren.”

Sebastian nodded. There was no need for the Marquis to explain further. He and Sebastian belonged to the same world, a world in which everyone understood only too clearly the need for a man in their position to produce a legitimate heir. Even at twenty-eight, Sebastian had already felt that pressure brought to bear upon himself, both by his father and by the weight of his own awareness of what he owed his house, his name.

“Ever since the death of my brother twenty years ago,” Anglessey was saying, “my heir has been my nephew. Bevan.”

The implications were inescapable. Sebastian studied the old man’s closed, angry face. “You think him capable of murder?”

“I think Bevan Ellsworth could kill someone who stood between him and what he considered his, yes. And as far as Bevan is concerned, my estates are essentially his. He took my marriage to Guinevere as a personal affront. He actually threatened to try to have the marriage set aside—as if he could.”

“Yet it’s been several years since your marriage. Why kill Lady Anglessey now?”

Anglessey let out a pained sigh. “Bevan’s expenses have always exceeded his income. Of course, as far as Bevan is concerned, the fault lies entirely with the inadequacy of his income rather than with the extravagance of his habits. He’s a very natty dresser, my nephew. He’s also sadly addicted to games of chance. As long as he was my heir, his creditors were willing to give him pretty much a free rein. I suspect things must have become rather uncomfortable when it became known that my wife was with child.”

“Yet the child might have been a girl,” Sebastian felt compelled to note, “in which case Bevan Ellsworth’s position as your heir would have remained secure.”

“The child might have been a girl,” Anglessey agreed. “But, frankly, I don’t think Bevan could afford to take that chance.”

Sebastian stood with the sun behind him, his own features thrown deliberately into shadow as he studied the older man’s face, set now in quiet thoughtfulness. The new lines scoured there by recent grief were easy to read, as was the vacant glaze of pain in the Marquis’s pale gray eyes and the heavy burden of sorrow that weighed down his slim, aged shoulders.

There was anger there, too, in the hard set of the jaw and the tight line of the thin lips. Rage at the sudden, unexpected loss of one so loved, at the selfish greed of the nephew he believed had stolen from him one held so dear. And yet…and yet Sebastian couldn’t shake the conviction that something else was going on here, too; something he was missing.

“When was the last time you saw your wife alive?” he asked suddenly.

Anglessey looked up, his eyes squinting as he stared into the sun. “Nearly ten days ago now.”

Sebastian drew a quick, sharp breath. “I don’t understand.”

“My wife hadn’t been well lately. Nothing serious, you understand.” A sad, wistful smile played around the old man’s lips. “It happens sometimes when a woman is in the family way. She was planning to come down to Brighton with me. She always enjoyed the weeks we spent here each summer. But in the end she decided she couldn’t face all those hours in a closed, swaying carriage. She stayed home.”

“Home?”

“That’s right.” The Marquis’s hand tightened around his secateurs as he pushed to his feet again. “The doctors thought the sea air would do me good, so she insisted I come without her. We were hoping she’d feel well enough to follow in a week or two. But until last night, I thought Guinevere was in London.”

Chapter 11

A
t first it seemed just one more bizarre twist in a tangled, incomprehensible string of imperfectly understood events, that Anglessey should have believed his wife to be in London at the time of her death. But the more Sebastian thought about it, the more it made sense.

According to Paul Gibson, Lady Guinevere had been killed some six to eight hours before the Regent was discovered clutching her body in the Yellow Cabinet. At some point during that long afternoon, she had lain for hours, faceup, so that the blood had congealed and darkened her flesh to a vivid purple. Only then had a dagger been driven into her bare back and her body positioned enticingly on its side in preparation for the Regent’s amorous approach.

All of which meant she might actually have been killed in London, and her body brought down to Brighton.

“That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard,” said Hendon, when Sebastian explained his reasoning to his father that evening over a glass of brandy in their private parlor at the Anchor. “And just how do you suppose this mythical killer managed to slip the lady’s corpse into the Yellow Cabinet? He could hardly have strolled through the Pavilion bearing her lifeless body in his arms, now, could he? Or do you imagine he smuggled her inside rolled up in a carpet, like some blackguard straight out of a circulating library romance?”

Sebastian watched his father walk over to the table beside the empty hearth and pour himself another brandy. “What are you suggesting? That she traveled down to Brighton unbeknownst to her husband, simply to commit suicide by some mysterious means after arranging to have her dead body fall on a dagger in the Regent’s Yellow Cabinet? Oh yes, and then lay there unnoticed for another six hours or so while the servants built up the fire and cleaned the room around her?”

Hendon set the brandy decanter down with a thump. “Don’t be ridiculous. What I’m suggesting is that your Irish friend doesn’t know what in the bloody hell he’s talking about!”

He broke off, his head turning at the sound of a discreet tap at the door. “Excuse me, my lord,” said the Earl’s valet, every inch of his body rigid with disapproval as he executed a short bow. “Viscount Devlin’s tiger is here to see him. He
says
he’s expected.”

Sebastian brought up a fist and coughed to hide his smile. Tom was not a favorite with the Earl’s staff. “That’s right. Please show him in.”

Not content to be left cooling his heels in the hall, Tom had already appeared in the open doorway, his face pinched and drawn with disappointment.

“Well?” said Sebastian as the manservant bowed himself out. “What did you discover?”

“Nothin’, gov’nor,” said the boy, his voice heavy. “Not a blessed thing. Nobody could remember seein’ nothin’ out of the ordinary. Not till all them nobs started screaming their heads off and running outta there like fleas off a dead dog.”

Hendon let out his breath in a self-satisfied
humph
and raised his brandy to his lips.

“Any speculation?” Sebastian asked the boy.

“Oh, aye. Lots o’ that. The kitchen maids, they’re all atwitter at the thought the Regent done the lady hisself, while the stable lads, they reckon Cumberland’s behind it somehow. And they’re all talkin’ about this Hanover C—”

Tom broke off to cast a quick glance at Hendon.

“Go on,” prompted Sebastian.

Tom sniffed and lowered his voice. “It’s said in whispers, of course. But there’s some as will have it the whole family isn’t just barny. They’re sayin’ the Hanovers is cursed. And that England will be cursed, too, as long as the Hanovers—”

“That’s rot nonsense,” roared Hendon, surging up from his chair.

The boy stood his ground, his eyes narrowed and wary. “It’s what they’re saying.”

Sebastian rested one hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave him a light squeeze. “Thank you, Tom. That will be all for now.”

“I’ll be damned if I’ll ever understand why you brought that boy into your household,” said Hendon, after Tom had taken himself off.

“You think my gratitude should have been sufficiently served by a simple thank-you and the gift of perhaps a gold watch? Tom saved my life, remember? Mine and Kat’s.”

Hendon’s jaw tightened in that way it always did whenever Sebastian did something of which Hendon disapproved—or that disappointed him. Once, the Earl of Hendon had boasted of three strong sons to succeed him. But fate had left him with only Sebastian, the youngest and least satisfactory. “I think most would have considered a small pension more than adequate,” said Hendon.

“The boy is useful.”

“Good God. And in what way might a pickpocket be of use to a gentleman of quality?”

“To survive on the streets requires agility, a talent for keen observation, and quick wits. All abilities I can use.”
Besides, the boy always wanted to work with horses,
Sebastian thought, although he didn’t say it. Hendon would only have scoffed. “He seems to have managed to control his larcenous activities these last four months.”

“Or so you think.”

Sebastian drained his brandy and set the glass aside. “I’d best say good night. I plan to start for London at dawn.”

“London?” Hendon’s lips pursed in disapproval. “I thought the business with this murder would at least keep you away from there for a while.” Of course, it wasn’t London itself Hendon found objectionable; what troubled the Earl was the beautiful young actress he knew Sebastian would be seeing there.

Refusing to be drawn into an argument on that score, Sebastian turned toward the door. “I don’t see what else I can do here. Anglessey has agreed to allow Paul Gibson to transfer the Marchioness’s body to his surgery for a postmortem. Even if Lady Guinevere wasn’t killed in London, someone there might be able to tell me where she went—and why.”