Where Serpents Sleep (23 page)
Read Where Serpents Sleep Online
Authors: C. S. Harris
Kane squinted up at the sky. “There goes the sun.”
“How’s your man’s arm?” Sebastian pushed away from the tomb as Kane flipped open a leather-bound wooden box littered with paint-stained bottles and old rags at his feet. “An injury like that can incapacitate a man for a spell.”
“I heard you’d tangled with a cadger near the docks yesterday,” said Kane, thrusting his palette and brushes into the box. “I don’t know who the fellow was.” He closed the lid on the box and snapped the fastenings before straightening. “But I do know this: It wasn’t one of my lads.”
“Now why should I believe you?” said Sebastian.
“Believe me or not, as you choose. But your questions are obviously making someone uneasy.” Kane smiled and reached for his easel. In the pale light, the blue scar left across his forehead by his early years in the coal mines looked even darker. “Uneasy enough to want to kill you.”
In his surgery near Tower Hill, Paul Gibson shifted on the hard wooden seat of his chair, his head tipped to one side as he listened to the wounded man’s ragged breathing. Hero Jarvis’s assailant had passed a restless night drifting in and out of consciousness. Once, he had startled awake, his gray eyes open wide, his lips parting as if on a gasp. Gibson had leaned forward to say softly, “What’s your name?” But the man had only closed his eyes and turned his head away.
Pushing to his feet, Gibson left the man’s bedside and limped down the hall. The stump of his left leg was aching badly, giving him a slow, awkward gait. He answered a call of nature, then splashed water on his face and roughly toweled it dry. He was pouring himself a morning ale when he thought he heard a step in the hall.
“Anyone there?” he called.
The stillness of the surgery stretched out around him, raising a sudden, inexplicable length of gooseflesh on his arms.
“Who’s there?” he called again, setting aside the ale.
He lurched toward the front room, torn between surging alarm and a feeling of profound foolishness. From the street outside came the shuffling hoofbeats of a passing horse and the voice of a hawker crying, “ ’Ere I am with me rabbits hangin’ from me pole. Who’ll buy me rabbits?”
At the doorway, Gibson hesitated. The wounded man appeared to be sleeping peacefully, the sheet pulled up over his chest. It wasn’t until Gibson limped over to the bedside that he saw the man’s eyes staring wide-open and sightless. Gibson put out one hand, touching the man’s slack jaw and watching the head loll.
Someone had broken his neck.
Chapter 30
Parting from Ian Kane outside the churchyard of Allhallows Barking, Sebastian went in search of Rachel Fairchild’s onetime betrothed, Tristan Ramsey.
He found him drinking Blue Ruin with Lord Alvin and Mr. Peter Dimsey at the Thatched House Tavern in St. James’s. Walking up behind Ramsey’s chair, Sebastian laid a heavy hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “We have something to discuss,” said Sebastian, fixing his gaze on the other two men in a way that made both gentlemen shift uncomfortably in their seats. “You gentlemen will excuse us?”
Ramsey froze. “My friends and I are having a drink,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Surely this can wait?”
Sebastian kept his hand on Ramsey’s shoulder. “I think not.”
Ramsey’s gaze went from Sebastian to his friends. If he was hoping for any succor from either Alvin or Dimsey, he misjudged his friends. Both gentlemen had suddenly become wholly absorbed in the study of their drinks. “Perhaps for a moment,” he said, and thrust back his chair.
They pushed through the crowded tavern to a narrow passage that led to a door opening onto a cobbled lane at the rear. Ramsey closed the door behind him with a snap and said, “Now see here, Devlin—”
Moving calmly and deliberately, Sebastian whacked the back of his gloved hand across the man’s face. He was in no mood for any more of Ramsey’s bluster and lies.
A different kind of man might have called Sebastian out for such an offense. Not Ramsey. “Bloody hell!” Both hands cupped protectively over his nose, he doubled over as if he’d been gut-punched. “You’ve drawn my cork.”
Picking up the man by his lapels, Sebastian slung Ramsey back against the brick wall behind him. “We’re going to have a conversation. Only, this time, you’re going to be very careful not to lie to me.”
“What? What the hell is wrong with you? I didn’t lie to you!”
“You did. You knew Rachel Fairchild was in Covent Garden. More than that—you knew exactly which house she was in.”
A tiny trickle of blood ran from Ramsey’s left nostril. “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I—”
“You went there.” Sebastian grabbed the man’s shoulders and thumped his back against the wall again. “You like paying for it, do you, Ramsey? You like it when women have to do exactly what you tell them to do? When they moan on cue whether you’re really bringing them pleasure or not? Must have been quite a shock to find your own fiancée lined up there with all the other soiled doves offering her charms to any man with the money to pay for them.”
“Why you—” Ramsey bucked against Sebastian’s hold, his lips twisting with rage.
“What I don’t understand is how the hell you walked away and left her there.”
“I tried to get her to leave!” said Ramsey, his breath blowing bloody bubbles out his nostril. “She wouldn’t come with me. I had to pay for her just to talk to her! She took me upstairs to one of those awful rooms.” His upper lip curled at the memory. “The bed reeked of stale sweat and sex.
She
reeked of sex—of men. I begged her to come with me. But she just stood there listening to me with her arms crossed and a bored look on her face. Then she said I only had three minutes left, so if I wanted to fuck her, then I’d better hurry up and do it.”
She
reeked of sex—of men. I begged her to come with me. But she just stood there listening to me with her arms crossed and a bored look on her face. Then she said I only had three minutes left, so if I wanted to fuck her, then I’d better hurry up and do it.”
Sebastian studied the younger man’s trembling chin as full understanding dawned on a tide of rage and revulsion. “And so you did, didn’t you?” Sebastian let Ramsey go and took a step back before the urge to plant the bastard a facer grew overwhelming. “Mother of God. What manner of man are you?”
Ramsey wiped his sleeve across his bloody upper lip. “You don’t understand. She
taunted
me. She wanted it!”
taunted
me. She wanted it!”
“Is that what you told yourself? So you—what? Fucked her there? In the upstairs room of a Covent Garden brothel?
And then you just left her?”
And then you just left her?”
“What else was I supposed to do?”
“You could have told her father where she was.”
“Lord Fairchild?” Ramsey looked appalled. “You think I wanted to kill him? The man has a weak heart.”
Sebastian studied Ramsey’s blood-smeared features. “Did you find out how Rachel ended up in Covent Garden?”
“No.”
“You did ask, didn’t you?”
“Of course I asked!”
“And she told you nothing? Nothing at all?”
“She told me to go away and leave her alone.”
“Did you ever go back there?”
Revulsion spread across the man’s face. “Good God, what do you think I am?”
“You don’t want to know.” Sebastian stooped to scoop up Ramsey’s hat from the cobbles, where it had been knocked in the scuffle. “Here,” he said, slamming it against the man’s chest.
Ramsey’s hands jerked up to close on the hat’s brim. “Anyone would have done the same in my place,” he said, clutching the hat to his chest.
Sebastian studied the man’s heightened color and shifting, restless gaze. “You didn’t try to talk her into leaving with you,” said Sebastian, suddenly knowing it for the truth. “Oh, I’ve no doubt you ranted at her. Demanded to know why she’d left you and how she could have done such a thing to you. But you didn’t try to talk her into leaving. After all, what if she had said
yes
? What would you have done with her then? Taken her to wife?”
yes
? What would you have done with her then? Taken her to wife?”
Ramsey’s head snapped back. “You say that as if you would have done any differently. What man would have wanted her after that? She was a whore!”
He must have seen something flare in Sebastian’s eyes, because he took a hasty step back. “All right,” said Ramsey, breathing heavily enough to shudder his chest. “It’s true. I didn’t beg her to leave with me. But it isn’t as if she asked me to take her away from there.”
“And that surprises you?”
Ramsey raked the back of one hand across his upper lip. The bleeding was stopping now. “You don’t know the way she treated me. The way she just stood there swearing at me, talking to me like a—” He broke off.
“Like?” prompted Sebastian.
Ramsey sniffed and shook his head.
“When was this?” Sebastian demanded.
“Two weeks ago.” Ramsey sniffed again. “Something like that. I don’t remember for certain.”
“Two weeks ago? And you did nothing?”
Ramsey carefully set his hat on his head. The crown was dented, giving him a rakish air. “I said I didn’t tell Lord Fairchild. That doesn’t mean I did nothing.”
“You astound me,” said Sebastian. “What did you do?”
Ramsey twitched his lapels and adjusted his cuffs. “I told her brother.”
Chapter 31
Sebastian sat for a time on the terrace of the gardens overlooking Whitehall Stairs. The patches of blue sky and Sintermittent sunshine of that morning had vanished behind thickening piles of gray clouds that shaded to black in the distance. The river flowed dark and choppy before him, whipped by the wind into white-flecked waves. A wherryman halfway across the Thames worked his oars with a strong, steady rhythm, the plash of his paddles hitting the water carrying clearly in the strengthening breeze.
Sebastian kept remembering the expression on Cedric Fairchild’s face when first told of his sister’s death in Covent Garden. The shock of denial had been all too readily apparent—that natural human tendency to disconnect when first confronted with the death of a loved one, the wailing mental
No!
that is common to all. Yet Fairchild had displayed neither disbelief nor confusion when told of his sister’s presence in Covent Garden. That brief bristling at the mention of the Magdalene House had all been for effect, because Cedric Fairchild had known only too well what his sister had become.
No!
that is common to all. Yet Fairchild had displayed neither disbelief nor confusion when told of his sister’s presence in Covent Garden. That brief bristling at the mention of the Magdalene House had all been for effect, because Cedric Fairchild had known only too well what his sister had become.
Tristan Ramsey had told him.
Sebastian slid off the low wall, his gaze lifting to the dark thunderclouds churning overhead. He understood why Cedric would attempt to keep the truth of his sister’s disgrace to himself, even after her death. What he couldn’t understand was why Rachel’s brother, like her betrothed before her, had simply walked away and abandoned her to her fate.
Rachel’s brother was cupping wafers at Menton’s, his right arm extended, steady and true, when Sebastian walked up to him. “One would think you’d have had all the target practice you needed in Spain,” said Sebastian when Cedric Fairchild turned away from the firing range.
“It doesn’t hurt to keep one’s hand in,” said Cedric. He had stripped down to his shirtsleeves and waistcoat to shoot. Now, handing his pistol to the attendant, he reached for his dark blue coat.
“You sold out and came back to London because of Rachel, didn’t you?” said Sebastian, watching the former lieutenant shrug into his coat. “Who told you she was missing? Ramsey?”
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