Why Mermaids Sing (18 page)

A
iden O’Connell trolled the pleasure haunts of the haut monde, looking for a tall man with long black hair and the wink of pirate’s gold in one ear.

He found Russell Yates at Gentleman Jackson’s in Bond Street. For a moment, Aiden simply stood on the sidelines, watching the ex-privateer spar with the Champion himself.

Yates was an enigma, a born gentleman with a comfortable fortune who amused himself by running rum and the odd French agent beneath the noses of His Majesty’s Navy. Some did it for money, and some did it out of a fierce conviction; Yates did it for fun.

Aiden waited to approach him until the other man had left the ring, a towel draped around his neck. “I need to talk to you,” said Aiden quietly.

Yates scrubbed the towel across his sweaty face, his eyes alert and gleaming with interest. “What is it?”

Aiden leaned in close to drop his voice. “A mutual acquaintance of ours needs to go away.”

Kat was organizing papers at her desk when Russell Yates sent up his card. For the sake of Sebastian’s investigation, she checked her first impulse, which was to have the shipowner told she was not at home.

“This is unexpected, Mr. Yates,” she said, rising to greet him when Elspeth showed him up. “Please, have a seat. Have you recalled something of relevance concerning the
Harmony
?”

Yates stretched out in one of the chairs beside the fireplace, a large, powerfully built man who exuded virility and a rakish air of danger. “Actually, I’m here because of an interesting conversation I had with Aiden O’Connell this morning. He tells me you’ve decided to travel abroad. Permanently.”

Kat raised one eyebrow. “Now why would he tell you a thing like that?”

“Mr. O’Connell and I have made these sorts of arrangements before.”

“I see.” Kat came to sink into the chair opposite him. “And can you arrange it? Before tomorrow night?”

“I assume you wish to go to France rather than to the Americas? The Americas are so dreadfully, well,
colonial
. Still. Something about the mind-set, I suppose.”

“France would be fine,” Kat said in a tight voice. She knew it should matter to her, where she went, but somehow it did not. She found the thought of life without Devlin—anywhere—too unbearable to contemplate for long enough to come up with a coherent plan beyond removing herself from the temptation of saying yes to everything he was urging.

“I have a sloop leaving Dover with tomorrow’s tide. It can have you in Calais in four hours.”

Kat felt an ache pull across her chest. It was one thing to reach the decision to leave, but something else entirely to actually make the arrangements. “Good,” she said briskly, pushing up from the chair and reaching for the bell to summon Elspeth. “Now you’ll have to excuse me. I have much to prepare—”

“O’Connell also told me something of why you’re leaving,” said Yates.

She swung slowly to face him again.

“I saw Lord Devlin’s announcement in this morning’s
Post
. There aren’t many actresses who would abandon everything they know—home, career, friends—to save the man they love from ruining himself. You’re a remarkable woman.”

“I wouldn’t say so.”

“No. I don’t suppose you would.” He rested his elbows on the delicate arms of the chair, his fingers templed before him. “Right now, you believe you have only three alternatives. You can take your chances with Lord Jarvis—never a good idea. You can ruin Viscount Devlin by marrying him. Or you can flee the country. But there is a fourth option.”

She gave a short, humorless laugh. “There is?”

“We could help each other.”

She cocked her head. “How could I help you?”

“You’ve heard the whispers about me, no doubt?” He smiled when she hesitated. “Don’t be shy. The rumors have been circulating for years. The tales of my exploits on the briny seas diminished them for a time, but only for a time. Lately the gossip has become both more vicious and more troublesome. People are watching me. I fear the moral climate of our age is becoming more oppressive. Have you noticed?”

“The inclination of which you speak has never been condoned. Not in our culture.”

“How true. One can gamble away a fortune, drink oneself to death, openly set up half a dozen mistresses, or regularly debauch young virgins fresh from the countryside, and no one in Society will give it a second thought. But direct your love toward a member of the wrong sex, and the punishment is not mere social ostracism, but death. A death as ugly and unpleasant as that which Jarvis promises you.”

Kat studied the man’s dark, square-jawed face. “You have enemies who would wish to see you destroyed?”

“One. One very powerful enemy. He dares not move against me directly, but it is not so difficult to manipulate rumor and public opinion.”

Kat came to sink back into the chair opposite him. “It’s Jarvis, isn’t it?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“I don’t understand. Why would Jarvis dare not move against you directly?”

“Because it just so happens that Lord Jarvis is hiding a dangerous secret. A secret that, if it were to become known, would destroy his influence at the palace and very likely lead to his own death.”

“You have proof of this?”

“If I did not, I would be dead. Jarvis knows my death will lead to the publication of what he most desires be kept undisclosed. Hence his caution.”

“I would think such a threat from you would be sufficient to motivate his lordship to suppress any rumors about you, not foment them.”

“You might think so. But there’s a flaw in that logic. If I were to move to bring down Lord Jarvis, he would retaliate by having me killed. We would effectively destroy each other.”

“So what does any of this have to do with me?”

“It occurs to me that the easiest and quickest way to lay the rumors to rest would be for me to take a wife. A famous wife known for her beauty, sensuality, and charisma.”

Kat laughed. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am utterly serious. It would be a mutually beneficial arrangement: I would protect you from Jarvis, while you would provide me with what I suppose one could call a disguise. With Kat Boleyn as my wife, anyone questioning my virility or sexuality would be laughed out of the room.”

“Why me? Why not choose a bride from the selection available at Almack’s?”

He smiled. “This isn’t the kind of arrangement I’d care to explain to some innocent debutante just out of the schoolroom. You need have no worry I would press to consummate the marriage. I offer you companionship and witty conversation at the supper table, but our amorous adventures, obviously, would be directed elsewhere. All I ask is that you pursue them with discretion—as shall I.”

Kat pushed up from her chair to pace the room. She should have dismissed the suggestion out of hand. Instead, she found herself saying, “Devlin would never forgive me were I to embark on such a marriage.”

“You think he would forgive you for running away to France?”

When Kat said nothing, he added, “I can have a marriage contract drawn up preserving your control over whatever wealth you bring to the marriage as well as your subsequent earnings.”

“No. This is impossible.”

“Don’t dismiss the idea too hastily. Give it some thought.”

She brought up one hand to rub absently at her temples. “This proof you claim to possess against Jarvis. How do I know it exists?”

He smiled. “I expected you to be suspicious.” Slipping his hand into his coat, he drew forth a case of soft brown leather tied with a thong. “So I brought it.”

The documents in the case were thorough, damning, and irrefutably authentic. “Good God,” whispered Kat when she had finished reading through them.

“Exactly.” Yates tucked the documents away and rose to his feet to cast a significant glance around the elegantly proportioned room with its peach silk hangings and theatrical memorabilia. “You don’t need to give all this up.”

“What you’re suggesting is outrageous.”

He shrugged. “Think about it.”

Kat stayed where she was, her hands gripped tightly together in front of her.

At the door he paused to look back, his pirate’s earring winking in the sunlight streaming in through the front windows. “Oh. I almost forgot. The name of the
Harmony
’s cabin boy you were asking about? It was Forbes. Gideon Forbes.”

After Yates left, Kat paid a boy a shilling to carry a brief note to Brook Street, giving Sebastian the dead cabin boy’s name. Then she thought about sending Elspeth up to the attic to pull down her trunks.

Instead she stood at the front window, looking out at Harwich Street and the familiar crowded rooftops, chimneys, and soot-stained spires of the city she had called home for more than ten years.

L
ater that afternoon, Sebastian drew up the curricle on the gravel sweep before a small Elizabethan sandstone manor. Lying to the north of London, near St. Albans, the childhood home of Gideon Forbes proved to be a pleasant, well-kept estate with fat-bellied cows and well-tended fields. As he swung down from the curricle, Sebastian could hear the sound of children’s laughter mingling with the barking of a dog in the distance.

“It’s funny,” said Tom, squinting up at the manor’s forest of chimneys. “But when you think about what musta happened to that lad, somehow you don’t expect ’im to ’ave grown up someplace that looks so
ordinary
.”

“I know what you mean,” said Sebastian. Acting on Kat’s message, he had found it easy enough to trace Gideon Forbes here, to this idyllic corner of the Hertfordshire countryside. Gideon’s father was a country squire named Brandon Forbes; the boy’s mother was some four years dead. But whatever Sebastian had been anticipating, it wasn’t
this
, this utterly English landscape of unpretentious gentility and bucolic peace.

A shout brought Sebastian’s head around. A sturdily built man in serviceable buckskin breeches was walking toward the house from across a park of oak trees and sun-spangled grass that waved gently in the breeze. He looked to be in his midforties, his dark hair newly touched by gray, the lines on his long face just beginning to settle and deepen with age. A liver-colored hound loped at his heels. “May I help you?” he called.

Sebastian went to meet him. “Mr. Forbes? I’m Viscount Devlin. I’d like to talk to you about your son Gideon.”

The man blinked several times, his eyes narrow and a bit wary. “All right,” he said at last. “Come walk with me.”

They followed a footpath that curled away toward a distant string of cottages, the hound racing ahead of them. “It’s because of these terrible murders, isn’t it?” he said after a moment. “That’s why you’re here. You think there’s some connection to the wreck of the
Harmony
.”

Sebastian studied the man’s sun-darkened face. “Did you attend the trial of the mutineers?”

“No.” Forbes stared off across the fields, to where two little girls played with a much younger boy still in leading strings. “I’m afraid Gideon’s mother was sickening by then. She’d never been well after the birth of our last daughter, you see, and I didn’t want to leave her. But I followed it in the papers.”

“Did you go to the hangings?”

Forbes shook his head, his lips twisting in a grimace. “Nah. What would be the point?”

“Revenge, perhaps?”

“It wouldn’t bring the boy back, now, would it?”

Sebastian nodded toward the laughing children in the distance. “Are they yours?”

Forbes’s features lightened into a proud smile. “That’s right. Catherine there is eleven; Jane is seven, while Michael has just turned two. And I’ve two older boys by my first wife: Roland, who helps me here at the manor, and his younger brother, Daniel. Daniel’s up at Cambridge.”

As Sebastian watched, the boy on the leading strings took a tumble and started to cry. His half sisters rushed to pick him up again. “You’ve remarried?”

“Aye.” He sighed. “I’ve buried two wives, God rest their souls. I pray to the good Lord I won’t bury the third.”

Sebastian brought his gaze back to the man’s plain, long face. “Do you think these murders have something to do with the
Harmony
?”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it? I mean, I didn’t think much about it after Carmichael’s and Stanton’s sons were killed. But now, with Captain Bellamy’s son, and what the papers are saying was done to young Thornton last Easter…” He hesitated. “Well, it makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“Did you ever talk to Captain Bellamy about what happened to your son?”

“Aye. Bellamy came to see me when it was all over. Brought me this.” He pulled a worn Spanish piece of eight from his pocket and held it out. “It was Gideon’s. He’d had it from the time he was a little one. Carried it with him everywhere.”

“Did he tell you how the boy died?”

“Spar fell on him during the storm. He didn’t die right away, though. Gideon was a plucky one, no doubt about it. Maybe if they’d been rescued sooner, he’d have made it. But without food or water…” The man’s voice trailed away. He hesitated, then blew out his breath in a long sigh. “I never should have let him go to sea. Not that young. But from the time he was a little tyke, it was all he could talk about. The sea and tall ships and all the foreign lands he wanted to visit. In the end, he wore us down. One of his mother’s cousins knew Captain Bellamy and arranged to have him take the lad on as cabin boy. Gideon was aiming to be a sea captain, you know. He’d have made it, too. If he’d lived.”

Sebastian studied the man’s pleasant, weathered face. “The young men who’ve been killed have all been found with various objects stuffed in their mouths—a papier-mâché star, a mandrake root, a page torn from a ship’s log, and the hoof of a goat. Do you have any idea what it could mean?”

As Sebastian watched, Forbes’s face became tight with an effort to control his emotions. “I didn’t read anything about that.”

“It does mean something, doesn’t it? What is it?”

Forbes swung away to stare out over the park, toward the laughing children. “Gideon had a poem he liked. You know the one? Something about mermaids singing?”

“‘Go and Catch a Falling Star,’” said Sebastian softly. “By John Donne?”

Forbes’s throat worked as he swallowed. “That’s it. ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star.’” He brought his gaze back to Sebastian’s face. “Bellamy told me they buried Gideon’s body at sea. But that’s not what you think happened to him, is it? Is it?” he said again, when Sebastian remained silent.

Sebastian met the other man’s intense gray eyes. “No. No, I don’t.”