When Maidens Mourn: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery Read online

  WHEN MAIDENS MOURN

  THE SEBASTIAN ST. CYR SERIES

  What Angels Fear

  When Gods Die

  Why Mermaids Sing

  Where Serpents Sleep

  What Remains of Heaven

  Where Shadows Dance

  WHEN

  MAIDENS

  MOURN

  A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

  C. S. HARRIS

  AN OBSIDIAN MYSTERY

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

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  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, March 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © The Two Talers, LLC, 2012

  All rights reserved

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Harris, C. S.

  When maidens mourn: a Sebastian St. Cyr mystery/C. S. Harris.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56582-7

  1. Saint Cyr, Sebastian (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—England—London—Fiction. 3. London (England)—History—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.R5877W476 2012

  813′.54—dc23 2011049244

  Set in Weiss

  Designed by Elke Sigal

  Printed in the United States of America

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For my cousin

  Kaitlyn Johnston

  Out flew the web and floated wide;

  The mirror crack’d from side to side;

  “The curse is come upon me,” cried

  The Lady of Shalott.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892),

  “The Lady of Shalott”

  The place at which he stopped was no more than a mound, partly surrounded by a ditch, from which it derived the name of Camlet Moat. A few hewn stones there were, which had escaped the fate of many others…vestiges, just sufficient to show that “here in former times the hand of man had been.”

  —Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832),

  The Fortunes of Nigel

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Camlet Moat, Trent Place, England

  Sunday, 2 August 1812

  Tessa Sawyer hummed a nervous tune beneath her breath as she pushed through the tangled brush and bracken edging the black waters of the ancient moat. She was very young—just sixteen at her next birthday. And though she tried to tell herself she was brave, she knew she wasn’t. She could feel her heart pounding in her narrow chest, and her hands tingled as if she’d been sitting on them. When she’d left the village, the night sky above had been clear and bright with stars. But here, deep in the wood, all was darkness and shadow. From the murky, stagnant water beside her rose an eerie mist, thick and clammy.

  It should have wafted cool against her cheek. Instead, she felt as if the heavy dampness were stealing her breath, suffocating her with an unnatural heat and a sick dread of the forbidden. She paused to swipe a shaky hand across her sweaty face and heard a rustling in the distance, the soft plop of something hitting the water.

  Choking back a whimper, she spun about, ready to run. But this was Lammas, a time sacred to the ancient goddess. They said that at midnight on this night, if a maiden dipped a cloth into the holy well that lay on the northern edge of the isle of Camlet Moat and then tied her offering to a branch of the rag tree that overhung the well, her prayer would be answered. Not only that, but maybe, just maybe, the White Lady herself would appear, to bless the maid and offer her the wisdom and guidance that a motherless girl such as Tessa yearned for with all her being.

  No one knew exactly who the White Lady was. Father Clark insisted that if the lady existed at all—which he doubted—she could only be the Virgin Mary. But local legend said the White Lady was one of the grail maidens of old, a chaste virgin who’d guarded the sacred well since before the time of Arthur and Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table. And th
en there were those who whispered that the lady was actually Guinevere, ever young, ever beautiful, ever glorious.

  Forcing herself to go on, Tessa clenched her fist around the strip of white cloth she was bringing as an offering. She could see the prow of the small dinghy kept at the moat by Sir Stanley Winthrop, on whose land she trespassed. Its timbers old and cracked, its aged paint worn and faded, it rocked lightly at the water’s edge as if touched by an unseen current.

  It was not empty.

  Tessa drew up short. A lady lay crumpled against the stern, her hair a dark cascade of curls around a pale, motionless face. She was young yet and slim, her gown an elegant flowing confection of gossamer muslin sashed with peach satin. She had her head tipped back, her neck arched; her eyes were open but sightless, her skin waxen.

  And from a jagged rent high across her pale breast showed a dried rivulet of darkness where her life’s blood had long since drained away.

  Chapter 2

  London

  Monday, 3 August

  Driven from his sleep by troublesome dreams, Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, leaned into his outstretched arms, fingers curling around the sill of his wife’s open bedroom window. He’d learned long before of the dangers that lurk in those quicksilver moments that come between darkness and the dawn. When the world hovers between night and day, a man could get lost in his own tortured memories of the past if he wasn’t careful.

  He drew a deep, shuddering breath into his lungs. But the dawn was unusually warm, the air too parched and dusty to bring any real relief. He was aware of a sheen of sweat coating his naked skin; a humming like bees working a hive droned behind his temples. The urge to wrap his hand around a cool glass of brandy was strong.

  He resisted it.

  Behind him, the woman who just four days before had become his Viscountess stirred in her bed. Their marriage was so recent—and the reasons behind it so complicated—that he sometimes found himself still thinking of her not as Hero Devlin but as “Miss Jarvis,” formidable daughter of Charles, Lord Jarvis, the brilliant but ruthless cousin of the King who served as the acknowledged power behind the fragile regency of the Prince of Wales. Once, Jarvis had sworn to destroy Sebastian, however long it might take. Sebastian knew that his marriage to Jarvis’s daughter had not changed that.

  Looking over his shoulder, he watched now as Hero came slowly awake. She lay motionless for a moment. Then her eyelids fluttered open and she shifted her head against the pillow to stare at him from across a darkened room hung with blue silk and gilded mirrors and scented with lavender.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked. “I am sorry.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Sebastian huffed a soft laugh. There was nothing either indulgent or coquettish about Hero.

  She slipped from the bed, bringing with her the fine linen sheet to wrap around her nakedness as she crossed to him. In the darkness of the night, she could come to him without inhibition, a willing and passionate lover. But during the day…

  During the day they remained in many ways essentially strangers to each other, two people who inhabited the same house yet were self-conscious and awkward when they chanced upon each other in the hall or met over breakfast. Only at night could they seem to put aside the wary distrust that had characterized their relationship from the beginning. Only in darkness could they forget the deep, dangerous antagonism that lay between his house and hers and come together as man and woman.

  He was aware of the gray light of dawn stealing into the room. She hugged the sheet tighter around her.

  “You never sleep,” she said.

  “I do. Sometimes.”

  She tipped her head to one side, her normally tidy brown hair tangled by last night’s lovemaking. “Have you always had such troublesome dreams, or only since marrying the daughter of your worst enemy?”

  Smiling faintly, he reached out to draw her to him.

  She came stiffly, her forearms resting on his naked chest, creating some distance between them. She was a tall woman, nearly as tall as Sebastian himself, with her powerful father’s aquiline countenance and Lord Jarvis’s famous, disconcerting intelligence.

  He said, “I’m told it’s not uncommon for men to dream of war after they’ve returned home.”

  Her shrewd gray eyes narrowed with thoughts he could only guess at. “That’s what you dream of? The war?”

  He hesitated. “Mainly.”

  That night, he had indeed been driven from his bed by the echoing whomph of cannonballs, by the squeals of injured horses and the despairing groans of dying men. Yet there were times when his dreams were troubled not by the haunting things he’d seen or the even more haunting things he’d done, but by a certain blue-eyed, dusky-haired actress named Kat Boleyn. It was an unintentional but nonetheless real betrayal of the woman he had taken to wife, and it troubled him. Yet the only certain way for a man to control his dreams was to avoid sleep.

  The daylight in the room strengthened.

  Hero said, “It’s difficult for anyone to sleep in this heat.”

  He reached up to smooth the tangled hair away from her damp forehead. “Why not come with me to Hampshire? It would do us both good to get away from the noise and dirt of London for a few weeks.” He’d been intending to pay a visit to his estate all summer, but the events of the past few months had made leaving London impossible. Now it was a responsibility that could be delayed no longer.

  He watched her hesitate and knew exactly what she was thinking: that alone together in the country they would be thrown constantly into each other’s company. It was, after all, the reason newlywed couples traditionally went away on a honeymoon—so that they might get to know each other better. But there was little that could be termed traditional about their days-old marriage.

  He expected her to say no. Then an odd, crooked smile touched her lips and she surprised him by saying, “Why not?”

  He let his gaze rove over the smooth planes of her cheeks, the strong line of her jaw, the downward sweep of lashes that now hid her eyes from his sight. She was a mystery to him in so many ways. He knew the formidable strength of her intellect, the power of her sense of justice, the unexpected passion his touch could ignite within her. But he knew little of the life she had lived before their worlds became intertwined, of the girl she had once been or the forces and events that had fashioned her into the kind of woman who could without hesitation or compunction shoot a highwayman in the face.

  He said, “We can leave for Hampshire today.”

  She shook her head. “I’m to meet Gabrielle Tennyson up at Trent Place this morning. She’s been consulting with Sir Stanley on the excavations of a site on his property called Camlet Moat, and she’s promised to show me what they’ve discovered.”

  Sebastian found himself smiling. Hero’s driving passion would always be her clearheaded, logical commitment to reforming the numerous unjust and cruel laws that both handicapped and tarnished their society. But lately she’d also developed a keen interest in the need to preserve the rapidly vanishing legacies of England’s past.

  He said, “They’ve discovered something of interest?”

  “When you consider that ‘Camlet’ is a recent corruption of ‘Camelot,’ anything they find is intriguing.”

  He ran the backs of his fingers along her jawline and smiled when he saw her shiver in the heat. “If I remember my Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory identified Camelot with what is now Winchester.”

  She wrapped her hand around his wrist, effectively ending the caress. “Gabrielle thinks Malory was wrong.”

  From the street below came the scent of fresh bread and the tinkling bell of the baker’s boy crying, “Hot buns.”

  Sebastian said, “Tomorrow, then?”

  By now, the golden light of morning flooded the room. Hero took a step back out of the circle of Sebastian’s arms to hug the sheet tighter around her, as if already regretting her commitment. “All right. Tomorrow.”

  But
it was barely an hour later when a constable from Bow Street arrived at the house on Brook Street with the information that Miss Gabrielle Tennyson had been found dead.

  Murdered, at Camlet Moat.

  Chapter 3

  A small, middle-aged man with a balding pate and a serious demeanor stood at the base of the ancient earthen embankment. He had his hands clasped behind his back, his chin sunk into the folds of his modestly tied cravat. A weathered dinghy lay beside him where it had been hauled up onto the moat’s bank. It was empty now, but a smear of blood still showed clearly along the edge of the gunwale.

  Sir Henry Lovejoy, the newest of Bow Street’s three stipendiary magistrates, found himself staring at that telltale streak of blood. He had been called to this murder scene some ten miles north of London by the local magistrate, who was only too eager to hand over his investigation to the Bow Street public office.

  Lovejoy blew out a long, troubled sigh. On the streets of London, most murders were straightforward affairs: a drunken navvy choked the life out of his hapless wife; two mates fell out over a dice game or the sale of a horse; a footpad jumped some unwary passerby from the mouth of a fetid alley. But there was nothing ordinary about a murdered young gentlewoman found floating on an abandoned moat in the middle of nowhere.