Where Serpents Sleep sscm-4 Read online

  Where Serpents Sleep

  ( Sebastian St Cyr Mystery - 4 )

  C.S. Harris

  London, 1812. The slaughter of eight young prostitues in a house of refuge near Covent Garden leaves only one survivor-and on witness: Hero Jarvis, reform-minded daughter of the Prince Regent's cousin, Lord Jarvis. When Jarvis quashes any official inquiry that might reveal his daughter's involvement, Hero launches an investigation of her own and turns to Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, for help.

  THE SEBASTIAN ST. CYR MYSTERY SERIES

  What Angels Fear

  When Gods Die

  Why Mermaids Sing

  In memory of

  Dr. Robert D. Harris, December 1921-August 2007.

  Scholar, mentor, friend.

  “…who knows where serpents sleep?”

  —ANONYMOUS

  Chapter 1

  MONDAY, 4 MAY 1812

  The girl stared out the window, one hand sliding up and down her shawl-covered arm in a ceaseless, uneasy motion. Outside, a thick fog leached the light from the dying day and muffled the sounds of the surrounding city.

  “You don’t like the fog, do you?” Hero Jarvis asked, watching her.

  They sat together in a pool of golden light thrown by the lamp on the plain tea table where Hero had laid out her notebook, pen and ink, and the standard list of questions she’d drawn up to ask. The girl jerked her gaze back to Hero’s face. This one was older than some of the other prostitutes Hero had interviewed, but still young, her face still smooth, her skin clear, her green eyes sharp with intelligence. She said her name was Rose Jones, although in Hero’s experience women in this business seldom gave their true names.

  “Who does like fog?” said Rose. “You can never tell what’s out there.”

  The girl’s accent was disconcerting: pure Mayfair, without a trace of Cockney or any country inflection. Studying the girl’s fine bone structure and graceful bearing, Hero knew a flicker of interest mingled with something both more personal and less admirable that she didn’t care to examine too closely. How had this girl—surely no more than eighteen or nineteen years old and so obviously gently born and bred—ended up here, at the Magdalene House, a refuge run by the Society of Friends for women who wished to leave prostitution?

  Reaching for her pen, Hero dipped the tip into her inkwell and asked, “How long have you been in the business?”

  A bitter smile touched Rose’s lips. “You mean, how long have I been a whore? Less than a year.”

  It was said to shock. But Hero Jarvis was not the kind of woman who shocked easily. At twenty-five years of age, she considered herself immune to the excesses of sensibility that afflicted so many of her sex. She simply nodded and went on to her next question. “What sort of work did you do before?”

  “Before? I didn’t do anything before.”

  “You lived with your family?”

  Rose tipped her head to one side, her gaze assessing the other woman in a way Hero did not like. “Why are you here, asking us these questions?”

  Hero cleared her throat. “I’m researching a theory.”

  “What theory?”

  “It is my belief that most women enter prostitution not because of some innate moral weakness but out of economic necessity.”

  A quiver of emotion crossed Rose’s face, her voice coming out harsh. “What do you know about it? A woman like you?”

  Hero set aside her pen and met Rose’s gaze without flinching. “Are we so different?”

  Rose didn’t answer. In the silence that followed, Hero could hear the voices of the other women drifting up from downstairs, the clink of cutlery, a quick burst of laughter. It grew late; soon Hero’s carriage would return to take her back to Berkeley Square, to the safety and comfort of her privileged world. Perhaps Rose was right, in a sense. Perhaps—

  The sound of a fist pounding on the front door below reverberated through the house. Hero heard a woman’s startled exclamation, mingled with a man’s harsh growl. A cry of outrage turned suddenly to a scream of terror.

  Rose leapt from her chair, her eyes wild. “Oh, God. They’ve found me.”

  Hero pushed to her feet. “What do you mean? What’s happening?”

  She could hear the voices of more men now, the crash of overturned furniture, the smashing of crockery. Women shrieked. Someone pleaded, tearful, her voice trailing off into a whimper that ended abruptly.

  “They’re here to kill me.” Rose whirled around, her gaze sweeping the room to fix on an old walnut cupboard, which took up most of the near wall. “We must hide.”

  From below came the sound of running feet and a woman’s scream transformed, hideously, into a throaty gurgle. Rose yanked open the cupboard door. Hero reached out a hand, stopping her. “No. That’s the first place they’ll search.”

  Crossing the room, Hero threw wide the casement window that overlooked the mist-swirled alley below. The window opened onto the sloping roof of what was probably the kitchen or a washroom. “This way,” said Hero. She sucked in a quick breath, the damp, coal smoke-tinged air biting her lungs as she threw one leg over the low sill and ducked her head through the frame.

  Covered with moss and condensation and soot, the slate roofing tiles felt treacherously slippery beneath the smooth leather soles of Hero’s kid half boots. She moved cautiously, one hand braced against the rough brick of the house wall as she turned to help Rose through the narrow opening.

  As she eased the window closed behind them, Hero heard a man shout from inside the house, “She’s not here.”

  Another man answered, his voice lower pitched, his footsteps already heavy on the staircase. “She’s here. She must be upstairs.”

  “They’re coming,” Hero whispered, and felt Rose’s hand tighten around her upper arm in warning.

  Following the direction of the girl’s shaky, pointing finger, Hero discerned the figure of a man looming out of the fog below. A guard, stationed at the back door to make certain none of the women in the house escaped to the alley.

  Hunkering low, Hero crab walked down the slippery slope of the roof to its edge. She watched the man below pace back and forth, his hat pulled over his eyes, his shoulders hunched against the dampness.

  Moving as silently as she could, Hero swung her feet over the edge, her stocking-clad legs showing creamy white against the white of the mist as the hem of her fine blue alpaca carriage dress caught on the edge of the tiles and hiked up. She waited until the guard paused just below her. Then she pushed off from the eaves to drop straight down on him.

  The force of the impact knocked him to his knees with a grunt and threw Hero to one side. She landed on her hip in the mud, hard enough to bring a small cry to her lips, but she scrambled quickly to her feet. The man was still on his hands and knees when Hero’s heel caught him hard on the side of his head and sent him staggering back against the house wall to land in a slumped heap. He lay still.

  Rose slid over the edge of the roof to come down in a rush of tearing petticoats and scraped skin. “Good heavens. Where did you learn to do that?”

  “I used to play with my brother.”

  The sound of the upstairs window being thrown open brought both their heads up. A man’s voice cut through the fog. “Drummond? You there?”

  Rose grabbed Hero’s hand and they ran.

  They raced up an alleyway of mud and ancient half-buried cobbles hemmed in by soaring walls of soot-blackened brick. Breathing hard, her fingers gripping the other woman’s hand tightly, Hero sprinted toward the square patch of white at the alley’s mouth, where the silhouette of a carriage appeared out of the mist. They had almost reached the footpath when Hero heard the boom of a gun behind them. Beside her, Rose falte
red.

  Turning, Hero caught the girl as she began to crumple. The bullet had torn a gaping, oozing hole through her chest.

  “Oh, no. No,” Hero whispered.

  Rose’s lips parted, spilling dark red blood down her chin. Hero could feel the girl’s blood running warm and wet over her hands, see the light in Rose’s eyes ebb, dim.

  “No!”

  The boom of a second shot echoed up the alleyway. Hero imagined she could feel its passing like the whisper of a ghost beside her cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, sobbing slightly as she eased Rose down into the mud and ran on.

  Chapter 2

  TUESDAY, 5 MAY 1812

  The morning dawned overcast and unseasonably cool, the air heavy with the scent of coal smoke and the last lingering wisps of the fog. Winding westward toward the City, a lady’s yellow-bodied carriage persistently shadowed a gentleman’s curricle as he wove around tumbledown hackneys and towering drays driven by men in smocks and leather aprons. When they reached the Strand, the curricle’s driver reined in before the last in a row of small, bow-fronted shops, his pair of blood chestnuts snorting and throwing their heads, restless. Leaning forward, the lady signaled her own coachman to draw up.

  “They were ’opin’ fer a good run,” said the gentleman’s tiger from his perch at the curricle’s rear, the sharp Cockney tones of his voice carrying clearly in the damp air.

  “They’ll get it soon enough,” said the gentleman, handing the reins to the young groom.

  The gentleman’s name was Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin. The fourth child and youngest of three sons born to the Earl of Hendon and his Countess, Sophia, he had only succeeded to the heir’s title on the death of his two older brothers. Now nine-and-twenty, the Viscount was said to have been badly affected by his experiences in the Wars, although few in London seemed to know the exact nature of the circumstances that had led to his decision to sell his commission some two years before and return to England. Until the previous autumn, he had kept the famous actress Kat Boleyn as his mistress, but that liaison had ended abruptly for reasons also shrouded in mystery.

  The lady in the carriage watched as the Viscount hopped down from his curricle, his multicaped driving coat swirling around him, his head falling back as he glanced up at the wooden sign with a dagger and a pair of crossed swords that swayed gently in the breeze. He was built tall and lean, with hair that was dark—darker even than that of his father in his prime. But whereas the father’s eyes were a piercing blue, the son’s were a feral yellow that brought to mind the howl of wolves in the night. Once, his lordship had made the apprehension of murderers his specialty. But for the past eight months, he had given himself over to drinking and gambling and riding to hounds with a reckless abandon that seemed calculated to get him killed sometime in the very near future.

  The lady in the carriage watched as the Viscount entered the shop. “Wait here,” she ordered her coachman, and signaled to the footman to let down the steps.

  Sebastian balanced the dagger in his hand and carefully tested its heft. It was a splendid piece, its ebony hilt inlaid with silver and brass in a delicate Moorish design.

  “It arrived just this week from Spain, my lord,” said the shopkeeper, a short rounded man with full rosy cheeks and a balding pate who hovered behind the counter of his discreet little establishment in the Strand. “The finest Toledo steel. And the workmanship on the hilt is unusually exquisite, wouldn’t you say?”

  Nodding, Sebastian whirled to send the dagger flying toward the dartboard on the shop’s back wall. The blade bit just left of center, quivered a moment, then stilled.

  The shopkeeper’s hands fluttered in dismay. Devlin never missed. “Obviously there is an unseen flaw. Let me show you another—”

  “No. The blade flew true.” Sebastian rubbed his eyes with a splayed thumb and forefinger, aware of a faint tremor in his hand born of too many sleepless nights, too many bottles of brandy, too many dinners left uneaten. “I’ll take it.” He was reaching for his purse when the bell on the door jangled and a gentlewoman in an ostrich-plumed hat and a hunter green pelisse entered the shop, bringing with her the scent of the cool spring morning.

  She was a tall woman just past the first blush of youth, with light brown hair she wore pulled straight back in an unflattering style that accentuated the aquiline nose she had inherited from her father, Charles, Lord Jarvis, cousin to the King and the acknowledged power behind Prinny’s fragile regency. She nodded in response to the shopkeeper’s effusive greetings but turned her frank gray stare on Sebastian.

  “I see your curricle is waiting outside. The one with the matched chestnuts and a tiger who looks no more than twelve.”

  Sebastian returned his attention to the business of counting out the requisite number of banknotes. “I believe Tom is thirteen. Why? Has he lifted your purse?”

  She raised one eyebrow in an expression he found unpleasantly evocative of her father at his most arrogant and ruthless. “He’s a pickpocket?”

  “He used to be.”

  “How . . . original.” She cleared her throat. “I would like to take a ride around the park.”

  Sebastian studied Hero Jarvis’s hostile, determined face. He had no illusions about how this woman felt about him. She’d given it as her opinion on more than one occasion that he ought to be arrested—or else summarily shot. “I take it this is my cue to invite you for a drive?”

  “Thank you.” She swept toward the door. “I’ll await you in your curricle.”

  His curiosity piqued, Sebastian walked out of the shop a few minutes later to find Miss Jarvis sitting on the high seat of his curricle, a furled parasol at her side, the reins in her own capable hands. Sebastian’s tiger was nowhere in sight, although he could see Miss Jarvis’s elegant town carriage waiting up near the corner. Its driver looked asleep.

  “Where’s Tom?” Sebastian demanded, leaping up beside her to take the reins.

  “I told him he wasn’t wanted.”

  “Two things,” Sebastian said evenly, giving his chestnuts the office to start. “I don’t like other people handling my horses, and I tolerate no one giving false orders to my servants.”

  “There was no falsehood involved. I didn’t want him.” She opened her parasol with a snap and tilted it toward the feeble sunshine. “And while I understand your sentiments about the horses, once I had eliminated your tiger, there really was no other option, now was there?”

  “Miss Jarvis,” he said, his voice coming out in a grating rasp, “in the last eighteen months, your father has attempted to have me killed and very nearly destroyed someone close to me. Why are we taking this drive?”

  “He attempted to have you killed? It is my understanding that you threatened to kill him.”

  “Several times,” Sebastian agreed, turning in through the gates to Hyde Park.

  “And you kidnapped me,” she reminded him.

  “Along with your maid,” he agreed. “But only briefly. Which brings us back to the question: Why are you here?”

  “Last night, a group of unidentified men attacked the Magdalene House near Covent Garden. They killed over half a dozen women and set fire to the house.”

  The Magdalene House was not a subject generally discussed in mixed company. Sebastian cast her a quick glance before returning his gaze, deliberately, to his horses. “I knew the refuge had burned,” he said. “But I don’t recall hearing anything about the house being attacked.”

  “It is much easier for Bow Street to dismiss the fire as an accident.” Her lip curled. “After all, the victims were only women of ill repute.”

  “How do you know the fire wasn’t an accident?”

  “Because I was there, in the house. One of the women and I escaped through a window and ran down the alley.”

  There was a moment’s silence while he digested this. She said, “You haven’t asked why I was there.”

  “Very well, Miss Jarvis: Why were you there?”


  “I have been conducting research for a bill to be presented in Parliament at the next session, for the relief of indigent women. Centuries of sanctimonious moralists and ministers thundering from their pulpits have convinced society that women become prostitutes because they suffer from some innate moral depravity. I, on the other hand, believe that the unpalatable truth is most women enter the profession only as a last, desperate resort. Unable to earn a living wage by any of the other means our society makes available to them, they soon realize they can either steal, sell their bodies, or starve.”

  Sebastian glanced at her tightly held face. It seemed an unlikely subject to stir the passions of Lord Jarvis’s daughter. But then, Sebastian really knew little about this woman. “What happened to the girl you say escaped with you?”