Where Serpents Sleep sscm-4 Page 12

  Tristan Ramsey proved elusive. But in the Blue Room of the Cocoa-Tree Club, Sebastian ran across Rachel’s brother. A sporting young buck in doeskin breeches and topboots, Cedric Fairchild sat sprawled beside another man in one of the bell chairs clustered around the room’s empty hearth, one leg thrown carelessly over the chair’s arm, a glass of brandy cradled in his right hand. The man beside him was unfamiliar, although he wore the yellow-frogged blue tunic of a captain in the 20th Hussars.

  Sebastian’s acquaintance with the younger Fairchild was slight. They’d served together, briefly, in Lisbon. But Sebastian had been a captain at the time while Cedric had been a cornet some four or five years his junior. Sebastian remembered him as a likable young officer, open-faced and guileless and quick to laugh.

  “Devlin,” said the younger man, his leg sliding off the chair’s arm when Sebastian walked up to him. “Good God, I haven’t seen you in an age.”

  “When did you sell out?” asked Sebastian.

  Cedric Fairchild had his father’s almost black hair, with his sister’s fair skin and green eyes. “Just after Albuera.” He motioned to the hussar captain at his side. “You know Patrick Somerville?”

  “No,” said Sebastian, shaking the man’s hand. “But I’ve heard of you. You’re General Somerville’s son, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” said the captain. He was tall and gaunt, with swooping blond sidewhiskers and the shiny pale skin suggestive of both malaria and a too-frequent recourse to the relief to be found in quinine and arsenic. “You know m’father?”

  “I served with him as a young lieutenant.” Sebastian settled into a nearby chair. “I hear he’s retired now.”

  “Nominally.” A smile crinkled the skin beside the hussar’s pale blue eyes. “He spends his days preparing for a possible French invasion by marching every able-bodied cottager of Northamptonshire back and forth with pitchforks and shovels.”

  “Only the able-bodied ones?”

  Somerville laughed. “Well, the ones with two legs at any rate.”

  Cedric leaned forward. “I say, Devlin, did you ever serve with Max Ludlow?”

  “I don’t believe so. Why?”

  “Somerville here has just been telling me he’s gone missing.”

  Sebastian turned toward the captain. “Since when?”

  “Last Wednesday night,” said Somerville, draining his porter.

  Wednesday? Sebastian knew a quickening of interest. “Precisely what do you mean when you say he’s gone missing?”

  “We thought at first he must be with some wench. But six days and six nights?” Somerville shook his head. “Ludlow doesn’t have that kind of stamina—or interest, for that matter.”

  Sebastian studied the hussar’s troubled, sweat-sheened face. “Is Ludlow from Northamptonshire, as well?”

  “Ludlow? No, Devonshire. We sent word to his brother’s country seat, but they haven’t seen him in months.” Somerville lifted his empty glass and stretched to his feet. “I need a refill.” Nodding to Sebastian, he told Cedric, “Let me know if you hear anything.”

  Sebastian waited until the sandy-haired captain was out of earshot, then said bluntly, “I just had a conversation with your father. About your sister Rachel.”

  Cedric Fairchild stiffened, his pleasant smile fading away. “What about my sister?”

  “Two nights ago a woman answering your sister’s description was murdered in Covent Garden. I’m told this bracelet was hers.” Sebastian drew the silver bracelet from his inner pocket and held it out in his palm.

  Cedric made no move to touch it. “Oh, God,” he whispered, his face going slack.

  “Your father insists she’s in Northamptonshire. But it’s not true, is it?”

  Sebastian expected the man to deny it. Cedric sat for a moment, his gaze fixed on the crested medallion. Then he covered his face with his hands and drew a ragged breath.

  “When did she run away?” Sebastian asked.

  Cedric drew in another deep breath. “Last summer,” he said, his voice muffled.

  “She never went to Northamptonshire?”

  “No—I don’t know. She was already gone by the time I got back from Spain.”

  “Do you know why she left?”

  Cedric shook his head, his splayed fingertips digging into his forehead. “Father said she quarreled with Ramsey.”

  “Her betrothed?”

  Cedric scrubbed his hands down his face, drawing them together before his mouth. “That’s right.”

  “But you don’t think so?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked up, a desperate hope kindling his features. “Are you quite certain this dead woman—I mean, it might not be Rachel. Someone could have stolen her bracelet, right?”

  “The woman was described as young and pretty, with green eyes and brown hair. Tall. Slender.”

  Cedric collapsed back in silence. It was as if he were slowly drawing into himself, trying to absorb the unbelievable. After a moment he said, “What happened?”

  “She was at the Magdalene House when it burned.”

  “Rachel?” He threw a quick glance around and leaned in closer to lower his voice. “At the Magdalene House?” Anger flared, brittle and blustering. “What the devil are you suggesting? That my sister was a—a—”

  “I’m saying that a woman who fit your sister’s description died in that fire.”

  Doubt and determination hardened Cedric’s face. “I want to see her body.”

  “You won’t be able to recognize her. Most of the women were badly burned.”

  “I don’t care. I want to see her.”

  Sebastian hesitated. But after four years of war, there would be little in the way of horrors Cedric Fairchild hadn’t seen. He said, “The Society of Friends is planning to bury the women this evening. If we hurry, we should make it.”

  Chapter 23

  The Friends’ Meeting House in Pentonville stood at the corner of Collier Street and Horseshoe Lane, just beyond where the last straggling houses of the village gave way to fields of green growing barley and small garden plots. Roofed in thatch, it was a simple structure of coursed stone, with a small cemetery stretching out beyond it. Sebastian drew up his curricle in the lee of a spreading elm tree and turned to the silent man beside him.

  “I can wait here, if you like.”

  A cold wind blew over them, bringing with it the earthy scents of the surrounding fields and the song of a robin from somewhere in the distance. Cedric Fairchild sat with his shoulders hunched, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the small knot of drab-gowned women and plainly dressed men in collarless coats and broad-brimmed black hats gathered on the flagged walkway leading to the meetinghouse’s simple stoop. “No. Please, come in.”

  “Walk ’em,” said Sebastian, handing the reins to Tom. As he jumped down, one of the men near the meetinghouse door detached himself from the small group and came toward them, his body tall and gaunt.

  “Sebastian St. Cyr,” said Joshua Walden, “it is good of thou to come.” The Quaker nodded to Fairchild. “And thou, friend, welcome.”

  “This is Cedric Fairchild,” said Sebastian. “It’s possible one of the women killed at the Magdalene House was his sister. He would like to see her body.” Sebastian paused, then added, “It’s the woman who was shot.”

  Cedric cast Sebastian a look of surprise, while Joshua Walden’s smile faltered. “That body is badly burned. Very badly burned.”

  “I’d still like to see her,” said Cedric, his jaw rigid.

  Walden studied the younger man’s tightly held face, then nodded. “Very well. Come this way.”

  He led them through the meetinghouse’s simple door into a large, plain room filled with benches and the softly glowing light of evening. The room smelled of freshly planed wood underlain faintly by the sweet stench of decay. Eight crude wooden coffins stood in a row in the center of the meeting hall. “The woman thou seeks is the second from the end on the left,” said Walden, pausing res
pectfully just inside the door. “The lids have not yet been nailed down.”

  Cedric hesitated. When he finally walked forward, it was with the measured tread of a man who dreads what he is forcing himself to do. At the side of the coffin, he hesitated again, and Sebastian thought for a moment his courage had failed him. Then he grasped the edge of the plain wooden lid with both hands and thrust it up.

  From where he stood beside the Quaker, Sebastian watched Cedric’s face blanch. He watched the man’s hands tighten around the edge of the lid, saw the quiver of revulsion and horror that swept across his face. Then Fairchild dropped the coffin’s lid back in place and bolted for the door.

  Sebastian caught up with him just beyond the stoop. He stood hunched over, his hands on his knees, his body heaving with each successive shudder of dry retching. “Here,” said Sebastian, holding out his handkerchief.

  Cedric straightened, his fist closing convulsively around the handkerchief. A cold sweat beaded the pallid flesh of his forehead and upper lip, and he dabbed at it. “You were right,” he said, his breath coming in strained gasps. “She was beyond recognizing. But I had to—” He broke off.

  “I understand.” Sebastian studied the shaken man beside him. “You knew Rachel was in Covent Garden, didn’t you?”

  Hot color flooded his pale face. “Good God, of course not. How can you even suggest such a thing?”

  The denial rang untrue, but Sebastian let it slide. He said, “Tell me about your sister. What was she like?”

  Cedric stared up the lane, to where a milkmaid in a white apron and a large-brimmed bonnet was hazing a cow toward home. The evening breeze ruffled his dark hair and his features softened with memory. “When she was a child, she was the sweetest little creature imaginable. Always bubbling with laughter and joy, yet so tender and loving. Whenever something happened—if Georgina or I were upset about something—Rachel would always come and put her arms around us and sing us a song.” A deep breath shuddered his chest. “She used to love to sing. She’d sing to her dolls, to our father’s hounds, to the stable cats.”

  Sebastian tried to reconcile the laughing, loving child of Cedric’s memory with the cynical Cyprian Hero Jarvis had described. The two images refused to blend. “You said she used to love to sing. That changed?”

  Cedric nodded. “Around the time our mother died. It was as if . . . I don’t know. As if all the joy within her just leached away. She quit singing, and then she—” He broke off.

  “And then what?” prodded Sebastian.

  Cedric looked down at the handkerchief he held crumpled in his fist. “I found her one day digging a row of graves in a meadow in the park. She’d borrowed a shovel from one of the gardeners. The graves were for her dolls. She said they were all dead. And she buried them.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Ten. Eleven.”

  Sebastian’s mother had died the summer he was eleven . . . or rather, he’d been told she died. He stared off across fields lit now by the soft golden light of evening. The breeze brought them the scent of ripening grain and the bawling of a goat tethered somewhere out of sight. “Did she write to you, when you were in the Army?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Did she write about Tristan Ramsey?”

  “She told me of the betrothal. I honestly thought she was pleased with it. She sounded . . . happy.”

  “She didn’t normally sound happy?”

  Cedric’s eyes narrowed. Instead of answering, he said, “Why have you involved yourself in this?”

  Sebastian chose his words carefully. “There was a woman at the Magdalene House who survived the attack. She asked for my help.”

  From somewhere down the lane came the sweet tolling of a church bell. Cedric brought up a hand to rub his temples. “I don’t understand. What’s this about an attack, about Rachel being shot? I thought the Magdalene House was simply destroyed by fire.”

  “The fire was deliberately set to cover up the women’s murders.”

  Cedric’s hand dropped. “I’ve heard nothing of this.”

  “You won’t.”

  Sebastian turned as Joshua Walden walked up behind them, his hands folded in front of him, and cleared his throat. “We are about to begin. You are welcome to attend.”

  Cedric pressed the handkerchief to his lips. “I’ve never attended a Quaker service before.”

  “We believe that true religion is a personal encounter with God rather than a matter of ritual and ceremony, and that all aspects of life are sacramental. Therefore, no one day or place or activity is any more spiritual than any other. But we gather together at such times to discover in stillness a deeper sense of God’s presence.”

  Cedric lifted his gaze to the small cemetery that stretched away from the road, a plain grassed area surrounded by trees and shrubs and enclosed by a mortared low rubble wall. “You will bury her there?” he said hoarsely. “Despite what she’d become?”

  “There is a spark of God in every human being,” said Walden, following his gaze. “And all ground is God’s ground.” He put out a hand to grip the younger man’s shoulder. “Come. Thy sister is at peace. Let us bid her farewell.”

  Chapter 24

  That night, Sebastian dressed in black velvet knee breeches and black pumps with silver buckles, and set forth for Almack’s Assembly Rooms.

  Known as the Seventh Heaven of the Fashionable World, Almack’s was a private club that provided its male and female members with a dance and supper every Wednesday night for the twelve weeks of the Season. But unlike the men’s clubs of St. James’s, Almack’s was a club controlled by women. The mere possession of vulgar wealth was not enough to enable one to penetrate these carefully guarded portals; the Patronesses of Almack’s were very careful to exclude rich Cits, crass country nobodies, and even titled, gently bred ladies whose indiscretions had carried them beyond the pale. For above all else, Almack’s served as a safe haven where society’s marriageable young women could be introduced to society’s marriageable young men. Which was why Sebastian had no doubt that Tristan Ramsey, whose young sister was making her debut that Season, would be in attendance.

  Arriving at the long, Palladian-styled building on King Street well before the fatal hour of eleven o’clock—after which time absolutely no one was allowed admittance—Sebastian paused just inside the club’s ballroom. Adorned with gilt columns and pilasters, the room was lit by scores and scores of candles clustered in multitiered chandeliers suspended overhead. The club was crowded, for the Season was now at its height and Almack’s was as popular with the wives of aging Parliamentarians and select foreign ministers as with the younger set. The air was heavy with the scent of hot candles, French perfume, and well-dressed, perspiring bodies.

  He was standing beneath the semicircular balcony for the musicians and watching the progress of Tristan Ramsey down a line of the country dance when a woman’s voice behind him said coldly, “Whatever are you doing here?”

  Sebastian swung around to find his sister, Amanda, studying him through narrowed blue eyes. She wore an elegant gown of silver-gray satin simply adorned with puffed sleeves, for she was still less than eighteen months widowed.

  “Did you hope the Patronesses had blackballed me?” he said.

  Amanda let out her breath in a scornful huff. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the heir to an earldom. You could murder half a dozen virgins in the middle of Bond Street, and they’d still let you in.”

  Sebastian returned his gaze to Tristan Ramsey. A small but well-formed man in his midtwenties, he had curly auburn hair and pleasant, even features. But he moved with distracted clumsiness, his face as haggard and pale as a man with the ague . . . or a man who’d just learned that the woman he’d once planned to make his wife was dead. He partnered a dainty young thing with the exact same auburn hair and a scattering of freckles across her small, upturned nose. This, obviously, was the young Miss Ramsey making her debut.

  “We got on far more comfortably when you we
re still on the Continent,” said Amanda.

  “Not to mention the exciting possibility that I might at any moment get myself killed.” Sebastian let his gaze wander over the other dancers until he spied his eighteen-year-old niece, Miss Stephanie Wilcox, going down the line with Lord Ivins, the rakish young heir to a Marquis. “Would it make you feel better if I pledged to endeavor not to irretrievably disgrace the family before my niece goes off?”

  He watched as Stephanie executed a neat pirouette. She had grown into a ravishing young woman, with a tumble of golden curls and the vivid blue St. Cyr eyes. Along with her mother’s coloring, she had Amanda’s tall, slim elegance. But unlike Amanda, Stephanie had escaped the rather blunt features Amanda had inherited from Hendon. In fact, Stephanie looked startlingly like Sebastian’s own mother, Sophia.