What Angels Fear sscm-1 Page 14

  He could hear Kat’s husky voice, even before he reached the drawing room door.

  “There’s a saying, that a good foist must have the same talents as a good surgeon: an eagle’s eye, a lady’s hand, and a lion’s heart. An eagle’s eye to ascertain a purse’s precise location, a lady’s hand to slip lightly, nimbly into the man’s clothes, and a lion’s heart”—she paused, and he could hear the smile in her voice—“to fear not the consequences.”

  “Gor. How did you do that?” said a voice Sebastian recognized as belonging to his young protégé, Tom.

  Sebastian could see them now, standing at the far end of the room with their backs to the door. Kat was wearing a black silk gown made high at the neck, with modest crepe sleeves that told him she must have only recently returned from Rachel York’s funeral. He couldn’t even begin to guess at the reason for Tom’s presence.

  “Now let’s try it again,” she said, handing the boy a small silk purse. “This time, I’ll close my eyes while you hide it in one of your pockets. Try to detect the instant I lift it.” She squeezed her eyes shut.

  Tom tucked the purse deep into his pocket. “Ready.”

  Leaning against the door frame, Sebastian watched as Kat brushed past the boy once, then again, extricating the purse from his pocket on the second pass with deft, practiced skill. She was good. Very good. But then, before he’d met her, before she’d become one of Covent Garden’s most acclaimed actresses, this is what she had done, on the streets of London. This, and other things she rarely talked about.

  “When you gonna lift it?” said Tom, still waiting patiently.

  Kat laughed and waved the purse under the boy’s nose.

  Tom’s face shone with admiration and delight. “Blimey. You are good.”

  “One of the best,” said Sebastian, and pushed away from the doorway.

  Kat swung to face him, an amused smile still curving her full lips. “At least this time you knocked,” she said, and he was left wondering if she’d been aware of his presence, of him watching them, all along.

  He turned to Tom. “I thought you were planning to spend the evening searching for Mary Grant?”

  Tom nodded. “I figured Miss Kat ’ere might be able to put me on to a few places to look.”

  Sebastian took off his highwayman’s jaunty hat and tossed it onto a nearby chair. “I don’t think I’ll ask how you progressed from that to pickpocket lessons.”

  The boy ducked his head to hide a grin. “Well, I’ll be off, then.”

  Sebastian watched Tom saunter off whistling a most improper ditty through his teeth. Beside him, Kat said, “Tom tells me you’ve hired him as a snapper.”

  Sebastian smiled. “Actually, he’s proving useful for a variety of tasks.”

  She tilted her head, looking up at him. “You trust him?”

  Sebastian met her thoughtful gaze and held it. “You know me. I have a foolishly trusting nature.”

  “I wouldn’t have said that. On the contrary, I’d have said you’re an extraordinarily perceptive judge of character.”

  Sebastian lifted one corner of his mouth in an ironic smile and turned away to strip off his greatcoat. “You went to the funeral,” he said, tossing the coat and his gloves onto the chair.

  Kat walked over to the bellpull and gave it a sharp tug. “Yes.”

  He could see the strain of the last few days in her face. She might not have been excessively close to Rachel York, but the young woman’s death had obviously shaken Kat, and the funeral had been hard on her. He wondered what she’d say if she knew he had a rendezvous with a group of resurrection men scheduled for midnight.

  She ordered tea and cakes from the flustered, mousy-haired maid, who appeared stuttering apologies for her failure to properly guard the door.

  “Hugh Gordon was there,” said Kat, when the housemaid had taken herself off.

  “Was he?” Sebastian stood with his back to the fire, his gaze on the face of the woman he’d once loved to such distraction he’d thought he couldn’t live without her. “That’s interesting. How about Leo Pierrepont?”

  She came to settle on a sofa covered in cream and peach striped silk. “The son of a French comte attend the funeral of a common English actress? Surely you jest.”

  Sebastian smiled. “And Giorgio Donatelli?”

  “He was there, weeping profusely. I hadn’t realized he and Rachel were so close. But then, he’s Italian. Perhaps he simply cries easily.” She leaned her head back against the silk cushions, the flickering light from the candles in their wall sconces shimmering gold over the smooth bare flesh of her throat as she looked up at him. “Did you have an opportunity to speak to Hugh?”

  Sebastian wanted to touch her, to run his fingertips down the curve of her neck to her breasts. Instead, he shifted to stare down at the coals glowing on the hearth. The mantel was of white Carrara marble, he noticed, the Sèvres vases exquisite, and the oil painting above them looked like a Watteau. Kat had done very well for herself in the past six years. And he had survived.

  “You were right,” he said, his voice sounding strained, even to himself. “Hugh Gordon is still furious with Rachel for having left him. Perhaps furious enough to kill.”

  “You think he did it?”

  “I think he’s hiding something. He was seen arguing with her near the theater on the afternoon she was killed.”

  “Do you know what about?”

  “No. But he said he’d make her pay.” Sebastian swung about as the housemaid reappeared at the door, a tray of tea things in her arms. “I’d like to know where he was later that night.”

  “He’s doing Hamlet at the Stein.” Kat reached for the teapot. “But they’re not set to open until this Friday.”

  Sebastian waited until the maid had withdrawn again, then he said, “I also had an opportunity to make the acquaintance of the painter, Giorgio Donatelli. It seems Rachel was modeling for him.”

  Kat glanced up from pouring the tea. “Nothing ominous there.”

  “Perhaps. Unless she was sleeping with him, too.”

  “He is a very beautiful man. And Rachel liked beautiful men.”

  Sebastian reached to take the cup from her hand. He was very, very careful not to let his fingers brush hers. “According to Donatelli, Bayard Wilcox has been following Rachel around since before Christmas.”

  “Isn’t he your nephew?”

  “Yes, he is. Did she never tell you about it?”

  “She did mention once or twice that some nobleman was watching her, although she never told me his name. She tried to laugh it off, but I thought she was being less than honest with herself, that he was making her nervous.” Kat took her own cup into her hands. “Is he capable of such a thing, do you think? A crime of such passion, such violence?”

  Sebastian brought his cup to his lips, and nodded. “Except that he says he was with his friends until just before nine that night, at which point he passed out drunk and had to be carried home by his father.”

  “But you don’t believe him.” She said it as a statement, not a question.

  “I learned long ago not to trust anything Bayard tells me. But in this case, it should be easy enough to find out if he’s telling the truth or not.”

  Kat sat back, her gaze on the cup she held, idle, in her lap. “You do realize, of course, that it’s possible Rachel didn’t know her killer? He could be anyone. Anyone at all.”

  “I don’t think so. If she’d been found in the streets, or even in her rooms, then I might believe that. But she went to that church on Tuesday specifically to meet someone. I know it wasn’t me. So who was it?”

  “It couldn’t have been some cousin named St. Cyr?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “No.” They weren’t a family that tended to breed, the St. Cyrs. His father had several cousins he disliked intensely, but they all lived up north, in Yorkshire or some such place. And it was not a common name. “I keep coming back to that appointment book. Whoever removed those pages did it
to prevent something from being known. And yet the book was left so that it could be found. Why?”

  “But the book was hidden!”

  “Yes. Except you knew where to look for it. It’s conceivable others could have, as well. Pierrepont, for instance? He was paying the rent on her rooms. He might very well have a key.”

  She sat silent for a moment, as if considering this. “The woman upstairs described the man she saw the morning after Rachel’s death as young. Pierrepont must be almost fifty.”

  “He could have sent someone.”

  Kat thrust aside her teacup and stood up. “You think Pierrepont killed Rachel?”

  Sebastian watched her walk over to straighten one of the drapes at the front windows. It was a fussy thing to do, not at all like her. “Why not? He was involved with her. For some men, that’s all the reason they need, if the woman decides to try to walk away from them. Or if she should suddenly become infatuated with a beautiful Italian painter.”

  Kat turned to face him again. “When I was at Rachel’s lodging house, the Scotswoman who lives upstairs told me she thought Rachel was planning to leave London.”

  “You think it’s true?”

  “I don’t know. Rachel certainly never said anything about it. But this woman seems to have the impression Rachel was about to get her hands on a lot of money.”

  “Money?” Sebastian set aside his empty cup. “I wonder if she was blackmailing someone.”

  Hardly had the words left his mouth when a thought occurred to him, a thought at once inevitable and so terrible as to take his breath. And he knew by the way Kat’s eyes flared wide that the possibility had come to her at almost exactly the same time. “No,” he said, before she could give voice to it.

  “But—”

  “No,” he said again, walking up to her. “You’re wrong. I know my father. He might be able to kill, given the right provocation, but not like that. He could never kill like that.”

  Her head fell back, her wide, beautiful eyes dark and troubled as she looked up into his face.

  It wasn’t simply something Sebastian was saying; he truly believed Hendon could never have raped Rachel York on those altar steps, or left her dying in a sea of her own blood. And yet . . .

  And yet the name St. Cyr had been there, in the dead woman’s small red leather book. And the gentleman who’d been stalking her for so many months wasn’t only Sebastian’s nephew.

  Bayard Wilcox was also the Earl of Hendon’s grandson.

  Chapter 28

  Sebastian met Jumpin’ Jack Cochran and his two-man crew in a dark byway just off Highfield Lane. A cold wind had come up, tossing the bare branches of the elm trees and silhouetting against a storm-swirled sky the church’s spire just visible above the slate roofs of the nearby row of houses.

  “Don’t kin why yer so feverish to tag along,” said Jumpin’ Jack, hawking up a mouthful of spittle that he shot downwind. “ ’Tain’t as if the good doctor’s affeared we cain’t be relied on t’ deliver the goods.”

  The grave robber was an incredibly tall, lean man somewhere between forty and sixty, with deep-set, narrowed eyes and rawboned features and a good two weeks’ of graying beard grizzling his cheeks and chin. But he was a natty dresser, with a bright red kerchief tied around his neck and striped trousers that showed only a hint of mud around the cuffs. The resurrection business was a lucrative one.

  Sebastian simply returned the man’s quizzical stare and made no attempt to put his reasons into words. This man made his living stealing dead bodies from churchyards. He would never be able to understand the compulsion that had brought Sebastian here, the belief that his responsibility for the desecration of Rachel York’s grave somehow obligated him to be there to witness it.

  They left the resurrection men’s cart and horse in the care of one of the lads and set off down a narrowed, darkened alley. They walked softly, their long-handled tools wrapped in sacking to prevent them from clanking together. In a nearby yard, a dog began to bark, deep, throaty howls that blew away with the wind. They kept walking.

  Rachel York had been laid to rest in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s, an ancient sandstone pile that rose up suddenly before them. Hundreds of years of internments had raised the level of its graveyard so far above the street that the swelling soil had to be contained by a stone wall some three feet high. And still it bulged out, pestilent and seemingly filled to bursting.

  Along the top of the wall ran a high iron fence topped with a menacing row of spikes. But at the end of the alley lay a narrow side gate, half-overgrown with ivy, which someone had been paid to leave unlocked. The same person had obviously been compensated for oiling the gate’s hinges. No telltale squeak shrieked out into the stillness of the night as they slipped quietly inside.

  A foul stench hung in the air, dank and vaguely, sickeningly sweet. The other men moved as if blind, only risking an occasional flash of their shuttered lantern as they crept through the dark, moonless night. But Sebastian could see almost too well the scattered gray headstones and looming arches of tombs, the occasional pale glow of a skull or long bone protruding here and there from the muddy earth. The cold night air filled with sounds, the wind rising through the bare branches of the trees, the stealthy, muffled padding of feet on a muddy path and the hushed, strained breathing of nervous men.

  “Here ’tis,” whispered Jumpin’ Jack, his lantern flashing for an instant on a mound of naked, freshly turned soil. Unwrapping their tools, the two men set to digging, shovels scraping softly as they sank deeper and deeper into the earth.

  The stench was stronger here. Lifting his head, Sebastian realized it came from the long, half-filled trench of the poor hole, half-lost in the gloomy shadows of the far corner. In the distance, the dog was still barking. From somewhere nearer at hand came the slow, steady drip, drip of water.

  The thwunk of metal striking wood echoed around the yard. Jumpin’ Jack let out a grunt of satisfaction and said, “Got it.”

  Sebastian forced himself to look down into that dark hole. The resurrection men were experts at their business. Rather than exhuming the entire coffin, they’d simply dug down to the head. Using one of the shovels as a pry, Jumpin’ Jack levered open the top of the casket. Then the young boy with them—a stocky lad of about sixteen named Ben—jumped down into the hole. Wheezing a string of curses under his breath, he slowly eased what was left of Rachel York from the coffin, the still, white-clad body showing ghostly pale against the darkness of the turned earth.

  Squatting down beside the corpse, Jumpin’ Jack slipped a knife from the sheath at his side and began with swift, practiced strokes to cut away her shroud.

  Sebastian’s hand reached out to grip the man’s arm, stopping him. “What are you doing?”

  Jumpin’ Jack hawked another mouthful of spittle, his pale eyes glittering in the darkness as he spat into the gaping hole beside them. “Ain’t no law agin cartin’ a dead body through the streets. But ye can win yerself seven years in Botany Bay, if’n yer caught with a stiff in graveclothes.”

  Sebastian nodded and took a step back.

  They stripped the body of everything except the band wound lengthwise around her head to hold her jaw closed. Then, leaving the naked body lying in the muddy path, they shoved the grave clothes back into the coffin, closed the lid, and quickly shoveled the earth back onto the empty grave.

  “You there, Ben,” said Jumpin’ Jack, squatting down to grasp the body’s bare white shoulders. “Grab her feet.”

  Sebastian collected the shovels and the lantern, while the other two men lifted the body between them, one bare arm flopping down to drag limply in the mud as they set off toward the gate.

  From somewhere in the distance came the cry of the watch, One o’clock and all is well.

  They carried Rachel York’s body into the small stone outbuilding behind Paul Gibson’s surgery and laid her on a flat granite slab with drains cut around the outer edges in a way that reminded Sebastian, uncomfortably, of
an ancient sacrificial altar he’d once seen in the mountains of Anatolia.

  He paid Jumpin’ Jack fifteen pounds, which was the going price for a “half-long” and more than a good housemaid could earn in a year. As the resurrection men’s cart rattled off into the night, Paul Gibson thrust home the bolt on the outside door, then limped over to hang his oil lamp from the chain suspended above the table.

  Golden light flooded the room, throwing the two men’s shadows tall and unnaturally thin across the rough plaster of the wall behind them. “Nasty piece of work, this,” he said after a moment.

  Sebastian had to force himself to look down at what lay on the slab before them. Rachel York had been a beautiful woman, her body long limbed and gracefully made, slim of waist and hip, with full, ripe breasts. Now her soft flesh was deadly pale, and smeared with the mud from her grave. But he could see other marks, bruises left by hard fingers digging into her wrists. More bruises, on her arms, her cheeks. And ugly slashes across her neck so deep that one might almost imagine her attacker’s objective had been to sever her neck. Reaching out, Paul Gibson untied the band around her head and her jaw fell open. Sebastian looked away.

  “It would have been better if I could have examined her before she was bathed and laid out and dumped in the mud,” Paul said. “Much will have been lost.”

  Sebastian didn’t like the way the small, stone-walled outbuilding smelled. Or the way it felt. He knew a sudden, driving urge to get away. “How long will it take?”

  Paul Gibson reached for what looked like a butcher’s apron and tied it around his neck and waist. “I might be able to tell you something in the morning, although, of course, the full postmortem will take longer.”

  Sebastian nodded, the smell of death so thick in his nostrils that each breath became a labor. He realized that Paul Gibson was looking at him strangely. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard?” said the doctor.

  “Heard what?”

  “This afternoon, your father walked into the Queen Square Public Office and confessed to the murder of Rachel York.”