Who Slays the Wicked Read online

  “People can reach a breaking point and snap,” said Sebastian. “Particularly when they work for a man as vicious as Ashworth.”

  “True.”

  Pushing to his feet, Sebastian squinted up at the blood-splattered silk-lined tester that arched over the bed. “Jesus,” he said softly. “Whoever did this must have been covered in blood.”

  Lovejoy nodded. “There’s blood on the inside handle of the bedroom door and another streak smeared along its frame. I’m told there was also blood downstairs on the door to the street, but one of the housemaids unfortunately washed it off before the body was discovered.”

  Sebastian nodded toward the pale-figured carpet. “Interesting there are no bloody footprints leading back to the door. How the devil do you hack a man to death and keep from tracking his blood all over the place?”

  A gleam of white peeking out from beneath the bed caught his eye, and he reached to pick up what turned out to be a woman’s white silk stocking, gossamer fine and quite new. He held it up to the morning light streaming in the window. “Any idea as to the identity of the woman Ashworth was entertaining last night?”

  “We’re told the valet, Digby, might know.”

  “And he’s making himself scarce.” Sebastian found himself staring at a black leather whip that lay half-tangled in the blood-drenched bedding and felt his throat tighten. Ashworth had a well-known taste for sexual games—vicious games of pain and humiliation that sometimes turned deadly. “If ever a man deserved to die like this, it’s him.”

  Lovejoy gazed woodenly at a far wall. “You still believe he was a part of what we discovered last year out at Clerkenwell and Bethnal Green?”

  “Yes.” Seven months before, Ashworth had been implicated in a string of brutal murders targeting vulnerable, homeless youths snatched off the poorest streets of London. Sebastian had killed one of the men responsible. But he hadn’t been able to prove Ashworth’s involvement even though he’d kept working on it ever since, searching for evidence he might have missed and keeping a watchful eye on the nasty son of a bitch.

  Keeping an eye on Stephanie.

  Something about Lovejoy’s silence told Sebastian he understood only too well the drift of Sebastian’s thoughts. “Do you know of anyone who might have wanted him dead?” asked the magistrate quietly.

  Besides me? thought Sebastian. After all, the thin scar on Ashworth’s cheek had been left by the tip of Sebastian’s own swordstick. Aloud, he said, “No one I can name offhand. But men like Ashworth do tend to accumulate enemies. And they—” He broke off, leaning forward to study the knot in the twisted silk cord that held Ashworth’s nearest wrist lashed to the bedpost. “That’s odd,” he said, circling the bed to study each cord in turn.

  “My lord?”

  “These knots aren’t as tight as you’d expect. Even if the cords weren’t tied tightly to begin with, surely they would have been pulled tight when Ashworth struggled against them as he was being killed.”

  “You think he was tied up after he was murdered?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  A shout echoed up from the entry hall below, followed by an aged, imperious voice demanding, “Let me pass this instant! How dare you? That is my son lying up there dead, you fools.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Lovejoy. “My colleague Sir John volunteered to go to Lindley House and personally inform the Marquis of his son’s death. But surely he must have advised his lordship not to come here?”

  “I doubt the Marquis would listen.”

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Then Alexander Adrian Ledger, the Third Marquis of Lindley, appeared in the doorway shadowed by a harassed-looking constable who threw Lovejoy an apologetic look.

  In many ways, the Marquis was an older, thinner version of his son: white-haired but still tall, square jawed, and handsome despite his eighty-plus years. Yet there was a distinctly kinder, gentler cast to the elderly man’s expression that his son had lacked. Now deep lines of shock and grief etched his face.

  “My lord,” said Sebastian, stepping forward to block the old man’s view of the bed. “You don’t want to see this.”

  The Marquis met Sebastian’s gaze, his light gray eyes blazingly fierce and drowning in a father’s pain. “Let me pass.”

  Sebastian hesitated, then nodded and stood aside.

  At the sight of Ashworth’s savaged, bloody corpse, the old man checked for an instant, his nostrils flaring. Then, swallowing hard, he tightened his face as if guarding against any betraying signs of emotion and forced himself to approach his dead son. The effort required for him to put one foot in front of the other was painful to watch.

  “Dear God,” he whispered, one hand reaching out to grasp the nearest bedpost as his knees half buckled. “Anthony.” He stared down at the dead man, his face a frozen mask of horrified disbelief. Then he swung toward them, his voice gruff, almost accusatory. “Who did this? Have you no idea?”

  “Not yet, my lord,” said Lovejoy with a deep bow.

  Lindley turned back to the bed, a spasm of revulsion quivering over his aged features as he stared at the silken cords wrapped around his son’s wrists and ankles. “A woman, obviously. Surely the servants must know who she is?”

  “We are still conducting interviews, my lord.”

  He dragged a shaky hand down over his face. “Yes. Of course. I beg your pardon.”

  “When was the last time you saw your son, my lord?” asked Sebastian.

  The question seemed to confuse the old man. “I don’t know. . . . It’s been several days. Why?”

  “Did he mention anyone with whom he’d quarreled recently?”

  “Not that I recall, no.” He sucked in a deep, ragged breath and gave a faint shake of his head. “Poor Stephanie. She’s visiting her mother this morning, so she wasn’t at home when the magistrate came to tell us what had happened. I’ve sent a message to Lady Wilcox—it seemed best that she be the one to break the news to her daughter, but . . . This will be so very hard on her.”

  “Yes, undoubtedly,” murmured Lovejoy.

  Sebastian himself remained silent. He wasn’t certain how much Stephanie had known about Ashworth’s unorthodox sexual interests when she married him. But her continued residence in her father-in-law’s Park Lane mansion suggested she’d learned enough by now to stay far away from her new husband.

  It was a thought that should have reassured Sebastian. Yet, for some reason he couldn’t quite name, it did not.

  Chapter 4

  “How long must we put up with this?” demanded the Crown Prince, his plump face red with annoyance.

  His Royal Highness George August Frederick, Prince of Wales and for three years now Regent of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, stood at an upper window of his Carlton House palace overlooking Pall Mall. The object of his revulsion—a beautiful, exotic-looking young woman with a wide smile and flashing dark eyes—was seated in an open-topped barouche passing below. The cheers and huzzahs of the crowds thronging the street to greet her wafted up to the opulently furnished room in roaring waves. For a prince who was inevitably met with boos and hisses wherever he went, it was a painful spectacle to witness.

  “How long?” he snapped again.

  The question was addressed to his adviser, confidant, and distant cousin, Charles, Lord Jarvis. A brilliant and ruthlessly cunning man, Jarvis had successfully steered the kingdom through every hazard from republican fervor and endless war to royal madness and princely incompetence. He might be both brutally determined and utterly amoral, but he was also genuinely dedicated to protecting and promoting the interests of both the monarchy and Britain. The House of Hanover would have crumbled long ago without him.

  In age he had just turned sixty. Decades of attendance on his dissolute, hedonistic prince had added extra pounds to Jarvis’s tall frame, but he was still an attractive man
, with an aquiline nose and surprisingly sensual lips that could smile with a disarming—although generally insincere—sweetness. He cast a dismissive glance at the flamboyant occupant of the carriage below. “She has only just arrived, sir. The hoi polloi’s enthusiasm for her will dissipate soon enough.”

  “I wish I could share your confidence.” The Prince turned away from the aggravating spectacle. “Why the devil has she come so early?”

  The object of the Prince’s annoyance was Grand Duchess Catherine of Oldenburg, the recently widowed and best-loved sister of Tsar Alexander of Russia. With the allied armies advancing ever closer to Paris, it was becoming obvious to all that the decades-long war with France would soon be at an end. And so the Regent had invited the Allied Sovereigns to convene in London that summer for what he envisioned as a grand, weeks-long victory celebration. But the celebration wasn’t until June, and the Tsar’s favorite sister had already arrived.

  Her explanation for her early presence—to prepare for her brother’s impending visit—was laughably suspect. Jarvis had several theories about her true motives, but he had no intention of sharing them with his agitated prince.

  “I don’t trust her,” said the Regent, going to fling himself in a gilded, silk-covered chair fashioned to look like a lotus blossom. As far as the Prince was concerned, all women (with the exception, of course, of his own beloved mother) were either silly, annoying featherheads or scheming vixens. The formidable Grand Duchess Catherine obviously fell into the latter category. “She’s up to something. I know it.”

  “Perhaps,” said Jarvis soothingly. “But there’s no need to distress yourself, sir. Have you given any more thought to having Lawrence paint a new portrait of you for the Allied Sovereigns’ visit?”

  The Regent’s petulant expression relaxed into a smile, for he was always easily distracted by his favorite conversation topic: himself. “Life-sized, don’t you think? And in one of my uniforms. Perhaps against the backdrop of the Battle of Talavera?” The Prince had never been anywhere near a battle in his life. But that didn’t stop him from amassing a collection of splendid uniforms and entertaining dinner guests with fanciful tales of his supposed feats of courage and brilliance on the field of arms.

  “Talavera?” said Jarvis as the cheers for the Grand Duchess receded into the distance. “Or would you prefer Vittoria?”

  Chapter 5

  Sebastian walked out of Lord Ashworth’s house to find Curzon Street packed with street hawkers and apprentices jostling tradesmen and shopkeepers and what looked like more than a few of the dead man’s curious aristocratic neighbors.

  What he didn’t see was his curricle.

  He eventually discovered his tiger watering the chestnuts at a trough outside a pub at the corner of Clarges. The boy was simply staring into space, his gaze fixed unseeingly on nothing in particular.

  “M’lord,” said Tom, collecting himself with a jerk when Sebastian walked up to him. “I didn’t see ye! I’m that sorry, I am. I shoulda—”

  Sebastian leapt up to the curricle’s high seat and collected the reins. “It’s all right, Tom. Believe it or not, I am capable of walking a couple of blocks without suffering undue fatigue.”

  The boy scrambled up to his perch. “Is ’e—is Ashworth dead?”

  “Very.”

  “Ye know who offed ’im?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Ye ask me, whoever killed ’im done the world a favor, gettin’ rid o’ that cove.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with you.”

  “So ye ain’t gonna bother tryin’ t’ figure out who done it?”

  Sebastian turned his horses toward his sister’s house in St. James’s Square. “Unfortunately, the brutal murder of a marquis’s son is something the authorities can’t simply ignore. That means they’re going to need to arrest someone. And if the palace gets too insistent, it won’t matter if the person they finger is guilty or innocent, as long as he hangs.” He paused, aware of the quiet but insistent whisper of a disturbing possibility, and added, “He, or she.”

  * * *

  Sebastian’s relationship with his sister, Amanda, the Dowager Lady Wilcox, had never been easy.

  Of the four children born to the marriage of the Fifth Earl of Hendon and his beautiful, errant Countess, Amanda was the eldest. If she’d been a boy, she would automatically have become Viscount Devlin and heir to Hendon’s vast lands and titles. Instead, as a girl, she’d watched that honor go first to her brother Richard and then, after his death, to Cecil. Sebastian knew she’d resented both Richard and Cecil, although she’d never hated either of those two long-dead siblings the way she’d always hated her youngest and only surviving brother, Sebastian. But then, she was twelve years his senior, which meant she’d been old enough to know some painful truths about Sebastian’s birth that had until recently eluded him.

  A widow now for three years, she lived in an elegant town house on St. James’s Square that technically belonged to her son, Bayard, the current Lord Wilcox. But the young Baron was a troubled soul still firmly under the control of his mother. Knowing what he did of Bayard Wilcox, Sebastian suspected that was a good thing.

  Her ladyship’s impressive front door was guarded by a grim-faced butler named Crowley who bowed to Sebastian and said stiffly, “I beg your pardon, my lord, but I still have orders not to admit your lordship to the house.”

  “I know.” Sebastian handed the man his hat anyway. “Is Lady Ashworth with my sister?”

  “She is, my lord. There’s been”—the butler hesitated, the hat clutched in both hands as he obviously debated how much information to divulge to his employer’s estranged brother—“an incident.”

  “I am aware of Ashworth’s murder, if that’s what’s worrying you. I’ll wait while you inform my sister and niece that I have some information they urgently need to hear. I suspect you’ll find Lady Wilcox changes her mind about seeing me.”

  The butler looked doubtful but showed Sebastian to a small withdrawing room and went off to convey his message to her ladyship. On his return, he bowed again and said, “This way, my lord.”

  He led Sebastian to a pleasant morning room where Amanda and her daughter sat near a window overlooking the rear gardens. The remnants of a half-eaten breakfast littered the table before them, as if Lindley’s message had interrupted their meal.

  Amanda was well into her forties now. Like their mother, the beautiful but infamous Countess of Hendon, she was built slim and graceful, her golden hair still little touched by gray. But her blunt facial features were those of her father, the Earl, as were her startlingly blue eyes. Lately she’d taken to wearing gowns of silver or the pale gray of half mourning in honor of her dead husband, a nasty man she’d intensely hated and certainly did not miss.

  Her nineteen-year-old daughter, the newly widowed Lady Ashworth, sat with her hands gripping the delicate arms of her chair.

  Like her mother, Stephanie was golden-haired and elegantly built, with the same intensely blue St. Cyr eyes. But unlike Amanda, the girl had avoided inheriting Hendon’s less attractive features. Instead, she looked startlingly like her errant grandmother—ethereally beautiful, alluring, and recklessly wild to the point of self-destruction. Studying her pale but tightly composed face, Sebastian found himself wondering not for the first time about the exact nature of the sequence of events that had led her to marry Ashworth seven months before.

  “If you’ve come here simply to gloat,” said Amanda without any greeting, “you can turn around right now and leave.”

  Ignoring his sister, Sebastian met his niece’s gaze and said, “I won’t pretend to be sorry he’s dead, Stephanie. But I am sorry for any distress his death causes you.”

  “Delicately put, Uncle,” said Stephanie. “Do you know how he died?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  She shook her head. “The Marquis’s message to Mama
was tactful to the point of abstruseness. I take it that’s because the truth is rather lurid?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Oh, stop being so namby-pamby and tell us,” snapped Amanda.

  “Very well. He was found bound hand and foot to his bed, naked. It’s a bit hard to tell at this point, but from the looks of things, I’d say someone took a hatchet to his chest.”

  “Good God,” said Amanda. “What a fool to put himself in such a vulnerable position.”

  Sebastian watched his niece. Her chest lifted with a quickly indrawn breath, but otherwise her expression didn’t alter. He said, “You don’t appear surprised.”

  She met his gaze squarely. “I know what he was like.”

  Since neither woman had invited him to sit, he went to stand before the hearth, one arm resting along the mantel. “Do you have any idea who might have killed him?” he asked Stephanie.

  “Someone who disliked him?” she suggested, her nostrils quivering with a pinched look. “That should narrow the list of suspects down to virtually everyone who ever dealt with him.”

  The faint, niggling whisper of misgiving Sebastian had experienced earlier now flared into full-blown concern. She was too calm, too . . . prepared. “Where were you last night, Steph?”

  “Merciful heavens.” Amanda pushed to her feet and took several steps toward him with a haste that set her silver mourning gown to swishing about her ankles. “Precisely what are you suggesting?”

  Sebastian kept his gaze on Stephanie. “You know the question is going to come up,” he said softly. “Where were you?”

  Her hands spasmed on the arms of her chair. “Home. Asleep.”

  “Can anyone verify that?”

  Her chin came up. “I was alone, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Amanda’s hand flashed through the air in a sharp, dismissive gesture. “Seriously, Devlin? She’s barely a month out from childbirth. What do you mean to imply?”