Who Speaks for the Damned Read online

  “I was under the impression he’d been transported for life, without eligibility for parole.”

  “He was.”

  “Yet he came back to England?” For a man transported for life to return to Britain without a pardon was to court a death sentence. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you’ve seen him since he came back?”

  Calhoun nodded.

  “Why did everyone believe he’d died in Botany Bay?”

  “He told me they had a flash flood on some big river out there that swept him away from the chain gang he was on. When he came to, he was lying next to a dead man of about the same height, build, and hair color. The fellow was a freeman who’d once been a soldier, and he’d obviously spent some time in irons and been flogged, because his body was scarred. Hayes changed clothes with him, took his papers, and bashed in the dead man’s face with a rock until he was unrecognizable. And then he seized the first chance that offered to get away from the colony.”

  Jesus, thought Sebastian. “And went to China?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Why did he contact you?”

  “He said he might need my help, and he wanted to know if I’d be willing to give it.”

  “Your help with what?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  The valet met Sebastian’s gaze, and held it. “I told him yes.”

  * * *

  “Dead bodies in my gardens?” muttered Irvine Pennington, sweating heavily as he led the way along a central allée of pleached hornbeam underplanted with low-clipped hedges of boxwood and waves of purple allium. “It’s an insult, it is, even to suggest such a thing. An insult!”

  The owner-manager of Pennington’s Tea Gardens was a short, stout man in his middle years, with heavy jowls, a long upper lip, and bushy side-whiskers. They’d arrived in Somer’s Town to find that the tea gardens closed early on Thursdays. Pennington had resisted Sebastian’s request that he reopen the gardens for them and scoffed loudly at the idea that one of his patrons might be lying dead somewhere within. But at the magical words “Bow Street,” the garden owner’s opposition evaporated. Leaving one of his lads at the gate to await the magistrate and constables, he insisted on personally accompanying Sebastian.

  “So, where is this mythical corpse?” Pennington grumbled, holding his horn lantern high. “Hmmm? You tell me that.”

  Sebastian glanced at Calhoun, who said, “According to Ji, he’s lying somewhere to the west of the pond, near a brick wall.” They’d hoped to find Ji waiting for them at the tea gardens, but they’d yet to see any sign of the child.

  “Where’s your pond?” asked Sebastian.

  “Just up ahead. But it’s nonsense to suggest—”

  “Then let’s go left.”

  Without waiting for Mr. Pennington, Sebastian veered onto a narrow path that wound through a shrubbery toward the high wall that separated the gardens from the hayfields to the west.

  Mr. Pennington hesitated a moment, then charged after them, his lantern held high. “Wait, wait!” Pennington shouted. “How can you even see where you’re going?”

  “I have good eyesight.”

  “But it’s too dark! What a fool’s errand this all is. Your lad probably saw someone who’d simply lain down and dozed off after drinking too much ale. Havey-cavey it is, accusing me of leaving corpses littered about my gardens. Why, I’ve a mind to—”

  “There,” said Sebastian.

  The man lay facedown in a small clearing just off the path, his head turned to one side, his widely staring eyes already beginning to flatten and film. His clothes and boots were of a similar quality to those of the missing boy, respectable but neither fashionable nor expensive. The back of his coat was dark and shiny with the blood that had spilled out around the sickle buried deep between his shoulder blades.

  Pennington gave a gasp and stumbled to a halt, his lantern swinging wildly. “The Lord preserve us.”

  “Grab that lantern before he drops it and starts a fire,” Sebastian told Calhoun.

  Calhoun lifted the lantern from the garden owner’s unresisting grasp and brought the light closer. “Is he dead?”

  “Very,” said Sebastian, hunkering down beside the body.

  Nicholas Hayes—if this was indeed Hayes—couldn’t have been more than thirty-eight or thirty-nine, not too many years older than Sebastian himself. But life had been hard on this earl’s son. His once-dark hair was thickly laced with gray, his complexion weathered by years of hard labor beneath the blazing hot sun of New South Wales. Born with all the advantages of wealth and lineage, he should have lived a comfortable, dignified, even productive life. Instead he’d endured nearly two decades of unimaginable horrors that ended in . . . this. Sebastian felt the tragedy of the man’s wasted life and senseless death press down on him like a heavy weight of sadness mingled, he knew, with an unsettling realization of just how easily this man’s miserable life could have been his.

  “Is it Hayes?” he asked his valet.

  Calhoun crouched down beside him, the lantern dancing a macabre pattern of shadow and light across the still, alabaster flesh of the dead man’s face. “Dear God. It is.”

  Sebastian glanced over at him. “Not simply the man you saw recently, but the man you knew eighteen years ago?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m certain of it. He’s older, but I knew him the instant I saw him.”

  Sebastian brought his gaze back to the body before them. He’d been a handsome man, Nicholas Hayes, tall and leanly built, with a long, straight nose, straight dark brows, and high cheekbones. Why would a man so easily recognizable return to England? Why come back and risk near-certain death?

  Sebastian looked at the tea gardens’ owner. “Is this sickle one of yours?”

  Pennington began to back away. “Mine? Oh, surely not. What a thing to ask.”

  “It strikes me as a reasonable question.”

  Pennington backed into the trunk of a linden tree and stopped, his head shaking slowly back and forth, back and forth. “This won’t be good for business. It won’t be good for business at all. Perhaps we could—” He licked his lips. “Perhaps we could shift the body? Just a tad? There’s an access gate in the wall near here. If we were to—”

  “No.”

  “Who would care? Look at him. He’s—what? A shopkeeper, perhaps? A cobbler or maybe a—”

  “As it happens, he’s the youngest son of the late Earl of Seaforth.”

  “The Earl of—” A succession of emotions flickered across the garden owner’s face as shock gave way to wonderment, followed almost immediately by a gleam of hopeful avarice. “Really? Well, well, well. Perhaps this won’t ruin me after all. I could make the site into a special attraction. Yes, that might work. I could even fence off the area and charge a separate admission. I wonder if they’ll let me have the dead man’s clothes. I could have them stuffed and restage the murder scene. I could even—”

  “Why, you sick, greedy bastard,” swore Calhoun, surging to his feet. “The man is dead, and all you can think about is—”

  Sebastian just managed to snag his normally mild-mannered valet’s arm and haul him back. “Calhoun,” he said softly.

  Mr. Irvine Pennington threw up both hands and scuttled around behind the linden tree as if using the trunk as a shield. “Merciful heavens.”

  “May I suggest you await the arrival of Bow Street at the entrance gate? That way you can direct them where to go when they arrive.”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll do that. I’ll do that right away.” He hesitated, then added timidly, “May I have the lantern back, please?”

  Sebastian waited until the garden owner trotted off, the lantern light swinging wildly over the darkened shrubbery. Then he let the valet go.

  “I beg your pardon,
my lord,” said Calhoun, smoothing the tumbled hair from his forehead and repositioning his hat with unsteady hands. “That was unforgivable of me.”

  “Yet understandable.” Sebastian brought his attention back to the dead man at their feet. “I suspect Bow Street won’t take kindly to the realization that you knew Hayes was an escaped convict and yet failed to report him to the authorities. We need to come up with a convincing story to tell Sir Henry. Quickly.”

  Chapter 4

  U nbelievable,” said Sir Henry Lovejoy, holding his lantern high as he peered at the dead man’s face over the rims of his spectacles. “It really is Nicholas Hayes.”

  The Bow Street magistrate was a small, balding man with a rigid moral code and a serious demeanor. Earlier in life he’d been a moderately successful merchant, but the tragic death of his wife and daughter some years before had led him to change course and decide to devote the rest of his days to public service. Far too many of London’s magistrates were either venal, lazy, or both. But Lovejoy was neither. Dedicated, scrupulously honest, and clever, he had a tendency to see each murder, each violation of the public’s trust, as a source of deep personal sadness.

  “You knew him?” said Sebastian in surprise.

  “Not personally, no. But I remember the trial quite clearly. Such a tragic, sordid affair it was. The woman he killed—the wife of the Count de Compans—was so young, and quite lovely.” Lovejoy shifted his lantern to let the light play over the bloody sickle still embedded in Nicholas Hayes’s back. “Ghastly. You say a lad brought you word of this?”

  “Yes.”

  “How very odd. Why didn’t he go to the local authorities?”

  Sebastian glanced over at Calhoun, who was busy staring fixedly into the surrounding darkness. They’d decided to simply fudge some of the particulars. “Certain segments of society do tend to have a virtually inbred fear of the constabulary.”

  Lovejoy frowned. “Any possibility this lad could be involved in the murder himself?”

  “I doubt it. He was a mere child. Unfortunately, he took off without giving us his direction.”

  “Most unfortunate, indeed.” Lovejoy drew a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed the neatly folded square against his damp forehead. “Goodness, it’s warm tonight.” Handkerchief still in hand, he straightened to glance around the small clearing. He’d set a couple of his constables to going over the area as best they could by lantern, but they’d need daylight for a more thorough search. “The use of the sickle suggests a crime of both opportunity and passion, although I suppose simple robbery could also have been the motive. I’m tempted to leave the weapon in place and send the body as it is to Paul Gibson.”

  “Probably a good idea,” said Sebastian. No one in London could read a corpse better than the former Army surgeon.

  Lovejoy was silent a moment. “It makes no sense—Hayes coming back here, I mean. Somehow the man must have managed to escape from Botany Bay with everyone thinking he was dead. Why risk everything by returning to England again?”

  “I suspect the answer to that might tell us who killed him.”

  “I hope you’re right. Because the palace isn’t going to like this. They aren’t going to like this at all.”

  Sebastian knew only too well what that meant. The palace had a tendency to see sensational crimes involving the nobility or the royal family—whether as victims or perpetrators—as threats to the established order of society. Their first instinct was to shut down any and all investigations, usually by finding a convenient scapegoat to blame.

  Lovejoy pressed his handkerchief to his sweat-dampened face again. The magistrate had always been abnormally sensitive to cold, but lately he’d begun to have trouble tolerating heat as well. “We’ll need to move quickly to inform the current Earl of Seaforth before he hears of this from elsewhere. He’s—what? Nicholas Hayes’s brother?”

  “First cousin. I believe Hayes did have brothers, but all died before the previous Earl.”

  Lovejoy tucked his handkerchief away. “Only a cousin? How very awkward. So the man has been calling himself the Earl of Seaforth for years when the rightful heir was alive all along.”

  “Well, no one could dispute that he’s the rightful Earl now,” said Sebastian, his gaze on the still, pallid face of the dead man at their feet.

  Chapter 5

  H is Royal Highness George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales and Regent of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, looked out at the bejeweled, highborn crowd overflowing his palace’s stifling-hot reception rooms and smiled. His color was high and his eyes sparkled with pleasure, for the Regent was in fine spirits on this, the third day of the Allied Sovereigns’ visit to London.

  At the Regent’s invitation, a glittering assortment of Europe’s hereditary ruling families had descended on London to celebrate the recent defeat of Napoléon: the Tsar of Russia and his sister the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg; King William of Prussia and his sons; Princes Metternich and Leopold and dozens of other, lesser princes and war heroes. The city was lit in a glorious three-day Illuminations of Joy, and the streets were constantly filled with jubilant, cheering crowds. The fact that they were cheering not the Prince of Wales but his royal guests had yet to penetrate the Regent’s overweening sense of amour propre.

  “It’s quite the defining event of the Season. Wouldn’t you agree, Jarvis?” said the beaming royal.

  “Undoubtedly, sir,” said Charles, Lord Jarvis, the Prince’s most trusted advisor and distant cousin as well as the real power behind Wales’s fragile Regency.

  “Everyone is saying it was a stroke of genius, my inviting all the Allied Sovereigns here for a grand visit to commemorate our victory.”

  Those who knew their self-absorbed Prince were actually predicting he would quickly tire of sharing the attention he so desperately coveted. But Jarvis wasn’t about to tell him that. “They are indeed, sir.”

  The Prince’s smile faded as he watched the Tsar’s beautiful, proud, ostentatious sister Catherine, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, go down the line of a country dance. “Does it look to you as if she dislikes music? You remember when she told me she doesn’t like music and made me stop the orchestra I had playing at my banquet in her honor?”

  “Perhaps she only dislikes music when she’s dining,” suggested Jarvis. Privately he suspected the Grand Duchess’s announcement had been made to spite the Regent, who’d been bragging about personally selecting the pieces to be played with each course of the banquet.

  “Possible, I suppose. Still, it’s odd, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Well, she is Russian.”

  “There is that.”

  Jarvis let his gaze drift over the gathering of the Kingdom’s wealthiest and most powerful and found his attention settling on his own daughter, Hero. She was exceptionally lovely tonight in a silver silk gown of half-mourning worn in memory of her dead mother. Her looks were not of a type he admired. Jarvis preferred blond, petite women with winning ways, whereas Hero was brown haired, alarmingly tall, and far too masculine in both her features and her interests. But he had to admit that marriage and motherhood had improved her.

  Her choice of husband still rankled him to no end.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said with a bow to the Prince.

  The crowd parted before him easily, for Jarvis was a large man as well as being so powerful—well over six feet tall and fleshy, with a penetrating gray stare and a well-earned reputation for being utterly ruthless. “I don’t see that scapegrace husband of yours,” he said, coming up to his daughter. “Is it too much to hope you’ve finally decided to dispense with him?”

  The gray eyes she had inherited from him lit up with amusement. “Good evening, Papa. As it happens, something came up. He hopes to be able to join me here later.”

  Jarvis frowned. “It’s never a good sign when you use that airy tone.”


  She laughed out loud, but he noticed her attention had strayed to the small cluster of people around Gilbert-Christophe de LaRivière, the Count de Compans. A close confidant of both the newly restored French King Louis XVIII and his brother Charles, the Count was acting as a kind of surrogate for the absent Bourbons, who had already returned to Paris to claim their throne.

  “It was LaRivière’s wife that Nicholas Hayes was convicted of killing all those years ago, was it not?” said Hero.

  “It was. Her name was Chantal, and she’s been dead for over eighteen years now. Why the sudden interest?”

  “A man believed to be Nicholas Hayes has just been found murdered up in Somer’s Town.”

  “Impossible,” said Jarvis, his gaze going to where Ethan Hayes, the Third Earl of Seaforth, was deep in conversation with a man who had his back to them. “Nicholas Hayes died a convict in New South Wales in 1799.”

  “Evidently not.”

  As Jarvis watched, a familiar lean, dark-haired man in his early thirties walked up to Seaforth and said something in the Earl’s ear.

  Jarvis said, “I take it Devlin has involved himself in this murder. In Somer’s Town, did you say? What a dreadfully plebeian locale.”

  The Earl of Seaforth hesitated a moment, then turned to walk away with Devlin.

  Hero said, “It does look as if the dead man really is Nicholas Hayes, doesn’t it?”

  Jarvis shifted his gaze to where the Prince Regent now stood in conversation with the Count de Compans. Without even looking at Hero again, he said, “Excuse me,” and walked away.

  Chapter 6

  S ebastian had arrived at Carlton House to find the Prince Regent’s Pall Mall palace stuffed to overflowing with the most select members of the Upper Ten Thousand, all flushed and sweating from the heat but eager for a close-up look at the Allied Sovereigns.

  Working his way with difficulty through the crowd packing the Regent’s gilded, silk-hung reception rooms, he finally came upon Ethan Hayes, the current Earl of Seaforth, deep in quiet conversation with a middle-aged man Sebastian vaguely recognized as one of the Directors of the East India Company.