What Remains of Heaven sscm-5 Read online

  An angry muscle jumped along her rigid jaw, shattering the image of vulnerability. “You are wrong in your supposition, my lord. There is no child.” And then she said it again, her eyes steady and fierce, as if she could compel him to believe her: “There is no child.”

  She reminded him so much of Hendon, fiercely lying in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that the similarity sent a chill over him. “You said yourself you wouldn’t tell me, even if there were.”

  She swung away, head held high, back rigid, to jerk the bellpull beside the fireplace. The butler must have been hovering nearby, because he appeared almost instantly.

  “Viscount Devlin is leaving,” she said. “Please show him out.”

  Sebastian settled his hat on his head. There was just enough uncertainty in his mind to keep him from continuing to press her. But he said, his voice low, “I’m not going to let this go.”

  “Call again and you will find me not at home,” she said, and swept from the room.

  Sebastian sat on the tumbledown stone wall of the ruined gardens that had once belonged to the original Somerset House, his gaze on the sun-shimmered waters of the river before him. The air was heavy with the hum of insects and the fecund odor of a long-abandoned garden. Two hundred years ago, a mighty renaissance lord had seized this gently sited strip of land and built here a grand palace with graceful parterred gardens and vine-draped terraces. But the old Somerset House was long gone. All that remained, now, was this deserted, overgrown tangle of broken stones and half-dead roses, and a set of hidden, cracked steps leading down to forgotten cellars prone to flood when the tide rushed in.

  He pushed the memories of that day from his mind, his eyes narrowing as he watched a wherryman row his fare toward the opposite shore, oars throwing up a spray of water to sparkle in the sun. He had an uneasy sense that time was running out, although he knew that could simply be a product of his own personal frustration and anger and what Kat had once called his characteristic inability to admit defeat.

  He kept coming back to something Sir Peter had said in the Jerusalem Gate on the morning after Francis Prescott’s death—something Sebastian had missed, until now. Says something, don’t it, Sir Peter had said, when a man needs to make an appointment to see his own bloody uncle.

  Sir Peter claimed last Tuesday’s meeting had been just one more installment in an ongoing argument over a certain dark-eyed opera dancer. Except that would imply that Francis Prescott had sought Sir Peter out, rather than the other way around.

  Sebastian knew it could simply be a coincidence that Sir Peter had met with his uncle the day after the Bishop’s angry encounter with Jack Slade on the pavement before London House. But he doubted it.

  What would a man like Jack Slade do, Sebastian wondered, if Francis Prescott had refused the butcher’s attempts to extort more money? Sebastian could identify three options: Slade could admit defeat. He could proclaim the Bishop’s secret to the world in angry revenge. Or . . .

  Or he could take his dangerous but valuable secret to a new buyer. Lady Prescott, perhaps.

  Or her son. Sir Peter Prescott.

  Chapter 40

  Midway through the afternoon, after her mother had retired to her dressing room for a few hours’ rest, Hero ordered her carriage and drove up the river, to Chelsea.

  Drawing up in the shade of a spreading chestnut at the end of Cheyne Walk, she sat for a time, her gaze on the neat brick house at Number Eleven. She watched Mrs. McCain venture out to feed the ducks at the river’s edge; she watched Dr. McCain come strolling home, his chest puffed out with self-importance, his feet splaying slightly as he walked. They were a kind and worthy couple, and she had no doubt they would someday make a needy child fine parents. But not her child. She could not give these people her child to raise.

  Sitting forward, she rapped on the carriage roof and called out sharply, “Drive on.”

  In deference to Gibson’s dire warnings to rest his injured arm, Sebastian allowed himself to be driven out to Tanfield Hill by his tiger. Tom enjoyed the experience hugely, although by the time they reached the village late that afternoon, Sebastian could see a faint shadow in the boy’s eyes. Gibson had obviously overestimated Tom’s pace of recovery.

  Leaving the chestnuts in Tom’s care at the Dog and Duck, Sebastian followed the narrow footpath up the millstream. The sun was sinking low toward the western hills, the golden light filtering down through the leafy canopy of the willows and oaks to cast dappled shadows across thick humus still damp from the rain.

  Bessie Dunlop, nurse to Sir Peter and his mother before him, sat on a weathered ladder-backed chair drawn up before the open door of her cottage. She was shelling a bowl of peas she held in her lap, and did not look up when Sebastian entered the clearing. But the doe that grazed contentedly near the corner of the cottage froze, muscles tense, ready to run.

  “It’s all right, girl,” Bessie told the deer. “He won’t harm you.” Only then did she look up. “I expected you yesterday.”

  “You obviously overestimated my powers of deduction.” She laughed at that, a rich, melodious laugh that could have belonged to a much younger woman.

  He went to hunker down beside her, his elbows braced on his spread knees, his gaze hard on her face. “You told me Sir Peter came to visit you last week. What day?”

  Gnarled, work-worn fingers snapped another pod, spilling its hard green peas into the bowl. “One evening is much like the next, to me.”

  “It was the evening the Bishop died, was it?”

  “Could have been.” She snapped another pod. “He’s a good boy, Sir Peter. Never too busy or puffed up in his own conceit to forget to visit his old nurse.”

  “Yet somehow, I don’t think Tuesday’s call was in the nature of a social visit, was it?”

  When she didn’t answer, Sebastian said, “Sir Peter came to ask if what Jack Slade had told him was true, didn’t he? That the Bishop was his father.”

  Her fingers stilled at their task. “Oh, no, he already knew that.”

  “The Bishop had admitted the truth to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why did Sir Peter come to you?”

  “He came to ask if Francis Prescott had killed Sir Nigel.”

  Sebastian looked across the clearing, to where the millstream flowed lazily past, the trailing leaves of the willows nearly touching its waters. “And what did you tell him?”

  “I told him Francis Prescott could never kill any man. Even one as vile as his own brother.”

  Sebastian pushed to his feet. “And was that the truth?”

  She tipped her head to one side, her gaze searching his face. “You have a great regard for the truth, do you not, Lord Devlin? Truth and justice. You have made them your calling. More than that, you have made them your touchstones, perhaps even your gods. But some truths should never be known. And sometimes what men in their righteous ignorance call justice is no justice at all, only one more wrong that can never be made right.”

  With an ease and grace that belied her years, she rose from her chair, the bowl of peas balanced on her hip. Turning, she walked into her cottage and slammed the door.

  He stood for a moment, listening to the warm breeze sigh through the willows, watching a duck paddle across the placid warm waters lit now by the golden light of the westering sun. But the doe had gone, and the peace of the place was broken. He knew he had broken it.

  Rather than return to the Dog and Duck, Sebastian walked up the village high street, then cut through the wind-ruffled grass scattered with forget-me-nots and tumbled gray tombstones until he reached the northern side of the old Norman nave. Someone—probably Squire Pyle—had nailed some of the broken boards from the demolished charnel house over the entrance to the crypt. But Sebastian could still smell its rank odor wafting up from below like a cold exhalation of death.

  He took a step back, his gaze drifting to the line of willows that marked the millstream. From here he could see two boys in straw
hats and bare feet fishing off the arched stone bridge, their lines catching the slanting rays of the setting sun, their joyous laughter carrying to him on the warm breeze. If Sir Peter had visited his old nurse the evening of Tuesday last, he would have passed the church on his way back to London.

  The old nurse’s words kept echoing in Sebastian’s head. Perhaps she was right; perhaps some truths were better left unknown. Thirty years ago, a cruel and vicious man had met a secret death in the depths of this crypt. Perhaps it would have been better if the events of that dark, terrible night had never become known. But the Reverend Earnshaw’s innocent destruction of the old charnel house had shed the light of the present on the past. And now Earnshaw and four other men were dead.

  He watched a slim blond woman in a shako-style hat and a riding habit with brass buttons guide a fine blood bay up the high street. At the gate to the churchyard she drew up, the black train of her riding habit trailing over the horse’s dark red flanks, the bay throwing its head with a jingle of its bridle as she slid gracefully from her saddle. She paused for a moment, head lifting as she scanned the churchyard. He strolled through the high grass to meet her.

  “Lady Prescott,” he said, taking her horse’s reins.

  “Lord Devlin.”

  They turned to walk together, the mare ambling along behind. She said, “Bessie told me I would find you here.”

  When he made no comment, she turned to look at him, her gentle blue eyes lit with amusement. “I don’t know if she sees things the rest of us don’t see, or if she is simply an excellent observer of people. But she can be uncomfortable, at times, to live around.”

  He said, “Why are you here, Lady Prescott?”

  She looked up at the age-blackened stone belfry before them, the light falling full on her face to reveal the smooth skin of her cheeks and a faint scar he now noticed that cut across the lid of her left eye. “Thirty years is a long time to live with a secret.”

  He waited, and after a moment she said, “Sir Nigel returned from America with a packet of papers—treasonous letters written by someone who styled himself ‘Alcibiades.’ ”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Do you know who wrote them?”

  He shook his head.

  She pursed her lips and blew out a long breath. “It was my father. The Marquess of Ripon. He claimed he did it in an out-pouring of devotion to republican principles. He was quite the student of the Enlightenment, you know, forever reading the likes of Voltaire and Rousseau.”

  “But you didn’t believe him?”

  She huffed a soft laugh devoid of all amusement. “The only thing my father was really devoted to was the gaming table.”

  “I have heard he was badly dipped.”

  “They all were. Sandwich. Dashwood. Fox. But they didn’t all seek to come about by betraying their country.”

  “Did you know what he was doing?”

  “Not until I saw the letters.”

  “Sir Nigel showed them to you?”

  “Yes. He’d recognized Father’s handwriting immediately.” She stared off down the hill, to where one of the boys on the bridge was hauling in his line. “In one of the letters, my father revealed some vital information on the Army’s plans at Yorktown.” She paused. “Someone very dear to me was killed at Yorktown.”

  Sebastian said, “Why didn’t Sir Nigel take the letters to the King?”

  “And expose his own wife’s father as a traitor?” A tight smile touched her lips. “What do you suppose would have happened then to my husband’s ambitions of being named foreign secretary?”

  Her hand crept up to her face, her fingertips touching the scar above her eye in an unconscious movement before drifting away. “He had a vicious temper, Sir Nigel. He was furious with Father, and furious with me. He knew he couldn’t expose my father without harming his own interests. But he thought the threat of exposure would be enough to force my father to retire from London.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “Father knew my husband’s ambitions made him vulnerable. When Nigel threatened him, my father laughed at him. Said he’d retire to his estates if Nigel paid him ten thousand pounds.”

  “Wily old fox.”

  “Oh, yes. But my father miscalculated. He underestimated the power of Nigel’s fury.”

  A fly buzzed the bay’s ears. The mare shook its head, flicking its mane. Lady Prescott reached out to pat the horse’s neck.

  “When was this?”

  “The day he died. The twenty-fifth of July. He came home from London that evening in a rage. Swore he was going to reveal my father as a traitor and divorce me. I begged him not to do it, but he called for his horse and rode off.”

  It said something about English marriage laws and the attitudes of their society that a terrified, abused woman would be horrified by her husband’s threat to divorce her. Sebastian studied Lady Prescott’s half-averted profile. Most women would suffer unimaginable cruelties at the hands of their husbands rather than face the social stigma and financial ruin that were the lot of divorced women. He said, “So you went after him.”

  She nodded. “I thought he was going to London. But when I rode through Tanfield Hill, the moon was full and I could see his mare—Lady Jane—tied up by the charnel house. My husband and his brothers used to play in the crypt as children. He was always telling me stories, bragging about how he would hide things down there when he was a boy. I realized he must have hidden the Alcibiades letters there. I’d looked for them at the Grange, you see, and hadn’t been able to find them.”

  They’d long ago stopped walking and were standing on the gravel sweep beside the church. From here they could see the piles of rubble left by the demolition of the charnel house. When the wind shifted around, it brought with it an old, old smell.

  Sebastian said, “You followed him down into the crypt?”

  She stared down at her knotted hands. “I was still hoping I could get him to see reason. But he was drunk on brandy and fury and a lust for revenge. As soon as he saw me, he came at me. I’d never seen him like that before. He’d hurt me in the past, but this time, I swear, he wanted to kill me.” Her gaze lifted to where the setting sun baked the golden stones of the bridge over the millstream. The boys had gone. “I honestly think he would have.”

  Sebastian said, “The silver dagger. You brought it with you from the Grange, did you?”

  The muscles in her throat worked as she swallowed. “My father had given it to me. He’d brought it back from Rome as a young man, when he was on his grand tour. Sir Nigel had . . . hurt me before he left. When I rode after him, I took the dagger with me. Just . . . just in case.

  “When I came down the steps, he was at the back of the crypt. He’d taken a lantern from the sacristy, and I could see the light flickering over the rows of old columns and the stacks of coffins in the bays. He turned when he heard me. I said his name. That was all. Just his name. He started screaming at me, calling me the vilest things. Then he pushed me back against one of the columns and put his big hands around my throat.”

  She paused for a moment, her gaze on her own hands twisted together before her. “I could feel his fingers digging into my neck, pressing ever so hard. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to beg, to plead with him to stop. But I couldn’t speak. And I thought, He doesn’t need to divorce me. He’s going to kill me.”

  “So you stabbed him.”

  She nodded, her voice an anguished whisper. “Only he didn’t let go. He just opened his mouth and roared and squeezed harder. So I stabbed him again. And again. And then he let me go.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I ran to the vicarage. I was covered in blood. Most of it was my husband’s, but not all of it. Francis—Sir Nigel’s brother—was the priest in residence at the time. He was a very different sort of man from his brother. While Sir Nigel was away, he and I had become . . . close.”

  She stared off down the hill again. Sebastian waited, and after a moment she continued. “The
y still burn women who kill their husbands. Did you know? It’s considered a form of treason.”

  “You killed him in self-defense.”

  The ghost of a smile touched her lips. “And what jury of men do you think would have believed that? I stabbed him in the back. In a crypt.”

  “Francis Prescott believed you?”

  “Francis knew his brother.”

  Sebastian said, “It was Francis Prescott’s idea to seal off the crypt?”

  She nodded. “He’d been planning to do it anyway. Between the two of us, we managed to drag Nigel farther back into the shadows. Then Francis locked the gate to the crypt, and took the mare and turned it loose on the heath. By dusk of the next day both entrances to the crypt had been bricked up.”

  She drew in a deep breath that lifted the bodice of her black riding habit. Sebastian looked at the gently fading fair hair that curled against her neck, the soft blue eyes that were so much like her son’s, and knew she wasn’t telling him everything.

  He said, “Did Sir Nigel know you were carrying his brother’s child?”

  He watched her lips part, her jaw go slack. But she recovered quickly, her chin lifting. “I don’t know what you’re talking a—”

  “Don’t,” said Sebastian. “Please don’t try to play me for a fool, Lady Prescott.”

  She looked away, her eyes blinking rapidly.

  He said, “Did Sir Nigel know?”

  She shook her head, her voice a whisper. “I didn’t even know at the time. It was . . . It was wrong of us. We knew that. But Francis . . . He was such a good, gentle man. Everything his brother was not. And I was so very lonely.”

  Sebastian watched a puff of white clouds near the horizon take on a golden hue, and thought about what kind of good, gentle priest comforted his brother’s sad, lonely wife with the heat of his own body.

  A very human one, he supposed.