What Remains of Heaven: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery Read online

  “Good God,” he whispered.

  “The Bishop was found near the back end,” said Lovejoy, his voice quavering as they walked between the towering walls of coffins. In the older sections of the crypt, the coffins at the bottom had begun to warp and split, their contents spilling out as the weight of the burials above slowly crushed the ancient wood below. Sebastian could see some bare bones, stained an odd brown. But most of the visble bodies were horribly whole, their skin shriveled and discolored but intact, their winding sheets and shrouds glowing white from the murky depths of the vaults.

  “Here,” said Lovejoy, his hand trembling as he paused to hold the lantern aloft. “Bishop Prescott was found here, just beside this last column. I’ve already sent the bodies to be autop sied, but everything else is exactly as it was.”

  Sebastian stared down at the long, rusty red stain of blood that had soaked into the uneven limestone paving blocks. “Where did you send them?”

  “To Gibson.”

  Sebastian nodded with satisfaction. An Army doctor who’d lost the lower part of one leg to a French cannonball, Paul Gibson now kept a small surgery near Tower Hill. No one in London knew more about death and the human body than Paul Gibson. “I’ll go see him as soon as I get back to London.”

  “Fortunately, the local magistrate had enough sense not to disturb anything,” said Lovejoy. “I gather he took one look, posted guards at the entrance to the stairs, and sent for Bow Street.”

  Sebastian hunkered down to study the stained stones. There must have been a lot of blood. But then, there would have been, if the Bishop had been hit on the head. In Sebastian’s experience, head wounds bled prodigiously.

  Looking up, he studied the worn stone base of the nearby column. “Any chance he might simply have fainted and bashed in his own skull?”

  Lovejoy shook his head. “We found an iron bar—possibly one of the tools left by the workmen—lying beside the body and covered in gore. I’ve sent it to Gibson along with the body, so he can make comparisons. But I’ve no doubt he’ll agree it was the murder weapon.”

  Sebastian’s gaze shifted to where the nearby paving stones showed a large, man-sized area of brown discoloration. “The other body was there?”

  Lovejoy made an odd, strangled sound. “That’s right. He must have been lying here in the shadows when the crypt was bricked up. They probably didn’t even see him. The only reason Earnshaw spotted the Bishop was because Prescott had brought a lantern with him. It was still sitting on the floor beside him, lit.”

  Sebastian glanced over at the piles of cobweb-draped coffins stuffed into the nearest bay. The wood of one of the caskets had split, giving a grisly view of its desiccated contents, the corpse’s head thrown back, its mouth wide-open as if in an endless, soundless scream. But the weight of the burials above kept the cadaver pinned down. Sebastian had thought at first, seeing the way some of the coffins had shifted and smashed, that the velvet-dressed body might simply have fallen out of one of the collapsed vaults and rolled here. Now he realized that was unlikely. Apart from which, who would bury a murder victim with the knife still in his back?

  Sebastian pushed to his feet. “Any idea who the other man might have been?”

  “None whatsoever. I’ll be surprised if we ever know.”

  Sebastian studied the surrounding bays, each with its own towering, moldering cargo of splintered caskets and spilling contents. His eyes had completely adjusted to the gloom by now. There were times when he wished he were as blind in the dark as other men. “Could there be another way in here?”

  Lovejoy nodded toward the far end of the crypt. “There’s a second flight of steps that once led up to the apse and was originally closed off with just an iron gate. Both entrances were walled off at the same time. No one’s been down here for decades.” The magistrate shivered, and by mutual consent the two men turned toward the stairwell.

  “Sir James thinks the Bishop must have surprised a thief,” said Lovejoy. “Someone who’d heard the crypt was open and seized the opportunity to sneak down here and look for jewelry or other valuables to steal from the dead.”

  “I suppose that’s one explanation.”

  Something in his tone caused Lovejoy to pause at the base of the steps and turn to stare back at him. “Surely you don’t think there’s some connection between the two murders? How could there be? With decades between them?”

  Sebastian had no explanation, of course, although he found it difficult to believe that two men could be murdered in almost exactly the same spot without there being some connection between them—even if their murders did take place decades apart. “It does seem unlikely,” he agreed.

  Lovejoy started up the steps, the crypt plunging into darkness again as the lantern light quivered over the old whitewashed stones of the stair vault. “Alternatively, someone could have been following the Bishop, intending to do him harm. He seized the opportunity offered by the Bishop’s descent alone into the crypt, and killed him.”

  “You’re aware that Prescott was a serious contender to be named the next Archbishop of Canterbury?” said Sebastian, following him.

  Reaching the top of the stairs, the magistrate scrambled through the broken wall. “The Archbishop did mention it, yes. Although I received the impression that he was inclined to agree with Sir James’s assessment—that the Bishop simply fell victim to a chance-met thief.”

  Sebastian followed him out of the rank chill of the stairwell into the clean, wholesome warmth of the sunny June day. “I suspect the Archbishop was being diplomatic.”

  Lovejoy snuffed out his lantern. “What makes you say that?”

  Sebastian stared off down the hill toward the rambling, slate-roofed vicarage, where a middle-aged matron in a starched white cap and a high-necked black bombazine gown was standing on the back stoop, watching them. “Because if the Archbishop genuinely believes the Bishop of London was killed by a simple thief, then why did he come to me?”

  Chapter 5

  While Lovejoy set about organizing a party of constables to conduct a more thorough search of the crypt, Sebastian walked down the hill to the vicarage, to inquire after the Reverend Malcolm Earnshaw.

  “He’s still abed,” said the matron in black bombazine, who proved to be the Reverend’s wife. She was a hatchet-faced woman, her features as plain as her gown and just as no-nonsense. “He’s received a terrible shock. Simply terrible. I’ve had Dr. Bliss in to see him, and he agrees it’s best to keep the Reverend quiet for a time, lest the incident overset his mind.”

  She gave Sebastian a fierce, uncompromising scowl and refused to budge. The Reverend’s wife was obviously made of sterner stuff than the Reverend. Sebastian had no choice but to admit defeat and withdraw.

  His next stop was the small but graceful eighteenth-century brick manor house that stood on the edge of the village, near the millstream. He found the local magistrate, Douglas Pyle, behind the house, in his kennel.

  He was a typical Middlesex squire, booted and spurred, full of jowl and wide of girth, with the ruddy, weathered face and squinting gray eyes of a man who spent his days tending his herds and fields, and riding to hounds. “You’ve no objection to talking to me while I supervise the feeding of the hounds?” said the Squire, his voice deep and rough. Sebastian took him to be somewhere in his early fifties, his brown hair mingled liberally with gray.

  “Not at all,” said Sebastian, stooping to tug the ears of a liver-colored bitch that loped up to sniff at him.

  “She smells the crypt on you,” said the Squire, watching the dog. “My wife swears she’ll never get the reek of it out of the clothes I had on last night.”

  “It’s a fine pack of hounds you’ve got here.”

  “They’re Irish,” said the Squire, nodding to the kennel boy.

  “And rogues, the lot of ’em. They’ll bring down a cow if you turn your back on ’em. But they can’t be beat on a hunt.”

  The two men watched as the kennel boy dumped boiled mea
t into the trough, the hounds jostling and scrabbling for position.

  “I suppose you’re here to talk about the murder,” said the Squire, not looking around.

  “Murders,” said Sebastian. “There were two bodies, after all.”

  “Oh, aye. Two.” The Squire grunted. “Which is two more than I’ve ever had to deal with. Believe me, I’m more than happy to turn the whole nasty business over to Bow Street. What do I know of murder?”

  Sebastian studied the Squire’s pack as they gulped eagerly at the trough. They were smaller than most foxhounds, but strongly built, with broad heads. “I understand the Reverend Earnshaw came to you when he found the Bishop’s body. What time was that?”

  “About eight, I suppose. Maybe half past. At first I thought the poor man had gone stark raving mad, babbling on the way he was about crypts and dead bishops and pools of blood. It took a bit of convincing before I finally agreed to go over to the church and have a look at the place. But there was the Bishop, all right. Dead as dead comes.”

  “You saw the older body as well, did you?”

  “The fright in blue velvet and lace?” The Squire’s ruddy cheeks sagged, and he pursed his lips to blow out a long breath. “I’ll be seeing that face in my dreams for the rest of my life. Or rather, in my nightmares. He looked like a hog left too long in the smokehouse.”

  “You didn’t recognize him?”

  The Squire gave a laugh that jostled his belly up and down. “Never knew anyone looked like a dried hog. Did you?”

  Sebastian smiled. “Point taken. Can you think of anyone in these parts who disappeared somewhere around the time of the revolt in the American Colonies?”

  “Not off the top of my head. But then, I wasn’t here myself for much of that time.” He squared his shoulders with obvious pride. “The Sixteenth Light Dragoons. Cornet. We spent two years in the Colonies, fighting to put down the rebellion. We could have managed it, too, if the bloody government had been willing to let us do what was necessary. Now look where we find ourselves—dealing with a bunch of upstarts calling themselves the United States of America and threatening to declare war on us!”

  “So you were in the Sixteenth, were you?” said Sebastian, encouraging him. “Where else did you see service?”

  “India. And then Cape Town. We were headed for the West Indies when my father wrote to say my brother Ted’d died, and I was to sell out and come home.” The trough was almost empty now. Sir Douglas watched as the greedier hounds shifted from place to place, intent on scooping up the last morsels. “What makes you so sure it was someone from around here, anyway?” he asked. “We’re but an hour’s ride from London, after all. It could even have been someone who wandered over from West Wycombe. Thirty or forty years ago, that would’ve been back in the days of Sir Francis Dashwood and his Hellfire Club. I remember once when I was a lad, the priest caught Dashwood himself breaking into the crypt, looking to steal skulls and such for their blasphemous orgies.”

  “What about last night?” Sebastian asked. “Any strangers around?”

  The Squire shook his head. “I did ask, you know. Before that squeaky-voiced magistrate showed up from Bow Street and took over. No one noticed anything out of the ordin’ry. The Reverend did think he saw the shadow of a man in the churchyard as he was leaving the crypt. But the truth is, Mr. Earnshaw’s as blind as a bat. And the Bishop’s own coachman was sitting right there on the box of his carriage just a few feet from the church door the whole time, and he never saw a thing.” The trough was empty now, the hounds whining to be let out of the feeding yard. “If he’d been a different sort of man, I’d say Prescott probably just fainted and bashed his head on the edge of a coffin or some such thing. The Pyles have always been buried in the churchyard, thank God, but not the Prescotts. Can’t be pleasant, seeing your own kith and kin reduced to grinning horrors. Not that it ever seemed to bother the Prescott brothers.”

  “Are you saying the Bishop was from around here?”

  “Didn’t you know? He grew up at Prescott Grange, between here and Hounslow. The Prescott brothers used to play in that crypt all the time when they were boys. All five of them.”

  “Five?”

  “Aye. Five of ’em, God rest their souls. Some cousin or other had the living back then, and they used to steal the key to the gates off his belt when he was dozing in the sacristy.” Turning to the kennel boy, Pyle said, “Open the door and let ’em have a run.”

  The kennel boy opened the door and called, “Come, hounds!”

  Sebastian stepped back, his gaze on the Squire’s full, weathered face. “You went down there with them, did you?”

  A self-conscious grin crinkled the fleshy corners of the Squire’s pale eyes. “Well, of course I did. Even played deer stalker and blindman’s wand down there with them.”

  Sir Douglas watched the hounds sweep through the open door, his smile fading as they raced off in joyous, fluid leaps. “But I never liked it,” he said. Then he said it again, as if once weren’t enough. “I never liked it.”

  “Learn anything?” Sebastian asked Tom when the tiger brought up the curricle.

  “Nobody in the village seen or ’eard a thing last night,” said Tom, scrambling onto his perch as Sebastian gave the horses the office to start. “Not till the Reverend started screeching, at any rate.”

  Sebastian nodded. “I gather the combination of a murdered Bishop and legions of old, half-decayed corpses was too much for the man’s delicate sensi—What?” he said, breaking off when Tom leaned forward to give an audible sniff. “What is it?”

  Tom’s nose wrinkled. “What’s that smell?”

  “The crypt. I’m told the odor is rather pervasive.”

  “Per-what?”

  “Pervasive. It sinks in and doesn’t go away.”

  “I don’t know about that, but there’s no denying it stinks.” He cast a wistful gaze over his shoulder as they started on the road back to London. “I’d like to ’ave seen it.”

  “Would you indeed? Frankly, I think it’s the best argument in favor of cremation I’ve ever encountered.”

  “Cre-what?”

  “Cremation. It’s a method of body disposal practiced by the Hindus in India. The deceased is placed on a pile of wood, and burned.”

  “Burned? But that’s ’orrible. Why, it’s . . . it’s unchristian, it is.”

  Sebastian laughed. “You think that’s horrible, you should see what thirty or forty years in a crypt will do to you.” As they reached the outskirts of the village, he dropped his hands and let the chestnuts spring forward. “I tell you what: When we get to Paul Gibson’s surgery, you can have a look at the mummified body they brought out of that crypt. Make up your own mind.”

  Tom stared at him. “I can?”

  “You can.”

  “Gor,” said Tom, and gave a little shiver of anticipatory delight.

  But by the time they reached the narrow winding lanes and ancient stone shops of Tower Hill, the sun was high in the sky and the coats of the horses gleamed dark with sweat.

  “If you’re gonna be ’ere long, I reckon I should take the chestnuts back to Brook Street,” said Tom, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice.

  Sebastian hopped down to the lane’s worn footpath. “Yes, take them home. They’ve had a good run. See them put up, and then bring the curricle back with the grays.”

  Tom’s face cleared. “And then can I see the mummy?”

  “And then you can see the mummy.”

  “Thank you, my lord!”

  Sebastian stood for a moment, watching the former street urchin negotiate his way through the lane’s traffic with admirable skill. Then Sebastian turned to cut through the noisome alley that ran along one side of the surgery to a neglected rear garden and the low stone building where Paul Gibson performed his autopsies. It was also here where the surgeon expanded his understanding of the human body with surreptitious dissections performed on a covert supply of cadavers, culled from the ci
ty’s churchyards and sold by masked, dangerous men who did their best work on dark and moonless nights.

  Chapter 6

  Charles, Lord Jarvis, was in the library of his house on Berkeley Square, perusing the latest report from one of his French agents, when his daughter, Hero, came to stand in the doorway and said without preamble, “Did you kill the Bishop of London?”

  He looked up at her. Since the death of his son, David, at sea several years before, she was his only surviving child. In some ways she was a handsome woman, with a Junoesque build and strong features. But she looked too much like Jarvis himself—and had far too forceful a personality—to ever be considered pretty. He said, “I won’t deny I’m glad Prescott’s dead. But it’s not my work.”

  She met his gaze and held it. “Would you lie to me?”

  “I might. But not in this instance.”

  At that, she gave a soft laugh. “I must say, I am glad to hear it.”

  Jarvis settled back in his chair. “The Bishop was something of a favorite of yours, was he not?”

  “We were friends, yes. We worked on several projects together.”

  Jarvis made a face. “Projects. You’re five-and-twenty, Hero. Isn’t it time you gave up this unnatural penchant for good works and found yourself a husband?”

  “I might.” She came to lean over the back of his chair. “If English law didn’t grant a man the powers of a despot over his wife.”

  “A despot, Hero?”

  “A despot.” She placed an affectionate hand on his shoulder. “But as for good works, you must be thinking of Mama. She’s always been far better at that sort of thing than I.”