Who Buries the Dead: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery Page 3

  She frowned. “Well, I guess it musta been. Didn’t really think about it, but, yeah, I reckon it was.”

  Sebastian made inquiries at the stables, but Cian O’Neal hadn’t come to work that morning. He eventually tracked the lad to a tumbledown cottage off Wilderness Row, where he lived with his widowed mother and five younger siblings.

  Sebastian’s knock was answered by the lad’s mother, a rail-thin, worn-down woman with gray-threaded hair who looked sixty but was probably younger than forty, judging by the squalling infant in her arms.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, me lord,” she said, dropping a curtsy when Sebastian explained who he was and the purpose of his visit, “but I’m afraid you won’t be gettin’ much sense out of Cian. He didn’t sleep a wink all night—just sat in the corner by the fire and shivered. Some constable come by here from Bow Street and tried to talk to him a bit ago, and the poor lad started babblin’ all sorts of nonsense about havin’ seen the Dullahan.”

  Sebastian had heard of the Dullahan. A figure in Irish folklore said to be a horseman dressed all in black and astride a black, fire-breathing stallion, he rode the darkened lanes and byways, carrying his own head in his hand. According to legend, whenever the Dullahan stops, a man, woman, or child dies.

  Sebastian said, “I’d like to try talking to him.”

  He knew by the worry pinching the woman’s face that she’d rather have denied him. But she belonged to a class whose members had been trained since birth to obey their “betters.”

  She dropped a curtsy and stood back to let him enter.

  The cottage was clean but wretchedly poor, with low, heavy beams, a swept dirt floor, and a worm-eaten old table with benches that looked as if they’d been knocked together from scrap wood picked up off the street. Of one room only, the place had a mattress in an alcove half-hidden behind a tattered curtain and a pegged, roughly hewn ladder that led up to a loft.

  Cian O’Neal sat on a low, three-legged stool before the fire, his shoulders hunched forward, his hands thrust together between his tightly clasped knees. He was a fine-looking lad of seventeen or eighteen, big and strapping and startlingly handsome, with clear blue eyes and golden hair that curled softly against his lean cheeks. He kept his attention fixed on the fire, as if oblivious to Devlin’s approach. But when his mother touched him on the shoulder, he jerked violently and looked up at her with wide, terrified eyes.

  “Here’s a lord come to talk to you, Cian,” she said gently. “About last night.”

  The boy’s gaze slid from her face to Sebastian. A spasm passed over his features, the chest beneath his thin smock jerking visibly with his quick, agitated breathing.

  Sebastian said, “I just want to know if you saw anything—heard anything—that might help us figure out what happened last night.”

  The boy opened his mouth, the air rasping in his constricted throat as he drew a deep breath that came out in a high-pitched, terrified scream.

  Sebastian pressed a coin into the poor woman’s hand and left.

  Chapter 7

  “You aren’t seriously suggesting that I might somehow know who killed Stanley, or why? Good God!”

  Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth and Home Secretary of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, stood with his hands clenched at his sides, his gaze on the big man who sat at his ease in a tapestry-covered armchair beside the empty hearth of his Carlton House chambers.

  Charles, Lord Jarvis, fingered the handle of a diamond-studded quizzing glass he’d lately taken to wearing on a riband around his neck. “You would have me believe you do not?”

  “Of course not!”

  Jarvis pursed his lips. He was an unusually large man, impressive in both height and breadth, his face fleshy, his lips full and unexpectedly sensual, the aquiline nose he’d bequeathed to his daughter, Hero, lending a harsh cast to his face. Addington might be Home Secretary while Jarvis carried no official title, but Jarvis was by far the more powerful man. He owed his preeminence not to his kinship with the King—which was distant—but to the brilliance of his mind and the unflinching ruthlessness of the methods he was willing to use to protect the power and prestige of the monarchy at home and the interests of Britain abroad. The only thing that had kept the Prince Regent from suffering the same fate meted out to his fellow royals across the Channel was Jarvis, and most people knew it.

  Jarvis raised his quizzing glass to one eye and regarded the Home Secretary through it. “You would have me believe this murder has nothing to do with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The man was your cousin.”

  A faint, telltale line of color appeared high on the Home Secretary’s cheekbones. “We were not . . . close.”

  “And his death in no way involves any affairs of state?”

  “No.”

  Jarvis let the quizzing glass fall. “You’re quite certain of that?”

  “Yes!”

  Jarvis rose to his feet. “You relieve my mind. If you should, however, discover you are mistaken, you will of course alert me at once?”

  Sidmouth’s jaw tightened. He was in his mid-fifties now, his once dark hair turning silver, his waist grown thick, the flesh of his hands and face as soft and pale as any pampered gentlewoman’s. But he had the jaw of a butcher or a prizefighter, strong and powerful and pugnacious. “Of course,” he said.

  “Good. That will be all.”

  Sidmouth bowed curtly and swept from the room.

  A moment later, the tall, dark-haired former hussar major who had been waiting in the antechamber appeared in the doorway. His name was Peter Archer, and he was one of several former military officers in Jarvis’s employ.

  “Sidmouth is hiding something,” said Jarvis. “And I want to know what it is.”

  A faint smile curled the major’s lips as he bowed. “Yes, my lord.”

  Chapter 8

  H oping that Paul Gibson had made some progress in the postmortem of Preston’s body, Sebastian turned his horses toward the Tower of London, where the Irishman kept a small surgery in the shadow of the grim medieval fortress’s soot-stained walls.

  The friendship between Sebastian and the former regimental surgeon dated back nearly ten years, to the days when both men wore the King’s Colors and fought the King’s wars from Italy to the West Indies to the Peninsula. Then a cannonball took off the lower part of Gibson’s left leg, leaving him racked with pain and tormented by an increasingly serious opium addiction. In the end, he’d left the Army and come here, to London, where he divided his time between his surgery and teaching anatomy at the city’s hospitals. He knew more about the human body than anyone Sebastian had ever met, thanks in part to an ongoing series of illicit dissections performed on cadavers filched from the area’s churchyards by resurrection men.

  Until that January, Gibson had lived alone. But he now shared the small, ancient stone house beside his surgery with Alexi Sauvage, a beautiful, enigmatic, and unconventional Frenchwoman who was as damaged in her own way as Gibson.

  Rather than chance an encounter with her, Sebastian cut through the narrow passage that ran along Gibson’s house and led to the unkempt yard at the rear. Overgrown with weeds and a mute witness to the secrets buried there, the yard stretched down to a high stone wall that abutted the single-room outbuilding where Gibson performed both his legally sanctioned autopsies and his covert dissections. Through the open door, he could hear the Irishman singing softly under his breath, “Ghile Mear ‘sa seal faoi chumha, ‘S Éire go léir faoi chlócaibh dubha. . . .”

  The headless, naked body of Stanley Preston lay on the high stone table in the center of the room. When Sebastian’s shadow fell across it, Gibson broke off and looked up. “Ah, there you are, me lad,” he said, exaggerating his brogue. “Thought I’d be seeing you soon enough.”

  He was only several years older than Seba
stian, but chronic pain had already touched his dark hair with gray at the temples and dug deep lines in his face. His opium addiction hadn’t helped either, although Sebastian noticed he didn’t look quite as emaciated as he had lately.

  Pausing in the doorway, Sebastian let his gaze drift around the cold room until he located Preston’s head, cradled in an enameled basin on a long shelf. In the last twelve hours, the face seemed to have sunk in on itself, taking on a waxy, grayish tinge.

  Sebastian swallowed and brought his gaze back to the rest of the cadaver. A small purple slit, clearly visible against the alabaster flesh, showed high on the man’s chest.

  “He was stabbed?” said Sebastian. “Why the hell didn’t I see that?”

  “Probably because he was so drenched in blood from his head being taken off. And because he was stabbed in the back. What you’re seeing is where the tip of the blade came all the way through his body—but not by much, I’d say. It just barely sliced his waistcoat. If you’ll help me turn him over, I’ll show you.”

  “That’s quite all right; I’ll take your word for it.”

  Gibson grinned.

  “So that’s what killed him?” said Sebastian.

  “It might have, eventually. But not right away. I suspect he fell when he was stabbed, and his killer finished him off by slitting his throat.” Gibson paused. “Obviously, he got a wee bit carried away and completely cut off the head.”

  “With what? Any idea?”

  “My guess is a sword stick; the stab wound in the back is the right size. I’d say your killer ran him through with the sword stick, then used the same blade to slit his throat, slashing down as the poor man lay on the ground. Could be he wasn’t intending to cut off the head—he was just trying to make sure Preston was dead.”

  “So why did he then pick up the head and put it on the bridge?”

  “Ah. Nobody told me that part.”

  Sebastian studied the ragged, truncated flesh of the cadaver’s neck. He’d lopped off more heads than he cared to remember with a heavy cavalry sword swung from the back of a horse. But to chop the head off a man lying on the ground with a slim sword stick must surely be considerably more difficult. “How easy is it to cut off a head like that?”

  “Not easy at all, evidently. Took whoever did it at least a dozen blows, maybe more.”

  “Lovely.” Sebastian turned to stare out at the yard. The cloud cover from last night’s storm was beginning to show signs of breaking up, but the sunlight was still weak and fitful. As he watched, a woman came out of the house and paused for a moment on the back stoop. She was small and slight, with a head of fiery red hair and the kind of pale skin more often seen in Scotland than in France. Her gaze met his, and he saw her nostrils flare, her lips tighten into a flat line as she picked up a basket and trowel and moved to where he realized someone was nurturing a small plot of sweet peas and forget-me-nots along the house’s rear wall.

  Sebastian said, “Does Madame Sauvage know you’ve spent the last few years planting this yard with the remains of your dissections?”

  “Aye, I told her. She says all the more reason to clean it up.”

  Sebastian leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb and watched her. He knew some of her history, but not all of it. Born in Paris in the days before the Revolution, she’d trained as a physician in Italy. But because Britain refused to license female physicians, she was allowed to practice in London only as a midwife. Like Gibson, she was in her early thirties and by her own account had already gone through two husbands and two lovers.

  All were now dead—one of them by Sebastian’s hand.

  Gibson said, “And how is young master Simon St. Cyr?”

  “He’s an angel—until the clock strikes six in the evening, at which point he starts screaming bloody murder and is impossible to console until nearly midnight.”

  “Colicky, is he? It’ll soon pass.”

  “I sincerely hope so.”

  The surgeon grinned and limped over to stand beside him. Gibson’s gaze rested, like Sebastian’s, on the woman now working the rich black soil near the house. “I’ve asked Alexi to marry me a dozen times,” he said with a sigh, “but she won’t hear of it.”

  “Does she say why not?”

  “She says all of her husbands have died.”

  So have her lovers, thought Sebastian, although he didn’t say it.

  He shifted to study his friend’s lean, pain-lined face. “She said she could do something to help with the phantom pains from your missing leg.” His pain—and his opium addiction. “Has she tried?”

  “She keeps wanting to, but it sounds daft to me. How can a box with mirrors possibly do any good?”

  “It’s worth making the attempt, isn’t it?”

  The Irishman simply shook his head and turned back to his work. “I’ll let you know if I find anything else.”

  Sebastian nodded and pushed away from the doorframe.

  But as he followed the narrow path to the gate, he was aware of Alexi Sauvage’s gaze on him, silent and watchful.

  It often seemed to Sebastian that trying to solve a murder was somewhat akin to approaching a figure in the mist. At first an indistinct, insubstantial blur, the murdered man or woman began to take form and emerge in detail only as Sebastian came to see the victim through the eyes of the various people who had known, loved, or hated him.

  At the moment, virtually all Sebastian knew about Stanley Preston was that the man was cousin to the Home Secretary, a widower and father of two who owned plantations in Jamaica and was not in the habit of trying to fondle the pretty young barmaid at the local pub. Before he approached the dead man’s grief-stricken daughter, Sebastian felt the need to learn more. And so his next stop was the home of Henrietta, the Dowager Duchess of Claiborne.

  One of the grandes dames of Society, the Duchess had long maintained a relentless interest in the personal lives and antecedents of everyone who was anyone. Since she also possessed an awe-inspiring memory that deemed few details too trivial not to be retained forever, he couldn’t think of anyone in London better able to tell him what he needed to know about Mr. Stanley Preston.

  Born Lady Henrietta St. Cyr, elder sister of the current Earl of Hendon, she was known to the world as Sebastian’s aunt, although she was one of the few people aware of the fact that the relationship between them was in name only. She lived alone with an army of servants in a vast town house on Park Lane, in Mayfair. Technically, the house belonged to her son, the current Duke of Claiborne, who resided at a far more modest address in Half Moon Street. An amiable, somewhat weak-willed gentleman now of middle age, he was no match for the Dowager Duchess, who had every intention of dying in the house to which she had come as a bride some fifty-five years before. She was proud, nosy, perceptive, arrogant, judgmental, opinionated, and wise, and one of Sebastian’s favorite people.

  He found her ensconced in a comfortable chair beside her drawing room fire, an exquisite cashmere shawl draped about her stout shoulders and a slim, blue-bound book in her hands.

  “Good heavens, Aunt Henrietta,” he said, stooping to kiss one subtly rouged and powdered cheek. “Have I caught you reading a novel?”

  Rather than put the book aside, she thrust one plump finger between the pages to mark her place. “I bought it to see what all the fuss is about—it has quite taken the ton by storm, you know. But I must confess to finding it unexpectedly diverting.”

  Sebastian went to stand before the fire. “Who wrote it?”

  “No one knows. That’s partly what makes it so delicious. It’s simply ascribed to ‘the author of Sense and Sensibility.’ And no one has yet to discover who she is.”

  He reached to pick up one of the other two volumes resting on the table beside her and read the title. “Pride and Prejudice. Whoever it is obviously likes alliteration.”

  “And she has the m
ost devastatingly wicked wit. Listen to this.” She opened the book again. “‘They were in fact very fine ladies . . . had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people of rank; and were therefore in every respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others. They were of a respectable family in the north of England, a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than that their brother’s fortune and their own had been acquired by trade.’”

  “Devastating, indeed. I wonder, could you tear yourself away from this delightful tale long enough to tell me what you know of Mr. Stanley Preston?”

  “Stanley Preston?” she repeated, looking up at him. “Whatever for?”

  “You haven’t seen the morning papers?”

  “No; I’ve been reading this book. Why? What’s happened to him?”

  “Someone cut off his head.”

  “Good heavens. How terribly gauche.”

  “Frightfully so. What do you know of him?”

  She laid the book aside, open and facedown, although he noticed she gave it one or two reluctant glances before she brought her attention back to him. “Well, let’s see. The family is old—he’s from the Devonshire Prestons, you know, although his is a rather insignificant, cadet branch.”

  “Yet his cousin is Lord Sidmouth.”

  She waved a dismissive hand; obviously, the Home Secretary’s antecedents did not impress her. “Yes, but Sidmouth himself was only recently raised to the peerage. His father was a mere physician.”

  “So where did Preston acquire his wealth?”

  “His father married a merchant’s daughter. The woman was dreadfully vulgar, I’m afraid, but quite an heiress. The elder Preston invested her inheritance in land in the West Indies and did very well for himself, as a result of which he was able to marry his own son—Stanley—to the daughter of an impoverished baron.”

  “Wealth acquired from trade being seen as something vile and shameful that can be magically cleansed by investment in land—even when that land happens to be worked by slaves?”