What Angels Fear sscm-1 Read online

  “So?” said the Earl now. “Did you kill him?”

  “Talbot?” Sebastian swung off his caped driving coat and tossed it over one of the cane chairs by the bowed front window. His hat and gloves followed. “Unfortunately, no.”

  “You’re damned cool about it.”

  Sebastian walked to the side table and poured himself a glass of brandy. “You would wish me otherwise?”

  The Earl’s jaw worked furiously back and forth. “What I wish is that you curb this propensity to try to put a period to the existence of your fellow men. This makes three meetings in the six months you’ve been back in England.”

  “Actually, it’s been some ten months since I sold out.”

  “Damn your impertinence.” Hendon surged to his feet. “The last one—what was his name?”

  “Danford.”

  “That’s right. Danford I could understand. There are some insults a gentleman can’t be expected to allow to pass unchallenged. But Talbot? My God. You were screwing the man’s wife. There’d have been hell to pay if you’d killed him, I can tell you that.”

  Sebastian drained his brandy in one long pull and tried to swallow twenty-eight years’ worth of raw, conflicting emotions with it. He hadn’t, in point of fact, been screwing Melanie Talbot. But even if Sebastian had been inclined to explain himself, there would have been no point: the idea of simple friendship between a man and a woman was something Hendon could neither believe nor understand. Any more than he’d understand why Sebastian would care if a man such as Captain John Talbot should choose to beat his gentle young wife.

  “The man wants killing,” Sebastian said simply.

  “Why? So you can have his wife?”

  Turning away, Sebastian went to splash himself another drink. “That was never my intention.”

  “What you need is a wife of your own.”

  Sebastian froze, then carefully lowered the brandy carafe. “So we’re back to that, are we?”

  “If you’re going to insist upon continuing this dissolute lifestyle of yours, the least you can do is have the courtesy to ensure the succession before you drink yourself into a decline. Or go out some morning and get yourself shot.”

  “You underestimate me.”

  He turned to find his father studying the gash across Sebastian’s forehead through narrowed, troubled eyes. “This one was close.”

  “I told you, the man wants killing.”

  The Earl’s jaw hardened. “You’re eight-and-twenty. It’s past time you settled down.”

  “To do what? Take over management of the estates?” Sebastian laughed at the spasm of alarm that crossed his father’s features, lifted the brandy in a mock toast and murmured, “Touché.”

  “The seat for Upper Walford is empty.”

  Sebastian choked on his drink. “You can’t be serious.” His father continued to stare at him. Sebastian lowered his glass. “Good God. You are serious.”

  “Why not? It would give you something to do besides drinking and gaming and sleeping with other men’s wives. And we could use a man of your abilities in the Commons.”

  Sebastian subjected his father to a long study. “Afraid Prinny means to bring in the Whigs if he’s made Regent, are you?”

  “Oh, the Prince of Wales will be made Regent, make no mistake about that. It’s only a question now of form, and timing. But he’ll find he runs up against stiff opposition if he attempts to circumvent the Tories and resurrect the Ministry of All Talents. Or something worse.”

  “Not so stiff as you might wish, obviously, if you’re trying to recruit me as a candidate.”

  The Earl lowered his gaze to his own glass, turning it slowly in his palm so that the cut facets reflected the light from the lamps that burned even now, at midday, against the foggy gloom. “One might consider it a duty, in such perilous times as these, to join right-thinking men in defense of national interest, property, and privilege.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to you that if I were in Parliament, I might actually choose to challenge the sacred traditions of property and privilege, and champion instead the heresies of Jacobinism, atheism, and democracy?”

  Lord Hendon swallowed the remainder of his brandy in one long gulp and set the glass aside. “Even you wouldn’t be such a fool.” Without bothering to ring for the footman, he strode to the door, only pausing with his hand on the knob to glance back and say, “Think about it.”

  Sebastian stood at the window, one hand holding aside the heavy green velvet as he watched his father’s powerful, familiar figure disappear into the swirling fog. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, or an effect of the mists, but his father suddenly looked older and more tired than Sebastian remembered him being. And he knew a twist of regret, an urge to reach out and stop his father, to somehow make things right between them. Except that things could never really be right between them because Sebastian could never be what his father wanted him to be, and they both knew it.

  He was reminded again of that long-ago, laughter-filled morning on the slopes above the cove. Alistair St. Cyr hadn’t been there that summer. Even in those days, the Earl had spent most of his time in London. But he’d come home the next day, his face tight with grief, to hold the pale, lifeless body of his eldest son and heir clutched in his arms.

  With Richard dead, the title of Viscount Devlin, like the position of heir apparent, had passed to the second son, Cecil. Only Cecil had died, too, just four years later. Then all of Alistair St. Cyr’s hopes, all his ambitions and dreams had fallen on the boy who’d never been meant to be the heir, the youngest and least like his father of them all.

  With a shrug, Sebastian let the curtain drop and turned toward the stairs.

  He’d made it almost to his bedroom when his majordomo came hurrying down the hall. “My lord, I must speak with you. We’ve had the constables here this morn—”

  “Not now, Morey.”

  “But my lord—”

  “Later,” said Sebastian, and firmly shut the door.

  Chapter 5

  His hat clutched in his cold hands, Sir Henry Lovejoy followed a liveried and powdered footman through the echoing, labyrinth-like corridors of Carlton House. A few months ago, Lord Jarvis would have held such an audience at St. James’s Palace, where the poor mad old King George III kept his offices. That Jarvis had now shifted his base here, to the palace of the Prince of Wales, struck Lovejoy as the clearest sign imaginable that a Regency was indeed imminent.

  The great man was at his desk, writing, when Lovejoy was ushered into his presence. He acknowledged Lovejoy’s existence with a curt motion of one plump, ringed hand, but he did not glance up or even invite Henry to sit. Henry hesitated just inside the threshold, then went to stand before the hearth. The fire was a small one, the room cavernously large and frigid. Henry held his numb hands out to the flames. From somewhere in the distance came the rhythmic rat-a-tat of a hammer and the clanging of what might be scaffolding. The Prince of Wales was always renovating, whether here at Carlton House or at his Pavilion in Brighton.

  “Well?” said Jarvis at last, laying aside his pen and shifting in his chair so that he might regard his visitor. “What have you to report about this sorry business?”

  Retracting his cold hands and turning, Lovejoy executed a neat bow, then launched into a precise description of the crime scene, the victim, and the evidence they’d collected so far.

  “Yes, yes,” said Jarvis, thrusting up from his chair with an impatient gesture that cut Henry short. “I’ve heard all this from your constable. It’s obvious Lord Devlin must be arrested immediately. Indeed, I can’t conceive why a warrant hasn’t been issued already.”

  Lovejoy watched his lordship fumble in his pocket for a delicate ivory snuffbox. He was an unusually large man, standing well over six feet in height and weighing some twenty to twenty-five stone. In his youth, he had been handsome. Beneath the ravages of indulgence and dissipation and the passing of the years, traces of those good looks
could still be seen, in the fiercely intelligent gray eyes, the strong, aquiline thrust of the nose, the sensual curve of the mouth.

  Lovejoy cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, my lord, I am not convinced the evidence is sufficient to justify such an action at this time.”

  Jarvis’s head came up, his eyes narrowing, his fleshy face deepening in hue as he fixed Lovejoy with a hard stare. “Not sufficient? Good God, man. What do you want? An eyewitness?”

  Lovejoy drew a steadying breath. “I admit the evidence implicating the Viscount appears on the surface quite damning, my lord. But we really know very little as yet about this woman. We don’t even have a clear idea as to what the killer’s motive might have been.”

  Deftly flicking open his snuffbox with one fat finger, Lord Jarvis lifted a pinch to his nostrils, and sniffed. “She was raped, was she not?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “So there’s your motive.”

  “Perhaps, my lord. Although the violence of the attack suggests a level of anger, of instability even, which goes beyond simple sexual hunger.”

  Jarvis closed the box with a snap and sighed. “Unfortunately, such outbursts of violence are not unknown amongst young gentlemen who have served King and country in war. As I understand it, Devlin has killed on at least two other occasions since his return from the Continent.”

  “Affairs of honor, my lord. And his opponents were wounded. Not killed.”

  “Nevertheless, the tendency is obviously there.”

  His lordship walked away to stand for a moment at a window overlooking the terrace below, his hands clasped behind his back, his profile carefully composed, as if in deep thought. It was a moment before he spoke. “You’re a sophisticated man, Sir Henry. Surely I’ve no need to explain to you what it means, to have the son of a prominent peer—a member of the government, for God’s sake—implicated in such a crime. If we are seen to hesitate”—he swept one well-tailored arm in an expansive gesture toward the streets—“if the crowds out there believe that being born to a position of privilege is enough to allow an Englishman to get away with rape and murder, with sacrilege—” Jarvis broke off, his arm falling back to his side, his voice dropping to a deep, solemn hush. “I was in Paris, you know, in 1789. I’ll never forget it. The sight of blood running in the gutters. Of men’s severed heads, stuck on pikes. Of gentlewomen snatched from their carriages and torn limb from limb by the howling mobs.” He paused, his gaze sharpening suddenly on Lovejoy’s face. “Is that what you want to see here, in London?”

  “No. Of course not, my lord,” Lovejoy said hastily. He knew he was being manipulated, knew there were undercurrents to all this that he, a simple magistrate, could never hope to understand. He knew it, yet that didn’t stop the chill that touched his soul, the sick dread that clutched at his vitals. It was every Englishman’s worst fear, that the endless, rampant, mindless carnage of the French Revolution might someday spread across the Channel and destroy everything he held most dear.

  “If Lord Devlin is indeed innocent of this terrible crime,” Jarvis was saying, “he will in due course be exonerated and freed. The important thing is to be seen acting now. These are perilous times in which we live, sir. The news from the war is not good. The masses are discontented and sullen, and easily stirred up by radicals. With His Majesty’s health unlikely to improve and a Regency bill even now before Parliament, the very stability of the realm could be at stake. This is no time to be seen to hesitate, to dither and delay. The Prince of Wales wants Devlin arrested, and he wants it done before nightfall.” Jarvis paused. “I trust I can rely upon you to handle the situation with the tact and discretion required.”

  It was never easy, bringing a member of the aristocracy to justice. Yet it did happen. It wasn’t so many years since the Fourth Earl Ferrers had been arrested for the murder of his steward, tried before the House of Lords, and hanged. As heir to the Earl of Hendon, Sebastian St. Cyr carried the title of Viscount Devlin as a courtesy title only. “Lord” he might be called, but otherwise the title conveyed upon him none of the legal rights of an actual peerage. Until the day he became Earl of Hendon in his father’s stead, Devlin would not, technically, be a peer. And so he would be tried before the King’s Bench, like any other common criminal, rather than in the House of Lords.

  If it came to that, of course.

  Lovejoy bowed sharply. “Yes, my lord. I’ll see to it personally.”

  An unexpectedly winning, almost gentle smile spread across Lord Jarvis’s face. “Good man. I knew I could count on you.”

  His hat gripped tightly before him, Lovejoy bowed himself out of the great man’s presence. But as he turned to walk down that long, ornate corridor, his footsteps echoing hollowly, his heart feeling strangely heavy in his chest, Sir Henry Lovejoy became aware of a growing conviction that he was being used.

  Chapter 6

  Sometimes, dreams of the war still came to him. Dreams haunted by dying children, dark eyes filled with pain and fear and bewilderment, and golden-skinned women, swollen pregnant bellies ripped open by soldiers’ bayonets. Once it had mattered to him which soldiers’ bayonets, French or English? It had mattered desperately. That had been before he’d understood it was irrelevant, that it was only a factor of time and geography, that soldiers of all nations did these things. Once, he’d thought England a nation anointed by God, a favored land blessed and divinely protected, a force of good, battling enemies who must therefore be the forces of evil. Once, he had believed that there were such things as just wars and righteous causes. Once.

  Sebastian opened his eyes, his breath coming short and fast, his clenched hands clammy with sweat. The gloom of his velvet-shrouded bedchamber gave no indication of time, and it was a moment before he remembered where he was, and why. He hadn’t meant to sleep, had only intended to rest. Slowly, he squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. But the memory of the images remained, dark and haunting and indelible.

  Sir Henry Lovejoy decided to take Senior Constable Edward Maitland with him to Brook Street, along with another, younger constable named Simplot, whom Maitland suggested. It wasn’t that Lovejoy expected a man of Devlin’s position in Society to resist arrest. But Lovejoy had to admit to a certain, secret fear that, minus the two constables’ weighty presence, the Viscount might not take Lovejoy seriously. One heard tales of this viscount, of his irreverent, unconventional ways. Lovejoy could imagine such a man simply laughing in the face of an arresting magistrate. Perhaps if Lovejoy had stood taller than four-foot-eleven in his boots, he’d have felt more confident. At any rate, he was quietly pleased to discover that Simplot was even taller than Maitland, and satisfyingly broad shouldered.

  “Wait for us,” Lovejoy told the driver of their hackney as they drew up before Devlin’s Mayfair residence. The townhouse was an elegant structure with a neat bay window and beautifully proportioned ionic portico, but it couldn’t begin to compare with St. Cyr House, that massive granite pile on Grosvenor Square that would someday belong to Devlin along with his father’s titles, the estates in Cornwall and Devon and Lincolnshire, the interests in mining and shipping and banking. Lovejoy stared up at the townhouse’s neat, stuccoed façade, and wondered what it said about relations between the Earl of Hendon and his only son and heir, that Devlin chose to reside here, in Brook Street, rather than beneath that palatial paternal roof.

  “His lordship’ll be finding the lodgings at Newgate a far cry from this,” Maitland said in a quiet aside as a stony-faced majordomo bowed them into the hall. “A far cry indeed,” he added, his handsome blond head craning this way and that in an attempt to glimpse more of that gleaming expanse of black and white marble, the procession of gilt-framed paintings marching up the sweeping staircase that curved out of sight to the first floor.

  “You move ahead of the courts, Constable,” hissed Lovejoy as the majordomo’s discreet knock upon the library door elicited the Viscount’s permission to enter.

  “My lord,” said the majordomo. �
��The persons who were here to see you this morning have returned. With another.”

  Viscount Devlin stood with one buckskin-clad hip resting on the edge of his desk, a shade of annoyance crossing his finely chiseled features as he glanced up from the sheaf of papers he held in his hands. He was built long and lean, with dark hair and a high forehead across which something—or someone—had recently left a nasty gash. “Yes?” he said. “What is it?”

  Lovejoy waited for the majordomo to withdraw, then executed a neat bow and said, “I am Sir Henry Lovejoy, chief magistrate at Queen Square. A warrant has been issued in your name, my lord. For the murder of Rachel York.”

  Lovejoy couldn’t have said what sort of reaction he’d been expecting: a flush of guilt, perhaps, or a passionate protestation of innocence. At the very least one might have anticipated expressions of shock and sorrow over the death of a beautiful woman Devlin must surely have admired. But the young man’s face remained impassive, unmoved by any emotion except for a faint quiver of what looked very much like boredom.

  He set aside the papers. “What is this? Some sort of jest?”

  “No jest, my lord. You have been implicated both by evidence found at the scene of Miss York’s death and by the testimony of witnesses.”

  The Viscount crossed his arms at his chest and shifted his weight so that he could thrust his long legs out in front of him. “Really? That’s interesting. What evidence? And who are these witnesses?”