Who Speaks for the Damned Page 3

  Slightly built, rusty-haired, and of medium height, the current Earl of Seaforth was perhaps a year or two younger than his ill-fated cousin. His gray eyes were small and closely set, his freckled cheeks ruddy, his jaw line decidedly on the weak side. His estates were in Ireland, but he visited them seldom, preferring to spend most of his time in the North Audley Street town house he inherited from his uncle, the Second Earl. He had a vague tendency toward dandyism, but otherwise was considered solidly respectable, carefully avoiding the popular pitfalls of gambling and highfliers that were bankrupting so many of his peers. Married for ten years, he was said to be exceptionally devoted to his plump, rather plain wife and growing brood of children.

  “Good evening, my lord,” said Sebastian, walking up to him just as Seaforth’s companion was turning away. “I wonder if I might have a word with you in private. It’s rather important.”

  Seaforth opened his eyes wide, for Sebastian barely knew the man. “I suppose,” said the Earl.

  He followed Sebastian to a small withdrawing room hung with figured red silk and stuffed with black lacquered Chinese furniture and a few dozen pieces of the Regent’s vast collection of Ming dynasty porcelains. “Bit irregular, this,” said the Earl, drawing up just inside the door.

  “I have some disturbing news, I’m afraid. Your cousin Nicholas Hayes has just been found dead at Pennington’s Tea Gardens up in Somer’s Town. He’s been murdered.”

  Seaforth stared at him for a moment, his nostrils flaring on a quickly indrawn breath, his features slack and expressionless. Then his face hardened. “Is this some sort of jest? If so, I take leave to tell you it’s damnably rude. Nicholas died fifteen years ago in the most sordid circumstances imaginable, and everyone in London knows it.”

  “No jest.”

  The Earl turned away to go stand beside the room’s empty hearth with one hand resting on the marble mantelpiece. He was silent for a moment, his gaze fixed on nothing in particular as if he were struggling to compose himself—or perhaps simply choosing how best to respond. He finally said, “You’re certain?”

  “Reasonably so, yes. Bow Street is sending the body for a post mortem.”

  “A post mortem? How barbaric. Is that really necessary?”

  “I’m afraid so, under the circumstances.”

  Seaforth swung to face him again, his forehead beaded with sweat. “Why are you the one telling me this?”

  “It seemed preferable to having someone from Bow Street cause a stir by barging into the Regent’s reception with the news.”

  Seaforth’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, but why you? What has any of this to do with you?”

  Rather than answer, Sebastian said, “You didn’t know your cousin had returned to London?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Any idea why he might have decided to come back?”

  “I told you, I thought he was dead.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t think of a reason why he might decide to return, if he were alive.”

  “How’s this for an answer? I have no idea what he was doing in London.” The Earl’s lips flattened into a pinched expression. “Although I probably should have guessed he’d find one more way to embarrass and disgrace the family. I don’t suppose there’s any possibility of keeping this from becoming widely known?”

  “No,” said Sebastian. “When was the last time you heard from him?”

  “Nicholas? I never heard from him again after he left England. Actually, I never spoke to him at all after his arrest—or in the months before that. The man was a disgrace. Why would I?”

  “You weren’t close?”

  “Hardly. I don’t know how familiar you are with his history, but my uncle had already disowned him for abducting an heiress a good six months before he was arrested for murder. No one in the family had anything to do with him.”

  Sebastian hadn’t heard this part of the tale. “An heiress?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I don’t know.” The tone was testy. Annoyed. “What difference does it make?”

  “Do you recall the names of your cousin’s friends?”

  “No, I don’t. I told you, I try not to think of the man.” Seaforth glanced beyond Sebastian to the noisy, crowded reception rooms. “And now you really must excuse me. I didn’t come to Carlton House tonight to discuss Nicholas.” And with that, he brushed past Sebastian and began to push his way through the throng.

  Sebastian went to stand in the doorway, his gaze following the Earl’s progress. He was still standing there when Hero came up beside him.

  She said, “Do I take it the dead man up in Somer’s Town actually is Nicholas Hayes?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “Was Ji there?”

  “No.”

  “That’s worrisome.” She was silent, her gaze, like Sebastian’s, following Seaforth as he worked his way across Carlton House’s vast, opulent hall. “How did he take the news of his cousin’s return and death?”

  “With anger and bluster but not a great deal of surprise—and not even a hint of feigned grief.”

  “You think he knew Nicholas Hayes was in London?”

  “I can’t say for certain, but I think he might have.”

  “Discovering that the rightful owner of the titles and estates you’ve been calling your own for years is actually very much alive strikes me as a powerful incentive for murder. If one were the murdering sort, of course.”

  Sebastian watched Seaforth turn to glance back at them, as if aware of both their scrutiny and their speculation. “It does, doesn’t it?”

  Chapter 7

  J i couldn’t stop shivering.

  The night was warm, the dark sky above clear with a scattering of stars. And still the child shivered. Drawing back into the shadows of a crumbling, deeply recessed doorway, Ji stared across the narrow lane at the ancient inn. The warm golden glow of light from the familiar mullioned windows beckoned like a comforting old friend, but Ji’s heart was thumping with fear and uncertainty.

  Trying desperately not to cry, the child listened to the outbursts of laughter from the inn’s taproom, the clink of glasses, the murmur of strangely accented male voices. Then the tavern’s door crashed open and a couple of drunken drovers staggered out to stand legs astraddle and relieve themselves against a post. The air filled with the acrid stench of their urine.

  Everything in this place, England, was so strange. The crush of carriages filling the streets with the thunder of horses’ hooves and the clatter of iron-rimmed wheels over cobbles. The women—so many women, not only servants and concubines but also ladies from good families, or so said Hayes—walking in the streets, their dresses thin and filmy, their huge hats decorated with bows and flowers and towering feathers. And the smells! Canton smelled of open sewers, incense, roasting ducks, and steaming dumplings. But one of the most pervasive odors in London was a pungent burning aroma that Hayes identified as roasting coffee, mingled always, everywhere, with the dung of horses and the tang of ale.

  “Well, Englishmen do like their horses. And their ale,” Hayes would say whenever Ji commented on it.

  “Why? It’s nasty stuff,” Ji had said just that afternoon as they walked the shady paths of the gardens. “And they don’t know how to drink tea. They put milk in it!”

  Hayes had laughed at the expression on the child’s face. “You should try it.”

  “Never!” said Ji, and Hayes had laughed again.

  Ji was trembling now, the child’s mind skittering away from the dangerous places it kept wanting to wander, to images of a shadowy clearing . . . memories of the sharp, raw smell of blood . . . a pale, dearly beloved face . . .

  Choking back a sob, the child pushed away from the dank, rough bricks of the old archway and was about to cross the lane toward the inn
when the shadow of a man shifted near the corner. Shrinking back, Ji watched as the man sucked on a pipe and the warm glow of burning tobacco illuminated his face. It was only for a fleeting instant, but it was enough for Ji to recognize him.

  Poole, Hayes’s friend had called the man they’d noticed following them earlier in the week. Titus Poole.

  “That’s a funny name,” Ji had said. But then, most English names sounded funny to the child.

  “It is a bit,” Hayes agreed. “But there’s nothing the least bit funny about Mr. Titus Poole, from what I’m hearing.”

  It was when he didn’t think the child was listening that Hayes had told his friend Mott, I’m afraid someone has hired him to kill me. Me, and perhaps Ji too.

  Heart pounding now so hard that it hurt, the child stared helplessly at the beckoning light streaming from the old inn’s windows. If this man Poole knew where they were staying, then the inn was no longer the safe refuge it once had been.

  With a spiraling surge of panic, Ji thought about going back to Hayes’s friend Jules Calhoun. But Hayes hadn’t trusted the nobleman and -woman Calhoun worked for and had carefully avoided going anywhere near their house himself. Hayes’s death might have driven the child there, briefly, but Ji wasn’t about to trust anyone Hayes hadn’t trusted.

  Again the shadowy man sucked on his pipe, the tobacco glowing in the dark. Ji watched him exhale, smelled the fragrant smoke drifting on the warm night air. Was it you? the child wondered, shaking now with fury as much as with fear and raw, unimaginable grief. Did you kill him? Did you? Did you?

  As if aware of the child’s gaze upon him, the man glanced around. Ji froze, not daring even to breathe.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Chapter 8

  Friday, 10 June

  T he morning papers were filled with sensational tales of the sordid sins, unexpected return, and gruesome murder of Nicholas Hayes. After reading through one dubious account of the man’s scandalous history after another, Sebastian sat down in his library with Jules Calhoun and said, “I need you to tell me everything you know about Nicholas Hayes.”

  The valet met his gaze squarely. “Where do you want me to start, my lord?”

  “You can begin with where he’s been staying since he arrived in London.”

  “That I don’t know, my lord. He wouldn’t tell me—said it was better I not know.”

  “He didn’t trust you?”

  “I don’t think it was that. He was afraid of what might happen to me if he was caught.”

  “Do you know when he arrived in London?”

  “Sometime near the end of last week, I believe. But I don’t know precisely.”

  “On a ship from China?”

  “Yes, Canton. That’s where he’s been since not long after he left Botany Bay.”

  “When exactly did you see him?” asked Sebastian.

  A faint trace of color rose in the valet’s cheeks. “This past Sunday.”

  “He—what? Sent you a note?”

  Calhoun nodded. “We met at Oxford Market.”

  “How did he know where to find you?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

  “So what did he say?”

  Calhoun squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and pinched the bridge of his nose. “He told me how he’d escaped from Botany Bay. How he’d been living in Canton.”

  “Interesting place to take refuge.”

  “He said he left Botany Bay on an American whaler and spent a season working with them. But then they ran into a storm and had to put into Canton for repairs. Right before they were to leave, he came down with a fever. The monsoons were about to hit, so they left him. Everyone thought he was going to die, but he didn’t.”

  “And he’s been in Canton ever since?”

  Calhoun nodded. “He was working with one of the Hong merchants. Seems the fellow was happy to have someone who not only spoke perfect English and French—along with a smattering of other languages—but could understand European ways of thinking as well.”

  Merchants from Britain, Europe, and the United States were all eager to trade with China, the ancient source of silks and porcelains and the increasingly popular tea. After having been rigidly closed off for centuries, the country was finally beginning to open up. But the Qing emperors insisted on tightly controlling their subjects’ contact with the barbaric West. By Imperial decree, all trade was funneled through the city of Canton and the nearby island of Macau, with foreigners forced to do business through specially licensed middlemen known as Hong merchants.

  “Did you ask him why the hell he threw it all over to risk his life by coming back here?”

  “I did. But all he’d say was he had his reasons. And then he said he might need my help, and asked if he could count on me.”

  And you said yes, Sebastian thought, no questions asked. It revealed much about the strength of the bond between the two men.

  Aloud, Sebastian said, “Tell me about the child. What is he to Hayes?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Is he a servant, do you think?”

  “I don’t believe so, no.”

  “Any chance the boy could be Hayes’s son?”

  “I wondered that myself. He does look half-European. But he didn’t say and I didn’t ask.”

  Sebastian studied his valet’s fine-boned, tensely held face. He’d known Calhoun for years now. In general, he was an affable man, calm and easygoing. But Sebastian had always suspected that there was another side to the valet, a hidden side that was the legacy of all those growing-up years spent in the dangerous back alleys of places like Seven Dials and Hockley-in-the-Hole. “Tell me about when you knew Hayes before—those months when he was staying at your mother’s flash house. Did any of his friends or relatives come to see him while he was there?”

  Calhoun looked thoughtful. “There was an Irish fellow who’d been up at Cambridge with him and came a few times, but I’m afraid I don’t recall his name. It’s been nearly twenty years, and I didn’t pay that much attention anyway.”

  “No one else?”

  “Everyone else pretty much cut him off after his father disowned him—all except for his brother, of course.”

  “I thought he had several brothers.”

  “He had two. But it was only Crispin, the middle son, who came to see him. They were quite close, so his death hit Nicholas hard.”

  “Crispin Hayes died while Nicholas was in prison? Or when he was staying at the Red Lion?”

  “It was right before the Frenchwoman’s murder.”

  “How did he die?”

  “He drowned.”

  Jesus. What a tragic family, thought Sebastian. “Tell me about Nicholas Hayes himself—what manner of man he was.”

  Calhoun drew a deep, pained breath. “I know what they said about him in the papers this morning, how they made him out to be some ne’er-do-well, depraved reprobate. But he wasn’t like that. I mean, yes, he was wild and maybe a bit reckless and hotheaded. But he was a good man—honorable and trustworthy and true.”

  “Most people would consider abducting an heiress fairly depraved.”

  Calhoun set his jaw and said nothing.

  “So, why did he kill Chantal de LaRivière?” asked Sebastian.

  “He said he didn’t.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  Calhoun met Sebastian’s gaze. “Yes—then and now.”

  “Did you attend the trial?”

  “No. Nicholas said he didn’t want me to.”

  Interesting, thought Sebastian. Because Hayes wanted to spare the lad pain? Or because he didn’t want Calhoun to realize he really was guilty of murder?

  Aloud, Sebastian said, “Who do you think killed him?”

  Calhoun drew his lower lip between his tee
th and shook his head. “I don’t know. But whoever it was, Nicholas must not have seen him as a threat. I mean, he turned his back on the fellow, didn’t he? You wouldn’t do that with someone you thought might kill you. Would you?”

  “The killer could have crept up behind him.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Ji didn’t know the name of the man Hayes was planning to meet in the tea gardens last night?”

  “No. Or, at least, he said he didn’t.”

  “Do you have any idea where Ji might have gone or how to set about finding him?”

  “No, my lord. Believe me, I wish I did.” The valet took a deep breath. “With your lordship’s permission, I’d like to spend the day looking for the lad.”

  Sebastian nodded. “We need to find him, and quickly. Was Ji with Hayes when you met him at Oxford Market?”

  “He was, yes.”

  “Would he run if he saw you, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. He ran away from me last night, didn’t he?”

  “True. But he was scared.”

  Calhoun thrust up from his seat by the cold hearth and went to stare out the front windows. The sun was already high and hot; it was staging up to be another brutal day.

  After a moment, he said, “Is Ji in danger, do you think?”

  Sebastian was aware of a sense of disquiet settling low in his gut. “That child might not know whom Hayes was meeting last night. But if the killer thinks there’s a chance he does, then I’d say yes, he’s in danger. Grave danger.”

  Chapter 9

  H ero was dressed in a plain walking gown of soft gray sarcenet and positioning a simple high-crowned bonnet on her head when Sebastian came to stand at the entrance to her dressing room.

  “You’re going to look for that child, aren’t you?” he said, watching her.

  She kept her gaze on her reflection in the mirror as she tilted the hat just so. “How can I not? It’s ghastly to think about such a young child all alone in a strange city. In a strange country.”