When Gods Die: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery Read online

  “Devlin here,” Sebastian called in a clear, ringing voice. “Don’t shoot.”

  “Devlin?” The old man shifted in his chair, his face contorting as he squinted into the darkness. “What are you doing here?”

  Sebastian stepped into the circle of light cast by a brass lantern and hunkered down beside the old man’s chair. “I’ve something to tell you,” he said. And there, beside Guinevere Anglessey’s grave with the night wind soft against his cheek, Sebastian told Guinevere’s husband how she had died, and why.

  When Sebastian had finished, the Marquis sat in silence for some moments, his head bowed, his breath coming slow and heavy. Then he lifted his head to fix Sebastian with a fierce stare. “This woman—this Lady Audley. You’re certain she’s dead?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. The wind gusted up, shifting the leaves of the oak tree overhead and bringing them the scents of the place, of long grass and decay and death.

  “Do you believe in God?” Anglessey asked suddenly, breaking the silence that had fallen between them.

  Sebastian met the old man’s anguished gaze and answered honestly, “Not anymore, no.”

  Anglessey sighed. “I wish I didn’t. If I didn’t, I would take this gun and blow Bevan’s brains out. It’s what I should have done before.”

  “Perhaps if you can stay alive long enough you’ll be lucky and someone else will do it for you.”

  Anglessey grunted. “The ones who deserve to die rarely do.”

  He stared off across the graveyard to where the moonlight reflected off the high arched windows of the ancient stone church. “I was sitting here tonight, wondering what it would have been like if I had been born thirty years later—or if Guinevere had been born thirty years earlier. Do you think she would have loved me?”

  “She loved you. I think in the end she came to realize you had given her the one thing no one else in her life ever had.”

  Anglessey shook his head, not understanding. “What was that?”

  “Your unselfish love.”

  The old man’s eyes squeezed nearly shut, as if he were wincing at some deep, inner pain. “I was selfish. If I hadn’t been so obsessed with getting an heir—if I hadn’t pushed her into that young man’s arms again—she never would have died.”

  “You can’t know that. I may not believe in God, but I’ve come to believe that there is a pattern. A pattern that works itself out in ways we can’t begin to understand.”

  “Isn’t that just another way of describing God?”

  “Perhaps,” said Sebastian. He was suddenly very tired. He felt a powerful need to hold Kat in his arms. To hold her safe and close forever. “Perhaps it is.”

  HE CAME TO HER IN THE STILLNESS OF THE NIGHT, when the last carriage had rumbled through the streets and the moon was only a pale memory on the horizon. Moving restlessly in the unnatural heat of the night, Kat awoke and found Devlin beside her.

  “Marry me, Kat,” he said, his hand shaking as he brushed the hair from her sweat-dampened brow.

  She watched his face in the dying moonlight, watched until the hope began to fade and the hurt crept in. And when she could bear it no longer she leaned into him, her forehead pressing against his shoulder so that she couldn’t see his face and he couldn’t see hers. “I can’t. There’s something you don’t know about me. Something I’ve done.”

  “I don’t care what you’ve done.” He twisted his fingers through her hair, his thumbs slipping under her chin to force her head up. “There’s nothing you could have done that would make me—”

  She pressed her fingertips to his lips, stopping his words. “No. You can’t say that when you don’t know what it is. And I don’t have the courage to tell you.”

  “I know I love you,” he said, his lips moving against her fingers.

  “Then let that be enough. Please, Sebastian. Let that be enough.”

  TOSSING HIS CHAPEAU BRAS AND GLOVES on a table in the darkened hall, Jarvis walked into his library, kindled a small branch of candles, and poured himself a glass of brandy.

  Smiling with satisfaction, he carried the brandy to a chair beside the fire. But after a moment, he set the brandy aside untasted and slipped Lady Hendon’s silver-and-bluestone necklace from his pocket.

  Threading the chain through his fingers, he held it up to the light, the bluestone disk and its superimposed silver triskelion tracing a slow arc as it swung back and forth through the air. It was all nonsense, of course, the legend that had grown up around the thing; intellectually he knew that. And yet it seemed to him that he could feel the pendant’s power. Feel it, yet not grasp it.

  “Papa?”

  Looking around, he found his daughter, Hero, standing in the doorway. His fist closed over the pendant, stilling it.

  “Why are you still up?” she asked, coming into the room. In the white satin evening gown she’d chosen for the Prince’s fete, with the soft light of the candles golden on her skin and her hair crimped around her face, she almost looked pretty.

  He dropped the necklace onto the table and reached for his glass. “I thought I’d have a brandy before going up to bed.”

  Her gaze fell on the necklace beside him. “What an interesting piece,” she said, reaching to pick it up before he could stop her.

  She cradled the pendant in her palm. As he watched, her expression slowly altered, her lips parting, her eyebrows twitching together.

  “What?” he said more sharply than he’d intended. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. It’s just…’’ She gave a shaky laugh. “It sounds ridiculous, but it’s almost as if I can feel it growing warm in my hand.” She looked up at him. “Whose is it?”

  Jarvis drained his glass in one long pull and set it aside. “I believe it’s yours.”

  Author’s Note

  The Jacobite threat to the Hanoverian dynasty was considered quite real in Georgian England. The Catholic Relief Act of 1778 was contingent upon the swearing of an oath to disavow the Stuarts. But the death in the early nineteenth century of Henry Stuart, brother of Bonny Prince Charlie, effectively ended the Stuart dynasty. Their claim passed to the King of Savoy, who was descended from the daughter of Charles I (the Hanoverians traced their descent from a daughter of Charles I’s father, James I).

  This much is history. The Prince of Wales did, indeed, hold a grand fete in June of 1811, to celebrate the beginning of his Regency. It was much as I have described it, although sticklers will note that I have moved its date back one day to accommodate my story. The Prince Regent’s obsession with all things Stuart was also very real, as was his enormous unpopularity. The song Sebastian hears the crowd singing on the night of the fete was actually part of a poem written by Charles Lamb in 1812. However, the 1811 conspiracy to replace the Hanovers with the House of Savoy is my invention, as is the existence of a daughter Anne married to a Danish prince.

  The story of the Welsh mistress of James II and her necklace is based in part on the true story of a woman named Goditha Price. She bore Prince James two children, one of whom, Mary Stuart, married a Scottish laird named McBean. As a wedding present she received from her royal father her mother’s necklace. An ancient piece in the form of a silver triskelion set against a bluestone disk, the necklace is said to grow warm in the hands of the one destined to possess it. It is also said to bring long life.

  Mary Stuart gave the necklace to her son, Edward McBean, when his participation in a rising against the Hanoverian dynasty on behalf of his uncle, the Old Pretender, led to his exile. McBean sailed for America, where he lived to the ripe old age of 102 and fathered a large family from which the author is descended. The necklace has not, unfortunately, descended along my branch of the family. Its most recent owner, a salty old lady I first met over the Internet, died at the age of 103.

 

 

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