Sebastien St. Cyr 08 - What Darkness Brings Read online

  “I did. He says it’s called The Key of Solomon and it does indeed appear to be some sort of magic handbook.”

  “So you were right,” said Sebastian, going to pick it up.

  “I was, although I’m afraid poor Mr. Bloomsfield was quite shocked by the contents. He translated a few passages for me, then refused to have anything more to do with it.”

  “Had he heard of it before?”

  She shook her head. “No. But he found an inscription inside the frontpiece that indicates it was copied in Amsterdam. He says it’s written in Sephardic cursive script.” She came to watch as he leafed through the strange text. “I have a friend named Abigail McBean who is something of an expert on these old magic texts. She told me once that they’re called ‘grimoires’ and—” She broke off, her eyes narrowing as he looked up at her and smiled. “What’s so funny?”

  At that, he laughed out loud. She was friends with a motley collection of brilliant, fascinating, and decidedly unfashionable people, from scholars and poets to reformers and artists. She knew geologists and architects, antiquaries and engineers; he should have expected that she’d be acquainted with at least someone whose specialty was ancient magic texts.

  The amusement faded as it occurred to him that there was something decidedly off about a man accepting his wife’s help in his attempts to prove the innocence of his former mistress’s new husband. He said, “You don’t need to be doing this.”

  She reached over to tweak the manuscript from his grasp. “Yes, I do.”

  She started to turn away from the window, the book in her hands, then paused, her gaze on the darkening scene outside.

  The rain had settled into a steady downpour, the clouds hanging dark and low to steal whatever light had been left in the sky. Women with shawls pulled over their heads hurried through the gathering gloom, their pattens clicking, the murky glow from the oil lamps reflecting in a dull gleam off rain-washed paving stones. A landau emblazoned with a coronet and drawn by a matched team of dapple grays dashed past, its spinning red wheels throwing up a fan of water from the gutter to spray over the footpath. It wet the trouser legs of a man standing near the area steps of the house across the street, his slouch hat pulled low over his face. He neither flinched nor moved but simply stood, his gaze fixed on their house.

  “What is it?” Sebastian asked, watching Hero’s expression change.

  “That man. He’s been standing there staring at the house for nearly an hour. I noticed him when I was showing Mr. Bloomsfield the manuscript. We brought it here to the window so that he could catch the last of the daylight and—”

  But Sebastian was already pushing away from the window to stride rapidly toward the door.

  Chapter 18

  S

  ebastian walked out of the house into a wild wind that threw rain in his face and flapped the tails of his coat. A whip cracked, a shaggy team of shire horses filling the road in front of him so that he had to pull up sharply at the edge of the footpath, swearing impatiently as he ducked around the laden coal wagon. He half expected the slouch-hatted watcher to have disappeared into the mist by the time he reached the far side of the street. But the man was still there, his rain-darkened coat huge on his skeletally thin frame, his mouth pulled wide into a madman’s grin as he waited for Sebastian to walk up to him.

  “Who the bloody hell are you and why are you watching my house?” Sebastian demanded, coming to a halt in front of him.

  “It’s funny you should be asking that, you see,” said the man, “because I was wanting to pose the same question to you.”

  His hair was a greasy dark tangle heavily threaded with gray that hung too long around a face with hollowed cheeks and sunken, watery black eyes. At sometime in the distant past, his nose had been badly broken, and a puckered red scar distorted one side of his face. In age he could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty, exposure to the elements and ill-health having roughened his skin and dug deep grooves beside his mouth. For a moment, Sebastian thought he looked vaguely familiar; then the haggard face twitched and the impression vanished.

  Sebastian frowned. “What question?”

  “Who are you?”

  “You’re telling me that’s why you’re standing here in the rain? Because you want to know who I am?”

  “It is, yes.”

  The rain poured around them, dimpling the puddle in the gutter at their feet, pinging on the iron railing of the steps that led down to the kitchen, and running in rivulets down the smiling man’s face.

  The man’s grin widened. “She’s a fine-looking woman, your wife. Very fine-looking.”

  A powerful surge of fear-fueled rage coursed through Sebastian. He slammed the man back against the brick wall of the house behind him, one forearm pressed up tight against his skinny throat. “What the devil is that supposed to mean?”

  The man shook his head, his grin still eerily in place. “Didn’t mean nothing by it.”

  “Why the bloody hell do you want to know who I am?”

  The man’s eyes squeezed shut as he gave a strange, half-strangled laugh. “I saw you. Saw you coming out of his house.”

  “Whose house?”

  The man flattened his hands against the brick wall behind him, his stringy muscles tense, his fingers splayed. Then he opened his eyes, and they were like the eyes of a child or of the very old, when the mind begins to lose its ability to comprehend and simply stares out at the world in helpless confusion and need. “Oh, I can’t tell you that.”

  Sebastian took a step back and let the man go. “You stay away from my wife. Is that understood? You stay away from my house, and you stay away from my wife. I see you hanging around here again, I’ll have you taken up by the watch.”

  He realized the man was no longer looking at him but at something beyond him. Turning, Sebastian saw Hero calmly crossing the street toward him, the hem of her delicate white muslin gown lifted above the mud- and manure-strewn paving.

  When Sebastian looked back, the man was gone.

  “So, who is he?” Hero asked, her gaze following the skinny man’s retreating figure as she stepped up onto the flagway beside him. A gust of wind blew the rain in stinging, swirling sheets around them.

  “Someone who belongs in Bedlam.”

  She brought her gaze back to Sebastian. “Oh? You mean like a man who charges out into the rain with neither hat nor cloak?”

  He swiped the water out of his eyes and looked at his wife. Rain dripped from her wet hair, ran down her cheeks, soaked the wet muslin of her elegant gown so that it clung to every swell and hollow of her magnificent body. He said, “You mean like you?”

  Her face lit up with surprised delight and she let out a peal of laughter that tilted her head up to the sky.

  The rain eased up later that evening, only to sweep back in just after midnight.

  Lying awake in his wife’s bed, Sebastian could see streaks of strange green lightning illuminating the churning clouds that pressed low over the fetid alleyways and rain-lashed docks to the east. There came a moment’s breath-stealing pause; then the rumble of the thunder began, building louder and louder into a window-rattling crescendo that bled seamlessly into memories he would rather have forgotten.

  He sensed a subtle shift beside him, heard a whisper of movement. A soft, warm hand crept across the bare flesh of his chest. Hero said, “You’re not sleeping.”

  He smiled into the darkness. “And you are?”

  She rolled over to press her long body against his side as he brought his arms down to gather her to him.

  She said, “You’re worried about that man, the one who was watching the house.”

  He stroked his hand down her back and over the swell of her hip. “I keep thinking I’ve seen him before, only I can’t place where.”

  “A beggar on a street corner, perhaps? A face glimpsed in the desperate crowds outside St. Martin’s poorhouse?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “I don’t think he’s a beggar.
”

  “You said yourself he sounds as if he belongs in Bedlam.”

  “That doesn’t mean he isn’t somehow involved in Daniel Eisler’s death.”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “Why was he here, now, watching the house? Watching you? Not me. You.”

  She propped herself up on one elbow so she could look down at him. “I can take care of myself.”

  Her words echoed those Kat had said to him earlier that day. Only, in that instance she had been referring to the threat posed by Jarvis . . . Hero’s own father.

  He caught the dark fall of hair curtaining her face and swept it back with his splayed fingers. He had seen her shoot a man point-blank in the chest and barely register any reaction, either horror or remorse. There was a hard edge to this woman that he knew came to her from her father, Jarvis. It was leavened by her sense of justice and a measure of compassion for the suffering of those less fortunate that Jarvis had never experienced. But Sebastian knew she could still kill without hesitation or compunction to protect herself or others, just as he knew that none of that might be enough to keep her safe.

  He said, “We’re all vulnerable. Especially when dealing with a madman.”

  She was silent a moment, her face solemn, a frown digging a furrow between her eyebrows. “Do you think I don’t worry about you?”

  “That’s not—”

  “Not the same? Because you are a man and I am a woman?”

  “No. Because it’s one thing for me to make the choice to put my own life in danger and something else entirely when my actions endanger someone else.”

  She touched her fingers to his lips. “I knew what I was letting myself in for when I married you, Devlin.”

  He smiled against her hand. “I’m not sure I did.” It was the closest he’d ever come to speaking of the profound shifts in their relationship and the unexpected, life-altering deepening of the ties that bound them.

  She let her hand slide down his chest, down over the tender flesh of his belly. His breath caught, and he saw her eyes darken with want.

  He rolled her onto her back, rising above her. The wind drove the rain against the windowpanes. The green glow of the lightning flickered in ethereal pulses around them. He kissed her cheek, her eyelids, her hair, the delicate hollow at the base of her throat. His world narrowed down to the rasp of flesh against flesh, hands reaching, fingers clenching. The softness of her lips. The whispered urgency of her desire.

  And his.

  Sebastian was easing his breeches up over his hips when he became aware of Hero coming to stand in the doorway of his darkened dressing room. She’d drawn a blanket over her shoulders against the chill, but otherwise she was naked, her body long and pale, her rounded belly silhouetted against the throbbing electric light of the storm.

  She said, “I suppose there’s a good reason you’re sneaking away from my bed at one in the morning.”

  He smiled and pulled a shirt over his head. “I want to have another look at Eisler’s house—alone, and with no interruptions.”

  “Unless someone interrupts your housebreaking with a blunderbuss.”

  “Do you think me so careless?”

  “No. But you didn’t get any sleep last night. You need to rest, Devlin.”

  He bent to pull on his boots. “How much rest do you suppose Russell Yates is getting tonight?”

  “There will always be innocent men in danger of being hanged.”

  He knotted a casual kerchief around his neck and reached for his coat. “True.”

  “You said the doors were bolted and the windows barred. So how will you get in?”

  “I’ve an idea.”

  “Well, it’s reassuring to know that should we ever find ourselves in dire straits, you could make a credible living as a burglar.”

  He grunted and caught her to him for a quick kiss, but she surprised him by holding him close and hard.

  She said, “You’ll be careful.” In typical Hero fashion, it was more of a command than a request.

  He kissed her again, on her nose. “Good God. You sound just like a wife.”

  “Don’t be insulting.” She adjusted the set of his hat. “What exactly do you expect to find?”

  “Answers, hopefully.”

  “To precisely which questions?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  Chapter 19

  A

  single oil lamp mounted high on the wall of the corner greengrocer’s shop cast a small, murky puddle of light. But the rest of the crooked lane lay still and quiet in the wet darkness.

  Pausing in the shadow of a recessed doorway that smelled strongly of urine, Sebastian watched as the gusting wind ruffled the rain-drenched ivy that draped the scarred stone facade of Eisler’s house and half obscured the ancient leaded windows. Like the warehouses and shuttered shops around it, the house was dark. He had no way of knowing if the aged retainers employed by Eisler were still in residence, but if so, they would long ago have retired to their attic bedchamber for the night. Casting a quick glance around, he crossed the street to duck down the narrow, malodorous passageway that ran along the south side of the house.

  Vennels, he’d heard them called in Scotland and the north of England. This one was barely wide enough for a man turned sideways and terminated in an old gate made of thick, vertical planks studded with clavos and hinged with iron straps. But the wood was crumbling with rot, the rusted mountings flaking and so thin they snapped easily when Sebastian leaned his weight against the boards. He caught the gate before it could clatter onto the weed- and leaf-strewn paving and set it carefully to one side.

  What must once, two hundred years or more earlier, have been a delightful Renaissance garden of rose-shaded walks bordering parterres of comfrey and chamomile, tansy and feverfew, was now a dark, overgrown tangle hemmed in by the looming, grimy brick walls of its neighbors. Massive elms, their spreading limbs heavy with rain, had grown up near the terrace. Any other man would have been blind. But Sebastian moved easily, picking his way over downed rotting branches, tangled wet vines, and broken masonry.

  It was a gift, his mother had told him, this catlike ability to see clearly in all but the complete absence of any light, to hear sounds too subtle or high-pitched for most human ears. The trait was shared by no one else in his family, and he still remembered the look on his mother’s face when she first discovered the strange, almost animalistic quality of his senses.

  She’d come upon him unexpectedly one evening, when he was curled up on a bench in the summerhouse reading a book long after the sun had set. He realized now that she had surely known then, even if Sebastian himself had not, that this gift came to him from his father. . . .

  The father who was not the Earl of Hendon.

  He pushed the memory from his thoughts and quietly mounted the shattered steps to the terrace, stepping carefully to avoid the telltale clatter of broken stones shifting beneath his boots. The rows of ratty wooden cages were still there to the left of the door, their forlorn feathered occupants huddled against a damp wind that carried with it a foul stench of neglect and misery. Nearly every food bowl was empty, the water vessels scummed.

  Moving purposefully from cage to cage, he quickly unlatched one door after the other, rattling the slats of those whose occupants appeared too weakened or morose to seize the freedom offered them. In a whirl of wings, they rose against the night sky, first sparrows, doves, and larks; then, once the smaller birds had flown to safety, the goshawks and owls. Sebastian stood at last before the cage of the disgruntled, long-haired black cat, which looked up at him with slitted green eyes. Sebastian swung open the cage door, its hinges squealing loud enough to make him wince.

  “Well, go on, then,” he whispered when the cat remained motionless. “What are you waiting for? An invitation from the King?”

  The cat blinked.

  Sebastian tipped the cage forward, upending the cat, which dropped lightly onto the pavement beside hi
m with an indignant yowl.

  “Shhh,” hissed Sebastian.

  The cat streaked into the night, its ridiculously long, bushy tail lashing back and forth.

  Sebastian watched it for a moment, ears straining for any sound that might indicate that his presence had been detected. The wind gusted up again, thrashing the creaking limbs of the old elms.

  He eased the knife from his boot and crossed to the back door.

  The gap between the door and its frame was not as wide as he’d hoped, but it was enough. Slipping the blade through the opening close against the frame, he pressed down until the hard steel of the knife sank into the softer iron of the bolt with enough purchase to enable him to slide the bolt a fraction to the right. Then he freed the blade, eased it in close to the frame again, and pressed down.

  He did this again and again, working the bolt back bit by bit. The work was excruciatingly slow. It would have been much easier to simply knock out the bars on one of the windows and break the glass, but he preferred to leave as little sign of his entry as possible. He was aware of a soft patter as the rain started up again, and the distant cry of the watch shouting, “Two o’clock on a rainy night and all is well.” Then the bolt cleared the frame with a soft click, and the door creaked inward perhaps six inches.

  Sebastian pushed it open wider, took a step, and nearly tripped as something warm and furry threaded between his legs.

  “Will you go away?” he whispered.

  The cat let out a soft mew.

  Bloody hell.

  Slipping the knife back into its sheath, Sebastian stepped over the cat, then quickly shut the door in its face.

  “Meow,” complained the cat, caught on the outside.

  With the door closed, the corridor lay in near total darkness, the only illumination a faint glow that spilled through the archway from the windows of the vast hall beyond. The rows of heavy paintings on the walls and stacks of fine furniture loomed out of heavy shadows. The smell of mold and rot hung thick in the air.