Authors: C.S. Harris
What Angels Fear (29 page)
Sebastian glanced up to find the artist watching him nervously. “You’re doing a portrait of Lord Jarvis’s family?”
“That’s the study. The portrait itself was finished last spring.”
“When you were still painting theatrical scenery?”
A muscle ticked along the side of Donatelli’s jaw. “Lord Jarvis is known for his generous encouragement of new artists. He’s the man responsible for bringing me to the attention of the
ton
.”
Sebastian looked back at the family grouping. He was aware of a shadow of a thought flitting about the edges of his consciousness. But when he tried to reach for it, it simply floated away, a pale, mocking chimera that was there, and then gone.
The small flintlock still in hand, Sebastian continued about the room, studying the various canvases propped against the walls, looking for something that would tie all the strange, disparate threads of Rachel’s life and death together.
He stopped suddenly before a haunting painting of a young girl, her wrists tied together over her head, her naked body twisted in agony, her eyes cast heavenward as if to beseech her god for mercy. As he looked closer, Sebastian realized that the girl was Rachel, only younger. Much younger. “That’s Rachel York, isn’t it? As a child.”
Giorgio Donatelli was looking, not at the painting, but at him. “You’re the merchant who was here on Friday. You look different, but the features are the same.” His brows drew together in a troubled frown. “You asked about Rachel then, too. Why?”
There were probably half a dozen things Sebastian could have said. He decided to use the truth. “Because I’m trying to find out who killed her.”
“They say they know who did it. A viscount named Devlin.”
“I am Devlin.”
Sebastian wasn’t sure how he expected the other man to react. Donatelli glanced down at the pistol Sebastian still held in his hand, then away, and nodded once, as if he’d somehow come to this conclusion himself.
“Rachel used to talk to me sometimes,” he said, jerking his chin toward the canvas, “when I was painting her. She’d tell me about her life, about when she first came to London. And before. It’s what gave me the idea for this painting.”
“Her life in Worcestershire?”
Donatelli’s eyes shone dark and fierce. “She was only thirteen when her father died. Her mother was already dead and she had no relatives willing to take her in, so she was thrown on the parish. They sold her as a housemaid.” He sucked in a deep breath that flared his nostrils and expanded his chest. “They do that here, you know. You English, you talk so fine, looking down your noses at the Americans and prosing on about the sin and inhumanity of their African trade. And yet you sell your own children into slavery.”
He paused. “They sold her to a fat old merchant and his wife. She was mad, that woman. Sick in her head. She used to tie Rachel to a post in the cellar and lay her bare back open with a whip.”
Sebastian stared down at the naked, frightened girl in the painting. He was remembering the thin, crisscrossing bands of white lines Paul Gibson had found on Rachel’s back, and the scars on her wrists.
“But what the merchant did to her was even worse.” Donatelli’s voice trembled with emotion. “He used Rachel as his whore. A thirteen-year-old girl child, and he bent her over his desk and took her from behind like a dog.”
“A woman who’s been through something like that, I wouldn’t think she’d have much use for men,” said Sebastian softly.
“She learned to do what she needed to survive.”
“Did you know she was planning to leave London?”
Donatelli’s gaze shifted away. “No. She never mentioned it.”
“But you knew she was with child.”
It was said as a statement, not a question. To Sebastian’s surprise, Donatelli’s eyes went wide, his lips parting as if on a sudden gasp of fear. “How do you know that?”
“I know. Who was the father? You?”
“No!”
“Who then? Lord Frederick?”
“Lord Frederick?” Donatelli gave a short, sharp laugh. “Hardly. The man’s a Bulgarus.”
It was an old term,
Bulgarus
; an old term for a man with certain tendencies that were as old as time. Sebastian’s first inclination was to reject the accusation out of hand. Except that Donatelli was too passionate, too transparent to be much of a liar. And it didn’t sound like a lie. “If that’s true, then why was he involved with Rachel?”
“He wasn’t. She was his—how do you say it? His cover. He paid her for the use of her rooms so that he could meet his lover there. A young clerk.”
It was a common enough ruse, especially amongst those in espionage and government: cover up one secret by disguising it as another, a secret so spicy and naughty that if anyone should happen to discover it, they’d never think to look beyond it to the real, more dangerous truth it was intended to disguise. Thus, if Lord Frederick’s visits to Rachel York’s rooms were to become known, people would automatically assume that he’d set up the young actress as his mistress. Shocking, of course, but a common enough activity for a man of his age and wealth. Society would titter and gossip about it, but no one would ever think to look beyond it to the real secret that would destroy him, if it were to become known.
The problem with those kinds of arrangements, however, was that they left one vulnerable to blackmail. And blackmail was often a motive for murder. Except . . . Except that it was hard to imagine a man whose tastes ran to young male lovers being so physically aroused by the act of killing as to rape the dead bodies of his female victims.
Sebastian’s gaze fell on another of Donatelli’s paintings, the one of Rachel as an odalisque, preparing for her bath. For the first time he noticed that the painting also contained the figure of a man, peering out at her from behind a nearby planting of pleached orange trees.
“Tell me again about Bayard Wilcox,” said Sebastian suddenly. “You said he used to watch Rachel, follow her around. But he never actually approached her?”
“Not until last Saturday.”
Sebastian looked up in surprise. “Saturday?”
“At Steven’s in Bond Street. We went there after the play—a group of mainly theater people. At about half past eleven, Bayard arrived with some of his fellow
aristos
.” Donatelli’s angelic features quivered with remembered revulsion and disgust. “They were falling down drunk. Propping each other up. Laughing like idiots. Then Bayard, he saw Rachel. He went quiet all of a sudden and left the others to come lean against a nearby column and stare at her in that way he had. His friends tried to pry him away, but he wouldn’t budge. So they started teasing him. Said he must be some kind of a eunuch, to stand around simply looking at a woman the way he did. They said that if he had any balls, he’d walk up to her and tell her how he felt about her.”
“So he did?”
Donatelli nodded. “Walked right up and told her he wanted to fuck her. In those exact words. She threw her punch in his face.”
“What did Bayard do?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. One minute he was blubbering all over himself, saying she was like a goddess to him, and how he couldn’t think of anything but what it would be like to have her naked and beneath him. Then she threw the punch in his face and it was as if he turned into someone else. I mean, his face actually changed—his eyes scrunched together and his lips curled back and his skin grew dark. It was as if he were possessed by someone else. Someone evil.”
Sebastian nodded. He knew what Donatelli was talking about. He’d seen that kind of a change come over Bayard, even when he was a boy.
“If we hadn’t been there,” Donatelli was saying, “I think he’d have killed her on the spot with his bare hands. We had to physically hold him back until his friends finally dragged him away. You could still hear him screaming when he was outside, spewing the most vile obscenities. Saying he was going to kill her.”
“He said that? That he wanted to kill her?”
Donatelli nodded, his face ashen and strained. “He said he’d rip her head off.”
N
ormally, Sunday was the only day of the week when Charles, Lord Jarvis, spent any time at home. He would shepherd his mother, wife, and daughter to church in the morning, and then he’d sit down with them for a traditional English Sunday dinner before retreating to one of his clubs, or to the chambers set aside for his use in Carlton House or St. James’s Palace.
But a condition his doctors called inflammation of the heart—but which Jarvis himself considered little more than heartburn—had kept him in bed that Monday under the care of his caustic, sharp-tongued mother, who ran his household while his wife retreated farther and farther into her own misty dream worlds and his daughter was off tilting at windmills and meddling in things she refused to believe were none of her affair.
It was one of the ironies of Jarvis’s existence, that his life was filled with women. In addition to his mother, wife, and daughter, who lived with him, Jarvis was far more involved than he would have liked in the lives of his two sisters: weepy, harebrained Agnes, forever needing his help to tow her useless husband and son out of dun territory; and Phyllis, who, while no more intelligent than her sister, had at least had the wit to marry well.
Women, in Jarvis’s opinion, were generally even more profoundly brainless and foolish than most men. True, there were some exceptions—females with astonishingly rational, quick minds who tended to be either embittered and sour, or sarcastic and irreverent, and who irritated him even more than their empty-headed sisters. His deep and abiding hatred of the French notwithstanding, Jarvis had to agree with Napoleon in this, if nothing else: the only two things women were good for were recreation and reproduction.
Which was a thought that brought him back, as it often did, to Annabelle, his wife.
She’d been a fey, pretty little thing when he’d married her, a thin slip of a girl with sparkling blue eyes and a merry laugh and a handsome dowry. But she’d proved a severe disappointment. She’d managed to produce only one living daughter and a sickly, weak son before succumbing to a series of yearly miscarriages and stillbirths that the doctors claimed had ruined her health and overset the balance of her delicate mind. Jarvis knew better. Annabelle’s mind had never been balanced. But whatever hopes he might have had that her precarious health would soon carry her off proved misplaced. She lived on, year after year, forbidden by her doctors from providing him with the release his body still occasionally craved and unable to produce the son he needed to replace David, lying now in a watery, unknown grave.
Yet of all the women in his life, it was his daughter, Hero, who tended to cause Jarvis the most grief. A stubborn, wrongheaded creature, she had dedicated her life, nauseatingly, to good works, while spouting any number of alarming sentiments gleaned from her reading of the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Marquis of Condorcet. Worse, having stubbornly resisted his efforts to contract for her any number of advantageous matches, she was now nearly twenty-five, and well on her way to becoming a spinster for life. Never the pretty, taking little thing her mother had been, whatever good looks she might once have had were in danger of fading fast.
She was off right now, inspecting a workhouse, of all things. Just the thought of it brought a sour burn to his chest so that he was in no good humor when, midway through the afternoon, that fool magistrate, Lovejoy, was finally ushered into his presence.
“You wished to see me, my lord?” said the little man, bowing.
“It’s about time,” groused Jarvis from the sofa beside the fire, where he had set up a kind of temporary office. “I hear Devlin has killed again.”
“We don’t actually know—”
“He was seen there, wasn’t he?”
The little man pressed his lips together and sighed. “Yes, my lord.”
“The Prince is greatly displeased by this entire affair. There are whispers on the streets. Alarming talk. They’re saying it’s reached the point that noblemen in this country can kill with impunity, that common folks’ women are no longer safe even in their own homes. It’s the last thing the Prince needs, with his installation as Regent just two days away.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“The Prince wants Devlin brought in—or dead—within forty-eight hours. Or Queen Square will be looking for a new magistrate. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, my lord,” said Lovejoy, and bowed himself out.
I
t was just past noon when Sebastian reached his sister’s townhouse on St. James’s Square.
“
My lord
,” said Amanda’s butler, his eyes widening in surprise and fear when he answered the door to Sebastian’s preemptory knock.
“Bayard’s still at home, I presume?” said Sebastian, brushing past the man and heading for the stairs.
“I believe Mr. Wilcox is in his dressing room, my lord. If you care to wait in the—
My lord
,” bleated the butler, but Sebastian was already taking the stairs two at a time.
Sebastian flung open the dressing room door without warning to find Bayard in his shirtsleeves, his neck craning back at an awkward angle as he struggled with one of the monstrously wide cravats he affected. He spun about, his jaw going slack, his eyes opening wide. “
Devlin
.”
Sebastian caught him in an angry rush that sent a chair flying and took the two men across the room to slam Bayard’s back up against the wall, hard enough to drive the air out of him in a painful huff.
“You lied to me,” said Sebastian, pulling his nephew away from the wall, then slamming him back against it a second time. “You said you’d never gone near Rachel York. Now I hear you threatened to kill her at Steven’s in Bond Street.”
Bayard’s voice wheezed, his chest jerking with the effort to draw breath. “I was foxed! I didn’t know what I was doing, let alone what I was saying.”
“You were foxed the night she died, too. How do you know what you did then?”
