Authors: C.S. Harris
What Angels Fear (37 page)
The sexton wiped a splayed hand back and forth across his unshaven face. “I weren’t exactly truthful when I told you how it was, last Wednesday mornin’. You see, I coulda sworn I’d locked the north transept door the night afore. But then I come here the next day and there it was, open, with them men’s bloody footprints in the transept and that girl left so indecent-like in the Lady Chapel. I thought I musta been misremember-ing, that I’d forgotten to lock the door after all . . . that it was me own fault, what was done to the church. All that blood . . .”
The old man reached again for his shovel, then simply stood there, gripping the handle, his gaze on the earth beneath his feet. “When I found that key, I knew I’d been right, that I had locked the door after all. She musta unlocked it herself when she come. Only by that time it was too late to say anythin’ about it, ’cause I’d already told your constable I’d found the door locked that mornin’.”
Lovejoy’s hand tightened around the iron key, the toothed end digging into his palm. “You do realize the implications of this, don’t you? That it completely changes our estimation of Miss York’s time of death?”
Jem Cummings nodded, his head ducking as he thrust his shovel back into the earth.
Lovejoy stepped back. “How many people have a key to this church?”
“I don’t rightly know. You’d haveta talk to the Reverend McDermott about that. He oughta be in the Rectory about now.”
Lovejoy nodded and turned away, only to swing back as another thought struck him. “Just a moment. Did you say you saw
men’s
footprints in the transept that morning?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you certain?”
“Course I am. I mighta lived in Londontown these past forty years and more, but I grew up in Chester. Me da, he was gamekeeper to Lord Broxton, and he taught all us little ones how to read game tracks. Men’s tracks is no different. There was two sets of men’s bloody footprints, comin’ out o’ that chapel. Ain’t no doubt about that.”
S
ebastian propped a hip on the edge of Lord Jarvis’s heavily carved Jacobin desk, one leg swinging back and forth as he leveled the Cassaignard flintlock at the fat man’s chest. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”
“I never do anything stupid,” said Jarvis, his glance flicking from Sebastian to the long windows overlooking the rear garden, then back again. “You’ve tracked mud on my carpet.”
“So I have. A legacy of my recent conversation with Lord Frederick Fairchild.”
Jarvis leaned his back against the closed door and crossed his arms at his massive chest. “Really? Is that statement meant to be significant?”
“Lord Frederick tells me you presented the Prince of Wales with one of a collection of indiscreet letters written by Lord Frederick to a certain young gentleman in the Foreign Office. Now, as I understand it, you led the Prince to believe this letter was found in the possession of a French agent named Monsieur Léon Pierrepont. Which is curious, don’t you think, given that Rachel York stole those letters from M. Pierrepont’s townhouse shortly before she was murdered last Tuesday?”
Jarvis’s full lips curled up into a smile. “Really?”
“Don’t,” said Sebastian, pushing away from the desk. “Don’t try my patience. I’ve had a long and very fatiguing day.”
Jarvis’s gaze passed, derisively, over Sebastian’s rain-soaked and muddied Rosemary Lane clothing. “Obviously.”
Sebastian plucked a stray wisp of hay from his lapel and let it fall. “How did you find out Rachel York was working for the French?”
“There is very little happens in this town I don’t know about.”
“So you—what? Offered her protection from arrest if she agreed to cooperate with your scheme to discredit Lord Frederick?”
“Traitors’ deaths are such messy, painful affairs. It’s amazing what people will agree to do in order to avoid that kind of unpleasantness.” Jarvis nodded toward a cut-crystal decanter warming on a table beside the hearth. “I trust you won’t shoot me if I should venture to pour myself a glass of brandy?”
A tapestry bellpull hung just to one side of the carved mantel. Sebastian smiled. “Of course not. As long as you remember what I said about Stupid Things.”
He watched the big man cross the room. It did much to explain Rachel York’s nervousness in the weeks leading up to her death, if Jarvis had discovered her association with the French and used it to coerce her into working for him.
Jarvis reached for the brandy decanter and lifted it from its tray with slow, ponderous movements.
“So Rachel stole the letters from Pierrepont to give them to you,” said Sebastian.
“Letter,” said Jarvis, correcting him. “Fair Rachel provided me with one letter only.”
“And the other documents? Did she take those at your directive as well? Or was that her own initiative? Is that why you killed her? Because she’d discovered something she wasn’t meant to know?”
Jarvis huffed a soft laugh. “You don’t seriously think I would stoop to killing some insignificant little bit of muslin, now do you?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Why would I? She’d delivered the letter I needed. I admit it wasn’t as incriminating as I had hoped, but in the end it served its purpose. Quite nicely.”
“You see, that’s one of the things that puzzles me. Rachel York stole some half a dozen of Lord Frederick’s letters from Pierrepont’s townhouse, yet you say she gave you only one. What happened to the others?”
Jarvis’s florid, self-confident face gave nothing away. But Sebastian saw a hint of surprise flicker in the man’s eyes. “I neither know nor care.”
“And here I thought little happens in this town that you don’t know about.” Sebastian watched Jarvis splash a generous measure of brandy into a glass. “You did know, of course, that it wasn’t true, what you told the Prince. Lord Frederick might have been foolishly indiscreet, but he wasn’t dealing with the French.”
Jarvis eased the crystal stopper back into the decanter and set it aside. “Truth is such an overrated commodity. This country could not continue with a mad king on the throne; everyone knew that. We needed this Regency. But the creation of the Regency threatened to provide the Whigs with an opportunity to seize power. And then what? They would have taken the greatest, happiest nation in history—the admiration of the world—and ruined it. All in the name of a set of shallow, presumptuous French principles like ‘democracy,’ and ‘freedom.’ The kind of madness that can only lead to chaos and confusion and the disintegration of all social order. That’s the only truth I’m interested in. The only truth that matters.”
“I heard Prinny announced his government. He’s decided to retain Spencer Perceval and the Tories.”
“That’s right. There’ll be no Whig government, no peace negotiations with the French, no reform of Parliament, no Catholic emancipation.”
“I wouldn’t have thought even Prinny could be induced to turn from his friends so easily.”
Jarvis let out a sharp laugh. “The Prince’s friendship with the Whigs has always stemmed more from a petulant son’s desire to spite his father than from any real dedication to Whiggish causes.”
Sebastian knew it for the truth. Beneath his veneer of easygoing modernity, the Prince of Wales was essentially the same Catholic-hating, autocratic-minded monarchist as his father, George III.
Jarvis shifted closer to the hearth, as if drawn to the warmth. A large canvas heavily framed in gilded wood hung over the mantel, a group portrait of Lord Jarvis with his wife and mother and daughter. Sebastian had seen this portrait before, as a small study in the studio of Giorgio Donatelli.
“You say you had no reason to want to see Rachel York dead,” said Sebastian. “Yet she knew enough to expose all your clever machinations for what they were.”
“Not without exposing herself.”
Sebastian kept his attention, seemingly, on the dramatically swirling colors of Donatelli’s canvas. All the jagged, inconsistent pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place: Leo Pierrepont, patiently spinning a web in which to ensnare the man everyone expected to be the next Whig prime minister, while Lord Jarvis schemed to keep the Whigs from gaining control of the government in the first place. And Rachel York—fiercely passionate, badly frightened—had been caught between them.
“The way I see it,” said Sebastian, “whether you killed her yourself, or had her killed, or simply created the set of circumstances that led to her death, you’re the one who is ultimately responsible for what happened to Rachel York.”
“Am I expected to be overcome with remorse?” Jarvis lifted his brandy glass to his lips. “What difference does the life or death of one stupid little whore make when the future of an empire hangs in the balance?”
Sebastian knew a flash of sheer, potent rage. “It makes a difference to me.”
“Only because you’ve been foolish enough to allow yourself to be saddled with the blame for it.”
Sebastian nodded toward the family portrait over the mantel. “And the commission to Giorgio Donatelli? Was that a part of the payment?”
There was a step in the hall, the soft whisper of a woman’s slippers over marble tiling. Jarvis’s hand inched toward the bell cord. Sebastian drew back the pistol’s safety with a click that reverberated loudly around the room. “That would fall under the heading of Stupid Things to Do, my lord.”
Jarvis froze, just as the door from the hall swung open.
“Your carriage has been brought round, Papa,” said a young woman, stepping into the room. “Do you wish me to tell Coachman John to—”
She was a tall young woman, almost as tall as her father, with ordinary brown hair she wore slung back in an unbecoming bun. One hand still on the knob, she drew up just inside the room with a small gasp that jerked Sebastian’s attention away from the man by the hearth for one, disastrous moment.
And in that moment, Jarvis fell on the bell rope and gave it a hard yank.
S
ebastian leapt toward the woman. Catching her by the arm, he spun her around in front of him just as the first footman appeared in the door. His fingers digging into her arm, Sebastian pressed the flintlock’s muzzle against the side of the woman’s head. “Tell them to back off,” he said to Jarvis.
Consternation, fury, and a whisper of what might have been fear chased each other across Jarvis’s normally impassive face. His jaws clenched tight, only his lips working as he glared at the wide-eyed men piling up in the open doorway and spat out, “Stay back, you fools.”
Arms spread, his gaze fixed on Sebastian, the lead footman took a step back, then another, his fellows falling back with him.
“Miss Jarvis here—” Sebastian glanced questioningly at the woman he held. “That is, I assume you are Miss Jarvis?”
Maintaining awesome composure, she slowly nodded her head.
“I thought so.” Sebastian edged through the door and out into the hall, dragging the woman with him. “Miss Jarvis here is going to provide me with an escort to safety. I do trust you will all have the sense not to attempt anything heroic.”
The hall seemed suddenly full of servants, white-faced men and women who fell silently back as Sebastian edged Jarvis’s daughter toward the front. From the doorway of the library, Jarvis nodded to the stony-faced butler, who rushed to open the door.
An eerie, opaque darkness loomed beyond, what was left of the day having been swallowed by the fog that curled through the open door and drifted into the hall, bringing with it a foul, acrid stench that pinched the nostrils and tore at the throat.
Sebastian glanced down at the woman who held herself so stiff and straight in his grasp. “You did say there’s a carriage outside, didn’t you?”
“Did I?” she said in an admirably clear, steady voice.
“I rather think you did.” He glanced at one of the maids, a big-boned, ruddy-faced woman who stood just inside the front door, her arms wrapped around her head, her eyes squeezed shut so tight, her entire face contorted with the effort.
“You there.”
The maid’s eyes flew open wide, her mouth going slack.
“Yes, you,” he repeated, when she simply stared back at him, the bodice of her gown jerking up and down with each rapid, shallow breath. “Get in the carriage. Now.”
“Surely one hostage will be sufficient to guarantee your safety,” said Miss Jarvis hastily. “You don’t need Alice.”
“It’s not my safety I’m concerned about.” Sebastian shifted the muzzle of the gun toward the maid. “Now, Alice. In the carriage.”
With a bleat of terror, Alice scuttled down the front steps and up into the carriage.
Sebastian backed up the carriage steps, hauling Miss Jarvis with him. “It would be detrimental to the ladies’ health were anyone to attempt to follow us,” he said to the grim men crowding the door behind them. “Drive toward Tothill Fields,” he shouted to the coachmen. “
Now
.”
At the crack of the whip, the horses leapt to the traces, the carriage lurching forward with a jerk that set the lanterns to swinging on their brackets. The maid huddled into a corner of the forward seat, her hands holding her apron over her face as she let out a series of soft little screams.
“Stop that infernal nonsense,” said Sebastian after roughly the twentieth scream.
“She’s afraid,” said Miss Jarvis.
Sebastian transferred his attention to the woman who sat tall and stiff-backed on the seat beside him. “You’re not?”
She swung her head to look directly at him. In the swaying light from the outside lanterns, he could see the terror in her eyes. “Of course I am.”
“I must say, you control yourself admirably well.”
“I see no point in indulging in hysterics.” She ran one hand up her other arm briskly, as if to warm it. A brazier of coals spread its slow heat through the carriage, but a damp cold radiated off the glass and her modest muslin gown was not designed for warmth.
Sebastian reached for the carriage robe of wool lined with fur that lay folded up beside him and held it out to her. “I shan’t harm you, you know.”
After the briefest of hesitations, she took the robe with a politely murmured, “Thank you,” and wrapped it around her shoulders.
