What Angels Fear (44 page)

Sebastian felt the planks of the dock rough beneath his knees, the cold air blowing in from the basin cool against the film of sweat on his face as he watched Wilcox walk up to him. “And what of your choices, Wilcox? Your choice to kill Rachel York rather than pay for whatever she was offering to sell to you. Was that so wise?”

Wilcox kept coming until he stood just feet away, the pistol held straight-armed before him. “Ah, but you see, I thought our dear Rachel had made an unwise choice herself. When I heard she’d gone to meet Hendon that night, I assumed she’d found a higher bidder for her wares. So I followed, expecting to recover the evidence of my little insurance scheme. Instead, what do I find but your mother’s most interesting affidavit. It was a surprise, believe me.”

“Insurance scheme—?” Sebastian began, only to break off as he suddenly understood. “Of course. The story you carried to Hendon last year about an embarrassing sexual peccadillo was an invention, designed to extricate yourself from an awkward situation. How long
have
you been caught in Leo Pierrepont’s web?”

Wilcox’s habitual smile never slipped. “Three years. I’m the one who tipped Pierrepont off as to our intentions in Spain.” He said it as if he were proud of it.

“So that’s the reason you tracked down Rachel’s maid, Mary Grant? To recover whatever evidence Rachel took from Pierrepont that would have proved your involvement with the French went back much further than anyone supposed.”

“That’s right. I doubt the stupid fool even realized the value of what she had.”

“But that didn’t stop you from killing her.”

“One could never be sure,” he said, smiling through his teeth. “The evidence against myself I destroyed at once, of course. But the other documents I kept. One never knows when such things might prove useful. Where you made your mistake was in taking your mother’s affidavit from my library. Until I found it missing, I’d no notion you’d tweaked onto me.”

Sebastian looked up into his brother-in-law’s face, and laughed. “I don’t have the affidavit. Do you mean to tell me you’ve lost it? How . . . careless of you.”

Wilcox’s hand tightened convulsively around the pistol’s handle, then relaxed. “An interesting tactic. You think to unnerve me, I take it?” He shook his head. “It won’t work.” The man’s face suddenly hardened, his normally placid, smiling features twisting in a way that reminded Sebastian of Bayard. “Set the girl down on the dock—but don’t get up. Back away from her on your knees.”

His gaze still focused on Wilcox’s face, Sebastian eased Kat down onto the dock. She let out a soft sigh, then lay still as he shifted away from her, repositioning his weight subtly so that he came up into a crouch.

Wilcox smiled. “There. I need a clean shot. Wouldn’t want to confuse the authorities when I present them with your dead body. And the mutilated corpse of your last victim, of course,” he added, his gaze flicking significantly toward Kat. “They’ll be so pleased.”

Sebastian had his good leg under him, his muscles tensed, ready to spring, as he watched Wilcox’s eyes.

“No one actually
cares
who killed those women. You understand that, don’t you? No fire burns within the collective metropolitan bosom to see justice done. People simply want to feel safe, and with you dead, they will. I’ll be a hero. Ironic, isn’t it?”

Sebastian saw the flicker in Wilcox’s eyes the instant before his finger tightened on the pistol’s trigger.

Sebastian dove forward, twisting his body sideways as he flung up his left arm. His open palm slammed into Wilcox’s extended wrist, knocking it up just as the pistol exploded fire and smoke into the night.

Sebastian felt a searing heat tear across his upper arm. Then his right shoulder slammed into Wilcox at midthigh. He wrapped his good arm around the back of the bastard’s knees and yanked, although the sheer momentum of the lunge would have been enough by itself to knock him over.

Wilcox went down hard, his back hitting the dock with a thump that drove the air from his lungs in a huff as Sebastian landed on top of him. Still gasping for breath, Wilcox swung the empty flintlock like a club, bashing its heavy weight down on Sebastian’s back.

Swearing harshly, Sebastian grabbed the man’s pistol hand in a brutal grip and yanked it over his head, tightening his grip until Wilcox relaxed his hold on the pistol in a spasm of pain. Then he went suddenly, utterly still.

“So you’ve overpowered me,” he said panting, the light from the distant fire gleaming in his eyes as he smiled up at Sebastian. “What now, hmm? You do realize that you’ve no proof of what I did to those women. None. Even the scratches that bitch left on my neck have healed. It’ll simply be your word against mine. And who would believe you?”

“You’re forgetting Kat Boleyn.”

“What? The word of a whore? Against that of a friend of the Crown Prince himself?” Wilcox smiled. “I don’t think so.” Still smiling, he twisted his lower body and drove his knee up, straight into Sebastian’s wounded thigh.

The pain exploded in a fireball that made Sebastian gasp. For an instant his vision blurred and his head swam, and his hold on Wilcox relaxed just enough to enable the man to clamber backward from beneath him.

Rolling over, Wilcox made it as far as his hands and knees before Sebastian lunged after him. They teetered for a moment at the edge of the dock, then went over together.

Sebastian lost his grip on Wilcox as they fell. Wilcox slammed into the water in an awkward, crumpled heap. But Sebastian managed to straighten his body so that he hit feet first. He plunged deep into the cold, black water, then shot back to the surface, treading water heavily, weighed down by the awkwardness of boots and rough breeches, the wounds in his shoulder and thigh on fire.

He could hear his brother-in-law coughing and gasping, see the white of his cravat and waistcoat glowing out of the darkness of the night. Sebastian swam toward him. For a moment the man’s fat head disappeared beneath black water sheened with orange by the distant fire. Then he floundered up again, arms and legs thrashing, his eyes opening wide in his pale face when he saw Sebastian.

“Help me! For God’s sake,
help me
. I can’t swim.” One of his flailing hands caught at Sebastian’s neck, clutching, strangling.

“Let go of me, you fool. You’ll drown us both.”

But Wilcox was beyond reason. “You can’t let me drown,” he sputtered, his grip on Sebastian tightening, frantic.

Sucking in a deep breath, Sebastian dove, twisting under Wilcox’s arm to break the man’s grip. This time, he was careful to surface behind the floundering man’s back. With a straight arm, Sebastian reached out and grasped the back of Wilcox’s collar. It was a standard lifesaving maneuver; Sebastian had only to pull the man in close, wrap a bent elbow beneath Wilcox’s chin to keep his head above water, and swim toward the dock.

He could hear in the distance the roar of the flames consuming the warehouse and, more distant still, the frantic
clang-clang
of the fire bell. Sebastian tightened his grip on the back of Wilcox’s coat. But he kept his arm straight.

It all comes down to choices
, the man had said. And the choice Sebastian now faced lay dark and murky before him. Because Wilcox was right: there was no proof of what the man had done, nothing linking him to the twisted slaying of those two women, nothing to stop him from doing it again, and again.

Other considerations whispered to his conscience: if saved from the water, Wilcox might still somehow manage to best Sebastian and attack Kat. But Sebastian knew that wasn’t the real issue. He had learned long ago that the line between right and wrong, between good and evil, isn’t always sharply drawn. But he still believed that the line existed, nonetheless. He’d set out, barely a week ago, to prove himself unjustly accused of a heinous crime. Only gradually had his purpose shifted. And he knew that while he might never be able to prove his own innocence, he could at least fulfill a promise made to a woman too long dead to hear.

From somewhere near at hand came the sound of a man’s shout. But it didn’t matter. Sebastian had made his choice. Opening his hand, he let the coat of Bath superfine slip through his fingers.

Chapter 63

F
rom where he stood at the edge of the dock, Sir Henry Lovejoy watched the Viscount climb the rough ladder from the water below. As he reached the top, Devlin looked up, his uncanny eyes gleaming yellow in the reflected fire’s light.

The two men stared at each other, Devlin’s breath coming so hard and fast that the coarse cloth of his water-soaked, bloodstained shirt shuddered with each lifting of his chest. It was Devlin who spoke first.

“The boy, Tom? Where is he?”

“Quite safe. I intercepted him just outside your father’s house in Grosvenor Square. That’s right,” he added, when Devlin’s eyebrows twitched together. “I overheard your instructions to the lad back at the Rose and Crown.”

“And?”

Lovejoy cleared his throat. “I found Wilcox’s note in his pocket.”

“The note was unsigned.”

“Yes. I admit I initially found it difficult to credence the lad’s rather long and tangled tale. But he’d had the forethought to liberate his lordship’s pocketbook, which lent considerable weight to his story.”

Levering himself up onto the dock, his wet clothes clinging to his lean frame, the Viscount went to crouch beside the crumpled, bloody form of the woman. Lovejoy didn’t move. “Is she . . .”

“No.” Her blood streaming over his hands, Devlin lifted the woman gently into his arms. The wind caught her long dark hair, blowing it loose across his face. She stirred, her voice a hoarse murmur, and he nuzzled his lips against her ear, whispering reassurances.

Then his gaze lifted, again, to meet Lovejoy’s. “How much did you overhear? Just now.”

And Sir Henry Lovejoy, that hardheaded stickler for the processes of the law and the sanctity of truth, who had arrived at the basin’s edge only in time to watch Wilcox’s head first disappear beneath the black waters, smiled tightly and said, “Enough.”

Chapter 64

S
ebastian watched Kat breathe, watched the gentle rise and fall of her breasts beneath lace-trimmed sheets, watched the flicker of golden candlelight over the pale skin of her eyelids, closed now in gentle sleep.

He stood beside the bed, his dressing gown thrown casually over his shoulders. Around them, the Brook Street house settled into the hush of the night. It seemed oddly strange, to be here again in his own house, to be wearing freshly laundered linen and fine silk. He was here, and safe, and yet the coiled sense of alertness, the driving restlessness remained.

“She’s going to be fine, Sebastian,” said Paul Gibson, coming to stand beside him. “I’ll stay with her. But you need to get some rest. You’ve lost a fair amount of blood yourself.”

Sebastian nodded. Beneath the bandages, his shoulder and leg throbbed with a fiery ache that seemed to radiate out and blend with every cut and bruise he’d acquired over the past week. He felt as if he hadn’t slept in a lifetime. “Call me if she wakes.”

“Of course.”

Turning toward his room, Sebastian became aware of the sound of a man’s loud, angry voice drifting up from the hall below.

“Damn your impudence,” swore the Earl of Hendon. “And to hell with your instructions.
I want to see my son
.”

Sebastian paused at the top of the stairs. “Father.”

Hendon looked up, a succession of emotions chasing one another across the features of his white, anguished face as he watched Sebastian limp down the stairs toward him. But all he said was, “I’d heard you were hurt.”

“It’s nothing,” said Sebastian, and led the way into the drawing room.

Hendon closed the door carefully behind him. “I’ve had a meeting with Lord Jarvis and Sir Henry Lovejoy, concerning these recent revelations about Wilcox. The situation is delicate, particularly with the Prince’s instillation as Regent to take place tomorrow. For an intimate of the Prince to be implicated in such heinous crimes at this time . . .”

“Devilishly inconvenient. So what is Jarvis proposing? I’m confident he’s come up with some solution.”

At the levity in Sebastian’s tone, the Earl’s features settled into a deep frown. “As a matter of fact, the suggestion was mine. The murders of Rachel York and Mary Grant will be attributed to the Frenchman, Leo Pierrepont.”

“Of course. Cooperative of him to have fled the country.” Sebastian went to stand before the hearth, his gaze on the fire. “And Wilcox’s death?”

“The work of the cutthroats and thieves who set fire to the warehouse. The riverfront can be a dangerous place at night.”

“Amanda will be pleased. No opprobrium attached to the family name to interfere with Stephanie’s come out next year.” Sebastian glanced around. “You do realize that Amanda knew?”

“What? That Wilcox had butchered those two women? That I can’t believe. Even of Amanda.”

Sebastian smiled grimly. “Unlike you, however, she was unaware of her husband’s French connections.”

Sebastian wasn’t expecting an apology from his father and he didn’t get one. Sebastian waited, instead, for the inevitable question.

Hendon cleared his throat. “It was Wilcox who took Lady Hendon’s affidavit from Rachel York’s body, I assume?”

“Yes. Although I gather from something he said it’s gone missing again. He thought I’d taken it.”

Hendon stood very still, beads of moisture showing on his temples, as if he were hot. “You don’t have it?”

“No.”

The Earl turned away, one hand scrubbing across his face as he struggled to absorb this. It was a moment before he said gruffly, “And the woman? I understand her injuries are serious.”

“She’s lost a lot of blood, but the doctor says nothing vital was hit. Barring infection, she should recover.”

Hendon worked his lower jaw back and forth in that way he had. “She told you, I presume, what passed between us six years ago.”

Sebastian stared at his father.