The Birth of Blue Satan (14 page)

Robert Shaw, his father’s steward, came forward and, anxiously lowering his gaze, went down on one knee. “Welcome, my lord. Your message reached us yesterday evening. Mr. Bramwell is awaiting your lordship’s pleasure, and Sir Harrowby is here. He has begun receiving your lordship’s guests for tomorrow.”

The death of an earl was a momentous event, to be marked with ceremony. The number of carriages in the drive signaled that quite a few of his father’s friends had come. Gideon wanted to ask Robert Shaw whom his father had named as his executor and why that person had not waited for his recovery before scheduling the burial. But there was something he had to do first.

“Thank you, Robert. I should like to see my father now. You may tell Mr. Bramwell that I am here and will speak to him later.”

“As you will, my lord.” Robert paused. “My lord—may I express my deep regret for your lordship’s loss? His lordship—Lord Hawkhurst—”

Moved by Robert’s tearful emotion, Gideon filled in for him, fighting the catch in his own throat, “Yes. He was a grand old gentleman, was he not?”

“Indeed, my lord, he was.”

Then Robert, noting his pallor perhaps, gestured to a footman stationed near the stairs. “Assist his lordship upstairs.”

Gideon waved him away. “No, thank you. I had rather go up alone.”

He looked behind him for his two constables, but they had vanished somewhere between the carriage and the end of the hall. He had to assume their way had been blocked by his servants, and he could only be relieved.

On the stairs he passed the hired mutes, with their schooled expressions of sadness, stationed at intervals up the wide stone steps. The dreary sight made him forget his weakness, until he reached the top, when he was forced to notice it, due to the shakiness in his legs. Two days in a closed carriage, on top of a fortnight in bed had sapped his vigour, just when he had a need for twice as much.

He fought against his impatience. It was the unfortunate result of his countrymen’s insistence on having no police force that the burden of bringing offenders to justice had to be borne by the victims of crime. It was the price they all paid for the extraordinary freedom England gave her citizens, but Gideon could not help but feel that more could have been done in the case of his father’s murder than Sir Joshua had seen fit to do.

Upstairs he passed through an antechamber hung with more baize, then through another the walls of which had been completely covered in black cloth. Beyond this second one lay the Great Chamber, which had been shrouded in heavy black velvet, his family coat of arms attached by nails on every wall.

Whoever had arranged the details, while he had been too ill to see to them himself, had ordered them as his father would have wished.

Raised on a dais, on a bed of state beneath a canopy, lay his father’s shrouded body.

A sudden whine came from near the foot of the bed. Gideon stooped to pet the dog that came to greet him. The sleek, grey body of his father’s favourite lurcher whipped about his legs in a frenzy of relief.

“Hello, Argos. How are you, boy?” He had to fight the tightening of his throat provoked by the unfailing loyalty of his father’s dog.

No one else was in the room. Undoubtedly it had been cleared to allow him to express his grief in private. He gave a look about him and took a deep, aching breath before approaching the bed.

The room was being kept very cold, which was easy to do at this time of year with the weather still chill. Gideon glanced once at the empty fireplace, which at Christmas had been blazing with logs. He suppressed a shiver and moved on.

His father’s body had been preserved with sawdust and tar to give his mourners these few weeks to pay their respects. Its unnatural appearance was not to be wondered at, but Gideon could not help but be affected by the insult that had been done to it. He sought some sign of the man he had known inside this pale, cold shell. He stroked his father’s face and felt the impartialness of death.

This corpse no longer housed his father. The vigorous, iron-willed man that had been Lord Hawkhurst had long since abandoned it to go to another place. No matter how many days his soul had been allowed to reanimate his body by this formal delay, it was gone for good. Seeing his effigy brought Gideon some minor comfort, but there was nothing here to which to cleave. He had missed the chance to say goodbye, to ask for forgiveness, and nothing would ever bring his lost chance back.

He had never felt so alone. With neither parent nor sibling living, he was without kin in the world. He could not count his cousin Harrowby or his more distant relatives, for there was something about close family, the people who had watched one grow from birth, that could never be approached by anyone else.

His painful musings turned to fury at the person who had taken his father from him, especially at the moment when they had suffered the worst falling out of their lives. Gideon stood over his father’s body and swore an oath to bring the man to justice if it was the last thing he did.

Questions and worries that had been plaguing him since he’d recovered consciousness began to tumble through his mind. He wondered how his father had been wounded. If his sword had been near enough to grab—and apparently it had—how had his murderer managed to deal a mortal blow? In spite of Lord Hawkhurst’s age, he had been a large and powerful man with a long reach, and gifted with a sword. He had kept up his practice, even here in Kent.

Gideon’s curiosity led him to examine the body. His father’s white shroud had been made of linen, in defiance of the statutes. Even in death, he would never have condescended to wear wool next his skin, but it was unlikely that Mr. Bramwell, whose duty it was to report the infraction, would ever think of questioning his father’s right.

Before he quite knew what he was doing, Gideon had untied his father’s cravat and the chin cloth to his cap to get at the slit in his shirt.

The shroud had been folded about his feet and tied at the end. The opening over his breastbone had not been stitched together, as by custom, no dress for a corpse was to be sewed with thread. Gideon parted the linen layer and gently pushed it back to reveal his father’s injuries.

Starting at his heart and running to the middle of his abdomen, was a long, ugly rift with sharp, blue edges pulled badly together with stitches. The sight of it made Gideon pull back in horror, until he realized that this particular injury had been made by the embalmers themselves. Even knowing this, he needed a moment to marshal his will to carry on. He regretted his impulse to investigate, but now that his own disrespect had been added to the insults to his father’s corpse, he did not want to have acted in vain.

He forced himself to ignore his feelings and scanned his father’s thick chest for evidence of a mortal wound. His eyes soon found a small, surprisingly thin slit—no more than a half-inch across—in the region of his heart. He could not imagine that his father would have allowed a swordsman an opening like that, no matter how gifted his assailant had been. And the wound was neat, as if he had been unable to deflect it at all.

The wound was too neat. There was no sign of scraping or bruising or tearing. It was as neat as if a piece of beef had been pierced.

With a sudden hunch, Gideon pushed the shroud completely off his father’s left shoulder and turned him over on his right side. On his back he found another slit, only this slightly wider. The skin where the blade had entered had been scraped. And a small circular bruise around it showed where the edge of the hilt had hit.

His father had been stabbed hard, and from behind. A small-sword with a small, round hilt—a shape that Gideon had never seen before— had been thrust with so much force that it had run clear through him. It had been his murderer’s intention to kill him from the outset. There had been no fight.

As he eased his father’s corpse onto its back and began to redress it with gentle movements, his mind filled in the likely scene. Lord Hawkhurst had turned his back on someone he had known. Someone for whom he had apparently had no fear. He had turned to fetch something, for it would have been impolite otherwise to turn his back on a guest. And his killer had used that moment to murder him.

He had drawn a blade and thrust it into Lord Hawkhurst’s back, and only then had Gideon’s father been aware of the treachery. He would have fought—Gideon knew his father well enough to know that nothing could have brought him down immediately, not even a blade through his heart.

He would have reached for the sword that was never far from his side. He would have turned—perhaps with the other man’s blade still inside him. His murderer would have been defenceless, in that case, for only a few seconds before the impact of his father’s wound brought him down.

In that brief moment, however, at least his father would have had the satisfaction of getting in the last blow.

And then, while he was bleeding to death, his murderer stayed to withdraw his blade. Because he might be identified by it? It was likely. Swords were crafted by hand. A fine blade—and this had been very fine, judging by its narrow size—might have been easy to trace to its maker and, through him, to its owner.

As Gideon finished dressing his father, pulling the shroud back in place, relacing his cravat, and tying the broad chin cloth to his cap, he realized how very tired he was. The emotion of this day would not be something he would ever want to live through again.

When his father’s corpse was laid out as neatly as it had been before, he knelt on the floor beside the bed, took his father’s left hand in his, put his forehead against the mattress, and prayed.

He fell asleep like that and no one disturbed him until later that night when the Reverend Mr. Bramwell sent a servant to see if his lordship would receive him. Gideon learned that his cousin Harrowby was entertaining his guests in one of the Abbey’s large withdrawing rooms, information he welcomed because it absolved him of his hosting duties for one more day. Considering how widespread the news of his own illness had been, he believed he would be excused from receiving people tonight.

He revived himself with a visit to his own bedchamber and a bit of water splashed on his face, and ordered a supper to be brought up to his rooms. Then he met the Reverend Mr. Bramwell in the gallery with the intention of strolling up and down inside it, knowing that the sooner he exercised his strength, the sooner he would regain it.

Mr. Bramwell entered and made him a deep, ceremonial bow.

Seeing the distress on the priest’s face, Gideon hastened to help him up and embrace him. Feeling the old man tremble beneath his palms, he gave up thoughts of walking for the moment, and instead led him to a wooden bench against the wall.

“I should not say it,” Mr. Bramwell said, “I, who spoke the prayers over his body as he lay there dying—But I cannot accept that his lordship is gone. The Abbey always echoed with his voice, and now that voice has been stilled.”

Gideon did his best to soothe him, though the silence the priest described had enhanced his own sense of loss. Eventually, Mr. Bramwell achieved a certain degree of calm.

After a few minutes’ talk, Gideon perceived that no small part of Mr. Bramwell’s sorrow was linked to his anxiety over the loss of his patron. A learned, nonjuring priest, he had long ago sought the protection of Lord Hawkhurst when all state positions had been barred to one of his tenets—not for his religion, which was conformist, but for his deep, unquestioning belief in the divine right of succession. When William of Orange had supplanted James II, Mr. Bramwell had refused to swear allegiance to the Crown, and he had refused to take the oath of loyalty to all subsequent monarchs, whom he regarded as usurpers of the legitimate line.

Gideon consoled the tutor of his boyhood years with a promise that he would always have a home at Rotherham Abbey. Then, he asked him why the funeral had been scheduled when it was doubtful he would be able to come.

“That was James Henry’s doing. You know how your father trusted him with all of his business. He made him his executor, and as such Henry insisted that the funeral should not be delayed. I begged him to wait until you were recovered, but he said that since your own life was feared for, we had better finish with one funeral in time for the next.”

Gideon wasn’t sure that his motive had been quite that simple—not since he knew that James Henry was the servant who had relayed the facts of his argument with his father to Sir Joshua Tate. But at least some reason had been given. He would speak to James Henry himself, tomorrow after the service, and find out how deep his hostility was.

“I should have liked to know of my father’s wishes before all the arrangements were made.”

“As to that, I believe you will be satisfied. I had expected your father to wish to be interred in Westminster Abbey, where most of your forebears have been laid,” Mr. Bramwell said, “but his will was very clear on the subject. He wished to be laid here in his own chapel. He did not want to be put to rest alongside so many traitors. Of late, he had become more hopeless about our cause, but his loyalty to our rightful king never wavered.”

Gideon hid a small smile. It would be impossible to tell how much of these sentiments had come from his father and how much from the person who reported them. Without a family to care for, Mr. Bramwell had always been rather unguarded in his Jacobite speech, and age had done nothing to make him more discreet.

“But the details are as he asked?”

“Right down to the number of pairs of mourning gloves and the rings that should be ordered. You will receive yours tomorrow after the service.”

“Mr. Bramwell, did my father express any fears to you before he was murdered? Was there anyone he especially feared?”

“You are asking me if I know who might have done this terrible thing. That toad-eating Whig, Sir Joshua Tate, tried to ask me the same thing, but I had to tell him I was not in his lordship’s confidence.”

He glanced over at Gideon. “You stare because you must have imagined that if anyone was in your father’s confidence, it would have been I, his spiritual advisor. But I will tell you something I never would say to that scheming magistrate. Your father always kept things close to his chest. He knew the risk of entrusting too many people with a secret. That is why he was so trusted himself.