When Maidens Mourn (12 page)

“You were a soldier?” said Sebastian.

“What makes ye think that?”

“It left you with a rather distinctive face.”

The man pushed away from the cellar. “I was here all day Thursday. Ask any o’ the lads in the public room; they’ll tell ye. Ye gonna call ’em all liars?”

Sebastian said, “I’m told Jamie Knox has yellow eyes. So why are yours brown?”

The man gave a startled laugh. “It’s dark. Ye can’t see what color a man’s eyes are in the dark.”

“I can.”

“Huh.” The tavern owner sniffed. “They only say that about me eyes because of the sign. Ye did see the sign, didn’t ye? They also like t’say I only wear black. Next thing ye know, they’ll be whisperin’ that I’ve got a tail tucked into me breeches.”

Sebastian let his gaze drift around the ancient yard. The massive flint and tile rampart that ran along the side of the court was distinctly different from the wall that separated the yard from the burial ground at its rear. No more than seven feet high and topped by a row of iron spikes designed to discourage body snatchers, that part of the wall lay deep in the heavy shadows cast by the sprawling limbs of the graveyard’s leafy elms. And in the fork of one of those trees crouched a lean man dressed all in black except for the white of his shirt. He balanced there easily, the stock of his rifle resting against his thigh.

To anyone else, the rifleman would have been invisible.

Sebastian said, “When he comes down out of his tree, tell Mr. Knox he can either talk to me, or he can talk to Bow Street. I suppose his choice will depend on exactly what’s in his cellars.”

The stocky man’s scarred face split into a nasty grin. “I don’t need to tell him. He can hear ye. Has the eyes and ears of a cat, he does.”

Sebastian turned toward the gateway. The stocky man put out a hand to stop him.

Sebastian stared pointedly at the grimy fingers clenching his sleeve. The hand was withdrawn.

The man licked his lower lip. “He could’ve shot out both yer eyes from where he’s sittin’. And I’ll tell ye somethin’ else: He looks enough like ye t’be yer brother. Ye think about that. Ye think about that real hard.” He paused a moment, then added mockingly,
“Me lord.”

S
ebastian walked down Cheapside, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his coat, the hot wind eddying the flames of the streetlamps to send leaping shadows over the shuttered shop fronts and dusty, rubbish-strewn cobbles.

Once, he had been the youngest of three brothers, the fourth child born to the Earl of Hendon and his beautiful, vivacious countess, Sophie. If there had ever been a time in his parents’ marriage that was pleasant, Sebastian couldn’t remember it. They had lived essentially separate lives, the Earl devoting himself to affairs of state while the Countess lost herself in a gay whirl of balls and routs and visits to country houses. The few occasions when husband and wife came together had been characterized by stony silences punctuated all too often with stormy bouts of tears and voices raised in anger.

Yet Sebastian’s childhood had not been an entirely unhappy one. In his memories, Sophie’s touch was always soft and loving, and her laughter—when her husband was not around—came frequently. Her four children had never doubted her love for them.
Though unlike each other in many ways and separated in age, the three brothers had been unusually close. Only Amanda, the eldest child, had held herself aloof. “Sometimes I think Amanda was born angry with the world,” Sophie had once said, her thoughtful, worried gaze following her daughter when Amanda stormed off from a game of battledore and shuttlecock.

It would be years before Sebastian understood the true source of Amanda’s anger.

He paused to look out over the gray, sunken tombs and rank nettles choking St. Paul’s churchyard, his thoughts still lost in the past.

In contrast to his gay, demonstrative wife, the Earl of Hendon had been a stern, demanding father preoccupied with affairs of state. But he’d still found the time to teach his sons to ride and shoot and fence, and he took a gruff pride in their prowess. An intensely private man, he had remained a distant figure, detached and remote—especially from his youngest child, the child so unlike him in looks and temperament and talents.

Then had come a series of tragedies. Sebastian’s oldest brother, Richard, was the first to die, caught in a vicious riptide while swimming off the coast of Cornwall near the Earl’s principal residence. Then, one dreadful summer when the clouds of war swept across Europe and the fabric of society as they’d always known it seemed forever rent by revolution and violence, Cecil had sickened and died too.

Once the proud father of three healthy sons, Hendon found himself left with only the youngest, Sebastian. Sebastian, the son most unlike his father; the son on whom the Earl’s wrath always fell the hardest, the son who had always known himself to be a disappointment in every way to the brusque, barrel-chested man with the piercingly blue St. Cyr eyes that were so noticeably lacking in his new heir.

That same summer, when Sebastian was eleven, Hendon’s
countess sailed away for a day’s pleasure cruise, never to return.
Lost at sea,
they’d said. Even at the time, Sebastian hadn’t believed it. For months he’d climbed the cliffs overlooking the endless choppy waters of the Channel, convinced that if she were in truth dead, he’d somehow know it; he’d feel it.

Odd, he thought now as he pushed away from the churchyard’s rusted railing and turned his feet toward the noisy, brightly lit hells off St. James’s Street, how he could have been so right about that and so wrong about almost everything else.

Lying alone in her bed, Hero heard the wind begin to pick up just before midnight. Hot gusts billowed the curtains at her open window and filled the bedroom with the smell of dust and all the ripe odors of a city in summer. She listened to the charlie cry one o’clock, then two. And still she lay awake, listening to the wind and endlessly analyzing and reassessing all that she had learned so far of the grinding, inexorable sequence of shadowy, half-understood events and forces that had led to Gabrielle’s death and the disappearance of her two little cousins. But as the hours dragged on, it gradually dawned on Hero that her sleeplessness had as much to do with the empty bed beside her as anything else.

It was a realization that both startled and chagrined her. Her motives for entering into this marriage had been complicated and confused and not entirely understood by anyone, least of all herself. She was not a woman much given to introspection or prolonged, agonized examination of her motives. She had always seen this characteristic as something admirable, something to be secretly proud of. Now she found herself wondering if perhaps in that she had erred. For who could be more foolish than a woman who doesn’t know her own heart?

A loose shutter banged somewhere in the night for what seemed like the thousandth time. Thrusting aside the covers with a
soft exclamation of exasperation, she crossed the room to slam down the sash. Then she paused with one hand on the latch, her gaze on the elegant, solitary figure strolling down the street toward the house.

The night was dark, the wind having blown out most of the streetlights and both oil lamps mounted high on either side of the entrance. But Hero had no difficulty recognizing Devlin’s long stride or the lean line of his body as he turned to mount the front steps.

She knew a wash of relief, although she had been unwilling to acknowledge until now the growing concern his long absence had aroused. Then her hand tightened on the drapery beside her.

They were strangers to each other in many ways, their marriage one born of necessity and characterized by wary distrust leavened by a powerful current of passion, a grudging respect, and a playful kind of rivalry. Yet she knew him well enough to recognize the brittle set of his shoulders and the glitteringly dangerous precision of each graceful movement.

Eleven months before, something had happened in Devlin’s life, something that had driven him from his longtime mistress Kat Boleyn and created a bitter estrangement between the Viscount and his father, the Earl. She did not know precisely what had occurred; she knew only that whatever it was, it had plunged Devlin into a months-long brandy-soaked spiral of self-destruction from which he had only recently emerged.

But now, as she listened to his footsteps climb the stairs to the second floor and heard the distant click of his bedroom door closing quietly behind him, she knew a deep disquiet…

And an unexpected welling of an emotion so fierce that it caught her breath and left her wondrous and shaken and oddly, uncharacteristically frightened.

Tuesday, 4 August

“My lord?”

Sebastian opened one eye, saw his valet’s cheerful, fine-boned face, then squeezed the eye shut again when the room lurched unpleasantly. “Go away.”

Jules Calhoun’s voice sounded irritatingly hearty. “Sir Henry Lovejoy is here to see you, my lord.”

“Tell him I’m not here. Tell him I’m dead. I don’t care what the hell you tell him. Just go away.”

There was a moment’s pause. Then Calhoun said, “Unfortunately, Lady Devlin went out early this morning, so she is unable to receive the magistrate in your stead.”

“Early, you say? Where has she gone?” He opened both eyes and sat up quickly—not a wise thing to do under the circumstances.
“Bloody hell,”
he yelped, bowing his head and pressing one splayed hand to his pounding forehead.

“She did not say. Here, my lord; drink this.”

Sebastian felt a hot mug thrust into his free hand. “Not more of your damned milk thistle.”

“There is nothing better to cleanse the liver, my lord.”

“My liver is just fine,” growled Sebastian, and heard the valet laugh.

Calhoun went to jerk back the drapes at the windows. “Shall I have Morey tell Sir Henry you’ll join him in fifteen minutes?”

Sebastian swung his legs over the side of the bed and groaned again. “Make it twenty.”

Sebastian found the magistrate munching on a tray of cucumber and brown bread and butter sandwiches washed down with tea.

“Sir Henry,” said Sebastian, entering the room with a quick step. “My apologies for keeping you waiting.”

The magistrate surged to his feet and dabbed at his lips with a
napkin. “Your majordomo has most kindly provided me with some much-needed sustenance. I’ve been up at Camlet Moat since dawn.”

“Please, sit down,” said Sebastian, going to sprawl in the chair opposite him. “Any sign yet of the missing children?”

“None, I’m afraid. And that’s despite the hundreds of men now beating through the wood and surrounding countryside in search of them. Unfortunately, Miss Tennyson’s brother has offered a reward for the children—he’s even set up an office in the Fleet, staffed by a solicitor, to handle any information that may be received.”

“Why do you say ‘unfortunately’?”

“Because the result is likely to be chaos. I’ve seen it happen before. A child is lost; with the best of intentions, the grieving family offers a reward, and suddenly you have scores of wretched children—sometimes even hundreds—being offered to the authorities as the ‘lost’ child.”