When Maidens Mourn (31 page)

A warning bell sounded in the distance. He hesitated a moment, then took her hand in his and kissed her fingers. “Thank you,” he said, and turned toward the door.

“Sebastian—”

He paused to look back at her.

“They say Jamie Knox’s hearing, eyesight, and reflexes rival yours. And we both know he looks enough like you to be your brother—or at least your half brother. What’s going on here?”

All the noise of a theatrical troupe about to begin a dress rehearsal
echoed around them—quickly stifled giggles, a hoarse shout for some missing prop, the thump of hurrying feet on bare floorboards. Sebastian said, “I don’t know. He claims his father was a cavalry captain.”

“But you don’t believe him?”

“I don’t know what to believe. Amanda told me once that my father was probably a groom.”

Kat’s lip curled. “That sounds like something Amanda would say, just to be hurtful.” Sebastian’s sister, Amanda, had hated him from birth—for being male, for being eligible to inherit their father’s title and riches, and, as Sebastian had learned recently, for being living evidence of their mother’s endless, indiscriminate infidelities.

He said, “That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be true.”

Sebastian was standing before the empty hearth in his library, a booted foot on the cold grate, a glass of brandy in his hand, when he heard a carriage draw up before the house and Hero’s quick steps mount to the front door. A single brace of candles burned on the mantel; the rest of the room lay in shadow. He listened to her low-voiced consultation with Morey. Then she appeared at the entrance to the library, one gloved hand raised to release the throat catch of her evening cloak.

“You’re home early,” he said, straightening as he turned toward her.

“I’m glad I found you,” she said, advancing into the room. “I’ve just learned the most astonishing information.”

In spite of himself, Sebastian found himself smiling. “Really? What?”

She swung off her cloak and draped it over the back of a nearby chair. “Hildeyard Tennyson isn’t just courting this Miss Goodwin; they’re betrothed!”

“I know.”

Hero stared at him, dawning indignation chasing incredulity across her features. “You knew!”

“Tennyson mentioned it when he first arrived back in London. He said the betrothal was arranged shortly before he left for Kent, but was never formally announced due to the sudden death of Miss Goodwin’s grandmother in the midst of the settlement negotiations.”

“But if you knew, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought I did.”

“No. You told me he’d formed an attachment to the daughter of one of his colleagues; you said nothing of a betrothal.”

“I beg your pardon. I suppose I didn’t consider it significant. You obviously disagree; why?”

“Think about it. Gabrielle was still in the schoolroom when she took over the management of her father’s household after her mother died. She was mistress of the Tennyson town house in the Adelphi and their small estate in Kent for something like thirteen years. Can you imagine a woman like Gabrielle meekly turning over to her brother’s new eighteen-year-old bride the reins to two houses she’d considered hers for years, and then continuing to live there in any kind of comfort?”

Sebastian took a slow sip of his brandy. “To be honest, I never gave a thought to the effect his marriage would inevitably have on his domestic arrangements.”

The look on Hero’s face said so clearly,
Men,
that he almost laughed out loud.

He said, “So tell me exactly what all I’ve missed by being so, well, male about this.”

She jerked off her long gloves and tossed them on the chair beside her cloak. “The thing is, you see, if Gabrielle were penniless, she would have had no option but to continue living at the Adelphi with her brother and his new bride. But Gabrielle wasn’t penniless;
her father had left her an independent income. It might not have been excessive, but it was enough to enable her to live on her own, or—”

“Or with the man she loved,” said Sebastian. “And under the circumstances, I can’t see his qualms about being seen as a fortune hunter stopping him.” The inclination to laugh was gone.

Hero walked to where she had left the book of English Cavalier poets lying on the table beside the chair. “I was thinking about that poem Arceneaux gave Gabrielle, the one by Robert Herrick. He copied out the last three stanzas to give to her. But it’s the first three that I think may be important.” She flipped through the book. “Here it is; listen:

Sebastian recited the poem from memory along with her, his gaze locked with hers, their voices blending together, tenor and contralto. “‘Or bid it languish quite away, / And’t shall do so for thee.’”

“Bloody hell,” he said, and drained his brandy to set the glass aside with a snap.

A
rceneaux’s lodgings lay in a dark, narrow lane not far from the church of St. Clements. While not exactly a slum, the once genteel area had long ago begun the slow slide into poverty. As Sebastian paused on the footpath, his gaze scanning the old house’s dusty windows and crumbling facade, a bedraggled woman well past her youth, her face gaunt and haunting, separated herself from the shadows of a nearby archway to hiss at him invitingly.

He shook his head and pushed open the street door.

The atmosphere inside the house was hot and close and filled with the smells of cooked cabbage and dry rot and the faint but inescapable odor of uncollected night soil. He climbed the worn, darkened stairs to the attic, trying to imagine Gabrielle’s gentle, scholarly French lieutenant in this place. From behind one door came a man’s hoarse, angry shouts and a woman’s soft weeping; from the next, the wail of a babe went on and on. Someone somewhere was coaxing a sad melody from a violin, the bittersweet notes mingling bizarrely with the yowl of mating cats in the back alley.

There were only two doors at the very top of the stairs. Neither showed any trace of light through their cracks, but Sebastian knocked on both anyway and stood listening for some hint of movement.

Nothing.

Under the terms of his parole, Arceneaux should have been in his lodgings by now. Sebastian turned back toward the stairs, hesitating a moment with one hand on the battered newel post. Then he headed for the Angel on Wych Street.

He found the coffeehouse nearly empty in the heat. Tobacco smoke and the smell of freshly roasted coffee hung heavy in the pale flickering light. As he closed the door quietly behind him, the barman looked up questioningly. Sebastian shook his head, his gaze drifting slowly over the desultory groups of men hunched sullenly around their tables, their conversations low voiced.

Arceneaux was not amongst them. But in a corner near the empty hearth, the big blond hussar captain, Pelletier, was playing chess with a gaunt infantry officer in a tattered blue coat. At Sebastian’s approach, the hussar lifted his head, the gold coins at the ends of his love knots winking in the candlelight, the fingers of one hand smoothing his luxurious mustache as he watched Sebastian cross the room toward him.

“Come to ruin another of my games, have you?” he said when Sebastian paused beside the table.

“Has Arceneaux been here tonight?”

The hussar pursed his lips and raised one shoulder in a shrug.

“Does that mean you haven’t seen him? Or that you don’t know where he is?”

“It means he is not here now.”

“Do you know where I might find him?”

The man’s lips parted in an insolent smile.
“Non.”

“I thought under the terms of your parole you were confined to your lodgings after eight p.m.”

“Our lodgings are here,” said the infantry officer when the hussar remained silent. “We’ve rooms upstairs.”

Sebastian glanced down at the chessboard. “Interesting. Whose move?”

“Mine,” said the infantry officer, plucking at his lower lip with one thumb and forefinger, his brow knit in a puzzled, hopeless frown.

“Try queen to F-seven,” said Sebastian, turning away.

“Casse-toi,”
hissed the hussar with an angry growl, half rising from his seat.

“Not a wise idea,” said Sebastian, turning back with one hand on the flintlock in his pocket.

For a moment, the hussar’s fiery eyes met his. Then the Frenchman sank back into his seat, his jaw set hard, his chest rising and falling with his rapid breathing.

Sebastian was aware of the man’s angry gaze following him to the door.

Outside, the night had taken on a strange, breathless quality, the air hot and heavy and oppressive. He stood on the flagway, aware of a rising sense of frustration. Where the
hell
was Arceneaux? For a paroled officer to be found outside his lodgings after curfew meant the revocation of his parole and consignment to the same hell holes as men from the ranks.

Sebastian felt the faintest suggestion of a breeze wafting through the streets, carrying with it a coolness and the promise of a change. He smelled the river and the inrushing tide and a touch of brine that hinted at faraway lands.

And he knew where the French lieutenant had gone.

Only ten months into its building, the new Strand Bridge rose from the bank of the river at the site of what had once been the Savoy, the grandest palace on the Thames. But the Savoy had long since
degenerated from its days of glory, first into an almshouse, then a prison and barracks. Now it was only a shattered, half-demolished ruin that stretched between the Strand and the riverbank below, a wasteland scattered with rubble and piles of dressed stone and brick and timber that extended out onto the rising bridge itself. As Sebastian worked his way down the darkened slope, he could see the curving stone foundations of a small medieval guard tower and a long brick wall pierced by empty mullioned arches. Beyond the ruins, the jagged, looming bulk of the new bridgehead stood out pale against the blackness of the sky.

The first four of the bridge’s vast arches were already complete, although the wooden forms at their centers were still in place and a rope-suspended walkway and scaffolding ran beneath the beginnings of what would eventually be an entablature, cornice, and balustrade above. When finished, the bridge’s carriageway would rise even with the level of the Strand. But now it lay some feet below it, a rough, unpaved grade that stretched out toward the opposite bank only to end abruptly over the rushing water.

As he walked out onto the bridge, Sebastian could hear the tide splashing against the cofferdams at the base of the piers, feel the unexpected coolness of the breeze wafting against his sweat-sheened face. He kept his gaze focused on the solitary figure of a man that showed against the sliding expanse of the Thames beyond. The man sat at the jagged end of the bridge, his legs dangling over the water hundreds of feet below, one hand resting companionably on the brown and black dog at his side.

“How did you know where to find me?” Arceneaux asked when Sebastian paused some ten feet away from him.

“I remembered what you told me, about liking to come here.”

The Frenchman tilted back his head, the wind off the water ruffling the hair around his face. “Are you going to turn me in?”

“No.”

Arceneaux took a long breath, eyes closing, nostrils flaring, lips
pressed into a tight smile as he drew the air deep within him. “Do you smell it? It’s the sea. The same sea that at this very moment is swelling the estuary of the Rance and battering the stone ramparts of Saint-Malo.”

Sebastian stood very still, the growing wind tugging at the tails of his coat.