When Maidens Mourn (42 page)

Beneath his stocking feet, the muddy bottom felt squishy and slick. A ripe odor of decay rose around him. He felt the water lap at his thighs, then his groin. The moat was deeper than he’d expected it to be. He yanked the pistol from his waistband and held it high. But the water continued rising, to his chest, to his neck. There was nothing for it but to thrust the pistol back into his breeches and swim.

Just a few strokes carried him across the deepest stretch of
water. But the damage was already done; his powder was wet, the pistol now useless as anything more than a prop.

Streaming water, he rose out of the shallows, his shirt and breeches smeared with green algae and slime. He pushed through the thick bracken and fern of the island, his wet clothes heavy and cumbersome, the small stones and broken sticks and thistles that littered the thicket floor sharp beneath his stocking feet. Drawing up behind a stand of hazel just beyond the circle of lamplight, he palmed the knife in his right hand and drew the waterlogged pistol from his waistband to hold in his left hand. Then he crept forward until he could see George Tennyson, up to his waist now in the trench.

He heard Hildeyard say to the boy, “That’s enough.”

The boy swung around, the shovel still gripped in his hands. His face was pale and pinched and streaked with sweat and dirt and rain. “What are you going to do, Cousin Hildeyard?” he asked, his voice high-pitched but strong. “The Gypsies know what you did to Gabrielle. I told them. What do you think you can do? Shoot all of them too?”

Hildeyard pushed up from the log, the pistol in his hand. “I don’t think anyone is going to listen to a band of filthy, thieving Gypsies.” He raised the flintlock and pulled back the hammer with an audible click. “I’m sorry I have to do this, son, but—”

“Drop the gun.”
Sebastian stepped into the circle of light, his own useless pistol leveled at the barrister’s chest. “Now!”

Rather than swinging the pistol on Sebastian, Tennyson lunged at the boy, wrapping one arm around his thin chest and hauling his small body about to hold him like a shield, the muzzle pressed to the child’s temple. “No. You put your gun down. Do it, or I’ll shoot the boy,” he added, his voice rising almost hysterically when Sebastian was slow to comply. “You know I will. At this point, I’ve nothing to lose.”

His knife still palmed out of sight in his right hand, Sebastian
bent to lay the useless pistol in the wet grass at his feet. He straightened slowly, his now empty left hand held out to his side.

Hildeyard said, “Step closer to the light so I can see you better.”

Sebastian took two steps, three.

“That’s close enough.”

Sebastian paused, although he still wasn’t as close as he needed to be. “Give it up, Tennyson. My wife is even as we speak laying information before Bow Street.”

The barrister shook his head. “No.” His face was pale, his features twisted with panic. He was a proud, self-absorbed man driven by his own selfishness and a moment’s fury into deeds far beyond anything he’d ever attempted before. “I don’t believe you.”

“Believe it. We know you left Kent at dawn on Sunday morning and didn’t return to your estate until long past midnight.” It was only a guess, of course, but Tennyson had no way of knowing that. Sebastian took another step, narrowing the distance between them. “She wrote you a letter, didn’t she?” Sebastian took another step forward, then another. “A letter telling you she’d had an epileptic seizure.”

“No. It’s not in our side of the family. It’s not! Do you hear me?”

“Did she think you owed it to your betrothed, Miss Goodwin, to warn her that you might also share the family affliction? Is that why you rode into town to talk to her? And when you told her you wanted her to shut up and keep it a secret, did she threaten to tell Miss Goodwin herself?” Sebastian took another step. “Is that when you killed her?”

“I’m warning you, stay back!” Hildeyard cried, the gun shaking in his hand as he swung the barrel away from the boy, toward Sebastian. “She was going to destroy my life! My marriage, my career, everything! Don’t you see? I had to kill her.”

For one fleeting moment, Sebastian caught George Tennyson’s frightened gaze. “And the boys?”

“I forgot they were there.” Hildeyard gave a ragged laugh, his
emotions stretched to a thin breaking point. “I forgot they were even there.”

Sebastian was watching the man’s eyes and hands. He saw the gun barrel jerk, saw Hildeyard’s eyes narrow.

Unable to throw his knife for fear of hitting the boy, Sebastian dove to one side just as Hildeyard squeezed the trigger.

The pistol belched fire, the shot going wide as Sebastian slammed into the raw, muddy earth. He lost the knife, his ears ringing from the shot, the air thick with the stench of burnt powder. He was still rolling to his feet when Hildeyard threw aside the empty gun and ran, crashing into the thick underbrush.

“Take the gig and get out of here!”
Sebastian shouted at the boy, and plunged into the thicket after Hildeyard.

Sebastian was hampered by his heavy wet clothes and stocking feet. But he had the eyes and ears of an animal of prey, while Hildeyard was obviously blind in the darkness, blundering into saplings and tripping over roots and fallen logs. Sebastian caught up with him halfway across the small clearing of the sacred well and tackled him.

The two men went down together. Hildeyard scrabbled around, kicked at Sebastian’s head with his boot heel, tried to gouge his eyes. Then he grabbed a broken stone from the well’s lining and smashed it down toward Sebastian’s head. Sebastian tried to jerk out of the way, but the ragged masonry scraped the side of his face and slammed, hard, into his shoulder.

Pain exploded through his body, his grip on the man loosening just long enough for Hildeyard to half scramble up. Then Sebastian saw George Tennyson’s pale face looming above them, his jaw set hard with determination, the blade of his shovel heavy with caked mud as he swung it at his cousin’s head.

The flat of the blade slammed into the man’s temple with an ugly
twunk
. Tennyson went down and stayed down.

Sebastian sat up, his breath coming heavy. “Thank you,” he said
to the boy. He swiped a grimy wet sleeve across his bloody cheek. “Are you all right?”

The boy nodded, his gaze on his cousin’s still, prostrate body, his nostrils flaring as he sucked in a quick breath of air. “Did I kill him?”

Sebastian shifted to rest his fingertips against the steady pulse in Hildeyard’s neck. “No.”

Stripping off his cravat, Sebastian tied the man’s hands together, then used Hildeyard’s own cravat to bind his ankles, too. He wasn’t taking any chances. Only then did he push to his feet. His shoulder was aching, the side of his face on fire.

George Tennyson said, “I still don’t understand why he killed her. She was his sister.”

Sebastian looked down into the boy’s wide, hurting eyes. He was aware of the wind rustling through the leaves of the ancient grove, the raindrops slapping into the still waters of Camelot’s moat. How did you explain to a nine-year-old child the extent to which even seemingly normal people could be blindly obsessed with fulfilling their own personal needs and wants? Or that there were those who had such a profound disregard for others—even their closest family members—that they were willing to kill to preserve their own interests?

Then he realized that was a lesson George had already learned, at first hand; what he didn’t understand was how someone he knew and loved could be that way. And with that, Sebastian couldn’t help him.

He looped an arm over the boy’s shoulders and drew him close. “It’s over. You’re safe, and your brother’s safe.” Inadequate words, he knew.

But they were all he had.

Saturday, 8 August

G
ustav Pelletier sat on the edge of his hard bunk, his laced fingers tapping against his mustache.

“You’re going to hang anyway,” said Sebastian, standing with one shoulder propped against the prison cell’s stone wall. “So why not tell the truth about Arceneaux?”

The tapping stopped. “You would like that, yes? So that you can make all tidy?” The hussar’s lips curled.
“Casse-toi.”
Then he turned his face away and refused to be drawn again into conversation.

Lovejoy was waiting for Sebastian in the corridor outside. “Anything?” he asked as the turnkey slammed the heavy, ironbound door closed behind him.

Sebastian shook his head.

They walked down the gloomy passageway, their footsteps echoing in the dank stillness. “If he did shoot Philippe Arceneaux,” said Sebastian, “he’s going to take the truth of it to the grave.”

Sebastian had already identified one of the recaptured French officers, a Lyonnais by the name of François LeBlanc, as the second
of the two men who had jumped him that night in Covent Garden. The man confessed that he and his fellow officer had attacked Sebastian out of fear the Viscount’s persistent probing might uncover their escape plan. But the Frenchman swore he knew nothing about Arceneaux’s death.

Lovejoy sighed. “You think Arceneaux abandoned his plans to escape with his comrades for the sake of Miss Tennyson?”

“I think so, yes.”

“But then, why, once she was dead, didn’t he reconsider?”

“Perhaps he’d come to regret the decision to break his parole. Although I think it more likely because he suspected his comrades of killing the woman he loved. He said as much to me right before he was shot, only at the time I didn’t know enough to understand what he was saying.”

They walked out the prison gates into the brilliant morning sunlight. The rain had cleared the dust and filth from the city streets to leave the air blessedly clean and fresh. Lovejoy said, “I’m told the children’s father, the Reverend Tennyson, has arrived from Lincolnshire. Fortunately, Hildeyard provided us with a full confession, so young George shouldn’t need to testify against him.”

“Thank God for that,” said Sebastian. The previous night, while they were waiting for Bow Street to reach Camlet Moat, Sebastian and the boy had sat side by side in the golden light of the lantern, the rain falling softly around them. In hushed tones, George had told Sebastian of how they’d been playing hide-and-seek that morning after church. Gabrielle was “it” and the two boys were hiding behind the heavy velvet drapes at the dining room windows when Hildeyard came barging into the house. Much of the argument between brother and sister had gone over George’s head. But the confrontation had ended in the dining room, with Hildeyard grabbing the carving knife from the table in a fit of rage to stab Gabrielle.

The boys had remained hidden, silent and afraid, until Hilde-
yard stormed from the house—probably to fetch a gig. Then George grabbed Alfred’s hand and ran to his friends the Gypsies.

Lovejoy said, “To think the man went out every day looking for his young cousins—even posted a reward! I was most impressed with him. He seemed such an admirable contrast to the boys’ uncle.”

“Well, unlike d’Eyncourt, Hildeyard sincerely wanted to find the boys—and silence them. He might have made a great show of hiring men to comb the countryside around the moat, but he advertised the reward he was offering here in London—and set up a solicitor in an office in Fleet Street to screen any information that might come in.”

Lovejoy nodded. “The solicitor has proved most anxious to cooperate with us, for obvious reasons. Seems he received a tip yesterday from a wherryman who’d seen the two lads with the Gypsies. Of course, he claims he was utterly ignorant of Tennyson’s real reason for wanting to find the boys.”

“I suspect that he’s telling the truth.”

“One would hope so. He also admits to having put Tennyson in contact with the ruffian who attacked you beside the Thames yesterday—once again claiming no knowledge of Tennyson’s purpose in hiring such an unsavory individual.”

“A most incurious gentleman, if he’s to be believed.”

“He claims it’s an occupational hazard.”

“I assume he’ll hang?”

“Tennyson, you mean? I should think so.” Lovejoy paused to look back at the prison’s grim facade. “Unfortunately, he insists he knows nothing about the death of the French lieutenant. I’d like to believe Pelletier or one of the other escaping officers was responsible. But I don’t know. I just don’t know.…”

He glanced over at Sebastian, the magistrate’s brows drawing together in a frown as if he knew there was something Sebastian was keeping from him.

But Sebastian only shook his head and said, “I wonder if the boys would be interested in a dog.”

He came to Hero in the quiet of the afternoon, when the sun streamed golden through the open windows of her bedchamber and the breeze wafted clean and sweet.

She was watching a small boy and girl roll a hoop along the pavement, their joyous shouts and laughter carrying on the warm breeze. She didn’t realize she was crying until he touched his fingers to her wet cheeks and turned her to him.

“Hero,” he said softly. “Why now?”

The night before, she had insisted on driving out to Camlet Moat with Lovejoy and his men. The magistrate hadn’t wanted her to come, but she had overridden his objections, impatient with every delay and tense but silent until they arrived at the old chase. Then, for one intensely joyous moment, her gaze had met Devlin’s across the misty dark waters of the moat. But she had turned away almost at once to focus all her attention on the comfort and care of her dead friend’s nine-year-old cousin.