by C. S. Harris
Someone with Russell Yates’s colorful background could easily attract a crowd of twenty thousand or more.
Sebastian became aware of Tom sitting motionless on the curricle’s high seat, his solemn gaze on a workman who was climbing up on the platform to lever into place a stout beam studded with massive iron hooks. Tom’s own brother had been hanged here for theft at the age of just thirteen.
It had been Sebastian’s intention to drive to St. Botolph-Aldgate and take a look at the scene of Mr. Daniel Eisler’s murder. But he was suddenly aware of a profound exhaustion he saw mirrored in his tiger’s face, of his rumpled clothing and day’s growth of beard, and of the need to offer his condolences to the grieving widow of an old friend.
He ran a hand down the nearest chestnut’s sweat-darkened neck and told Tom, “Go home, see the chestnuts put up, and then take the day off to rest.”
Tom’s face fell. “Ne’er tell me ye’ll be takin’ a hackney?” That peerless arbiter of taste and deportment, Beau Brummell himself, had decreed that no gentleman should ever be seen riding in a hackney carriage, and Tom had taken the Beau’s strictures to heart.
“I am indeed. To drive this pair back out to Kensington again, after all they’ve been through, would be beyond cruel.”
“Aye, but. . gov’nor. A hackney?”
Sebastian laughed and turned away.
Sebastian had known Annie Wilkinson for as long as he’d known Rhys-except that when he’d first met her, she’d been Annie Beaumont, the plucky, freckle-nosed, seventeen-year-old wife of a dashing cavalry captain named Jake Beaumont. Few officers’ wives chose to “follow the drum” with their husbands, for the life could be both brutal and deadly. But Annie, the daughter of a colonel, had grown up in army camps from India to Canada. She took the hardships and dangers of a campaign in stride, without ever losing her ready laugh or cheerful disposition. He remembered once, in Italy, when a brigand caught her in the hills outside of camp and she coolly shot her would-be assailant in the face. When her first husband died from a saber wound complicated by sepsis, she married again, to a big, rawboned Scotsman who succumbed to yellow fever in the West Indies just months after their wedding.
Rhys Wilkinson might have been Annie’s third husband, but Sebastian had never doubted the strength of her love for the easygoing Welshman. And of her three husbands, only Wilkinson had succeeded in giving Annie a child. Now, as Sebastian mounted the steps to the couple’s cramped lodgings in a narrow street called Yeoman’s Row, just off Kensington Square, he found himself wondering if that made this husband’s death easier or harder for Annie to bear.
He had intended only to send up his card along with a note of condolence. But he was met at the door by a breathless, half-grown housemaid who dropped a quick curtsy and said, “Lord Devlin? Mrs. Wilkinson says to tell you she’d be most pleased to see you, if’n you was wantin’ to step upstairs?”
And so he found himself following the housemaid up the bare, narrow set of stairs that led to the shabby apartment to which Rhys Wilkinson’s continued illness had reduced his young family.
“Devlin,” said Annie Wilkinson, both hands extended as she came forward to greet him. “I was hoping you’d come. I wanted to thank you again for trying to-for looking-” Her voice cracked.
“Annie. I’m so sorry.” He took her hands in his, his gaze hard on her face. The freckles were still there, although faded to a sprinkling of cinnamon dust across the pale flesh of her high cheekbones and the thin arch of her nose. As a girl, she’d been awkward and almost funny-looking, all skinny arms and legs and a wide, toothy grin. But she’d grown into a delicate beauty, her form tall and willowy, her features unusual but exquisite, her hair a rich strawberry blond. “Tell me what you need me to do,” he said, “and I’ll do it.”
He felt her hands tremble in his. “Sit and just talk to me, will you? Most of my acquaintances seem to assume that I’ve either dosed myself senseless with laudanum, or that since this is my third experience with widowhood then I must be taking it comfortably in stride. I can’t decide which is most insulting.”
She led him to a sagging, aged sofa near where a curly-headed little girl was playing with a scattering of toy horses. “Come and make your curtsy to his lordship, Emma,” she told the child.
Pushing to her feet, the little girl carefully positioned one foot behind the other and bobbed up and down with a mischievous giggle. She was tall for her age, and skinny like her mother, with her father’s dark hair and gray eyes, and a roguish dimple that was all her own.
“Hello there,” said Sebastian, hunkering down beside her. “Remember me?”
Emma nodded her head vigorously. “You gave me my Aes-hop’s Fables,” she said, stumbling over the pronunciation of the name. “Daddy tells me a story every night.” A faint frown tugged at her gently arched eyebrows. “Only, he didn’t come home in time last night.”
Sebastian glanced up at Annie’s stricken face. He had brought the child the book some months before, when Rhys invited him to dinner one evening. “I could read you a story now,” he said, “if you’d like.”
“That’s all right,” said Emma with a wide smile that was more like Annie’s than that of her dead father. “But thank you.” She dropped another curtsy and went back to her horses.
Sebastian rose slowly.
Annie said, “I told her, but I don’t think she really grasps what has happened. How much of death do we understand at the age of four?” Her voice quavered again, and Sebastian reached out to recapture one of her hands.
They sat for a time in silence, their gazes on the child, who was now whispering, “Clippity-cloppity, clippity-cloppity,” as she pushed a small bronze toy horse mounted on wheels along the pattern of the threadbare carpet. Then Annie said, her voice low, “Did he kill himself, Devlin? Tell me honestly. I wouldn’t blame him if he did-he’s been so dreadfully unwell. I don’t know how he stood it so long.”
Sebastian knew a moment of deep disquiet. It was one thing to harbor such suspicions himself, and something else again to hear them voiced by Wilkinson’s own wife. “I didn’t see anything to suggest it, but it’s impossible at this stage to tell.”
Her freckles stood out, stark, against the pallor of her face. “There’ll be a postmortem?”
“Gibson is doing it. I can stop by his surgery and let you know what he’s found, if you like.”
Nodding, she swallowed hard before answering. “Yes. Please. I’d like to hear it from you. . if it’s true.”
“Annie. .” He hesitated a moment, then pressed on. “I know things have been hard for you, since Wilkinson was invalided out. I wish you’d let me-”
“No,” she said forcefully, cutting him off. “Thank you, but no. I’ve a grandmother in Norfolk who offered years ago to take me in, should I ever find myself homeless. When this is all over, Emma and I will go to her.”
He studied her tightly held face. “All right. But promise me that should you ever find yourself in need, you’ll let me know.”
“I’ll be fine, Devlin; don’t worry.”
He stayed talking to her for some time, of happier days with the regiment in Italy and the Peninsula. But when he was leaving, he touched his fingertips gently to her cheek and said, “You didn’t promise me, Annie.”
She crinkled her nose in a way that reminded him of the near child she’d been when they first met. “I’ll be fine, Devlin. Truly. “
He forbore to press her further. Yet as he hailed a hackney and headed toward home, he could not shake the conviction that he was somehow failing both her and his dead friend.
Chapter 6
Sebastian lived in a bow-fronted town house on Brook Street, near the corner of Davies. The house was elegant but small. Once, it had suited him just fine. But since his marriage six weeks before to Miss Hero Jarvis, he’d been thinking he ought perhaps to consider moving to something larger, grander. Only, when he’d mentioned it to Hero, she’d simply looked at him steadily in that way she ha
d and said, “I like our house.”
He found her now seated sideways at the bench before her dressing table. She wore a very fetching emerald green walking dress trimmed with navy braid and had her head bowed as she worked at closing the fastenings of a smart pair of navy half boots. He paused for a moment, one shoulder propped against the doorframe, and watched her. Just for the pleasure of it.
She was a woman in her twenty-sixth year, generally described as more handsome than pretty and taller than most people thought a woman ought to be. She had inherited her aquiline profile, fierce intelligence, and a certain chilling ruthlessness from her powerful father, Charles, Lord Jarvis. But her Enlightenment-inspired beliefs-and her conviction that with affluence and privilege came an obligation to fight for the rights of society’s underdogs-were unique to her.
Sebastian hadn’t liked Hero much when they first met. Since he’d been holding a gun to her head at the time, he suspected the antipathy had been mutual. Respect had come gradually, even grudgingly; the intense physical attraction that accompanied it had surprised-and dismayed-them both.
Their marriage was as complicated as the reasons that had brought it about, and they were still working their way toward understanding and something else, something deep and powerful that both beckoned and scared the hell out of him. Passion came easily; trust and openness took time and effort and a leap of faith he wasn’t certain either of them was yet ready to make. There was still so much she didn’t know about him, or he about her. And it occurred to him now that he was about to jeopardize all that they had so far managed to build between them by what he was about to do.
Just as he knew he had no real choice.
She looked up, caught him watching her, and smiled.
“It’s a nasty habit you have,” she said, “sneaking around, spying on people.”
“I wasn’t sneaking. I made quite a bit of noise, actually.”
She let out a genteel huff. “We don’t all have the eyes and ears of a bird of prey.” Still smiling, she rose to her feet and came to rest her hands on his shoulders, her gaze on his face. Her smile faded, and it occurred to him that perhaps she knew him better than he thought she did, because she said, “Your friend is dead, isn’t he?”
“A keeper found the body this morning in Hyde Park.”
“Oh, Devlin; I’m so sorry.”
He bracketed her face with his palms and kissed her once, long and hard. Then he rested his forehead against hers and took a deep breath before letting her go. “More interviews today?” he asked lightly.
She nodded, turning away to tuck a small clothbound notebook into her reticule. “I’ve found another crossing sweep who’s agreed to talk to me.”
“I should think they’d all be eager to talk, given that you pay them handsomely for nothing more than the privilege of listening to them natter on about themselves.”
“You’d be surprised how many of these children are afraid to open up,” she said, hunting for something amidst the litter of hair clips and books on her dressing table. “And I don’t blame them. From what I’m hearing, their distrust of authority figures is more than justified.”
Sebastian found himself smiling. After working on everything from Catholic emancipation and the slave trade to labor laws and the economic causes of the current proliferation in the number of prostitutes in London, Hero was now writing an article on the poor children who eked out a meager living by sweeping London’s street crossings. She was so taken with the project that she was thinking about doing a collection of such articles to be gathered into a book entitled London’s Working Poor.
“Ah, here it is,” she said, coming up with a pencil. She straightened, caught him smiling, and said, “You’re laughing at me.”
“Yes. But that doesn’t mean I don’t admire what you do.”
She poked the pencil into her reticule and reached for her gloves. “My father, needless to say, is scandalized. I’m not certain which concerns him more: the possibility that I might contract some dread disease from one of the wretches or the lowering suspicion that I’m turning into a maudlin lady bountiful.”
“Surely he knows you better than that.”
She gave a soft chuckle. “He should by now. I’m far too much his daughter to ever take to ladling out soup or teaching Sunday school.” She looked up from pulling on her gloves, and whatever she saw on his face stilled her amusement. She said, “There’s something more, isn’t there? Something besides Rhys Wilkinson’s death.”
He nodded. “Have you seen this morning’s papers?”
“Not yet. Why? What has happened?”
“Russell Yates has been arrested for the murder of an Aldgate diamond merchant.”
She kept her features carefully composed. She was very good at hiding what she was thinking. “And did he do it?”
“He says he didn’t. I believe him.”
“Can you prove it?”
“I don’t know. All I know is, if I don’t, he’ll hang.”
She reached for her hat and turned away, her attention all for her reflection in the mirror as she settled the velvet-trimmed confection on her head. Like most of London society, Hero knew only too well that the woman who was now Yates’s wife had once been Sebastian’s mistress. She knew, too, that something had happened between them the previous autumn, something that ended in Kat Boleyn’s marriage to Yates and sent Sebastian into a brandy-soaked downward spiral from which he had with difficulty only recently emerged. But that was all she knew, and he wasn’t sure he was ready to tell her the rest.
He said, “This is something I must do.”
He watched while she positioned her hat just so, then pivoted slowly to face him again. “Are you concerned that I might object? Pitch a fit and take to sulking in my room in a jealous pique?”
He gave a rueful laugh. “No. But-”
“You told me just now that you admire my work. Do you think I don’t admire what you do? Do you imagine I’m the kind of woman who would begrudge your efforts to save a man’s life simply because you share a past with that man’s wife?”
He shook his head. Reaching out, he cupped his hand beneath her chin, tipped his head to brush her lips with his. “You’re a wonder to me, Lady Devlin,” he said, his breath mingling with hers.
She smiled. But he saw the shadow in her fine gray eyes, and he knew that while she could never begrudge him what he was about to do, that didn’t mean the situation didn’t worry her.
Just as it worried him.
Chapter 7
The boy looked to be eight or nine years old at most, his face round, with widespread eyes and a short upper lip, his sandy hair as dirty and matted as moldy hay.
He sat on the bottom step of the Church of St. Giles, a cheap, ragged broom clutched in one fist, his head tipped back as he peered up at Hero. He wore tattered corduroy trousers and a threadbare man’s coat so big its tails hung down to his ankles and he’d had to roll up the sleeves like a washerwoman. His hands, like his feet, were bare, and every inch of visible skin so grimy as to resemble aged oak in hue. But his light brown eyes were bright and lively, his features mobile and expressive as he let his gaze take in the glory of Hero’s braid-trimmed gown and plumed, broad-brimmed velvet hat.
“Are you really a viscountess?” he asked, lisping slightly.
“I am, yes.” Hero nodded to the elegant equipage drawn up at the kerb beside them. “See my carriage?”
The urchin-who said his name was Drummer-stared at the shiny, yellow-bodied carriage with its team of restless, highbred blacks, its liveried coachman and footman waiting impassively. “And ye want to talk to me?” said the boy on a rapt exhalation of breath.
“I do, yes. I want to know how long you’ve been working as a crossing sweep.”
The lad screwed up his features with the effort of thought. There were thousands of poor boys and girls like him across London-children who made their living by sweeping the mud and manure from the city’s street crossings. In a sens
e, it was a form of begging, although the children did perform a service. Since they staked out a site and worked the same location for years, the trustworthy ones soon became known in a neighborhood and could also earn extra money by running errands, holding horses, or carrying packages for the area’s inhabitants.
“Well,” he said, “I started at it right after me da died, the winter I turned ten. I’m twelve now, so it’s been more’n two years, I guess.”
Hero made a surreptitious adjustment to the notes she was taking in her notebook. “And is your mother still living?”
“No, m’lady. She died o’ the flux just six months after me da. He used to be a bricklayer, ye know. But he fell off a scaffold and broke his leg so bad he died from it. At first I tried tatting hair nets, like me mum used to do. But I weren’t no good at it. Then I seen other children getting money for sweeping the crossings, so I bought meself a broom and took it up. I usually work this corner with another boy named Jack, but he ain’t been well lately.”
“Where do you live?”
“Usually I takes a room with some other lads in a lodging house up the lane there. But it’s thruppence a night, and with winter comin’ soon, I’m saving me money so’s I can buy me a pair o’ boots.”
“So where are you sleeping now?”
“Here, m’lady. If I rolls up in a tight ball in the shadows by the door, the charlie don’t usually see me. And even if he does rouse me, I just come back once he’s gone.”
