Where Serpents Sleep: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

by C. S. Harris

  At the doorway, Gibson hesitated. The wounded man appeared to be sleeping peacefully, the sheet pulled up over his chest. It wasn’t until Gibson limped over to the bedside that he saw the man’s eyes staring wide-open and sightless. Gibson put out one hand, touching the man’s slack jaw and watching the head loll.

  Someone had broken his neck.

  Chapter 30

  Parting from Ian Kane outside the churchyard of Allhallows Barking, Sebastian went in search of Rachel Fairchild’s onetime betrothed, Tristan Ramsey.

  He found him drinking Blue Ruin with Lord Alvin and Mr. Peter Dimsey at the Thatched House Tavern in St. James’s. Walking up behind Ramsey’s chair, Sebastian laid a heavy hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “We have something to discuss,” said Sebastian, fixing his gaze on the other two men in a way that made both gentlemen shift uncomfortably in their seats. “You gentlemen will excuse us?”

  Ramsey froze. “My friends and I are having a drink,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Surely this can wait?”

  Sebastian kept his hand on Ramsey’s shoulder. “I think not.”

  Ramsey’s gaze went from Sebastian to his friends. If he was hoping for any succor from either Alvin or Dimsey, he misjudged his friends. Both gentlemen had suddenly become wholly absorbed in the study of their drinks. “Perhaps for a moment,” he said, and thrust back his chair.

  They pushed through the crowded tavern to a narrow passage that led to a door opening onto a cobbled lane at the rear. Ramsey closed the door behind him with a snap and said, “Now see here, Devlin—”

  Moving calmly and deliberately, Sebastian whacked the back of his gloved hand across the man’s face. He was in no mood for any more of Ramsey’s bluster and lies.

  A different kind of man might have called Sebastian out for such an offense. Not Ramsey. “Bloody hell!” Both hands cupped protectively over his nose, he doubled over as if he’d been gut-punched. “You’ve drawn my cork.”

  Picking up the man by his lapels, Sebastian slung Ramsey back against the brick wall behind him. “We’re going to have a conversation. Only, this time, you’re going to be very careful not to lie to me.”

  “What? What the hell is wrong with you? I didn’t lie to you!”

  “You did. You knew Rachel Fairchild was in Covent Garden. More than that—you knew exactly which house she was in.”

  A tiny trickle of blood ran from Ramsey’s left nostril. “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I—”

  “You went there.” Sebastian grabbed the man’s shoulders and thumped his back against the wall again. “You like paying for it, do you, Ramsey? You like it when women have to do exactly what you tell them to do? When they moan on cue whether you’re really bringing them pleasure or not? Must have been quite a shock to find your own fiancée lined up there with all the other soiled doves offering her charms to any man with the money to pay for them.”

  “Why you—” Ramsey bucked against Sebastian’s hold, his lips twisting with rage.

  “What I don’t understand is how the hell you walked away and left her there.”

  “I tried to get her to leave!” said Ramsey, his breath blowing bloody bubbles out his nostril. “She wouldn’t come with me. I had to pay for her just to talk to her! She took me upstairs to one of those awful rooms.” His upper lip curled at the memory. “The bed reeked of stale sweat and sex. She reeked of sex—of men. I begged her to come with me. But she just stood there listening to me with her arms crossed and a bored look on her face. Then she said I only had three minutes left, so if I wanted to fuck her, then I’d better hurry up and do it.”

  Sebastian studied the younger man’s trembling chin as full understanding dawned on a tide of rage and revulsion. “And so you did, didn’t you?” Sebastian let Ramsey go and took a step back before the urge to plant the bastard a facer grew overwhelming. “Mother of God. What manner of man are you?”

  Ramsey wiped his sleeve across his bloody upper lip. “You don’t understand. She taunted me. She wanted it!”

  “Is that what you told yourself? So you—what? Fucked her there? In the upstairs room of a Covent Garden brothel? And then you just left her?”

  “What else was I supposed to do?”

  “You could have told her father where she was.”

  “Lord Fairchild?” Ramsey looked appalled. “You think I wanted to kill him? The man has a weak heart.”

  Sebastian studied Ramsey’s blood-smeared features. “Did you find out how Rachel ended up in Covent Garden?”

  “No.”

  “You did ask, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I asked!”

  “And she told you nothing? Nothing at all?”

  “She told me to go away and leave her alone.”

  “Did you ever go back there?”

  Revulsion spread across the man’s face. “Good God, what do you think I am?”

  “You don’t want to know.” Sebastian stooped to scoop up Ramsey’s hat from the cobbles, where it had been knocked in the scuffle. “Here,” he said, slamming it against the man’s chest.

  Ramsey’s hands jerked up to close on the hat’s brim. “Anyone would have done the same in my place,” he said, clutching the hat to his chest.

  Sebastian studied the man’s heightened color and shifting, restless gaze. “You didn’t try to talk her into leaving with you,” said Sebastian, suddenly knowing it for the truth. “Oh, I’ve no doubt you ranted at her. Demanded to know why she’d left you and how she could have done such a thing to you. But you didn’t try to talk her into leaving. After all, what if she had said yes? What would you have done with her then? Taken her to wife?”

  Ramsey’s head snapped back. “You say that as if you would have done any differently. What man would have wanted her after that? She was a whore!”

  He must have seen something flare in Sebastian’s eyes, because he took a hasty step back. “All right,” said Ramsey, breathing heavily enough to shudder his chest. “It’s true. I didn’t beg her to leave with me. But it isn’t as if she asked me to take her away from there.”

  “And that surprises you?”

  Ramsey raked the back of one hand across his upper lip. The bleeding was stopping now. “You don’t know the way she treated me. The way she just stood there swearing at me, talking to me like a—” He broke off.

  “Like?” prompted Sebastian.

  Ramsey sniffed and shook his head.

  “When was this?” Sebastian demanded.

  “Two weeks ago.” Ramsey sniffed again. “Something like that. I don’t remember for certain.”

  “Two weeks ago? And you did nothing?”

  Ramsey carefully set his hat on his head. The crown was dented, giving him a rakish air. “I said I didn’t tell Lord Fairchild. That doesn’t mean I did nothing.”

  “You astound me,” said Sebastian. “What did you do?”

  Ramsey twitched his lapels and adjusted his cuffs. “I told her brother.”

  Chapter 31

  Sebastian sat for a time on the terrace of the gardens overlooking Whitehall Stairs. The patches of blue sky and Sintermittent sunshine of that morning had vanished behind thickening piles of gray clouds that shaded to black in the distance. The river flowed dark and choppy before him, whipped by the wind into white-flecked waves. A wherryman halfway across the Thames worked his oars with a strong, steady rhythm, the plash of his paddles hitting the water carrying clearly in the strengthening breeze.

  Sebastian kept remembering the expression on Cedric Fairchild’s face when first told of his sister’s death in Covent Garden. The shock of denial had been all too readily apparent—that natural human tendency to disconnect when first confronted with the death of a loved one, the wailing mental No! that is common to all. Yet Fairchild had displayed neither disbelief nor confusion when told of his sister’s presence in Covent Garden. That brief bristling at the mention of the Magdalene House had all been for effect, because Cedric Fairchild had known only too well what his s
ister had become.

  Tristan Ramsey had told him.

  Sebastian slid off the low wall, his gaze lifting to the dark thunderclouds churning overhead. He understood why Cedric would attempt to keep the truth of his sister’s disgrace to himself, even after her death. What he couldn’t understand was why Rachel’s brother, like her betrothed before her, had simply walked away and abandoned her to her fate.

  Rachel’s brother was cupping wafers at Menton’s, his right arm extended, steady and true, when Sebastian walked up to him. “One would think you’d have had all the target practice you needed in Spain,” said Sebastian when Cedric Fairchild turned away from the firing range.

  “It doesn’t hurt to keep one’s hand in,” said Cedric. He had stripped down to his shirtsleeves and waistcoat to shoot. Now, handing his pistol to the attendant, he reached for his dark blue coat.

  “You sold out and came back to London because of Rachel, didn’t you?” said Sebastian, watching the former lieutenant shrug into his coat. “Who told you she was missing? Ramsey?”

  Cedric straightened his collar, his eyes narrowing. “Actually, it was our sister Lady Sewell.” A sudden burst of laughter from a group of men entering the room brought his head around.

  “Walk with me,” said Sebastian.

  Buffeted by a cool wind, they strolled up the Mall toward Cockspur Street, with the rolling green swath of St. James’s Park stretching away to their right behind Carlton House and its gardens. “There used to be a leper hospital there,” said Cedric, looking across the park toward the river. “Did you know? It was a pretty insalubrious place at the time, all swamps and marsh-land. They say a fair number of lepers from the hospital are still buried there. Every now and then the royal gardeners dig up some poor bastard’s skull or thighbone.”

  Sebastian stared out across the carefully tended greens and clipped hedges of the gardens and the park beyond it. Beneath the cloudy afternoon sky, the park had assumed a cold, somber aspect.

  “They were outcasts,” said Cedric. “Shunned even by their families. Some were tradesmen, peasants, and laborers. But there were also noblemen, scholars . . . artists. It didn’t matter. What they had been was superseded by what they’d become. Something diseased and rotting. A threat to society.”

  Sebastian shifted his gaze to the man beside him. “Is that how you thought of your sister?”

  Cedric let out his breath in a harsh grating sound. “No. But it’s how she thought of herself.”

  “You went to see her after Tristan Ramsey told you where he’d found her?”

  Cedric’s face was ashen. “I tried to get her to come away with me.” His lips flattened. “She refused.” Tristan Ramsey had said much the same thing; but in Cedric’s case, Sebastian was inclined to believe it was true. “She said she was where she belonged. That house—” He broke off, swallowed. “It was horrible seeing her there.”

  “Did she tell you why she ran away?”

  Cedric shook his head. “I asked. She refused to say.”

  They turned their steps toward Charing Cross and Northumberland House and Gardens beyond it. “I still don’t understand how she ended up there,” said Cedric. He threw a sideways glance at Sebastian, pale features suddenly flushing dark with anger. “But I swear to God, if you breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll kill you.”

  Sebastian said, “Do you think it’s possible she was in love with another man? I mean someone other than Ramsey. Someone who lured her away from home, then abandoned her?”

  Cedric thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat, his shoulders hunched. “I admit I thought it possible. When I pressed her to leave with me, she just threw back her head and laughed. She said she was in love with that Lincolnshire fellow. The one who owns the house.”

  Sebastian cast Cedric a sharp sideways glance. “You believed her?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t look like a woman in love to me. If anything, I’d say she was afraid.”

  “Of Kane?”

  “I think she was afraid he’d kill her if she tried to leave. She said he’d killed before—other women who had tried to leave him. I told her she was being irrational. That we could protect her from the likes of some Covent Garden thug.” He paused. “She just told me to go away and not come back.”

  “And so you did?”

  “What else could I do? She refused to talk to me anymore. When I went back last Saturday, they told me she was no longer there.” He brought up both hands to scrub them across his face, his shoulders hunched. “I thought they were lying—that she just didn’t want to see me again. But a part of me was terrified something must have happened to her.”

  “What made you think that?”

  Cedric knotted the fingers of his hands together, as if he were in prayer. “I don’t know. It was just a feeling I had.” He hesitated. “I remember this one time in Spain, just before Ciudad Rodrigo. A fellow by the name of Hobbs took out a patrol. They were late coming back. We’d had one of those bloody awful rains that can come up out of nowhere in the Peninsula. Everyone was convinced they’d just used the storm as an excuse to spend the afternoon in a bodega somewhere.”

  “But you didn’t think so?”

  “No.” Cedric stared off across the gardens. “They’d been ambushed. We found them not two miles outside camp. They’d been set upon by peasants with pitchforks and scythes.” His face contorted with the memory. “They were literally ripped apart.”

  Both men were silent for a moment, lost in visions of the past, of men bloodied and torn by cannon fire and bayonets as well as by pitchforks and scythes. Sebastian said, “Did you tell Lord Fairchild that you’d found your sister?”

  Cedric let out a sound that was like a laugh, only devoid of all humor. “My father?” He shook his head. “My father isn’t well. It would kill him, if he knew what had happened to Rachel.”

  “Sometimes not knowing is worse than knowing.”

  “Not this time.”

  Chapter 32

  Hero gently closed the door to her mother’s room and paused in the hall for a moment, her hand still on the knob, a weight of sadness pressing down on her. Lady knob, a weight of sadness pressing down on her. Lady Jarvis had reacted badly to last night’s incident. Sometimes she worked herself up into such a state that it lasted for weeks.

  Her hand slipping off the knob, Hero was just turning away when her father came up to her. “How is your mother?” he asked. There was neither warmth nor caring in the question.

  “Resting. Dr. Ross has dosed her liberally with laudanum. She should sleep the rest of the day.”

  Lord Jarvis’s lips thinned into the pained expression he inevitably assumed whenever the topic under discussion was his wife. “That’s a relief.” His eyes narrowed as he studied Hero’s face. “You’re certain you’re all right?”

  “Thanks to you teaching me to keep a steady finger on the trigger.”

  Father and daughter shared a private smile. His smile faded quickly. “I’ve dismissed the two footmen you and your mother had with you last night.”

  “It wasn’t their fault.”

  “Of course it was their fault,” said Lord Jarvis. “I didn’t send you into the country with three armed men to have you come back covered in some highwayman’s gore.”