Where Serpents Sleep: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

by C. S. Harris

  “Nothing to his discredit. He’s described as a model officer—loyal, brave, efficient.”

  “Which regiment?”

  “The Twentieth Hussars.”

  The same as Somerville, thought Sebastian. Aloud, he said, “Where did he serve?”

  “Italy, Jamaica, Egypt, the Sudan—just about everywhere. He even had a hand in the capture of Cape Town from the Dutch.”

  “Then he was sent to Argentina?”

  “That’s right.”

  Sebastian stared down at the dregs of his teacup. It had been nearly five years since the disastrous Argentinean campaign, when Britain had tried to wrest Spain’s wealthy South American colony for its own. The expedition had been ill conceived and undermanned. Thousands of men from England, Scotland, and Ireland had left their bones in the Rio de la Plata, while many of the survivors returned home ruined and bitter.

  “You’ve no idea who this third man is?” said Lovejoy.

  Sebastian set aside his empty cup and pushed to his feet. “No. If I could find out who Ludlow and Somerville’s associates are—who they served with in the past—it might tell me something.”

  Lovejoy nodded. “I’ll set one of the constables to look into it.”

  “You’ll—” Sebastian broke off as comprehension dawned. “So you’ve done it, have you? You’ve decided to accept the position at Bow Street.”

  Sir Henry permitted himself a small, proud smile. “It’s not official until tomorrow morning, of course. But, yes.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Sir Henry’s smile widened, then slowly began to dim.

  Chapter 55

  MONDAY, 11 MAY 1812

  Hero slept poorly that night. Long after the house had settled down around her and the last of the carriages had rattled past in the street below, she lay awake staring at the satin folds in the hangings above her bed.

  She’d thought, once, that if she could only discover who killed the women of the Magdalene House, and why, then she’d understand how Rachel Fairchild had come to be there—how the granddaughter of a duke could ever have fallen so low as to make the sordid life of a woman of the streets her own. Once or twice Hero’d had the niggling suspicion that Devlin knew more than he was letting on. But she couldn’t begin to comprehend why he was refusing to tell her. Hero herself felt no closer, today, to understanding the riddle of Rachel’s life than she’d been a week ago. And she knew a growing sense of frustration, a fear that she was never going to know, never going to understand.

  Sometime before dawn she heard the rain begin again, pattering against the windowpanes. She thought of Rachel Fairchild lying in her cold, lonely grave beneath the pounding rain, and although she knew it was absurd, the rain unsettled her. When she finally drifted off to sleep, it was with the vague, half-formed intention of visiting the Friends’ burial ground the next day.

  She arose early that morning, little refreshed. The rain had stopped sometime after dawn, although the clouds still hung low and heavy. Armed with a selection of lilacs and lilies from the corner flower stall, Hero set forth shortly after breakfast, accompanied by her maid and traveling in her own carriage. She was aware of her father’s servant discreetly shadowing her, but she had no need, today, to escape his watchful eye.

  He followed her north, past Oxford Road to Paddington and the small hamlet of Pentonville that lay beyond it. She located the Friends’ meetinghouse and burial grounds easily enough, for she had sought directions from Joshua Walden. Leaving her carriage beneath the arching canopy of an old elm growing at the side of the road, she entered the burial ground through a simple gate in its low rubble wall.

  The graves of the eight women were easy to find, a sad row of freshly turned earth beside the far western wall, slashes of dark brown contrasting starkly with the green of the wet grass. As Hero walked down the hill, her gaze narrowed at the sight of a tall woman who stood beside the graves with her head bowed, her shoulders hunched. She was dressed in black silk, with her hands fisted around the strings of a large traveling reticule. At the sound of Hero’s footfalls on the sodden grass, the woman turned, revealing the grief-ravaged face of Rachel’s sister Lady Sewell.

  “It’s you,” she said in a breathy whisper, one hand coming up to cover her trembling mouth.

  Hero’s step faltered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were here.” She made a vague gesture with the flowers she’d brought. “I’ll just leave these and go.”

  Lady Sewell nodded toward the row of unmarked graves. “I don’t even know which of these graves is hers. Do you?”

  Hero shook her head. “No. I’m sorry.”

  Lady Sewell’s breath caught on a sob. “She never told me what he was doing to her. You do believe me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Hero, although she hadn’t the slightest idea what the woman was talking about.

  “All those years and she never said a word. But I should have known, shouldn’t I?”

  “You should?”

  Lady Sewell clenched her jaw tight to keep it from shuddering. “We made a deal, Father and I. I would keep quiet about the shooting, and he in turn would let me marry Sewell.” Her lip curled. “I should have known I couldn’t trust him.”

  “The shooting?” said Hero.

  A muscle bunched along the woman’s jaw. “He killed her, you know. My mother. It was an accident. He was trying to take the gun away from her, and it went off. But he still killed her.”

  Hero remembered what Devlin had told her, about the death of Rachel’s mother. “You mean, in the pavilion?”

  Rachel’s sister nodded. “Mama found out what he was doing to me. She knew he was spending the afternoon by the lake, working on some speech he was to give. She went down there, intending to kill him. I ran after her, begging her not to do it. She just told me to go home.”

  Hero studied the other woman’s mottled, tear-streaked face. “Your mother was planning to shoot your father? But . . . why?”

  Lady Sewell gave a soft, scornful laugh. “You still don’t understand, do you? You have no idea what it’s like. Lying in bed at night, afraid. Listening for the creak of the stairs. Your stomach clenching with the dread of hearing his footsteps in the hall. Knowing what’s coming. The pain, the . . .” Her lip curled. “The shame.”

  Surely she didn’t mean . . . Comprehension warred with incredulity and Hero’s own ignorance. Did fathers do that to their own daughters?

  A wry smile curled the other woman’s lips, and Hero realized something of her horror and disbelief must have shown on her face. “See,” said Rachel’s sister. “You don’t believe it. After he killed Mama, I told him I was going to let everyone know what he did to me at night—what he’d been doing to me for years. He just laughed at me. He said no one would believe me. They’d think I made it all up.”

  Hero hunched her shoulders as a damp wind blowing off the surrounding fields buffeted her. It wasn’t cold, but she still shivered.

  “So we struck a bargain, he and I. He promised if I left he wouldn’t start doing to Rachel what he’d done to me all those years. But now that I look back on it, I realize . . .” She drew in a ragged breath. “He’d already started doing it to her, too. It’s why she stopped singing. Why she buried her dolls. I thought it was because of Mama, but it wasn’t. It was because of him.”

  Hero stared at the woman’s tall, elegant frame and pale features, not knowing what to say.

  Lady Sewell turned away to stare out over the surrounding fields. “I remember one morning not long after Rachel’s betrothal to Ramsey was announced, I came upon her in the garden. She was singing, and I thought she was happy because she was in love. Now I realize she was happy because she thought she was finally going to get away from him.”

  Hero’s voice came out in a broken, raspy croak. “When she ran away, where did you think she’d gone?”

  “I thought she’d gone to Ramsey. Secretly, to get away from Father. I just—” She broke off, swallowed, and be
gan again. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t she come to me? Why didn’t she tell me what he’d been doing to her?”

  “Perhaps she thought you wouldn’t believe her,” Hero said softly.

  Lady Sewell gave a strange laugh that raised the hairs on the back of Hero’s neck. “I went there to kill him, you know. This morning.”

  Hero shook her head, not understanding. “Kill whom?”

  “Father. I should have done it all those years ago.” Yanking open her tapestry reticule, Lady Sewell drew forth a heavy carriage pistol. Hero stepped back, her gaze darting to the road, where her father’s watchdog lounged at his ease.

  “I held the gun right in his face. But then I thought, if I shoot him, they’ll hang me. And then what will become of Alice?”

  “Alice?”

  “My little sister. He swears he’s never touched her. But I don’t believe him. Not this time.”

  Hero felt a cool gust of wind caress her cheek, breathed in the familiar scents of long, wet grass and damp earth, and felt so fundamentally altered by what she was hearing that she wondered if she’d ever quite right herself again. In the last two weeks, she’d been touched by violence on a shocking scale; she’d killed, and very nearly been killed herself. And then there was that other incident—the one she was endeavoring to forget. Yet this . . . this was somehow worse. She’d known about violence and death and, vaguely, about what happened between a man and a woman. She hadn’t known about . . . this. How could any man be so depraved as to do such a thing to his own child? How could any child ever come to terms with such a monstrous betrayal?

  “So we made another bargain,” Lady Sewell was saying. “Father and I. I let him live, and he will send Alice to live with me.” She gave another of those wild laughs. “He worries people will think it strange. Can you imagine?” The laughter suddenly died, leaving her expression pinched. “I wish I could have killed him,” she whispered.

  “No,” said Hero, reaching out to take the gun from Lady Sewell’s hand. She expected the woman to resist, but she did not. “No. Your younger sister needs your comfort and support, and he’s not worth hanging for.”

  “Yet if I’d killed him before, Rachel wouldn’t be here.”

  Hero stared down at the row of unmarked graves. “Don’t blame yourself. You can’t be certain of that.”

  “You know it’s true,” said Rachel’s sister.

  Hero’s fist tightened around the gun in her hand. “You can’t blame yourself,” she said again, even though she knew there was nothing she could say, nothing anyone could do that would ever take away the crushing burden of this woman’s guilt.

  It was several hours later that a lad playing catch with his dog on Bethnal Green stumbled across the decomposing remains of another body.

  “Is it a woman?” asked Sir Henry Lovejoy, holding his folded handkerchief to his nose as he peered into the weed-filled ditch.

  “Looks like it, sir,” said one of the constables, standing ankle deep in the murky water, his hat pulled low against the drizzle. “What you want we should do with ’er?”

  “Take the body to the surgery of Paul Gibson, near Tower Hill,” said Lovejoy, his eyes watering from the stench. “And you—” He beckoned to the lad still hovering nearby with his dog. “I’ve a crown for you, if you’ll take a message to Brook Street.”

  Chapter 56

  When Sebastian arrived at Tower Hill, Paul Gibson was downing a tankard of ale in his kitchen. The surgeon had stripped down to his breeches and shirtsleeves, and even from across the room, Sebastian could smell the stench of rotting flesh that clung to him. Mrs. Federico was nowhere in sight.

  “Is it Hessy Abrahams?” Sebastian asked.

  “Could be,” said Gibson, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “She’s the right age. But she’s beyond identification, I’m afraid.”

  Sebastian knew a spurt of disappointment. “How did she die?”

  “Her neck’s broken. But it’s the way it’s broken that’s interesting. Come, I’ll show you.”

  Suppressing a groan, Sebastian followed the Irishman down to the end of the garden, through a swarm of buzzing flies, and into a room so thick with the reek of death it made his eyes water. “Good God,” said Sebastian, holding his handkerchief to his nose. “How do you stand it?”

  “You get used to it,” said Gibson, tying a stained apron over his clothes.

  After nearly two weeks, Hessy Abrahams’s body—if this was indeed Hessy Abrahams—was in an advanced state of decomposition, the flesh blistered and suppurating and hideously discolored. It took all of Sebastian’s concentration to keep from losing what little he’d eaten of Madame LeClerc’s delicate nuncheon.

  “Do you know what happens when someone dies of a broken neck?” Gibson asked, picking up a scalpel and what looked like a pair of pincers.

  “Not exactly, no.”

  Standing at the corpse’s throat, Gibson peeled back some of the decaying flesh to reveal the bone beneath. “The top seven bones in your spine form your neck. Basically, they’re part of your backbone, but they also serve to protect the spinal cord that runs through here—” He broke off, pointing. “You can break your neck and be all right as long as you don’t damage your spinal cord. If you break the lower part of your neck and do injure the cord, you lose the use of your legs and maybe your arms, too, depending on which vertebrae you break.”

  Sebastian nodded. He’d seen a lot of men crippled by their injuries in the war.

  “But if the neck breaks up here,” said Gibson, indicating the first several bones, “and the spinal cord is injured, then a person basically suffocates. They can’t breathe.”

  Sebastian took one look, then glanced away. “How long does that take?”

  “About two to four minutes.”

  “Is that what happened to this woman?”

  “No. You see, there’s another way to die from a broken neck. If the neck is twisted so sharply the spinal cord is torn in half, it affects your heart and the circulation of the blood.”

  “And you die?”

  “Almost instantly. You see it sometimes when a hanging goes well. Of course, they don’t often go well.”

  Sebastian forced himself to look, again, at the desiccated form on Gibson’s dissection table. “How was her neck broken?”

  “The spinal cord was snapped. The man I was treating after he stopped Miss Jarvis on the way back from Richmond had his neck snapped in exactly the same way. I didn’t attach much importance to it at the time, but after I saw this, I got to thinking. So I spoke to the surgeon at St. Thomas’s who performed the postmortem on Sir William Hadley. He was killed the same way. So was the Cyprian found in the Haymarket, Tasmin Poole.”

  Sebastian raised his gaze to his friend’s face. “This is significant. Why?”

  “It’s not an easy thing to do, to break a neck like this. It requires training.”

  “We already suspected these men were military.”

  “Yes. But learning how to kill silently with a quick snapping of the neck isn’t part of most officers’ training. The thing is,” said Gibson, laying aside his instruments, “I’ve seen necks snapped like this before. Over the last three or four years, we’ve probably had a dozen or more cases.”

  Sebastian studied his friend’s tight, worried face, not understanding at all. “And?”

  “No one investigates those deaths,” said Gibson. “Some are common people—government clerks, French émigrés. But some are more prominent. You recall when Sir Humphrey Carmichael and Lord Stanton were found dead last autumn? Their necks were broken. Just like this.”