by C. S. Harris
She stared at her reflection dispassionately, her hands splayed across her lower abdomen. Her body was still slim, her stomach flat. But for how much longer? One month? Two? For how long could she continue to move amongst the haut ton of London? The high-waisted, fashionable dresses of the day would disguise her changing shape for a while, but the time was coming when she would need to go away.
It had been her intention to spend the coming autumn and winter in the Welsh mountains, at the home of a dear cousin. Hero knew the name of the couple who was to receive her child, but they had been carefully kept in ignorance of her identity. And without Prescott, her ability to transfer the child to its adoptive parents without betraying her own identity was seriously compromised.
She thought about contacting the couple directly, then rejected the idea out of hand. To do so would mean condemning herself to a lifetime of looking over her shoulder, worrying always about exposure and blackmail. She needed to find some other alternative. Quickly.
She was running out of time.
Chapter 18
By the time Sebastian made it back to Brook Street, his riding jacket and breeches were soaked.
“Murder investigations can definitely take a toll on a gentleman’s wardrobe,” said Jules Calhoun, collecting the discarded garments.
Sebastian smoothed the folds of his fresh cravat. “Tempted to quit, Jules?” Until he had discovered the unflappable Calhoun, Sebastian had endured everything from vapors to temper tantrums from valets unused to serving a gentleman who regularly found himself involved in all the down-and-dirty particulars of murder investigations.
Calhoun looked around, affronted. “Who, me? Of course not, my lord!”
Changed into dry clothes, Sebastian ordered his curricle brought round and set forth in search of the Bishop of London’s nephew, Sir Peter Prescott.
He found the Baronet sprawled in one corner of a high-backed, old-fashioned bench in a tavern known as the Jerusalem Gate, near Hans Place. It was just past ten in the morning, and from the looks of things, Prescott had yet to make it to his bed. A half-empty bottle of brandy rested on the small octagonal table before him; his cravat was disordered and stained with sweat. A day’s growth of blond beard shadowed his cheeks, and his well-tailored coat of olive drab was creased and muddied near the cuffs. When Sebastian pulled a chair opposite him, Sir Peter looked up without shifting his posture and announced unnecessarily, “I’m foxed.”
“My condolences on the death of your uncle, the Bishop,” said Sebastian, ordering two tankards of ale.
Sir Peter let his head fall back against the bench’s high wooden slats. He was a slim man of medium height, with fine fair hair that curled against his forehead. Combined with his soft blue eyes, that halo of golden curls had given him a deceptively angelic appearance as a boy. Now, the curls were plastered against his forehead with sweat, the eyes bloodshot. “Dear Uncle Francis,” he said. “Leave it to the Bishop to get himself murdered in a church.”
Sebastian studied the Baronet’s flushed, strained features. The two men had known each other for some twenty years, first as schoolboys, then as young men on the town. But after that, their lives had diverged. While Sir Peter settled down to the management of the ancestral estate that had been his since birth, Sebastian’s days had filled with the tramp of red-coated soldiers and the howl of artillery shells he sometimes still heard exploding in his dreams.
Sebastian took a sip of ale, his gaze on his old friend’s familiar face. “I was always under the impression you and your uncle were quite close.”
“Close.” Sir Peter gave a peculiar shudder. “I suppose. I mean, it worked out well, didn’t it? He didn’t have a son, and I didn’t have a father. A match made in heaven, you might say. Or in hell.”
“I take it you quarreled recently?”
“I didn’t know he was going to die,” said Sir Peter, scrubbing a shaky hand across his lower face. “You try having the bloody Bishop of London as your bloody uncle. If I had aspirations toward sainthood I’d have become a bloody priest, like him.”
“No, I never thought you had any aspirations for sainthood.”
A ghost of a schoolboy’s grin lifted the edges of the other man’s lips. “Me? I may be the one who loosed that goat in the old headmaster’s bedchamber, but you’re the one who dreamt up the prank in the first place.”
Sebastian gave a soft laugh. The truth was, Bishop Prescott should have had little to complain of in his nephew. The ebullient schoolboy had matured into a good-natured but responsible landowner far more interested in his herds and the latest strain of oats than in the turf or the dice box. Sebastian could think of only one way in which the Baronet strayed from the path of respectability: Like Sebastian, Sir Peter had never taken a wife, preferring to allow his mother to continue as chatelaine of his estate’s ancient, rambling house while he himself divided his time between the Grange and a certain dark-haired, dark-eyed opera dancer he kept in rooms in town.
Sebastian leaned back in his seat and stretched out his boots to cross them at the ankles. “Heard about your opera dancer, did he?”
Sir Peter hunched forward to wrap one fist around his tankard, and sniffed. “To listen to him, you’d have thought I was a bloody Turkish pasha with a harem. Didn’t look good, I suppose, for the nephew of the bloody Bishop of London to be consorting with a low woman—especially when the Bishop of London has a shot at becoming the next Archbishop of Canterbury.”
“Is that what he wanted to talk to you about on Tuesday?”
Sir Peter looked up in surprise. “How’d you know about that?”
“The Bishop’s diary secretary.”
He took a deep draught of ale. “Says something, don’t it, when a man needs to make an appointment to see his own bloody uncle?”
“How was he when you saw him?”
Sir Peter’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Did he seem . . . unusually distressed by anything?”
“No. Why would he be?”
Sebastian raised his tankard and took a slow sip. Both Miss Jarvis, who saw the Bishop at six that evening, and William Franklin, who met with Prescott the previous afternoon, had described the Bishop of London as unusually agitated about something. Either Sir Peter was a particularly insensitive nephew, or he was being less than truthful. “So tell me,” said Sebastian, “who do you think killed him?”
“Me? What would I know of it?”
“You must have some thoughts on who might be responsible.”
Sir Peter cast a quick glance sideways, then leaned forward, one forearm pressing into the tabletop between them as he dropped his voice. “Seems to me, what the authorities ought to be asking is, Who would have the most to gain from the Bishop of London’s death?”
“Good question,” said Sebastian. “What would you say is the answer?”
Sir Peter flopped back in his seat. “That’s where it gets tricky. Uncle Francis wasn’t afraid of making enemies of the kind of men who can be dangerous.”
“Did he ever mention anyone in particular?”
Sir Peter gave a sharp laugh. “What, you mean besides everyone from Jarvis and Quillian to Liverpool and Canning?”
“He sounds like a quarrelsome man.”
“Quarrelsome?” Sir Peter frowned, then shook his head, some of the anger and resentment seeming to be leeched out of him. “No. He wasn’t particularly quarrelsome. He simply believed passionately in the ideals of his faith. Justice. Charity. Peace.”
“In other words, an admirable man.”
“Yes.” Sir Peter drew in a deep breath. Suddenly, he didn’t look so drunk. “Yes, he was.”
Sebastian glanced across the taproom, to where he could see raindrops chasing one another down the old leaded glass panes of the windows. “Where were you Tuesday evening?”
Sir Peter’s eyes darkened. “In Camden Place. Why?”
“Camden Place?”
“I keep rooms there.”
/> “Ah.” Sebastian studied his former schoolmate’s trembling hand, the day’s growth of beard shadowing his normally ruddy cheeks. From the looks of things, Prescott had been drinking steadily since hearing the news of his uncle’s death. Sebastian said, “When was the last time you saw Lady Prescott?”
“M’ mother?” Sir Peter frowned. “Yesterday. Why do you ask?”
By now, Sir Henry Lovejoy would have made the awkward journey out to Prescott Grange bearing a tattered coat of blue velvet, a stained satin waistcoat, and an old-fashioned gold pocket watch and fob. If their supposition was correct, if the decades-old corpse in blue velvet was indeed Sir Nigel, then Lady Prescott had just learned she was a widow.
Sebastian said, “You do know they found another body in the crypt with your uncle—the body of a man who was apparently murdered there thirty years ago?”
The Baronet went suddenly still. “You say thirty years ago?”
“That’s right.”
Whatever color Sir Peter had left drained from his face. “What are you saying?”
Sebastian pushed to his feet and dropped a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I’m saying you might consider returning to the Grange. I suspect you’ll find Lady Prescott in need of your support.”
Chapter 19
Sebastian was driving up Whitehall, headed toward Bow Street, when he spotted Charles, Lord Jarvis, coming out of the Foreign Office. The rain had eased up for the time being, leaving the gutters running and the pavement glistening with wet beneath heavy gray skies.
Sebastian drew in close to the curb. “I wonder if I might have a word with you, my lord?”
“Only if you’re willing to walk with me,” said Jarvis without breaking his stride.
“Follow along behind us,” Sebastian told his tiger, and jumped down from the curricle’s high seat.
Jarvis continued walking as Sebastian fell into step beside him. The two men shared a tangled history of animosity stretching back nearly two years. Sebastian never made the mistake of underestimating either Lord Jarvis’s intellect and power, or his malevolence.
“I hear you’re making inquiries into the death of Bishop Prescott,” said the big man. “It’s rather undignified, don’t you think? The son of a peer of the realm, continually involving himself in murder investigations like some common Bow Street Runner?”
“As long as I don’t do anything truly sordid, such as accept payment for my activities, the reputation of the house of St. Cyr should survive.”
Jarvis grunted and kept walking.
Sebastian said, “I understand you and the Bishop of London had differences.”
“Differences?” Jarvis threw him a sideways glance. “I should rather think so. You’d be hard-pressed to find a member of the House of Lords who didn’t have ‘differences’ with the Bishop of London—and that includes his fellow ecclesiastics on the Bishops’ Bench. The man was a bloody radical.”
“You mean because of his stand on slavery?”
“I mean because of his stand on everything. He even wrote a poem about peace.” Jarvis spat the word out as if it were an abomination.
“He was a man of God, after all.”
“And this country does God’s work.” Jarvis paused at the curb to let a two-wheeled cart piled high with casks and pulled by a gray mule rattle past. “Although not, of course, in Prescott’s reckoning. ‘Princes are privileged to kill, as if numbers sanctify the crime,’ ” he quoted derisively.
“Prescott was in favor of pursuing peace with the French?”
“With the French, and with the bloody Americans.”
“Despite the fact that he held both nations in considerable contempt?”
Jarvis made a rude sound. “Don’t ask me to make sense of the man’s twisted reasoning.”
Sebastian studied Jarvis’s arrogant, aquiline profile. “I understand you opposed Prescott’s translation to Canterbury.”
“I should rather think so.”
“Because of his opposition to the war, or because of his stand on abolition?”
“What do you think?”
“I think the Bishop of London seems to have accumulated a number of enemies.”
The big man drew up on the footpath outside Carlton House. “That tells you something about a man, does it not?”
His words echoed something Jarvis’s own daughter had said. “I suppose,” said Sebastian. “A lot depends on the nature of that man’s enemies.”
A gleam of amusement touched the other man’s hard gray eyes. “So it does. Good day to you, my lord.”
Sebastian waited until Jarvis was passing through the gate in the screen separating the Mall from the palace courtyard before raising his voice to say, “What about the Bishop’s brother? What manner of man was he?”
Jarvis swung slowly to face him again. “Francis Prescott had four brothers. To which are you referring?”
“The eldest.”
“Sir Nigel?” A quiver of distaste passed over the Baron’s aristocratic features. “Bishop Prescott was a tiresome, meddlesome fool. But Sir Nigel was something far worse. He was, pure and simply, bad ton. I wasn’t the least surprised when someone finally murdered him.”
Sebastian blinked. He himself had good reason to believe Sir Nigel had spent the last thirty years lying facedown in the crypt of St. Margaret’s with a dagger in his back. But that fact was as yet not well-known. He said, “Was Sir Nigel murdered? I was under the impression the man simply . . . disappeared.”
“Of course he was murdered. Do you think men of his ilk simply disappear?”
“Who do you think killed him?”
“I honestly don’t know. But if I did, I’d be inclined to buy the man a drink.” Jarvis paused as the bell towers of the city began to toll the hour, a harmonious jumble of high and low dongs ringing over the rooftops. “Now, good day to you, my lord.”
Sebastian watched the Baron cross the courtyard toward the palace steps.
“Gov’nor?” said Tom, reining in the chestnuts beside him.
Sebastian stood for a moment, frowning after the King’s powerful cousin. Then he leapt into the curricle and turned his horses toward Bow Street.
“I don’t think there’s much doubt about it,” said Sir Henry Lovejoy, his features set in serious lines. “Our mysterious eighteenth-century victim is in all likelihood the Bishop’s long-missing brother, Sir Nigel. Lady Prescott identified the blue velvet coat and satin waistcoat as identical to what her husband was wearing when he disappeared. The watch and fob were his, as well.”
The two men had left the Public Office in Bow Street and were pushing through the crowds that thronged the nearby arcades fronting Covent Garden Square. By now the tumult that characterized the early morning market had died down, the heavy wagons of the merchants and traders giving way to the handcarts of the costers and strolling hawkers selling buns and oysters, knives and pocketbooks.
“And the crooked left arm?” asked Sebastian.
“She says he broke it as a boy. At Eton,” added the magistrate, watching a stout, thick-necked woman with a basket balanced on her head stagger past. The air was heavy with the scents of coffee and fresh flowers and drying horse droppings.
“How did Lady Prescott receive the news his body had been found?”
“She wept.”
“What did she tell you of the circumstances surrounding Sir Nigel’s disappearance?”
“As I understand it, the Baronet was last seen on the twenty-fifth of July. He left the estate after an early dinner, intending to pass the evening at one of his clubs. Only he never arrived.”
“His horse was found wandering on Hounslow Heath that night?”
“The next day.”
“Any blood on the saddle or horse?”
“Not that anyone remembers.”
They paused beside a medicinal stall selling everything from leeches and dried herbs to snails for a healing broth. “Yet they attributed the man’s disappearance to highwaymen?” said
Sebastian. “Seems a bit of a stretch, does it not? When was the last time you heard of thieves leaving a purebred horse and saddle, and stealing their victim’s dead body?”
“The authorities assumed the horse bolted when Sir Nigel was set upon. Hounslow Heath was particularly notorious in those days.”
“Was there no suspicion at the time that the Baronet might have met with foul play at the hands of some enemy?”
“Oh, yes, there was considerable speculation. I gather Sir Nigel had a rather unsavory reputation.”
“I’ve heard he was a member of the Hellfire Club.”
“That, too.” The magistrate peered thoughtfully at a mound of dried mint on the table before them. “He seems to have had a talent for arousing the passions of his enemies.”
“Somewhat like his brother,” observed Sebastian. “Although not, obviously, for the same reasons.”
“How true.” Lovejoy paid for a measure of the mint, and slipped the packet into his pocket. “I understand that, at first, suspicion focused on the son of a former tenant who was nursing a powerful grudge against the Baronet. But the lad possessed a solid alibi for the evening in question.”
“What sort of alibi?”
They turned back toward Bow Street. “He was locked up in a roundhouse here in London.”
Sebastian thought about the Renaissance dagger that had been found in Sir Nigel’s corpse. He could see a disgruntled farmer taking a sickle to the Baronet’s back. But an antique Italian dagger? Aloud, he said, “What was the nature of the lad’s grudge?”
“Seems his father had quarreled with Sir Nigel over some trifle. Sir Nigel retaliated by having the family evicted from their cottage. It was in the midst of a dreadful snowstorm and the entire family froze to death on the heath trying to make it into London. Mother, father, two young girls. The only reason the lad survived was because some uncle had arranged for him to be apprenticed to a butcher in London, so he wasn’t with them.”
Sebastian drew up short, the tumult of the busy square swirling around him. “You say the lad was a butcher’s apprentice?”
