Where Serpents Sleep sscm-4

by C. S. Harris

  But Sebastian only laughed.

  Chapter 38

  That evening shortly before dinner, Hero was working in the library when her father entered the room. Lord Jarvis rarely dined at his own home. Looking up, she had little doubt as to why he was here, now.

  He stared at the books she had scattered across the library table and frowned. “What is all this?”

  Hero laid down her pen and sat back. “Some research I’m doing.”

  Lord Jarvis grunted. “Why can’t you arrange flowers and embroider seat covers like other women?”

  “Because I’m your daughter,” she said, gathering the books into a neat stack.

  He didn’t even smile. Pressing both hands flat on the tabletop, he leaned into them, his gaze hard on her face. “What exactly is Devlin’s interest in the deaths of the Magdalene House women?”

  Hero stared up at him without flinching. His lackey had obviously wasted no time reporting back to him. “The same as mine. To see justice done.”

  Pushing away from the table, he swiped one big hand through the air, like someone brushing aside an annoying gnat. “There is no justice in this world. There are only the strong and the weak. Those women were weak.”

  “Which is why it is the obligation of the strong to fight for them.”

  Lord Jarvis let out his breath in a scornful huff. “I told you I would deal with those responsible.”

  Hero pushed to her feet. “Because of me. Not because of them.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  She found herself oddly reluctant to explain to him the effect her meeting with Rachel Fairchild had had upon her, or the guilt that drove her to try to understand what had gone wrong in the young woman’s life. She said instead, “Has your Colonel Epson-Smith discovered those responsible?”

  “Not yet. But he will.” He turned away to pour himself a glass of brandy. “You broke our agreement. You went to Bow Street.”

  “On a slightly different errand. You heard Sir William is dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know he was involved with one of the women killed?”

  Jarvis looked over at her. “Who told you that? Devlin?”

  “No. Someone else.”

  Jarvis grunted. “You brought Devlin into this?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much does he know?” he asked, decanter in hand.

  “You mean, does he know I was at the Magdalene House when it was attacked? Yes.”

  Lord Jarvis poured himself a measure of brandy, then replaced the stopper in the decanter and set it aside without looking at her. She knew he was choosing his words carefully. “Devlin wouldn’t hesitate to hurt you to get at me. You know that, don’t you?”

  She chose her words with equal care. “I know he is your enemy. But I do not believe he would hurt me to get at you. He’s not”—she started to say, like you, then changed it to—“like that.”

  She expected him to laugh at her again. Instead, he merely looked thoughtful. He took a slow sip of his drink, his gaze turned now to study her face in a way that made her uncomfortable. He said, “Why Devlin?”

  Because he’s the one man in this country who isn’t afraid of you, she thought. But again, she didn’t say it. She said, “He has achieved good results in the past, in similar situations.”

  “And did you ask yourself why he agreed to help?”

  “I know why he agreed. To get back at you.”

  “Yet you say he wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “That’s right.”

  He went to sit in one of the upholstered chairs near the empty hearth, his glass cradled in his palm. “I set Farley to follow you this afternoon for your own protection. You knew that. Yet you evaded him. Why?”

  “I know something of your Colonel’s methods. The last thing I would ever want to do is unwittingly furnish him with a few more hapless victims.”

  Lord Jarvis pressed his lips together in a frown. “That’s not the intent here.”

  She met his gaze squarely. “It’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”

  He glared right back at her. “And your exposing yourself to danger is a risk I’m not willing to take.”

  “Papa.” She went to lean over the back of his chair, her arms looped around his neck. “I was never in any danger this afternoon and you know it.”

  He brought up one of his big hands to cover hers. With anyone else, he would have been overbearing and coldly threatening, but he’d learned long ago that didn’t work with Hero. She was too much like him. He said, “Where did you go this afternoon?”

  “To meet a woman I hoped would help me make some sense of what happened at the Magdalene House.”

  He took a long swallow of his brandy. “With Devlin?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose it’s better than going on your own.” He shifted his hand to lightly grasp her wrist and tug her around so that he could see her face. “Finding out about this woman is so important to you?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t understand it.”

  “I know.”

  He hesitated, and she knew again the fear that he would forbid her to continue her inquiries. But all he said was, “I would ask you to be careful.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  He nodded. “You are unusually sensible for a woman . . . however ill advised your political ideas are.”

  She knew he had said it to provoke her. But she only smiled and refused to rise to the bait.

  That night, Hero and her mother were descending the steps of their Berkeley Square house toward the carriage that had been ordered to take them to a fashionable soiree when a malodorous little boy came pelting down the footpath toward them.

  “My goodness,” gasped Lady Jarvis, shrinking back in a cloud of pale azure satin as the boy slammed right into Hero.

  “You there,” shouted the butler, starting forward, “watch where you’re going.”

  But the boy was already off, feet flying, one hand held up to clamp his cap to his head as he disappeared around the corner.

  “Brazen guttersnipes,” muttered Grisham, staring after him. “Whatever is the world coming to? I trust you suffered no harm, Miss Jarvis?”

  “I’m fine,” said Hero, the folded missive slipped her by the boy carefully tucked out of sight.

  Chapter 39

  FRIDAY, 8 MAY 1812

  The next day Hero dressed in her plainest riding gown topped by a particularly ugly hat with a dense veil that made her grandmother tut-tut and prophesy she was destined to end her days as an old maid.

  “I sincerely hope so,” said Hero, then prudently whisked herself out of the room to avoid being sucked into an old and well-worn argument.

  She evaded the watchdog set by her father simply by descending into the kitchens to confer with the housekeeper and then slipping out by the area steps. Walking briskly to the corner of Davies Street, she caught a hackney and directed the driver to Number 41 Brook Street.

  It was most unseemly for a young unmarried woman to visit the house of an unmarried gentleman—particularly without her maid. Hero had given the situation considerable thought, but in the end decided there was no avoiding it. She had promised her father she would not put herself in danger, and Hero Jarvis kept her promises. Her major concern was that she might find Lord Devlin already gone from home.

  Paying off the hackney, she rang an imperious peal on the Viscount’s door. It was opened almost at once by a military-looking majordomo who regarded her with unconcealed suspicion.

  “Pray inform Lord Devlin that I am here to see him,” she said loftily.

  “And whom shall I say is calling?”

  “My good man,” said Hero at her most condescending, “if I wanted you to know my name, I would have given it to you.”

  The majordomo hesitated. Fear of giving offense to a veiled noblewoman warred with the horror of ushering some grasping harpy into his master’s presence. Fear of giving
offense won. He bowed and let her in. “One moment while I see if his lordship is receiving.”

  He achieved a measure of revenge by leaving her in the hall rather than ushering her into a receiving room. He returned in a moment, his face giving nothing away, to lead her upstairs to the drawing room. “Tea will arrive shortly,” drawled the majordomo, and withdrew.

  Pushing back her veil, Hero prowled the room. She studied the curious, intricately incised brass platter on one wall, the carved wooden head that looked as if it had come from Africa on another. A tea tray arrived along with a plate of bread and butter, but she ignored it, her attention caught by a painting over the mantel. It was by Gainsborough, of a laughing young woman with unpowdered golden hair and a braid-trimmed riding costume in the style of the last century. Hero could trace the resemblance to the Viscount in the flare of the woman’s cheekbones, the curve of the lips. So this was Devlin’s mother, Hero thought. They still talked about the long-dead Countess of Hendon in scandalized whispers.

  She was so absorbed in her study of the painting that she failed to hear the door open behind her.

  “I suspected it was you,” said an amused voice, “from my majordomo’s description. I don’t know that many tall, haughty gentlewomen with the manner of a Turkish pasha.”

  She swung to face him. “I don’t know any Turkish pashas.”

  “Which is probably a good thing,” he said, leaving the door open behind him. “They like their women obsequious and agreeable.”

  “Like most Englishmen.”

  “Like most men,” he agreed, advancing into the room.

  He was dressed in doeskin breeches and a well-tailored dark coat, but his hair still curled damply away from his face. She said, “I’ve caught you at your bath.”

  “Actually, you caught me still abed.” He glanced at the tea, which she hadn’t touched. “Join me?” he asked, pouring a cup.

  She took it from his outstretched hand. “You haven’t asked why I’m here.”

  He poured himself a cup and lifted one of the pieces of buttered bread from the plate. “I have no doubt it is your intention to enlighten me.”

  He had a nearly limitless capacity for irritating her, and it did no good to remind herself that he provoked her intentionally. The urge to simply set down her tea and leave was overcome with difficulty; a promise was a promise. She said, “I’ve received a note from Tasmin Poole. A boy passed it to me as I was about to enter my carriage last night.”

  He selected another slice of buttered bread. “She has located the missing Hannah Green?”

  “So it seems. The woman is hiding in a cottage just off Strand Lane, and she has agreed to meet me there.”

  The Viscount swallowed his bread and took a sip of tea. “You’re suspicious. Why?”

  “I am to go there at midday with only one servant to accompany me. According to the note, these precautions are necessary because Hannah Green is frightened. I believe the note to be genuine, but I am aware of the possibility that it could be a trap.”

  “It certainly sounds like one to me.”

  “Yet if it’s not and I fail to go, the chance to meet Hannah Green will be lost.”

  He reached for another slice of bread. “Are you certain you don’t want some of this?” he asked, nudging the plate toward her. “It’s really quite good.”

  “Thank you, but I breakfasted hours ago.”

  “Is that an insult? I wonder.”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed and finished the last of the bread. “I think I begin to understand. If you were anyone else, I might assume you had come to ask for my advice. On the strength of our limited acquaintance, however, I suspect you have already made up your mind to go and have simply come here to request that I accompany you”—his gaze took in her riding costume—“posing, I take it, as your groom?”

  “And to beg the loan of a horse. I was forced to slip out the basement to avoid my watchdog.”

  “We could take a hackney.”

  “Then I would need a lady’s maid, not a groom,” she pointed out.

  “True. Unfortunately, I don’t own any ladies’ horses.”

  “Neither do I.” She glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantel. “If you have finished your tea and bread?”

  “It’s a trap, you know,” he said, suddenly serious.

  “Will you do it?”

  “Drink your tea,” he told her, “while I transfer myself into a more humble attire.”

  Lying just to the west of St. Clements, Strand Lane proved to be a narrow cobbled passage that wound a torturous path down toward the river.

  The day was overcast and cold, with the kind of biting wind more typical of March than May. Pausing his gelding at the head of the lane, Sebastian let his gaze flick to the watch house and church of St. Mary’s that had been left marooned in the center of the Strand by the widening of the street. “It seems an unlikely place for a frightened prostitute to go to ground,” he said.

  “Perhaps she grew up around here,” said Miss Jarvis, reining in her mount beside him.

  He kneed his horse forward between aged gabled houses of timber and whitewashed daub that nearly met overhead. The buildings might be old, but they were well kept, the cobbles and worn doorsteps swept clean. A little girl dashed past, laughing as she chased a kitten through flowers tumbling out of green-painted window boxes. They passed a ramshackle old inn, the Cock and Magpie, and a livery. But within a hundred yards or so, the lane unexpectedly opened up to their right and Sebastian found himself staring out over a tumbledown stone wall at a stretch of open land.

  “It’s a curious place for a meeting,” he said, reining in. He could see, scattered amidst rioting wisteria and lilacs, the broken, ivy-covered statues and rusted iron gates of an abandoned garden that stretched all the way to the terrace and neoclassical side elevation of Somerset House in the distance.

  “It’s the ruins of the eastern gardens of the original Somerset House,” said Miss Jarvis. “When they tore down the old palace, the plan was to construct an eastern wing on the new building that would stretch nearly to Surrey Street. But the government ran out of money. My father is always raging about it. He thinks the capital of a great nation needs impressive government buildings, and London is woefully lacking in anything majestic or monumental.”

  Sebastian narrowed his eyes against the glint of the light reflected off the Thames. Down near the river’s edge, to their left, stood a lumberyard, its great stacks of drying timber towering twenty to thirty feet in the air. But a strange air of quiet hung over the area. “I don’t like it,” he said, thankful for the weight of the small, double-barreled flintlock pistol he’d slipped into the pocket of his groom’s coat before leaving Brook Street.

  “Surely if it were a trap,” she said, “the rendezvous would have been set for tonight. What are they going to do? Cosh me—and my servant—over the head in broad daylight? It’s not exactly a disreputable neighborhood.”

  “Would you have come here at night?”

  “Of course not.”

  Sebastian studied the expanse of overgrown gravel paths and untamed shrubbery. “Where exactly is this Hannah Green supposed to be?”

  “There,” said Miss Jarvis, nodding to what looked like a caretaker’s cottage at the base of the garden near the water’s edge.

  Sebastian swung out of the saddle. “Wait here,” he told her. “Your groom is going to knock on the door.”

  He expected her to argue. Instead, she took his reins in her strong gloved hand, a frown line forming between her eyes as she studied the small stone house.

  The original Somerset House had been built in the mid- sixteenth century by the Duke of Somerset, uncle and Lord Protector of the boy king Edward VI. A vast Renaissance palace, it had been pulled down late in the previous century and replaced by the current Somerset House, now used by various Royal societies and government offices. Only this stretch of the old gardens had survived. Once, the sandstone cottage near the river mi
ght have been a part of the ancient Tudor palace itself. A retainer’s lodge, perhaps, or a delightful garden retreat for the dowager queens who had once used the old palace as their Dower House. The echoes of the original house’s renaissance glory were there, in the crumbling stone steps, in the sweet-scented damask rose blooming stubbornly from amidst a thicket of thistles.

  Sebastian walked up the neglected path, the gravel crunching beneath his feet, his senses alert to any movement, any sound. The garden appeared deserted.