Where Serpents Sleep sscm-4

by C. S. Harris

Naked and half eviscerated, the body on the room’s stone slab looked like something out of his worse nightmares. One glance at the bloated, waxy flesh and its resident insect population was enough. Sebastian stared at the ceiling. “Are they sure that’s Max Ludlow?” Sebastian asked when he was able.

  “Someone from the regiment identified him. In another day it probably would have been impossible. Parts of the body were already virtually reduced to bones, but thanks to the way he was lying, the face is actually fairly well preserved.”

  Sebastian held his handkerchief to his nose and resisted the impulse to take another look. “Any idea how he died?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” Gibson turned around to reach for a tin basin. “I found this in his heart.”

  Sebastian stared down at a bloody pair of strange, broken blades, handleless and oddly shaped. “What are they?”

  “It’s a broken pair of sewing scissors,” said Gibson, setting the bowl aside so that he could demonstrate an upthrusting, twisting motion. “Whoever killed him must have stabbed him with the scissors, then broken them off when they hit a rib.”

  “So he was killed by a woman,” said Sebastian.

  “Not necessarily, but more than likely. Did Hannah Green ever mention how Rachel Fairchild killed the man in her room?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “She may not have known.” He went to stand in the yard just outside the door to try to breathe. It didn’t help.

  Wiping his hands on a stained cloth, Gibson came out with him. “I heard about the fire at the Academy last night. That makes four more dead.” He brought up one splayed hand to rub his temples. “I thought I’d left carnage on this scale behind when I got out of the Army.”

  Sebastian jerked his head toward the dark, foul room behind them. “That body on your slab was once a hussar captain, remember?”

  Gibson’s hand slipped back to his side, his eyes widening. “What are you saying? That you think these killers are military men?”

  “It’s what war teaches us, isn’t it? Not just to kill, but to kill on a grand scale.”

  “There’s a difference between killing enemy soldiers on a battlefield and slaughtering unarmed Englishwomen in a London slum.”

  “You mean because one is sanctioned by authority and the other is not?”

  “Well, yes.”

  In the silence that followed, the endless drone of buzzing flies sounded both abnormally loud and oppressively familiar. It was the sound of death. Sebastian said, “Some men learn to like killing. Or at least, they learn not to shrink from it. And that can be just as dangerous.”

  Gibson squinted up at the clouds beginning to gather on the horizon, his face grim. Sebastian knew what he was remembering, the images that haunted both men’s dreams. The Portuguese peasants shot down in their fields along with their mules and their dogs. The Spanish families burned alive in their farm-houses. Gibson said, “But for British soldiers—officers—to kill Englishwomen . . .” He shook his head. “I know that shouldn’t make a difference, yet to most people it does.”

  “It makes a difference because most people have a tendency to see anyone who speaks a different language or has darker skin as somehow less human than themselves. But a lot of people see prostitutes as less than human, too. Their lives are considered cheap. Expendable. If it hadn’t been for Miss Jarvis, the eight women who died at the Magdalene House would already be forgotten.”

  “But why would hussar officers want to kill the Prime Minister?”

  “I don’t know,” Sebastian admitted.

  Gibson jerked his head toward the dank room behind them. “If it’s true . . . if Max Ludlow was one of the three men Hannah Green was telling us about, then who were the other two?”

  “At this point, I’d put my money on Patrick Somerville being one of them.”

  “The hussar captain from Northamptonshire? Do you think Hannah could identify him?”

  “She might not be able to remember names, but women in her line of work learn to recognize faces.”

  “Yet it won’t be enough, will it?” said Gibson. “Even if Somerville was at the Academy the night Rachel Fairchild and Hannah Green fled, there’s still nothing to tie him to the Magdalene House killings. Or to last night’s attack.”

  “No. But Miss Driscoll might be able to do so.”

  Gibson looked confused. “Miss Driscoll. Who is she?”

  “The Academy’s blind harp player.”

  Gibson’s frown deepened. “If she’s blind, how can she identify him?”

  Sebastian thought about explaining, then gave it up. “Never mind. Just lend me some paper and a pen, would you?”

  Chapter 53

  The difficult part, Sebastian realized, would be finding a surreptitious way for Miss Driscoll to hear Patrick Somerville speak. Much easier to first show Patrick Somerville to Hannah Green, he decided, and see if she recognized him.

  Leaving Gibson’s surgery near Tower Hill, Sebastian directed his coachman to Grace Calhoun’s Red Lion Tavern in West Street. Lying just a few houses from Saffron Hill on the north side of one of the last uncovered stretches of Fleet Ditch, the Red Lion was well-known as the resort of thieves and the lowest grade of the frail sisterhood.

  He found Grace in the tavern’s back parlor, polishing pewter tankards. She was a tall woman, taller even than her son and just as lean, with a face that was all sharp planes and interesting angles accentuated rather than blurred by the passing of the years. At the sight of Sebastian, she turned the tankards over to a gnarled old man with a gray whiskered face and a wooden peg for a leg, and came out from behind the counter.

  She had bright, intelligent brown eyes and hair the color of storm clouds she wore neatly tucked beneath a fine lace cap. In her youth, she must have been striking. She was still handsome—and very, very astute. “So you’re the fine lord my Jules has been telling me about,” she said, looking Sebastian up and down without a smile. “It was never my intention to see the boy set up as a gentleman’s gentleman, you know. I hired that old fool of a valet to teach him how to talk and act and dress like a gentleman. Not to teach him to be a gentleman’s gentleman.”

  “He is a very good valet.”

  “It’s not what I’d intended.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “I s’pose you’re here to see that young trollop Jules asked me to mind.”

  “I hope Miss Green hasn’t been causing you any trouble.”

  Grace Calhoun gave a derisive snort. “That one. She’s a taking little thing—I’ll grant you that. Which is lucky, seein’ as how she ain’t got the sense God give a fencepost.” She cast him another assessing glance, then turned back to her tankards. “Last I saw her, she was in the yard.”

  He found Hannah Green sitting cross-legged in a corner of the cobbled yard near the dilapidated stables, the fitful sun on her bowed bare head, her arms full of three wiggling, squirming black-and-white kittens. “Do look, Lord Devlin,” she said merrily when she saw him. “Aren’t they just the sweetest things you’ve ever seen? I always wanted a kitten.”

  She was still wearing the spangled pink-and-white-striped gown, but without the rouge and the burgundy plumes, she looked even younger than before, no more than fifteen or sixteen at the most. Sebastian watched her laughingly peel one adventurous kitten off the top of her head, and it occurred to him that he was beginning to collect dependent females. He had no idea what he was going to do with either of them.

  “If you can tear yourself away from the kittens,” he said, “I thought you might like to take another carriage ride.”

  Hannah scrambled to her feet, her eyes going round. “Honest? Oooh. Let me just get my bonnet.”

  Sebastian rescued the tumbling kittens and barely had time to restore them to the mother cat sunning herself atop a nearby moldering bed of hay before Hannah was back, the bedraggled plumed hat once more atop her auburn head, her reticule swinging from its fraying strings.

  “Where we goin’?” she asked as she trustingly allowed
herself to be handed up into Sebastian’s town carriage.

  He swung up to take the forward seat. “You said you recognized the man who came to your rooms in the Haymarket and strangled Tasmin Poole. That he was one of the men who also hired you off the floor last week?”

  “Y-yes,” she said, not sure where his questions were headed. “He was the tight-lipped one who picked us up from the Academy.”

  “Tight-lipped?” asked Sebastian, diverted.

  “Yeah. You know. He has those thin kinda lips he always keeps crimped together.” She held out both hands, thumbs pressed tightly to index fingers in what he supposed was meant to be an imitation of the killer’s mouth. “Like he was afraid a bug might crawl in there when he weren’t payin’ attention or somethin’.”

  It was more than she’d said before. “And the man Rose Fletcher killed the next night, when the men came back—he was with the tight-lipped gentleman when he picked you up in the hackney?”

  She nodded. She’d given up imitating the killer’s mouth and had taken to gnawing a fingernail instead, her gaze on the crowded streets and shop windows flashing past outside the carriage

  “I’m interested in the third gentleman,” said Sebastian.

  She craned her neck around to continue watching a hurdygurdy player with a monkey, who stood on a street corner. “You mean the birthday cove?”

  “That’s right. The one who chose you when the men returned to the Academy the next night. Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

  Hannah swung her head to look at him, her eyes huge in an uncharacteristically solemn face. “I don’t want to see him again. I don’t want to see any of them again.”

  “But you would recognize him.”

  “Yes,” said Hannah around the fingernail in her mouth.

  “That’s where we’re going now. To see if we can find him.”

  She gave a startled laugh. “Go on with you. I hear tell there’s a million or more people in London. How you going to find one cove in amongst a million people?”

  “There’s a coffeehouse in Cockspur Street called the Scarlet Man. Most officers in town—either active duty or half pay—wander in there at one point or another on a Sunday afternoon.”

  “How’d you know they was military coves?”

  He regarded her fixedly. “You knew they were military?” She’d never mentioned it.

  She twitched one shoulder. “Yeah.”

  “What else do you know that you haven’t told me?”

  It came out more sharply than he’d intended. Her eyes narrowed. “I didn’t think it was important.”

  The horses slowed. She shifted her gaze to the glazed front of the coffee shop that stood near Charing Cross. “You reckon the birthday cove is in there now?”

  The coachman drew the carriage in close to the opposite curb. “If not, he’ll be here eventually. Can you see the door of the coffeehouse from where you are?”

  She shifted her weight restlessly, her lower lip creeping out in the beginnings of a pout. “Aye.”

  Suppressing a smile, Sebastian drew from his pocket the note he had prepared and signaled one of the footmen. “Find an urchin and give him a couple of shillings to deliver this to Captain Patrick Somerville in the Scarlet Man.”

  “That’s right clever,” said Hannah, watching the footman turn away with the note. “What’s it say?”

  “Only that the Captain is needed at his regiment.”

  Her brows drew together under the strain of thought. “You reckon this Somerville is the birthday cove?”

  “Does the name sound familiar?”

  Hannah shrugged. “I don’t pay no attention to names.” Her frown deepened as she watched the footman hail a half-grown lad. “What if this Somerville ain’t there?”

  “Then we wait.”

  The lower lip came into play again. “We shoulda brought the kittens.”

  But in the end, they had no need to wait. A moment later, a tall, lean gentleman in the gold frogged, dark blue tunic of a hussar appeared at the door of the coffeehouse and turned to walk briskly toward Whitehall.

  “That’s him,” said Hannah, shrinking back into the shadows of the carriage’s interior. “That’s the birthday cove.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “ ’Course I’m certain. I told you, I don’t pay no attention to names. But I never forget a face.”

  Sebastian regarded her thoughtfully. She was not, despite all appearances to the contrary, quite as lacking in sense as a fencepost. He said, “You wouldn’t happen to know how Rose Fletcher killed the man in her room that night, would you?”

  “She stabbed him,” Hannah whispered, leaning forward as if someone could overhear. “Stabbed him with a pair of sewing scissors. Leastways, that’s what she said.” She sat back again, the anxiety on her face fading as her thoughts turned to a more pleasant topic. “Do you think Mrs. Calhoun would let me keep one of the kittens?”

  Chapter 54

  A slow drizzle fell that evening, glazing the paving stones and footpaths of Mayfair with a wet sheen that reflected the light of the wind-flickered streetlamps and passing carriage lanterns. Dressed in knee breeches and a white silk waistcoat with buckled shoes at his feet and a chapeau-bras tucked under one arm, Sebastian set forth for the ball being given that evening by Lady Burnham in her Park Lane home.

  The rain had thinned the crowds gathered on the footpath outside to watch, but it still took Sebastian’s carriage an inordinate amount of time to press its way forward, for some five hundred people had been invited to the ball. He had no doubt that Patrick Somerville’s well-married sister, Lady Berridge, would be in attendance, with her reluctant brother in tow.

  As he entered the ballroom, the first person he saw was his aunt Henrietta, who immediately gasped and groped for the quizzing glass she always wore around her neck, even when decked out in mauve silk and lace and a towering turban. “Good heavens. Devlin, whatever are you doing here? First Almack’s and Lady Melbourne’s breakfast, now Lady Burnham’s ball?” She drew in a deep breath that swelled her massive bosom and gave him an arch smile. “Don’t tell me you’ve finally taken it into your head to look for a wife?”

  “No,” he said baldly, his gaze raking the crowded ballroom beyond her. In actual fact he was looking for a murderer, but he wasn’t about to tell his aunt that. His eyes narrowed as he spied Patrick Somerville talking to a pale-haired young matron near the bank of French doors that overlooked the rear terrace. “If I change my mind, believe me, Aunt, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Excusing himself, he pushed on through the laughing, chattering crowd. But as ill luck would have it, he had only worked his way around half of the room when he came upon Miss Jarvis.

  “Good heavens,” she said in a tone that exactly matched his aunt’s, except that Miss Jarvis was not smiling. “What are you doing here?”

  “I received an invitation.”

  “Yes, but you never attend these things.” She was wearing an emerald green silk gown that became her surprisingly well, and had crimped her hair so that it softened the angular planes of her face. But there was nothing soft about her expression. She frowned. “You’re looking for someone, aren’t you? Who is it?”

  He deliberately turned his back on the row of French doors. “Perhaps I’ve suddenly taken it into my head to enjoy a bit of dancing.”

  “Nonsense.” She cast a quick glance around. “We can’t talk here. Escort me to the refreshment room.”

  He was too much of a gentleman to refuse her, and she knew it. Lending her his arm, he led her through the crush to a chamber that had been set aside for refreshments. He was hoping to find it crowded. It was nearly deserted.

  “I want you to tell me what happened last night in Orchard Street,” she said, accepting a glass of lemonade. “You do know, don’t you?”

  She would have read about the fire in that morning’s papers, of course. He picked up a plate and surveyed the delicate tidbits offered by their h
ostess to sustain her guests until supper. “I think the abbess was the intended target,” he said as calmly as if they were discussing the orchestra or the silver streamers decorating the ballroom. “Do you like shrimp or crab?”

  “Shrimp, please.” He didn’t expect her to know what an abbess was, but in that, he reckoned without the research that had embroiled her in this murderous tangle to begin with. She said, “They killed her?”

  “Yes.” He selected three fat shrimp, then added a slice of ham and some melon. “Along with a fair number of others.”

  “Because they thought she could identify them? Is that it? If she could, it’s a wonder they let her live so long.”