When Maidens Mourn: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

by C. S. Harris

  Breathing hard and fast, the man careened from side to side, upending first one milk can, then another and another, the cans rattling and clattering as they bounced down the slope like giant bowling pins, filling the air with the hot splash of spilling milk.

  “God damn it,” swore Sebastian, dodging first one can, then the next. Then his boots hit the slick wet bricks and his feet shot out from under him. He went down hard, slamming his shoulder against a brick pier as he slid back down the slope and the next milk can bounced over his head.

  He pushed up, the leather soles of his boots slipping so that he nearly went down again. He could hear the man’s running footsteps disappearing around the bend up ahead.

  Panting heavily now, Sebastian tore around the corner and out a low archway into the unexpected sunlight of the open air. He threw up one hand to shade his suddenly blinded eyes, his step faltering.

  The lane stretched empty and silent before him.

  The man was gone.

  After leaving Carlton House, Hero spent the next several hours at a bookseller’s in Westminster, where she selected several items, one of which proved to be very old and rare. Then, sending her purchases home in the charge of a footman, she directed her coachman to the British Museum.

  It was at an exhibition of Roman sarcophagi at the British Museum that Hero had first met Gabrielle Tennyson some six years before. Initially, their interaction had been marked more by politeness than by cordiality. Both might be gently born, well-educated women, but they belonged to vastly different worlds. For while the Jarvises were an ancient noble family with powerful connections, Gabrielle Tennyson came from a long line of barristers and middling churchmen—gentry rather than noble, comfortable rather than wealthy.

  But with time had come respect and, eventually, true friendship. Their interests and ambitions had never exactly coincided: Gabrielle’s passion had all been for the past, whereas Hero’s main focus would always be the economic and social condition of her own age. Yet their shared willingness to challenge their society’s narrow gender expectations and their determination never to marry had forged a unique and powerful bond between them.

  Now Hero, much to her mingling bemusement and chagrin, had become Lady Devlin. While Gabrielle…

  Gabrielle was dead.

  The bells of the city’s church towers were just striking three when Hero’s coachman drew up outside the British Museum. She sat with one hand resting casually on the carriage strap, her gaze on the towering portal of the complex across the street as she listened to the great rolling clatter and dong of the bells swelling over the city.

  Built of brick in the French style with rustic stone quoins and a slate mansard roof, the sprawling mansion had once served as the home of the Dukes of Montagu, its front courtyard flanked by long colonnaded wings and separated from Great Russell Street by a tall gateway surmounted by an octagonal lantern. She watched a man and a woman pause on the footpath before the entrance, confer for a moment, and go inside. Then two men deep in a heated discussion, neither of whom Hero recognized, exited the gateway and turned east.

  One after another the bells of the city tapered off into stillness, until all were silent.

  Hero frowned. She had come in search of an antiquary named Bevin Childe. Childe was known both for his formidable scholarship and for his fanatical adherence to a self-imposed schedule. Every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday between the hours of ten and three he could be found in the Reading Room of the museum. At precisely three o’clock, he left the museum and crossed the street to a public house known as the Pied Piper, where he ate a plate of sliced roast beef and buttered bread washed down by a pint of good, stout ale. This was followed by a short constitutional around nearby Bedford Square, after which he returned to the Reading Room from four until six. But today, Childe was deviating from his prescribed pattern.

  The minutes ticked past. “Bother,” said Hero softly under her breath.

  “My lady?” asked her footman, his hand on the open carriage door.

  “Perhaps—” she began, then broke off as a stout man in his early thirties dressed in a slightly crumpled olive coat and a high-crowned beaver came barreling through the museum’s gateway, his head down, a brass-headed walking stick tucked under one arm. He had the face of an overgrown cherub, his flesh as pink and white as a baby’s, his small mouth pursed as if with annoyance at the realization that he was nearly ten minutes late for his nuncheon.

  “Mr. Childe,” called Hero, descending from the carriage, her furled parasol in hand. “What a fortunate encounter. There is something I wish to speak with you about. Do let’s walk along for a ways.”

  Childe’s head jerked up, his step faltering, a succession of transparent emotions flitting across his cherubic features as his desire to maintain his schedule warred with the need to appear accommodating to a woman whose father was the most powerful man in the Kingdom.

  “Actually,” he said, “I was just on my way to grab a bite—”

  “It won’t take but a moment.” Hero opened her parasol and inexorably turned his steps toward the nearby square.

  He twisted around to gaze longingly back at the Pied Piper, the exaggerated point of his high collar pressing into his full cheek. “But I generally prefer to take my constitutional after I eat—”

  “I know. I do beg your pardon, but you have heard this morning’s news about the death of Miss Tennyson and the disappearance of her young cousins?”

  She watched as the pinkness drained from his face, leaving him pale. “How could I not? The news is all over town. Indeed, I can’t seem to think of anything else. It was my intention to spend the day reviewing a collection of manor rolls from the twelfth century, but I’ve found it nearly impossible to focus my attention for more than a minute or two at a stretch.”

  “How…distressing for you,” said Hero dryly.

  The scholar nodded. “Most distressing.”

  The man might still be in his early thirties—not much older than Devlin, she realized with some surprise—but he had the demeanor and mannerisms of someone in his forties or fifties. She said, “I remember Miss Tennyson telling me once that you disagreed with her identification of Camlet Moat as the possible site of Camelot.”

  “I do. But then, you would be sorely pressed to find anyone of repute who does agree with her.”

  “You’re saying her research was faulty?”

  “Her research? No, one could hardly argue with the references to the site she discovered in various historical documents and maps. There is no doubt the area was indeed known as ‘Camelot’ for hundreds of years. Her interpretation of those findings, however, is another matter entirely.”

  “Was that the basis of your quarrel with her last Friday? Her interpretation?”

  He gave a weak, startled laugh. “Quarrel? I had no quarrel with Miss Tennyson. Who could have told you such a thing?”

  “Do you really want me to answer that question?”

  Her implication was not lost on him. She watched, fascinated, as Childe’s mobile features suddenly froze. He cleared his throat. “And your…your source did not also tell you the reason for our little…disagreement?”

  “Not precisely; I was hoping you could explain it further.”

  His face hardened in a way she had not expected. “So you are here as the emissary of your husband, not your father.”

  “I am no one’s emissary. I am here because Gabrielle Tennyson was my friend, and whoever killed her will have to answer to me for what they’ve done to her—to her and to her cousins.”

  If any woman other than Hero had made such a statement, Childe might have smiled. But all of London knew that less than a week before, three men had attempted to kidnap Hero; she had personally stabbed one, shot the next, and nearly decapitated the other.

  “Well,” he said with sudden, forced heartiness. “It was, as you say, a difference of opinion over the interpretation of the historical evidence. That is all.”

  “Really?�
��

  He stared back at her, as if daring her to challenge him. “Yes.”

  They turned to walk along the far side of the square, where a Punch professor competed with a hurdy-gurdy player, and a barefoot, wan-faced girl in a ragged dress sold watercress for a halfpenny a bunch from a worn wooden tray suspended by a strap around her neck. A cheap handbill tacked to a nearby lamppost bore a bold headline that read in smudged ink, KING ARTHUR, THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING!

  Normally, the square would have been filled with children playing under the watchful eye of their nursemaids, their shouts and laughter carrying on the warm breeze. But today, the sunlit lawns and graveled walks lay silent and empty. Gabrielle’s murder and the mysterious disappearance of the two boys had obviously spooked the city. Those mothers who could afford to do so were keeping their children safely indoors under nervous, watchful eyes.

  “I was wondering,” said Hero, “where exactly were you yesterday?”

  If Childe’s cheeks had been pale before, they now flared red, his eyes wide with indignation, his pursed mouth held tight. “If you mean to suggest that I could possibly have anything to do with— That—that I—”

  Hero returned his angry stare with a calculated look of bland astonishment. “I wasn’t suggesting anything, Mr. Childe; I was merely hoping you might have some idea about Miss Tennyson’s plans for Sunday.”

  “Ah. Well…I’m afraid not. As it happens, I spend my Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays at Gough Hall. The late Richard Gough left his books and papers to the Bodleian Library, you see, and I have volunteered to sort through and organize them. It’s a prodigious undertaking.”

  She had heard of Richard Gough, the famous scholar and writer who had been director of the Society of Antiquaries for two decades and who had made the Arthurian legends one of his particular areas of interest. “Gough Hall is near Camlet Moat, is it not?”

  “It is.”

  “I wonder, did you ever take advantage of the opportunity offered by that proximity to visit the excavations on the isle?”

  “I wouldn’t waste my time,” said Childe loftily.

  Hero tilted her head to one side, her gaze on his face, a coaxing smile on her lips. “So certain that Miss Tennyson was wrong about the island, are you?”

  No answering smile touched the man’s dour features. “If a real character known as Arthur ever existed—which is by no means certain—he was in all likelihood a barbaric warrior chieftain from the wilds of Wales whose dimly remembered reality was seized upon by a collection of maudlin French troubadours with no understanding of—or interest in—the world he actually inhabited.”

  “I take it you’re not fond of medieval romances?”

  She noticed he was staring, hard, at another handbill tacked up on the wall of the house at the corner. This one simply proclaimed, KING ARTHUR, SAVE US!

  Hero said, “Who do you think killed her?”

  Childe jerked his head around to look at her again, and for one unexpected moment, all the bombastic self-importance seemed to leach out of the man in a way that left him seeming unexpectedly vulnerable—and considerably more likeable. “Believe me when I say that if I could help you in any way, I would. Miss Tennyson was—” His voice quivered and he broke off, his features pinched with grief. He swallowed and tried again. “She was a most remarkable woman, brilliant and high-spirited and full of boundless energy, even if her enthusiasms did at times lead her astray. But she was also very good at keeping parts of her life—of herself—secret.”

  His words echoed so closely those of Hero’s father that she felt a sudden, unexpected chill. “What sort of secrets are we talking about?”

  “If I knew, they wouldn’t be secrets, now, would they?” said Childe with a faintly condescending air.

  Hero asked again, her voice more tart, “So who do you think killed her?”

  Childe shook his head. “I don’t know. But if I were intent on unmasking her killer, rather than focus on Miss Tennyson’s associates and activities, I would instead ask myself, Who would benefit from the death of her young cousins?”

  They had come full circle, so that they now stood on the footpath outside the Pied Piper. The door beside them opened, spilling voices and laughter and the yeasty scent of ale into the street as two gentlemen emerged blinking into the sunlight and crossed the street toward the museum.

  “You mean, George and Arthur Tennyson?” said Hero.

  She realized Childe was no longer looking at her but at something or someone beyond her. Throwing a quick glance over her shoulder, Hero found herself staring at the watercress girl from the square. The girl must have trailed behind them and now leaned wearily against a nearby lamppost, her wooden tray hanging heavy from its strap, a wilting bunch of greens clutched forlornly in one hand. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, with golden hair and large blue eyes in an elfin face. Already grown tall and leggy, she was still boy-thin, with only a hint of the breasts beginning to swell beneath the bodice of her ragged dress. And Childe was looking at her with his lips parted and his gray eyes hooded in a way that made Hero feel she was witnessing something unclean and obscene.

  As if becoming aware of Hero’s scrutiny, he brought his gaze back to her face and cleared his throat. “As I said. And now, Lady Devlin, you really must excuse me.” Turning on his heel, he strode into the Pied Piper and shut the door behind him with a snap.

  Hero stood for a moment, her gaze on the closed door. Then, digging her purse from her reticule, she walked over to the watercress girl. “How much for all your bunches?”

  The girl straightened with a jerk, her mouth agape. “M’lady?”

  “You heard me. You’ve what? A dozen? Tell me, do you always sell your watercress here, by the museum?”

  The girl closed her mouth and swallowed. “Here, or at Blooms-bury Square.”

  Hero pressed three coins into the girl’s palm. “There’s a shilling for all your watercress and two more besides. But don’t let me catch you around here again. Is that understood? From now on, you peddle your bundles only at Bloomsbury.”

  The girl dropped a frightened, confused curtsy. “Yes, m’lady.”

  “Go on. Get out of here.”

  The girl took to her heels and fled, the ragged skirt of her dress swirling around her ankles, her tray thumping against her thin body, her fist clenched about the coins in her hand. She did not look back.

  Hero watched until the girl turned the corner and the receding patter of her bare feet was lost in the rumble of the passing carriages and carts, the shouts of the costermongers, the distant wail of the hurdy-gurdy player from the square.

  But the uneasiness within her remained.

  She was about to turn back toward her carriage when she heard a familiar low-pitched voice behind her say, “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find you here, but I must confess that I am.”

  Chapter 11

  Sebastian stood with one shoulder propped against the brick wall of the pub, his arms crossed at his chest, and watched his wife pivot slowly to face him. The hot sun fell full across a face unusually pale but flawlessly composed.

  “Devlin,” she said, adjusting the tilt of her parasol in a way that threw her features into shadow. “What brings you here?”

  He pushed away from the wall. “I was hoping to find someone at the museum who could direct me to a certain unidentified antiquary who quarreled recently with Miss Tennyson. I take it that’s the gentleman in question?”

  “His name is Bevin Childe.” She stood still and let him walk up to her. “Post-Roman England is his specialty.”

  “Ah, the Arthurian Age.”

  “Yes. But I wouldn’t let Childe hear you call it that. I suspect you’d get an earful.”

  “Mr. Childe is not a fan of Camelot?”

  “He is not.”

  “How much do you know about him?”

  They turned to walk together toward her waiting carriage. “Apart from the fact that he’s a pompous ass?�
�� she said with unladylike frankness.

  Sebastian gave a startled laugh. “Is he?”

  “Decidedly. As for what I know about him, I’m told his father is a Cambridge don. A doctor of divinity.”

  “I wouldn’t have expected such a man to have much to do with Miss Tennyson.”

  He watched her brows draw together in a frown. “Meaning?” she asked.

  “Meaning that however brilliant or accomplished she may have been, Miss Tennyson not only lacked a formal university education, but she was also female. And there’s no need to scowl at me; I didn’t say I agreed with that sort of prejudice, did I?”

  “True. I beg your pardon.”

  “What about Childe himself? Is he a clergyman?”

  “I believe he was once rather reluctantly destined for the church. But fortunately for Mr. Childe, a maternal uncle managed to acquire a fortune in India and then died without siring an heir. He left everything to Mr. Childe.”

  “Fortuitous, indeed—for both Mr. Childe and the church. How do you come to know so much about the gentleman?”

  “From Gabrielle. Her brother was up at Cambridge with Childe, and the two men have remained friends ever since—much to Gabrielle’s disgust, given that she has heartily detested the man since she was still in the schoolroom.”

  “Any particular reason why?”

  “She said he was arrogant, opinionated, self-absorbed, pedantic, and—strange.”

  “‘Strange’? Did she ever explain exactly what she meant by that?”

  “No. I asked her once, but she just shrugged and said he made her uncomfortable.”

  “Interesting. And precisely how large of a fortune did the arrogant and pedantic Mr. Childe inherit?”

  “A comfortable enough independence that he is now able to devote himself entirely to scholarship. I gather he currently divides his time between research here at the museum and a project he has undertaken for the Bodleian Library, which entails cataloging the library and collections of the late Richard Gough.”