by C. S. Harris
O’Brian glanced up from his plate and frowned. “Do I know you?”
“We’ve met.”
O’Brian gave Sebastian a hard look, then grunted. “So we have. You’ve lost twenty years and a good two stone in twenty-four hours. Quite a feat.”
Sebastian smiled. “It turns out that neither one of us is exactly what we first portrayed ourselves to be. You, for instance, are not just a purchasing agent.”
O’Brian carefully cut a piece of bacon. “And I take it you’re not really a Bow Street Runner.”
“No.” Sebastian paused while the apple-cheeked woman bustled up to take his order. “Just tea, please,” he told her with a smile. After she’d gone, he brought his gaze back to the agent and said quietly, “Nor am I interested in what happened to a certain warehouse full of Russian sables.”
O’Brian chewed slowly, and swallowed. “So what are you interested in?”
“The death of a young woman.”
“We went over all that.”
“Did we? I’ve learned a few things since then. For instance, did you know Rose was really Rachel Fairchild, daughter of Basil, Lord Fairchild?”
The man’s face gave nothing away. “Who told you that?”
“This,” said Sebastian, laying the silver bracelet on the table. “Have you ever seen it?”
O’Brian’s fork clattered against the side of his plate. He stared at the bracelet a moment, then lifted his gaze to Sebastian’s. “You obviously know it’s hers. Where did you get it?”
“From one of the whores at the Academy. It used to belong to Rose?”
“Yes.” Picking up the bracelet, O’Brian studied the medallion with its crested helm and three eagle heads. “You say she was a Fairchild?”
“You didn’t know?”
“No.”
If the man was lying, he was bloody good at it. But then, of course, he was good at it. His life depended upon it. Sebastian said, “I understand Russian sables are very valuable.”
O’Brian gave a slow smile. “So they say.”
“A man with that much to lose could be dangerous,” said Sebastian, “if someone found out about his plans.” He paused while the plump-faced woman put his tea on the table before him. O’Brian said nothing.
“If he realized a woman knew what he did for a living, such a man might well intimidate her—bully her—just to keep her quiet. Except, I can see a woman like Rachel—or Rose—getting scared. So scared she ran away. In which case then, she’d really be a threat. A threat that needed to be tracked down and silenced before she ruined everything.”
O’Brian tore off a piece of bread and used it to wipe up the egg yolk on his plate. “A man doesn’t stay in this business long if he doesn’t learn to keep his mouth shut. I’m not that careless.” He popped the bread in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “If I was, I’d be in Botany Bay. Or dead.”
“Mistakes happen.”
“Not if you’re careful. I’m very careful. I’m also not a violent man. Ask around the docks; anyone will tell you. Sure, I have a temper. My father was Irish, after all.” He leaned forward. “But a body’d have to be sick to kill all those women.”
“Or very afraid.”
O’Brian met Sebastian’s gaze, and held it. “There’s nothing I’m that afraid of.”
Sebastian took a long sip of his tea. “Kane tells me you wanted to buy Rose out of the house, but she refused.”
“He said that?”
“Are you saying it’s not true?”
“Are you kidding? Of course she was willing. She hated Kane, and she hated that house.”
“Do you think that’s why she ran away? Because of Kane?”
“What would be the sense in that? I was getting her out of there.” O’Brian leaned his elbows on the table, his linked hands coming up to tap against his chin. “The only thing I can figure is something must have happened. Something that scared her. She just bolted.”
“So why didn’t she bolt to you?”
“Maybe she figured she’d be too easy to trace.” A wry smile tightened the flesh beside his eyes. “Didn’t take you long to find me, now did it?”
Sebastian studied the agent’s dark, handsome face. “Ian Kane says her departure meant nothing to him. That she was easily replaced.”
O’Brian huffed a humorless laugh. “What do you think? I was about to pay him two hundred pounds for her.” He leaned forward. He was no longer smiling. “It sets a bad example for the other girls, now doesn’t it? Her taking off like that. I don’t know what he told you. But the truth is, he was livid when he found out she’d run away. Said if he ever got his hands on her again, he’d kill her.”
Chapter 29
Ian Kane sat on a folding stool amidst the tumbledown tombs and overgrown headstones of the churchyard of All-hallows Barking, a paintbrush in one hand, a flat palette smeared with paint in the other. Balanced on the easel before him stood the canvas on which the north face of the church was beginning to emerge in a glory of sun-washed golds and blues and reds. Sebastian squinted up at the billowing clouds building overhead and said, “You’re about to lose your sun.”
“This is England,” said Kane, his gaze on the church before him. “I always lose my sun.”
Sebastian watched the brothel owner load his paintbrush with gold. “I’d have thought a gloomy day more suited to your subject.”
“You would,” said Kane.
Sebastian gave a sharp laugh. The church was a curious blend of styles and materials, the massive round pillars and Gothic arches of the west end dating back to the thirteenth century, while the eastern end was much more recent, with a brick steeple that had been added only a hundred fifty years before.
“I was eight when I started in the mines,” said Kane, squinting at the point where the church’s old staircase turret wound toward a roof badly in need of replacement. “I was lucky. Most lads go down when they’re only six—some as young as four. I was a pony boy. Did you know that they keep those poor beasts down in the mines until they die? Their hooves turn green. It’s unnatural, stabling horses a mile underground so they never see the sun.” He added a fleck of light to the painted turret on the canvas. “I like the sun.”
The air filled with a gentle cooing from the pigeons roosting on the steeple. Kane painted for a few moments, then said, “What brings you sniffing around me again?”
Sebastian leaned against the edge of a nearby lichen-covered tomb. “I found Luke O’Brian.”
“That didn’t take long. Did he confess to the murders?”
“No. But he provided me with some interesting information. He says Rose Fletcher was more than happy to let him buy her out of your house.”
Kane added a touch of blue to a clerestory window. “I don’t buy and sell women. You make me sound like some bloody Yank.”
Sebastian crossed his arms at his chest and leaned back. “Right. You were simply going to let O’Brian pay the woman’s debts—with a handsome commission for you, of course.”
“It’s the English way, isn’t it—commissions?”
“He also said you weren’t as sanguine as you would have me believe about her precipitous departure. He says you were furious that she’d left. Furious enough to threaten to kill her if you found her.”
Kane shrugged. “It’s an easy thing to say, isn’t it? I’d like to kill him. Or, I could kill her. People say it all the time. Not many follow through on it.”
“Some do.”
“I had no reason to kill her. Rose was a good source of revenue but she wasn’t irreplaceable. What good would killing her do me?”
Sebastian said, “She was about to be sold—excuse me, released—to O’Brian. So why would she run?”
“You tell me.”
“Maybe she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see.”
Kane threw him a sideways glance. “What are you imagining? Murder? Treason? Satanic rituals?”
Sebastian met his gaze and held it. “I hadn’t though
t about the satanic rituals.”
Kane swung back to his painting. After a moment, he said, “A gentleman came to the house a couple of weeks ago. He was quite surprised to find Rose at the Academy. Only, he didn’t call her Rose. He called her ‘Rachel.’ ”
“A gentleman?”
“Most definitely a gentleman. Not a scrambling functionary or schoolteacher or vicar, but a real gentleman.” Kane gave him a mean smile. “Like you. Only smaller, thinner. Reddish brown hair. Good-looking enough, I suppose, but he had a weak chin.”
The church bells began to peal, startling the pigeons roosting on the tower so that they flew up, their wings beating the air with a soft whirling sound quickly lost amid the distant rattle of harness and the crunch of ironbound wheels over cobbles, and the cry of a chimney sweep’s boy shouting, “ ’Weep, ’weep.”
“Sound like anyone you know?” said Kane, one eyebrow raised in mocking inquiry. He waited a beat, then added, “My lord Devlin?”
Sebastian studied the clouds building overhead. “You had me followed,” he said.
Kane squinted up at the sky. “There goes the sun.”
“How’s your man’s arm?” Sebastian pushed away from the tomb as Kane flipped open a leather-bound wooden box littered with paint-stained bottles and old rags at his feet. “An injury like that can incapacitate a man for a spell.”
“I heard you’d tangled with a cadger near the docks yesterday,” said Kane, thrusting his palette and brushes into the box. “I don’t know who the fellow was.” He closed the lid on the box and snapped the fastenings before straightening. “But I do know this: It wasn’t one of my lads.”
“Now why should I believe you?” said Sebastian.
“Believe me or not, as you choose. But your questions are obviously making someone uneasy.” Kane smiled and reached for his easel. In the pale light, the blue scar left across his forehead by his early years in the coal mines looked even darker. “Uneasy enough to want to kill you.”
Pushing to his feet, Gibson left the man’s bedside and limped down the hall. The stump of his left leg was aching badly, giving him a slow, awkward gait. He answered a call of nature, then splashed water on his face and roughly toweled it dry. He was pouring himself a morning ale when he thought he heard a step in the hall.
“Anyone there?” he called.
The stillness of the surgery stretched out around him, raising a sudden, inexplicable length of gooseflesh on his arms.
“Who’s there?” he called again, setting aside the ale.
He lurched toward the front room, torn between surging alarm and a feeling of profound foolishness. From the street outside came the shuffling hoofbeats of a passing horse and the voice of a hawker crying, “ ’Ere I am with me rabbits hangin’ from me pole. Who’ll buy me rabbits?”
At the doorway, Gibson hesitated. The wounded man appeared to be sleeping peacefully, the sheet pulled up over his chest. It wasn’t until Gibson limped over to the bedside that he saw the man’s eyes staring wide-open and sightless. Gibson put out one hand, touching the man’s slack jaw and watching the head loll.
Someone had broken his neck.
Chapter 30
Parting from Ian Kane outside the churchyard of Allhallows Barking, Sebastian went in search of Rachel Fairchild’s onetime betrothed, Tristan Ramsey.
He found him drinking Blue Ruin with Lord Alvin and Mr. Peter Dimsey at the Thatched House Tavern in St. James’s. Walking up behind Ramsey’s chair, Sebastian laid a heavy hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “We have something to discuss,” said Sebastian, fixing his gaze on the other two men in a way that made both gentlemen shift uncomfortably in their seats. “You gentlemen will excuse us?”
Ramsey froze. “My friends and I are having a drink,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Surely this can wait?”
Sebastian kept his hand on Ramsey’s shoulder. “I think not.”
Ramsey’s gaze went from Sebastian to his friends. If he was hoping for any succor from either Alvin or Dimsey, he misjudged his friends. Both gentlemen had suddenly become wholly absorbed in the study of their drinks. “Perhaps for a moment,” he said, and thrust back his chair.
They pushed through the crowded tavern to a narrow passage that led to a door opening onto a cobbled lane at the rear. Ramsey closed the door behind him with a snap and said, “Now see here, Devlin—”
Moving calmly and deliberately, Sebastian whacked the back of his gloved hand across the man’s face. He was in no mood for any more of Ramsey’s bluster and lies.
A different kind of man might have called Sebastian out for such an offense. Not Ramsey. “Bloody hell!” Both hands cupped protectively over his nose, he doubled over as if he’d been gut-punched. “You’ve drawn my cork.”
Picking up the man by his lapels, Sebastian slung Ramsey back against the brick wall behind him. “We’re going to have a conversation. Only, this time, you’re going to be very careful not to lie to me.”
“What? What the hell is wrong with you? I didn’t lie to you!”
“You did. You knew Rachel Fairchild was in Covent Garden. More than that—you knew exactly which house she was in.”
A tiny trickle of blood ran from Ramsey’s left nostril. “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I—”
“You went there.” Sebastian grabbed the man’s shoulders and thumped his back against the wall again. “You like paying for it, do you, Ramsey? You like it when women have to do exactly what you tell them to do? When they moan on cue whether you’re really bringing them pleasure or not? Must have been quite a shock to find your own fiancée lined up there with all the other soiled doves offering her charms to any man with the money to pay for them.”
“Why you—” Ramsey bucked against Sebastian’s hold, his lips twisting with rage.
“What I don’t understand is how the hell you walked away and left her there.”
“I tried to get her to leave!” said Ramsey, his breath blowing bloody bubbles out his nostril. “She wouldn’t come with me. I had to pay for her just to talk to her! She took me upstairs to one of those awful rooms.” His upper lip curled at the memory. “The bed reeked of stale sweat and sex. She reeked of sex—of men. I begged her to come with me. But she just stood there listening to me with her arms crossed and a bored look on her face. Then she said I only had three minutes left, so if I wanted to fuck her, then I’d better hurry up and do it.”
Sebastian studied the younger man’s trembling chin as full understanding dawned on a tide of rage and revulsion. “And so you did, didn’t you?” Sebastian let Ramsey go and took a step back before the urge to plant the bastard a facer grew overwhelming. “Mother of God. What manner of man are you?”
Ramsey wiped his sleeve across his bloody upper lip. “You don’t understand. She taunted me. She wanted it!”
“Is that what you told yourself? So you—what? Fucked her there? In the upstairs room of a Covent Garden brothel? And then you just left her?”
“What else was I supposed to do?”
“You could have told her father where she was.”
“Lord Fairchild?” Ramsey looked appalled. “You think I wanted to kill him? The man has a weak heart.”
Sebastian studied Ramsey’s blood-smeared features. “Did you find out how Rachel ended up in Covent Garden?”
