by C. S. Harris
“No,” said the harpist, her spine still pressed flat to the wall. “Down the hall, toward the back of the house.”
His gaze shifted to the darkened hall that ran along the back of the stairs. “What’s there?”
“The kitchen,” she said. Her head lifted suddenly, her face turning as a more pungent scent of smoke overrode the lingering wisps from the candles. “Do you smell that?”
He smelled it. He could hear it, too: the crackling of flames, the roar of ancient timbers catching, flaring up. “Bloody hell,” he swore, grabbing her wrist. “They’ve torched the place. Come on.” Jerking her from the alcove, he raised his voice to shout, “Fire! Everyone out! Quickly! Fire!”
“No,” she said, squirming from his grasp to dart back behind the curtain. “My harp.”
“Bloody hell,” he said again as she struggled beneath the instrument’s weight. “I’ll bring the bloody harp.” Already he could see the faint reddish glow from the rear of the house, hear the screams of the women, the excited shouts of the men, the thump of running feet on the stairs. “Just get out of here.”
She refused to leave without him—or, more accurately, without her harp. “Be careful,” she cautioned as he staggered beneath its bulk. Squealing, half-naked women and men with bare pink flesh that glowed in the lamplight pushed past them in a scrambling rush for the door. A middle-aged man with a hairy, sunken white chest and flaccid phallus kept bleating, “I say, I say, I say.”
The clanging of the firebell reverberated up and down the street. Already a crowd was forming at the base of the house’s front steps. Buckets appeared, passed hand to hand. Swearing softly beneath his load, Sebastian pushed their way through the shouting throng and turned toward Portman Square. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand, Miss—”
“Driscoll,” she said, hovering protectively about her harp as the crush of men, women, and children rushing toward the fire increased. “Mary Driscoll.”
“Miss Driscoll.” The sounding board of the harp was beginning to dig unpleasantly into his back. “Why didn’t those men kill you?”
“They didn’t know I was there. I put out my candle and quit playing the instant I heard them in the hall with Thackery.”
“You know who they were?”
“No. But I recognized their voices. They came to the house the night Hessy Abrahams died.”
Sebastian studied her gaunt, strained features. “You recognized their voices? How many times have you heard them?”
“Only the once.” She must have caught the doubt in his own voice, because an unexpected smile curled her lips. “When you’re blind, you learn to listen very, very carefully.”
He could see his curricle now, Tom at the chestnuts’ heads trying to quiet them as they sidled nervously, their manes tossing, nostrils flaring at the scent of the fire. Sebastian said, “Tell me about the men. How many were there?”
“Only two,” she said. “The one was older, in his thirties, I’d say. He was the one in charge. The younger man listened to him, did what he was told without question or argument.”
Like a good soldier, thought Sebastian. Aloud, he said, “What about their accents?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell much, beyond the fact that they were gentlemen.”
He put out his hand, stopping her when she would have kept walking. “We’re at my carriage.”
“Gov’nor,” said Tom, his mouth falling open, “you ain’t never gonna fit that thing in the curricle.”
“Yes, I am,” said Sebastian, temporarily setting the harp on the flagstones beside the carriage. “Miss Driscoll here is going to hold it on her lap.” He offered her a hand up and she took it without hesitation.
With the Academy in flames, he supposed she had no place else to go. But as he watched her settle on the curricle’s high seat, another thought occurred to him. He said, “Do you know who I am?”
Again, that faint smile. “Of course I know who you are. You’re Viscount Devlin. You came to the house last Tuesday. You had wine with Miss Lil, Tasmin, Becky, and Sarah. Then your questions made Miss Lil uncomfortable, and she asked you to leave.”
“I never gave my name.”
“No. But I heard Miss Lil and Mr. Kane talking about you later. People are strange in that way. If you can’t see, they often act as if you can’t hear, either. Or perhaps they simply assume I’m stupid.”
She was far from stupid. He handed the harp up to her, grunting softly beneath its weight. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re willing to come with me.”
She clutched the harp to her. “Those men were looking for Miss Lil. Once they’d killed her, they left.” He saw her delicate throat work as she swallowed. “I don’t want them to come for me.”
Sebastian gazed up at her thin, plain face. Now that he had her in his curricle, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do with her. From the distance came a shout, followed by what sounded like a collective sigh as the walls of the Academy collapsed inward in a fiery inferno that sent sparks flying high into the night sky.
“Gov’nor?” said Tom.
Sebastian leapt up into the curricle and gathered the reins. “Stand away from their heads,” he said, and turned the chestnuts toward Covent Garden Theater.
Chapter 51
Kat Boleyn might have been the most celebrated young actress of the London stage, but her cramped dressing room at the Covent Garden Theater was not designed to accommodate Miss Boleyn in full costume as Beatrice, a tall nobleman in a many-caped driving coat, and a blind woman clutching a harp.
She looked at Mary Driscoll’s pale, strained face and said to Sebastian, “Could I speak to you outside for a moment?”
They crowded into a dimly lit corridor smelling strongly of grease paint and orange peels and dust. Kat whispered, “Sebastian, what are you going to do with her?”
“I’m hoping she can identify the men who forced their way into the Academy tonight.”
“She’s blind.”
“Yes, but she heard their voices. She’ll be able to recognize them if she hears them again.”
Kat looked at him. He knew what she was thinking, that while he might credit Miss Driscoll’s ability to identify voices, no one else would. But all she said was, “And afterward? What will you do with her then?”
“Don’t worry. I won’t leave you lumbered with her forever.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“I’m sorry, but I had no place else to take her where I knew she’d be safe.” He couldn’t see taking a woman like Mary Driscoll to the Red Lion.
“Sebastian, truly, it’s all right.” She reached out to touch his arm. A simple enough gesture, yet it sent a rush of forbidden longing coursing through him. It had been a mistake to come here, he realized, a mistake to allow himself to stand this close to her, to breathe in all the old familiar scents of a tainted past.
She dropped her hand and took a step back. “I heard someone has tried to kill you. Twice.”
“Where did you hear that?”
She stood with her arms gripped across the stomach of her costume as if she were cold, although it was not cold in the theater. Instead of answering, she said, “You will be careful. Not just of this killer, but of Jarvis.”
“I can handle Jarvis.”
“No one can handle Jarvis.”
To his surprise, Sebastian found himself smiling. “His daughter can.”
The tiger glanced at the door of the nearby music hall, then back at Sebastian’s face. “I can stay.”
Sebastian’s gaze lifted, like Tom’s, to the music hall door. It was too well lit, too loud, too full of the exuberance of life. Sebastian intended to do his drinking someplace dark and earnest. He clapped the tiger on the shoulder and turned away. “Just go home, Tom. Now.”
Chapter 52
SUNDAY, 10 MAY 1812
“Here,” said Calhoun, slipping what felt like a warm mug into Sebastian’s slack hand. “Drink this.”
>
“What the devil is it?”
“Tincture of milk thistle.”
Sebastian opened the other eye, but it didn’t work any better than the first. “What the hell are you doing here? Go away.”
“A message has arrived from Dr. Gibson.”
“And?” Sebastian opened both eyes this time and clenched his teeth as the room spun unpleasantly around him.
“It seems the authorities have recovered the body of a military gentleman by the name of Max Ludlow. Dr. Gibson will be performing the autopsy this morning, and he thought you might be interested.”
Sebastian sat up so fast the hot liquid in the forgotten mug sloshed over the sides and burned his hand. “Bloody hell.”
“Drink it, my lord,” said Calhoun, turning away toward the dressing room. “Nothing is better than milk thistle when you’ve got the devil of a head.”
The milk thistle helped some, but not enough to encourage Sebastian to do more than glance at the dishes awaiting him in the breakfast room before turning away and calling for his town carriage. The day had dawned cool but clear and far too bright. He subsided into one corner of his carriage and closed his eyes. Gibson’s autopsies were never pleasant, but Sebastian didn’t want to even think about the kind of shape Max Ludlow’s body would be in after ten days.
“ ’E’s in the room out the back,” said Gibson’s housekeeper when she opened the door to Sebastian. A short, stout woman with iron gray hair and a plain, ruddy face, she scowled at him with unabashed disapproval. “I’m to take you there. Not that I’m going any farther than halfway down the garden, mind you. It’s unnatural, what ’e does down there.”
Sebastian followed Mrs. Federico’s broad back down the ancient, narrow hall and through the kitchen to the untidy yard that led to the small stone building where Gibson performed both his postmortems and his illicit dissections. True to her word, halfway across the yard Mrs. Federico drew up short. “Viscount or no viscount, I ain’t goin’ no farther,” she said, and headed back toward her kitchen.
Sebastian had to quell the urge to follow her. He could already smell Max Ludlow.
“There you are,” said Gibson, appearing at the building’s open doorway, his gore-stained hands held aloft. “I thought you’d be interested in this.”
Sebastian tried breathing through his mouth. “Where did they find him?”
“In Bethnal Green. Wrapped in canvas and dumped in a ditch along Jews Walk.”
“I suppose it’s better than the Thames,” said Sebastian. He’d seen bodies pulled out of the river after a week. It wasn’t a sight he cared to see again.
“There was water in the ditch.”
“Good God,” said Sebastian. He should have had more of Calhoun’s milk thistle.
Gibson ducked back into the building’s dank interior. After a brief hesitation, Sebastian followed.
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.”
