When Gods Die sscm-2

by C. S. Harris

  “The offer’s still open. Tonight. Five shillings.”

  The man had never exactly said what he wanted Tom to do for those five shillings, but Tom was no flat. He knew. His empty stomach heaved.

  He had no blanket, not even a thin pallet to absorb some of the cold rising up from the stone floor. Here in Newgate, such luxuries as food and bedding had to be purchased. If it weren’t for the hap-hazard charity of benevolent societies and various philanthropically minded individuals, the poorer prisoners would starve. Many did.

  Pushing up from the vermin-ridden straw, Tom stood and walked away from the crooning temptation of that voice. The room was no more than twelve by fourteen feet, and crowded with some fifteen to twenty men and boys. One of the boys couldn’t have been more than six. He lay curled on his side in a corner, his fair hair matted and dirty, his grimy face streaked with tears. Every once in a while he’d start crying for his mother until one of the men would kick him and tell him to be still.

  Tom went to press his face against the bars. For a moment, he squeezed his eyes shut and felt himself sway on his feet.

  He hadn’t dared close his eyes through all the long, dark hours of the night. Not that he could have slept, anyway, what with the fear and the rustling of the rats and the cold that seemed to sink all the way to his bones. And then there were the screams. The screams of the despairing, the mad, the sick and dying, mingled with the plaintive cries of women being taken by force.

  The turnkey rented them out by the hour, one of the other boys had told Tom. Some of the women were probably willing enough—they’d learned long ago to sell their bodies to survive. But even when they weren’t willing, they were given no choice.

  He’d seen them dragging one girl across the yard. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, her flailing arms showing pale and thin in the sputtering light of a torch, her dark eyes wild in a small, tight face.

  “Psst. Boy…”

  Tom kept walking.

  He’d tried to get the beadle who’d hauled him here to send word of what had happened to Viscount Devlin, but the big man had only laughed at him and called him Captain Bounce. Then the gaoler had emptied Tom’s pockets so he couldn’t even pay someone to take a message to Brook Street.

  He paused again beside the bars looking out onto the yard. He kept trying to imagine what his lordship would think when Tom never showed up. Would he assume Tom had simply run off? He wouldn’t really think that, would he?

  Surely he would know something had happened to Tom. He’d go looking for him. But he would never think to look here. At least not at first. Tom had heard some of the other prisoners talking. They said there was a session scheduled for tomorrow. A boy could be condemned one day and hanged the next. It didn’t happen all that often. Mostly the sentences were commuted to transportation. But it did happen. Tom knew.

  He felt the walls begin to close in on him, pressing close and heavy. He sucked in a deep breath and the smells of the place overwhelmed him, the stench of excrement and sweat, sickness, and fear. Fear of gaol fever, fear of the whip and the hulls on the Thames. Fear of the hangman’s noose and the surgeon’s knife.

  “Help me, Huey,” Tom said softly, sinking to his knees. It was a kind of a prayer, he supposed, although he wasn’t sure Huey was any place he could hear, let alone help. Did all thieves go to hell, even if they were only thirteen years old? “How did you stand it? Oh, God, Huey. I’m so sorry.”

  And he pressed his face against his knees and wept.

  Chapter 44

  The Physic Garden lay just north of the Thames at Chelsea. It was an old apothecary garden, said to date back to the seventeenth century, if not before. Kat herself had never been there, but she could understand how its gently curving walks and nearly deserted order beds would make an ideal meeting place, where spymaster and spy could come together and linger without arousing suspicion.

  Once, she might have looked forward to this rendezvous with a certain flush of anticipation. She’d enjoyed it, that tingling sense of exhilaration that comes from living always on the jagged edge of danger. Once, she’d had nothing to lose but her life. That was no longer true.

  She drove herself to the gardens in her phaeton and pair, with her groom, George, sitting up beside her. “It’s hot today,” she told him as she reined in at the West Gate. “Do what you can to keep them cool.”

  Holding a sapphire blue silk parasol aloft to shade her complexion from the sun, she entered through the West Gate and turned toward the pond rock garden. It was cooler here. A faint breeze rustled the leaves of the lime trees overhead, bringing her a medley of sweet scents, of sunbaked rosemary and exotic jasmine and freshly scythed grass.

  She wandered for a time between neat beds of roses. At one point she spotted an aged gentleman, his back hunched, his weathered skin darkened by years beneath a tropical sun. But he made no move to approach her, and in the end she lost sight of him admidst a planting of distant shrubs.

  She walked on, her sandaled toes kicking out the skirts of her gown with each step. She wondered who he would be, this new spymaster. Would he be a French émigré, like Pierrepont? Or perhaps an Englishman, someone who’d been unwise—or unlucky—enough to enable the French to gain an indestructible hold over him. Or maybe someone who’d become disaffected from his own country, who nourished a determined admiration for the French and what they were doing across the Channel.

  Kat herself owed no allegiance to France. As much as the ideology of the Revolution appealed to her, its savagery and excesses repelled her. And in the end the French had betrayed their own ideology, surrendering all to a military dictator who seduced them with visions of world supremacy.

  But she accepted that old maxim “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Kat’s enemy was England. It always had been, even before that misty morning in Dublin, when her world had been shattered by the tramp of soldiers’ boots and a woman’s screams and the shadows cast by two bodies swaying in the breeze.

  She became aware of another visitor to the gardens, a tall man clad in fawn-colored doeskin breeches and a well-tailored olive coat, his figure lean but powerful. She recognized him, of course. His name was Aiden O’Connell, and he was the younger son of Lord Rathkeale of Tyrawley.

  She felt herself stiffen. When the rest of the Irish were being hounded from their lands, the Tyrawley O’Connells had embraced both the conquering English and their religion. As a result, the O’Connells had not only kept their estates, but prospered.

  Pausing beside the pond’s edge, she waited for him to walk up to her. He was a handsome man, with sparkling green eyes and two dimples that appeared often in his lean, tanned cheeks.

  “Top o’ the morning to you,” he said cheerfully, dimples deepening. “Lovely gardens, don’t you think?”

  She kept her gaze on the sun-spangled expanse of water before her. She found it difficult to believe that such a man could be Napoléon’s new spymaster in London, and she certainly had no desire to encourage his attentions if he were here simply by chance.

  “Reminds me of some gardens I saw in Palestine once,” he said when she didn’t answer, “not far from Jerusalem. The cedars and sycamores were shining like silver and gold in the sunlight, so grand you’d swear they scraped the sky.”

  She swung slowly to face him. He was older than he looked, she realized, probably more like thirty than twenty-five. And there was a sharp gleam of intelligence to his gaze that the beguiling effect of those dimples tended to disguise.

  “I came here to meet you as a courtesy,” she said, although that wasn’t strictly true. She was here because she knew that if she hadn’t shown, he would simply have contacted her again. “I don’t want to do this. Not anymore.”

  Aiden O’Connell’s smile widened, crinkling the skin beside his eyes. “It’s because of Lord Devlin, is it? I did wonder.”

  She held his gaze but said nothing, and after a moment he looked away, across the smooth surface of the pond to where a
duck waddled through the reeds, a row of ten ducklings strung out behind her. “Does he know about your affection for the French?”

  “I have no affection for the French. It’s Ireland I work for.”

  “I doubt he’d see the difference.”

  Kat knew a spurt of anger fanned by fear. “Is that an observation or a threat?”

  He threw her an amused glance. “An observation only, to be sure.”

  “Because if it’s a threat, I’d like to remind you and your masters that I can do as much damage to them as they can to me. And that damage would not be contained by my death.”

  He was no longer smiling. “The French are not my masters,” he said. “And I don’t think there is any danger of your premature death.”

  She let the latter part of that statement go; her point had been made. It remained to be seen whether or not O’Connell—and the French—would take her threat seriously enough to leave her alone in the future. And it came to her in a rush of bitter realization that this was one danger that would always haunt her. One fear from which she’d never truly be free.

  She studied the pleasant face of the man beside her. “Why do you do this?” she asked suddenly.

  “For the same reason you do. Or should I say, for the same reason you did.”

  “For Ireland?”

  He raised one eyebrow. “You find that so difficult to believe?”

  “From what I know of the O’Connells, yes.”

  “We O’Connells, we’ve always believed that a man who beats his head against a stone wall is a fool.”

  “Is that how you’d characterize the brave men and women who’ve fought and died for Ireland over the years? As just so many fools beating their heads against stone walls?”

  His dimples peeped. “That’s right. The time for Ireland’s independence will come, but it won’t come until the English have been weakened. And it won’t be the Irish who’ll be weakening them. It’ll be someone else. Someone like the French. Or maybe the Prussians.”

  “The Prussians and the English have been allies.”

  “They’re not anymore.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, her gaze, like his, on the mother duck shepherding her brood one by one into the water. The air filled with a happy chorus of quack-quacks and the soft slap of ever-widening ripples moving out over the surface of the pond.

  “There’s a lot of disaffection in the streets,” O’Connell said after a moment. “Rumors. Whispers. People are ready for a change.”

  “What kind of change?” she asked, her breath suddenly coming so hard and fast she had to call on all her abilities as an actress to make her voice sound casual, disinterested.

  He kept his gaze on the mother duck and her brood. “A different dynasty, perhaps.”

  “How would that help Ireland?”

  “The Stuarts were always more sympathetic to the Catholics.”

  She swung her head to look directly at him. “There are no Stuarts anymore. Not really. And the English would never accept a Catholic king. Remember what happened to James the Second?”

  “James the Second never tried to restore Catholicism to England. All he wanted was tolerance and an end to the debilitating restrictions put on Catholics.”

  “Yet the people still wouldn’t accept him. And if they wouldn’t accept James the Second a hundred and twenty years ago, what makes you think they’ll accept someone like him now?”

  “Because the House of Hanover is tainted by madness and everyone knows it. Because men are out of work by the thousands, and women and children are starving in the streets. Because we’ve been at war for so long it’s all most people can remember. If a new King promised to bring peace and an end to high taxes and the press gangs, I think a lot of people would welcome him.”

  Kat’s eyes narrowed. “Who is pushing this?”

  He was regarding her with a studied expression that made her realize she’d said too much, shown too much interest. “That’s the funny thing about conspiracies,” he said with a smile. “Different men can be attracted to the same conspiracy for altogether different reasons. Reasons that sometimes aren’t even compatible. Why does it matter so much who’s behind it, as long as it’s good for Ireland?”

  “You suggest a restoration of the Stuarts might lead to peace with France,” she said. The sun slipped out from behind the chestnut trees on the far side of the pond, striking her in the eyes. She tilted her parasol until it once again shaded her face. “But I thought England at war with France was good for Ireland. You said that’s what we need, to weaken the English. That it’s the only way the Irish will ever win their freedom.”

  He laughed. “You are quick, aren’t you?” He leaned toward her, suddenly more serious than she’d seen him. “But if the English at war with France is good for Ireland, then how much better do you think a new English civil war would be?”

  She searched his face, but he was as good at hiding what he really thought as she. “Is that what these people want? Civil war?”

  “Hardly. But I suspect it’s what they’re going to get.”

  BY MIDMORNING, Tom was so hungry his head was spinning. He’d known hunger in the past, in the dark days before fate brought Viscount Devlin into his world. But these last few months he’d grown accustomed to a full belly and a warm bed. He’d even begun to feel safe again, the way he’d felt in the golden, half-forgotten years before his da took sick and his mother—

  But Tom slammed his mind shut on that thought before tears and the clawing blackness of terror could take him again.

  He was sitting against the back wall, his forehead resting on his drawn-up knees, when he heard a commotion in the yard, men banging tin cups against iron bars and laughing women calling out soft, obscene suggestions.

  The men and boys in his cell crowded up to the bars. Tom pushed to his feet and wiggled his way forward to take a look. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Some magistrate,” said one of the other boys, a big, half-grown lad from Cheapside who’d been caught pinching pewter tankards from a public house and would probably hang for it. “They say ’e’s here on account of the nob’s son what got hisself butchered in St. James’s Park t’other night.”

  Tom could see him now, a funny little man with bowed legs and wire-framed glasses he wore pushed down to the tip of his nose. Despite the heat of the day he wore a thick greatcoat, and held a pomander to his nose.

  Tom surged forward. “Sir ’Enry,” he called, pressing his face against the bars. “Oye, Sir ’Enry. It’s me, Tom. Sir ’Enry—”

  A rough hand thumped Tom in the shoulder, giving him a shove that sent him sprawling back into the filthy straw. “You there,” spat the gaoler. “You dirty little filcher, you shut yer mouth. You ’ear?”

  Tom scrambled to his feet and threw himself forward again, but by then it was too late. The yard was empty and the little magistrate had gone.

  Chapter 45

  Sebastian spent the morning in Smithfield, looking for Tom.

  He made no attempt to disguise who he was. He even brought along a couple of strapping footmen to preclude any possibility of a repeat of what had happened on his last visit to the area. But Tom had obviously followed instructions and taken care to blend into his surroundings. Sebastian found an old woman selling buttons who said she’d seen a boy about his age running through the streets just before sunset, running like the hounds of hell were after him. But she didn’t know what had happened to the lad, or even who’d been chasing him.

  Sebastian looked for the maimed Scottish soldier who’d been reduced to begging outside the Norfolk Arms, but no one could remember having seen the man for days. Standing in the shade cast by a ribbon shop’s awning, Sebastian studied the inn’s ancient brick facade, and knew a deep and powerful disquiet.

  He’d come back at dusk, Sebastian decided, when the creatures of the night were aprowl. “Andrew, James,” he said curtly. The two footmen snapped to attention as he pushed away from the building. “I
want you to check every watchhouse in the area, every watchman, every beadle. Do you understand? Someone must have seen him.”

  “Aye, my lord.”

  Leaping up into the carriage, Sebastian slammed his own door and sent the coachman flying to Queen Square, only to learn there that Sir Henry Lovejoy was out pursuing leads on his gruesome park murder. Increasingly frustrated, his temper fraying, Sebastian thought about Tess Bishop’s early morning visit and knew how he would spend the remaining hours until dusk.

  HE TRACKED THE CHEVALIER DE VARDEN to Angelo’s Fencing Academy in Bond Street, where Varden was fencing with the master himself. Sebastian stood for a time, watching them. The Chevalier was a good swordsman, with a keen eye and flexible wrists and a quick, light step. Barefoot, stripped down to his shirtsleeves and buckskin breeches, he moved effortlessly across the hardwood floor, foil flashing, his light brown hair tumbling in his eyes.

  Sebastian had never heard anything to the man’s discredit. The ladies liked him for his charming manner and graceful step on the dance floor, while the men liked him for his ready laugh and easy generosity and courage on the hunting field. True, the Chevalier was known to have a quick temper. But there was nothing to suggest he was the kind of man who could subject the woman he loved to a slow and painful death by poison.

  As Sebastian watched, the Chevalier feigned to the left, then slipped past the master’s guard to land a hit to his shoulder. The master laughed and the match ended. They stood talking a few moments with the easy camaraderie of two men in love with the same sport. Then Varden headed for the changing room.

  Sebastian caught him just inside the door.

  Locking onto Varden’s right wrist, Sebastian twisted the man’s arm in a way that shoved his hand up into the middle of his back and spun him around, throwing Varden off balance. Sebastian slammed him face-first against the wall, Sebastian’s left arm coming across the front of Varden’s throat to hold him from behind. “You bloody bastard,” Sebastian whispered in his ear.