When Gods Die sscm-2

by C. S. Harris

  “Tell me,” said Sebastian, his attention seemingly all for his driving, “who do you really think killed her?”

  Varden fixed his gaze on the horses’ heads, their manes tossing lightly with the late-morning breeze and the smooth action of their gait. After a moment, he said, “When I heard she was dead, I naturally assumed Bevan Ellsworth was responsible. Then I heard she’d been found in the Prince’s arms, and I thought he’d done it. A part of me still suspects Ellsworth, although you say it couldn’t have been him, that he was otherwise occupied that day.” He swiped an open hand across his face, rubbing his eyes. “Now? I don’t know. I just don’t know,” he repeated softly.

  Sebastian drew the bluestone necklace from his pocket and held it out. “Have you ever seen this before?”

  The Chevalier stared at the necklace, his nostrils flaring with a sudden intake of breath, his eyes opening wide with what looked very much like horror. “Good God. Where did you get that?”

  Sebastian threaded the silver chain through his gloved fingers. “It was around Lady Anglessey’s neck when she was found in the Pavilion.”

  “What? But that’s—” He broke off.

  “Impossible? Why? You have seen it before, haven’t you? Where?”

  Varden stared off across the Park. Even this early in the day, the Park was crowded. The morning had dawned clear, the sun warm in an open blue sky. But dark clouds could be seen building again on the horizon, threatening more rain before nightfall. “The summer when I was twelve or thirteen, my mother took us to the south of France. There was a peace then, if you’ll remember. It didn’t last long, but my mother missed France, and she wanted us to see it. We took Guinevere with us.”

  “Just Lady Guinevere?”

  Varden shook his head. “Morgana, too. We stayed with some people who had a château near Cannes. Somehow or another they’d managed to survive the Revolution, although they’d fallen on hard times. We came to know a woman there—an Englishwoman who was another of their guests. The necklace was hers. She told us a strange story about it, how it had once belonged to a mistress of James the Second, and how the necklace always chose the next person it was to go to by growing warm in their hand.”

  He leaned back against the curricle’s seat, his arms crossed at his chest. “I didn’t believe any of it, although it made a wonderful story. But when the woman took the necklace from around her neck and handed it to Guinevere…’’ His voice trailed away.

  “It grew warm?”

  “Yes. It was practically glowing.” He let out a ragged half laugh. “I know it sounds unbelievable. I remember Morgana was so jealous she practically snatched the necklace from her sister’s hand. But it immediately went cold again.”

  Sebastian looked at him sharply. When Sebastian had described the necklace to Morgana, she’d disclaimed all knowledge of it. Had she simply forgotten the incident? Or remembered it all too well? “And this woman…she gave Guinevere the necklace?”

  “No. That’s just it. The last time I saw the necklace, it was still around the Englishwoman’s neck. And that was eight or nine years ago.”

  “What was her name?” The question came out sounding harsher than Sebastian had meant it to. “Do you remember?”

  Varden shook his head. “They said she was mistress to a Frenchman—one of Napoléon’s generals, I believe. But I don’t remember her name. I couldn’t even tell you what she looked like.”

  “Was she fair?” said Sebastian, his chest so tight he found himself scarcely able to breathe. “Fine-boned and fair?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Varden, the sun golden on his face as he turned to look directly at Sebastian. “I don’t remember.”

  Chapter 57

  Kat’s gowns were made by London’s most fashionable modistes, her slippers of the finest silk and kid, her chemises trimmed with delicate Belgian lace. But there had been a time when she had been intimately familiar with London’s booming secondhand clothing trade. She’d known who would fence a silk handkerchief, just as she’d known who would give the best price for a stolen watch.

  Not all the goods in the secondhand clothing trade were stolen. Men and women fallen on hard times with nothing left to sell could still sell their own clothes, their appearance becoming ever more ragged as they spiraled down into the gutter. Yet such a huge traffic in used items also created a ready market for thieves. Having once been a thief, Kat knew exactly where to go when she decided to track down the dealer who had sold Lady Addison Peebles’s green satin ball gown to Guinevere Anglessey’s killer.

  Many of the secondhand clothing dealers had stalls in the Rag Fair in Rosemary Lane, while others sold their goods from barrows in Whitechapel, with the occasional purloined round of cheese or bacon hidden away beneath the tattered petticoats and breeches. But the finest quality goods could be found in a little shop kept by Mother Keyes in Long Acre.

  There, in her elegantly bowed front window, Mother Keyes displayed delicate silk handkerchiefs and nightdresses of linen and lace, snowy white kid gloves and ball gowns fit for a queen. All looked new, although they were not. Some had been sold by their owners or the servants to whom they had been given. Others had come into the shop by more nefarious channels, with any initials or marks carefully removed before the items were put on display.

  The bell on the front door jangled pleasantly as Kat entered the shop, bringing with her the warm scents of sun and morning breeze. Mother Keyes looked up from behind her counter, her sharp hazel eyes narrowing as they traveled up the length of Kat’s fringed and embroidered poult-de-soie walking gown, assessed the package she carried, and came to rest on her face.

  It had been nearly ten years now since a much younger Kat had slipped through Mother Keyes’s door, and she hadn’t been wearing soft kid gloves or a chip hat with a delicately curled ostrich feather that cost enough to feed a family for months. But Kat knew the woman recognized her. Remembering faces and reading the subtle, telltale signs of character writ there had kept Mother Keyes out of Newgate for sixty years or more.

  Holding the old woman’s gaze, Kat spread the green satin gown on the polished counter between them and said, “If I were abigail to a duke’s daughter-in-law and my lady gave me a gown such as this that she no longer wanted, I think I’d bring it to you to sell.”

  Mother Keyes glanced down at the gown, her eyes narrowing, although her face gave nothing away. She was a tiny woman, her frame delicate, the features in her wrinkled face small and even. She looked back up at Kat. “Think me a flat, do you?”

  Kat laughed. “I know very well you are not. And this maid I’m talking about—the one who sold you this dress? She spoke the truth. Lady Addison Peebles did give her the gown. Her mother-in-law said the color made her look like a sick frog.”

  Mother Keyes blinked. “You have the dress, and you know who sold it. So why are you here?”

  Kat laid a guinea on the expanse of shimmering satin. “I want to know who bought it.”

  Mother Keyes hesitated a moment, then picked up the coin with quick, nimble fingers. “I don’t know their names, but I do remember them.”

  It didn’t surprise Kat. People were Mother Keyes’s hobby. She amused herself by watching them, studying them, analyzing them. “They were a queer pair,” she said. “No doubt about it.” She paused expectantly.

  Kat placed a second coin on the counter. “There were two of them?”

  “That’s right. One of them was from the Colonies. The Southern Colonies, from the sound of him.” She leaned in close and dropped her voice. “An African, no less. Mind you, ’e was as pale skinned as a Portuguese, but ’e ’ad the features, if you know what I mean. That flat nose, and them full lips. Big, ’e was, too. And bald as a plucked goose.”

  Kat dutifully deposited another coin. “And the other one? What was he like?”

  “Not a man. A girl. A London girl. Young, she was. No more’n fifteen or sixteen, I’d say. Maybe less. Yellow-headed and tall, but otherwise ordinary lookin’.
I don’t remember much else about her, ’cept for her eyes.”

  “Her eyes?”

  “They were so pale. Reminded me of rainwater on a cloudy day. Nothin’ there but a reflection.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to remember anything they said, would you?”

  Mother Keyes gazed out the shop’s window at the troop of soldiers marching past, her lips pursing with studied thought. “Well, let me see….”

  Kat placed another coin on the table.

  The coin disappeared beneath Mother Keyes’s tiny hand. “They argued a bit about the size of the dress. The girl, she kept insistin’ they needed something bigger, but the African, he said no, it’d do just fine. And then he said the queerest thing.”

  The old woman paused expectantly. Suppressing a sigh of impatience, Kat produced another coin.

  Mother Keyes drew back her lips in a smile that displayed a mouthful of unexpectedly sound teeth. “He said that dress, it was just the thing for a lady to wear to the Brighton Pavilion.”

  Chapter 58

  “I’d like you to spend some time hanging around Lady Quinlan’s house,” Sebastian told his tiger after they had returned the Chevalier to St. James’s Street. “See if you can find out what her ladyship was doing the day Guinevere Anglessey was killed.”

  “You think Lady Quinlan offed ’er own sister?” squeaked Tom in surprise.

  “I think I’d like to know what she was doing last Wednesday.”

  “I’ll find out, ne’er you fear,” promised Tom.

  Sebastian grunted. “And do endeavor not to get picked up by the watch this time, do you hear?”

  “I never—” Tom began as they turned onto Brook Street, only to break off and say, “Gor! Look there. Ain’t that Miss Kat?”

  She stood on the footpath before Sebastian’s house, the embroidered skirt of her poult-de-soie walking dress clutched in one hand as she prepared to mount his steps. Kat never came to his house. She said it wasn’t appropriate, that the time they shared together should be kept separate from the life he lived in Mayfair as the Earl of Hendon’s son and Lady Wilcox’s brother. She knew it infuriated him, but she wasn’t the kind of woman to be intimidated by a man’s anger. No matter how much he told her he didn’t give a damn about the conventions, that he had only one life and she was a vitally important part of it, she stubbornly stayed away. Only once before had she come here, and then she’d been both unconscious and bleeding.

  At the sound of the curricle, her head turned, the brim of her chip hat casting the features of her face into shadow.

  “Stable them,” he told Tom, handing the boy the reins and jumping lightly from the curricle’s high seat. “What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked, his hands clasping Kat’s shoulders as she came up to him.

  She shook her head. “Nothing’s wrong. I located the secondhand dealer who sold Lady Addison’s green satin evening gown.”

  He knew better than to ask how out of all the secondhand clothing dealers in London she’d known which one to go to. “And?”

  “She says she sold it to an African and a tall young girl with pale gray eyes.”

  THE GIRL WAS EASY ENOUGH TO FIND.

  According to one of the men Sebastian came upon sifting through the still-smoking rubble of the Norfolk Arms on Giltspur Street, her name was Amelia Brennan. The eldest of eight children, she lived with her mother and father in a ramshackle whitewashed cottage built into what had once been the garden of a bigger house facing Cock Lane. The larger houses themselves had long since been broken up into lodgings, their gardens disappearing beneath a warren of shanties and hovels threaded by a narrow byway half-filled with heaps of ashes and steaming rubbish piles.

  As Sebastian’s carriage turned down the lane, ragged children stared from open doorways, their hair tangled and matted, their faces and arms as caked with dirt as newly dug potatoes. Most had probably never seen a lord’s carriage, with its well-fed, glossy-coated horses, its liveried and powdered footmen standing up behind. They had certainly never seen such a sight here in Ha’penny Court.

  Sebastian waited in the carriage while one of the footmen hopped down and went to rap on the Brennans’ warped door. The show of ostentatious power and wealth was deliberate, and Sebastian meant to use it to his advantage.

  The Brennans’ cottage was better tended than its neighbors, he noticed, its missing windows covered with oiled parchment rather than simply stuffed with rags, the front step freshly swept. But signs of encroaching decay were evident in the rotting eave at one corner, in the shutter that hung drunkenly from a broken hinge.

  A woman answered the door, a boy of about two balanced on one hip. She had the worn face and graying hair of an old woman, although considering the age of her children, Sebastian suspected she was only in her midthirties. He watched her gaze travel from the powdered footman to the grand carriage filling the lane outside her cottage, and saw the terrible fear that flooded into her eyes. Her lips parted, her arm tightening around the child so that he let out a whimper of protest.

  Sebastian swung open the carriage door and stepped down with an affected, languid pace, a scented handkerchief held to his nostrils. “Your daughter Amelia has been implicated in the murder of the Marchioness of Anglessey,” he said, his voice at its most patrician and condescending. “If she cooperates, I can help her. But only if she cooperates. If she doesn’t, it will go hard on her.” He let his gaze drift with unmistakable meaning over the humble cottage. “On her, and on you and your other children.”

  “Oh, my lord,” gushed the woman, sinking to her knees. “Our Amelia’s a good girl—truly she is. She only did what she was told, like a proper servant, when—”

  Sebastian cut her off. “Is she here now?”

  “No, my lord. She’s—”

  “Get her.”

  A crowd of stair-stepped children filled the open doorway behind the woman. She twisted around, her gaze singling out a thin boy of perhaps eleven or twelve. Normally, a lad of that age would be off earning money to help his family. That he was here now suggested that the boy, like his sister, must have worked at the Norfolk Arms. Last night’s fire would be hard on this family.

  “Nathan,” said the woman. “Go. And be quick.”

  Sebastian watched the boy dash off, then turned back to the woman. “I would like to come in and sit down.”

  Mrs. Brennan stumbled to her feet, her thin chest jerking with each rapid breath. “Yes. Of course, my lord. Please, come in.”

  The house was neat and tidy, the dirt floor swept, the walls scrubbed clean. There were two rooms, one above the other, with a steep set of steps along one wall leading up to the second floor, where the children doubtless slept. It was a luxury for a family to have two rooms. In some parts of London families slept twenty and more to a room.

  Shoving the baby into the arms of a girl of about seven, Amelia’s mother showed Sebastian to a settle beside the empty hearth. Fronted by a crude trestle table with benches, the hearth took up most of the back wall. A box bed stood in the far corner, where in the dim light Sebastian could make out the huddled shape of a man lying on one side so that he faced the wall.

  “He hurt his legs some months back,” said the woman, following Sebastian’s gaze. “His legs and his head. He hasna been able to work since. He cain’t even walk.”

  Which explained the rotting eave and broken hinge on what had once been a well-tended cottage, Sebastian thought. Without its major wage earner, this was a family sliding toward the edge of disaster. Through the open door at the rear, Sebastian could see a small yard with a washhouse and a big copper kettle steaming over a brassier. According to the man at the Norfolk Arms, Amelia’s mother worked as a laundress. When she brought him a pot of ale, Sebastian’s gaze fell on her cracked, raw hands. A woman could scrub clothes until her hands bled, and still she wouldn’t be able to earn enough to feed a family of ten.

  “Our Amelia’s a good girl, truly she is,” Mrs. Brennan said again, her red hands twist
ing in the cloth of her apron. “She was only doin’ what she was told.”

  “Which was?” Sebastian cradled the ale pot in his hands, but he was careful not to taste it. Not after what had happened to Guinevere Anglessey in this neighborhood.

  The click of a woman’s pattens on the muddy cobbles outside brought Mrs. Brennan around, her face pinched and anxious. Amelia paused on the threshold of the open door, her hands gripping either side of the frame, her pale eyes widening. At the sight of Sebastian, she whirled to run, then let out a soft cry when Andrew, one of the strapping footmen Sebastian had brought with him, stepped forward to grasp her by the arms.

  “There, there now, miss,” said Andrew. “I believe his lordship was wishing to speak with you.”

  Chapter 59

  “Amelia, please,” said Mrs. Brennan. She reached out to loop an arm around the neck of one of the younger children and pull him closer to her, as if she might somehow protect him from what was about to happen. “Please.”

  Amelia’s pale gray eyes met her mother’s darker, troubled gaze. She hesitated, then bent to unstrap her pattens. When she straightened, her face was carefully wiped clean of all expression.

  She came to slide onto the bench on the far side of the table. Four of the younger children crowded around her, their faces solemn as they stared at Sebastian. The girl with the baby hung back against the far wall, but her gaze, like her siblings’, was fixed on Sebastian. Only Amelia refused to look at him, her gaze on the table before her.

  “I want you to tell me precisely what happened at the Norfolk Arms last Wednesday,” he said to her. “I already know about the murder. All I need you to do is confirm the details.”

  She brought up both hands to smooth her lank hair away from the sides of her face. Her expression might be calm, but her hands were shaking. She sucked in a deep breath, her teeth working her lower lip. “I didn’t know nothin’ about it till it was all over.” She glanced up at him once, quickly, then away. “I swear I didn’t. We was busy that afternoon and I was workin’ the common room. Then Mr. Carter, he comes to me and says he wants me to help him buy a dress for…for the lady.”