Why Kill the Innocent

by C. S. Harris

  Unfortunately, the Bishop of Salisbury was not at Warwick House on this blustery Saturday morning. According to the whey-faced footman who answered the door, the prelate typically attended the Princess only on Thursdays and Fridays. He advised Sebastian to try the Bishop’s residence. At the Bishop’s residence, a somber cleric who identified himself as Fisher’s chaplain said he believed Salisbury intended to spend the day in the Reading Room of the British Museum. The staff at the Reading Room said Salisbury had been there and gone. They suggested a local coffee shop favored by the prelate.

  When he drew a blank at the coffee shop, Sebastian decided on a long shot to try the House of Lords. The snow was coming down harder now but still wet, turning the streets and footpaths into an ugly brown slush.

  “It’s bloody miserable out ’ere,” said Tom through the folds of his scarf as they plowed their way up Whitehall.

  Sebastian kept his head ducked as he guided the curricle around a stalled brewer’s wagon. “Hopefully he’ll be here.”

  The Reverend Doctor Fisher had been around Parliament that day—several people reported seeing him. But it was long past noon before Sebastian found a harried clerk who said he rather thought the Bishop had mumbled something about spending the rest of the day in the library of St. Paul’s.

  The Cathedral Library was reached from St. Paul’s southwest tower, via a grand cantilevered stone staircase that spiraled upward in sweeping swirls. The door to the library was locked. Sebastian knocked discreetly, waited, then knocked again. The minutes ticked by. Impatient, he raised a fist and pounded hard, just as the Cathedral’s choir began to sing, the sweet notes floating up from below.

  “Stop that racket!” hissed a voice on the far side of the panel as unseen hands worked the bolt.

  The door jerked in to reveal a shriveled, white-haired librarian, who glared at Sebastian’s proffered card, sniffed, then stood back grudgingly to admit him into the stone chamber. The Cathedral’s collection was contained within a single soaring room lined with dark oak cases and smelling strongly of musty old books. Volumes were everywhere: overflowing the shelves, stacked on tables, and cramming the wooden gallery that ran around the entire space overhead.

  “What are you doing here?” demanded the Great Up in a harsh whisper, scrambling down a steep ladder from the wooden gallery above. “You’re all wet!”

  Sebastian swiped a crooked elbow across his face. “You’re not an easy man to find.”

  “Shhh! Keep your voice down. And stay away from the books. You are dripping!”

  As far as Sebastian could tell, the Bishop and the aged librarian were the only people in the chamber, but he obligingly lowered his voice. “I’ve been thinking about the day Jane Ambrose died. You said—”

  “Merciful heavens, you aren’t still going on about that, are you?”

  “You said you met her in the entrance hall as she was leaving Warwick House and exchanged a few pleasantries.”

  “Y-yes,” said the Bishop, drawing the word out into two syllables. “And that triviality requires you to interrupt my studies and risk ruining a collection that dates back centuries?”

  Sebastian held himself very still. “Did you actually see Mrs. Ambrose leave Warwick House that day? I mean, physically walk through the gate?”

  “Of course not. I told you: I encountered her in the entrance hall immediately following the Princess’s lesson. After we spoke, I continued on my way up the stairs. Why would I watch her leave?”

  “And you spoke of—what? The weather?”

  “It is an endless topic of conversation these days, is it not? I’d recently returned to London, and needless to say the roads were atrocious.”

  “So you did speak of the weather?”

  “Yes; I thought I’d made that clear. I believe I made some reference to the state of the roads and said I was fortunate I’d decided to return to London when I did, since things had become so much worse. I spent the Christmas holidays with family in Petersfield, you see.”

  “And did you speak of your trip out of town?”

  “Briefly. I mentioned encountering Mrs. Ambrose’s brother at a coaching inn there, and as I recall, she expressed surprise, since she was not aware of his having been out of town.”

  “You saw Christian Somerset in Petersfield?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You know him?”

  The prelate sniffed. “Let us say simply that I know of him.”

  “Well enough to recognize him?”

  The Bishop tilted back his head so that he could look down his impressive nose at Sebastian. “That is rather implied by what I said, is it not?”

  “And when was this? That you saw Christian Somerset in Petersfield, I mean.”

  “Saturday the fifteenth of January. Why?”

  “You’re certain of the date?”

  “Of course I am certain. It’s the day I returned to London.”

  “And Mrs. Ambrose was unaware of the fact that her brother had been out of town?”

  “That is what I said. Seriously, my lord, are you not listening?”

  “I simply want to be certain I understand exactly what you’re telling me.”

  “About a trivial, inconsequential weather conversation?”

  “I have a feeling it wasn’t inconsequential,” said Sebastian. “Not at all.”

  * * *

  As he guided his horses eastward through the slush-snarled traffic of the Strand and Fleet Street, Sebastian found himself pondering the random incidents that can alter a person’s life, sometimes for the better but at other times catastrophically.

  What were the odds? he wondered. What were the odds that a superficial exchange of pleasantries between Jane Ambrose and the Princess’s self-important Preceptor could have led in just a few hours to Jane’s death? Or was that seemingly inconsequential conversation simply the inevitable culmination of a fated series of events that had begun with Christian Somerset overhearing Jane’s low-voiced discussion of the Hesse letters with Maxwell and continued through Somerset’s chance encounter with Fisher at a coaching inn in Petersfield?

  The Hesse letters had been stolen from Portsmouth sometime around the thirteenth or fourteenth of January. Given the weather, anyone traveling from Portsmouth to London at that time would surely have stuck to the main coaching road. And that road passed through Petersfield. According to the Bishop, Jane hadn’t known about her brother’s trip out of town, while according to Somerset, Jane had come to see him shortly after his return from a visit to Kent. Not Petersfield, Hampshire, but Kent.

  The variation could be meaningless, of course, but Sebastian didn’t think so. Far more likely it was a clever misdirection wrapped in a truth: The printer had been out of town, but he had been careful not to tell his sister, and he had not been to Kent.

  It was all too obvious, now, why Jane had not returned home as planned when she left Warwick House that last day. Troubled by her conversation with the Bishop, she must have gone to Paternoster Row to ask her brother if he had been behind the theft of the Hesse letters. Sebastian found it difficult to believe Christian Somerset had deliberately murdered his sister to keep her quiet. Far more likely that the siblings had quarreled, and at some point, Jane’s brother had struck her— the same way Jane’s husband had struck her so many times in the past. Only this time, when a man who claimed to love Jane knocked her down, she didn’t get up.

  Somerset’s dangerous involvement in the theft of the Princess’s indiscreet letters also explained why he had then panicked. Why he had—somehow—carried his sister’s body through the snow to leave her in a mean, snow-choked lane in Clerkenwell. Why Clerkenwell? The question had bothered Sebastian from the beginning. But the answer was simple: Unlike Jane’s husband, Christian Somerset had known his sister taught William Godwin’s daughter. But he had been unsure of the exact day of her lessons
.

  And so he had made a simple, telling mistake.

  * * *

  Sebastian reached Paternoster Row to find Somerset’s workshop once again manned by a single apprentice, who sat perched on a stool sorting type.

  “They’re all still at the Frost Fair,” said the boy Sebastian remembered from before.

  “Despite the rising temperatures?”

  The boy laughed. “That ice’ll hold for days yet. Everybody says so.”

  “Do they?”

  “Oh, aye,” said the boy. “Through Monday at least. It’s that thick, it is.”

  “Tell me,” said Sebastian, “did you know Mr. Somerset’s sister Jane Ambrose?”

  “Aye. They say she used to come here all the time when Mr. Somerset was in prison. She helped Mrs. Somerset a lot.”

  “Do you recall the last time you saw her?”

  “Aye,” said the lad, his hands stilling for a moment at their task. “She was here the day she died.”

  “She was?”

  The boy nodded. “I told her Mr. Somerset had gone off to see someone, but she said it didn’t matter because she just wanted to drop off a couple more ballads for him.”

  “Do you remember what time she left?”

  “I wouldn’t know. We weren’t busy that day, so Mr. Somerset had given us the afternoon off. I was talking to a friend in the courtyard and just happened to see her as she was lettin’ herself in.”

  “She had a key to the shop?”

  “I guess she must’ve. And Mr. Somerset keeps a spare key to his office just there, behind that picture.” The boy nodded to a water-stained lithograph of the old Cathedral of St. Paul that hung on the wall near the office door and grinned. “He thinks nobody knows about it, but we all do.”

  “Ah,” said Sebastian, shifting the print and calmly helping himself to the key. “Christian says he left a book for me on his desk. I’ll just fetch it.”

  With that, he unlocked the office door and let himself inside while the boy shrugged and went back to sorting type. It would never occur to a simple printer’s apprentice to question the actions of one of his master’s associates—particularly one as grand as a viscount.

  Closing the door behind him, Sebastian let his gaze drift around the small room. Somerset’s office was the same disorderly jumble he remembered from before, with stacks of manuscripts and books strewn everywhere. But Sebastian was looking at it all with different eyes, for he knew things now that he hadn’t known the last time he had been here.

  He stood with his back against the door, trying to imagine the afternoon more than a week ago when Jane had come to Paternoster Row for the last time. She could easily have chosen to wait for her brother in the comfort of his house’s parlor. Instead, she had come here. Why?

  Pushing away from the door, Sebastian tried to mentally reconstruct that stormy afternoon. It had been snowing hard, so she’d probably taken off her wet hat and gloves. But not her pelisse. Why? Because the fire in the stove had gone out and the room was cold?

  He found his gaze fixed on the rusty iron stove in the corner of the room. It was a large, old-fashioned piece, probably dating back to the time of the American War or before. Had she decided to light a fire to keep warm while she awaited her brother’s return? Was that how she had burned her fingers? It seemed a plausible explanation. Unless . . .

  Unless she had found the Hesse letters and burned her fingers in the process of lighting a fire to destroy them. Was that why she had chosen to come here, to her brother’s office, rather than to his house? Because she knew instinctively that if he had Charlotte’s letters he would hide them here, in this messy, dusty room that no one ever cleaned, rather than in his house?

  Had she found them? Sebastian wondered. Had she been trying to destroy the letters in the stove when her brother came in and saw her? What would he have done? Hit her and pushed her away from the stove? Tried to rescue the flaming letters? Had she picked them up again, burning her fingers as she thrust them back into the fire? Had he pushed her away again, knocking her down so that she struck her head? On what?

  Sebastian started looking.

  If the room had been cleaner, he never would have found it. But it was quite obvious, really, once he realized what he was seeing: a noticeably clean section on the side of the dirty old stove and another on the floorboards below, where Christian Somerset had carefully wiped up his dead sister’s blood.

  Sebastian stood for a moment, staring at the spot where Jane Ambrose had died. Then he turned and quickly searched the office. He hoped he might find something—Jane’s hat, gloves, and reticule, perhaps, or even the half-burned letters themselves. But there was nothing. And as the minutes ticked away, he realized with a rising sense of frustration that he had no evidence that Christian Somerset had accidently killed his sister. And nothing at all to prove he’d then deliberately murdered her husband in the hopes of throwing suspicion onto his childhood friend.

  Yes, Somerset’s young apprentice had seen Jane enter the workshop the day of her death. But Somerset himself hadn’t been there at the time, and the printer could easily claim that she’d been gone before he returned home. Given that afternoon’s worsening snowstorm, it was doubtful anyone had seen him. And the cause of the siblings’ argument—the missing Hesse letters—could never, ever be mentioned. Hell, he couldn’t even tell Lovejoy about them.

  Sebastian went to stare out the dirty window, his hands on his hips. The small courtyard was sloppy and wet now with the rising temperatures. But the handcart he’d noticed before was still there, parked just to the left of the workshop door.

  That’s how he did it, thought Sebastian. He loaded his sister’s body on the cart and pushed it through the snow to Clerkenwell. It wouldn’t have been easy, and the printer must have been beyond exhausted by the time he finished. But fear could drive men to do incredible things. Fear and the instinct for self-preservation. The problem was, how to prove it? Especially without involving the Princess and her stolen letters.

  How?

  Chapter 51

  It was almost dark by the time Sebastian reached the banks of the frozen Thames. The now-bedraggled strings of gaily colored flags and lanterns danced fitfully in the warming wind, but hundreds of fairgoers still thronged the ice, their shouts and laughter mingling with the cries of roving hawkers. The smell of ale and roasting mutton and hot spice cakes hung heavy on the damp air.

  “Ye think it’s ’er brother what killed ’er, don’t ye?” said Tom when Sebastian drew up at the foot of Queen Street to hand him the reins.

  Sebastian turned to give the boy a long, steady look. “I do. Although I’m afraid I can’t explain my reasoning to you.”

  Tom nodded, his face flat. He might not know the exact train of Sebastian’s thoughts, but he was clever enough to grasp the implications of their movements that day. “‘Ow they ever gonna put ’im on trial if it’s got somethin’ to do with the Princess and they don’t want nobody t’ know about it?”

  Sebastian dropped lightly to the slushy ground. “I don’t think they will.”

  * * *

  A heavy, wet snow was falling again, big clumpy flakes that hovered perilously close to rain. Sebastian could see gaps here and there in the double lines of tents, booths, and stalls, where some of the more prudent tradesmen had obviously begun to mistrust the ice and withdrawn. But the crowds were still thick. Half-grown boys with dogs at their heels mingled with tradesmen and apprentices, stout matrons and merchants in high-crowned hats, clusters of giggling serving girls and roving bands of seamen from the ships frozen fast at the docks. There was a raucous, almost frantic note to the noisy merrymaking, as if most sensed this would be the Frost Fair’s last night and were determined to make the most of it.

  He found a couple of apprentices working Somerset’s old wooden press, turning out souvenir cards while Somerset himself guarded
the piles of books and stationery from possible thieves. “Still doing a good business, I see,” said Sebastian, walking up to him.

  Somerset’s eyes crinkled with his soft, sad smile. “Can’t complain.”

  “May I speak with you for a moment?”

  Somerset nodded to one of the apprentices to take his place. “Of course.”

  “I know what happened to your sister,” said Sebastian as the two men turned to push their way down the crowded promenade.

  Something shifted behind the printer’s eyes, something swift and calculating and quickly hidden by half-lowered lids. “You do? Well, that’s encouraging. Was it her husband, then?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Oh?”

  “It was you.”

  Somerset drew up and swung to face him, the light from the torches flanking a nearby dance tent falling golden across his features. A burst of shouts and laughter and the high-pitched, urgent screech of a fiddle filled the night. “Is this some sort of sick jest?”

  “Hot pies!” shouted a passing boy selling mutton pies from a tray slung by a strap around his neck. “Pies, fresh and hot!”

  Sebastian kept his gaze on the printer. “The day she died, Jane discovered by chance that you’d been in Hampshire at the time the Hesse letters were stolen. She went to your print shop, presumably intending to confront you with what she suspected. Only you weren’t there. And so she searched your office, looking for the letters. She must have known you well, because she found them, didn’t she? Then she lit a fire in your stove so she could burn them. That’s when—”

  “This is madness! Whatever makes you think—”

  “That’s when you came in. You realized what she was doing and you struck her, knocking her aside so you could pull the letters from the flames. The way I figure it, she must have picked up the burning letters with her bare hands—singeing her fingers—and thrust them back into the fire. So you pushed her away again. Only, this time when she fell, she hit her head on the side of the stove. And it killed her.”