Why Kill the Innocent

by C. S. Harris

  The torches beside them hissed and smoked as a clutch of drunken soldiers reeled past, voices warbling, “O’er the hills and o’er the main—”

  Somerset swallowed hard. “No. You’re wrong. Do you hear me? You’re wrong.”

  “The ironic thing,” said Sebastian, watching him carefully, “is that what happened to Jane that day wasn’t murder. It was manslaughter. If you hadn’t panicked, you could even have passed it off as a simple accident by saying she’d slipped on the wet floor and hit her head. No one would have suspected anything. Except because of those bloody letters, you did panic. You were so desperate to get rid of her body that you hauled her through the snowstorm up to Clerkenwell and dumped her in the middle of Shepherds’ Lane. And it might have worked—except you had the wrong day for her lessons there, and one of the women who found her had the medical training to realize that the lack of blood meant she must have died someplace else.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Somerset again, breathing so hard and fast his chest was jerking. “It was Ambrose. I can’t prove it, but it had to be him. He was a lying, cheating, foul-tempered bastard who beat her for years. Years! Of course it was he.”

  Sebastian shook his head. “Ambrose was all that and more. But he wasn’t a murderer. Unlike you.”

  “Apples! Hot apples!” shouted an aged, stoop-shouldered woman with a steaming basket she thrust toward them. “Buy me hot apples, gentlemen?”

  Somerset’s gaze darted sideways. Jaw tightening, he yanked the basket from the woman’s arms, threw its contents in Sebastian’s face, and ran.

  The apples rested on a grate above a pan of coals, and Sebastian squeezed his eyes shut and flung up one crooked elbow to protect his face. He felt the shower of hot embers sting his skin, smelled the pungent reek of burning wool as the glowing coals and hot grate tumbled down the front of his greatcoat. A horde of laughing urchins descended on him to scramble after the fruit rolling at his feet.

  “Me apples!”

  “Bloody hell,” swore Sebastian as one of the children knocked into the old woman and sent her staggering against him.

  Steadying her, Sebastian paused long enough to thrust a couple of shillings into the woman’s hand, then turned and half tripped over a joyfully barking dog. “Bloody hell,” he said again.

  Christian Somerset was already seventy-five to a hundred yards ahead, plowing up the crowded promenade like the prow of a ship through debris-thick waters. Shaking off the old woman, the children, and the dog, Sebastian took off after him just as a stout butcher stepped backward out of a nearby mulled wine tent and slammed into Sebastian hard enough to make him grunt.

  “Oye! Why don’t ye watch where yer goin’ there?” the man shouted after Sebastian as he ran on. “Bloody nobs!”

  Sebastian kept going, past cook stalls and trinket booths and tents of tattered canvas that flapped in the wet wind. The snow was turning to rain now, and he nearly collided with a pretty woman in a fur-trimmed hat who’d stopped suddenly to look up at the sky and laugh, her face wet in the torchlight. Swerving, his feet slipping and sliding in the slush, he pelted past the Punch and Judy show. The children turned to laugh and point, the puppet master pivoting Judy to call after him in a high-pitched voice, “Tsk-tsk. Young gentlemen! Always in a hurry!”

  With Sebastian now gaining on him, Jane’s brother ducked through a beer tent, pausing just long enough to snatch up a tankard of ale and lob it at Sebastian before streaming out the far end.

  “Oye!” yelped the bereft drinker as Sebastian ducked.

  Erupting out the back of the tent, he caught his foot on one of the stakes holding up the canvas and nearly went down. “Shit,” he swore, stumbling against the mound of icy snow that formed the edge of a nearby skittles alley just as Somerset yanked the heavy wooden ball from the hands of one of the players and threw it at Sebastian’s head.

  Sebastian feinted sideways, his slush-encrusted boots sliding on the smooth ice of the alley to send him smashing into the skittles. The pins went flying, and a roar of indignation rose from the players.

  Jumping the far edge of the alley, he ran on, ducking beneath a young lady soaring high on a swing. Up ahead, he saw Somerset swerve onto one of the Frost Fair’s short side “streets.” Sebastian raced after him, past a last straggling shoemaker’s and a toy stand. And then they were in the open, heading out across the river’s ragged, uneven ice toward the opposite bank.

  A small rivulet of water still ran down the middle of the river. Farther upstream, the gap had been bridged with planks, with boatmen there to hand fairgoers across for a small fee. But there were no planks or boatmen here, and as Somerset neared the center of the river he was forced to veer right again, running straight toward the looming stone arches of London Bridge.

  Sebastian pelted after him, his breath coming in hard gasps, his boots slipping and sliding on the melting ice. Out here, away from the Frost Fair, the world was white: white sky, white ice, white snow, with a thin black ribbon of water surging beside them as they ran on and on.

  They’d almost reached the bridge when a loud crack-crack cut through the night. A chorus of screams arose from the distant fair as a massive section of the ice sheared off in front of them with a roaring crash. Skidding to a halt at the edge of the ice, Somerset swung around, his gaze darting frantically from side to side as he fought to draw in air.

  “End of the line,” said Sebastian.

  Somerset shook his head, his chest shuddering with the intensity of his breathing. The rain poured down around them. “If you want me, you’re going to have to kill me. I’ve seen men hanged. I’m not dying like that.”

  “They’ll never put you on trial,” said Sebastian. From the distance came more shrieks and cries of alarm as another loud crack echoed across the frozen river and fairgoers and booth keepers alike started a frantic rush toward solid ground. “They can’t afford to let anyone know about the Princess’s letters.”

  The printer gave a ragged laugh. “So you’re saying—what? That Lord Jarvis will simply send one of his henchmen to Newgate to garrote me in my sleep? I suppose that’s better than hanging. Marginally.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you just admit what had happened to your sister that day and face the music?”

  Somerset took a step back, then another, his gaze never leaving Sebastian’s face. “I can’t go to prison again. If you’d ever been in prison, you’d understand that.”

  “So instead you murdered Edward Ambrose? Just so you could cast suspicion away from you and onto your best friend?”

  Somerset’s nostrils flared wide, his eyes wild. “I’m not proud of what I did.”

  “What about Valentino Vescovi? Did you kill him, too?”

  “Good God, no. Why would I?” He swiped the cuff of one sleeve across his face. “I didn’t mean to kill Jane. I loved her. She was my sister! She was all I had left in this world. Don’t you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  Another series of massive cracks sounded, and the ice heaved and buckled at their feet. What had minutes before been a small rivulet in the center of the river was now a wide yawning gap. A chunk of ice with a shack advertising brandy balls went spinning past, a gray-faced man clinging to one of its upright timbers screaming, “Help! Somebody help me!” The air echoed with the terrified shrieks from the ruined Frost Fair.

  Somerset took another step back, then another, the ice beneath him groaning as he edged closer to the cold, rushing black water.

  “Don’t do this,” said Sebastian.

  Somerset gave him a strange, wobbly smile. “Why not? You think I should fear for my immortal soul? If I have one, it’s damned already for what I’ve done. And if not, then at least I’ll end it all at a time and in a manner of my own choosing.”

  If Sebastian were to lunge forward and haul Somerset back from the edge, he might have been able to save him. But fo
r what? A few miserable days in prison that would end all too quickly in hideous certain death?

  Something flickered across the other man’s face. “Thank you,” said Jane’s brother. Then he stepped back off the edge of the ice into the cold, dark water. He made only a small splash and sank quickly, coming up once with a gasp before being carried off on the swirling current.

  The screams and shouts of the panicked fairgoers had for one suspended moment faded from Sebastian’s awareness; now they came roaring back. Turning, he sprinted for the riverbank, his feet slipping on the slushy surface, the ice cracking and collapsing behind him, the rain cold in his wet face. His world narrowed down to endless ice and wind-driven rain and the ragged rush of his breath rasping in and out. Then hands were reaching out to grasp him, haul him in, steady him as he sagged. Safe. He was safe.

  Whirling, his breath a raw agony, he turned to stare out over the heaving, broken ice and black water.

  Somerset was gone.

  Chapter 52

  Sunday, 6 February

  “How many people were killed last night?” Sebastian asked as he walked with Sir Henry Lovejoy along the terrace of Somerset House. The ice-churned waters of the Thames raced swift and deadly beside them.

  “I doubt we’ll ever know,” said Sir Henry with a heavy sigh. “I’m told dozens of booths were carried off with much loss of property. But who’s to say how many lives were lost with them?” The magistrate paused to look out over the runoff-swollen river. Some of the abandoned booths and tents were still out there, perched precariously on the last remaining stretches of solid ice. But they wouldn’t be for long. “Last I heard they’d pulled four bodies from below the bridge. But most will probably never be found.”

  “None of them was Somerset?”

  “No.” The magistrate paused, then said carefully, “I’m told by the palace this must all be hidden from the public.”

  Sebastian nodded. He’d had a short, terse conversation with his father-in-law in the small hours of the night. Jarvis’s men had torn Somerset’s office and workshop apart, looking for the Hesse letters. But there’d been no sign of them, and Sebastian suspected Jane Ambrose had successfully destroyed them after all. He wondered if the young Princess appreciated that her beloved piano instructor had died trying to save her from the repercussions of her own folly, but he doubted it. Royals were like that. Typically, any sacrifice on the part of their subjects—no matter how great—was simply accepted as their due.

  “‘Our hands have not shed this blood, nor have our eyes seen it,’” said Sir Henry softly to himself.

  Sebastian glanced over at him in inquiry, and the magistrate cleared his throat self-consciously. “The Book of Deuteronomy, chapter twenty-one. It says that if someone be slain and found lying in an open place, then the elders of the nearest towns must behead a young heifer on the spot and wash their hands over it, saying, ‘Be merciful, O Lord, and lay not innocent blood unto thy people’s charge.’ And then the blood debt is forgiven them.” Lovejoy shook his head. “I’ve always found it an odd passage, given that an all-seeing God must surely know the identity of the guilty party.”

  Sebastian found himself faintly smiling. “True.” The smile faded. “Do you ever think that sometimes these things might best be left to fate?”

  “‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord’?” Lovejoy studied him with wise, compassionate eyes. “Neither Edward Ambrose’s death nor Christian Somerset’s is on your hands, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  “Not exactly. And yet . . . my determination to bring murderers to justice has always been driven by the obligation I believe we the living owe to the dead. Yet I can’t believe Jane Ambrose would have wanted to see her only surviving brother die, even if he did accidently kill her. It wasn’t deliberate. And my attempts to uncover what happened to her led directly to her husband’s death.”

  “Perhaps. But the fault was all Somerset’s, not yours. The Bible also says, ‘All things work together for God to them that love him.’”

  “You think in this instance things worked ‘for God’?” asked Sebastian.

  Lovejoy turned his face into the wind, his eyes troubled. “Only God has that answer.”

  * * *

  Later that afternoon, Sebastian found himself sitting in one of the worn pews of St. Anne’s, Soho. He tilted back his head, his gaze on the gloriously hued light streaming in through the stained glass window above the altar. He was not a religious man; his belief in the teachings of his youth had been swept away by six brutal years at war. Yet he was not immune to the sense of enveloping peace that a church could bring to those in need. And he was in need.

  After a while he heard the echo of a distant door opening and closing, followed by soft footsteps. Liam Maxwell came to sit beside him, his elbows on his spread knees and his hat in his hands. They sat in silence for a time. Then Maxwell said, “I heard about Christian’s death. He’s the one, isn’t he? It was Christian who killed Jane.”

  “Yes. By accident. And then he panicked. He was terrified of being sent back to prison. Or hanged.”

  Maxwell stared straight ahead, his jaw held tight. Sebastian expected him to ask next about Ambrose’s death, but he did not. And Sebastian realized it was because the journalist must already have figured it all out.

  He’d obviously known his friend very well indeed.

  The sun was slipping lower in the sky, the vibrant colors of the stained glass darkening to somber tones as the light began to fade. “I’ve loved her nearly half my life,” said Maxwell, his voice a raw whisper. “I don’t think I know how to go on living my life without her in it to love.”

  “Yet you will,” said Sebastian.

  Maxwell nodded, his lips pressed together, his throat working hard as he swallowed.

  “I honestly believe she had decided to leave Ambrose for you,” said Sebastian. “I don’t know if that makes everything easier or harder to bear.”

  Maxwell’s chin quivered. “Maybe both.”

  Sebastian nodded. This time he was the one who couldn’t quite trust his voice to speak.

  He stood, his hand resting briefly on the other man’s shoulder. Then he turned and left him there, with his grief, and his memories of the past, and his yearning for a tomorrow that would never be.

  * * *

  “Oh, I do so wish I could have gone to the Frost Fair,” said Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales. She stood between Hero and Miss Kinsworth at the side of Blackfriars Bridge, one finely gloved hand resting on the stone parapet, her cheeks rosy from the fresh air, her eyes shining as she looked out over the broken ice of the Thames. The wind was warm out of the south, the sun so bright that the glare off the melting snow dazzled the eyes. One of the fair’s remaining tents shuddered out on the ice and then tipped sideways as the section beneath it collapsed, and a sigh went up from the crowd gathered on the bridge.

  Watching the young Princess gaze longingly at the ruins of the Frost Fair, it struck Hero just how cruel it had been for the Regent to keep his daughter away from what had surely been one of the grandest spectacles of her age. She really was a coddled version of Cinderella—without the promise of a handsome Prince Charming to someday sweep her away from a dark, narrow existence in a gilded cage to which Prinny had doomed her.

  “Miss Kinsworth told me how Jane died,” said Charlotte, casting a quick stricken glance at her companion. “That this all happened because of those letters.”

  “I believe they truly have been destroyed,” said Hero.

  “It was unforgivably foolish of me to have written them,” said Charlotte. “And now Jane is dead because of my folly.”

  Hero’s gaze met Ella Kinsworth’s, and the older woman looked away, blinking hard. Charlotte stared out over the icy waters. Her features were solemn, but the agitation of her breathing betrayed the extent of her inner turmoil.


  “Don’t marry him,” Hero said in a sudden rush. “Orange, I mean. Forgive me, Your Highness, for speaking so boldly. But without the Hesse letters hanging over you, you are no longer as vulnerable as you were before.”

  Eyes wide and hurting, Charlotte turned to face her. “But how can I not?”

  “Drag out the negotiations over the marriage contract. I’ve heard Orange’s father is anxious for his son to marry and beget an heir. That means it’s not unlikely he’ll tire of the delay and look elsewhere for his son’s bride. This dreadful war will be over soon, and then so much will change—doubtless far more than we can even imagine.”

  For a long, pregnant moment, the Princess held Hero’s gaze. Then she nodded silently and smiled.

  It would take courage for a powerless girl of just eighteen to stand against the overbearing will of a selfish, bullying father who was also her prince. But Hero suspected Charlotte had the grit to do it.

  * * *

  “How did two people as selfish and foolish as Prinny and Caroline manage to beget a child as basically good and decent as Charlotte?” Devlin asked later that evening when they gathered in the drawing room before dinner.

  Hero looked up from where she sat by the fire with Simon and Mr. Darcy. “I honestly can’t imagine.”

  He took a long, slow swallow of his wine. “Do you think she will indeed stand up to Prinny?”

  “I believe she might. In some way I can’t quite define, I think Jane’s death has given Charlotte the determination she needs to refuse to let her father destroy her life.”

  Devlin cradled his glass in one hand, his gaze on the flames dancing on the hearth. “I wish I could have met her. Jane, I mean.”

  Hero watched their son pet the big black cat with studied care, and felt a part of the burden that had weighed so heavily upon her begin to shift. “I’m glad we know how and why she died—and that Princess Charlotte knows, as well. I suppose in the grand scheme of things it makes no real difference. And yet, on another level, it does.”