by C. S. Harris
Sebastian landed in a crouch a few feet from him, his dagger in his hand. The Russian pirouetted gracefully, his stiletto extended like a foil, his left arm curled in the classic fencing pose.
“So,” said Chernishav, his teeth bared in a smile. “Here we are.”
“You fence, I take it?” said Sebastian.
“Since childhood,” said Chernishav, flexing his wrist. “I hear you were a cavalry officer. Unfortunately, your saber is a little short.”
“So’s your foil,” said Sebastian.
“True.”
The two men circled each other warily. They were equally matched, of much the same height and build, both well trained in the arts of war. But each held a very different type of blade. The Russian’s stiletto was a thrusting weapon with no edge, while Sebastian’s dagger had carefully honed edges but was considerably shorter.
Chernishav struck first, lunging forward like a fencer thrusting with a foil, his stiletto aimed for Sebastian’s heart.
Sebastian sidestepped the thrust, dancing away easily to the right, his boots sliding over the muddy wet cobbles of the pottery yard. Lightning played across the heavy clouds pressing down on the waterfront; the rain pounded.
“The advantage is mine, I think,” said Chernishav. “You don’t have to do this, you know. Why make Miss Jarvis a widow before you have the opportunity to make her your wife?”
“You’d have me simply walk away?”
“Why not?”
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Sebastian said, “I told you why not.”
With a grimace, Chernishav struck again. Again, Sebastian skittered to the right. The repetition was deliberate; he was setting up the expectation of the pattern in the Russian’s mind.
The Colonel lunged a third time, expecting Sebastian to once more fall away to the right. Only this time, instead of dancing away, Sebastian stepped into the Russian’s lunge. It was a street fighter’s trick: Clamping his left fist around the man’s right wrist, Sebastian yanked the Colonel forward and stepped in to plunge his dagger up under the man’s sternum. Driving straight toward the heart.
He saw the Colonel’s eyes widen in surprise. Sebastian stepped back. Chernishav dropped to his knees, his hands coming up to clutch his chest as he toppled forward.
“So much for your bloody immunity,” said Sebastian, and swiped the dripping rain from his face.
Chapter 51
Thursday, 30 July
T he chapel of the Archbishop’s palace at Lambeth was small but graceful, with soaring lancet windows, a black-and-whitetiled marble floor, and delicate stone tracery that seemed to have captured and held the scent of some five centuries’ worth of burning incense.
Charles, Lord Jarvis, stood just inside the chapel door, his snuffbox clasped in one hand, a frown lowering his brows. Slowly and deliberately, he nodded to the man known to the world as the groom’s father. Hendon responded with the smallest of bows. Neither man smiled.
Owing to the hasty nature of the ceremony, the guest list was necessarily small. Devlin’s only surviving sibling, Lady Wilcox, had evidently chosen not to attend—if indeed she had been invited. But the redoubtable Dowager Duchess of Claiborne was there, looking fierce in puce satin and a towering feathered turban. Also in attendance were a peg- legged Irish surgeon of doubtful antecedents and a Bow Street magistrate, of all things.
The bride’s only living grandmother, the cantankerous old Dowager Lady Jarvis, had condescended to put in an appearance, as had Jarvis’s two bird-witted sisters. The three women huddled together to one side, their eyes wide with vulgar curiosity as they whispered speculatively behind their fans. It occurred to Jarvis that the only member of the assembled company who actually looked happy about the coming nuptials was his own half-mad wife, the bride’s mother, who stood with her face suffused with an idiotic kind of joy. And he found himself wondering how many of those in attendance—if any—knew the real reason for the quickly arranged wedding.
The truth would be obvious soon enough.
He transferred his gaze to his daughter. She was looking exceptionally lovely in an exquisite gown of white silk with a high-waisted bodice and small puffed sleeves embroidered with tiny blue rose sprays. Hero had always possessed unerring taste. A scoop neck edged in lace flowed into a V-shaped, charmingly gathered back, while a row of slightly larger rose sprays trimmed the hem above a long flounce of delicate lace. She had crimped her fine brown hair into soft curls that framed her face charmingly. Around her neck she wore a single strand of pearls with a sapphire pendant, a wedding gift from her husband. Devlin had clasped the necklace around her throat just moments ago. Jarvis had watched his daughter color faintly at her future husband’s touch.
It was a reaction Jarvis would not have expected.
Jarvis transferred his gaze to the groom, who stood now near the altar, his head tipped to one side as he conversed in low tones with the Archbishop. Devlin looked relaxed and remarkably untroubled, although Jarvis noticed he had done little more than nod to Hendon.
Devlin and Jarvis himself had exchanged only the coldest of unsmiling bows.
Flicking open his snuffbox, Jarvis raised a pinch to one nostril and inhaled sharply. Then he closed the box with a snap and tucked it away. Walking up to his daughter, he held out his arm. “Ready?” he asked.
She put her gloved hand on his crooked elbow. For a moment, her gaze strayed to the tall young Viscount near the altar. Then she brought her gaze back to her father’s face and surprised him by giving him a reassuring smile.
“Ready.”
That night, long after the wedding breakfast with its awkward strained silences and thinly veiled hostilities, and long after Sebastian had brought his new bride home and shown her to her rooms, he stood at the open window of his bedchamber, his gaze on the darkened rooftops and church spires of the city, the air cold against his naked flesh.
Swept clean by a brisk wind off the North Sea, the sky was unusually clear and full of stars, the streets below now quiet and empty. He could smell the hot oil from the lamps left burning at the top of his front steps, hear the distant cry of the watchman. “One o’clock on a fair night, and all is well.”
He held a glass of burgundy in his hand, but he had not tasted it, for he knew with quiet resignation that this was but the first of an endless string of lonely nights that stretched before him. He was a young man with all of a healthy young man’s appetites and a wife who was a wife in name only. A different kind of man might take that as a license to dishonor his marriage vows, but not Sebastian.
Yet, somehow, he had not expected the thoughts and images that now tormented him. The remembered warmth of her body beneath his on a stolen afternoon. The faint, evocative scent of starch mingled with honeysuckle. The way the morning light had quivered on the tops of her breasts when her gaze met his across the length of the chapel and she drew in an unexpectedly quick, nervous breath.
He raised the glass to his lips and then paused, his head turning as he caught the opening of a distant door, the sound of soft footsteps in the hall. His door swung slowly inward and Miss Jarvis—no, he reminded himself; his wife, the new Viscountess Devlin—stood on the threshold.
She wore only a thin chemise, her bare toes curling away from the cool floor, her eyes wide and dark in the night. “If you don’t want me here,” she said, “just say so.”
The wind billowed the curtains at the window and fluttered the loose hair about her face. He set aside his wine and went to her. If his nakedness caused her either embarrassment or alarm, she did not show it. He breathed in the familiar scent of her, and she lifted her face to him.
He covered her mouth with his and felt her hands slide up his bare back, pulling him close. He tangled his fingers in her hair, his thumbs brushing the soft flesh beneath her chin as he deepened the kiss. She pressed against him, and he felt the warm, remembered firmness of her body. Her breasts were small and high, her stomach gently rounded, her hair fragrant with the scent of f
lowers when he buried his face in her neck.
She threaded her hand with his and walked with him to his bed. He gazed into her eyes, saw her lips part. Reaching out, surprised to find himself trembling, he slipped the straps of her chemise from her shoulders.
“‘When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,’ ” he quoted softly with a smile, “‘and she me caught in her arms long and small ...’”
She stopped his words with her kiss, and he bore her down beneath him onto the tangled sheets of his bed. The wind filled the room with the scent of the distant sea and in concert with the moon set strange shadows to dancing around them. He was only dimly aware of the clatter of horses’ hooves and the rattle of carriage wheels passing in the street below. For his world had narrowed down to the silken hair that slid across his belly and the heated invitation of her legs wrapping around his hips and the gentle wonder with which his wife whispered, “Sebastian ...”
Author’s Note
As difficult as it is to believe in this age of instant communication, word of the United States’ declaration of war on Great Britain, which occurred on 18 June 1812, did not reach London until 29 July—and even that was unofficial. The Baltimore Mary, which in Where Shadows Dance brings word of the war nearly two weeks earlier, is my own invention.
The United States was still treated as a plural noun in 1812; thus, Englishmen at the time said, “The United States have declared war on us.”
The diplomatic maneuverings of the summer of 1812 that form the background of this story were real, although far more complicated than portrayed here since they also involved Austria and Prussia. England did indeed bribe the Swedes with gold and promises of Norway—which at the time was part of Denmark—in exchange for Finland, which Sweden had recently lost to Russia. The Czar was indeed pushing—unsuccessfully—for a strong, active alliance with the British.
Richard Trevithick ran a London Steam Carriage from Holborn to Paddington in 1803; in 1808 he constructed his Steam Circus in Bloomsbury. The New Steam Circus described here in 1812 is my own invention.
Antonaki Ramadani was a real man, although he was actually the Chargé d’Affaires from the Sublime Porte, not the Ambassador. Yasmina Ramadani is my own invention. The extensive spying activities directed toward ambassadors to the Court of St. James that Ramadani describes were quite real.
The Surrey Docks in Rotherhithe were the center of the Arctic whaling expeditions that set sail from London. Rather than being boiled aboard ship as became the practice in later years, the blubber was cut into blanket pieces and brought back to London to be melted down. But by the early nineteenth century, the whales that had once filled the seas near England were nearly extinct and the industry came to be dominated by the American whaling fleets.
The intrigue surrounding the Survey of the Situation, provided to Napoléon on the first and fifteenth of each month by the French Minister of War, was inspired by a real event. From 1811 to 1812, a traitor in the General Staff of the French Army was slipping copies of these reports to an officer attached to the Russian Embassy in Paris named Alexander Ivanovich Chernishav. The smuggling of these reports to London is my own invention, although I have referenced the real event by using Chernishav’s name for my Russian colonel.
The story of Nathan Bateman is based on the autobiographical account left to us by Joseph Bates, an American sailor impressed into the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Thousands of American sailors suffered his fate. And yes, Bates was sent to London as a prisoner and thrown into a hulk on the Thames after the United States declared war on Britain. He survived to become a ship’s captain, a revivalist minister, and a strong champion of abolition and the separation of church and state, before dying an old man in 1872.
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C.S. Harris
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