Sebastien St. Cyr 08 - What Darkness Brings

by C. S. Harris

  Campbell waited until they were back inside and the door was carefully relocked before saying, “Mr. Eisler frequently had visitors.”

  “Oh? Anyone in particular you remember?”

  “I’m afraid my memory isn’t what it used to be, my lord.”

  “Like your hearing.”

  Campbell slid the bolt home with quavering fingers. “Just so, my lord.”

  Sebastian let his gaze drift around the cluttered space. Many of the paintings, he now realized, were priceless; he spotted a Van Eyck, a Fouquet, and, half-hidden behind the open door to the kitchen stairs, a massive Tintoretto. “The only staircase to the first floor is the one in the hall?”

  “Yes, my lord.” Frowning, the butler leaned toward him, a suddenly arrested expression sharpening his features as he peered up into Sebastian’s face.

  “What is it?” Sebastian asked.

  “Have you by chance been here before, my lord?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “You’re quite certain you didn’t come one day last week, to see Mr. Eisler?”

  “Quite certain.”

  The butler pursed his lips, his brow furrowing as he subjected Sebastian to a narrow-eyed study. “Yes, you’re right, of course. Now that I think about it, I believe the gentleman in question was slightly darker and perhaps a few years older—and not exactly a gentleman, if you get my drift, my lord? But for all that, there’s no denying the individual in question looked enough like you to be your own brother. . . . If you don’t mind my saying so, my lord?”

  Chapter 9

  S

  ebastian was aware of a strange sensation, like a rush of burning liquid that coursed through his veins, tingling his fingertips and dulling all external sound. As if from a long way off, he heard the old man say, “You don’t by chance have a brother, do you, my lord?”

  “A brother?” Somehow, Sebastian managed to keep his voice calm and even. “Not living, no.” At least, not to my knowledge, he thought, although he didn’t say it. He turned deliberately toward the darkened parlor beside them. “You say Mr. Eisler was found in here?”

  “He was, my lord.” Campbell went to open the faded drapes at the front windows, filling the room with dust and a dim light half-obscured by thick wavy glass coated with the grime of ages. “Sprawled on his back just there. Quite ruined the rug, I’m afraid.”

  The chamber was long and narrow and crowded like the rest of the house with a discordant jumble of furniture and art. Sebastian recognized a Rembrandt self-portrait and a Madonna by Fra Filippo Lippi. The carpet on the floor looked like a priceless seventeenth-century silk Isfahan, its far edge disfigured by a large dark stain no one had yet made any effort to clean.

  Hunkering down beside it, he breathed in a cloying mixture of dust and blood and a faint but unmistakable whiff of stale burnt powder. Mr. Eisler’s wound had obviously bled profusely. Yet there were no splatters of blood on the nearby wall or on any of the furniture. Sebastian looked up. “How, precisely, was the body oriented?”

  The butler came to stand beside him. “He was on his back, as I said, my lord.”

  “Yes, but was he facing toward the door? Or away from it?”

  “Well, his head was just here”—the old man moved with ponderous slowness, his thin arms waving as if to sketch the position of the body in the air—“with his feet there, nearer the door. So I suppose he must have been turned in that direction when he was shot—wouldn’t you say, my lord?”

  “Probably,” said Sebastian, although he’d seen enough men shot in the war to know the force with which a bullet could spin a man around and send him staggering.

  He pushed to his feet, his gaze drifting over the strange, shadowy chamber. With its collection of furniture, statues, porcelains, and paintings, the place more closely resembled a storeroom or auction house than a home. “Are all the rooms like this?” Sebastian asked. “Full of furniture and piles of art, I mean.”

  “Most of them, yes. Mr. Eisler was something of a collector, you know. I’m afraid Mrs. Campbell gave up trying to fight the dust quite some time ago. People were always . . . giving him things.”

  From here, Sebastian could make out at least two more Rembrandts, a Caravaggio, and a nearly life-sized marble statue of a horse that looked as if it might have been looted from Constantinople by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. “Mr. Eisler’s friends appear to have been quite generous,” he said, picking his way through the clutter to the far end of the room. Nearly the entire back wall was taken up by a massive old-fashioned fireplace topped by a magnificent chimneypiece carved with mythical beasts and garlands laden with fruit and flowers.

  “An interesting piece,” said Sebastian, pausing before it.

  “Mmm. They say this house dates back to the time of the Tudors, although for all I know that could just be so much talk.”

  Sebastian let his gaze drop to the worn black horsehair sofa pulled up at an angle beside the cold hearth. He could just see the toes of a pair of blue satin slippers peeking out from beneath the bottom cushions.

  “Know who those might belong to?” he asked, nodding toward them.

  The aged retainer’s jaw sagged. “Good heavens. No.” Bracing his weight on one of the sofa’s rolled arms, he bent to come up with a cheap pair of women’s shoes decorated with gaudy paste buckles and somewhat the worse for wear.

  “I take it at least some of Mr. Eisler’s visitors were ladies?” said Sebastian, reaching for one of the shoes. Its owner must have been a tiny thing; the slipper was practically small enough to fit a child.

  Campbell cleared his throat and looked decidedly uncomfortable. “Some ladies, some . . . not ladies, if you get my drift, my lord?”

  Sebastian studied the shoe with a growing sense of puzzlement. He could understand a woman inadvertently leaving behind a hair ribbon or a bangle. But her shoes? How could a woman forget her shoes?

  “Were any of Mr. Eisler’s female visitors noticeably—,” he began, only to be interrupted by a thunderous banging on the front door.

  “Excuse me, my lord.” Campbell gave a painful bow and moved away to open the front door.

  Sebastian let his gaze drift once more around the room. There was another door, he now realized, half-hidden by a curtain and just to the left of the fireplace wall, that looked as if it might lead back to the passage. He was moving to investigate when a man’s gruff, booming voice filled the entry.

  “Where is he? I heard he was seen coming here. By God, if he thinks he’s—”

  A burly, middle-aged figure appeared in the doorway. He was big and sweaty and bursting with self-importance, his hair prematurely silver but still thick, his full face pink and unlined, his ponderous girth a testament to a life of ease. “Ah! So it’s true.” He brought up a thick hand to point an accusatory finger at Sebastian. “I knew it. I knew it! You’re Devlin, aren’t you? I’d heard you were at Newgate, visiting that bloody scoundrel. Well, let me tell you right now, we don’t need your interference around here. This is Aldgate, not Bow Street; do you hear? Sir Henry Lovejoy might welcome your meddling, but Bow Street has no interest in this case—none at all! So I’ll thank you not to be interfering in what’s none of your business. Do I make myself clear?”

  Sebastian calmly raised one eyebrow. “Have we met?”

  The man’s lips tightened into a hard, straight line. His eyes were a pale hazel, his cheeks full and crisscrossed with tiny red veins, his neck wreathed with rolls of fat. “I am Leigh-Jones. Bertram Leigh-Jones, chief magistrate at Lambeth Street Public Office. And you, sir, are not welcome here. You’re not welcome here at all. We already caught the scum who did this; you saw him yourself at Newgate.”

  “He says he didn’t do it.”

  Leigh-Jones let out a rude laugh. “Of course he says he didn’t do it. They all say they didn’t do it. There’s not a guilty man in Newgate, to listen to ’em.” The laugh turned into a sneer. “Your man Yates is no different. Found standing over the body, he w
as. Oh, he’ll hang, all right. No doubt about it.”

  With deliberate, provocative slowness, Sebastian let his gaze slide over the man before him, from his mottled, sweat-streaked face to his clumsily tied cravat and the egg stain on the garish waistcoat that pulled too snuggly across his protuberant belly. He watched the magistrate’s complexion darken and his jaw harden until the man was virtually shaking with fury. Then Sebastian nodded to the old butler and said, “Thank you for your time.”

  He turned toward the door, quietly tucking the blue satin slipper out of sight. He’d already made up his mind to return to the house later that night under the cover of darkness, when Campbell and his wife were asleep in their attic rooms.

  “You’re not to come back here,” Leigh-Jones shouted after him. “You come back here, and I swear to God, I’ll have you up before me on charges of trespass—viscount or no viscount. You hear me? You hear me?”

  Sebastian kept walking.

  Chapter 10

  S

  ebastian had first learned of the existence of another dark, lean young man with yellow eyes from a Chelsea doctor who’d lost his watch and pocketbook to such a man at the point of a gun one stormy night on Hounslow Heath. And then, just that August, Sebastian and the man had come face-to-face.

  His name was Jamie Knox, and he’d once served as a rifleman with the 145th. A crack shot with an almost mythical reputation for accuracy over long distances and in the dark, he was discharged when his unit was reduced after the disastrous defeat of the English forces under Wellington at Corunna. What he’d done after that was a matter of dispute. Sebastian was inclined to believe the tales that said he’d taken to the high toby and become a highwayman, a legendary figure in black who preyed on the coaches of those foolish enough to venture unescorted across the wasteland of Hounslow Heath after dusk.

  Aided by what was reputed to be an animal-like sense of hearing and a preternatural ability to see in the dark, Knox had quickly accumulated the resources to purchase a Bishopsgate public house known as the Black Devil. Although there were others who said Knox had in fact stolen the pub—and murdered its previous owner.

  Sebastian had never discovered which version of the tale was true. But he had it on reliable authority that the French wine and brandy in Knox’s cellars found its way across the Channel in the holds of darkened ships that plied their dangerous trade on moonless nights. . . .

  And that one of Knox’s associates in that shadowy world was a certain aristocratic ex-privateer named Russell Yates.

  The Black Devil was a half-timbered relic from an earlier age, built against one of the few remaining stretches of London’s old Roman walls. Popular with Bishopsgate’s shopkeepers, clockmakers, and tailors, it was marked by a faded wooden sign depicting a black devil dancing against a background of flames. Like its exterior, the inside of the house had changed little over the centuries. The heavily beamed ceiling hung low; the flagged floor was uneven and covered with sawdust to catch spills; a heavy, smoke-blackened stone hearth took up a significant portion of one wall. When Sebastian pushed open the taproom door, he found the public room crowded with a typical noontime assortment of journeymen and apprentices from the surrounding streets.

  A few of the nearest men glanced up, curious, then went back to their beer. Caught in the midst of drawing a tankard of ale, the young woman behind the counter froze as Sebastian walked toward her.

  “Bleedin’ hell,” she said, tossing her head to shake back a heavy lock of dark hair that had fallen into her face. “Not you again.”

  Sebastian gave her a smile that showed his teeth. “Where is he?”

  Setting aside the tankard, she rested one hand on her hip and hardened her jaw. Her mouth was wide and full, her cheekbones high, her dark eyes almond shaped and exotically tilted. She was beautiful and voluptuous, and she knew it. “Think I’d tell ye?”

  A low laugh came from behind him. “Pippa has a tendency to hold grudges, I’m afraid,” said Knox. “She somewhat resents your threat to see me hanged.”

  “Only if I discover that you’re guilty,” said Sebastian, turning.

  The tavern owner stood with one hand propped against the frame of a doorway that opened off the end of the taproom. He might have left the high toby behind, but he still dressed all in black, like the devil that danced before the flames of hell on the sign hanging outside his tavern. Black coat and waistcoat, black trousers and boots, black cravat. Only his shirt was white.

  He was older than Sebastian by a few years, darker, and perhaps a shade taller. But he had the same leanly muscled frame, the same fine-boned face, the same feral yellow eyes. As far as Sebastian knew, the two men were not related; yet Knox looked enough like Sebastian to be his brother.

  Or at least a half brother.

  “I didn’t kill your damned Frenchman,” said Knox. The smile on the man’s face remained, but his eyes had hardened. Just six weeks before, Sebastian had accused Knox of killing a paroled French officer named Philippe Arceneaux. Knox denied it. But Sebastian was never completely convinced of the man’s innocence.

  “How about a diamond merchant named Daniel Eisler?”

  The faintest flicker of surprise crossed the tavern owner’s features, then disappeared. It could have meant anything. “You’ve been busy, haven’t you? From what I hear, the man’s barely been dead twelve hours.” His gaze shifted, significantly, to a nearby table of leatherworkers who were suddenly looking interested. Pushing away from the doorframe, he took a step back. “Pippa? If you’ll bring us a couple of pints?”

  Following him into the inner room, Sebastian found himself in a small, neat office sparsely furnished with the unpretentious functionality of a campaign tent.

  “Please, sit,” said Knox, indicating the plain gateleg table that stood near a window overlooking the cobbled rear yard.

  Sebastian sat and waited while the woman, Pippa, banged two foaming tankards down on the tabletop, threw him a malevolent glare, then slammed the door behind her as she returned to the taproom. He said, “Somehow, I expected you to deny knowing Eisler.”

  Knox came to sprawl in the opposite chair. “Why should I? Because he’s dead? Are you imagining I killed him too?”

  “Where were you last night around eight or nine?”

  Knox took a long, slow sip of his ale and set it down before answering. “Here, at the Black Devil. And damn you to hell for asking.”

  Sebastian looked at the dark, handsome face of the man across from him and said, “You went to see Eisler last week. Why?”

  “How do you know I went to see him?”

  “His butler remembered you.”

  For a long moment, the other man stared back at him. Then he pushed up from his chair and crossed the room to unlock a small chest. He withdrew a flat rectangular object wrapped in oilcloth, locked the chest again, and came to lay the article on the table before Sebastian.

  Roughly bound with cord, the bundle was some fifteen inches long, slightly less wide, and two or three inches thick. “What is it?” asked Sebastian.

  “Open it.”

  Sebastian untied the cord that held the oilcloth in place and peeled it back to reveal a crumbling brown calf-bound book. Opening the tattered cover, he found himself staring at a handwritten script that was neither Roman nor Greek, but something at once strange and vaguely familiar. Puzzled, he ran his fingertips over the page. The book was definitely made of paper rather than vellum, yet it had been written by hand, not printed on a press.

  “How old is it?” he asked.

  “Late sixteenth century, I’m told,” said Knox, resuming his seat.

  “It’s in Hebrew?”

  “So they say.”

  Carefully turning the brittle, foxed pages, Sebastian studied the cramped script illustrated with curious geographical shapes and strange images. He looked up. “What does this old manuscript have to do with Eisler?”

  Knox reached for his tankard, but he didn’t drink from it. Instead, he turned
his head to stare out the window beside them. Watching him, Sebastian had the impression he gazed beyond the cobbled yard and the shady elms of the ancient churchyard that bordered it. Far beyond, to a distant, sun-blasted land, dry and stony and ravaged by war. In Sebastian’s experience, most ex-soldiers carried their past with them always, like a dark vision of hell that, once glimpsed, is never forgotten.

  “To men like you and me,” said Knox, his voice rough, “war means burned villages, dead women and children, and fields plowed by cannonballs. It means fruit rotting in orchards because there’s no one left alive to pick it, and wells fouled by the stinking bodies of pigs and goats and dogs. It means men with their bellies ripped open and their faces shot off. But that’s because we’re just the poor sods who fight and bleed and die. For some men, war is an opportunity.”

  “You’re saying Eisler was one of those men?”

  A faintly derisive smile curled the tavern owner’s lips. “There were very few opportunities Daniel Eisler missed.”

  “I’m told he kept agents on the Continent to buy the jewels of families that found themselves in strained circumstances.”

  “So I’ve heard, although I never dealt with them myself. But Eisler also had another man in his employ, a defrocked Spanish priest by the name of Ferdinand Arroyo. Arroyo’s mission was to acquire a certain type of manuscript of interest to Eisler—mainly in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but sometimes in Old French, Italian, or German.”

  Sebastian stared down at an age-mottled page half-filled by a curious representation of a winged angel holding what looked like Saturn and breathing fire. “This being an example?”

  “Yes.”

  “So how does it come to be in your possession?”

  “It was brought to London by gentlemen with whom I do business. I was to deliver it to Eisler today.”

  “Why show it to me?”

  Knox hesitated. “Let’s just say I consider Russell Yates something of a friend.”