Where the Dead Lie

by C. S. Harris

  “I wish I knew.”

  The Earl settled in a nearby chair and sucked hard on his pipe. They sat in silence for a time, united by their shared concern for the beautiful, willful, damaged young girl who was so dear to them both.

  “The other killer,” said Hendon, looking up. “Who is he?”

  “Sir Francis Rowe. It looks as if they deliberately switch off. Ashworth abducted Benji Thatcher—and presumably his sister too—on Friday evening when Rowe was with the Prince. Then Rowe killed the boy and tried to bury him on Sunday night when Ashworth was with Amanda and Stephanie. But from what I saw in the farmhouse on Penniwinch Lane, I’d say they both took part in what was done to the poor lad in between. And then Rowe killed the caretaker.”

  Hendon shook his head, his pipe clenched between his back teeth. “Ashworth is the son of the most powerful marquis in the Kingdom, while Rowe is cousin to the Prince Regent himself. Yet you say you’ve no proof?”

  “Nothing that will convince a jury.”

  “You must find it. Before it’s too late.”

  Sebastian met the old Earl’s gaze. And for one moment out of time, it was as if the estrangement between them and all the anger and hurt that accompanied it had never been. “I know.”

  • • •

  The key, Sebastian decided as he left Grosvenor Square, was Number Three, Pickering Place.

  He kept coming back to Jane Peters, the young girl who had died there in August. Grace Bligh had given him the names of Lord Ashworth and Hector Kneebone, but she had been steely in her refusal to surrender the identity of Jane Peters’s killer. Which told Sebastian she feared the killer—or the killer’s protector—more than she feared Sebastian.

  But Sebastian was about to change that.

  Chapter 54

  The soft glow of firelight filled the elegant private withdrawing room of Number Three with long, dancing shadows.

  Sebastian sat alone at his ease on one of the room’s delicate, silk-covered chairs. After more hours without sleep than he could count, he was tired enough that he had to be careful not to let his eyelids droop. It helped that the very fine Van Dyck on the wall behind him had been hung so low that he kept banging his head against the heavy gilt frame. He’d extinguished the branches of candles that flanked the marble fireplace, but he’d left the crystal oil lamp burning on a table near the room’s entrance. He could hear in the distance a man’s laugh followed by a woman’s anguished cry that he suspected was not feigned. It wasn’t the first cry of pain he’d heard, and if he sat here much longer, he thought, he was going to need a good, stiff drink.

  He could smell the promise of more rain as a cold wind kicked up, billowing the heavy velvet drapes at the window he’d left open. But he had not long to wait. He heard a soft step in the corridor and rose swiftly and silently to his feet. By the time Grace Bligh entered the room, he was in position. Stepping forward, he gently closed the door behind her with his foot as he jerked her back into his arms and pressed the blade of his knife against her bare throat.

  She went utterly still. “I take it you’re the reason the room is in near darkness, my lord?”

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “I know men,” she said cryptically, her voice calm and admirably under control. “How did you get in past Joshua?”

  “I know ways,” he said and was surprised to hear her huff a soft laugh.

  She said, “What do you want?”

  “The name of Jane Peters’s killer.”

  He felt her stiffen in his arms and for the first time sensed a ripple of fear course through her. “I can’t give you that.”

  “I rather think you can.”

  She carefully shook her head, wary of his blade.

  He said, “I could slit your throat.”

  “You could. But what would be the purpose in that? I can’t tell you anything if I’m dead.”

  “True. But I suspect it would inspire Joshua to be a bit more cooperative. Or Hope.”

  “Leave Hope alone,” she said quickly. Too quickly.

  He pressed his advantage. “Then tell me what I need to know.”

  He saw her tongue creep out to wet her lips. He expected her to try a lie, but she didn’t. “Very well; I’ll tell you. But it won’t do you any good. Jane Peters was killed by Rowe. Sir Francis Rowe.”

  “Jarvis hushed it up?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Yet you didn’t ban Rowe from the house?”

  “Of course we did. But I wasn’t about to tell you that.”

  “Because of Jarvis?”

  “Obviously.” The wind gusted up again, shifting the drapes and drawing her attention to the open window. But all she said was, “You don’t strike me as surprised. I take it you suspect Rowe of killing the street children out at Clerkenwell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “No.”

  “So why are you here? Do you seriously think to see him hang for the murder of Jane Peters?”

  “Something like that.”

  She laughed out loud. “Jarvis will never allow you or anyone else to bring Rowe to trial. And if by some miracle it should come to pass, I can assure you that neither I nor anyone else in this house will ever testify against him. There is nothing you can threaten us with that begins to compare to what Jarvis would do to us if we went against his wishes.”

  He couldn’t say he blamed her. How many people would behave differently in her position? And yet . . .

  “It doesn’t bother you?” he asked, taking her with him as he backed toward the windows, the knife still at her throat. “That someone like Rowe can slaughter one of your girls with absolute impunity simply because of his wealth and birth?”

  He expected her to shrug it off, to dismiss the girl’s death as the cost of doing business. Instead she said, her voice harsh, “Of course it bothers me. Jane Peters was barely fourteen years old. But I learned long ago the futility of railing against the realities of this world we live in.”

  “If we simply ignore injustice, nothing will ever change.”

  “Easy enough for you to say.” She paused, then added, “My lord,” laying heavy, mocking emphasis on his title.

  “Perhaps,” he agreed, pausing beside the billowing curtains.

  “So will you kill me now?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “I might scream when you take your knife from my throat.”

  “You could. But I move rather quickly. I doubt Joshua will arrive in time to do me any damage.” He let her go and swung one leg through the open window.

  She did not scream. But she did turn to face him, her features pinched with a passion that both took him by surprise and made him like her a little bit better than he had. She said, “Will you kill Rowe?”

  He met her gaze and shook his head. “I’m not an executioner.”

  “Then you’ll never stop him.”

  • • •

  Feeling the need to do something to keep himself awake, Sebastian sent his town carriage home and turned to walk up St. James’s Street. But he was only half-conscious of the boisterous, elegantly dressed masculine crowd and overpriced activity that swirled around him.

  Jarvis would never allow the King’s cousin to be brought to trial for the murder of either a young Pickering Place prostitute or any number of butchered street children; Sebastian knew that. But Jarvis could conceivably be persuaded to eliminate him. If Jarvis became convinced that the murder of Jane Peters was not an aberration but part of a pattern of brutal, repeated killings, then for the sake of King and country, Jarvis would not hesitate to have the Butcher of Culloden’s troublesome grandson killed. Quietly and efficiently.

  The problem was, how to convince him?

  • • •

  Sebastian was still ponder
ing that question when he arrived back at Brook Street some fifteen minutes later. “Is Lady Jarvis still in Berkeley Square?” he asked, handing Morey his hat and gloves.

  “She is, my lord.” Morey hesitated, a worried look pinching his normally wooden features. “Did you—did you by chance send for young Tom?”

  “Tom?” Sebastian paused in the act of shrugging off his greatcoat. “No. Why? What the devil has the boy been up to now?”

  “It’s Giles, my lord. He has something he thinks you ought to know. Shall I send him to you in the library?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Sebastian was pouring himself a brandy when Giles knocked at the door. “Giles. Come in. What’s this about Tom?”

  The middle-aged groom stood awkwardly just inside the entrance to the room. “It was earlier this evening, m’lord. I was up in the hayloft setting a mousetrap—we’ve had quite a problem with the little buggers lately, you see—when I hears a gentleman down in the mews hailing the lad.”

  Sebastian felt a swift tide of sick apprehension wash over him. “By name?”

  “Well, calling for ‘Lord Devlin’s tiger,’ he was.”

  “And?”

  “I heard Tom say, ‘That’s me.’ And the gentleman, he tells the lad that your lordship needs him, and he’s come to take Tom to you right away.”

  “My God. And Tom went with this gentleman?”

  “He did, m’lord. He’s been ever so cast down since you quit taking him with you in the curricle. Fair jumped at the chance, he did.”

  “When was this?”

  “Must’ve been an hour or more ago, m’lord. I didn’t think much of it till the carriage come back to the stables just now, and Coachman John, he says he don’t know nothin’ about you sendin’ for Tom. That’s when I started worryin’ maybe somethin’ weren’t right.”

  “Did you see him? The gentleman Tom went off with, I mean?”

  “I did, m’lord. There’s a window up there overlooks the mews, and I was curious enough to go have a peek. Driving a bang-up yellow-bodied phaeton, he was, pulled by a lovely dapple gray. Didn’t have no groom with him, though, which struck me as a bit queer even before I spoke to Coachman John.”

  Sebastian could feel his breath coming hard and fast. “And the gentleman himself? Did you get a look at him?”

  “Aye, m’lord. Appeared to be somewhere in his thirties, I’d say. On the short side and stocky, with a full face and a right dapper way of dressing.”

  “Did you hear anything at all to indicate where they might have gone?”

  “No, my lord. But I did watch to see which direction they went as they left the mews.”

  “And?”

  “The gentleman turned north, my lord.”

  Chapter 55

  Sebastian stood in a pool of soft lamplight at his library desk, methodically loading his double-barreled flintlock pistol and trying to think.

  Where had Rowe taken the boy?

  Where?

  Not to Upper Grosvenor Street, surely. The Baronet’s big, elegant town house was overflowing with watching, listening servants. Yet it had been only days since Rowe lost the use of the Penniwinch Lane farmstead. Surely he hadn’t had time to secure another such property?

  Had he?

  Think, Sebastian told himself as he rubbed a thin layer of beeswax around the edges of the pistol’s twin pans to keep out the rain he could hear lightly pattering against the library windows. Where would Rowe take the boy?

  Try as he might, Sebastian could come up with only one answer: the Clerkenwell shot factory.

  He tied an oilcloth lock cover over the primed pistol, then slipped it into his pocket. Looking up, he found Morey hovering in the doorway.

  “Giles has brought your mare around, my lord,” said the majordomo, his face a tight mask of concern.

  Sebastian reached for his greatcoat and gloves. “Send one of the footmen to Sir Henry Lovejoy with an explanation of what has happened. Tell him I plan to look for Rowe at the shot factory but I have no real evidence that’s where he’s gone.”

  “And if they’re not there, my lord?”

  Sebastian moved from behind his desk. “I’ve no idea. Hopefully something will come to me.”

  • • •

  Sebastian galloped up Oxford Street toward Clerkenwell, heedless of the cold, misty rain that wet his face and glistened on the slippery cobbles. It nagged at him, that he could be wrong, that the shot factory seemed too obvious, that surely Rowe would expect Sebastian to look for Tom there first. But then he reminded himself that Rowe had no way of knowing that his conversation in the mews with Tom had been overheard, no way of knowing that Giles had been there to peer out an upper window and see the Baronet’s round, smiling face and elegant phaeton. If Sebastian had returned to Brook Street to find his tiger simply absent from the stables, would anyone have suspected foul play?

  No.

  It struck Sebastian as the height of irony, that if he had kept Tom at his side as his tiger the boy would not at this moment be in the clutches of a brutal killer. By attempting to protect Tom from harm, Sebastian had succeeded only in leaving him vulnerable.

  No point, Sebastian reminded himself; no point in dwelling on the past. He forced himself instead to consider the Baronet’s purpose in snatching Tom from the stables. Rowe must be intending to abuse the boy and then kill him, quickly, in order to deposit his body someplace conspicuous—no doubt with another taunting note addressed to Sebastian.

  At the thought, his breath caught painfully in his chest.

  How long? Sebastian wondered as he galloped the mare through increasingly wet, windswept streets. How long had Tom been in Rowe’s hands? An hour? Two? The knowledge of what the boy must already have endured tore at Sebastian. And what if he was wrong? What if Rowe wasn’t at the shot tower? Then what?

  A jagged streak of lightning split the blue-black clouds roiling overhead and lit up the hills above Clerkenwell in a quick white flash. A mist was billowing up from the Fleet to creep across the lane, so that the lights in the windows of the row of cottages near the crossroads were barely visible. But as he drove the mare relentlessly up the slope toward the old shot factory, Sebastian caught sight of an elegant phaeton drawn up beside the broken stone wall.

  He reined in hard.

  A swift glance was enough to tell him the phaeton was empty, its dapple gray grazing lazily in the grassy verge. Without a groom, Rowe had simply abandoned his carriage here at the factory’s chained gate.

  Swiping his sleeve across his wet face, Sebastian narrowed his eyes against the rain and studied the somber bulk of the shot tower soaring dark and silent against the storm-tossed clouds. Through the tower’s arch-topped windows he could see the faint, flickering glow of what looked more like a fire than a lantern.

  “Easy, girl,” whispered Sebastian, patting his mare’s neck as she fidgeted beneath him. He was still some distance from the factory, but he slid out of the saddle and left the black tied there to the low branches of a young plane tree, lest the two horses be tempted to nicker at each other and warn the Baronet of Sebastian’s approach.

  He ran the rest of the way on foot, thick globs of mud exploding from beneath the slapping soles of his boots. When he reached the stone wall, he stripped off his greatcoat and left it there. It was raining harder now, water dripping off his face and trickling down the back of his collar. But the greatcoat’s bulk constricted his movements. In a fight, that could be deadly.

  Vaulting over the wall, he crossed the rubbish-strewn field at a slower, more cautious trot, the tall, frost-bitten grass bending around him beneath the assault of wind and rain. He could hear his own breathing so loud he wondered it wasn’t audible to everyone for miles. And as he neared the tower he caught the sound of Sir Francis’s calm, well-modulated voice saying, “True morality consists of taking our darkest
passions to their natural and therefore logical conclusions. Does that make sense to you, I wonder?”

  Tom—assuming this statement was addressed to Tom—didn’t answer. Probably couldn’t answer.

  Crouching low, Sebastian forced himself to draw up some ten feet from the tower’s curving brick base and consider his options. The tower’s old wooden door still hung drunkenly on its hinges, the weathered panels cracked from when Sebastian had kicked it in what seemed like ages ago now. But Rowe had pushed the broken door shut against the night, blocking Sebastian’s view of the interior. Sebastian looked for a window, except the lowest opening was a good eight feet off the ground, too high for him to see though. That meant there was no way for Sebastian to know what was happening inside the tower; no way to calculate Rowe’s or Tom’s positions. No way to know the best or worst moment to rush through that door.

  A flash of lightning lit up the clouds and set thunder to rumbling in the distance. Then the sky opened up and the rain came down harder, pounding loudly on the old slate roofs of the nearby warehouses.

  Sebastian eased his pistol from his pocket and hunched his body over it in an effort to protect the frizzen, flint, and pan from the driving rain as he slipped off the lock cover. The problem was, black powder had a way of drawing moisture from the very air. Even if he managed to keep the priming powder dry, the main charge might still be too damp from that long ride through the stormy night to ignite, resulting in a hangfire, squib, or misfire. He’d seen it happen far too often in the war.

  He thumbed back both hammers, the double snick of metal sounding painfully loud to his ears despite the noise of the storm. His heart was beating so hard he could feel it pounding in his fingers. He heard Rowe say, “It’s only through pain that one can truly appreciate pleasure, boy. I suspect that’s a truism beyond one with your simpleminded, brutish instincts, but this . . .” Rowe paused, and Sebastian could hear the smile in the man’s voice. “This just might awaken some base level of cognizance.”

  Pushing up, Sebastian hurtled forward to kick open the door and burst into the tower in a rush. In one blazing instant he saw Tom hanging in the shadows beneath the winding wooden staircase, his bound arms stretched high over his head, his bare back crisscrossed with bloody wheals. Sir Francis Rowe crouched beside a small fire he had kindled near the center of the big round room.