What Angels Fear (39 page)

“I don’t understand.”

Leo adjusted the lapel of his coat. “The latter proved a most useful acquisition, since the perpetrator of that little insurance fraud happens to be a boon companion of the Prince. He hasn’t been in a position to provide us with many state secrets himself, but he’s been an invaluable source of information on other men’s peccadilloes and potential weaknesses—Lord Frederick’s unfortunate inclinations being only one of many.”

“What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is that unless the Prince of Wales has recently taken to rape and all sorts of other ungodly occupations, then Rachel’s murderer is very likely your young viscount’s own brother-in-law, Martin, Lord Wilcox.”

Kat let out her breath in a rush. “Are you certain?”

“No. But I’d watch the man, if I were Devlin.” Pierrepont reached for his hat, then paused. “I gather Devlin doesn’t know you favor the French in this little war to which he devoted—what? Five years of his life?”

“It’s Ireland I fight for. Not the French. There is a difference.”

“Indeed there is,” Leo agreed, walking up to her. “But I suspect it’s a difference that would be lost on Devlin.” He reached out, his hand unexpectedly gentle as he touched her cheek. “Don’t fall in love with him again,
ma petite
. He’ll break your heart.”

Kat held herself very still. “I can control my own heart.”

Leo’s eyes crinkled into a smile that faded abruptly as he turned away. “Paris will be sending someone soon to take my place,” he said over his shoulder. “Be alert. He will contact you. You know the signal.”

Kat followed him, wordless, to the yard. She watched his traveling carriage disappear into the night. Then she lowered the veil over her face, remounted her horse, and rode away.

The fog lay heavy in the streets of London, a thick, throat-burning swirl of noxiousness that turned flickering gaslights into ghostly golden glows lost in the gloom.

Kat drew up before her house and handed the reins to her groom. “Stable them,” she said, sliding from the saddle. She stood for a moment, listening to the muffled beat of the horses’ hooves disappearing into the thickness of the night. Then she threw the train of her riding skirt over her arm and turned, just as a dark figure materialized from out of the mist. Kat sucked in a startled gasp.

“You ain’t seen the gov’nor, ’ave you?” said the boy, Tom.

Feeling vaguely ridiculous, Kat let go her breath in a soft sigh of relief. “I believe he received a note from his friend, Dr. Gibson. Perhaps he could tell you something.”

Tom shook his head. “It’s Gibson who’s wantin’ to see ’im. Somethin’ about a geegaw what was found in that mort’s hand.”

Kat paused at the base of her front steps. Someone was walking toward them on the footpath; a man with the flaring cape and measured gait of a gentleman.

“Miss Boleyn?” he said, one hand coming up to touch his hat brim as he paused beside her.

“Yes?” She knew a fission of fear, a precognition of understanding at the sight of his middle-aged, quietly smiling features. “May I help you?”

“I am Lord Wilcox,” said the man, his hand dropping ominously from his hat to slip inside his cape. “I must ask you to accompany me to my carriage.” He nodded into the mist-swirled darkness. “It’s just there, at the end of the street.”

Kat was aware of Tom tensing beside her, his eyes wide on the gentleman before them. “And if I refuse?” she said, her voice coming out low and husky.

His hand tightened around something just inside his cape and she realized it was a pistol he held there. A pistol he now lifted to point at her. His gaze noted the direction of her glance, and he smiled. “As you can see, that really is not an option.”

Chapter 57

A
manda was eleven the year her brother Richard told her the truth about their mother.

He’d been home from Eton that summer, ten years old and very full of himself. Amanda might have been a year his senior, but she was only a girl, after all, her world a tightly drawn circle of schoolroom and lessons and walks in the park with Nurse. She listened in shocked silence to Richard’s excitedly whispered tales of the revolting thing men did to women, about how they came together in a shameful, naked coupling of bodies. And then, while she was still retching in horror at the thought she might someday be forced to endure just such a vile invasion of her own body, Robert told her of the rumors he’d heard about their mother. About how the Countess of Hendon did
that
with other men besides her husband, Amanda’s father.

Amanda hadn’t believed Richard, of course. Oh, she’d seen enough activity amongst the estate’s farm animals to realize that
that
part of his information, at least, was probably correct. But she refused to believe what he said about their mother, about how the beautiful, laughing Countess did
that
with everyone from royal dukes to common footmen. Amanda hadn’t believed a word of it. Not a word.

But suggestions can have an insidious way of worming into a body’s soul and eating away at it. As summer stretched into autumn, Amanda found herself watching their mother. Watching the look that crept into the Countess’s sparkling blue eyes whenever a handsome man walked into the room. The way she tilted her pretty blond head and laughed when a man spoke to her. The way her lips could part and her breath catch when he took her hand.

And then one rare sunny day in September, when the Countess and her children were rusticating down in Cornwall and the Earl danced attendance, as usual, upon the King, Amanda escaped the schoolroom and went for a walk. The air was crisp and sweet with the earthy scent of plowed fields and sun-warmed pine needles, and she walked farther than she’d meant, farther than she was allowed. A restlessness had been building within her lately, an unsettled yearning that led her to leave the trim terraces of the gardens and the neatly hedged-in fields of the home farm behind, and penetrate deep into the wild tangle of forest that stretched away toward the sea.

It was there that she found them, in a sun-soaked hollow sheltered by a rocky outcropping from the brisk winds blowing off the white-capped water. The man lay on his back, his naked, sweat-slicked body stretched out long and lean, his neck arching in what seemed at first an agony. A woman sat astride him, her soft white lady’s hands holding his larger, darker ones cupped over her breasts, her lower lip gripped between her teeth, her eyes squeezing shut in ecstasy as she rode him.
Rode him
.

In the months that had passed since Richard’s visit, Amanda had sought to picture this vile thing that he had told her about. But never had she imagined—never could she have imagined anything like this.

Drawn by a sick combination of horror and fascination, she crept closer, her heart pounding painfully within her, her stomach acids backing up hot and sick into her throat. But it wasn’t until her fascination had drawn her, trembling and nauseous, ever closer, that Amanda realized the truth. That the woman whose breath came in such harsh, ragged gasps was her own mother, Sophia Hendon. And that the man whose naked pelvis thrust up again and again in a savage, pounding rhythm, who buried his body deeper and deeper inside hers, was her ladyship’s groom.

Amanda never told Richard what she had seen that day, although she knew from the bitter remarks her brother occasionally let fall that he blamed their father for the things their mother did, blamed Hendon for devoting all his time to King and country, and neglecting his lonely, lovely wife. But Amanda knew the truth, for she had seen the hunger in their mother’s beautiful, sunlit face. The shameful, insatiable hunger.

It had been dark for some time now, the fog swallowing the last glimmers of daylight before sliding away imperceptibly into night. The maid, Emily, had come at one point to draw the drapes and lay fresh coals upon the fire, but Amanda had sent her away.

Shaking off the long-ago memories, Amanda went now to turn up the flame of the oil lamp that filled the dressing room with a sweetly scented glow, and to close the heavy brocade drapes against the cold radiating off the long windows overlooking the square.

Crossing the room to her writing desk, she paused, her head raised as she listened. But the house lay silent around her, and after a moment she slid back the discreet latch that opened the desk’s hidden compartment, and drew forth the single piece of parchment from within.

She’d read it perhaps a hundred times already, but now she read it again, drawn by something she didn’t care to define, to this strange recital of that long-ago sin, written in Sophia Hendon’s own hand. Amanda couldn’t begin to guess what had driven her mother to set it all down in such stark, bare sentences, and then swear to it before witnesses. Nor did Amanda know how that harlot, Rachel York, had come by such a curious document, or for what purpose it had been intended. But Amanda had no doubt that the document had come from the actress.

Her blood still stained one corner.

It was Coachman Ned who’d first let slip the truth about that Tuesday night—or at least, the truth as he knew it. It had taken some time—and a few carefully worded threats—but eventually Amanda had drawn from him a curious tale, of how his lordship had been on his way to Westminster when he’d come upon Master Bayard, insensible with drink, on the footpath in front of Cribb’s Parlor. They’d taken the boy up into the carriage, of course. Only, they hadn’t brought him straight home. On his lordship’s orders, Coachman Ned had continued on to Great Peter Street, in Westminster, where his lordship had left the boy in the servants’ care.

It was not a servant’s place, of course, to question his master’s movements, although Coachman Ned admitted he’d been worried, watching Lord Wilcox disappear alone and on foot into that stinking fog. And his worst fears had been confirmed when, some twenty or thirty minutes later, Lord Wilcox had been set upon by thieves. He came staggering back to the carriage, his assailants’ blood drenching the front of his overcoat and still dripping from the sword stick he’d used to fight them off. He’d given Coachman Ned strict instructions that her ladyship was not to be told of the incident, lest it overset her nerves. He’d used the same line, Amanda eventually learned, to keep his valet, Downing, mum as well.

Bayard had snored insensible through it all. But Amanda wondered at the two servants, who surely knew her to be impervious to the kind of nervous spasms that troubled so many of the ladies of her station. She wondered, too, how they could have remained so unquestioningly believing when the gory details of what had happened that night in the Lady Chapel of St. Matthew of the Fields were on everyone’s lips. But then, perhaps neither Coachman Ned nor Downing had ever noticed the way his lordship’s face could draw taut with sexual excitement at the sight of a harlot being whipped through the streets. Perhaps they didn’t know about the string of housemaids he’d forced over the years, or the one he’d cut when she tried to refuse him. But Amanda had known, and pondered, and eventually been driven to ferret out the truth.

Refolding the parchment, Amanda carefully tucked it away and slid the secret compartment home. She wondered what Wilcox had thought, when he’d discovered the document missing. It was only by chance that Amanda had come upon it when she went looking for something—anything—that might confirm what in her heart of hearts she already knew to be the truth. The other papers she’d found with the affidavit—love letters from Lord Frederick to someone named Wesley and an interesting royal birth certificate—she left where she had found them, for they were of no significance to her. But her mother’s confession Amanda had taken without hesitation. A document of that nature was too volatile, too potentially valuable to be left in the hands of someone such as Martin.

She was so lost in thought that she missed the sound of the door quietly opening. It was only the change in the atmosphere of the room that told her, suddenly, that she was no longer alone. Turning her head, she found Sebastian leaning against the doorjamb.

She knew a moment of consternation at the thought he had seen her with their mother’s affidavit. Then she realized he was looking at her, not the writing desk, and she knew he had not.