What Angels Fear (41 page)

For a moment longer, Tom hesitated. Then he reached for the note and darted out into the street, brushing past Wilcox on the way. But on the cobbles the boy suddenly stopped, swinging back around, one hand coming up to clutch his hat tighter to his head. “And if’n the gov’nor don’t come?”

“Remind him what happened to Rachel York and Mary Grant,” said Wilcox, taking Kat’s arm and drawing her close to him with a firm grip. “He’ll come.”

Sebastian was changing his clothes in his room at the Rose and Crown when Tom came hurtling through the door, bringing with him the cold stench of the foggy night.

“God save us, gov’nor, but ’e’s nabbed her,” panted the boy, his eyes wide, his thin chest jerking with the effort to draw breath. “E’s nabbed Miss Kat.”

Sebastian whipped about. “
What
? What are you saying?

“Yer nevy’s papa. Lord Wilcox. Grabbed her right outside her ’ouse, he did, and give me this ’ere message for you. Said I was to tell you—”

Sebastian snatched the sealed missive from the boy’s outstretched hand and tore it open, his gaze scanning the cramped lines.

I have in my possession an item which I believe is of considerable interest to you. You may claim this item in person at the Prosperity Trading Company warehouse, below the Hermitage Dock. The rapidity of your response will ensure that the item remains undamaged.

Needless to say, you will come alone and unarmed. The consequences otherwise would be swift and unfortunate.

Sebastian felt a torrent of rage and fear sweep through him, a sick mingling of hot and cold that stole his breath and twisted at something vital deep within him. He knew Tom was still speaking, but the words were lost in the roaring in Sebastian’s ears.

He lifted his head to look directly at the boy. “What? Say that again.”

Something in Sebastian’s face made the boy take a step back, his nostrils flaring as he sucked in a deep breath and swallowed hard. “It’s ’im, isn’t it? He’s the cove what you’ve been lookin’ for, the one what’s been killin’ them women. ’E said I was to remind you o’ what happened to them other two morts. Rachel York and Mary Grant.”

“
Oh, Jesus.
” Sebastian flung aside the note and grabbed his boots.

Behind him, Tom darted forward to pick up the fallen paper, his mouth moving soundlessly as he struggled to decipher the words. He looked up, his brows twitching together, his breathing still ragged. “You can’t be meaning to go there? To this wharf?”

Sebastian shoved one foot into a boot. He hadn’t realized the boy knew how to read. “What would you suggest I do instead?”

“But it’s a trap!”

“So I am aware.”

“What you thinkin’ yer gonna do? Just walk into it?”

“Not if I can help it.” He paused to grasp the boy’s shoulders. “But in case something should happen to me, I want you to go to my father, the Earl of Hendon. Tell him as much of the tale as you can.”

Tom’s nostrils flared as he jerked in air. “No earl’s gonna believe me! Not some snatcher off the streets.”

“Show him the note. It’s a pity it isn’t signed, but then, Wilcox is no fool.”

An unexpected gleam of delight danced in the boy’s eyes. “I lifted—” He broke off when Sebastian held up a warning hand. “What is it? What’d you ’ear?”

Coat in hand, Sebastian crossed swiftly to listen at the door. “Did someone follow you here?” The sounds were distant but unmistakable: a quickly hushed whisper, the soft and careful tread of men upon the stairs.

“No.” Tom’s eyes went wide. “But I seen a beak sittin’ in the taproom when I come in. I got the feelin’ ’e was waitin’ for someone.”

The footsteps were in the hall now.

Sebastian shrugged into his coat and started across the room. “I think we’ll go out the window,” he said, just as glass shattered and the casement frame flew in on a gust of cold, smoke-tinged air.

“Bloody hell,” swore Sebastian. Snatching up the straight-backed chair from the table, he smashed it into the chest of the black-bearded man whose bulky torso had appeared at the shattered window. The man gave a grunt and disappeared. Sebastian was swinging what was left of the chair at a second man’s gut when he heard a key grating in the door behind him. He swore again.
Damn
that innkeeper.

Chair still in hand, Sebastian spun to the door and found himself facing the big, blond-headed constable he remembered from that fatal night in Brook Street. “Tom,
run
,” said Sebastian over his shoulder as he and Edward Maitland circled each other, both men crouched and watchful. “Get to my father. Goddamn it,” he cried, when the boy simply stood there slack mouthed and frozen. “I said, run!”

The boy whirled toward the door.

Something hard and solid slammed into the side of Sebastian’s head. He staggered and tried to turn, but the world began to go black. The last thing he saw was the skinny, flailing arms of the boy, Tom, held fast in the hands of Sir Henry Lovejoy.

Chapter 59

S
ebastian came awake to a sense of movement, to the clip-clop of horses’ hooves and the clatter of carriage wheels jolting over uneven paving.

Through a dizzying spiral of pain, his thoughts flew at once to Kat. The horror of what he knew Wilcox would do to her was so powerful he was nearly shaking with the need to control it, with the need to keep himself from lashing out in mindless, useless frustration. He forced himself to keep his eyes closed and lie still, fighting down a wave of nausea that burned sour in his throat as he concentrated all his senses on the task of understanding the situation in which he now found himself.

He lay on the cracked leather seat of an old carriage. The forward seat. Rough ropes bit into his wrists, binding them together before him. His ankles were bound as well. But he could detect the steady breathing of only one other person in the carriage with him, a man who sat quiet and alert on the opposite seat. One man.

Which man?

Sebastian opened his eyes to find Sir Henry Lovejoy regarding him through narrowed, watchful brown eyes. “Well,” said Sebastian in a pleasantly conversational tone, “I wouldn’t have expected the Beau Brummell of Queen Square to willingly miss this.”

“If you are referring to Senior Constable Maitland, he is currently otherwise occupied. Conveying two of his fellow constables to the surgeon, to be precise.”

Fighting down a fresh wave of nauseous dizziness, Sebastian shifted his weight slightly and discovered that in addition to being tied together, his wrists were also tethered to a ring bolted to the carriage floor. He tightened his jaw against a violent upswelling of rage, but some hint of his feelings must have shown on Sebastian’s face because he noticed the magistrate sink back farther into his corner, his eyes wide and watchful.

Sebastian showed his teeth in a smile. “You aren’t afraid I’ll murder you between here and the Public Office? Cut off your head and take a bath in your blood and do all manner of other ungodly things to your person?”

Lovejoy was not amused. “I think not.”

Sebastian glanced out the window as the carriage swung around a corner. The foggy void of the night swirled about them. “And the boy?” he asked casually.

“If you mean that appallingly foul-mouthed urchin who was taken up in your company, he slipped out of my grip and darted off as we were leaving the inn.”

It was a crumb of comfort, pitifully small. There were too many things that could go wrong. Hendon could refuse to see the boy, or simply refuse to believe him. And even if the Earl did believe the boy’s tale, what then? Whether Hendon sent a party of constables to the wharf, or went himself, the result would be disastrous. Martin Wilcox might be a murderer, but he was no fool and he knew what was at stake. The trap he had laid for Sebastian would be cleverly, carefully planned and orchestrated so that, whatever the outcome, Kat would die. Wilcox couldn’t afford to let her live to tell the tale.

Sebastian fixed Sir Henry Lovejoy with an intense stare. “You must let me go.”

The little magistrate thrust his hands into his pockets and settled deeper into his overcoat, as if bothered by the cold that seeped up from the straw-strewn floorboards and whistled in with the wind through the cracked windows. “It might be some consolation for you to know that I have reason to believe that you are indeed innocent of the deaths of those two women, Rachel York and Mary Grant. However, once the formalities are satisfied—”

“You don’t understand,” said Sebastian, his voice low and earnest. “You need to let me go
now
. The man who killed those women has taken another one, Kat Boleyn. If I don’t get to her in time, he’ll kill her, too.”

The carriage lurched suddenly, slowing to a crawl as a thickening press of bodies engulfed them. At first Sebastian thought it another bread riot. Then he heard a cry, “Huzzah for Florizel,” and saw the laughter and bright expectation in the swell of upturned faces shining in the golden light of the carriage lamps, and he understood. This was not a mob, but a crowd of revelers celebrating the installation of the Prince as Regent, which was to take place in the morning. They genuinely believed their hard-pressed, desperate lives were finally going to take a turn for the better. They didn’t understand that nothing would really change, that they were simply replacing an earnest but mad old king with a vain, pleasure-loving, self-indulgent prince who gave far more thought to the cut of his coats than to the spiraling cost of bread; who had never heard the wail of a child starving in the cold, never seen those stacks of pitifully small, white-shrouded bodies waiting for the quicklime of the poor hole.

“There is still the matter of Constable Simplot,” said Sir Henry. “While I can understand—”

“
God damn it
,” Sebastian swore, coming half upright only to be thrown off balance by his bound ankles. “I didn’t attack your bloody constable. Why would I? Did you not hear what I said? A woman is going to
die
. Tonight.”

A string of firecrackers went off next to the carriage, startling the horse and bringing a roar of excitement from the crowd. “If that is true,” said Lovejoy, his nervous gaze darting to the window, “then tell me where this man is keeping her. I’ll send constables after them.”

Sebastian let out a harsh laugh. “She’s bait in a trap set for me. If your constables go charging in there, she’ll die.”

“I think you underestimate the capabilities of my constables.”

“Do I?”

“This man—the one you say is killing these women. Who is he?”

“My brother-in-law. Lord Wilcox.”

The magistrate’s lips parted as if on a gasp, but he kept his features otherwise admirably controlled. Still, it was several moments before he said, “And your proof?”

Sebastian had to beat back an uncharacteristic welling of frustration and despair. Proof? He had none. “The only proof I have is that he has taken Kat Boleyn.”

“And your proof of that?”

A sudden explosion of fireworks ripped through the night, filling the street with a shower of sparks that glowed eerily in the heavy fog. “I have none.”

Lovejoy nodded, the light of a new burst of fireworks winking on the lenses of his eyeglasses. “And if you walk into this trap you say Lord Wilcox has set for you? How will that save her?”

“I have no intention of falling neatly into Wilcox’s trap.”

“Yet you might. If you will simply tell me—”

“Goddamn you!” Sebastian cried, yanking painfully, uselessly, at the ropes that tethered him. “You stupid, bloody-minded, self-congratulating bastard. Every minute you keep me here, you are
killing
her.”

Sebastian went suddenly still, his chest jerking on a quick intake of cold, smoke-fouled air as he carefully trained his gaze away from the window through which he had seen, briefly, the small, thin arm of a boy who clung to the back of the carriage.

“I understand your frustration,” said Sir Henry with a plodding calm that made Sebastian want to scream. “But the law—” He broke off as the hackney’s near door jerked open and a small, roughly dressed body appeared on the step. “I say—” he began, then broke off again when Tom swung up into the carriage. The flaring glow from an explosion of fireworks gleamed bright and dangerous on the blade he held gripped tightly in one fist.

“Make a sound or move a whisker,” said the boy fiercely, “an’ I’ll slit yer gullet.”

“Heaven preserve us,” said Sir Henry, one hand groping for the strap as the carriage gave a sudden lurch.

“I know I didn’t do what you done told me,” Tom said as he leapt to slice through the ropes at Sebastian’s wrists.

“Thank God for that.” Sebastian flung aside the remnants of the ropes while the boy crouched to cut the bindings at his ankles. Careful to keep one eye on the white-faced magistrate, Sebastian gripped Tom’s shoulder, his hand tightening in a spasm of wordless gratitude as the boy rose to his feet. “But do it now, lad. Quickly. And this time, don’t look back.”

Tom’s head jerked, his face settling into stubborn lines. “I’m coming with you.”