What Angels Fear (46 page)

“No, wait!” George, Prince of Wales and soon to be Prince Regent, sucked in a desperate gasp of air and flung out one fat, beringed hand to grasp the red lacquered back of a nearby chair. “I can’t go out there yet. I can’t breathe.
Oh, God
. Do you think it’s my heart? I feel a series of palpitations coming on. Where is Dr. Heberden?”

Charles, Lord Jarvis, wrenched the stopper from a vial of smelling salts and waved the pungent concoction back and forth beneath his prince’s pale nostrils. “Here, here, Your Royal Highness. You’ll be fine. An understandable attack of nerves, that’s all,” he said soothingly, then whispered in an urgent undertone to one of the Prince’s gentlemen, “Loosen his corset.”

From his position near the door, the Earl of Hendon slipped a watch from his waistcoat pocket and frowned. The Privy Council had already been kept waiting for an hour. But then, everyone at Court was accustomed to waiting for the Prince. There was no reason to expect his installation as Regent to be any different.

The Prince was breathing better now, but Jarvis shook his head at the Earl of Hendon and pressed a glass of wine into the Prince’s trembling hands.

It hadn’t been an easy thing, shepherding the Prince toward his new position as Regent while simultaneously maneuvering to keep the Whigs out of government. That girl’s murder coupled with the apparent involvement of Hendon’s son had come perilously close to scuttling the entire scheme. But in the end all had come off as planned. The Whigs had been discredited, Perceval and the Tories would remain in power, and the war would continue until the French were finally, irrevocably crushed. Soon, there would be no one left in all the world to challenge British supremacy. Unconquerable and all-powerful, Britannia would take her divinely ordained position as the New and Final Rome. It was to be the happy fate of Jarvis’s own generation of Englishmen to witness the final inauguration of an empire that would last a thousand years and more into the future.

“Jarvis?” The Prince’s voice rose in a peevish whine. “Where is Jarvis?

“Here,” said Jarvis, easing the wineglass from his prince’s plump fingers. “Shall we go, Your Highness? England and your destiny await you.”

Author’s Note

A
lthough it would not have been recognized in the early nineteenth century, the unusual abilities displayed by Sebastian St. Cyr are characteristic of Bithil Syndrome, a little-known but very real genetic mutation found in certain families of Welsh descent.

Bithil Syndrome is marked by astonishingly acute eyesight and hearing, and an abnormal sensitivity to light that allows those with this genetic variation to see clearly in the dark. Other characteristics of the syndrome include extraordinarily quick reflexes, a misshapen vertebra in the lower back, and yellow eyes, the eye color being recessive to both blue and brown.

Although rare, Bithil Syndrome is nevertheless quite ancient, having been discovered in at least one individual known to have died in Wales some ten thousand years ago. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, immigrant Welsh families carried this mutation to North America, where it can be found today, particularly in the southeastern United States amongst families of mixed Cherokee and Welsh descent.