What Remains of Heaven (33 page)

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Authors: C. S. Harris

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General

BOOK: What Remains of Heaven
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She knew a pounding rush of excitement. She could return to England in a few years and simply present the child as an orphan she’d adopted in the course of her travels.
Why not?
 
 
That morning, Sebastian revolted his tiger by once again summoning a hackney carriage.
“Ye don’t like the way I ’andled the chestnuts on the way to Tanfield ’Ill?” said the boy, his street urchin’s face pinched tight with suppressed emotion.
“It’s not that,” said Sebastian. “It’s—” He broke off, unwilling to vocalize the faint wisps of unease left by the previous night’s dreams. He slipped his dagger into its sheath in his Hessians and said simply, “I know how much yesterday’s drive hurt my arm, and I know it must have pained you as well. I want you to rest another day. That’s all.”
The boy’s face cleared a little, but he still looked mulish. “My shoulder’s fine.”
“It’ll be even better after another day’s rest. Now go find me a hackney.”
 
 
Sir Peter kept his opera dancer in Camden Town, in a small house just off Brompton Road. It was a respectable if unfashionable street of tidy houses with shiny, freshly painted doors and window boxes spilling pelargoniums and heartsease against carefully pointed redbrick walls.
Sebastian’s knock was answered by a flat-chested, sharp chinned lass of perhaps thirteen who wore a starched white cap and a startled expression. This was obviously a household that received few visitors. “Gor,” she whispered, expelling her breath in wonder.
“Amy,” called a woman’s voice from inside the house. “Is that the—
Oh
.”
Sir Peter’s opera dancer appeared behind her young maid, one tiny hand flying up to her lips in consternation when she saw Sebastian. She had thick, dark ringlets and twinkling eyes and a Devonshire-cream complexion that must have made her the darling of the opera once. Now, from the looks of the bulge beneath the high waist of her simple sprigged muslin gown, she was at least six months heavy with child.
“I beg your pardon for the intrusion, madam,” said Sebastian, removing his hat. “I was looking for Sir Peter.”
“He’s taken Francis down to Whitehall, to watch the Changing of the Guard.”
“Francis?”
“Our son.” She smoothed her left hand over her swelling stomach in a self-conscious gesture, and Sebastian saw the morning sun glimmer on the gold of the simple band on her third finger.
 
 
“She’s not my mistress,” said Sir Peter. “She’s my wife. She has been for nearly four years now, since before Francis was born.”
They stood together at the edge of the Horse Guards parade, where a flaxen-haired lad of about three clambered over the barrel of a Turkish cannon captured a decade earlier in Egypt. “She’s lovely,” said Sebastian.
A soft smile lit the other man’s features as he watched his son. It faded slowly. “Her lineage is respectable. Her father was a physician. But when he died, the family was left penniless. She came to London looking for work.” He paused. “You know how that goes.”
Sebastian stared off across the parade, toward the Hyde Park Barracks. A warm sun bathed the park in a golden light, but he could see the threat of dark clouds building again on the horizon.
“Of course,” Sir Peter was saying, “her birth makes no difference now. Not after she’s trod the boards. What kind of a man marries his mistress?”
“The kind of man with the courage to follow his heart,” suggested Sebastian.
“Courage?” Sir Peter gave a harsh laugh. “If I had courage, Arabella would be living openly with me as my wife at the Grange, rather than being hidden away in Camden Town.”
They could see the new guard now, dark horses advancing in majestic solemnity, sun shining on the red-coated men’s helmets and white plumes. “The Bishop knew of your marriage, did he?” said Sebastian. “Is that why you quarreled?”
Prescott narrowed his eyes against the sun. “Initially, yes.”
The little boy, Francis, slid off the cannon and ran toward them. “They’re coming, Papa!”
Sebastian said, “I know Jack Slade paid you a visit last Monday night, and I know why.”
Sir Peter kept his face half turned away, his gaze on the approaching Life Guards, their dark mounts moving in flawless precision. “It’s no easy thing discovering that your entire life has been a lie.”
Sebastian stared off across the field and said nothing.
After a moment, Prescott continued. “Slade wanted me to give him money. Two thousand pounds.”
“Did you oblige him?”
“I told him I needed time to gather such a sum.”
“Would you have given it to him?”
“I don’t know.” He glanced sideways at Sebastian. “I hear you killed him. I must say, I’m glad.”
Sebastian watched the royal standard snap in the breeze. “He had no proof of anything. Only his word.”
Prescott huffed a soft, humorless laugh. “That, and the fact that my uncle had been paying to keep him silent for years.”
Sebastian watched the trumpeter lift his instrument for the royal salute. “You told me you were here, in Camden Town, the night Francis Prescott died. But that’s not true. You rode out to Tanfield Hill that evening to see Bessie Dunlop.”
Prescott turned to face him. “What the devil are you suggesting, Devlin? That I saw the Bishop in St. Margaret’s churchyard when I was riding through the village and decided to follow him down into the crypt and bash in his brains? What the bloody hell would I do that for? Because he cuckolded my mother’s husband? Because he didn’t like my own marriage?”
“Ever hear of the Alcibiades letters?”
“No.”
Sebastian studied his old schoolmate’s flushed, angry face, the soft blue eyes and disheveled fair curls that fell across his brow. If it was an act, it was a good one.
The notes of the salute drifted across the parade. “
Toot-toot
,” said Master Francis, marching in place, hand raised as he blew into an imaginary trumpet.
Sebastian watched the sun glint on the boy’s flaxen curls and finely featured face. “Your son looks amazingly like you,” he said. “And your mother.” For a moment, the shrill notes of the trumpet and the shouts of the small crowd faded. He was thinking of another man with fair curls and soft blue eyes and the delicate bone structure of a scholar.
Or a priest.
As if from a long way off, he heard Sir Peter say, “The Ash leys always breed true.”
Sebastian swung to face him. “
Ashley
is your mother’s family name?”
Sir Peter’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “Yes. Why?”
“And Dr. Simon Ashley—the Bishop’s chaplain—is what? Your mother’s brother?”
“Yes.”
“Bloody hell,” whispered Sebastian.
“Why didn’t Uncle Simon come with us to watch the Changing of the Guard?” demanded Master Francis, following the drift of their conversation in that disconcerting way of children.
“He had someplace else he was supposed to be,” said Sir Peter.
Sebastian knew a sudden chill. “You saw him today?”
“It was rather curious, actually. He said he’d heard tales of the Prescott brothers playing in the crypt of St. Margaret’s as children, and he wanted to know if Uncle Francis ever told me the secret hiding place they’d had there.”
“Had he?”
Sir Peter nodded. “There’s supposed to be a small altar niche in the western wall of the crypt. One of the stones at the base of the niche is loose.”
“When was this?”
“That we saw him? Shortly before Francis and I left the house. Perhaps half an hour ago. Why?”
Sebastian thought about Paul Gibson, shoving notebooks and candles into a haversack last night in gleeful anticipation of a day to be spent inspecting and analyzing the moldering remains of centuries of his fellow men. An ambitious churchman who had already killed twice in his attempt to secure the evidence of his father’s treason would not hesitate to kill a one-legged Irish surgeon with an abiding fascination with the human body.
“Papa!” said Master Francis, tugging at his father’s coattails. “Do you see—” The boy let out a whoop as Sebastian scooped him up and took off at a run across the parade grounds.
“Quickly,” he shouted over his shoulder to Sir Peter. “I need to borrow your horse.”
Prescott struggled to keep up with him. “But I don’t understand—”
“I don’t have time to go back to Brook Street. And I’ll need you to take a note to Bow Street. It is very important that you deliver it personally into the hands of Sir Henry Lovejoy. Can you do that?”
“Yes, but—Hell and the devil confound it, Devlin! What the devil is going on?”
“Simon Ashley murdered your father. Your
real
father. And if I don’t make it out to Tanfield Hill in time, he could very well kill a friend of mine. Paul Gibson.”
Chapter 42
 
Sebastian spurred Sir Peter’s neat chestnut gelding hard, his left hand sweaty on the reins, his injured right arm hugged in tight to his body. A stiff wind scurried the growing banks of clouds overhead, hiding the sun and thrashing the limbs of the oaks and elms that shadowed the road to Tanfield Hill. By the time he reached Hounslow Heath, the pain in his sliced arm was a searing, white-hot agony that kept his breathing quick and shallow and dulled his thoughts. He pushed on.
The first drops of rain began to fall as he clattered over the millstream’s bridge and spurred the gelding up the hill. Rain streaked the quiet tombstones with splashes of wet and pattered softly in the long grass of the churchyard. Reining in beneath the ancient bell tower, Sebastian slipped from the saddle, one hand coming up to cup the gelding’s nose when it would have whickered softly. The churchyard was deserted. If either Gibson or Simon Ashley were here, they had stabled their horses at the Dog and Duck before descending into the crypt.
Cradling his aching arm close to his body, Sebastian worked his way around the church. At the gaping entrance to the crypt’s stair vault, he slowed, alert to any sound of movement. Someone had torn away the weathered boards from the broken opening and thrown them aside. He could see the narrow, steep steps plunging down into a dark void faintly lit as if by a distant flickering flame.
Chill, dank air wafted up from below, bringing him the smell of old, old earth and death. Painfully conscious of the soft crunch of debris beneath the soles of his boots, Sebastian crept down the worn stairs. His feet found the last step, then the sunken, uneven paving of the crypt’s floor. Flattening his back against the coursed, rough stones of the wall, he drew in a deep, steadying breath.
The flame of a single candle glowed at the far western end of the crypt, sending the long, distorted shadow of a man stretching out across the worn paving and rows of crude columns. Then the shadow moved, and Sebastian saw Simon Ashley, the hem of his black cassock brushing the dusty floor. He had his back turned, his shoulders working as he used an iron bar to pry up the stones at the base of a crude niche in the back wall.
Gibson was nowhere to be seen.
Sebastian reached down with his left hand to slip the dagger from his boot. Moving cautiously, he crept past shadowy bays stuffed with dusty, cobweb-draped caskets stacked five and six high, some banded with iron in an attempt to foil grave robbers, others pitifully small and painted white, as denoted a child. As his eyes adjusted to the sepulchral gloom, more details began to emerge: the ruched frill of a coffin lining peeking through split wood, its lace edging threaded with tattered ribbon; a casket handle shaped like a cherub; the tarnished brass of a lozenge-shaped end plate that read,
Mary Alice Mills, died 1725, aged 16 years
. . .
The toe of his boot bumped against something lumpy and yielding. Looking down, Sebastian saw Gibson’s haversack, a jumble of notebooks and tape measures and calipers spilling across the worn paving stones.
Paul Gibson lay just beyond it, sprawled facedown at the base of a towering wall of ancient coffins warped and crushed by the weight of the ages. Crouching beside him, Sebastian pressed his fingertips to his friend’s neck. Gibson’s pulse was faint, but there. At Sebastian’s touch, he let out a soft moan.
The Chaplain jerked around, his fist clenched on a yellowing packet of letters, his eyes widening at the sight of Sebastian. “
Devlin
. What the bloody hell are you doing here?”
Sebastian pushed to his feet, the dagger held low at his side. “Give it up, Ashley,” he said evenly. “A Bow Street magistrate and half a dozen runners are already on their way here.”
The Chaplain shook his head, the flickering light from the candle he’d wedged atop a nearby casket dancing over his pale face and the stark white of his ecclesiastical collar. He slipped the letters inside his coat and wrapped both fists around the iron bar. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that.”
Sebastian was hideously aware of his right arm hanging useless in its sling, of Gibson lying unconscious beside him, of the time it must have taken Sir Peter to find Lovejoy. How long, he wondered, would it take Lovejoy and his constables to make the journey out to Tanfield Hill? An hour? More?

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