When Gods Die (20 page)

“Why are you asking me? I wasn’t even in Brighton that summer, remember? I was already married, with young children of my own.”

“You’re her daughter.”

She glanced up at the lichen-covered statue of an ancient Tudor king beside them. “Have you discussed this with Hendon?”

“Yes. He may not know the truth himself.”

“Not all truths are ever known, dear brother,” she said, gathering her black skirts. “Now you’ll have to excuse me. I’m expecting Lady Jersey this afternoon.” She swept past him, her head held high, a tight smile on her lips.

Left alone in the gardens of St. James’s Square, Sebastian watched a young nursemaid shepherd her laughing charges down the steps of one of the stately houses fronting the square, and lead them across the street. He turned in a slow circle, his gaze sweeping row after row of imposing mansions around him. How many women, he wondered, lived lives of quiet despair behind those imposing facades? What tales of disappointment and heartache, fear and desperation, did those walls of marble and brick disguise?

Still thoughtful, he drew the triskelion from his pocket and turned it over to study the entwined initials of another pair of doomed lovers. A. C. and J. S. Addiena Cadel and James Stuart. Was the ancient Welsh necklace that had once belonged to Sophie Hendon a clue to what had happened to Guinevere Anglessey, Sebastian wondered, or simply a distraction? What was Guinevere’s intention when she left that grand, four-story house on Mount Street in a hackney carriage headed for Smithfield, only to be found some eight hours later, dead and in the arms of the Regent in Brighton? During the intervening hours, someone had poisoned her, exchanged her simple red afternoon walking dress for a slightly smaller woman’s green satin evening gown, and used her dead body in an elaborate scheme to further discredit an already unpopular prince. But why?
Why?

Somewhere in the half-truths and subtle nuances of what Sebastian had discovered about Guinevere’s life lay the explanation for her death. And for some reason he couldn’t explain, he found himself coming back again and again to that image of the child Guinevere had once been. Grief-stricken, frightened, left alone by her mother’s early death, the young Guinevere had known little love from either her father or her older sister, while her governesses had been content to let her roam the countryside with the kind of freedom usually reserved for the males of her class.

And so the cliffs above the wild Welsh coast had become her refuge, the open fields and forests of her father’s estate her schoolroom. In a sense she’d been fortunate. Her childhood experiences had nurtured her instinctive independence and resiliency, while the love she’d been denied at home had been found nearby, within the ancient walls of Audley Castle. First from Lady Audley, herself so recently bereaved, and then from her son, the Chevalier de Varden, a young man with a life as tragic in its own way as Guinevere’s.

What would have happened, Sebastian wondered, if the old Earl of Athelstone hadn’t placed his own greed and ambitions ahead of his daughter’s happiness? Sebastian had a brief image of the woman he’d last seen dead in the Yellow Cabinet at Brighton, only in his mind’s eye she was alive, with the golden light of the Welsh sun warm on her face as she played with her children on a windy hill overlooking a foam-flecked sea. What if…?

But that was a futile, if beguiling, path to travel, and he closed his mind to it.

Watching the nursemaid chase after her wayward charges, Sebastian found himself remembering what Guinevere had said to the starving, desperate woman she’d made her abigail.
If we’re given a hard road to walk in life, we can’t give up. We must fight to find some way to make what we want out of what life has given us
.

Faced with such determined opposition from her family, another woman might simply have succumbed to the wishes of her keepers and lived a pale, unhappy life of resignation and acceptance. But not Guinevere. Given no real choice, she had come to London. But she had come determined to find some way to make her life on her own terms.

And so she had taken to husband the Marquis of Anglessey, a man who was not only wealthy and kindly, but also old enough to be nearing the end of his life. As a wealthy widow, Guinevere would have been free to marry to please herself. Had that been her objective? Only, in the end it had been the Marquis of Anglessey who buried his beautiful young wife.

If the murder had been staged in such a way as to implicate Bevan Ellsworth or Lady Anglessey’s unknown lover, Sebastian might have believed the Marquis guilty. It wouldn’t have been the first time an old, impotent husband had been driven to murder by the discovery that his beautiful young wife was giving her love to a younger man. But Guinevere Anglessey’s killer hadn’t implicated Bevan Ellsworth. He had targeted the Prince Regent.
Why?

Leaving the square, Sebastian closed his fist around the bluestone necklace, a necklace given as a talisman by a Welsh witch to her lover, a fugitive Stuart prince who in turn had presented it to his illegitimate daughter on her wedding day. From there its history was obscure until that day some thirty years ago now when a withered old crone in the wilds of northern Wales had pressed it upon the young Countess of Hendon.

Whatever link existed between the two women must lay there, Sebastian decided, somewhere in the green, misty mountains of northern Wales.

Chapter 33

T
hey were referred to as morning calls, that endless round of formal visits that took place daily amongst the members of Society in residence in London. But the truth was that no gentleman or lady with any pretensions to breeding would dream of appearing on the doorstep of any but his or her most intimate of friends before three o’clock.

And so Sebastian spent the next several hours in Jackson’s saloon, working the soreness out of his muscles. It wasn’t until half past three that he arrived at the home of Guinevere’s sister, Morgana, Lady Quinlan. After the thinly veiled hostility of their encounter at the balloon ascension, he half expected to be told she was not at home. Instead, he was shown upstairs to the drawing room, where he found Lady Quinlan in conversation with another caller, a young woman introduced to him as Lady Portland, wife to the Home Secretary and half sister to Guinevere’s childhood love, the Chevalier de Varden.

She had much the look of her mother, Isolde, being incredibly small and fine-boned. Only her hair was different, an ashen blond rather than a fiery auburn. She was also very young, no more than twenty at the most. As a child of Lady Audley’s second marriage, she was younger than Varden, younger even than Guinevere.

“Lord Devlin,” said Claire Portland, offering her hand and looking up at him with that intense interest used to flirtatious effect by so many of her sex. “I’ve been hearing a great deal to your credit.”

The hand in his was a dainty, frail thing, and he found himself thinking that Claire Portland, like her mother, was far too tiny to have been the owner of the green satin gown that had been used as Guinevere’s death shroud.

“Portland tells me you’ve agreed to help discover the truth about what happened to poor Guinevere,” Claire was saying. “How gallant of you.”

Sebastian adjusted the tails of his coat and sat on a nearby sofa. “I don’t recall,” he said to Lady Portland. “Were you present at the Prince’s musical evening last Wednesday?”

She gave a little shudder. “Thank goodness, no. I had the headache and decided to stay in my room.”

“But you were in Brighton.”

“Oh yes.” She leaned forward as if confiding a secret. “Personally, I find the place rather tedious. But now that Prinny has been named Regent, I fear we shall all be doomed to follow him down there every summer.”

Leaning back again, she fixed him with an intense gaze and said, “Is it true what Portland says, that the people on the streets actually believe the Prince killed poor Guin?”

Sebastian glanced at Morgana, who sat quietly beside the empty hearth. “It’s been my experience that most people tend to believe what they are led to believe,” he said.

Lady Quinlan’s features remained inscrutable, while Claire Portland tipped her head sideways, her expression quizzical, as if she were not quite sure how to take that. Looking into her clear, cornflower blue eyes, Sebastian found himself wondering just how much Lord Portland confided in his pretty young wife. She projected an image of innocence and gaiety, of disingenuous superficiality and the mindless helplessness most men found appealing. But Sebastian knew it was an impression deliberately created by many of her sisters, a consciously deceptive facade that often hid a sharp and calculating mind. Claire Portland was, after all, Lady Audley’s daughter. And Lady Audley was neither mindless nor helpless.

Lord Portland’s pretty young wife stayed chatting a few minutes more, then very correctly rose as required by custom to take her leave. Yet as she made her adieus with sweet effusiveness, Sebastian caught the furtive glance she shared with their hostess. It was a look that spoke of an intention to follow up Sebastian’s visit with a private conference, and hinted at the existence of an old, close friendship. A friendship he wouldn’t have expected between the plain, intensely serious Morgana and this flirtatious woman who was at least as young, if not younger than, the murdered sister with whom Morgana claimed to have had so little in common.

“Why are you doing this?” Morgana asked, fixing Sebastian with a thoughtful stare as soon as the footman had shown her other guest out. “It’s not for love of the Prince Regent, whatever Claire might think.”

Sebastian raised his eyebrows in a simulation of surprise. “Does Lady Portland indeed think that?”

An expression he couldn’t quite decipher flitted across his hostess’s features. She leaned back in her chair, one hand smoothing her gown across her lap. “You came, obviously, to ask me something. What is it?”

It was no easy thing, asking a lady for the name of her sister’s lover. Sebastian tried an oblique approach. “Was your sister happy, do you think, in her marriage?”

A knowing gleam shone in her eyes. “You’re being discreet, aren’t you? What you really mean to ask is, Did Guinevere have a lover and do I know his name? The answer to the first question is, Possibly. To the second question I’m afraid I must answer, No. I don’t know his name. It’s not the sort of thing she would confide in me. As I told you, Guinevere and I were not close.”

“Yet you knew of her childhood attachment to Varden.”

“That was hardly a secret. Presumably even Guinevere would be prudent if she were cuckolding a husband.”

“Whom might she have confided in? Did she have a close friend?”

“Not that I know of. She was always something of a loner, Guinevere.”

To his annoyance, he heard the distant rap of the front knocker, heralding the arrival of yet another round of guests come to offer their condolences to Lady Quinlan on the death of her sister. Sebastian said, “Your sister had a necklace, a necklace with a silver triskelion superimposed on a bluestone disk. Do you know anything about it? It’s an ancient piece, from well before the seventeenth century.”

Lady Quinlan shook her head, her expression blank. Either she knew nothing of the necklace, or she was even better at hiding her thoughts and feelings than he would expect. “No. As a child she had a pearl necklace and one or two small pins that once belonged to her mother, but nothing else I ever knew of. You say it was silver? It seems a strange thing for Anglessey to have given her. Unless, of course, it was a family piece.” A faint smile touched her lips. “Although if that were the case, you wouldn’t be asking me about it, now, would you?”

The new visitors were on the stairs. Sebastian could hear the ponderous tread of a matron, along with the lighter step of a younger woman, probably her daughter. “You wouldn’t happen to know what took your sister to Smithfield last week, would you?” Sebastian asked, rising to take his leave.

“Smithfield?” She rose with him. “Of all the unfashionable places. Good heavens, no.”

Standing beside her, Sebastian was reminded again of the unusual height that Morgana Quinlan, like her sister, Guinevere, had inherited from their father. If anything, Morgana was even taller—and certainly more robust—than her sister had been.

The green satin evening gown could no more have come from this woman’s wardrobe than from that of Claire Portland.

T
HAT GREEN SATIN GOWN
was beginning to bother him.

Returning to his house on Brook Street, Sebastian decided to take the gown to Kat and hear what she might be able to tell him about it. “Have Tom bring the curricle around,” said Sebastian, handing his hat and walking stick to Morey, his majordomo.

“I’m sorry, my lord,” said Morey. “But young Tom has not yet returned.”

Sebastian frowned. The sun was already low in the sky, and he’d warned the tiger not to linger in Smithfield after dusk. Sebastian turned toward the stairs. “Then have Giles bring the curricle round.”

Morey gave a stately bow and withdrew.

Some half an hour later, clad in evening dress and with the groom Giles sitting up behind him, Sebastian stuffed the brown paper package containing the green satin evening gown beneath his curricle’s seat and turned the chestnuts’ heads toward Covent Garden. Already, the setting sun was painting long streaks of orange and vivid pink across a fading sky. The traffic in the streets was heavy, the ponderous wagons of the carters and coal sellers mingling with the elegant landaus and barouches of the ton as the fashionably idle set out for the opera and theater and endless round of dinner parties, card parties, and soirees with which they filled their evenings. There were single horsemen, too: fashionable bucks in leather breeches and white-topped high boots, their blood mounts stepping high and proud; country gentlemen in old-fashioned frock coats, their horses sturdy and serviceable…and one brown-coated gentleman on a nondescript gray who was still trailing a steady distance behind as the more fashionable districts faded away and Sebastian swung the curricle into St. Martin’s.