When Gods Die (27 page)

“Such as your lack of fortune?”

He huffed a small, bitter laugh. “That most of all. When Guinevere was seventeen, her father’s sister invited her to spend the Season in London. She’d done the same for Morgana. At the time old Athelstone had grumbled, but in the end he’d scraped together the money needed for clothes and sent Morgana off. She succeeded better than anyone expected. Athelstone was convinced Guinevere would do even better.” Varden paused. “The old bastard needed her to do better.”

“Badly dipped, was he?”

Varden nodded. “Worse than Guinevere realized. She thought he’d leap at the opportunity to be spared the expense of a London season. But when she told him she had no need of a brilliant alliance because she planned to marry me, he laughed. And then, of course, he flew into a rage.”

While they’d been talking, a breeze had come up, ruffling the long grass and singing through the high branches of the surrounding elms. In the distance, one of the children brought out a kite, a red confection of paper and bamboo that careened straight to earth each time the boy tried to run with it.

Varden’s voice was hard. “Everything my father would have left me, everything that was in my family for generations, has been lost. All I have is a title and a noble pedigree and some impoverished royal relatives who are in nearly as bad straights as I am.”

Sebastian watched the little boy pick up the kite and try again. There weren’t many noblemen who’d welcome a penniless half-French émigré as a son-in-law.

“Guin tried to argue with him, but Athelstone was ruthless. He threatened to cut her off without a penny and cast her out of the house if she refused to go to London—or if she failed to do what she needed to do while she was there. He meant it, too.”

“So she agreed?”

“Not at first. She ran out of the house.” Varden swung his head away, his eyes narrowing as he, too, watched the kite. “I’ll never forget that night. There was a violent storm blowing in from the sea. She came along the cliffs, the way she always had as a child. It’s a wonder she wasn’t killed.” He sucked in a deep, shaky breath. “I’d been out riding and been caught in the storm. She found me in the stables.”

Sebastian pictured Guinevere Anglessey as the young girl she must have been, her wet hair tumbling down her back, her eyes wild with desperation and fear. “What did you tell her?”

The Chevalier kept his face turned away, his throat working as he swallowed. “What could I say? I was eighteen years old. I couldn’t support a wife. I couldn’t even marry without permission.”

“Your mother wouldn’t have taken her in?”

The younger man smiled. “My mother was fond of Guinevere, particularly when she was a child. But she would never have agreed to such a marriage.”

Sebastian thought about the proud, elegant woman he’d met. Lady Audley must have watched the maturing affection between the young Chevalier and his childhood friend with growing concern. Such a woman’s plans for her dispossessed son would not include marriage to the daughter of some impoverished provincial earl. London was full of rich bankers and merchants more than willing to take on a penniless son-in-law, as long at the son-in-law came with a title and a noble lineage and royal connections.

“What did Lady Guinevere do when you told her?”

“She ran back out into the storm. I tried to go after her, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. I was afraid she’d thrown herself from the cliffs.” He paused, and it seemed to Sebastian, watching him, as if the skin had tightened across his features, making him look suddenly older. “She told me later she almost did. But then she decided she wasn’t going to let her father destroy her. She made up her mind to go to her aunt in London and marry a rich old man—the older and richer the better. And then when he died, she’d be free of him.”

“And free of her father.”

“Yes. That was her plan, at any rate. The problem was, while there were plenty of rich old men to chose from, she found the thought of being married to any of them more than she could bear.”

“Until she met Anglessey.”

Varden’s lips compressed into a thin line. “Yes. She said that at first he seemed much like all the others—old and gray and jowly, and carrying far too much weight around his middle. But as she came to know him, she discovered he had a good heart and a fine mind, and they became friends. I think in many ways he was like the father she never really felt she had.”

Sebastian tilted back his head, his gaze on the red kite climbing now with sudden dips and eddies against the clouding sky. What was it Tess Bishop had said about the Marchioness of Anglessey and her lord?
They were well suited to one another…. They could spend hours together, just talking and laughing. You don’t see many couples like that
…. He wondered if Guinevere had ever told the love of her life just how much affection she’d come to develop for her aged husband. Sebastian doubted it.

He turned to study the younger man’s troubled face. “The night Lady Anglessey was killed, someone tried to break into her room. The abigail scared them away, but they came back again the next night, searching for something. You wouldn’t happen to know what that was, would you?”

Varden stared off across the parklands, as if thinking. But there was something about the way he held his mouth that told Sebastian the man didn’t need to think, that he knew right away what Tess Bishop’s mysterious housebreaker had been seeking. He shook his head. “I can’t imagine.”

“No? I understand you and Lady Anglessey had a quarrel recently. A serious quarrel.”

Varden’s brows drew together in a quick frown. “Who told you that?”

“Does it matter?”

He stopped and swung to face Sebastian, the gravel crunching beneath the soles of his boots. “What do you think? That she tried to break things off with me, so I killed her? It wasn’t like that at all.”

Sebastian held himself very still. “So how was it?”

Varden hesitated a moment, then said in a rush, “She was going to leave Anglessey. That’s why we quarreled. She wanted me to run away with her.”

Sebastian stared into the younger man’s tense, anxious face, and didn’t believe one word of it. “Why? Why would she even consider doing such a thing?”

“Because she was afraid of him. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. He seems so mild mannered: the perfect eighteenth-century gentleman. It’s what Guin thought at first. They were married several years before she saw what he’s really like.”

“How is he really?”

“Jealous. Possessive. It was his idea that she take a lover. But then when she did, he couldn’t bear it. In the end, Guin was afraid he might kill her. Kill her and the baby both.”

Sebastian shook his head. “Nothing is more important to Anglessey than cutting his nephew out of the inheritance. My God, the man was willing to encourage his wife’s adultery in the hopes of conceiving an heir. Why would he turn around and harm her?”

“I don’t know. But he did it before, didn’t he?”

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s how his first wife died. Didn’t you know? She was with child, and he knocked her down the stairs. He killed her. Her and the child both.”

S
EBASTIAN WAS CROSSING
B
OND
S
TREET,
headed toward the Marquis of Anglessey’s house on Mount Street, when he heard a man’s high-pitched, anxious voice calling his name.

“Lord Devlin. I say, Lord Devlin.”

Sebastian turned his head to find Sir Henry Lovejoy hailing him from a battered old hackney. “If I might have a word with you, my lord?”

Chapter 47

L
ondon was different from the country. In the country, traveling judges sat only at the quarterly assizes—if then. In the farthest counties a man could languish in jail for three months to a year, waiting for a trial. In London, a man—or a boy—could be caught, tried, and hanged in less than a week.

Sebastian tried not to think about that as he and Lovejoy followed a porter through grimy prison passages lit by smoking rushes. The air in here was foul, reeking of excrement and urine and rot. Rotting straw, rotting teeth, rotting lives.

They were shown to a cold but relatively clean room, its stone floor bare, the small, high, barred window casting only a dim light on a grouping of plain wooden chairs and an old scarred table.

“What were you doing here?” Sebastian asked Lovejoy when he and the magistrate were left alone to wait.

“The watch picked up a couple of housebreakers near St. James’s Park the night Sir Humphrey Carmichael’s son was killed. I was hoping they might have seen something.”

“And?”

Lovejoy’s lips twisted. “Nothing.”

Footsteps echoed down the passage, a man’s heavy stride and the smaller footfalls of a boy. Sebastian swung toward the door.

Tom entered the room with dragging steps, his head bowed. His coat was muddy and torn, his cap gone, his face pale and drawn. It was as if all the boy’s plucky determination and jaunty irreverence had been wiped out in one long, hellish night.

“’Ere ’e is, gov’nor,” said the gaoler grudgingly.

“Thank you.” Sebastian’s voice came out thick. “That will be all.”

Tom’s head snapped up, his mouth opening in a gasp. “My lord!”

Lovejoy put out a hand to stop the boy’s impetuous forward rush. “There, there now, lad. Remember your place.”

“Let him go,” said Sebastian as the boy dodged the magistrate and threw himself against Sebastian’s chest.

“I didn’t do it! I swear I didn’t prig that bloke’s watch.” The boy’s shoulders heaved, his entire body shuddering. “They made it up ’cause I seen the gunpowder and ’eard what they was talking about.”

“It’s all right,” said Sebastian, one hand tightening on the boy’s shoulder even as his gaze met Lovejoy’s over Tom’s head.
Gunpowder?
“I’ve come to take you home.”

“They was going to hang me.” Tom’s voice broke. “Hang me just like they done Huey.”

Sebastian looked down at the boy’s tortured, tear-streaked face. “Who was Huey?”

“My brother. Huey was my brother.”

L
EAVING THE PRISON,
Sebastian bundled Tom into the carriage and gave the coachman orders to take the boy to Paul Gibson.

“Gibson?” said the tiger, bounding up. “I don’t need no surgeon. You’re going back there, ain’t you? To Smithfield? Well, I’m coming, too.”

“You will do as you are told,” said Sebastian in a voice that had quelled rebellious soldiers still bloody from battle.

The boy sank back and hung his head. “Aye, gov’nor.”

Sebastian nodded to his coachman, then turned away to call a hackney.

“Whether you like it or not, I am coming with you,” said Lovejoy, scrambling into the hackney behind Sebastian as he leaned forward to give the jarvey directions to Smithfield. “The law does not look kindly on those who make false accusations of theft.”

Sebastian threw the magistrate a quizzical glance, but said nothing.

Lovejoy settled in one corner of the carriage, his teeth worrying his lower lip as he sat in a thoughtful silence. After a moment, he said, “All this talk of powder kegs and a repeat of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. You think that’s what’s afoot here? Revolution?”

Sebastian shook his head. Tom had told them in detail what he’d seen and heard beside the Norfolk Arms’s cellars. It had been suggestive, but hardly damning. “More like a palace coup, I’d say, rather than a revolution. But God knows where it might lead. Change can be difficult to control once it’s under way. The French Revolution was started by a few noblemen wanting to revive the old National Assembly, remember? They certainly got more than they bargained for.”

The steadily thickening clouds had robbed the day of its light, making it seem later than it actually was. Sebastian stared out the window at brick houses streaked with soot, at gin shops spilling drunken laughter into the street. The sultry air smelled of boiling cabbage and horse manure and burning garbage. A boy of ten or twelve, a street sweeper from the looks of him, scrambled to get out of their way, his broom held tight in one fist, his eyes wide as he watched them rattle past. Behind him, a little girl of no more than eight, her clothes a jumble of torn rags, her face pale and bleak, stretched out one grimy hand in the beggar’s universal plea for help.

The hackney swept on, the boy and girl lost in a ragged crowd.

Sebastian found himself thinking about two other children, one named Huey, the other Tom. And about their mother, a simple but devout widow, out of work and thrown onto the streets with two children to feed. For her as for untold thousands of women in such a situation, the choices were simple but stark: starvation, theft, or prostitution. Tom’s mother had chosen theft and earned herself a one-way voyage to Botany Bay. Prostitution might have brought her disease and an early death, but it wasn’t a capital crime. Stealing to feed your starving children was.

From what Tom had told him, Sebastian figured the boy had been nine years old when he and his brother stood on the docks and watched their mother being rowed out to a transport lying at anchor in the Thames. The older by three years, Huey had taken it upon himself to care for his younger brother the best he knew how—until they caught Huey for stealing, too. Huey wasn’t as lucky as their mother. They’d hanged him.

Lovejoy’s voice broke into Sebastian’s thoughts. “We discovered the identity of the man you killed by the river.”

Sebastian moved his head against the hackney’s cracked leather upholstery. “I didn’t kill him. He fell.”

Lovejoy’s lips twitched, which was about as close as the dour little magistrate ever came to a smile. “His name was Ahearn. Charles Ahearn. Ever hear of him?”

Sebastian shook his head. “What is known of him?”

“Nothing to his discredit. He served as tutor to Lord Cochran’s sons until the youngest went off to Eton last fall.”

“What’s he been doing since then?”

Lovejoy withdrew a large handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his nose. “That we’re not sure.”

Sebastian had become aware of a heavy stench of raw smoke overlying the other smells of the district, the reeking tannery pits, and the fetid stink of the shambles. Now, as they turned onto Giltspur Street, they could hear shouts and running feet and the roaring crackle of flames, the hackney struggling to wind its way through a thick crowd. From the distance came the steady
clang, clang, clang
of the fire bell.