Where Shadows Dance (11 page)

Sebastian was watching the Colonel thread a path across the crowded room when Miss Jarvis walked up to him.

“Learn anything?” she asked.

He turned to look into her shrewd gray eyes. As Lord Jarvis’s daughter, she probably knew more than almost anyone else in London about the delicate diplomatic maneuverings swirling around Ross’s death. Yet the fact that she was Jarvis’s daughter meant that Sebastian couldn’t trust her. And it occurred to him that the implications of that lack of trust did not bode well for their future together.

“What?” she said, her gaze hard on his face.

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

She raised one eyebrow. “Are you planning to tell me what makes you suspect that Alexander Ross did not, in fact, die peacefully in his sleep?”

Sebastian cast a meaningful glance about the glittering assembly. “This might not be the most appropriate setting for such a discussion.”

“I will be spending tomorrow morning at the site of the old Grayfriar’s Priory in Newgate. We can speak more freely there,” she said, and withdrew.

He watched her walk away, torn between amusement and annoyance and the unsettling realization that his coming marriage would alter his life in more ways than he could begin to envision.

From the distance came the peal of the city’s church bells, ringing out the half hour. Soon, it would be time to pay another, more surreptitious visit to Alexander Ross’s rooms on St. James’s Street. But first he had an important stop to make.

He ordered his carriage and set off for Covent Garden.

 

 

Auburn haired and beautiful, Kat Boleyn sat at her dressing table, the flickering candlelight casting a golden glow across her bare shoulders, her slender arms raised as she eased the pins from her dark hair. She looked up when he slipped into the room. Their eyes met in the mirror, and for one telling moment her breath caught.

She was the toast of the London stage, an actress famed for both her talent and her beauty. She was also the natural daughter of Alistair St. Cyr, the Fifth Earl of Hendon, and the love of Sebastian’s life.

“Devlin,” she whispered. She did not move.

He stood for a moment, his shoulders pressed against the closed door behind him. He had loved this woman for nearly a third of his life. Once, he’d sworn to make her his wife and to hell with the consequences. Then fate and a long, sordid tangle of lies had intervened. Now she was married to a man named Russell Yates, a dashing privateer whose secret sexual inclinations remained one of the few taboos still rigidly enforced by their otherwise lax society. While Sebastian ...

Sebastian was about to marry the daughter of his worst enemy.

He said, “I’m sorry for coming here, but I had to see you.”

She studied his face in the mirror. The effects of too many sleepless nights and too many brandies would be obvious to anyone who knew him as well as Kat. She said, “I’d heard you were wounded. Are you all right?”

He touched his arm, injured the week before in a fight to catch the killer of the Bishop of London. “It’s stiff, but that is all.” He drew a deep breath. “There’s something I must tell you. I’ve asked Miss Hero Jarvis to be my wife.”

“Jarvis?”
She went white, the only sound the clatter of one of her hairpins hitting the surface of the dressing table. Once, Lord Jarvis had threatened her with torture and death. She had found a refuge of sorts through her marriage to Yates, but they both knew she would never really be safe from someone like Jarvis.

She let out a strange sound that might have been a shaky laugh. “I suppose there must be a reason for this. But I can’t at the moment imagine what it is.”

“There is a reason.” It was all he could say. He supposed the reason would be obvious enough in a few months’ time, but it was not something he ever intended to confirm. He owed Miss Jarvis that.

“Does Hendon know?”

“Of the marriage? No.”

“I think you should be the one to tell him.”

When he didn’t answer, she drew in a quick breath, and then another. Yet her voice was still a harsh whisper when she said, “You know I wish you happy, Sebastian.” She hesitated, as if searching for something pleasant to say. “She ... she does not seem overly much like her father.”

“No. I don’t believe she is.”
Overly much
, he thought, although he didn’t say it. He watched Kat remove the last pins from her hair to send it cascading about her shoulders. The urge to reach out and touch her, to run his fingers through that heavy auburn fall, to draw her into his arms, was so intense that he shuddered with it.

She said, “I hear you are investigating the death of Alexander Ross.”

He was startled enough to smile. “Is there anyone in London who does not know of it at this point?”

“Probably not.”

He studied the familiar contours of her face, the wide, sensual mouth and childlike nose, the intense blue eyes she had inherited from her father. He knew that once she had worked for the French, passing along secrets she hoped would aid her mother’s people, the Irish. It had been more than a year now since she’d severed her connections to Napoléon’s agents. But that had been before—when they’d still been lovers, the truth of the connection between them blissfully unknown. It was possible, he supposed, that her relationship with the French had been resumed. He knew that her husband, Yates, still maintained his contacts with the smugglers who plied the perilous waters between England and the Continent.

He said, “Have you heard anything about Ross’s death?”

She shook her head. “No. But I can make some inquiries, if you’d like.”

“It might be helpful to know more about his activities.”

“I’ll let you know if I learn anything.”

She pushed up from her bench and turned to face him, her hands at her sides, her fingers curling around the edge of the table behind her. She wore only a petticoat, and a chemise beneath a short corset; he could see the heavy velvet folds of her costume thrown over a nearby chest. Her breasts were high and full, swelling above the confines of her corset. Her eyes shone wide and luminous in the candlelight, and for one dangerous moment out of time, he lost himself in looking at her.

She said, “I never would have married you. You know that, don’t you? I’ve been saying it for nearly ten years now.”

“If things had turned out differently, I could have made you change your mind. Eventually.”

She laughed at that, a low, sad laugh rich with love and all the years they’d lost and all the years they’d shared. “Oh, Sebastian. Always so cocksure and arrogant, so certain that somehow the world can be put to right.” Her smile faded and she gave a little shake of her head. “I realized long ago that if I truly loved you—and I do—that I couldn’t ruin you by marrying you. The only way I could ever have married you is if I were to fall out of love with you, and that will never happen.”

He felt an ache pull across his chest, but he managed to keep his own tone light. “Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

“It would, if you could ever be brought to believe it.”

“I can’t.”

“Believe it, Sebastian. Believe it.”

She came to him then, her skin soft beneath his touch, her hair sliding across his fingers as he drew her close, her lips yielding to his. It was a kiss of heartbreak and hopeless passion, of a wild, all-consuming yearning.

And a last good-bye.

She was the one who pulled away first. But still her lips came back to brush his, again and again, before she finally brought her fingers up to press them against his mouth. “I will always love you,” she said, her forehead touching his, her breath mingling hard with his. “And I know you will always love me. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn to love someone else.”

He looked into her blue St. Cyr eyes. “And you, Kat? Have you learned to love Yates?”

She drew back then, her lips swollen from his kisses, her chest sill rising and falling with her rapid breathing. “That’s different.”

“Yet you think I can be happy, knowing you are not?”

“It is what I would wish.”

He gave her a crooked smile. “And you say I am the one who likes to believe the world can somehow always be put to rights.”

T
he night was warm, the moon nearly half full and unusually bright.

Sebastian left his carriage on Piccadilly and strolled down St. James’s Street, an evening cape thrown over his shoulders, the heels of his dress shoes clicking softly on the flagged paving. The windows of the gentlemen’s clubs blazed with light. Music spilled from open doors; the laughter of ungenteel women carried on a soft breeze. Passing the Je Reviens coffee shop, he glanced in the oriel window. Despite the hour, the coffee room was still crowded, the burly, gray-bearded Frenchman at his station behind the counter.

Madame Champagne had obviously retired for the night.

Smiling softly at the thought of what she’d told him, Sebastian pulled his hat low and slipped in through the side door to quietly climb the steep, straight flights of steps. The stairwell was dark, with no telltale slivers of light showing beneath either of the doors on the first floor, the inhabitant of the one doubtless out on the town, the other asleep. The servants would long since have retired to their attic rooms.

On the second-floor landing, he paused and listened. Sebastian’s hearing, like his eyesight, was acute. As a child he had simply assumed that everyone could see well enough to read in the dark and could hear whispered conversations from distant rooms. But in time he’d come to realize that his senses were so keen as to be considered uncanny by most.
Wolflike
, Kat used to call him....

But he shut his mind to that.

He listened carefully but heard only the distant murmur of voices from the coffee shop and the clip-clop of hooves, the whirl of carriage wheels, the laughter and footsteps from the street below.

Reaching into his pocket, he drew out a ring with a cluster of small metal shafts, their tips bent at various angles. Selecting one of the shafts, he slid its tip into the door’s keyhole. It was a thieves’ tool, a picklock, and it took only a delicate touch and good hearing to slide the tip through the lock’s gates and carefully press the levers aside. He heard the final click, and the lock sprang open.

Pocketing the tool, he slipped inside and quietly closed the door behind him.

The light filtering in through the drapes was dim but sufficient to enable him to see that the valet, Poole, had made little further progress in his assigned task. The comfortable clutter of a young gentleman’s existence lay undisturbed, as if Ross had only just stepped out and was expected back at any moment.

Sebastian started in the bedroom, methodically searching through drawers, checking the pockets of the few coats left in the cupboard. But Poole’s efforts were most apparent here. There was little left. He found a litter of stray buttons, a chit from Tattersall’s, an enameled snuffbox that looked unused, as if it had been a gift. The framed profile shade—or silhouette, as the French called them—of a young woman, shadowy curls framing a winsome face, hung above the bedside table. One could imagine Ross pausing to gaze fondly upon it before retiring for the evening, never to wake again.

Except that Alexander Ross had not died peacefully in his sleep. He had been violently murdered, his body put to bed by his killer.

So where had the murder actually taken place? Here, in this room? Or somewhere else?

Sebastian went over the room carefully, looking for traces of blood. He found none.

Frustrated, he moved to the main chamber. He glanced through the invites on the mantel. In addition to the invitation to the Queen’s reception for the Russian Ambassador, there were also cards for a function at the Swedish Embassy, a dinner with the American Consul, an assembly being given by the Portuguese Ambassador. Alexander Ross had been a handsome young man, a rising star at the Foreign Office, the heir to a barony betrothed to a wealthy and beautiful woman. The combination had obviously made him a popular guest in diplomatic circles.

Turning to a davenport desk standing near the hearth, Sebastian lifted the hinged top and sifted through the contents of the upper compartment. He found a few tradesmen’s bills, but none of them excessive or overly extravagant. Beside the bills lay a sheet of parchment with what appeared to be a half-written letter addressed to Viscount Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty.

There the writing ended abruptly, as if Ross had been disturbed and set the letter aside to complete at a later time.

Thoughtfully tucking the letter into the pocket of his coat, Sebastian glanced quickly through the davenport’s drawers, then went to stand in the middle of the room. He was acutely conscious of the passage of time. The longer he stayed, the greater the risk that one of the occupants of the rooms below would awaken or return to hear the sound of footsteps overhead, or that someone in the street might look up and catch a whisper of movement behind the drapes.

He shifted his attention to looking for those things Ross might have preferred to keep hidden. He turned over the clock on the mantel, the cushions on the chairs; he felt behind furniture. Inside the frontispiece of a worn copy of
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
he discovered a folded sheet of parchment. Opening the page, he found himself staring at a curious line of numbers:

 

 

Puzzled, he was thrusting the page into his pocket when he heard a faint sound. The brush of cloth against cloth. The scuff of quiet footsteps on bare stair treads.