What Angels Fear

“Is that all you can think of?”

“Stephanie is my daughter. What else should I be thinking of?”

He regarded her thoughtfully for a long, intense moment. “I always knew you and Sebastian weren’t close. I suppose that was inevitable, given the number of years between you. But I don’t think I realized until now just how much you hate him.”

“You know why,” she said, her voice a harsh tear.

“Yes. But if I can see my way to forget it, then why in the name of God can’t you?” He turned away. “Give my best to my grandchildren,” he said over his shoulder, and left.

Amanda waited until she heard the front door close behind her father. Then she picked up the morning’s edition of the Post and went upstairs to her husband’s dressing room.

The Wilcox family was an ancient one, older even than the St. Cyrs, and long known for their staid respectability. Far from squandering his wealth on the turf or at cards in the manner of so many of his peers, Martin, the Twelfth Baron Wilcox, had taken what had once been merely a comfortable, land-based inheritance and, by judicial investments in a trading company and various other profitable wartime speculations, turned it into a sizable fortune.

Some women might have been appalled by their noble husband’s dabbling in commerce; not Amanda. The Earl of Hendon’s daughter understood well that while one’s claim to gentility would always come from land, financial security and the future of wealth lay elsewhere. Amanda had married Lord Wilcox at the end of her second Season. She’d rarely had cause to regret her decision.

She found him seated before his dressing table, engaged in the very serious business of tying his cravat. Martin Wilcox might be just shy of fifty, with gray threading his receding brown hair, and heavy jowls framing his thin lips, but like most members of the Prince’s set, he was a very careful dresser. After one look at his wife’s face, he dismissed his valet with a curt nod.

She tossed the opened Post onto the dressing table before him. “You might have told me.”

Wilcox kept his gaze on his reflection in the glass. “You had retired for the evening,” he said, as if that were the only explanation required, and indeed it was, for it had been some fifteen years since Amanda had allowed Wilcox past the door to her bedchamber. Not that he could complain that she hadn’t done her duty by him. In the first six years of their marriage she had presented him with first Bayard, then a daughter and a second son. It was only then, having produced the requisite heir and a spare, that Amanda had barred her husband from her bed.

The youngest child had died in its seventh year, but Amanda hadn’t been inclined to reverse her decision, and Wilcox—never one to make excessive demands upon his wife—had forborne to press her. Bayard was healthy enough . . . in body, at least, if not in mind.

“My father was here this morning,” she said, going to stand in the center of the room, her arms crossed at her chest.

“And?” Leaning forward to study his image in the mirror, Wilcox began to make careful adjustments to the folds of his neckcloth with his fingers. “Does he know where Devlin is?”

“No. He thought I might.”

Wilcox grunted. “If your brother has any sense, he’s fled the country by now. Nasty piece of work, this, from the sounds of it. I always knew Devlin could be violent, but”—he paused, tilting his head this way and that as he studied his reflection—“I must say, I never expected something like this. The scandals he’s forced us to endure in the past were nothing compared to this.”

Amanda let out a scornful huff. “Don’t be ridiculous. Sebastian didn’t murder that woman.”

He glanced up, his gaze meeting hers in the mirror, his habitual faint smile curving his lips. “So certain, my dear?”

“You do realize who this dead actress was, don’t you?”

Opening a Chinese lacquered jewel box, Wilcox considered its contents, then selected a diamond and two gold fobs. Martin always wore too much jewelry. “Should I?” he said, hanging one of the fobs from his watch chain.

“You might, if you paid more attention to your son and heir. Rachel York is the woman Bayard has been making such an exhibition of himself over since before Christmas.”

Wilcox slipped the ring on his finger. “So?”

“So, what if the case against Sebastian falls apart and the authorities start investigating this woman’s death? What then?”

“So?” he said again. “There’s no harm in a healthy young man admiring a beautiful woman—especially when the woman in question trades on that beauty, and uses it to entice, and to entrap. If the authorities are going to suspect every London buck who ever lusted after that woman, believe me, they’ll have a very long list.”

Amanda started to say something, then didn’t.

“Besides,” he continued, “if anyone asks, I have only to tell them that Bayard was with me Tuesday night.”

Amanda stared at her husband’s bland, untroubled face. “And if he really did do it, Martin? You’re worried about the scandal my brother has caused; what if it turns out to be Bayard?”

Wilcox stood up, his jowly face slowly darkening. “What precisely are you saying? That you think your own twenty-one-year-old son capable of a crime you don’t believe your rakehell of a brother could have committed?”

Amanda met his angry gaze, her own jaw tight. “You and I both know what Bayard is like.”

“I told you,” said Wilcox, with more force than usual. “Bayard was with me.”

“Well. What a relief. We’ve nothing to worry about, then,” she said dryly, and left the room.

Chapter 16

He possessed a knack, Sebastian had discovered during his years in the army, for playacting, for accents and mimicry and all the subtle nuances of behavior and attitude that could be used to impersonate and deceive. He also knew that, in general, people saw what they expected to see, that men looking for an absconding nobleman would not peer too closely at a humble vicar, or an honest shopkeeper in cheap linen and a poorly cut, drab coat.

And so, after leaving Kat Boleyn’s elegant little townhouse, he made his way to the Rag Fair in Rosemary Lane, where he bought a set of secondhand clothes, a drab topcoat, and a rusty black round hat. He stopped at several small shops, where he made an assortment of other purchases. Then, wrapped in his new topcoat, with the round hat pulled low to hide his tawny eyes, he took a room at a respectable but simple inn called the Rose and Crown, and set about transforming himself into someone else entirely.

Sebastian tipped his head first one way, then the other, surveying his reflection in the small mirror above the washstand. Mr. Simon Taylor, he thought he’d be called. He had little sense of style, Mr. Taylor, with his badly cut hair, old-fashioned coat, and poorly tied cravat.

With practiced care, Sebastian used chalk dust to add a few streaks of gray to his dark, newly chopped hair. After months of drifting aimlessly, of living a life at once privileged and predictable and always, inevitably, unbearably boring, he was conscious of a faint stirring of interest, of excitement such as he hadn’t known since he’d left the army ten months before.

He found Hugh Gordon in a corner booth of the crumbling old redbrick pub known as The Green Man that had been popular with the theatrical crowd since the days when Elizabeth was queen.

The actor was alone; a tall, elegant man drinking a pint of ale and eating a simple plowman’s lunch. His entire posture spoke of self possession and arrogance and a pronounced desire to be left alone.

Shuffling up to the table, Sebastian pulled off his hat and held it, awkwardly, humbly even, before his breast. “Mr. Hugh Gordon?”

Gordon looked up, his dark brows drawing together into a frown. Even offstage, his manner was theatrical, his voice stentorian. “Yes?”