that generosity willing, I wonder? Or not?”
“What do you think? That I killed Rachel in a fit of jealous passion?” Pierrepont waved one long, delicate hand through the air in a dismissive gesture. “Such a fatiguing emotion, jealousy—apart from being rather primitive and plebian. You see, I am not a possessive man, my lord. The arrangement Rachel and I had suited us both—however strange some might find it.”
“There are other reasons to kill.”
A gust of wind caught the carriage and rattled the glass in the window frame as they turned onto New Bond Street. “There are reasons, yes. But to slit a woman’s throat—viciously, repeatedly, until her head is virtually severed from her body? What manner of man does that, hmm?”
“You tell me.”
Pierrepont sat silent for a moment, his chin sunk onto his chest, his thoughts seemingly elsewhere. “When I was a young man, I watched my father’s head roll in the Place de la Concorde. Did you know that a decapitated head remains conscious for some twenty seconds after it is separated from its body? Twenty seconds. Think about that. It’s a long time, no? Do you think Rachel knew that? That horror?”
Sebastian listened to the rattle of the carriage wheels over the cobbles, the jingle of the harness. He hadn’t known that about Rachel’s death, either. He thought about that vibrant, beautiful young woman, thought about her alone and afraid in that church, her life’s blood ebbing away.
“You don’t ask, but I’ll tell you anyway,” said Pierrepont, his lips drawing back in a cold, hard smile. “Tuesday night, I hosted at a dinner party attended by some half-dozen highly respectable people who can swear I was at home the entire evening. So you see, my friend, you need to seek elsewhere for Rachel’s murderer—if you are not, in fact, he.”
The hackney slowed, swinging wide into Henrietta Place. Sebastian reached for the door handle. He didn’t doubt the Frenchman knew more than he’d been willing to admit, but they were almost to Cavendish Square and Sebastian had no desire to be seen there.
He was beginning to realize how little he really knew about either Rachel York or her death. He knew she’d been murdered in the Lady Chapel of a small parish church near Westminster Abbey after telling her maid she was going to meet him, and that one of his pistols had been found tangled in her clothes. But he had only Pierrepont’s word for it that she’d been raped, and that her throat had been repeatedly, savagely slashed. He didn’t even know who had found her or at what time, precisely, she had died. These were things he needed to learn, if he were to have any hope of tracking down the real killer.
And it occurred to him that he knew someone who just might be able to tell him.
Chapter 20
He cast a quick glance up and down the street. The freezing rain had driven most people indoors. There was no one to see him as he crossed the lane and knocked on the house’s weathered front door.
A dog barked in the distance. Sebastian heard the thump of uneven footsteps coming down the hall. Then there was silence, and Sebastian knew he was being watched. A wise man did not open his door to strangers at night, even when that man was a surgeon.
A bolt slid open and the door swung inward. The man who stood just inside the narrow, low-ceilinged hall was young still, no more than thirty, a dark-haired Irishman with a ready smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes and brought a roguish dimple to one lean cheek. “Ah. It is you,” said Paul Gibson, opening the door wider and stepping back. “I was hoping you might come to me.”
Sebastian stood where he was. “You’ve heard what they’re saying?”
“Sure then, but you don’t expect me to be believing everything I hear, now do you?”
Sebastian laughed and stepped inside.
Paul Gibson bolted the door, then led the way back down the passage, the smoothness of his gait marred at each step by a peculiar little half hitch. He’d been an army surgeon, once—even after a cannon ball took off the lower part of his left leg. “Come into the kitchen. It’s warmer there, and closer to the food.”
Sebastian had bought a paper-wrapped sausage midway through the morning. But he hadn’t stopped for lunch and it was now past dinner-time. The fragrant warmth of the kitchen folded itself around him and he smiled. “Food does sound uncommonly good at the moment.”
“There are some gentlemen of my acquaintance,” said Paul Gibson later, when they were seated at a table before the kitchen fire with a joint of cold ham, a crusty loaf of bread, and a bottle of wine. “They’re in the brandy trade, if you know what I mean, and I’ve no doubt but what they’d be agreeable to—”
“No,” said Sebastian, reaching for another slice of ham.
Paul Gibson paused with his wineglass halfway to his mouth. “No?”
“No. Why does everyone keep trying to introduce me to their friendly neighborhood smuggler?” Sebastian met his friend’s arrested gaze. “I’m not running, Paul.”
Paul Gibson took a deep breath and let it out through pursed lips. “All right. So how can I help?”
“You can tell me what you know about Rachel York’s death. Are you the one who did the postmortem?”
In the two years since he’d left the army, Paul Gibson had set up a small practice here, in the City. But he focused a considerable portion of his time and energy on research and writing, and the teaching of medical students, as well as providing the authorities with his expert opinion in criminal cases.
“There was no postmortem.”
He shrugged and emptied the last of the wine into Sebastian’s glass. “They’re not automatically done, you know. And in this instance, there wasn’t much of a reason for one, really. It was fairly obvious how she’d died.”
“You saw the body?”
“No. A colleague of mine was called in.” Lurching to his feet, the Irishman limped across the kitchen to fetch another bottle of wine. “It was a brutal attack, from the sounds of it. She’d been beaten as well as raped, her throat slashed not once, but many times.”
It fit with what Pierrepont had told him, but Sebastian had been hoping for more. “Would it be possible for you to arrange to see her?”
Gibson shook his head. “Too late. The body’s already been turned over for burial. The theater is arranging it.”
Sebastian swirled his wine thoughtfully in his glass.
“What do you think you’re going to do? Hmm?” Gibson swung his wooden leg over the opposite bench to sit down again with an awkward lurch. “Find the man who killed her yourself?”
“If I don’t, who will?”
“It’s not an easy thing, solving a murder.”
Sebastian looked up to meet his friend’s narrowed, worried eyes. “You know what I did in the army.”
“Yes. But there’s a difference, I should think, between being a spy and finding a killer.”
“Not as much as one might imagine.”
A hint of a dimple appeared in the Irishman’s cheek. “So. Have any suspects yet?”
Sebastian smiled. “Two, as a matter of fact. There’s an actor by the name of Hugh Gordon—”
“Ah. I saw him just last month. A very effective Hector.”
“That’s him. Seems Rachel York was his mistress when she first started at the theater. He took it badly when she left him.”
Paul Gibson frowned. “How long ago was this?”
