her and asked her to marry him. And she had said yes.
It was still raining, but softly now. He watched her walk quickly toward him, the hood of her cloak raised against the drizzle, her gaze turned toward the hackney stand at the end of the street.
“You should be more careful,” said Sebastian, falling into step beside her. “Now is not a good time to be out alone at night.”
She gave no start of surprise, only glancing up at him from beneath the shadow of her hood. “I refuse to live my life in fear,” she said. “I should think you’d remember that about me. Besides”—a soft smile touched her lips —“do you think I didn’t know you were there?”
He thought she probably had. He remembered that about her, too—that while most people were hopelessly, cripplingly blind in the dark, Kat’s night vision was unusually sharp. Not as good as Sebastian’s own, but sharp.
She made a move toward the nearest hackney. He caught her arm, drawing her on up the street. “Let’s walk.”
They turned their steps toward the West End, part of a crowd of playgoers straggling home through the lamp-lit darkness. Snatches of light and laughter tumbled from the quickly closed doors of taverns and coffeehouses, music halls and brothels. From a darkened, urine-drenched doorway, a streetwalker hissed at him, her eyes bold, desperate. Haunting. Sebastian looked away.
“What can you tell me about Leo Pierrepont?” he asked.
“Pierrepont?” The rain had stopped now. Kat pushed back her hood. “What has he to do with anything?”
“He was paying the rent on Rachel’s rooms.”
She was silent for a moment, and he remembered this about her, too, the way she carefully thought things through before speaking. “Who told you that?”
“Hugh Gordon. Pierrepont didn’t deny it.”
“You’ve spoken with him?”
“We shared a hackney ride,” said Sebastian, and smiled softly at the familiar way her brows drew together in thought. “It’s a curious arrangement, don’t you think, for one man to be paying the rent on a woman’s rooms while knowing she continues to receive other male visitors? Unless, of course, he’s acting as her pimp.”
Again that pause, as she thought through what he had said and considered her response. “Some men like to watch.”
Sebastian knew a surge of unexpected and unpleasant emotions. He wanted to ask how she knew this about Pierrepont—if she, too, had entertained the Frenchman by allowing him to watch her make love to other men. Instead, he said, “Well, that’s certainly one alternative that hadn’t occurred to me. Your experience in such matters is more valuable than one might realize.”
She halted abruptly, her chin jerking up, her eyes flashing. She would have swung away, back toward the theater, if he hadn’t caught her arm.
“I’m sorry. That was an unforgivable thing to say.”
She met his gaze. He couldn’t begin to interpret the dark shift of emotions he could see in her eyes. “Yes. It was.” She removed her arm from his unresisting grip and walked on again. A silence fell between them, filled only with the soft swish of the soles of her half-boots gliding over wet pavement and the whisper of old, old memories.
He let his gaze travel over the achingly familiar line of her profile, the arch of her neck. Her nose was small and turned up at the end like a child’s, her mouth wide, too wide, her lips full and sensuous. A seductive combination of innocence and sin.
There had been other women in his life since Kat Boleyn; beautiful, intelligent women, including one in Portugal he might even have fallen in love with if Kat Boleyn hadn’t always been there, like a shadow across his heart. And he wondered suddenly if he’d approached her this morning because she’d known Rachel York and could give him the information he needed, or if he had turned to her now for some other reason entirely, a reason his mind sheered away from.
She said, “You haven’t asked if I had a chance to speak with Rachel’s maid.”
A carriage dashed past, the coronet on its panels glistening with wet, the air filling with the scent of hot pitch from the linkboys’ torches. Sebastian watched it disappear into the distance, flames wavering against a black sky. “Did you?”
“No. She’s gone. Vanished—along with virtually everything in Rachel’s rooms that was movable.”
He brought his gaze back to her face. “I thought you said the constables were watching the house?”
“Only through the night, according to the elderly Scotswoman who lives upstairs. She also told me a young man came to Rachel’s rooms the morning after she was killed.”
“A young man?”
“A young man with a key. Looking for something, or so it seems. He went through Rachel’s rooms, then popped upstairs to ask our inquisitive neighbor if she knew where Mary Grant had gone.”
“Searching for what, I wonder?
“This, perhaps.” Pausing beneath the flickering light of a streetlamp, she drew something from her reticule and held it out to him.
It was a small book, bound in red calfskin and tied up with a leather thong. “I thought her rooms had been emptied,” he said, taking the book and loosening the knot in the leather.
“She kept it in a secret compartment in the mantelpiece.”
She didn’t say how she’d known about that compartment. He glanced up at her, then down at the book. It was fairly new, less than a fifth of its pages having been used.
And most of those first pages were now missing.
“The front pages have been cut out,” he said, running one finger along the ragged edges.
The clouds overhead shifted fitfully with the wind. The rain had cleared away the city’s nearly perpetual blanket of yellow fog, allowing rare glimpses of a distant full moon. In the shimmer of moonlight, her face appeared pale and faintly troubled. “It’s almost as if she knew something might happen to her.”
“Assuming it was Rachel who did it.” Sebastian thumbed through the dozen or so pages that were left. They covered little more than the previous week. “You think she was protecting someone?”
“I don’t know. It seems a reasonable explanation, doesn’t it?”
There was another explanation, of course: that Kat Boleyn had cut the pages out herself. Only, if there’d been something here she hadn’t wanted Sebastian to know about, why bother to give him the book at all? Why not simply destroy the thing and claim it had never been found? Why even offer to go to Rachel York’s rooms in the first place? To keep him from discovering whatever secret had been written on those missing pages? But why?
“Have you looked at what’s left?” he asked.
She nodded. “I’ve put notations beside the names I recognized. Most of them are people connected in some way with the play.”
“Any of them have a reason to wish Rachel harm?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Besides, we had a performance the night she died. We were all at the theater.”
Here was an aspect of Rachel York’s murder that hadn’t occurred to him. “All of you except for Rachel. Why wasn’t she there?”
“Her understudy went on in her place. Rachel sent word at the last minute, saying she was ill.”
“Did she do that often?”
“No. I can’t think of another instance. Rachel was never ill.”
Sebastian glanced quickly through the remaining pages. They mainly contained notations for meetings with the likes of hairdressers and seamstresses. But one name appeared on virtually every day. “Who’s Giorgio?”
“I think it might be Giorgio Donatelli. He helped design and paint the scenery when we did
“What do you know of him?”
“Not much, except that he’s young, and rather romantic-looking. He’s Italian.”
“Our young man with the key?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like Rachel to give any man the key to her rooms.”
