What Angels Fear

Chapter 29

Sebastian had been about nine years old when he’d begun to realize that there was something different about him, that most people couldn’t overhear whispered conversations held in distant rooms, or read the titles of the books on the shelves of the library in the dark of the night, or from across the room.

Sometimes he wondered if most people experienced the world around them a little bit differently from their fellows, if the assumption of commonality was simply an illusion. Once he’d met a man who thought a yellow dog was the same color as the swath of vivid green spring grass in which the dog played, and who swore the gray cloth of his suit was blue. It had been a stray remark made by Sebastian’s sister, Amanda, that had first made Sebastian aware of the fact that most people couldn’t see colors at night, that for them, darkness reduced the world to a shading of grays through which they moved almost blind.

He’d found his ability to see in the dark particularly useful when he’d undertaken special assignments for the army during the war. He found it useful now as he slipped over the garden wall of St. Cyr House on Grosvenor Square, and crept toward the terrace.

Alistair St. Cyr, the Fifth Earl of Hendon, slept in a massive Tudor tester bed that had once belonged to the First Earl’s great-grandfather. He came awake slowly, lips pursing in his sleep, eyelids fluttering open, closed. Open.

He sat up with a rasping gasp, jaw slack, eyes flaring wide as he took in the clusters of candles burning on the bedside table and along the mantel. His gaze lifted to where Sebastian leaned against the bedpost with his arms folded across his chest, and he let out a sigh of relief. “ Sebastian. Thank God. I’ve been hoping you’d come to me.”

Sebastian shoved away from the bedpost to stand with his arms at his side, anger thrumming through him. “What the bloody hell did you think you were about, walking into that Public Office and trying to convince people that you’re the one who killed Rachel York?”

The expression on Hendon’s face was one Sebastian had never seen before, a strange mingling of grief and worry and what looked very much like guilt. “Because I’m the one she went to meet that night.”

Tuesday, St. Matthew’s, St. Cyr.

“Oh, Jesus,” whispered Sebastian, one hand coming up to shade his eyes.

Hendon thrust aside the bedclothes and stood up, a powerful figure of dignity despite nightshirt and cap. “But I swear to you, she was already dead when I found her.”

Sebastian huffed a laugh, his hand falling back, loosely, to his side. “What do you think? That I’m going to believe you’ve taken to rape and murder in your old age?”

Turning, he went to crouch before the fire and stir up the coals on the hearth. He felt the heat fan his cheeks, lick at the graveyard chill left deep within his being. A whirl of disparate, incomprehensible facts suddenly clicked into place, making perfect, awful sense. “So it was your pistol they found,” he said, his gaze on the flames before him.

A cough rumbled deep in the older man’s chest. “I took it with me, just in case. I didn’t even realize I’d dropped it until I arrived home and found it missing. I thought about going back, looking for it, but . . .” He hesitated. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I guess I was hoping I’d lost it someplace else.”

Sebastian threw another shovelful of coal on the fire and watched it lay there, dark and smoldering. “And why, precisely, were you meeting Rachel York alone in a Westminster church in the dead of the night?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Sebastian twisted around, one knee pressing into the hearth rug. “You what?”

Wordless, his father stared back at him, that strange mingling of emotions shading his brilliant blue eyes.

“Was she blackmailing you? Is that it?”

“No.”

Sebastian thrust aside the coal scuttle and stood up. “What else am I to believe?”

Hendon scrubbed a hand across his face, his jaw working soundlessly back and forth in that way he had when he was thinking, obviously deciding what he was going to tell Sebastian and what he was going to keep to himself. “She contacted me early Tuesday,” he said at last. “She had something she thought I might be interested in purchasing.”

“So she was blackmailing you.”

“No. I told you, she had something to sell. Something I wanted to buy. We agreed upon a price, and she said she’d meet me at St. Matthew’s, in the Lady Chapel, at ten o’clock.”

“Why St. Matthew’s?”

“She said it was quiet. There’d be less chance of our being disturbed or discovered.” A round table with a gleaming, well-polished inlaid top stood at the foot of the massive bed, and Hendon went to seat himself in one of the nearby lyre-backed chairs. “That little cross-biting cully of a magistrate, that Lovejoy, he claims the church was locked at eight that night, but it wasn’t. The north transept door was open when I arrived there, just as she’d said it would be.”

“Did you see anyone else about?”

“No.” Hendon’s laced fingers tightened until the knuckles showed white. “No one. I thought we were alone. She’d lit all the candles on the chapel’s altar. I could see the flames flaring up together, like a warm golden glow as I walked toward the back of the church. Then I saw her.”

He rubbed one splayed hand across his eyes as if to wipe away the memory of what he’d seen. “It was ghastly, the way she’d been left lying there, on the altar steps with her legs spread. . . .” His voice trailed away to a whisper. The effort it took him to push the words out was an almost palpable thing. “You could actually see the bloody imprints of his hands on the bare flesh of her thighs. So much blood, everywhere.”

Sebastian gazed across the room at his father’s ashen, troubled face. No one would ever describe the Earl of Hendon as a sensitive man. He was hard, irascible, phlegmatic; he could be brutal. But he’d never been to war, never seen the blackened, bloated bodies of children lying in the burned ruins of their home. Never seen what artillery—or even a couple of drunken soldiers—could do to the once soft, smooth flesh of a woman.

Sebastian kept his voice steady, dispassionate. “And this—this whatever it was you went there to buy. Did she have it on her?”

Hendon sucked in a deep breath that lifted his chest, then blew it out again through pursed lips and shook his head. “I looked for it.” He pressed a clenched fist against his lips, and Sebastian thought he knew what it must have cost his father to approach that bloodied, ravished body and systematically, ruthlessly search it. “That must have been when I dropped the pistol. I had hoped I’d left it in the pocket of my greatcoat. I threw it away, you know—the greatcoat, I mean. Stuffed it down one of the drains in Great Peter Street. There was so much blood on it I could never have explained it to Copeland. I washed off my boots as best I could, but I still had to invent some faradiddle about stopping to help the victims of a carriage accident.” His gaze seemed to come unfocused, as if he were seeing into the past. “So much blood.”

Sebastian walked over to stand on the far side of the table, his gaze studying his father’s face. “You must tell me what you went there to buy.”

Hendon leaned back in his chair, his jaw set hard. “I can’t.”

Sebastian slammed the open palm of one hand down on the table between them. “Whatever you went to St. Matthew’s to buy is very likely the reason Rachel York died. How the bloody hell am I to discover who killed her when you won’t even tell me what this is all about?”

“You’re wrong. My business with that woman has nothing to do with her murder.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Yes, I can.”

Sebastian leaned his weight into the tabletop, then shoved himself away. “Bloody hell. Don’t you understand what’s at stake here?”

Hendon pushed to his feet, his face darkening. “You seem to forget who we are. Who I am. Do you seriously think I will allow a son of mine to be brought up on murder charges like some common criminal?”