What Angels Fear

could simply have seen her in the streets and followed her, watched as she lit the holy candles on the altar and then come at her out of the darkness, a lethal and intimate stranger.

Sebastian rubbed a hand across his eyes, aching now from lack of sleep. After he’d left his father’s house in Grosvenor Square, he’d spent what was left of the night walking the slowly lightening alleys and byways of the city. He kept turning what his father had told him over and over again in his mind, trying to figure out what Rachel York could have been selling that his father would be so desperate to buy that he agreed to meet her in a deserted church in the dark of the night.

He’d sworn it wasn’t blackmail, but Sebastian had to acknowledge that that could be mere quibbling, a question of semantics only. Whatever it was, Hendon wanted it badly enough that he’d forced himself to overcome his horror and search Rachel York’s bloody, mutilated body in hopes of finding it.

Yet he hadn’t found it. Which could mean either that her killer now had it, or that Rachel York had never brought it to St. Matthew’s in the first place.

Then again, Sebastian couldn’t discount the possibility that his father was lying, that Hendon had found it and taken it, after all.

An unexpected chill shook him. Sebastian turned up his collar against the cold. Hendon’s refusal to talk baffled him. After all these hours of walking the streets, of turning over one possibility after another in his mind, Sebastian was still no closer to understanding. It was only now, as he watched the snowflakes falling thick and fast from a lowering sky, that he was able to admit to himself that beneath the confusion and rage coursing through him every time he thought about his interview with his father, what he felt most powerfully was a deep and abiding sense of hurt. For try as he might, he found it impossible to imagine a secret so important that a father would place its preservation above the life and freedom of his only surviving son.

That afternoon, Sebastian paid an interesting visit to the small goldsmith’s shop across the street from Covent Garden Theater. He was just turning away when he spotted Tom, whittling on a block of wood with a small pocketknife as he waited in the protective lee of the theater’s wide porch.

“What are you doing here?” said Sebastian, walking up to him.

“Waitin’ for Miss Kat. She knows someone she reckons might be able to put me onto this Mary Grant’s whereabouts, but she figures it’d be better if’n she were to introduce me to the cove ’erself.”

“Ah,” said Sebastian, who knew something of the kind of “friends” Kat had from her early days in London. Leaning forward, he peered at the quadruped taking shape beneath the boy’s nimble fingers. “What is it?”

“A ’orse,” said the boy, proudly holding it aloft.

“Like horses, do you?”

Tom nodded. “I always thought it’d be just grand to be one o’ them tigers, sittin’ up behind some sportin’ gentleman in ’is curricle, watchin’ ’im tool a pair of prime ’igh steppers.”

Sebastian personally had little use for the current vogue for employing children as grooms. But as he looked down into the boy’s shining eyes, he found himself saying, “Once I fight my way clear of this wretched mess I’m in, I could take you on as a tiger. If you’re interested.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed. His face was wary and guarded against disappointment, but his breathing had quickened, his jaw going slack with awe. “You got a curricle?”

Sebastian laughed and stepped out into the street. “That I do.”

“Got a tiger?”

“Not yet.”

The boy nodded, struggling to contain a grin. “Where you off to, then?”

Sebastian turned up his collar against the snow. “To have another talk with Hamlet.”

Chapter 31

Darkness came early that day, settling over the city with a heavy fall of snow.

Across the street from the lodging house where Hugh Gordon had rooms, Sebastian stomped his numb feet and watched the stocky, gray-haired woman who came in daily to “do” for the actor close the street door behind her and set off toward the Strand, the snow blanketing her head and shoulders with white as she hurried through the gathering gloom.

Sebastian waited while a coal cart trundled by, followed by a brewer’s wagon. Then he crossed the street, with each step easing himself into the persona of Cousin Simon Taylor from Worcestershire. By the time he stood outside Gordon’s door, his shoulders had slumped and he was twisting his hat anxiously in his hands as he waited for Gordon to answer his knock.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” said the actor, his lips pressing together in annoyance as he cast a distracted glance toward the ornate ormolu clock on his sitting room mantel. He kept the door open no more than a foot. “I don’t have a great deal of time at the moment—”

“It won’t take long,” said Sebastian, smiling hopefully.

Gordon hesitated, then pushed his breath out in a sigh and opened the door wider. “Very well. What is it?”

“I was wondering if perhaps you could clear up something for me,” said Sebastian, scooting through the door. “The thing is, you see, I was speaking with the very kind gentleman who owns the jewelry store across the street from Covent Garden Theater—you know the place, don’t you? The one with the new gaslights? Well, Mr. Touro was telling me—that’s the proprietor’s name, Mr. Jacob Touro?—he was telling me how Rachel was in his shop on the very afternoon she died. But what I find confusing, you see, is that while you told me that you hadn’t seen Rachel for the better part of six months, Mr. Touro says that you came in his shop that same afternoon and confronted Rachel.” Sebastian fixed the actor with an anxious gaze. “Actually, accosted is the word he used.”

Hugh Gordon returned Sebastian’s stare with a bland look. “Obviously, the man is mistaken.”

“Well, one might think so. Except, he’s a particular fan of yours, is Mr. Touro,” Sebastian continued, smiling amicably as he seated himself—without invitation—on a high-backed settee covered in burgundy brocade. “He says he hasn’t missed a one of your performances in the past five years. And I gather that Cousin Rachel was one of his best customers, if you know what I mean? So, of course, when he read the next day about what had happened to Rachel, he remembered the incident. Although I must assure you that he has no intention of telling the authorities about the argument, or the way you seized Rachel’s arm and threatened to kill her.”

Gordon stood in the middle of his ornate, burgundy, and lace-draped sitting room, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully, as if he were beginning to reassess his attitude toward Rachel’s Cousin Simon. “I never did any such thing.”

“You’re right: I exaggerate. According to Mr. Touro, the precise phrase you used was ‘Beat you within an inch of your life.’ ”

The actor was silent for a moment, as if considering whether to continue denying the meeting or to provide Sebastian with some abbreviated, distorted version of the truth. Abbreviated distortion won.

“Rachel owed me money,” he said, swinging away to pour himself a brandy from an ornate tray of heavy gold-rimmed glasses that looked as if it might have been part of the stage props for a production of the Arabian Nights. “She has owed it to me ever since she first started at the theater. She wasn’t making much in those days, so I provided her with everything she needed in the way of dresses and such. She always knew it was no gift.”

“I’m sure you were more than generous with her,” said Sebastian, his smile hard.

Gordon’s brows drew together in an exaggerated frown. Everything about the man was exaggerated, Sebastian decided, from the opulent, plush burgundy and gold trappings of his sitting room to his stentorian speech and theatrical gestures. One of the hazards, one might suppose, of always playing to a large, distant audience. “She used those dresses to sink her avaricious little talons into another man and leave me,” said the actor, his brandy- clutching hand waving expansively through the air. “What would you expect me to do? Just forget it?”

“You seem to have forgotten it for the better part of two years.”

Gordon shrugged. “A man has expenses.”