What Angels Fear

Chapter 62

Martin Wilcox stepped out of the smoke-swirled darkness, a flintlock pistol gripped in one hand. His driving cloak was gone; soot stained the starched white linen of his cravat, and falling cinders had singed the Bath superfine of his inimitably cut coat. But his voice was still oddly pleasant, almost conversational.

“It all comes down to choices. Doesn’t it, Devlin?” he said. “The choice you made to stay in London and stir up trouble, for instance, when any reasonable, prudent man would have fled abroad. The choice you made to come here tonight and walk into my little trap. And then there’s the choice you faced just now. By sacrificing the girl, you might have escaped me. But that’s not a choice a man like you could live with, is it? It’s what makes you so fatally predictable.”

Sebastian felt the planks of the dock rough beneath his knees, the cold air blowing in from the basin cool against the film of sweat on his face as he watched Wilcox walk up to him. “And what of your choices, Wilcox? Your choice to kill Rachel York rather than pay for whatever she was offering to sell to you. Was that so wise?”

Wilcox kept coming until he stood just feet away, the pistol held straight-armed before him. “Ah, but you see, I thought our dear Rachel had made an unwise choice herself. When I heard she’d gone to meet Hendon that night, I assumed she’d found a higher bidder for her wares. So I followed, expecting to recover the evidence of my little insurance scheme. Instead, what do I find but your mother’s most interesting affidavit. It was a surprise, believe me.”

“Insurance scheme—?” Sebastian began, only to break off as he suddenly understood. “Of course. The story you carried to Hendon last year about an embarrassing sexual peccadillo was an invention, designed to extricate yourself from an awkward situation. How long have you been caught in Leo Pierrepont’s web?”

Wilcox’s habitual smile never slipped. “Three years. I’m the one who tipped Pierrepont off as to our intentions in Spain.” He said it as if he were proud of it.

“So that’s the reason you tracked down Rachel’s maid, Mary Grant? To recover whatever evidence Rachel took from Pierrepont that would have proved your involvement with the French went back much further than anyone supposed.”

“That’s right. I doubt the stupid fool even realized the value of what she had.”

“But that didn’t stop you from killing her.”

“One could never be sure,” he said, smiling through his teeth. “The evidence against myself I destroyed at once, of course. But the other documents I kept. One never knows when such things might prove useful. Where you made your mistake was in taking your mother’s affidavit from my library. Until I found it missing, I’d no notion you’d tweaked onto me.”

Sebastian looked up into his brother-in-law’s face, and laughed. “I don’t have the affidavit. Do you mean to tell me you’ve lost it? How . . . careless of you.”

Wilcox’s hand tightened convulsively around the pistol’s handle, then relaxed. “An interesting tactic. You think to unnerve me, I take it?” He shook his head. “It won’t work.” The man’s face suddenly hardened, his normally placid, smiling features twisting in a way that reminded Sebastian of Bayard. “Set the girl down on the dock—but don’t get up. Back away from her on your knees.”

His gaze still focused on Wilcox’s face, Sebastian eased Kat down onto the dock. She let out a soft sigh, then lay still as he shifted away from her, repositioning his weight subtly so that he came up into a crouch.

Wilcox smiled. “There. I need a clean shot. Wouldn’t want to confuse the authorities when I present them with your dead body. And the mutilated corpse of your last victim, of course,” he added, his gaze flicking significantly toward Kat. “They’ll be so pleased.”

Sebastian had his good leg under him, his muscles tensed, ready to spring, as he watched Wilcox’s eyes.

“No one actually cares who killed those women. You understand that, don’t you? No fire burns within the collective metropolitan bosom to see justice done. People simply want to feel safe, and with you dead, they will. I’ll be a hero. Ironic, isn’t it?”

Sebastian saw the flicker in Wilcox’s eyes the instant before his finger tightened on the pistol’s trigger.

Sebastian dove forward, twisting his body sideways as he flung up his left arm. His open palm slammed into Wilcox’s extended wrist, knocking it up just as the pistol exploded fire and smoke into the night.

Sebastian felt a searing heat tear across his upper arm. Then his right shoulder slammed into Wilcox at midthigh. He wrapped his good arm around the back of the bastard’s knees and yanked, although the sheer momentum of the lunge would have been enough by itself to knock him over.

Wilcox went down hard, his back hitting the dock with a thump that drove the air from his lungs in a huff as Sebastian landed on top of him. Still gasping for breath, Wilcox swung the empty flintlock like a club, bashing its heavy weight down on Sebastian’s back.

Swearing harshly, Sebastian grabbed the man’s pistol hand in a brutal grip and yanked it over his head, tightening his grip until Wilcox relaxed his hold on the pistol in a spasm of pain. Then he went suddenly, utterly still.

“So you’ve overpowered me,” he said panting, the light from the distant fire gleaming in his eyes as he smiled up at Sebastian. “What now, hmm? You do realize that you’ve no proof of what I did to those women. None. Even the scratches that bitch left on my neck have healed. It’ll simply be your word against mine. And who would believe you?”

“You’re forgetting Kat Boleyn.”

“What? The word of a whore? Against that of a friend of the Crown Prince himself?” Wilcox smiled. “I don’t think so.” Still smiling, he twisted his lower body and drove his knee up, straight into Sebastian’s wounded thigh.

The pain exploded in a fireball that made Sebastian gasp. For an instant his vision blurred and his head swam, and his hold on Wilcox relaxed just enough to enable the man to clamber backward from beneath him.

Rolling over, Wilcox made it as far as his hands and knees before Sebastian lunged after him. They teetered for a moment at the edge of the dock, then went over together.

Sebastian lost his grip on Wilcox as they fell. Wilcox slammed into the water in an awkward, crumpled heap. But Sebastian managed to straighten his body so that he hit feet first. He plunged deep into the cold, black water, then shot back to the surface, treading water heavily, weighed down by the awkwardness of boots and rough breeches, the wounds in his shoulder and thigh on fire.

He could hear his brother-in-law coughing and gasping, see the white of his cravat and waistcoat glowing out of the darkness of the night. Sebastian swam toward him. For a moment the man’s fat head disappeared beneath black water sheened with orange by the distant fire. Then he floundered up again, arms and legs thrashing, his eyes opening wide in his pale face when he saw Sebastian.

“Help me! For God’s sake, help me. I can’t swim.” One of his flailing hands caught at Sebastian’s neck, clutching, strangling.

“Let go of me, you fool. You’ll drown us both.”

But Wilcox was beyond reason. “You can’t let me drown,” he sputtered, his grip on Sebastian tightening, frantic.

Sucking in a deep breath, Sebastian dove, twisting under Wilcox’s arm to break the man’s grip. This time, he was careful to surface behind the floundering man’s back. With a straight arm, Sebastian reached out and grasped the back of Wilcox’s collar. It was a standard lifesaving maneuver; Sebastian had only to pull the man in close, wrap a bent elbow beneath Wilcox’s chin to keep his head above water, and swim toward the dock.

He could hear in the distance the roar of the flames consuming the warehouse and, more distant still, the frantic clang-clang of the fire bell. Sebastian tightened his grip on the back of Wilcox’s coat. But he kept his arm straight.

It all comes down to choices, the man had said. And the choice Sebastian now