What Angels Fear

chestnut rearing up.

“You there!” Sebastian heard Maitland shout. Looking back, Sebastian saw the constable leap onto the gig’s high seat. “Give me those reins.”

“I say, I say,” bleated Yellow Coat.

“Get down,” snarled Maitland, bringing the snorting horse under control and pushing Yellow Coat off his perch.

Up ahead, a crush of vehicles jammed the street. Sebastian collected his reins, his eyes narrowing against the steady downpour as he judged the distance between a stalled dowager’s barouche and the donkey cart making its slow, ponderous way up the street.

“My lord!” shouted Sir Henry Lovejoy, his rain-lashed head and half his upper body protruding from the landau’s open window, his fist pounding against the ancient panels. “In the King’s name, I demand you stop this carriage at once.”

Bloody hell, thought Sebastian. He’d forgotten about the magistrate. “Keep your head in,” he shouted, sparing Sir Henry one swift glance.

“I said, I demand you—” Sir Henry broke off, his eyes widening as Sebastian swung around the barouche, nipping in so close that one of the carriage’s dangling lamps caught the brim of the magistrate’s hat.

“Good God,” said the magistrate, jerking his bald head back inside the hackney.

Hauling on the reins, Sebastian brought the landau careening in a sharp left onto Maddox Street. Behind them, the donkey brayed and kicked, upending its cart to spill a load of squawking, feather-ruffled chickens across the wet pavement.

“Get that bloody donkey cart out of my way!” screamed Maitland, the gig at a standstill, the blowsy chestnut snorting and tossing its head as the constable jabbed at the ribbons.

The bays were stretched full out now. Sebastian gave them their heads, plowing up Maddox Street past the dignified stone pile of St. George’s. A gentle tolling of church bells cut through the crisp evening air. Fashionable ladies in gaily colored gowns and gentlemen holding aloft umbrellas scattered before the charging hackney.

“Stop this hackney,” shouted Lovejoy, banging his fist again as Sebastian swerved around the back of the church and onto Mill Street, “in the name of the King!”

Sebastian threw a quick glance behind them, but the street was empty except for a lamplighter and his boy. Sebastian swung back around just as the bays erupted into the rain-washed expanse of Conduit Street and a big- boned black hack, ridden by a young lady struggling to bring her mount under control, reared up before them.

He hauled on the reins, wrenching the bays sideways. The horses plunged, snorting, hooves striking sparks from the edge of the footpath. The joints of the old landau squealed. Wood snapped. The coach body crashed to the pavement, the box skewing sideways.

“Devlin,” screamed Sir Henry, struggling to push open the hackney’s door.

“Shit,” whispered Sebastian. Rain sluiced down his face; at some point, he realized, he’d lost his hat. Sliding off the box, he skidded on the wet paving blocks and dodged the young lady’s groom as the man scrambled off his own mount to grab the bridle of his mistress’s squealing, wide-eyed black.

Well mannered and patient, the groom’s mount stood with its big-boned, gray head down, its reins trailing loose in the swirling gutter. Snatching up the wet leather, Sebastian vaulted into the saddle.

“Hey! You there! Stop!” The white-faced groom swung around, his hands full with his mistress’s still-skittish hack. “Stop! Horse thief!”

Sebastian kneed the gray into a flat-out gallop that carried them down the rain darkened street, toward Covent Garden and the shadowy underworld of St. Giles beyond.

Chapter 8

Charles, Lord Jarvis, couldn’t remember precisely when he’d become aware of the level of incredible stupidity that characterized the vast majority of his fellow beings. He supposed the realization must have come upon him gradually over the years as he observed the behavior and thought processes of the housemaids and grooms, solicitors and physicians and country squires who populated his childhood world. But Jarvis knew exactly when he’d understood the strength of his own intellect, and the power it gave him.

He’d been ten years old at the time and suffering under one of that long line of tutors his mother had insisted on hiring to teach her dead husband’s only son and heir, rather than expose his fragile health (and her own position as the heir’s mother) to the potentially deadly rigors of Eton. Mr. Hammer, this particular vicar had been called, and he’d considered himself quite a scholar. Only vulgar necessity had induced Mr. Hammer to accept such an inferior position as tutor to a young boy, and he lost no opportunity to impress upon his pupil the magnitude of Jarvis’s relative ignorance and mental incompetence. And then one day he set for Jarvis what was intended to be an impossible task: a mathematical problem that had taken Hammer himself, as an undergraduate at Oxford, a month to decipher.

Jarvis completed the assignment in two hours.

Jarvis’s success so enraged his tutor that the man soon found an excuse to punish the boy with a severe beating. But it had been worth it, because in that moment of sweet triumph, Jarvis had understood. He’d understood that most men, even those who were gently born and well educated, had minds that limped and plodded and tied themselves into knots. And that his own ability to think clearly and quickly, to analyze and discern patterns, and to devise intricate strategies and solutions was not only rare. It was also, potentially, a very powerful tool.

At first he had expected things in London to be different. But it hadn’t taken Jarvis long to learn that essentially the same degrees of imbecility and incompetence existed at the highest echelons of society and government as were to be found, say, at a meeting of the hounds in Middlesex.

The man Jarvis was dealing with now, Lord Frederick Fairchild, was typical. He was a Duke’s son, Lord Frederick, but only a younger son, which meant he’d had to make his own way in life. He’d succeeded fairly well by his society’s standards, although a stubborn adherence to Whiggish principles had limited his access to power under the old King George III. Now, with the Prince of Wales about to be named Regent, Lord Frederick had expectations that his years of loyal adherence to Prinny were finally to be rewarded. He’d come here, to the chambers the Prince kept set aside for Jarvis’s use at Carlton House, in a rather transparent attempt to ferret out which position, exactly, would be his. That he had aspirations of perhaps even being named Prime Minister was an open secret known to everyone in London.

“The representatives from the Lords and Commons are to have a conference next Tuesday,” Lord Frederick was saying, his gentle gray eyes wide and watchful. “If a compromise on the wording can be reached, I see no reason the swearing in of the Prince as Regent should not take place on the sixth.” He paused and looked at Jarvis expectantly.

Despite his two-score-and-ten years, he was still considered a handsome man, Lord Frederick: tall and broad shouldered, with a trim waist and an enviably thick, wavy mass of silver hair. A widower, he was quite a favorite with the ladies. He could always be counted on to squire an unescorted matron down to supper, or to solicitously turn the pages of her music when she played. His amiability and social skills kept him amply supplied with invitations to country house parties and the usual whirls of the London Season. But Lord Frederick had expensive habits—dangerously expensive habits, which added a hint of urgency to his voice as he cleared his throat and asked with studied casualness, “Has the Prince made any decisions yet on the disposition of offices for the new government he’ll be forming?”

The question was delicately phrased. Everyone knew the Prince of Wales made few decisions on his own outside such pressing matters as choosing the color of the new silk hangings for his drawing rooms, or selecting an architect to undertake his latest renovation project. From his position near the window, Jarvis simply smiled. “No. Not yet.”

A spasm of disappointment, quickly veiled, passed over Lord Frederick’s features. The man was atypically nervous today. He even jumped when one of Jarvis’s secretaries knocked softly at the door and announced, “A Sir