“And you trust him?”
Sebastian gazed down at the still, ravaged body of the woman hidden beneath the sheet. “Not at all. But someone killed Guinevere Anglessey. Someone slipped that dagger into the livid flesh of her bare back and brought her body here to drape it across that couch in a deliberately suggestive posture. Lord Jarvis’s sole intent in all this is to protect the Prince. But mine is different. I’m going to find out who killed this woman, and I’m going to see that he pays for it.”
“Because of the necklace?”
Sebastian shook his head. “Because if I don’t, no one else will.”
“What does it matter to you?”
One of Guinevere’s slim white hands peeked out from beneath the sheet, its fingers curled lightly in death. Seeing it, Sebastian was reminded of another woman, left to die on an altar’s steps, her throat viciously slashed, her body obscenely violated; and another, hunted down like an unwary quarry and subjected to the same hideous end.
He had few illusions about the world in which he lived. He knew the shocking inequality between its privileged and its poor; he recognized the savage injustice of a legal system that could hang an eight-year-old boy for stealing a loaf of bread and yet let a king’s son get away with murder. Once, he’d been so repulsed by the raw barbarism and senseless cruelty of the wars his people fought in the name of liberty and justice that he’d been content simply to let himself drift, aimless and alone. Now that struck him as a reaction that was both self-indulgent and faintly cowardly.
Crouching down beside what was left of the young woman named Guinevere, Sebastian tucked the sheet over that pale, vulnerable hand and said softly, “It matters.”
Sebastian was crossing the yard toward the Pavilion’s glass-domed, Xanadu-inspired stables when he heard someone calling his name.
He turned to find the Home Secretary, Lord Portland, coming toward him across the paving. The midday sun was bright on the nobleman’s flaming red hair, but the skin of his face was pale and drawn tight as if with worry.
“Walk with me a ways, my lord,” said Portland, turning their steps down a path that angled off across the Pavilion’s wide expanse of green lawn. “I understand you’ve agreed to help sort out the truth about last night’s peculiar incident.”
Sebastian’s acquaintance with the Earl of Portland was slight, although in the year since Sebastian’s return from the Continent he’d attended several dinner parties and soirees in the man’s company. Like Jarvis and Hendon, Portland was profoundly conservative in his politics, dedicated to continuing the war against France and preserving England’s institutions in the face of a rising tide of demands for reform.
Yet whatever his opinion of the reactionary quality of the man’s beliefs, Sebastian couldn’t help but respect him. The Earl of Portland was one of the few men in the government—or out of it—who refused to play the role of one of Jarvis’s pawns. But there was something distasteful, almost sordid about referring to the death of a vital young woman as a
“If you mean Lady Anglessey’s murder,” said Sebastian, “then yes.”
“According to both the magistrate and the Prince’s doctors, the death was a suicide.”
Sebastian raised one eyebrow. “Is that what you believe?”
Portland expelled a harsh breath and shook his head. “No.”
They walked along in silence for a moment, Portland worrying his lower lip with his teeth. At last he said, “I feel somehow as if this were all my fault.”
“How is that?”
“If I hadn’t given the Prince that note—”
Sebastian swung to face him. “
“Yes. Although, of course, I’d no notion who she was. She was veiled.”
“When was this?”
“Shortly after the Prince’s chamber orchestra began playing last night. I was approached by a veiled young woman who handed me a sealed missive and asked that I pass it on to the Prince.” Portland hesitated, his fair skin coloring. “It’s hardly the first time I’ve been approached in such a way.”
Sebastian kept his thoughts to himself. Over the years, the Prince’s paramours had ranged from common opera dancers and actresses such as Mrs. Fitzherbert to some of the grandest dames of the ton—Lady Jersey and Lady Hertford among them. It wasn’t uncommon for those close to the Prince to find themselves thrust into the role of procurer.
“I actually know Guinevere Anglessey rather well,” Portland was saying. “She is—was—a childhood friend of my wife, Claire. It never occurred to me that’s who I was dealing with.”
“You weren’t.”
Sebastian watched the man’s light gray eyes widen, watched the first shock give way to some other emotion, something that looked oddly like fear. “I beg your pardon?”
“By the time the Regent’s chamber orchestra began playing last night, Lady Anglessey had already been dead perhaps as much as six to eight hours.”
Portland stopped short. “
