lighter step of a younger woman, probably her daughter. “You wouldn’t happen to know what took your sister to Smithfield last week, would you?” Sebastian asked, rising to take his leave.
“Smithfield?” She rose with him. “Of all the unfashionable places. Good heavens, no.”
Standing beside her, Sebastian was reminded again of the unusual height that Morgana Quinlan, like her sister, Guinevere, had inherited from their father. If anything, Morgana was even taller—and certainly more robust—than her sister had been.
The green satin evening gown could no more have come from this woman’s wardrobe than from that of Claire Portland.
THAT GREEN SATIN GOWN was beginning to bother him.
Returning to his house on Brook Street, Sebastian decided to take the gown to Kat and hear what she might be able to tell him about it. “Have Tom bring the curricle around,” said Sebastian, handing his hat and walking stick to Morey, his majordomo.
“I’m sorry, my lord,” said Morey. “But young Tom has not yet returned.”
Sebastian frowned. The sun was already low in the sky, and he’d warned the tiger not to linger in Smithfield after dusk. Sebastian turned toward the stairs. “Then have Giles bring the curricle round.”
Morey gave a stately bow and withdrew.
Some half an hour later, clad in evening dress and with the groom Giles sitting up behind him, Sebastian stuffed the brown paper package containing the green satin evening gown beneath his curricle’s seat and turned the chestnuts’ heads toward Covent Garden. Already, the setting sun was painting long streaks of orange and vivid pink across a fading sky. The traffic in the streets was heavy, the ponderous wagons of the carters and coal sellers mingling with the elegant landaus and barouches of the ton as the fashionably idle set out for the opera and theater and endless round of dinner parties, card parties, and soirees with which they filled their evenings. There were single horsemen, too: fashionable bucks in leather breeches and white-topped high boots, their blood mounts stepping high and proud; country gentlemen in old-fashioned frock coats, their horses sturdy and serviceable…and one brown-coated gentleman on a nondescript gray who was still trailing a steady distance behind as the more fashionable districts faded away and Sebastian swung the curricle into St. Martin’s.
Ignoring the turning that would have taken him to King Street and Covent Garden beyond, Sebastian simply continued on south toward the river. The horse was different, of course: a gray in place of the more noticeable bay. But there was something instantly recognizable about the set of the man’s shoulders, his easy seat in the saddle. It was the shadow from South Downs.
Alert now, Sebastian swung left onto Chandos Street. Following at a judicious interval, the brown-coated horseman kept pace with him.
Ahead, the street formed a lopsided Y around the sharply pointed corner of an ancient brick building whose ground floor housed an apothecary, its rotting sign peeling paint, its small windows shuttered now with the coming of night. Most of the traffic here veered left, toward Bedford Street; Sebastian guided the chestnuts into the narrow opening to the right, then turned a second hard right into an even narrower lane that angled off toward the river.
A heavy odor of age and damp closed in around them. High, sagging walls rose up steeply on either side, cutting off the dim light of the dying day. Most of the shops here were shuttered as well, or simply boarded up, the narrow, nearly deserted footpaths edging a lane of old cobbles half lost in a thick, noisome mud.
“Here, take them,” said Sebastian, passing the reins to his groom. “Keep going, and wait for me at the theater.”
Giles scrambled slack-jawed onto the seat. “My lord?”
“You heard me.”
One hand braced against the high seat iron beside him, Sebastian vaulted lightly to the cobbles. He was aware of heads turning. Ignoring them, he sprinted back to the ironmonger’s that stood on the corner. Beside it, a pile of scrap metal and old timbers blocked the footpath and spilled out into the lane. Sebastian scrambled to the top, the boards creaking and shifting precariously beneath him.
From the street came the passing whirl of a lightly sprung phaeton, mingling with the ponderous rattle of a heavy wagon’s iron-rimmed wheels and the even
The clatter of hooves came closer. Sebastian returned his attention to the corner beside him. An old woman walked past, bent nearly double beneath a bundle of what looked like rags.
Sebastian settled himself into a crouch.
A rat, its nose twitching, its eyes shining in the darkness, crept out from beneath the rotting board at Sebastian’s feet just as the brown-coated rider turned the corner. The flickering flambeau thrust into a holder fixed high up on the wall of the building opposite revealed a man with a top hat pulled low on his forehead, his gaze narrowed as he studied the curricle at the bottom of the lane. Sebastian could see the man’s powerfully jutting nose and sweeping side-whiskers, the rest of his face clean shaven and utterly unfamiliar.
The rat squealed in alarm and scampered off, just as Sebastian leapt.
Startled by the sound of the rat’s screech, the rider swung around. His eyes flared wide in alarm, his right arm jerking up instinctively to shield his face and upper body as Sebastian slammed into him.
The impact was enough to unseat the rider. But that blocking sweep of his arm and the shift in the man’s seat deflected Sebastian’s momentum enough that, rather than crashing down with the man on the horse’s far side, Sebastian was flung back. The edge of one of the boards raked his ribs painfully as he fell.
Squealing in terror, the gray reared up between them, its sharp hooves slashing the air. Sebastian scrambled to his feet, dodged the gray’s hooves as the horse reared again. But the brown-coated man was already up. Boots slipping in the mud, he bolted around the corner.
Sebastian tore after him, up a street lined with workshops and small traders closing now for the night. He
