Sebastian shook his head. “Nothing is more important to Anglessey than cutting his nephew out of the inheritance. My God, the man was willing to encourage his wife’s adultery in the hopes of conceiving an heir. Why would he turn around and harm her?”
“I don’t know. But he did it before, didn’t he?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s how his first wife died. Didn’t you know? She was with child, and he knocked her down the stairs. He killed her. Her and the child both.”
SEBASTIAN WAS CROSSING BOND STREET, headed toward the Marquis of Anglessey’s house on Mount Street, when he heard a man’s high-pitched, anxious voice calling his name.
“Lord Devlin. I say, Lord Devlin.”
Sebastian turned his head to find Sir Henry Lovejoy hailing him from a battered old hackney. “If I might have a word with you, my lord?”
London was different from the country. In the country, traveling judges sat only at the quarterly assizes—if then. In the farthest counties a man could languish in jail for three months to a year, waiting for a trial. In London, a man—or a boy—could be caught, tried, and hanged in less than a week.
Sebastian tried not to think about that as he and Lovejoy followed a porter through grimy prison passages lit by smoking rushes. The air in here was foul, reeking of excrement and urine and rot. Rotting straw, rotting teeth, rotting lives.
They were shown to a cold but relatively clean room, its stone floor bare, the small, high, barred window casting only a dim light on a grouping of plain wooden chairs and an old scarred table.
“What were you doing here?” Sebastian asked Lovejoy when he and the magistrate were left alone to wait.
“The watch picked up a couple of housebreakers near St. James’s Park the night Sir Humphrey Carmichael’s son was killed. I was hoping they might have seen something.”
“And?”
Lovejoy’s lips twisted. “Nothing.”
Footsteps echoed down the passage, a man’s heavy stride and the smaller footfalls of a boy. Sebastian swung toward the door.
Tom entered the room with dragging steps, his head bowed. His coat was muddy and torn, his cap gone, his face pale and drawn. It was as if all the boy’s plucky determination and jaunty irreverence had been wiped out in one long, hellish night.
“’Ere ’e is, gov’nor,” said the gaoler grudgingly.
“Thank you.” Sebastian’s voice came out thick. “That will be all.”
Tom’s head snapped up, his mouth opening in a gasp. “My lord!”
Lovejoy put out a hand to stop the boy’s impetuous forward rush. “There, there now, lad. Remember your place.”
“Let him go,” said Sebastian as the boy dodged the magistrate and threw himself against Sebastian’s chest.
“I didn’t do it! I swear I didn’t prig that bloke’s watch.” The boy’s shoulders heaved, his entire body shuddering. “They made it up ’cause I seen the gunpowder and ’eard what they was talking about.”
“It’s all right,” said Sebastian, one hand tightening on the boy’s shoulder even as his gaze met Lovejoy’s over Tom’s head.
“They was going to hang me.” Tom’s voice broke. “Hang me just like they done Huey.”
Sebastian looked down at the boy’s tortured, tear-streaked face. “Who was Huey?”
“My brother. Huey was my brother.”
LEAVING THE PRISON, Sebastian bundled Tom into the carriage and gave the coachman orders to take the boy to Paul Gibson.
“Gibson?” said the tiger, bounding up. “I don’t need no surgeon. You’re going back there, ain’t you? To Smithfield? Well, I’m coming, too.”
“You will do as you are told,” said Sebastian in a voice that had quelled rebellious soldiers still bloody from battle.
The boy sank back and hung his head. “Aye, gov’nor.”
Sebastian nodded to his coachman, then turned away to call a hackney.
“Whether you like it or not, I am coming with you,” said Lovejoy, scrambling into the hackney behind Sebastian as he leaned forward to give the jarvey directions to Smithfield. “The law does not look kindly on those who make false accusations of theft.”
Sebastian threw the magistrate a quizzical glance, but said nothing.
Lovejoy settled in one corner of the carriage, his teeth worrying his lower lip as he sat in a thoughtful silence. After a moment, he said, “All this talk of powder kegs and a repeat of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. You think that’s what’s afoot here? Revolution?”
Sebastian shook his head. Tom had told them in detail what he’d seen and heard beside the Norfolk Arms’s cellars. It had been suggestive, but hardly damning. “More like a palace coup, I’d say, rather than a revolution. But God knows where it might lead. Change can be difficult to control once it’s under way. The French Revolution was
