“I found one in his hair, the others caught in his shirt and coat.”
Sebastian took the fragile stems between his fingers and sniffed. “It’s hay.”
“I asked Martin if Barclay Carmichael had hay in his hair and clothes. He said yes—although he couldn’t imagine why it might be significant.” Reaching for the sheet, Gibson shook it out over the body, his motions unexpectedly gentle as he smoothed the covering over the boy’s mutilated feet. He stood for a moment, his gaze on the silent, shrouded form before him. When he spoke, his voice was hushed. “What kind of person would do something like this? Butcher a human body like a slab of meat?”
“You do it.”
Gibson looked up, his lips pressed together so tightly that two white lines bracketed his mouth. “I dissect cadavers for knowledge, to help save lives, and I respect and honor every body that comes to me. Whoever killed those two young men was acting out some twisted hatred, not pursuing any scientific inquiry. He desecrated their bodies in a way that violates every standard of decency, every tenet of civilization as we know it.”
“Yet we’ve both seen men do such things—and worse. Well-bred young men of birth and fortune.”
There was a silence as both men’s thoughts drifted back to another time and another place, and a fellow officer who had once delighted in the pain and dismemberment of his enemies.
“That was war,” said Gibson. “This isn’t war. And besides, he’s not here.”
“No, this isn’t war. But he is here in London.”
“Quail?” said Gibson.
Sebastian nodded. “Captain Peter himself.”
Captain Peter Quail was not the kind of fellow officer one easily forgot. A tall, lanky barrister’s son from Devon with corn-flower blue eyes, a shank of straight blond hair, and a ready laugh that came loud and often, he had served with Gibson and Sebastian in Portugal. He was every regiment’s dream with a cricket bat and poetry in motion on horseback. And he had taken a fiendishly sadistic delight in butchering informers—or men he suspected of being informers. He used to dump his victims’ mutilated bodies on their families’ doorsteps. As time passed, he developed what he considered his calling card—various parts of his victims’ anatomy sliced off and stuffed into their mouths.
“I’d heard he lost an arm at Ciudad Rodrigo.”
“He did. But he was able to use an inheritance from his wife’s people to buy a transfer to the Horse Guards.” Commissions in the Horse Guards were the most expensive in the Army.
Gibson stared at the silent figure before them. “What possible reason could he have to do this?”
“I don’t know,” said Sebastian. “Maybe he simply developed a taste for it.”
“I want you to find someone for me,” Sebastian told his tiger, Tom, as he drew Sebastian’s curricle up before the surgery.
Tom handed over the chestnuts’ reins and scrambled back onto his perch. “Who?”
“A captain in the Horse Guards named Quail. Peter Quail.”
Kat set the
After the death of her mother and stepfather, Kat had found a brief refuge with her mother’s sister, an ostentatiously religious woman named Emma Stone. Determined to prevent Kat from following her mother’s path to sin and damnation, Aunt Emma had wielded her whip with brutal purpose. But it was the lecherous advances of Mr. Stone that had finally driven Kat to escape into the night. The experience had left her with a bitter contempt for sanctimonious piety and a child’s delight in the joys of soft sheets and fine clothing.
This particular hat’s brim was of cherry velvet, with a bunch of silk flowers tucked beneath a darker ribbon at the crown, and the entire effect was—
“Charming,” said a deep male voice behind her.
Kat spun around to find a tall, dark-haired man regarding her through a quizzing glass. Nattily dressed in buff-colored breeches, an olive coat, and gleaming Hessians, he leaned casually against the frame of the shop’s open doorway. Behind him, she could see the bright sunshine of a fine September afternoon, the street crowded with dowagers and matrons in elegant carriages and town bucks on horseback. Yet she felt—and understood herself to be—utterly alone.
She knew him, of course. His name was Colonel Bryce Epson-Smith. Once an officer in the Hussars, he had for some three or four years served as the personal agent of Charles, Lord Jarvis, cousin to the King and the acknowledged power behind the Regent.
“Why, thank you.” Lifting the cheery confection from her head, Kat reached for a chip hat with a forest green velvet band and a matching wisp of a veil. “Or do you prefer this one?”
“Why not take both?”
Kat smiled. “Why not, indeed?” She turned to the woman behind the counter, a thin slip of a thing who had suddenly gone very quiet. “Wrap them up for me.”
Dropping his quizzing glass, Epson-Smith pushed away from the doorframe and took a step toward her. “Miss Boleyn will be sending someone to pick them up.” He spoke to the girl behind the counter, but he kept his gaze on Kat.
Kat met his inflexible stare. “I’d rather take them with me now.”
“Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. Lord Jarvis would like a word with you. He doesn’t appreciate being kept waiting.”
In spite of herself, Kat knew a flutter of fear. People had been known to simply disappear when Jarvis expressed an interest in seeing them. Others were later found dead, dumped in outlying fields after frightening things had been done to their tormented bodies. “And if I refuse?”
Epson-Smith’s eyes were gray and hard. It took all of Kat’s courage and determination to continue to hold his stare. “I don’t think you’re that stupid.”
That afternoon, following a tip from Tom, Sebastian tracked Captain Peter Quail to the horse auction yard of Tattersall’s.
Even in that crowd, Captain Quail was easy enough to spot: a tall, blond-haired man with the left sleeve of his regimentals hanging conspicuously empty. He was inspecting a carriage horse, a glossy bay with a gracefully arching neck and regally held tail, when Sebastian came up behind him.
“Showy,” said Sebastian. “But a bit short in the back, wouldn’t you say?”
Quail turned, the expression on his face closed and watchful. “I wouldn’t have said so, no. But then, you always did have the best horses in the regiment.”
“I heard you’d purchased a transfer to the Horse Guards. How comforting for your wife to have you once again by her side.”
Quail’s eyes narrowed. When they’d served together in the Peninsula, Quail had never been without a Portuguese mistress, sometimes keeping two whores at a time. “What’s this about, Devlin? I don’t flatter myself that you’ve sought me out simply for the sake of auld lang syne.”
Sebastian ran one hand down the bay’s neck. She really was a splendid animal. “I suppose I’m curious. You didn’t by any chance know a young gentleman named Dominic Stanton?”
“You mean the lord’s son who just got himself butchered?” Quail gave an abrupt huff of laughter. “Not hardly.”
“Yet you’ve heard what happened to him.”
“Who in London has not?”
