“And then what?” prodded Sebastian.
Cedric looked down at the handkerchief he held crumpled in his fist. “I found her one day digging a row of graves in a meadow in the park. She’d borrowed a shovel from one of the gardeners. The graves were for her dolls. She said they were all dead. And she buried them.”
“How old was she?”
“Ten. Eleven.”
Sebastian’s mother had died the summer he was eleven . . . or rather, he’d been told she died. He stared off across fields lit now by the soft golden light of evening. The breeze brought them the scent of ripening grain and the bawling of a goat tethered somewhere out of sight. “Did she write to you, when you were in the Army?”
“Sometimes.”
“Did she write about Tristan Ramsey?”
“She told me of the betrothal. I honestly thought she was pleased with it. She sounded . . . happy.”
“She didn’t normally sound happy?”
Cedric’s eyes narrowed. Instead of answering, he said, “Why have you involved yourself in this?”
Sebastian chose his words carefully. “There was a woman at the Magdalene House who survived the attack. She asked for my help.”
From somewhere down the lane came the sweet tolling of a church bell. Cedric brought up a hand to rub his temples. “I don’t understand. What’s this about an attack, about Rachel being shot? I thought the Magdalene House was simply destroyed by fire.”
“The fire was deliberately set to cover up the women’s murders.”
Cedric’s hand dropped. “I’ve heard nothing of this.”
“You won’t.”
Sebastian turned as Joshua Walden walked up behind them, his hands folded in front of him, and cleared his throat. “We are about to begin. You are welcome to attend.”
Cedric pressed the handkerchief to his lips. “I’ve never attended a Quaker service before.”
“We believe that true religion is a personal encounter with God rather than a matter of ritual and ceremony, and that all aspects of life are sacramental. Therefore, no one day or place or activity is any more spiritual than any other. But we gather together at such times to discover in stillness a deeper sense of God’s presence.”
Cedric lifted his gaze to the small cemetery that stretched away from the road, a plain grassed area surrounded by trees and shrubs and enclosed by a mortared low rubble wall. “You will bury her there?” he said hoarsely. “Despite what she’d become?”
“There is a spark of God in every human being,” said Walden, following his gaze. “And all ground is God’s ground.” He put out a hand to grip the younger man’s shoulder. “Come. Thy sister is at peace. Let us bid her farewell.”
Chapter 24
That night, Sebastian dressed in black velvet knee breeches and black pumps with silver buckles, and set forth for Almack’s Assembly Rooms.
Known as the Seventh Heaven of the Fashionable World, Almack’s was a private club that provided its male and female members with a dance and supper every Wednesday night for the twelve weeks of the Season. But unlike the men’s clubs of St. James’s, Almack’s was a club controlled by women. The mere possession of vulgar wealth was not enough to enable one to penetrate these carefully guarded portals; the Patronesses of Almack’s were very careful to exclude rich Cits, crass country nobodies, and even titled, gently bred ladies whose indiscretions had carried them beyond the pale. For above all else, Almack’s served as a safe haven where society’s marriageable young women could be introduced to society’s marriageable young men. Which was why Sebastian had no doubt that Tristan Ramsey, whose young sister was making her debut that Season, would be in attendance.
Arriving at the long, Palladian-styled building on King Street well before the fatal hour of eleven o’clock—after which time absolutely no one was allowed admittance—Sebastian paused just inside the club’s ballroom. Adorned with gilt columns and pilasters, the room was lit by scores and scores of candles clustered in multitiered chandeliers suspended overhead. The club was crowded, for the Season was now at its height and Almack’s was as popular with the wives of aging Parliamentarians and select foreign ministers as with the younger set. The air was heavy with the scent of hot candles, French perfume, and well-dressed, perspiring bodies.
He was standing beneath the semicircular balcony for the musicians and watching the progress of Tristan Ramsey down a line of the country dance when a woman’s voice behind him said coldly, “Whatever are you doing here?”
Sebastian swung around to find his sister, Amanda, studying him through narrowed blue eyes. She wore an elegant gown of silver-gray satin simply adorned with puffed sleeves, for she was still less than eighteen months widowed.
“Did you hope the Patronesses had blackballed me?” he said.
Amanda let out her breath in a scornful huff. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the heir to an earldom. You could murder half a dozen virgins in the middle of Bond Street, and they’d still let you in.”
Sebastian returned his gaze to Tristan Ramsey. A small but well-formed man in his midtwenties, he had curly auburn hair and pleasant, even features. But he moved with distracted clumsiness, his face as haggard and pale as a man with the ague . . . or a man who’d just learned that the woman he’d once planned to make his wife was dead. He partnered a dainty young thing with the exact same auburn hair and a scattering of freckles across her small, upturned nose. This, obviously, was the young Miss Ramsey making her debut.
“We got on far more comfortably when you were still on the Continent,” said Amanda.
