would killing her do me?”
Sebastian said, “She was about to be sold—excuse me,
“You tell me.”
“Maybe she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see.”
Kane threw him a sideways glance. “What are you imagining? Murder? Treason? Satanic rituals?”
Sebastian met his gaze and held it. “I hadn’t thought about the satanic rituals.”
Kane swung back to his painting. After a moment, he said, “A gentleman came to the house a couple of weeks ago. He was quite surprised to find Rose at the Academy. Only, he didn’t call her Rose. He called her ‘Rachel.’ ”
“A gentleman?”
“Most definitely a gentleman. Not a scrambling functionary or schoolteacher or vicar, but a real gentleman.” Kane gave him a mean smile. “Like you. Only smaller, thinner. Reddish brown hair. Good-looking enough, I suppose, but he had a weak chin.”
The church bells began to peal, startling the pigeons roosting on the tower so that they flew up, their wings beating the air with a soft whirling sound quickly lost amid the distant rattle of harness and the crunch of ironbound wheels over cobbles, and the cry of a chimney sweep’s boy shouting, “ ’Weep, ’weep.”
“Sound like anyone you know?” said Kane, one eyebrow raised in mocking inquiry. He waited a beat, then added, “My lord Devlin?”
Sebastian studied the clouds building overhead. “You had me followed,” he said.
Kane squinted up at the sky. “There goes the sun.”
“How’s your man’s arm?” Sebastian pushed away from the tomb as Kane flipped open a leather-bound wooden box littered with paint-stained bottles and old rags at his feet. “An injury like that can incapacitate a man for a spell.”
“I heard you’d tangled with a cadger near the docks yesterday,” said Kane, thrusting his palette and brushes into the box. “I don’t know who the fellow was.” He closed the lid on the box and snapped the fastenings before straightening. “But I do know this: It wasn’t one of my lads.”
“Now why should I believe you?” said Sebastian.
“Believe me or not, as you choose. But your questions are obviously making someone uneasy.” Kane smiled and reached for his easel. In the pale light, the blue scar left across his forehead by his early years in the coal mines looked even darker. “Uneasy enough to want to kill you.”
In his surgery near Tower Hill, Paul Gibson shifted on the hard wooden seat of his chair, his head tipped to one side as he listened to the wounded man’s ragged breathing. Hero Jarvis’s assailant had passed a restless night drifting in and out of consciousness. Once, he had startled awake, his gray eyes open wide, his lips parting as if on a gasp. Gibson had leaned forward to say softly, “What’s your name?” But the man had only closed his eyes and turned his head away.
Pushing to his feet, Gibson left the man’s bedside and limped down the hall. The stump of his left leg was aching badly, giving him a slow, awkward gait. He answered a call of nature, then splashed water on his face and roughly toweled it dry. He was pouring himself a morning ale when he thought he heard a step in the hall.
“Anyone there?” he called.
The stillness of the surgery stretched out around him, raising a sudden, inexplicable length of gooseflesh on his arms.
“Who’s there?” he called again, setting aside the ale.
He lurched toward the front room, torn between surging alarm and a feeling of profound foolishness. From the street outside came the shuffling hoofbeats of a passing horse and the voice of a hawker crying, “ ’Ere I am with me rabbits hangin’ from me pole. Who’ll buy me rabbits?”
At the doorway, Gibson hesitated. The wounded man appeared to be sleeping peacefully, the sheet pulled up over his chest. It wasn’t until Gibson limped over to the bedside that he saw the man’s eyes staring wide-open and sightless. Gibson put out one hand, touching the man’s slack jaw and watching the head loll.
Someone had broken his neck.
Chapter 30
Parting from Ian Kane outside the churchyard of Allhallows Barking, Sebastian went in search of Rachel Fairchild’s onetime betrothed, Tristan Ramsey.
He found him drinking Blue Ruin with Lord Alvin and Mr. Peter Dimsey at the Thatched House Tavern in St. James’s. Walking up behind Ramsey’s chair, Sebastian laid a heavy hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “We have something to discuss,” said Sebastian, fixing his gaze on the other two men in a way that made both gentlemen shift uncomfortably in their seats. “You gentlemen will excuse us?”
Ramsey froze. “My friends and I are having a drink,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Surely this can wait?”
Sebastian kept his hand on Ramsey’s shoulder. “I think not.”
Ramsey’s gaze went from Sebastian to his friends. If he was hoping for any succor from either Alvin or Dimsey, he misjudged his friends. Both gentlemen had suddenly become wholly absorbed in the study of their drinks. “Perhaps for a moment,” he said, and thrust back his chair.
They pushed through the crowded tavern to a narrow passage that led to a door opening onto a cobbled lane
