Where Serpents Sleep

“Two weeks ago.” Ramsey sniffed again. “Something like that. I don’t remember for certain.”

“Two weeks ago? And you did nothing?”

Ramsey carefully set his hat on his head. The crown was dented, giving him a rakish air. “I said I didn’t tell Lord Fairchild. That doesn’t mean I did nothing.”

“You astound me,” said Sebastian. “What did you do?”

Ramsey twitched his lapels and adjusted his cuffs. “I told her brother.”

Chapter 31

Sebastian sat for a time on the terrace of the gardens overlooking Whitehall Stairs. The patches of blue sky and Sintermittent sunshine of that morning had vanished behind thickening piles of gray clouds that shaded to black in the distance. The river flowed dark and choppy before him, whipped by the wind into white-flecked waves. A wherryman halfway across the Thames worked his oars with a strong, steady rhythm, the plash of his paddles hitting the water carrying clearly in the strengthening breeze.

Sebastian kept remembering the expression on Cedric Fairchild’s face when first told of his sister’s death in Covent Garden. The shock of denial had been all too readily apparent—that natural human tendency to disconnect when first confronted with the death of a loved one, the wailing mental No! that is common to all. Yet Fairchild had displayed neither disbelief nor confusion when told of his sister’s presence in Covent Garden. That brief bristling at the mention of the Magdalene House had all been for effect, because Cedric Fairchild had known only too well what his sister had become.

Tristan Ramsey had told him.

Sebastian slid off the low wall, his gaze lifting to the dark thunderclouds churning overhead. He understood why Cedric would attempt to keep the truth of his sister’s disgrace to himself, even after her death. What he couldn’t understand was why Rachel’s brother, like her betrothed before her, had simply walked away and abandoned her to her fate.

Rachel’s brother was cupping wafers at Menton’s, his right arm extended, steady and true, when Sebastian walked up to him. “One would think you’d have had all the target practice you needed in Spain,” said Sebastian when Cedric Fairchild turned away from the firing range.

“It doesn’t hurt to keep one’s hand in,” said Cedric. He had stripped down to his shirtsleeves and waistcoat to shoot. Now, handing his pistol to the attendant, he reached for his dark blue coat.

“You sold out and came back to London because of Rachel, didn’t you?” said Sebastian, watching the former lieutenant shrug into his coat. “Who told you she was missing? Ramsey?”

Cedric straightened his collar, his eyes narrowing. “Actually, it was our sister Lady Sewell.” A sudden burst of laughter from a group of men entering the room brought his head around.

“Walk with me,” said Sebastian.

Buffeted by a cool wind, they strolled up the Mall toward Cockspur Street, with the rolling green swath of St. James’s Park stretching away to their right behind Carlton House and its gardens. “There used to be a leper hospital there,” said Cedric, looking across the park toward the river. “Did you know? It was a pretty insalubrious place at the time, all swamps and marsh-land. They say a fair number of lepers from the hospital are still buried there. Every now and then the royal gardeners dig up some poor bastard’s skull or thighbone.”

Sebastian stared out across the carefully tended greens and clipped hedges of the gardens and the park beyond it. Beneath the cloudy afternoon sky, the park had assumed a cold, somber aspect.

“They were outcasts,” said Cedric. “Shunned even by their families. Some were tradesmen, peasants, and laborers. But there were also noblemen, scholars . . . artists. It didn’t matter. What they had been was superseded by what they’d become. Something diseased and rotting. A threat to society.”

Sebastian shifted his gaze to the man beside him. “Is that how you thought of your sister?”

Cedric let out his breath in a harsh grating sound. “No. But it’s how she thought of herself.”

“You went to see her after Tristan Ramsey told you where he’d found her?”

Cedric’s face was ashen. “I tried to get her to come away with me.” His lips flattened. “She refused.” Tristan Ramsey had said much the same thing; but in Cedric’s case, Sebastian was inclined to believe it was true. “She said she was where she belonged. That house—” He broke off, swallowed. “It was horrible seeing her there.”

“Did she tell you why she ran away?”

Cedric shook his head. “I asked. She refused to say.”

They turned their steps toward Charing Cross and Northumberland House and Gardens beyond it. “I still don’t understand how she ended up there,” said Cedric. He threw a sideways glance at Sebastian, pale features suddenly flushing dark with anger. “But I swear to God, if you breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll kill you.”

Sebastian said, “Do you think it’s possible she was in love with another man? I mean someone other than Ramsey. Someone who lured her away from home, then abandoned her?”

Cedric thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat, his shoulders hunched. “I admit I thought it possible. When I pressed her to leave with me, she just threw back her head and laughed. She said she was in love with that Lincolnshire fellow. The one who owns the house.”

Sebastian cast Cedric a sharp sideways glance. “You believed her?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t look like a woman in love to me. If anything, I’d say she was afraid.”

“Of Kane?”

“I think she was afraid he’d kill her if she tried to leave. She said he’d killed before—other women who had tried to leave him. I told her she was being irrational. That we could protect her from the likes of some Covent Garden thug.” He paused. “She just told me to go away and not come back.”