me in the carriage.”
The maid’s eyes widened, but she simply dropped a meek courtesy. “Yes, miss.”
Gibson let out a half-smothered laugh he turned into an improbable cough. Sebastian said softly to his friend, “If I should disappear, you’ll know where to tell them to search for my body,” and followed Lord Jarvis’s daughter out into the blustery afternoon.
“There’s a reason we’re taking my curricle,” said Sebastian, helping Miss Jarvis up into his carriage’s high seat. “Care to tell me what it is?”
“You are very perceptive, aren’t you?” she said, arranging her burgundy skirts around her.
Ignoring Tom’s fierce scowl, Sebastian hopped up beside her and gathered the reins. “I do occasionally have these rare moments of blinding insight.”
A smile played about her lips. She opened her parasol.
He said, “There’s no sun.”
“It’s there. It’s just behind the clouds.”
He hesitated a moment, his gaze on her aquiline profile, then gave his horses the office to start. “It’s your father, isn’t it?” he said when it was obvious she had no intention of answering his question. “Someone has tried to kill you twice in the past week, and so Lord Jarvis has set one of his men to watching you.”
She turned her head to look at him. “How did you know?”
“I know Lord Jarvis.” Sebastian deliberately swung his horses away from Billingsgate and the river. Over his shoulder, he said to Tom, “Anyone following us?”
“Aye. There’s a cove on a neat bay.”
“Can you lose him?” she asked.
“Probably,” said Sebastian. “Where precisely in Billingsgate are we going?”
“St. Magnus.”
Sebastian gave a sharp laugh. “No wonder you wished for me to accompany you.” The church was on the edge of the rough-and-tumble fish market that had made Billingsgate famous. It wouldn’t be as boisterous now as, say, at five o’clock on a Friday morning, but it was hardly the place for a lady. He glanced down at her fine burgundy skirt. “People generally wear their oldest clothes to Billingsgate.”
“Then we’re both overdressed, aren’t we?” She threw a quick glance over her shoulder. “How do you intend to lose him?”
Sebastian kept his attention on his horses. “Ever visit St. Olave’s in Seething Lane?”
“St. Olave’s?” she repeated, not understanding.
“The wife of Samuel Pepys is buried there. I think,” said Sebastian, guiding his horses between the vast warehouses of the East India Company, “that you’ve just been seized with an overwhelming desire to visit it.”
The church and its neglected churchyard lay in the shadow of one East India Company warehouse and across the street from another. Sebastian drew up outside a gate adorned with five skulls.
“Cheerful,” said Miss Jarvis, eyeing the ancient, moss-covered gateway.
“More cheerful now than when Pepys described it overflowing with the high graves of hundreds of new plague victims.” He handed the reins to Tom. “There’s a cold wind blowing, so you’d best walk them. But don’t go far.”
“Aye, gov’nor.”
Sebastian helped Miss Jarvis to alight, and noticed approvingly that she was careful not to let her gaze stray toward the dark-haired man reining in his bay at the end of the lane.
“Now what?” she asked, walking beside him into the churchyard.
“I will discourse at length on windows and corbels and the quaint gallery that once adorned the south side of the church, and you will look fascinated.”
“I’ll try.”
They took a tour of the overgrown graveyard with its broken, lichen-covered tombstones and leaning iron picket fence, then entered the church through a squeaky transept door. Miss Jarvis admired the organ gallery, and the altar tomb of some obscure Elizabethan knight named Sir John Radcliffe, who lay recumbent with his dutiful wife kneeling beside him for all time.
“I wonder where she is buried,” said Miss Jarvis, eyeing that devoted spouse. “Sir John seems to have forgotten to provide for her.”
“Perhaps she remarried some gallant courtier who didn’t expect her to spend the rest of eternity praying on her knees.”
Miss Jarvis fixed her gaze upon him. “I’m impressed with your knowledge of London’s obscure churches, but I must confess to a certain amount of confusion. What precisely have we accomplished by coming in here?”
“That depends upon how close a watch your shadow was ordered to keep.”
The sound of the church door opening echoed through the nave. A gust of wind entered the church, stirring up the scent of old incense and dank stones and long-dead knights.
Miss Jarvis’s watchdog entered the church with his hat in his hands, his head turned away as he affected an intense study of the church’s peculiar flat-topped windows. Sebastian touched Miss Jarvis’s elbow, glanced toward the door, and whispered, “Quickly.”
