Where Serpents Sleep

Looking around, he beheld a vision in spangled pink-and-white stripes that made him blink.

He was aware of Miss Jarvis’s lips curling into that malicious smile that was so much like her father’s. She said, “Lord Devlin, meet Hannah Green.”

Sebastian studied the girl’s button nose and scattering of freckles. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t this—this exuberant bundle of irreverence. “Are you certain she really is Hannah Green?”

“Are you bamming me?” said the girl. “I’d have to be daft to be claimin’ t’be me if’n I wasn’t me. I don’t want to be me right now.”

“According to Hannah here, Tasmin Poole is dead,” said Miss Jarvis by way of explanation. “Someone snapped her neck two nights ago.”

“It was the same cove,” said Hannah. “The one what come to the Academy and done for Hessy.”

Sebastian went to pour himself a brandy. “Do you know who this cove is?” he asked, reaching for Gibson’s decanter.

“Not exactly.” She threw a questioning glance toward Miss Jarvis.

“Tell Lord Devlin what you told me. About the three men who hired you out of the house last week.”

Sebastian looked up. “When was this?”

“Tuesday,” said Hannah. “They was havin’ a party, you see. It was one of the coves’ birthday, and they hired Hessy, Rose, and me fer the whole night.”

“Go on,” said Sebastian, splashing brandy into a glass. He silently offered some to Miss Jarvis and Gibson, but only Gibson took him up on it.

“We’d done it before. I don’t mean fer them three,” Hannah hastened to add, her gaze on the brandy. “But fer other coves.” Her face shone with saucy glee. “It can get a bit naughty, if you know what I mean. But it’s a lot less work than spending the night traipsing up and down the stairs at the Academy.”

Sebastian glanced at Miss Jarvis, with her primly knotted spinster’s hair and rigidly held spine. Did she have any inkling of the wild Dionysian scene conjured by Hannah Green’s words? Of the kinds of things three young men could demand of the compliant women they’d bought for the night? And then it occurred to him that she probably had a better idea now than she would have twenty-four hours ago.

“What manner of men were they?” he asked.

“Gentlemen,” said Hannah Green, as if that said it all.

“Old? Young? Fat? Thin?”

“Pretty old,” she said. Sebastian was picturing ponderous men with graying pates and drooping bellies until she added, “ ’Bout yer age.”

“I’m twenty-nine.” He glanced over at Miss Jarvis in time to see her bring up her hand to hide a smile. He said, “Did they take you to a house, or to rooms?”

“Rooms. Right fancy they were, too.” She cast a disparaging glance around Gibson’s unpretentious parlor. “More swell than this.”

“Where were these rooms?”

Hannah frowned in thought. “I don’t rightly know. They took us there in a carriage.”

“A gentleman’s carriage?”

“No. A hackney.” Then she frowned and added, “I think.”

Sebastian blew out his breath in a long sigh. “Do you remember anything from that night at all?”

She grinned. “Not much. I was that foxed, I was.”

“But you say you saw one of them again?”

“All three of ’em. They come to the Academy the very next night. Asked fer Rose, Hessy, and me again. Only, this time they weren’t hirin’ us off the floor. Just fer an hour.”

“So what happened?”

Hannah Green’s gaze returned again to Sebastian’s brandy. She licked her lips. “Can I ’ave one of them?”

“When you’ve remembered everything. I want you clear-headed. Tell me what happened Wednesday night. Exactly.”

“Exactly?” She screwed up her face with the effort of memory. “Well . . . I was takin’ off me dress when Rose comes bangin’ on me door, sayin’ she needs to talk to me. So I goes out into the hall to tell her to go away, and she grabs me arm and says them three gentlemen had come to kill us. At first I thought she was bamming me, but then she drags me down the hall and shows me poor Hessy layin’ there with her eyes wide-open and her neck bent all funny. And she tells me that she’s done gone and stabbed the gent what had paid fer her. I can tell you, we was that spooked. Rose give Tasmin Poole her bracelet to distract Thackery while we nipped down the back stairs and took off.”

Sebastian studied the girl’s animated face, unsure how much—if any—of this wild tale to believe. “The man you say you saw going into your lodging house in Haymarket right before Tasmin Poole was killed—was he the man you were with Wednesday night?”

Hannah shook her head, her eyes wide. “He’s the one went with Hessy.”

“What did he look like?”

“I told you, he was a gentleman! Now can I have that drink?”

Sebastian poured her a brandy and held it out. “Dark hair, or light?”