Sebastian’s gaze lifted, like Tom’s, to the music hall door. It was too well lit, too loud, too full of the exuberance of life. Sebastian intended to do his drinking someplace dark and earnest. He clapped the tiger on the shoulder and turned away. “Just go home, Tom. Now.”
Chapter 52
SUNDAY, 10 MAY 1812
“My lord?
“Here,” said Calhoun, slipping what felt like a warm mug into Sebastian’s slack hand. “Drink this.”
“What the devil is it?”
“Tincture of milk thistle.”
Sebastian opened the other eye, but it didn’t work any better than the first. “What the hell are you doing here? Go away.”
“A message has arrived from Dr. Gibson.”
“And?” Sebastian opened both eyes this time and clenched his teeth as the room spun unpleasantly around him.
“It seems the authorities have recovered the body of a military gentleman by the name of Max Ludlow. Dr. Gibson will be performing the autopsy this morning, and he thought you might be interested.”
Sebastian sat up so fast the hot liquid in the forgotten mug sloshed over the sides and burned his hand. “Bloody hell.”
“Drink it, my lord,” said Calhoun, turning away toward the dressing room. “Nothing is better than milk thistle when you’ve got the devil of a head.”
The milk thistle helped some, but not enough to encourage Sebastian to do more than glance at the dishes awaiting him in the breakfast room before turning away and calling for his town carriage. The day had dawned cool but clear and far too bright. He subsided into one corner of his carriage and closed his eyes. Gibson’s autopsies were never pleasant, but Sebastian didn’t want to even think about the kind of shape Max Ludlow’s body would be in after ten days.
“ ’E’s in the room out the back,” said Gibson’s housekeeper when she opened the door to Sebastian. A short, stout woman with iron gray hair and a plain, ruddy face, she scowled at him with unabashed disapproval. “I’m to take you there. Not that I’m going any farther than halfway down the garden, mind you. It’s unnatural, what ’e does down there.”
Sebastian followed Mrs. Federico’s broad back down the ancient, narrow hall and through the kitchen to the untidy yard that led to the small stone building where Gibson performed both his postmortems and his illicit dissections. True to her word, halfway across the yard Mrs. Federico drew up short. “Viscount or no viscount, I ain’t goin’ no farther,” she said, and headed back toward her kitchen.
Sebastian had to quell the urge to follow her. He could already smell Max Ludlow.
“There you are,” said Gibson, appearing at the building’s open doorway, his gore-stained hands held aloft. “I thought you’d be interested in this.”
Sebastian tried breathing through his mouth. “Where did they find him?”
“In Bethnal Green. Wrapped in canvas and dumped in a ditch along Jews Walk.”
“I suppose it’s better than the Thames,” said Sebastian. He’d seen bodies pulled out of the river after a week. It wasn’t a sight he cared to see again.
“There was water in the ditch.”
“Good God,” said Sebastian. He should have had more of Calhoun’s milk thistle.
Gibson ducked back into the building’s dank interior. After a brief hesitation, Sebastian followed.
Naked and half eviscerated, the body on the room’s stone slab looked like something out of his worse nightmares. One glance at the bloated, waxy flesh and its resident insect population was enough. Sebastian stared at the ceiling. “Are they sure that’s Max Ludlow?” Sebastian asked when he was able.
“Someone from the regiment identified him. In another day it probably would have been impossible. Parts of the body were already virtually reduced to bones, but thanks to the way he was lying, the face is actually fairly well preserved.”
Sebastian held his handkerchief to his nose and resisted the impulse to take another look. “Any idea how he died?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.” Gibson turned around to reach for a tin basin. “I found this in his heart.”
Sebastian stared down at a bloody pair of strange, broken blades, handleless and oddly shaped. “What are they?”
“It’s a broken pair of sewing scissors,” said Gibson, setting the bowl aside so that he could demonstrate an upthrusting, twisting motion. “Whoever killed him must have stabbed him with the scissors, then broken them off when they hit a rib.”
“So he was killed by a woman,” said Sebastian.
“Not necessarily, but more than likely. Did Hannah Green ever mention how Rachel Fairchild killed the man in her room?”
