long as you don’t damage your spinal cord. If you break the lower part of your neck and do injure the cord, you lose the use of your legs and maybe your arms, too, depending on which vertebrae you break.”
Sebastian nodded. He’d seen a lot of men crippled by their injuries in the war.
“But if the neck breaks up here,” said Gibson, indicating the first several bones, “and the spinal cord is injured, then a person basically suffocates. They can’t breathe.”
Sebastian took one look, then glanced away. “How long does that take?”
“About two to four minutes.”
“Is that what happened to this woman?”
“No. You see, there’s another way to die from a broken neck. If the neck is twisted so sharply the spinal cord is torn in half, it affects your heart and the circulation of the blood.”
“And you die?”
“Almost instantly. You see it sometimes when a hanging goes well. Of course, they don’t often go well.”
Sebastian forced himself to look, again, at the desiccated form on Gibson’s dissection table. “How was her neck broken?”
“The spinal cord was snapped. The man I was treating after he stopped Miss Jarvis on the way back from Richmond had his neck snapped in exactly the same way. I didn’t attach much importance to it at the time, but after I saw this, I got to thinking. So I spoke to the surgeon at St. Thomas’s who performed the postmortem on Sir William Hadley. He was killed the same way. So was the Cyprian found in the Haymarket, Tasmin Poole.”
Sebastian raised his gaze to his friend’s face. “This is significant. Why?”
“It’s not an easy thing to do, to break a neck like this. It requires training.”
“We already suspected these men were military.”
“Yes. But learning how to kill silently with a quick snapping of the neck isn’t part of most officers’ training. The thing is,” said Gibson, laying aside his instruments, “I’ve seen necks snapped like this before. Over the last three or four years, we’ve probably had a dozen or more cases.”
Sebastian studied his friend’s tight, worried face, not understanding at all. “And?”
“No one investigates those deaths,” said Gibson. “Some are common people—government clerks, French emigres. But some are more prominent. You recall when Sir Humphrey Carmichael and Lord Stanton were found dead last autumn? Their necks were broken. Just like this.”
The realization of what Gibson was saying spread through Sebastian like a strange numbing sensation. Sir Humphrey Carmichael and Lord Stanton, along with an East India Company man named Atkinson, had all died for the same reason. “And Felix Atkinson? He was killed the same way?”
“Yes.”
Sebastian walked out of the dank, foul-smelling building into the sunlit garden. Last night’s rain had cleansed the dust from the air, leaving the sky scrubbed so clean and blue it nearly hurt the eyes to look at it. “It makes no sense,” said Sebastian, aware of Gibson coming to stand beside him.
“I didn’t think so. But then I thought maybe I was missing something.”
Sebastian shook his head. A hideous possibility dawned, that all of this—the attack on the Magdalene House, Miss Jarvis’s interest in solving the riddle of Rachel Fairchild’s fall from grace and subsequent murder, even that poignant brush with death beneath the ancient gardens of Somerset House—had all been a part of some diabolical charade designed by Jarvis to draw him into . . .
There was only one thing Sebastian did know: While their deaths had never been officially solved, the men Gibson had listed—Stanton, Carmichael, and Atkinson—had all been killed on the orders of the same man.
Charles, Lord Jarvis.
Chapter 57
Sebastian slapped open the door to Lord Jarvis’s Carlton House antechamber and strode purposefully toward the inner sanctum. From behind the closed panel came the measured drone of the Baron’s voice.
Ignoring him, Sebastian thrust open the door to the inner chamber.
“As for the revenue—” Lord Jarvis broke off, frowning as his head turned toward the door. He sat at his ease on a settee with crocodile-shaped feet and plump cushions covered in brown-and-turquoise-striped silk. From a long table near the window overlooking the Mall, a second clerk occupied with the task of transcribing his lordship’s words looked up, his eyes widening in horror.
“Just what the bloody hell did you do?” Sebastian demanded without preamble. “Get your daughter to lure me into one of your diabolical plots so you could use me as a stalking horse?”
Jarvis cast a frozen stare first at one clerk, then the other. “Leave us. Both of you.”
Bowing his head, the man at the table scuttled away, his papers clutched to his chest, the first clerk at his heels.
Jarvis leaned back against the silk cushions, his arms comfortably spread out along the settee’s back, his big body relaxed. Far from being intimidated by Sebastian’s angry, looming presence, the Baron looked vaguely amused. “My daughter approached you on her own initiative,” he said. “If she employed some subterfuge to draw you into this investigation, it was not of my devising.”
