Sebastian felt the heat of an old rage course through him, blending with the new. “You expect me to believe that? When your henchmen have been killing everyone from Hessy Abrahams to Sir William Hadley?”
With deliberate slowness, Jarvis extracted an enameled snuffbox from his coat pocket and flipped it open. “And who, precisely, is Hessy Abrahams?”
“Don’t your men even bother to tell you the names of the people they kill?”
“Only if they’re important.”
Sebastian resisted with difficulty the urge to smash his fist into the big man’s fleshy, complacent face. “What precisely were their orders? To kill everyone connected with this incident in any way?”
Rather than answer, Jarvis lifted a pinch of snuff to one nostril and sniffed. He looked utterly bored and uninterested, but Sebastian knew it was all for effect. “What gives you the impression my men were responsible for the death of Sir William Hadley?”
“The manner of Hadley’s death—and Hessy Abrahams’s, and half a dozen others—is exactly the same as that employed to dispose of those individuals like Carmichael and Stanton who have displeased you in the past. It’s so unique it’s like a signature. There can’t be many men in England who know how to kill instantly with the simple snapping of a neck.”
Jarvis closed his snuffbox with a soft click. He was no longer smiling. “If you want me to believe this accusation, you need to tell me what you have discovered.”
“Why? So your henchmen can kill anyone they’ve missed?”
“
Sebastian thought of Hannah Green, and the blind harp player from the Academy, and realized the list was actually rather short.
Jarvis pushed to his feet and went to stand at the window overlooking the Mall. Watching him, Sebastian realized that his anger might have led him to misinterpret the situation. It was possible the plot to kill Perceval was Jarvis’s own, but that the big man remained ignorant of both his hirelings’ indiscretion on the night of Somerville’s birthday celebration and their subsequent attempts to cover it up.
Fixing his gaze on Jarvis’s face, Sebastian provided the King’s powerful cousin with a succinct version of the past two weeks’ events as he understood them.
But Jarvis never gave anything away. In the end, he merely said calmly, “Why would my henchman, as you call him, want to kill the Prime Minister?” The use of the singular—
“You could intend to use Perceval’s death to inflame public opinion. Or as an excuse to move against an enemy.”
“I could,” agreed Jarvis. “But I don’t.”
The two men’s gazes met, and for one fleeting moment, Jarvis’s famed self-possession slipped. Sebastian saw swift comprehension mingled with horror and the dawning of a fury so white-hot it swept away whatever lingering doubts Sebastian might still have had. And he knew in that instant that Jarvis would never forgive him for this, never forgive him for having been privy to the enormity of his failure.
“What are you saying? That your man is acting on his own for reasons neither one of us understands?” Sebastian gave a low laugh. “That’s rich. You think you know everything and control everything. Yet your agent has nearly killed your own daughter three times, and may yet succeed in assassinating the Prime Minister.”
Jarvis frowned. “
Too late, Sebastian recalled the Baron’s ignorance of the third incident. He flattened his hands on the surface of the table between them and leaned forward. “Tell me the man’s name.”
Jarvis’s fist clenched around his snuffbox so hard Sebastian heard the delicate metal crack. “Epson-Smith. Colonel Bryce Epson-Smith.”
Chapter 58
The rooms occupied by Colonel Bryce Epson-Smith were on the first floor of a genteel house just off Bedford Square. Sebastian arrived there shortly after four to find the former hussar colonel gone from home. A terse conversation with the Colonel’s majordomo elicited the information that the Colonel was spending the afternoon escorting the family of a Liverpudlian friend to the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art.
Turning south toward the river, Sebastian dropped his hands and let the chestnuts shoot forward. “If’n ’e’s lookin’ at pictures, at least ’e ain’t killin’ the Prime Minister,” said Tom, clamping his hat down tighter on his head and tightening his hold on his perch.
Sebastian kept his attention on his horses, feathering the corner as he swung onto Drury Lane. He had a niggling sense that he was still missing something. A connection he should have seen, perhaps, or an implication that continued to elude him.
The Royal Academy of Art occupied rooms in the large neoclassical pile on the Thames that had replaced the Duke of Somerset’s original palace. Pulling up on the Strand, Sebastian tossed the reins to Tom and hit the footpath running. He sprinted toward the vestibule, heedless of the shocked expressions and muttered tut-tuts, and took the steep, winding staircase two steps at a time. The Academy, like all the other societies and governmental departments housed in the building, occupied a vertical slice of all six floors. To take advantage of the natural light provided by a skylight, the Academy had placed their Exhibition Room in the high-ceilinged, nearly square space at the very top of the stairs.
Breathing hard, Sebastian burst into a chamber crowded with more than a thousand paintings, which climbed toward the ceiling in row after row hung together so closely that their heavy gilt frames nearly touched. At the sound of his hurried footsteps crossing the polished floor, the small party gathered beneath the central lantern turned. Sebastian had a vague impression of two wan-faced women in plain round bonnets and unfashionably cut pelisses, one clutching the hand of a half-grown girl, the other attempting to restrain a fidgety boy of perhaps eight.
