`What brings you here?' he asked, his attention seemingly all for the task of lighting the candle. He was aware of an air of constraint between them, for her recent marriage to Devlin had introduced a new element and subtly shifted the dynamic in a way neither had yet to confront or reveal.
`What makes you think I came for a purpose other than to see you?'
`Because if this were a gesture of familial affection, you wouldn't be at Carlton House. You would have come to Berkeley Square. Your mother is well, by the way, or perhaps I should say she is as well as she ever is. She's quite taken with the new companion you found for her.'
Refusing to be distracted, Hero said, `Gabrielle Tennyson was discovered murdered this morning, at Camlet Moat.' When he kept silent, she said, `You knew?'
He watched the wick of the candle catch, flare up bright. `There is little that happens in this Kingdom that I do not know about.'
`There is also little that happens in this Kingdom that you don't control.'
He glanced over at her. She stood with her back to the window, her hands curled so that her palms rested on the sill. Through the glass behind her he could see a heavy traffic of carriages, carts, and horses streaming up and down the Mall. He said, `Are you asking if I had her killed?'
`After what I overheard last Friday night, the thought naturally does occur to me.' When Jarvis remained silent, she added impatiently, `Well? Did you?'
`I did not.' He drew the broadsheet from his pocket and thrust it into the candle flame. It blackened and smoked for an instant, then caught fire. `Now the question becomes, do you believe me?'
She held herself quite still, her gaze on his face. `I don't know. I've never been able to tell when you re lying.'
He tilted the paper as the flames took hold, then dropped it onto the cold, bare stones of the nearby hearth. `I take it Devlin has become involved in the investigation?'
`Lovejoy has asked for his assistance with the case, yes.'
`And will you tell your husband that he should add me to his list of suspects, and why?'
She pushed away from the window, her nostrils flaring with a sharp intake of breath. `I am here because Gabrielle was my friend, not as Devlin's agent.'
`Perhaps. But that doesn't exactly answer my question.'
Their gazes met. They'd both known this day would come, when she'd find herself caught between what she felt she owed her own family and what she owed her new husband. Only, he hadn't expected it to come quite so soon.
She said, `I have no intention of betraying you if you are telling me the truth.'
He found himself smiling. `But then, in that case, you wouldn't actually be betraying me, now, would you?' He tipped his head to one side. `And how will your rather headstrong and passionate young Viscount react, I wonder, when he discovers that you have been less than forthcoming with him?'
`I must be true to myself and to what I believe is right. My marriage in no way negates that.'
`And if he doesn't understand or fails to agree?'
She turned toward the door. `Then we will disagree.'
She said it evenly, in that way she had. He knew she had analyzed the situation and made her decision calmly and rationally. She was not the kind of woman to waste time agonizing or endlessly analyzing her choices. But that was not to say that the decision had been made lightly or that it would be without emotional consequences. For he had seen the troubled shadows that lurked in the depths of her fine gray eyes. And he knew an upsurge of renewed anger and resentment directed at Devlin, who had put them there.
After she left, he watched the broadsheet on the hearth burn itself out until nothing remained but a blackened ash. Then he went to stand where she had stood, his gaze on the courtyard below. He watched her exit the Palace, watched her climb the steps to her waiting carriage. He watched the carriage bowl away up Pall Mall toward the west, the clatter of her horses hooves lost in the tumult of drivers shouts and hawkers cries and the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels over cobbles.
Turning, he rang for his clerk.
`Send Colonel Urquhart to me,' he said curtly when the man appeared. `Now.'
Chapter 6
The abandoned isle once known as Camelot lay on the northern edge of Trent Place, a relatively new estate dating only to late in the previous century, when the ancient royal chase had been broken up and sold to help pay for the first round of George III s wars. The properties thus created had proved popular with the newly wealthy merchants and bankers of the city. Sir Stanley, Trent Place's latest owner, was a prosperous banker granted a baronetcy by the King in reward for his assistance in financing the country's long struggle against Napoléon.
`One o' them constables was tellin' me this Sir Stanley already 'as a 'ouse in Golden Square what makes the Queen's Palace look like a cottage,' said Sebastian's tiger, Tom, as they turned through massive new gates to a meticulously landscaped park. `So why'd he need to buy this place too, just a few miles from London?'
The boy was thirteen years old now, but still small and gap-toothed and scrappy, for he had been a homeless street urchin when Sebastian first discovered the lad's intense loyalty and sense of honor and natural affinity for horses. In a very real sense, Tom and Sebastian had saved each other. The ties that bound lord to servant and boy to man ran deep and strong.
Sebastian said, `The possession of an estate is the sine qua non for anyone aspiring to be a gentleman.'
`The seenkwawhat?'
`Sine qua non. It's Latin for a condition without which something cannot be.'
`You sayin' this Sir Stanley ain't always been a gentleman?'
`Something like that,' said Sebastian, drawing up before what had once been a graceful Italianate villa but was now in the process of being transformed into something quite different by the addition of two vast wings and a new roofline. The pounding of hammers and the clatter of lumber filled the air; near a half-constructed wall, a tall, elegantly tailored gentleman in his early fifties could be seen conferring with a group of brickmasons.
`Keep your ears open around the stables,' Sebastian told Tom as the tiger took the reins. `I'd be interested to hear what the servants are saying.'
`Aye, gov'nor.'
`Devlin,' called Sir Stanley, leaving the bricklayers to stroll toward him.
He was a ruggedly handsome man, his chin square, his cheekbones prominent, his mouth wide and expressive. Despite his years, his body was still strong and powerful, and he had a head of thick, pale blond hair fading gradually to white, so that it formed a startling contrast to his unexpectedly sun-darkened features. The effect was more like what one would expect of a soldier or a nabob just returned from India than a banker.
They said the man had begun his career as a lowly clerk, the son of a poor vicar with sixteen children and no connections. Sebastian had heard that his rise to wealth, power, and influence had been both rapid and brutal and owed its success to his wily intelligence, his driving ambition, and a clear-sighted, unflinching ruthlessness.
`What brings you here?' asked Sir Stanley, pausing beside the curricle.
`I've just come from Camlet Moat,' said Sebastian, dropping lightly to the ground.
`Ah. I see.' The flesh of the man's face suddenly looked pinched, as if pulled too taut over the bones of his face. `Please,' he said, stretching a hand to indicate the broad white marble stairs that led up to the central, original section of the house. `Come in.'
`Thank you.'
`I was with Squire John when he discovered the body,' said Winthrop as they mounted the steps. `He's our local magistrate, you know. Seems some girl from the village showed up at the Grange in the middle of the night, babbling nonsense about white ladies and magic wells and a dead gentlewoman in the moat. The Squire was convinced it was all a hum actually apologized for coming to me at the crack of dawn but I said, No, no, let s go have a look.' He paused in the entrance hall, a quiver passing over his tightly held features. `The last thing I expected was to find Gabrielle.'
