“I was always careful. Always.”
“Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean someone didn’t tell her. Someone who wished you harm—you, or her.”
“You’re wrong, I tell you. Do you understand me? Wrong!”
“Perhaps.” Sebastian turned to go, then paused to say, “Tell me this: Did your wife have a particular friend? Someone in whom she might have confided?” Someone who knows the shadowy recesses of her life, which might hold the secret to her tragic death?
Ambrose shook his head. “No, not really.”
“You’re certain?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“But then, how well did you actually know your wife?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Think about it,” said Sebastian, and walked away.
Sebastian sat for a time in the quiet of St. Anne’s churchyard and watched a few lazy snowflakes fall to earth, his thoughts drifting haphazardly from one aspect of Jane Ambrose’s death to the next.
He’d been coming around to thinking that the threat to Jane’s life had come from outside her home—from someone such as Rothschild, Jarvis, or van der Pals. But like so many women, Jane had lived with a man who had no hesitation in taking his frustration and anger out on her with his fists. Debt, infidelity, jealousy, and rage were a potent brew that all too often could lead to death. The problem was, if Ambrose had killed his wife, why that Thursday? And where? It seemed to make no sense.
Which meant Sebastian was still missing something.
Frustrated, Sebastian walked to Christian Somerset’s establishment on Paternoster Row, only to find the bookstore closed and the printing workshop deserted except for a sandy-haired, rosy-cheeked lad of perhaps fifteen who was cleaning dirty type, his arms black with ink up to the elbows.
“Mr. Somerset and the other lads are all at the Frost Fair,” said the young apprentice with a grin. “You ought to see our booth; it’s ever so grand!”
Christian Somerset had set up his booth midway between Blackfriars and London Bridge, on the Frost Fair’s main promenade. It was indeed an impressive structure, painted with craggy cliffs and fairyland castles beneath a pastel sky and stocked with a fine collection of romances, poetry volumes, and packets of feminine stationery. For a penny, fairgoers could also buy a souvenir memento that carried a crude image of the Frost Fair above the Lord’s Prayer, with PRINTED ON THE THAMES 1814 FROST FAIR emblazoned in large type below it. Christian Somerset himself was personally working the press.
“Somehow I didn’t expect to find you here,” said Sebastian, walking up to him.
Jane’s brother rotated the press’s handle to roll the bed under the platen and gave one of his slow, self-deprecating smiles. “This frozen river is minting money. A man would need to be a fool to miss this kind of opportunity.” He paused to turn the screw’s long handle. “I even dragged my old wooden press out of the basement for the occasion. I was afraid if I brought one of the new iron-framed Stanhopes out here it would crash through the ice and drown us all.” He nodded to a nearby apprentice to take his place at the press, his smile fading as they stepped away from the booth. “I saw you at Jane’s funeral.”
“Allow me to express my condolences again on the loss of your sister,” said Sebastian.
Somerset nodded and had to look away for a moment, blinking. “Have you learned something new?”
“I’ve discovered you were right: Ambrose does indeed have a mistress—an opera dancer he keeps in rooms in Tavistock Street.”
Somerset’s jaw tightened. “I knew it. The bloody bastard.”
“What would Jane have done, do you think, if she found out? Would she have left him?”
Somerset shook his head. “Not Jane.”
“Not even if she discovered his mistress was heavy with his child?”
“My God. Is she?”
“Yes.”
Somerset stared thoughtfully at a group of men drinking rum and grog around a nearby bonfire. “I still don’t think she’d leave him.”
“Even with both her children now dead?”
“She might threaten it in the heat of the moment. But she’d never actually do it.”
“The question is, would Ambrose know that?”
Somerset frowned. “Perhaps not.”
“Did you know Jane wrote the music for all of Ambrose’s operas?”
Somerset blinked. “I always suspected she helped him, although she would never admit it—at least, not to me.”
“She didn’t simply help; the music was hers.”
He blew out his breath in a long, pained sigh. “Poor Jane. To think of the acclaim that could have been hers, had she only been born a man.”
“Did she feel it, do you think?”
Jane’s brother rubbed his eyes with a splayed thumb and forefinger. “She must have. Growing up, we all knew she was actually more talented than her twin, James—even he acknowledged it. Our father tolerated her playing, but he never actually encouraged her the way he did James. People were always complimenting her for ‘playing like a man.’ I know that used to anger her. But she never said anything to me about Ambrose’s music, if that’s what you’re asking. She was a very private person, Jane.”
“Do you know if she had any close female friends?”
“Our sister, Jilly, was just a year older than Jane, and they were quite close. But Jilly died a couple of years ago. Consumption.”
“Is there no one else?”
“Not that I know of. Sorry.”
Sebastian watched one of the men drinking rum by the fire stagger to his feet, only to fall flat on the ice. “You say Jane would never have left Ambrose because of the way your father raised her. But even fiercely devout people can lose their faith, particularly after the deaths of two dearly beloved children. She might have changed her mind.”
Somerset shook his head. “Not Jane. Liam Maxwell begged her to leave Ambrose right after Lawrence died, and she wouldn’t do it. She said she’d made a vow before God, and just because she later realized it was a
