A sudden outburst of laughter drew his attention to a circle of spectators gathered around a circus comic in a red velvet doublet and blue hose. The clown’s improbable yellow hair was curling wildly in the damp air, his white face paint and frozen, exaggerated red grin lending a faintly menacing quality to his pantomimes and pratfalls. For a moment Sebastian paused, his gaze drifting over the laughing men, women, and children of the performer’s audience. Their eyes were sparkling with delight, their cheeks rosy with the cold. But for some reason he could not have named, Sebastian found himself noting the subtle differences in attitude and posture that distinguished the men from the women, the boys from the girls.
He had never subscribed to the belief that women were by nature either less intelligent or less capable than men. Yet he now realized he’d never appreciated to what extent an Englishwoman’s sex determined essentially every aspect of her life—far more than her wealth or social status or perhaps even her skin color. Simply by virtue of having been born female, Jane had been raised by a father who tolerated rather than encouraged his girl child’s amazing talents. As a woman grown, she’d hidden her gifts as both a pianist and a composer in order to conform to the behavior considered proper for a modest gentlewoman of her station. And because of England’s civil and religious laws, she’d been forced to bear her husband’s unfaithfulness and physical abuse without complaint or possibility of redress.
Yet in the last months of Jane’s life, that willingness to conform, to play by the rules, had shattered. Much of it, surely, came from the spiritual crisis provoked by the recent deaths of her children as well as by her growing anger over the Regent’s treatment of the young Princess. But Sebastian suspected that the breaking point had come in that fetid alley off Savile Row.
Peter van der Pals had used all the advantages afforded by his privileged maleness to brutalize and hurt her, safe in the knowledge that she would never tell because, for a gentlewoman, the shame of others knowing what had been done to her was seen as worse than the rape itself.
And van der Pals had been right; she hadn’t told anyone—with the exception of Lady Arabella, although that was in the form of reproach rather than a confidence. And it came to Sebastian now as he watched the clown pantomime slipping and falling on the ice that the rape had acted as a kind of catalyst in Jane’s life. Up until then she had faithfully adhered to all the stringent, unfair rules of their society. She had done what her religion and her class demanded of her. Yet this terrible thing had befallen her anyway, and as a result, something within her had snapped. He wondered if she would actually have broken free if she’d lived. He suspected she would have. Instead, she had died.
How? Why?
It would be all too easy to pin her death on her weak, abusive, conveniently dead husband. But another explanation was beginning to form in Sebastian’s mind.
An explanation as troubling as it was tragic.
Liam Maxwell was helping one of his apprentices knock apart his stall on the Frost Fair’s grand promenade when Sebastian walked up to him.
“Calling it quits?” said Sebastian, watching the lad pile wooden shingles into a handcart.
The afternoon was warm enough that they’d worked up a sweat, and Maxwell paused to swipe a forearm across his face. “Feel that wind? It’s swinging around to the south. When I was a lad, I used to listen to my grandmother tell stories about how fast she’d seen the ice break up in the middle of a Frost Fair. I can’t afford to lose my press.” He grinned at the boy turning away from the cart. “Or any of my apprentices, for that matter.”
The boy laughed and stooped to gather another armload of shingles.
Sebastian nodded toward the growing throng of laughing, noisy fairgoers. “They don’t appear to share your concerns.”
Maxwell shrugged and swung his hammer at a cross brace, knocking it loose. “Had a couple of constables from Bow Street here a bit ago. They’re thinking I killed Ambrose, aren’t they?”
“Are they?”
Maxwell let his hand drop, the hammer dangling by his side. “You know they are.”
“Constables like simple explanations.”
“I didn’t kill him,” said the printer, his voice low and earnest.
Sebastian studied the other man’s haggard face. “Did you ever talk to Christian Somerset about the Orange betrothal?”
Maxwell cast a quick glance at his apprentice, who was now loading the loose boards from the dismantled stall into the cart. “No. Why?”
“Would Jane have told him about it?”
Maxwell looked thoughtful for a moment. “She might have. I couldn’t say for certain.”
“What about the Hesse letters? Would she have told him about those?”
Maxwell started to say something, then stopped.
“What?” asked Sebastian, watching him.
Maxwell’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you asking me about Christian?”
“I’m simply trying to get an idea of what happened in Jane’s life the last few weeks before her death.”
Maxwell tossed his hammer aside. “I don’t think she ever told him about Hesse, no. I remember one time she was in my print shop, talking about the Princess’s attempts to retrieve the letters, when Christian came in without her realizing it. She was worried he might have overheard what she was saying. But when she carefully tried to find out if he had heard, he teased her about being involved in some deep, dark secret and laughingly asked if he needed to worry
