“That is what I said. Seriously, my lord, are you not listening?”
“I simply want to be certain I understand exactly what you’re telling me.”
“About a trivial, inconsequential weather conversation?”
“I have a feeling it wasn’t inconsequential,” said Sebastian. “Not at all.”
As he guided his horses eastward through the slush-snarled traffic of the Strand and Fleet Street, Sebastian found himself pondering the random incidents that can alter a person’s life, sometimes for the better but at other times catastrophically.
What were the odds? he wondered. What were the odds that a superficial exchange of pleasantries between Jane Ambrose and the Princess’s self-important Preceptor could have led in just a few hours to Jane’s death? Or was that seemingly inconsequential conversation simply the inevitable culmination of a fated series of events that had begun with Christian Somerset overhearing Jane’s low-voiced discussion of the Hesse letters with Maxwell and continued through Somerset’s chance encounter with Fisher at a coaching inn in Petersfield?
The Hesse letters had been stolen from Portsmouth sometime around the thirteenth or fourteenth of January. Given the weather, anyone traveling from Portsmouth to London at that time would surely have stuck to the main coaching road. And that road passed through Petersfield. According to the Bishop, Jane hadn’t known about her brother’s trip out of town, while according to Somerset, Jane had come to see him shortly after his return from a visit to Kent. Not Petersfield, Hampshire, but Kent.
The variation could be meaningless, of course, but Sebastian didn’t think so. Far more likely it was a clever misdirection wrapped in a truth: The printer had been out of town, but he had been careful not to tell his sister, and he had not been to Kent.
It was all too obvious, now, why Jane had not returned home as planned when she left Warwick House that last day. Troubled by her conversation with the Bishop, she must have gone to Paternoster Row to ask her brother if he had been behind the theft of the Hesse letters. Sebastian found it difficult to believe Christian Somerset had deliberately murdered his sister to keep her quiet. Far more likely that the siblings had quarreled, and at some point, Jane’s brother had struck her— the same way Jane’s husband had struck her so many times in the past. Only this time, when a man who claimed to love Jane knocked her down, she didn’t get up.
Somerset’s dangerous involvement in the theft of the Princess’s indiscreet letters also explained why he had then panicked. Why he had—somehow—carried his sister’s body through the snow to leave her in a mean, snow-choked lane in Clerkenwell. Why Clerkenwell? The question had bothered Sebastian from the beginning. But the answer was simple: Unlike Jane’s husband, Christian Somerset had known his sister taught William Godwin’s daughter. But he had been unsure of the exact day of her lessons.
And so he had made a simple, telling mistake.
Sebastian reached Paternoster Row to find Somerset’s workshop once again manned by a single apprentice, who sat perched on a stool sorting type.
“They’re all still at the Frost Fair,” said the boy Sebastian remembered from before.
“Despite the rising temperatures?”
The boy laughed. “That ice’ll hold for days yet. Everybody says so.”
“Do they?”
“Oh, aye,” said the boy. “Through Monday at least. It’s that thick, it is.”
“Tell me,” said Sebastian, “did you know Mr. Somerset’s sister Jane Ambrose?”
“Aye. They say she used to come here all the time when Mr. Somerset was in prison. She helped Mrs. Somerset a lot.”
“Do you recall the last time you saw her?”
“Aye,” said the lad, his hands stilling for a moment at their task. “She was here the day she died.”
“She was?”
The boy nodded. “I told her Mr. Somerset had gone off to see someone, but she said it didn’t matter because she just wanted to drop off a couple more ballads for him.”
“Do you remember what time she left?”
“I wouldn’t know. We weren’t busy that day, so Mr. Somerset had given us the afternoon off. I was talking to a friend in the courtyard and just happened to see her as she was lettin’ herself in.”
“She had a key to the shop?”
“I guess she must’ve. And Mr. Somerset keeps a spare key to his office just there, behind that picture.” The boy nodded to a water-stained lithograph of the old Cathedral of St. Paul that hung on the wall near the office door and grinned. “He thinks nobody knows about it, but we all do.”
“Ah,” said Sebastian, shifting the print and calmly helping himself to the key. “Christian says he left a book for me on his desk. I’ll just fetch it.”
With that, he unlocked the office door and let himself inside while the boy shrugged and went back to sorting type. It would never occur to a simple printer’s apprentice to question the actions of one of his master’s associates—particularly one as grand as a viscount.
Closing the door behind him, Sebastian let his gaze drift around the small room. Somerset’s office was the same disorderly jumble he remembered from before, with stacks of manuscripts and books strewn everywhere. But Sebastian was looking at it all with different eyes, for he knew things now that he hadn’t known the last time he had been here.
He stood with his back against the door, trying to imagine the afternoon more than a week ago when Jane had come to Paternoster Row for the last time. She could easily have chosen to wait for her brother in the comfort of his house’s parlor. Instead, she had come here. Why?
Pushing away from the door, Sebastian tried to mentally reconstruct that stormy afternoon. It had been snowing hard, so she’d probably taken off her wet hat and gloves. But not her pelisse. Why? Because the fire in the stove had gone out and the room was cold?
He found his gaze fixed on the rusty iron stove in the corner of the room. It was a large, old-fashioned
