What Angels Fear

Chapter 18

Rachel York had kept rooms on the first floor of a neat little lodging house in Dorset Court, not far from Kat’s own townhouse. But it was midafternoon by the time Kat was able to get rid of Lord Stoneleigh and make her way there. Already, the light was fading from the day. As she climbed the long flight of stairs from the ground floor, a hard sleet began to fall, striking the window at the end of the wide hall like a flurry of small pebbles.

“You won’t find anyone there, I can tell you that,” said a querulous female voice floating down from the second floor just as Kat raised her hand to knock.

Crossing the hall, Kat stuck her head over the banister and looked up. “Excuse me?”

She found a small face, deeply wrinkled by time and surrounded by a halo of white hair, peering down at her from the gloom of the second floor. “She’s dead. Murdered in a church, God rest her soul.”

“Actually, it was her maid, Mary Grant, I was interested in seeing. I thought I might like to hire her, if she’s in need of a new position.”

“Huh. She’s long gone, that one. Cleaned the place out first thing this morning, she did.”

Kat was starting to get a crick in her neck. She shifted around to a more comfortable position. She could see the woman better now, so small she had to stand on tiptoe to rest her arms on the top of the upper banister. Her purple satin gown was of a style one might have seen in the previous century, although it looked new. Just like the ropes of pearls and emeralds and rubies draping her neck and thin wrists looked real—at least in this light, and from this angle. “Cleaned it out?”

“Took everything,” said the elderly woman, her inflection betraying lingering traces of a Highland accent. “Carried it right off. Easy enough to do, I suppose, seeing as how her mistress already had most everything packed.”

“Rachel was moving to new lodgings?” It was news to Kat.

“Huh. Leaving London, more like, if you ask me.”

“Leaving?”

“That’s what I thought, although she wasn’t exactly what I’d call forthcoming, that girl. All atwitter this week, she was—up in the trees one minute, scared of her shadow the next. She’d found some way to get her hands on some money, was what I thought.” The old woman expelled her breath in a little hmm. “Lot of good it did her, in the end.”

“But . . . I thought there was a constable here. How could Mary Grant have taken anything without his knowing?”

The old woman didn’t seem to find Kat’s interest in details in any way unusual. She gave another of her little hmms. “That one? He left at first light, he did. And good riddance to him, too. Let me tell you, the number of people we’ve had, tramping up and down these stairs! Why, it’s worse than what it was when that girl was alive.”

“I suppose you’ve had the authorities here. . . .” Kat allowed her voice to trail off encouragingly.

“Aye, three times. At least, I assume that’s who they were. And then there was that young man who had a key.”

Kat felt a quickening of interest. A young man with a key? None of Rachel’s men, as far as Kat knew, had been young. And Rachel never gave any of them keys. “One of her . . . cousins, I suppose?”

The elderly woman laughed, a ribald cackle that echoed eerily down the darkening stairwell. “One of her lovers, you mean. No need to pull your punches with me, young woman. I cut my eyeteeth long ago.”

Kat smiled up at her. “Come here regularly, did he?”

The woman sniffed. “Not him. Never seen him before.”

This time, Kat kept her smile to herself. She had no doubt the old woman kept a very, very close watch on the stairwell’s comings and goings.

“If you ask me,” said the woman, “he was here looking for something—something he didn’t find.”

“Really?”

“Aye. Heard him down there a good five minutes, going from room to room. And I says to myself, he must be searching that place. And then what does he do but come up here and knock at my door, bold as brass, wanting to know if I had any idea where that maid had taken herself off to. As if I would.” The old woman fixed Kat with a speculative look. “You’re an actress, too, I suppose.”

“Well,” said Kat hastily, “if Mary Grant is indeed gone, then I suppose I’m wasting my time looking for her here. Thank you for your help.”

Kat was aware of that bright, curious gaze fixed upon her as she walked back down the stairs, her steps slow and deliberate. It wasn’t until she had almost reached the ground floor that she finally heard the click of the old woman’s door closing above.

Slipping off her half-boots and hugging the wall so that the treads wouldn’t creak, Kat darted back up the steps. The lock on Rachel’s door was a simple mechanism, easy enough to pick when one has had the right training. Kat let herself in and closed the door quietly behind her.

Rachel had done well for herself in the three short years she’d trodden the boards. The rooms were well proportioned and richly paneled, the hangings at the windows of draped velvet. But the old woman was right: where once had stood gleaming polished tables and satin settees were now only small piles of rubbish and other litter strewn here and there.

Her bare toes curling away from the cold floorboards, Kat crept softly through the empty, echoing drawing room and interconnecting dining room. Rachel’s maid had left very little. At the back of the house lay the chamber Rachel had used as her bedroom, its walls covered in a flattering, pink silk. It was to this room that Kat now went. Crossing the bare floor, she carefully drew back the heavy drapes and let the fading light of the dying day into the room. Then, her arms at her chest, hugging herself against the cold, she went to stand before the fireplace.

The mantel had been cleverly worked, of carved wood painted to resemble marble. Kat studied the fluted pilasters, the scroll-like capitals. She touched first one decorative segment, then the other, pushing, twisting. It has to be here somewhere, she thought, just as a small section of the architrave pulled away from the others.

Thrusting her hand into the gaping blackness of the secret nook, she drew out a small book, its gilt-edged pages bound in red leather and tied up with a thong. Rachel’s appointment book. Kat checked the compartment again, but it was empty.

Untying the leather thong, Kat leafed quickly through the book. She would need to tear out some of the pages, she realized, before she gave the book to Sebastian. It would be too dangerous to let him see anything that might somehow link Rachel back to Leo. Kat could only hope enough would be left to provide Sebastian with some clue to the identity of Rachel’s killer.

The distant sound of the door from the hall opening brought Kat’s head up with a jerk. “Mother Mary,” she whispered beneath her breath and thrust the small book into her reticule.

A man’s voice came to her, high-pitched and sharp with angry incredulity. “What in the name of God has happened here? I ordered a watch set on this place.”

Shoving the secret compartment closed, Kat darted through a side door to the back cupboard, off which opened the steep, narrow flight of service steps.

“We left a man here overnight, sir,” said another voice, a younger man’s voice, at once defensive and conciliatory. “You said nothing about continuing the watch after that.”

Hopping inelegantly on one foot, Kat slipped on first one boot, then the other, her elbow thumping the stair door back against the wall as she momentarily lost her balance and wavered.

“What was that?”

Kat’s head jerked around as the urgent, high-pitched words echoed through the empty rooms.

“What? I didn’t hear anything.”

The first voice was moving. “There’s someone here. In the back. Quick.”

Kat didn’t wait to hear more. Her half-boots clattering on the bare steps, her reticule clutched in her hand, she fled.