What Angels Fear

Chapter 19

The ruse of simple Mr. Simon Taylor from Worcestershire wasn’t going to work with a man such as Leo Pierrepont. Sebastian and Pierrepont didn’t exactly move in the same circles, but the émigré knew Lord Devlin on sight, and a poorly cut coat and a few streaks of gray at the temples would be unlikely to prove an adequate disguise. Pierrepont had a reputation amongst the ton for shrewdness.

So Sebastian visited a discreet shop on the Strand, where he provided himself with a neat little French Cassaignard flintlock pistol with a cannon muzzle and stepped breech, which fit snugly into the front pocket of his greatcoat. Then, as an early dusk fell over the city and the lamplighters struggled against a steady rain and sharp January wind, he set off for Half Moon Street.

Leo Pierrepont hurried down his front steps, his coat collar turned up and hat brim pulled low against the wind-driven rain. “Cavendish Square,” he told the hackney driver, shutting the door behind him with a snap.

“There are more reasons than one might suppose,” said Sebastian, lounging at his ease in the far corner, “for the Beau’s assertion that gentlemen should avoid riding in hackney carriages.”

The Frenchman’s start of surprise was almost instantly controlled. “I beg your pardon,” he said, his glance darting, betrayingly, to the door. “I didn’t realize the jarvey already had a customer.”

He had quite a reputation as a swordsman, this Frenchman, his slim body still energetic and agile despite his forty or fifty years. Sebastian slipped his hand from his pocket and calmly aimed the flintlock at the Frenchman’s chest. “I think you understand.”

Leo Pierrepont stretched out his legs, settled deeper into the seat, and smiled. “Then I fear you overestimate my powers of imagination.”

“Yet you know who I am.”

“Of course.” His eyebrows rose in a very Gallic expression of disdain. “Wherever did you find that appalling coat?”

Sebastian smiled. “The Rag Fair in Rosemary Lane.”

“It looks like it. An effective disguise, I suppose, in its way. But only so long as the authorities fail to realize they should be seeking their missing viscount amongst the ill-dressed, hmm?”

“I’m not worried. I suspect you have your own reasons for avoiding the authorities. At least when the topic of conversation is Rachel York.”

“And if your suspicions are incorrect?”

“There is that, of course. Still, it’s interesting, don’t you think, that you were the man paying the rent on her rooms?”

A carriage rattled past, the glow from the torches carried by its linkboys slanting in through the hackney window to highlight the Frenchman’s sharp, hawkish features. “Who told you that?”

Sebastian lifted one shoulder in a careless shrug. “Information is easy enough to come by . . . when one uses the right means of persuasion.”

The Frenchman regarded him dispassionately for a moment. “Am I to guess why you’ve chosen to approach me on this matter?”

“I should think the reason obvious.”

Pierrepont opened his eyes wide. “Good God. What are you suggesting? That I killed Rachel? What do you imagine to be my motive, 4I wonder? Not lust, surely. Given the details you’ve discovered about our arrangement, it’s obvious I could have had the girl anytime I chose. Why rape her in a church?”

Sebastian studied the other man’s carefully composed features. Had Rachel been raped? “Yet you seem to have shared her with others,” said Sebastian, keeping his voice deliberately bland. “Was that generosity willing, I wonder? Or not?”

“What do you think? That I killed Rachel in a fit of jealous passion?” Pierrepont waved one long, delicate hand through the air in a dismissive gesture. “Such a fatiguing emotion, jealousy—apart from being rather primitive and plebian. You see, I am not a possessive man, my lord. The arrangement Rachel and I had suited us both—however strange some might find it.”

“There are other reasons to kill.”

A gust of wind caught the carriage and rattled the glass in the window frame as they turned onto New Bond Street. “There are reasons, yes. But to slit a woman’s throat—viciously, repeatedly, until her head is virtually severed from her body? What manner of man does that, hmm?”

“You tell me.”

Pierrepont sat silent for a moment, his chin sunk onto his chest, his thoughts seemingly elsewhere. “When I was a young man, I watched my father’s head roll in the Place de la Concorde. Did you know that a decapitated head remains conscious for some twenty seconds after it is separated from its body? Twenty seconds. Think about that. It’s a long time, no? Do you think Rachel knew that? That horror?”

Sebastian listened to the rattle of the carriage wheels over the cobbles, the jingle of the harness. He hadn’t known that about Rachel’s death, either. He thought about that vibrant, beautiful young woman, thought about her alone and afraid in that church, her life’s blood ebbing away.

“You don’t ask, but I’ll tell you anyway,” said Pierrepont, his lips drawing back in a cold, hard smile. “Tuesday night, I hosted at a dinner party attended by some half-dozen highly respectable people who can swear I was at home the entire evening. So you see, my friend, you need to seek elsewhere for Rachel’s murderer—if you are not, in fact, he.”

The hackney slowed, swinging wide into Henrietta Place. Sebastian reached for the door handle. He didn’t doubt the Frenchman knew more than he’d been willing to admit, but they were almost to Cavendish Square and Sebastian had no desire to be seen there.

He was beginning to realize how little he really knew about either Rachel York or her death. He knew she’d been murdered in the Lady Chapel of a small parish church near Westminster Abbey after telling her maid she was going to meet him, and that one of his pistols had been found tangled in her clothes. But he had only Pierrepont’s word for it that she’d been raped, and that her throat had been repeatedly, savagely slashed. He didn’t even know who had found her or at what time, precisely, she had died. These were things he needed to learn, if he were to have any hope of tracking down the real killer.

And it occurred to him that he knew someone who just might be able to tell him.