What Angels Fear

Chapter 22

Later that night, alone in his small chamber at the Rose and Crown, Sebastian lit a candle, slipped the leather-bound book from his pocket, and settled down in the room’s single, straight-backed wooden chair to read.

All the pages containing Rachel’s entries prior to the afternoon of Friday, January 18, had been cut from the book. Sebastian stared at the date at the top of the first surviving page. It had been bitterly cold that week, he remembered, as he followed Rachel York’s fine copperplate through the mundane passage of the last days of her life, through the rehearsals and performances, the lessons and appointments with tradesmen. He leafed through each successive day, scanning the entries, not realizing until he reached the morning of Thursday the twenty-fourth that another page was missing, the page for Thursday evening—along with the following morning, which must have been on the overleaf of the same page.

Thoughtful, Sebastian thumbed back to the beginning. Was there a significance, he wondered, in the pattern of missing pages? What had happened in her life on those two successive Friday mornings or Thursday nights that Rachel hadn’t wanted anyone to know about?

Or that someone else hadn’t wanted Sebastian to know?

Sebastian returned to the afternoon of Friday, the twenty-fifth. After that, the pages continued without interruption up to Tuesday, the twenty-ninth, the evening Rachel died. The evening she had planned to meet someone named St. Cyr in St. Matthew of the Fields.

He went back again to that first page, paying more attention this time to each individual entry and to the notations Kat had made beside them, in pencil. There was little out of the ordinary: singing lessons and meetings with wardrobe; a reminder to pick up a pair of dancing slippers from the shoe repair man. Each appointment with each individual would need to be checked out, of course. But Sebastian found his attention focusing on two names.

The painter, Giorgio Donatelli, appeared frequently, each time with only the brief notation, Giorgio, and a time. But even more intriguing was an individual referred to simply as “F.” Kat had circled each appearance of the initial, along with a question mark.

Once more, Sebastian went back to the beginning and ran through the entries. Whoever “F” was, he—or she—appeared in the twelve days covered by the book’s surviving pages twice: on the evening of Wednesday, the twenty-third, and again on Monday, the twenty-eighth. In other words, Rachel had met with “F” the evening before the missing Thursday, and again the night before she died. A coincidence, Sebastian wondered, or not?

“F” could be a lover, of course—someone so familiar, so dear, that a simple initial sufficed. But he could also be a person whose involvement in her life Rachel had wanted to keep secret. Why? For the same reason she had kept her appointment book hidden?

Conspicuously absent from Rachel’s days was the name of the man who had been paying the rent on her rooms, Leo Pierrepont. If neither Pierrepont nor “F” had been Rachel York’s lover, then who had been? Sebastian found it difficult to believe that such a woman had not had one. Except, then, why didn’t the lover’s name appear in her book? Because she took his regular appearances for granted? Or because his visits were so erratic, she never knew when he might appear?

A wind had come up, rattling the shutters on the window and causing the flame of the candle to flare, then almost die in a sudden, cold draft. A distant burst of laughter sounded, muffled, from the common room below. Out in the hall, a board creaked.

Rising quietly from his chair, Sebastian snuffed the candle flame between thumb and forefinger, plunging the room into darkness. Slipping the small French pistol he’d bought that afternoon in the Strand from his greatcoat pocket, he flattened himself against the wall, then reached out to turn the handle and throw open the door to the hall.

“ ’Oly ’ell!” yelped Tom, looking up, wide-eyed, from where he sat cross-legged on the bare floorboards opposite Sebastian’s door. “Don’t shoot me.”

Sebastian lowered the pistol. “What the devil are you doing here?”

In the dim light cast by the oil lamp dangling from a chain at the top of the stairs, the boy’s face looked pinched, cold. “Fer such a sharp cove, you can be mortal wet, at times. It’s watchin’ yer back, I am.”

“My back,” said Sebastian.

Tom shrugged. “Well, yer door, at any rate.”

“Why?”

The boy’s jaw tightened. “You paid me fer a week, you did. I’m earning me wages.”

Sebastian dropped the flintlock into his coat pocket. “Let me get this straight. You don’t see a problem in lifting a stranger’s purse, but you refuse to be given wages you don’t feel you’ve earned?”

“That’s right,” said Tom, obviously glad to be understood. “I gots me pride.”

“And a highly original set of principles,” said Sebastian.

The boy simply looked up at him, puzzled.

A gust of wind slammed against the inn, whistling through the eaves and sending an icy drought sluicing down the corridor. Tom shivered, his thin arms creeping around his legs, hugging them closer to his body.

Sebastian sighed. “It’s a bit drafty out here for conversation. You’d best come in.”

For a brief instant, Tom hesitated. Then he scrambled to his feet.

“How did you find me, anyway?” Sebastian asked, closing the door against the cold as the boy scooted across the room to the fire.

One bony shoulder lifted in a shrug. “ ’Twern’t difficult. All’s I did was ask around ’til I cottoned on to a young mort named Kat.”

“You followed me here from Covent Garden?”

Tom stretched his chilblain-covered hands out to the glowing coals. A residual shiver racked his thin, ragged frame. “Aye.”

Sebastian studied the boy’s half-averted profile. He was bright and resourceful, and determined, it seemed, to earn his “wages.” Sebastian thought about all the names and appointments in that little red book, and an idea began to form in his mind.

Opening the door to the room’s ancient wardrobe, he rummaged around and came up with a quilt and an extra pillow. “Here,” he said, tossing the bedding toward the boy. “You can sleep by the fire. Tomorrow we’ll see about getting you a room over the stables.”

Tom caught first the pillow, then the quilt. “You mean yer keeping me on?”

“I’ve decided I can use an associate of your talents.”

A wide, toothy smile broke across the boy’s face. “You won’t be sorry, gov’nor. There won’t be any bung-nappers getting their dibs on yer cly or foggles whilst I’m around, I can tell you that. Nor any tripper-ups nor rampsmen thinkin’ yer easy pickin’s.”

“Get some sleep,” said Sebastian, turning away with a smile. “I have an early assignment for you tomorrow. I’d like you to discover the address of a certain Italian gentleman.”

“An Italian,” said Tom, in exactly the same tone of voice he might have used had Sebastian divulged a friendship with a cockroach.

“That’s right. An Italian.” Sebastian slipped the pistol from his pocket and placed it, along with his pocketbook, beneath his pillow. “A painter, to be exact. A man by the name of Giorgio Donatelli.”

The dreams are rarely the same. Sleep and time distort memory; events become disjointed. Fleetingly glimpsed faces and haunting images recombine with unrelated incidents to torture and taunt. In a mist-shrouded mountain village, simple stone walls rise up scorched and shattered. Reaching out, Sebastian turns over a woman’s flyblown body to find Kat’s lifeless blue eyes staring up at him. He cries out, and fresh red blood seeps from her gashed neck. Her lips move. “Aidez-moi,” she says: Help me. “Je suis mort.” I am dead. But the knife is in his hand and he is the one slashing, he is the one killing, and the bloodlust runs hot and sweet through his veins—

“Oie, gov’nor. You right there?”

Sebastian opened his eyes to find the boy, Tom, sitting up, his thin body silhouetted against the glowing embers of the fire.

“I’m fine. I was just . . . It was just a bad dream.” Sebastian rolled onto his back, one bent arm coming up to cover his eyes. “Go back to sleep.”