What Angels Fear

Chapter 29

Sebastian had been about nine years old when he’d begun to realize that there was something different about him, that most people couldn’t overhear whispered conversations held in distant rooms, or read the titles of the books on the shelves of the library in the dark of the night, or from across the room.

Sometimes he wondered if most people experienced the world around them a little bit differently from their fellows, if the assumption of commonality was simply an illusion. Once he’d met a man who thought a yellow dog was the same color as the swath of vivid green spring grass in which the dog played, and who swore the gray cloth of his suit was blue. It had been a stray remark made by Sebastian’s sister, Amanda, that had first made Sebastian aware of the fact that most people couldn’t see colors at night, that for them, darkness reduced the world to a shading of grays through which they moved almost blind.

He’d found his ability to see in the dark particularly useful when he’d undertaken special assignments for the army during the war. He found it useful now as he slipped over the garden wall of St. Cyr House on Grosvenor Square, and crept toward the terrace.

Alistair St. Cyr, the Fifth Earl of Hendon, slept in a massive Tudor tester bed that had once belonged to the First Earl’s great-grandfather. He came awake slowly, lips pursing in his sleep, eyelids fluttering open, closed. Open.

He sat up with a rasping gasp, jaw slack, eyes flaring wide as he took in the clusters of candles burning on the bedside table and along the mantel. His gaze lifted to where Sebastian leaned against the bedpost with his arms folded across his chest, and he let out a sigh of relief. “ Sebastian. Thank God. I’ve been hoping you’d come to me.”

Sebastian shoved away from the bedpost to stand with his arms at his side, anger thrumming through him. “What the bloody hell did you think you were about, walking into that Public Office and trying to convince people that you’re the one who killed Rachel York?”

The expression on Hendon’s face was one Sebastian had never seen before, a strange mingling of grief and worry and what looked very much like guilt. “Because I’m the one she went to meet that night.”

Tuesday, St. Matthew’s, St. Cyr.

“Oh, Jesus,” whispered Sebastian, one hand coming up to shade his eyes.

Hendon thrust aside the bedclothes and stood up, a powerful figure of dignity despite nightshirt and cap. “But I swear to you, she was already dead when I found her.”

Sebastian huffed a laugh, his hand falling back, loosely, to his side. “What do you think? That I’m going to believe you’ve taken to rape and murder in your old age?”

Turning, he went to crouch before the fire and stir up the coals on the hearth. He felt the heat fan his cheeks, lick at the graveyard chill left deep within his being. A whirl of disparate, incomprehensible facts suddenly clicked into place, making perfect, awful sense. “So it was your pistol they found,” he said, his gaze on the flames before him.

A cough rumbled deep in the older man’s chest. “I took it with me, just in case. I didn’t even realize I’d dropped it until I arrived home and found it missing. I thought about going back, looking for it, but . . .” He hesitated. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I guess I was hoping I’d lost it someplace else.”

Sebastian threw another shovelful of coal on the fire and watched it lay there, dark and smoldering. “And why, precisely, were you meeting Rachel York alone in a Westminster church in the dead of the night?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Sebastian twisted around, one knee pressing into the hearth rug. “You what?”

Wordless, his father stared back at him, that strange mingling of emotions shading his brilliant blue eyes.

“Was she blackmailing you? Is that it?”

“No.”

Sebastian thrust aside the coal scuttle and stood up. “What else am I to believe?”

Hendon scrubbed a hand across his face, his jaw working soundlessly back and forth in that way he had when he was thinking, obviously deciding what he was going to tell Sebastian and what he was going to keep to himself. “She contacted me early Tuesday,” he said at last. “She had something she thought I might be interested in purchasing.”

“So she was blackmailing you.”

“No. I told you, she had something to sell. Something I wanted to buy. We agreed upon a price, and she said she’d meet me at St. Matthew’s, in the Lady Chapel, at ten o’clock.”

“Why St. Matthew’s?”

“She said it was quiet. There’d be less chance of our being disturbed or discovered.” A round table with a gleaming, well-polished inlaid top stood at the foot of the massive bed, and Hendon went to seat himself in one of the nearby lyre-backed chairs. “That little cross-biting cully of a magistrate, that Lovejoy, he claims the church was locked at eight that night, but it wasn’t. The north transept door was open when I arrived there, just as she’d said it would be.”

“Did you see anyone else about?”

“No.” Hendon’s laced fingers tightened until the knuckles showed white. “No one. I thought we were alone. She’d lit all the candles on the chapel’s altar. I could see the flames flaring up together, like a warm golden glow as I walked toward the back of the church. Then I saw her.”

He rubbed one splayed hand across his eyes as if to wipe away the memory of what he’d seen. “It was ghastly, the way she’d been left lying there, on the altar steps with her legs spread. . . .” His voice trailed away to a whisper. The effort it took him to push the words out was an almost palpable thing. “You could actually see the bloody imprints of his hands on the bare flesh of her thighs. So much blood, everywhere.”

Sebastian gazed across the room at his father’s ashen, troubled face. No one would ever describe the Earl of Hendon as a sensitive man. He was hard, irascible, phlegmatic; he could be brutal. But he’d never been to war, never seen the blackened, bloated bodies of children lying in the burned ruins of their home. Never seen what artillery—or even a couple of drunken soldiers—could do to the once soft, smooth flesh of a woman.

Sebastian kept his voice steady, dispassionate. “And this—this whatever it was you went there to buy. Did she have it on her?”

Hendon sucked in a deep breath that lifted his chest, then blew it out again through pursed lips and shook his head. “I looked for it.” He pressed a clenched fist against his lips, and Sebastian thought he knew what it must have cost his father to approach that bloodied, ravished body and systematically, ruthlessly search it. “That must have been when I dropped the pistol. I had hoped I’d left it in the pocket of my greatcoat. I threw it away, you know—the greatcoat, I mean. Stuffed it down one of the drains in Great Peter Street. There was so much blood on it I could never have explained it to Copeland. I washed off my boots as best I could, but I still had to invent some faradiddle about stopping to help the victims of a carriage accident.” His gaze seemed to come unfocused, as if he were seeing into the past. “So much blood.”

Sebastian walked over to stand on the far side of the table, his gaze studying his father’s face. “You must tell me what you went there to buy.”

Hendon leaned back in his chair, his jaw set hard. “I can’t.”

Sebastian slammed the open palm of one hand down on the table between them. “Whatever you went to St. Matthew’s to buy is very likely the reason Rachel York died. How the bloody hell am I to discover who killed her when you won’t even tell me what this is all about?”

“You’re wrong. My business with that woman has nothing to do with her murder.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Yes, I can.”

Sebastian leaned his weight into the tabletop, then shoved himself away. “Bloody hell. Don’t you understand what’s at stake here?”

Hendon pushed to his feet, his face darkening. “You seem to forget who we are. Who I am. Do you seriously think I will allow a son of mine to be brought up on murder charges like some common criminal?”

Sebastian kept his voice steady. “You can’t fix this, Father. A woman is dead.”

“An inconsequential whore?” Hendon swiped at the air between them. “Her death I could have dealt with. What I want to know is what the hell you thought you were about, stabbing a constable and leading the authorities on a chase across London?”

“The man slipped and fell against another constable. It wasn’t even my knife.”

“That’s not what they’re saying.”

“They’re lying.”

Sebastian met his father’s gaze and held it. Hendon let out a long sigh. “The constable’s not dead yet, but from what I hear it’s only a matter of time. You’ll need to leave the country until I can sort all this out.”

Sebastian smiled. “And Jarvis? You can’t tell me the King’s very busy cousin isn’t behind the authorities’ haste to see me arrested.”

Sebastian knew from the way his father’s jaw worked that he was right. United the two men might be in their hatred of the French, republicanism, and Catholics, but Hendon was far too much a stickler for the preeminence of rules and propriety to ever find favor with a Machiavellian schemer like Jarvis. “I can take care of Jarvis.”

Sebastian pressed his lips together and said nothing.

“I’ve made arrangements,” Hendon said, pushing up from the table. “With the captain of a ship—”

“I’m not running.”

Hendon went to jerk open a small drawer in the bureau on the far side of the bed. “There is no shame in temporarily removing yourself from harm’s way.”

The big old house seemed to stretch out around them, painfully familiar and suddenly, unexpectedly dear in the hushed stillness of the night. “I’m not running,” Sebastian said again. “I’m going to stay here and find out who killed that woman. And why.”

Hendon turned, a flash of what might have been fear flaring in his eyes. He hesitated, then thrust out his hand. “Here. At least take this.”

Sebastian glanced down at the banknotes in his father’s big, blunt-fingered, outstretched hand. “I don’t need money.”

“Don’t be a bloody ass. Of course you need money.”

It was true. His various purchases at the Rag Fair and in Haymarket had seriously depleted his funds, and he would need more in the days to come.

He took the money and turned toward the window, only to pause as a thought occurred to him. “Leo Pierrepont claims he was hosting a dinner party the night Rachel York was killed. Can you find out if it’s true?”

“Pierrepont? The French émigré? What the hell’s he to do with this?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Can you find out?”

That expression Sebastian could never quite read was back on his father’s face. “For God’s sake, Sebastian. This is madness. If you won’t leave the country, then at least lie low until it all blows over. I’ll hire the best Bow Street has to offer. They’ll track down the real killer. Just concentrate on keeping yourself safe.”

Sebastian gave a soft laugh and turned to fling up the sash. “I’m afraid you’ll find that the best of Bow Street is already busy.” He threw one leg over the sill, then paused to glance back at his father’s tense, troubled face. “They’re all out there right now. Looking for me.”

The next morning the clouds hung low and heavy, and there was a bite to the air that spoke of snow before nightfall.

Turning up the collar of his greatcoat against the cold, Sebastian set off on foot toward the City, walking briskly to keep warm. At the base of Tower Hill he bought a bag of roasted chestnuts from an old woman, then ended up giving most of them away to the small knot of ragged children who huddled nearby, stamping their feet and rubbing their hands in the bitter cold. He knew they had always been there, these bands of half-starved urchins, just like the desperate mothers clutching their wailing, dying infants, and the homeless, helpless old men and women. Yet it seemed to Sebastian as if he had, somehow, never really noticed them before. Or perhaps it was simply that he had never before walked among them, alone and vulnerable and sharing their fear.

“You don’t look as if you went to bed last night,” said Paul Gibson, when the surgeon’s young maidservant led Sebastian back to the kitchen where the Irishman was just finishing what looked like a quick breakfast of oatmeal and ale.

Sebastian rasped one hand across his unshaven cheek. “I didn’t.”

Gibson grinned. “Neither did I.” He swung his wooden leg awkwardly over the bench and stood up. “Come see. I’ve a few things that might interest you.”

Following his friend along the weedy path, Sebastian took a last, deep breath of cold air and ducked his head to enter the small stone outbuilding that served Gibson as a dissection room. There was a dampness to the room that he didn’t remember from before, the dankness accentuating the pungent stench of death and decay.

“I spent a good hour simply washing the mud off her,” said Gibson, limping to the body that lay white and cold on the altarlike slab. Sebastian was glad to see the surgeon hadn’t actually started cutting yet. “The slices on her neck were made by a two-edged knife, probably a sword stick, such as a gentleman might carry hidden in his cane or walking stick.”

Sebastian nodded. He had such a walking stick himself. As did Hendon.

“It was done like this—” Gibson demonstrated by slashing his arm through the air, first one direction, then the other. “Your killer cut back and forth, over and over again.” He let his arm fall. “There must have been a fair amount of blood splattered around that chapel.”

“So I hear.” Sebastian studied the savagely hacked flesh of Rachel York’s neck, and remembered what his father had said, about being so covered in blood he’d had to throw away his greatcoat. Whoever had done this must have walked away from that church drenched in blood. As Leo Pierrepont had said, the attack had half severed the head from the neck. And Sebastian was left thinking, How had the Frenchman known that?

“Because of the way it was done,” Gibson was saying, “there are slashes running from both the left and the right. But if you look closely, you’ll see that the cuts made from left to right are longer and deeper, which tells us that the man you’re looking for is right-handed.”

“And fairly strong?”

Gibson shrugged. “She was a small woman. Any reasonably-sized man could have overpowered her, although she did fight him. She wanted desperately to live, this woman.” With remarkable gentleness, he picked up one of the hands lying so pale and still against the granite slab. “Look at how the nails are broken and torn here—and there,” he said, pointing. “Not only that, but I found traces of skin embedded beneath two of the remaining nails on her right hand.”

Sebastian glanced up in surprise. “You mean, she scratched him?”

“I’d say so, yes. But I suspect it was before he pulled the knife on her. There are no cuts on her hands.”

Sebastian ran his thoughts back over the men he had spoken to; none had borne signs of having been scratched—at least, not in any place that was visible. “So she probably scratched him while he was raping her.”

“I’m afraid not.” Paul Gibson laid Rachel’s hand back down on the cold stone. “She was raped after she died. Not before.”

“What? How can you be sure?”

The Irishman leaned over the body. “Look at the bruising around her wrists and on her forearms. You can see where she struggled against him. But there’s no sign of bruising on her thighs. There would be, if he’d been forcing her legs apart, holding her down. Nor is there any bruising on her feminine parts; only a slight inner abrasion that could have come after death.”

He swung away to pick up a shallow, enameled basin from the long, low table that stood beneath the small paned front window. “But this is the most telling piece of evidence,” he said, and Sebastian found himself staring at a torn piece of satin, now so stained with blood it was impossible to guess at its original color.

“Presumably, it’s from her dress. I found it inside her. He must have shoved it into her when he entered her. The minor abrasions she suffered from the rape couldn’t be the source of all this blood. This blood must be from her throat. Which means that by the time he mounted her, he’d already killed her.”

The damp cold of the room was starting to penetrate through the cheap wool of Sebastian’s coat. He brought his cupped hands up to his mouth and blew on them, his gaze drifting back to the still form lying on that slab. He was remembering what his father had said, about seeing the bloody fingerprints on her bare white thighs. And it hadn’t even clicked.

Sebastian let his hands fall to his side. “So he—what? Struggles with her, bruising her arms and wrists, maybe backhanding her across the face when she scratches him. He pulls a sword from his walking stick, slashes her throat, over and over again, killing her. And then he rapes her?”

Gibson nodded. “And picture this: the way he had hacked at her throat, she would have been wet with blood. They both would have been.”

Sebastian breathed a harsh sigh. “My God. What manner of man does such a thing?”

“A very dangerous one.” Gibson set aside the basin with a clatter that rang loudly in the cold room. “There’s a name for this particular form of depravity. It’s called necrophilia.”

Sebastian brought his gaze back to the savaged, naked body of the woman before them. He’d heard of it, of course. There were places in London that specialized in catering to every sort of vile perversion a man could imagine—sodomy, sadomasochism, pederasty. And this.

“So he killed her in order to rape her?” Sebastian said. And he thought, What if Kat was right? What if Rachel York was killed by someone who didn’t even know her? What if her death had nothing at all to do with who she was, with the men who had moved through her life, or even with the mysterious rendezvous she had scheduled that night with the Earl of Hendon? How could Sebastian hope to find her killer, then?

“Perhaps,” said Paul Gibson. “Then again, some men are sexually stimulated by the act of killing.” His soft gray eyes grew troubled with the shadow of old, ugly memories, his voice dropping to a pained, torn whisper. “As we both know.”

Sebastian nodded, not meeting his gaze. It was something they’d both seen too many times during the war, the brutal lust of soldiers, still bloody from battle and turned loose on the hapless women and children of a conquered city, or a farm that simply happened to have the misfortune to lie in the army’s path. There was something about the act of killing that could bring out everything primitive and not quite human within a man. Or was that kind of thinking a misconception, Sebastian wondered, born of human arrogance? Because this particular brand of selfishly cruel destructiveness was all too peculiarly human. Many beasts in the wild killed for food, for survival, but there were none who killed for the sadistic, sexual pleasure of it.

“So he could have killed her for some other reason entirely, and found the whole experience so exciting that he felt compelled to ease his lust on her dead body.”

The doctor nodded. “The inner abrasions are slight. He must have already been very excited when he entered her.” He hesitated, then said, “There is one other thing, which may or may not be pertinent. Did you notice the scars on her wrists?”

Sebastian leaned forward to study the blurred, faded outline of old scars encircling each of her wrists like bracelets. Sebastian had scars like that himself, from his days in Portugal: a legacy of twelve painful, bloody hours spent twisting his wrists against the tight bite of a binding rope.

“And look at this.” Reaching beneath one shoulder, Gibson rolled the body so that Sebastian could see the faint lines of white scars crisscrossing her slim, beautiful back. “Someone took a whip to her.”

“How long ago, would you say?”

“I’m not sure.” Gibson eased the body back down. “At least several years ago, I’d say.” He was moving around the room now, assembling instruments on a tray. “I might have more to tell you in a day or two, when I’ve had a chance to do the actual autopsy.”

Sebastian nodded, his gaze caught by the still, beautiful features of the woman before him. Her skin had been pale, even in life; now in the cold morning light she looked nearly blue, her full lips a surprisingly dark purple. “I want to rebury her when you’re finished,” he said.

Gibson came to stand beside him. He had stopped clattering his surgical tools. “All right.”

Sebastian kept his gaze on all that was left of Rachel York. Less than a week ago, she had been nothing to him—a name on a playbill, a pretty face only. Even after he’d been accused of her killing, his thoughts had all been for his own survival, his desire to find her killer driven by his own needs, not hers.

But at some point in the last few days, he realized, that had changed. Rachel York had been less than nineteen years old when she died; a young woman, alone and defenseless, battling to survive in a society that used and discarded its weak and unfortunate as if they were somehow less than human. And yet she had stubbornly refused to allow herself to become a victim. She had struggled against the odds, fought back, brave and determined . . . until someone, some man, had cornered her in the Lady Chapel of an ancient, deserted church and done this to her.

The world was full of ugliness, Sebastian knew that; ugliness, and ugly people. But you couldn’t let them win, those men who took what they wanted with never a thought or care for the ones who suffered and died as a result. You could never stop fighting them, never let them think that what they did was right or somehow justified. Never let them triumph unchallenged.

“You’ll have justice,” he whispered, although the woman before him was long past hearing, and he’d lost his belief in an all-knowing, benevolently attentive God long ago, on some battlefield in central Spain. “Whoever did this to you won’t get away with it. I swear it.”

He was suddenly aware of Paul Gibson standing beside him, a strange expression quirking up one corner of his lips. “And here I thought you’d given up believing in either justice or righteous causes.”

“I have,” said Sebastian, turning toward the door.

But his friend only smiled.