What Angels Fear

Chapter 31

Darkness came early that day, settling over the city with a heavy fall of snow.

Across the street from the lodging house where Hugh Gordon had rooms, Sebastian stomped his numb feet and watched the stocky, gray-haired woman who came in daily to “do” for the actor close the street door behind her and set off toward the Strand, the snow blanketing her head and shoulders with white as she hurried through the gathering gloom.

Sebastian waited while a coal cart trundled by, followed by a brewer’s wagon. Then he crossed the street, with each step easing himself into the persona of Cousin Simon Taylor from Worcestershire. By the time he stood outside Gordon’s door, his shoulders had slumped and he was twisting his hat anxiously in his hands as he waited for Gordon to answer his knock.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” said the actor, his lips pressing together in annoyance as he cast a distracted glance toward the ornate ormolu clock on his sitting room mantel. He kept the door open no more than a foot. “I don’t have a great deal of time at the moment—”

“It won’t take long,” said Sebastian, smiling hopefully.

Gordon hesitated, then pushed his breath out in a sigh and opened the door wider. “Very well. What is it?”

“I was wondering if perhaps you could clear up something for me,” said Sebastian, scooting through the door. “The thing is, you see, I was speaking with the very kind gentleman who owns the jewelry store across the street from Covent Garden Theater—you know the place, don’t you? The one with the new gaslights? Well, Mr. Touro was telling me—that’s the proprietor’s name, Mr. Jacob Touro?—he was telling me how Rachel was in his shop on the very afternoon she died. But what I find confusing, you see, is that while you told me that you hadn’t seen Rachel for the better part of six months, Mr. Touro says that you came in his shop that same afternoon and confronted Rachel.” Sebastian fixed the actor with an anxious gaze. “Actually, accosted is the word he used.”

Hugh Gordon returned Sebastian’s stare with a bland look. “Obviously, the man is mistaken.”

“Well, one might think so. Except, he’s a particular fan of yours, is Mr. Touro,” Sebastian continued, smiling amicably as he seated himself—without invitation—on a high-backed settee covered in burgundy brocade. “He says he hasn’t missed a one of your performances in the past five years. And I gather that Cousin Rachel was one of his best customers, if you know what I mean? So, of course, when he read the next day about what had happened to Rachel, he remembered the incident. Although I must assure you that he has no intention of telling the authorities about the argument, or the way you seized Rachel’s arm and threatened to kill her.”

Gordon stood in the middle of his ornate, burgundy, and lace-draped sitting room, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully, as if he were beginning to reassess his attitude toward Rachel’s Cousin Simon. “I never did any such thing.”

“You’re right: I exaggerate. According to Mr. Touro, the precise phrase you used was ‘Beat you within an inch of your life.’ ”

The actor was silent for a moment, as if considering whether to continue denying the meeting or to provide Sebastian with some abbreviated, distorted version of the truth. Abbreviated distortion won.

“Rachel owed me money,” he said, swinging away to pour himself a brandy from an ornate tray of heavy gold-rimmed glasses that looked as if it might have been part of the stage props for a production of the Arabian Nights. “She has owed it to me ever since she first started at the theater. She wasn’t making much in those days, so I provided her with everything she needed in the way of dresses and such. She always knew it was no gift.”

“I’m sure you were more than generous with her,” said Sebastian, his smile hard.

Gordon’s brows drew together in an exaggerated frown. Everything about the man was exaggerated, Sebastian decided, from the opulent, plush burgundy and gold trappings of his sitting room to his stentorian speech and theatrical gestures. One of the hazards, one might suppose, of always playing to a large, distant audience. “She used those dresses to sink her avaricious little talons into another man and leave me,” said the actor, his brandy-clutching hand waving expansively through the air. “What would you expect me to do? Just forget it?”

“You seem to have forgotten it for the better part of two years.”

Gordon shrugged. “A man has expenses.”

Sebastian studied the actor’s gaunt cheeks and shadowed, preoccupied eyes. It was a look one saw often these days in the gaming hells and clubs of London—the haunted look of a man who was badly dipped. “What’s your poison? Faro?”

A wry smile curved the actor’s full lips. “Actually, I’ve chosen hazard as my own particular road to perdition.”

Sebastian regarded the other man thoughtfully. Debt had a way of making people desperate. And a desperate man could be a dangerous man. “There are those who say you’ve a ready fist,” said Sebastian, “when it comes to women.”

Gordon drained his drink with one practiced flick of the wrist, then pointed a finger at Sebastian over the rim of the empty glass. “Women like a strong man, a man who knows how to keep them in their place. Don’t ever let anyone tell you different.”

Sebastian nodded, as if in agreement. “I can see how a man with a heavy hand might get carried away, sometimes. Maybe set out to teach a woman a lesson and end up going too far.”

Gordon slammed the empty glass down on a nearby table, his nostrils flaring wide with a quickly indrawn breath. “What are you suggesting? That I killed Rachel? What kind of a bloody fool do you take me for? Rachel owed me money. When I saw her on Tuesday afternoon, she swore she’d have it to me by Wednesday noon.” He ran one hand through his dark hair, his fingers splaying wide, gripping, his voice dropping suddenly to almost a whisper. “You can’t get money out of a dead woman.”

Sebastian was remembering what Kat had told him, about the young man who’d been seen letting himself into Rachel’s rooms early Wednesday morning. Hugh Gordon was in his mid-thirties, but a woman in her eighties would surely describe him as young. “I’m not so sure about that,” said Sebastian. “If you know a woman has money and she’s refusing to pay what she owes, you can always go to her rooms and collect the debt yourself. If she’s dead.”

Gordon let his hand fall. “Good God. Now I’m a thief, as well as a murderer?”

Sebastian kept his gaze on the other man’s face. “Where were you Tuesday night?”

“I was here. At home. Studying my lines.”

“Alone?”

“I work best alone.” He glanced again at the ormolu clock on the ornate mantel. “Look, I have a performance that starts at seven. We just opened last night and I need to—”

“Relax.” Sebastian gave the man a slow, mean smile. “You’ve plenty of time.”

Gordon met Sebastian’s steady gaze. “You’re not Rachel’s cousin, are you?” His brows twitched together. “What are you? Some sort of Bow Street Runner?”

Sebastian smiled. “Something like that.” It was even, in a sense, true, he thought; he was certainly running from Bow Street.

Gordon swung away to jerk the burgundy velvet drapes closed against the growing cold. “She was an unusual woman, Rachel,” he said suddenly, one hand still gripping the heavy cloth as if he were struggling to put his thoughts into words. “There wasn’t much she was afraid of. She told me once that fear made a person vulnerable and she refused to ever be vulnerable again. But I’d noticed lately that she was nervous, jumpy—as if she’d suddenly found herself over her head in something and wasn’t quite certain how she was going to get out of it.”

Sebastian watched the other man turn away from the window. “Something like—what?”

“Actually, I’m beginning to wonder if Rachel wasn’t passing information to the French.”

“The French?” It was the last thing Sebastian had expected. “What makes you say that?”

“Look at the men she chose.” Hugh Gordon brought his hands up together in a gesture reminiscent of Moses Preaching to the Masses, and Sebastian knew then that the affectation of a confidence suddenly shared was an act, that whether it was true or not, this was information Hugh Gordon had deliberately decided to impart—probably with the specific intention of deflecting suspicion from himself. “Usually there’s a pattern with women. One will go after men with money, another likes the pretty boys, the dandies and pinks, while another is mad about any man with a title. Not Rachel. The men she selected tended to work in the Foreign Office, like Sir Albert. Or they were close to the King, like Lord Grimes. Once she even had an admiral in tow.”

Admiral Worth. Sebastian had heard his name along with that of Sir Albert and Lord Grimes and others whispered in the streets. As he ran through the names, he realized it was true, that Rachel York’s noble lovers shared this one, common trait: all were privy to information which could prove very useful if it were to fall into the wrong hands.

“You make no secret of having shared Rachel’s republican principles,” said Sebastian. “Have the French ever approached you?”

He expected angry denials and heated, patriotic rhetoric. Instead, Gordon met Sebastian’s questioning gaze and said simply, “However much I might wish to see changes here, I’m still an Englishman. I would never betray my own country.”

“But you think Rachel could?”

Gordon lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Rachel had a lot of anger in her, a lot of hate—both because of the things that had been done to her in her own life, and because of what she saw happening to others around her. She spent one afternoon a week working as a volunteer at St. Jude’s Foundling Home. Did you know that? She used to say that Napoleon might have betrayed the Revolution, but what the French had was still better than what most people have here.”

Sebastian studied the other man’s high-browed, aesthetic face. Hugh Gordon was an actor, a man who made a living out of making people believe a lie. Not for an instant would Sebastian ever trust him. But for all his posturing, his words had a ring of sincerity to them, and that terrible weight of plausibility that can come with an unlooked-for truth.

Outside, the wind gusted up, driving a flurry of snow against the windowpanes with a violence that sounded unnaturally loud in the sudden silence. He realized Gordon was watching him with narrowed, assessing eyes. “You don’t believe me, do you? Yet you have by now surely verified that what I told you before was true, that Leo Pierrepont was paying the rent on Rachel’s rooms.”

“What would you have me believe? That Leo Pierrepont acts as Napoleon’s agent?”

“Nothing as simple as that. Leo Pierrepont is what I think they call a spy master.”

Sebastian pushed to his feet. “Leo Pierrepont’s family lost everything they owned fleeing the Revolution twenty years ago.”

Gordon gave a tight little smile. “Pierrepont fled the Revolution and the Republic. But France is no longer a republic, now is it?”

The point was well made. The bloody, fervent days of the Republic and the Year II belonged to the past. Lately, more and more émigré families had been making their peace with France’s new emperor, swearing allegiance to the new government of France and reclaiming old estates. Sebastian eyed the other man, assessing. “It’s an easy enough accusation to make. Where’s your proof?”

“Men as good as Pierrepont don’t leave proof.”

“Indeed. Yet the last time I spoke to you, you would have me believe Leo Pierrepont was Rachel’s lover.”

Hugh Gordon’s smile widened into something at once genuine and vaguely scornful. “Actually, I believe I said the authorities would do well to look into Rachel’s association with him. I don’t recollect calling him her lover. That was your own assumption.”