What Angels Fear

Chapter 33

By the time Sebastian neared Half Moon Street, the darkness was complete, the snow a heavy, dirty white blanket that seemed to smother the city. But at the French émigré’s elegant townhouse, golden light blazed from every window. Thick straw buried the granite setts that paved the street, and a red carpet stretched down the entry steps to the footpath. It was just past six, but already a crowd had begun to gather, ragged men and women and children huddled together against the cold. Some murmured darkly, but most were laughing and joking in excited anticipation. They were something of a spectacle, these grand galas put on by the ton; not quite as entertaining as a hanging, but considerably more magnificent than a balloon ascension.

“Monsieur Pierrepont’s having a ball tonight, is he?” asked Sebastian, snagging a half-grown lad in livery who came rushing past, his face flushed with self-importance.

“Aye. A masquerade,” said the boy, his eyes bright with as much excitement as if he were to be one of the guests.

Sebastian watched the boy dash off, then stood for a moment as a part of the crowd, his gaze drifting from one blazing window to the next.

He kept turning over in his mind what Hugh Gordon had told him, that Rachel York might have been passing information to the French through Leo Pierrepont. If it was true, if Rachel York had been involved in some kind of underhanded game with the French, then it cast her killing in a different light entirely.

And if it was true, then what was Sebastian’s father doing meeting with her, in secret, in the dark, deserted Lady Chapel of an out-of-the-way Westminster church?

It was just minutes to curtain time. Kat was hurrying down a backstage corridor when a strong hand closed around her arm from behind, drawing her back into the shadows.

“Sebastian.” Kat cast an anxious glance up the hall. “Why are you here? Someone might see you.”

“I need a costume.”

In the dim light of the oil lamp at the end of the corridor, she could see the rough cut of his coat, the touches of gray he’d added to his dark hair. “I’d have said you were already fairly effectively disguised.”

“I had something a bit more elegant in mind. Something in silk or satin.”

“Satin? Going to a ball, are you?”

“Something like that.”

He waited until just before midnight, when the crowd of costumed revelers would be at its thickest and a stray pirate wearing a loo-mask and a black domino over a black and gold satin doublet might pass unnoticed.

Creeping quietly through the snow blanketed back garden, Sebastian mingled for a moment amongst the couples braving the cold on the terrace, then slipped inside through one of the long French doors that opened to the ballroom.

He walked into a blast of warm air scented with beeswax and delicate French perfume and the pungent odor of hundreds of hot, damp bodies pressed together in a confined place. Above the roar of voices and genteel laughter, the sweet strains of a quadrille could be faintly heard coming from a small ensemble set up on a dais at the end of the room, where a few brave couples were attempting to dance through the crowd. Leo Pierrepont’s masquerade would undoubtedly be deemed a “sad crush,” which was a way of calling it a resounding success.

Weaving his way through Valkyries and Romeos, Arab princes and Renaissance ladies, Sebastian found himself in the hall, where a teasing conversation with a dimpled young housemaid provided him with the information that Monsieur Pierrepont’s library could be found at the foot of the stairs on the ground floor, near the back of the house.

The door to the library was closed. When he opened it, Sebastian could see why, for much of the furniture which had been cleared from the house’s reception rooms was obviously being stored in here. Shutting the door behind him, Sebastian threaded his way through looming piles of settees and rolled carpets and end tables to jerk back the heavy velvet drapes at the windows.

The lamps from the nearby terrace shone on the snow outside to suffuse the library with a pale, white glow. Turning, Sebastian cast an expert’s appraising eye around the room. About half the library’s walls were taken up by floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcases, while the open panels in between were covered with Pierrepont’s collection of broadswords and dueling rapiers, daggers and cutlasses, their carefully maintained blades gleaming in the night.

Sebastian searched the room quickly but methodically, looking for anything that might associate Leo Pierrepont with Napoleon’s government and the dirty, underhanded game of spying. He checked behind pictures and along the backs of the bookcases. He rifled expertly through desk drawers, and found nothing. Stymied, he perched on the edge of the desk.

His gaze fell on a small, carved wooden box, sitting on the desk’s green leather top. If you want to hide something, went the adage, display it in plain sight. Sebastian flipped open the box’s wooden lid, and smiled.

To the uninitiated, it was a simple if somewhat curious cylinder about six inches long and composed of a row of disks of white wood revolving on a central iron spindle. But to those who knew, it was a wheeled cipher, invented by an ingenious American named Thomas Jefferson. Each of the cylinder’s thirty-six disks contained the letters of the alphabet arranged randomly. If identical cylinders were used by two parties to encrypt and decipher their correspondence, the resulting code was virtually impossible to break.

Sebastian held the cylinder between his hands, thoughtfully twirling the disks with his thumbs as he considered its implications. The Americans themselves had, curiously enough, recently abandoned the Jefferson cipher in favor of a far less secure device, while the English preferred, stubbornly, to rely upon their Black Chamber with its invisible inks to safeguard their secret correspondence. But the former American president’s clever little invention remained in favor with the Americans’ old ally, France.

Sebastian turned his head, his attention caught suddenly by a faint sound. He had been aware all the while of footsteps rushing past in the hall outside as servants hurried to and fro. But he heard now a different stride, firmer and more deliberate; a tread that stopped abruptly before the library’s door.

Sebastian dropped the cylinder into an inner pocket just as the door opened abruptly to flood the darkened room with light.