What Angels Fear

Chapter 35

She sat in the battered old chair beside the hearth, her head tipped back so that the firelight played over the elegant curve of her long, graceful neck and brought out the hint of auburn in her dark hair. She had worn a cherry red velvet opera cloak that now lay discarded on a nearby table, but she had come to him still dressed in the costume of her character, Rosalind.

“You picked the lock, I suppose.” Sebastian closed the door behind him and leaned back against it.

“It’s a very old lock,” said Kat Boleyn, the barest hint of a smile touching the edges of her lips.

He pushed away from the door and walked toward her. “Why did you come?”

“You left your clothes at the theater. I brought them.”

He didn’t bother to ask how she had found him here, at the Rose and Crown. She would have her ways, as he had his. It was a danger he had both acknowledged and accepted when he first decided to approach her.

“You’re hurt,” she said when he came to stand before her, close enough that his legs almost touched hers, but not quite.

“I went through a window.”

“Leo found you, did he?”

“What makes you think I went to see Pierrepont?”

“There weren’t that many masquerades in Mayfair tonight.” She shifted subtly in her seat, so that her thigh just brushed his. “What sent you there?”

“According to Hugh Gordon, Pierrepont is a French spy master.”

She sat very still and quiet for a moment, then said, “And do you believe him?”

Sebastian shrugged. “Gordon had no proof, of course. But I found a code cipher in Pierrepont’s library.” What Hendon had told Sebastian, he would keep to himself.

“What has any of this to do with Rachel?”

Sebastian turned away to swing off his cloak and hang it on a hook beside the bed. “I think she might have been passing Pierrepont information. She seems to have shared her favors with an interesting collection of men. Men in positions to know tidbits they might easily let slip, things like troop movements and shifting alliances and the thinking of those close to the King.”

“They say someone stole Rachel’s body from the churchyard,” she said. “Was it you?”

“Yes.”

Any other woman would have felt the need to affect a feminine display of shock and horror. Not Kat. She watched him strip off his doublet and shirt, then go splash cold water from the basin over his blood-encrusted face and neck. “What do you expect to learn from it?”

The room’s towel was coarse and stiff, and he dabbed gently around his cuts. “I don’t know. But I’ve already learned one interesting little fact: whoever killed Rachel York slit her throat first. Then he sexually assaulted her.”

“That’s a nasty little perversion.”

Sebastian tossed aside the towel. “What kind of man likes to have sex with a dead woman?”

“A man who hates women, I should think.”

Sebastian looked down at the bloodstains he’d left on the old towel. He hadn’t thought of it that way, that Rachel’s rape was an act of hate rather than lust, but he suspected Kat was right. Whoever killed Rachel York had taken joy in her destruction, had been sexually aroused by the act of slitting her pale throat and watching the life ebb slowly from her pretty brown eyes. Most men felt the need for at least some measure of response in the women with whom they copulated—it was, after all, the reason behind a prostitute’s little moans and gasps of simulated pleasure. But Rachel York’s killer was the kind of man who could find his release in the unresponsive, empty shell of what had once been a living, breathing woman.

Sebastian thought about the significant men in Rachel’s life, about Hugh Gordon and Giorgio Donatelli and Leo Pierrepont. Were any of them that twisted, that consumed by hatred for women? Or how about the others, that continually shifting parade of well-placed men such as Admiral Worth and Lord Grimes from whom she had, perhaps, coaxed sensitive information? Suspicion of all things feminine—one could easily label it a basic dislike of women—was so common as to be almost a tradition amongst the gentlemen of England, with their elite boys’ schools and stuffy men’s clubs and addiction to such masculine sports as boxing and cockfighting and hunting. But it didn’t lead most of them into murder and mutilation. What kind of man crossed that line? When did mistrust and dislike shade into something darker, something dangerous and evil?

Sebastian listened to the flutter of the wind beneath the eaves. He knew it again, that fear that he was never going to find Rachel York’s killer, that the man who had slit her throat and indulged his lust on her dead, bloodied body was some chance stranger, a random shadow from the night that Sebastian was never, ever going to track down.

He heard a whisper of movement, a rustle of cloth. Kat came to stand before him, her touch gentle as she cradled his face between her hands. “You’ll find him,” she said softly, as if he had spoken his fears out loud. “You’ll find him.” And even though he knew she spoke out of a need to reassure rather than from conviction, he found comfort in her words. Comfort, and the echo of an old but never forgotten desire in her touch.

He caught her to him, his fingers twisting in the dusky fall of her hair. His mouth sought and found hers, her breath coming now as rapid and shallow as his. He kissed her eyes and touched the smooth, warm flesh of her neck, and felt his body quicken with a need that was more than physical.

With increased urgency, his lips captured hers again. A shower of hot coals settled with a murmur on the hearth beside them as he bore her down on the bed, her arms wrapping around his neck, her body rising up to meet his touch.

Fevered hands tore away cloth, found the pleasures of smooth warm flesh beneath sliding fingers. And in that moment, he didn’t care about the nature of her association with Leo Pierrepont. He didn’t even care about the things she had said on that dark day six years before. He needed her.

With a soft sigh, Sebastian buried himself inside her. They moved as one, slowly at first, the tempo rising as he felt the coldness and the fear inside him fade away into the gentle rhythms of her body and the warmth of her keening breath mingling with his.

Afterward, he lay on his back in the firelit softness of the night. He held her nestled close, kissed her hair, listened to the sounds of the city settling to sleep around them, the distant rumble of a lone carriage and, nearer, the slamming of a shutter. He let his hand drift down her side, over the naked swell of her hip, and breathed in the unforgettably warm and heady fragrance of this woman.

After a time, she shifted her weight, rising up on her elbow so she could look down at him. She said, “What would an angel fear?”

He laughed softly, running his hand up her bare arm to her shoulder. “What kind of question is that?”

She traced an invisible pattern across his naked chest with her fingertip. “I was thinking of that line from Pope—you know the one? ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’ What would an angel have to fear?”

“Falling from grace, I suppose. I don’t know. I don’t believe in angels.”

“An immortal being, then. What could an immortal being possibly fear?”

He thought about it for a while. “Making a wrong decision, I would think; choosing badly. Imagine having to live with that for an eternity.” He turned his head to look at her profile, beautiful and unexpectedly serious in the firelight. “Why? What do you think an angel would fear?”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Love. I think an angel would fear falling in love with a mortal—someone who could be theirs for only a short time and then would slip away forever.”

He caught her to him, his elbow hooking behind her neck to bring her down to his kiss. This time when they came together, there was an edge to her lovemaking, a quiet kind of desperation that he noted, even if he could not understand it.

Sometime before dawn he awoke to the gentle patter of her footsteps on the worn floorboards, the rustle of cloth as she moved about, dressing. He could have said something, could have reached for her, stopped her.

He let her go, the door easing closed behind her on a breath of cold air.

Then he simply lay there, staring into nothingness and waiting for the coming of dawn.

By the next morning the snow had turned into a dirty brown slush that dripped off eaves and ran in wide rivulets down the center of unpaved streets.

Avoiding the steady rush of water sluicing from broken gutters and sagging awnings, Sebastian made his way to St. Jude’s Foundling Home, on the south bank of the Thames, near Lambeth. The Home turned out to be a large, gloomy structure built some two centuries before of the same red Tudor brick and in the same forbidding, fortresslike style as Hampton Court. Except that the Foundling Home was, of course, considerably less well kept than Hampton Court.

“I don’t know how much I can help you,” said the prune-faced matron when Sebastian presented himself to her in the guise of Cousin Simon Taylor from Worcestershire. “Miss York always came in on Mondays, which is my day off.”

The pursing of the mouth with which Matron Snyder spat out the name Miss York said much about the nature of the two women’s dealings with one another. She was a hard-faced woman, Matron Snyder, with a solid build and a massive, shelflike bosom. If she had ever been young or pretty, her disposition had long ago stamped out all traces of such earlier failings.

“Had it been up to me, of course,” said the matron, “her kind would never have been allowed through the Home’s doors.”

Sebastian pursed his own lips and nodded in sympathetic agreement.

“I suppose the Reverend Finley might be able to tell you something,” said Matron Snyder, unbending a shade. “Miss York was quite a favorite of his.”

“Reverend Finley?” Sebastian felt a quickening of interest. Until now, he’d found no trace of the mysterious “F” who appeared twice in the pages of Rachel’s appointment book. But if Rachel had developed a romantic interest in the Home’s young spiritual counselor, it did much to explain her continued visits to the place.

Mrs. Snyder’s mouth pursed again. Obviously, she didn’t approve of Reverend Finley, either. “If you hurry, you might find him in the courtyard. He often visits with the children there on Sunday mornings, before services.”

The courtyard was a cheerless, windswept place of cracked walks and patchy grass showing brown beneath the dirty remnants of last night’s snow. Turning up his collar against the cold, Sebastian walked across the neglected quadrangle, toward the group of pinch-faced children he could see clustered at the far end in a rare slice of thin winter sunshine. As he neared the group, he realized they were gathered around a man who was telling them a story about a lion and a rabbit; a thin, stoop-shouldered old man, his balding pink pate fringed with white hair, a pair of thick spectacles perched on the end of his long, thin nose.

Sebastian hung back, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his cheap greatcoat, a smile tugging at his lips as he watched the old reverend hold that band of ragged charity children enthralled with the simple power of his words. Whatever had been the nature of Rachel’s relationship with this man, it obviously wasn’t romantic.

“Terrible business, what happened to Rachel,” said Reverend Finley when, his story ended, he hurried the children toward the chapel and turned to listen to Sebastian’s introduction. “Such a tragedy.”

“Had she volunteered here for long?” Sebastian asked as the two men turned to walk together.

The old reverend peeled the wire-rimmed glasses off his face and rubbed his reddened eyes. “Nearly three years. Which is more than most women can take around here. They always start out full of such determination and good intentions, but it gets to them after a while. So many of the wee ones die, you see. I’ve never quite been able to understand it myself. But Rachel, she had this theory, that they died from a lack of love. And so she’d come every Monday afternoon and spend time holding each of the poor babes in turn. Just hold them. Sing to them.”

Sebastian stared off across the snowy courtyard to where the Matron Snyder was bustling about, getting the children lined up two by two at the chapel doors. “An unusual activity for such a woman, surely?”

“You mean, for a successful actress?” The old reverend lifted one thin shoulder in a shrug. “Rachel was an unusual woman. Most people, when they have the good fortune to pull themselves up from a bad situation, they soon forget where they came from. Rachel didn’t.”

“But Rachel was never a foundling.”

“No. But she knew what it was like to be a child alone and friendless in this world.” The reverend paused, his features pinched and troubled. “I sometimes wonder . . .”

“Wonder what?”

At the end of the quadrangle, the chapel’s lone bell began to ring, a solemn, steady toll. The old man’s eyes narrowed as he stared up at the small spire above them. “This past month or so, Rachel seemed different somehow. Preoccupied. It was almost as if she were afraid of something. But I never said anything to her about it. These last few days, after what happened . . . Well, I can’t help but wonder if I made a mistake. If perhaps I could have helped her in some way, if I had only asked.”

“You don’t have any idea what she was afraid of?”

Finley shook his head. “No. I wish she had confided in me, but she didn’t.”

“Did you know she was planning to leave London?”

The old man glanced around in surprise. “No. I’d no notion.”

“Any thoughts as to where she might have been planning to go?”

He considered this for a moment, but shook his head. “No. I could hardly see her going back to Worcestershire.”

No, Sebastian thought; she wouldn’t have gone back to Worcestershire. “Was there a man in her life, do you think? A man she maybe was afraid of?”

Most of the children were in the chapel now. Only three or four stragglers remained, hurried along by Matron Snyder, who cast a quick, disapproving glance at the two men.

The Reverend Finley turned toward the open chapel doors. “We never spoke of such things, of course, but I’d have said yes, Rachel was in love with someone—although I don’t think it was anyone she was afraid of. She had that look a woman gets when she’s happy in love.” A sad, almost wistful smile touched the old man’s lips. “You might think I’m too old to recognize that look, but we were all young once, you know.”

Sebastian walked through the cold, windblown streets of Lambeth to the banks of the Thames, where he took a scull that carried him across the river to the steps just below Tower Hill. From there it was but a short distance to Paul Gibson’s surgery.

He found his friend wrapped in a tattered quilt and sitting in a cracked leather armchair beside the parlor fire, his staring gaze fixed on the glowing coals.

“Leg bad, is it?” said Sebastian, sinking onto the ragged chair opposite.

“A wee bit.” Gibson looked up, his eyes bright with the unholy fires of the opium eater. It was an addiction far too many wounded men carried home with them from the war. Normally the Irishman could keep his compulsion under control, but there were times when memories of what he’d seen in the war would loom unbearable or the remnants of shrapnel in his leg would twist and bleed, and he would disappear for days into a drug-induced fog. “But I’ve finished your postmortem, never fear.”

“And?”

Gibson shook his head. “Nothing more, I’m afraid. If she’d been brought to me directly, there might have been some sort of evidence. But as it is. . .”

Sebastian nodded, swallowing his disappointment. He’d known it was a long shot. “I was wondering if you could get in touch with Jumpin’ Jack for me.”

“Cochran?” Gibson huffed a soft laugh. “Looking to steal another body, are you?”

Sebastian grinned and shook his head. “It’s information I’m interested in this time. I’m wondering if those in the resurrection trade have heard of anyone expressing a specific interest in female corpses.”

Paul Gibson nodded thoughtfully. “Think to come at your man from that angle, do you?”

“It’s worth a try.” Sebastian pushed to his feet, his hand grasping his friend’s shoulder for a moment before he turned toward the door. “I’ll drop by again in a few days. See how you’re getting on.”

He was reaching for the knob when Gibson stopped him by saying, “There is one thing my more complete examination of the body did reveal. It may or may not have a bearing on your investigation.”

Sebastian swung back around. “What was that?”

“Rachel York was in what the ladies refer to as a delicate situation.”

Sebastian felt a sudden twist, deep down in his gut. He thought about what the Reverend Finley had told him, about Rachel York coming to St. Jude’s Foundling Home every Monday afternoon to hold the babies and sing to them, so that they wouldn’t die from lack of love. Had she known? And if she had known, what must her last thoughts have been, when she felt her killer’s knife slash across her throat, again and again?

“How far along was she?” Sebastian asked, his voice oddly hoarse.

“Almost three months, I’d say. Enough that she would surely have known she was carrying a child.”