What Angels Fear

Chapter 36

Sebastian was nursing a tankard of ale in the public room at the Rose and Crown when Tom burst in from the street, bringing with him a blast of icy air scented with coal smoke.

“I found ’er,” he said, his voice high and tight with exaltation. “I found yer Mary Grant. And she musta done weery well with that stuff she lifted from her old mistress, weery well indeed, ’cause she’s livin’ as high as you please—in Bloomsbury, no less.”

Rachel York’s erstwhile maid had taken rooms in a lodging house facing a respectable street just south of Russell Square. By the time Sebastian got there, the sky was a flat white that promised more snow before nightfall.

Conscious of a surge of anticipation and hope he tried to damp down, Sebastian climbed the neat staircase to the first floor. The door was to his left, as Tom had said it would be. But when Sebastian rapped sharply on the freshly painted panels, it creaked open beneath his touch.

“Miss Grant?” he called, his voice echoing in the stillness. He pushed the door open wider and stepped inside.

He was standing in a parlor filled with the cherrywood furniture and gilt-framed mirrors and expensive oddities that had once belonged to Rachel York. All had been thoroughly, savagely ransacked.

Mirrors and pictures had been torn from the walls and smashed; chairs lay overturned, their stuffing spilled out across the rumpled rug. Drawers had been pulled from bureaus, their contents strewn about in what appeared to have been a wild, frantic search.

Sebastian closed the door behind him with a snap that sounded unnaturally loud in the early afternoon hush. He walked from one room to the next. Impossible to know what the intruder had been searching for, or if he had found it. But when Sebastian entered the bedroom, he thought he knew at least part of the answer to that question. For here, only half the room lay in disarray; the rest had not been touched.

Sebastian walked to the chest of drawers that stood on the far side of the room, its bottom four drawers still intact. Lacy, feminine things spilled from the top drawer where it lay broken on the carpet. It was the logical place to have begun a search of this kind; women were always tucking secret things away amongst their undergarments. Whoever Mary Grant’s intruder was, he was obviously new to this game.

Sebastian hunkered down beside the broken drawer, his attention caught by the corner of what looked like a piece of blue paper that had fallen or been kicked so that it lay almost completely hidden beneath the chest’s frame. Easing the edge of the paper from beneath the wood, Sebastian found himself holding a blue envelope across which someone had written in a bold, masculine-looking scrawl, Lord Frederick Fairchild.

He was one of the most prominent, articulate Whigs in the House, Lord Frederick, urbane and witty and—unlike most of the Prince of Wale’s set—remarkably temperate. When the Prince was sworn in as Regent in a few days’ time, it was commonly assumed that Fairchild would be selected to help form the new Whig government.

Sebastian stared thoughtfully at the blue envelope in his hands. Here, surely, was the “F” referred to in Rachel York’s red leather-covered book. Could Lord Frederick even be the father of her unborn child? And maybe her murderer?

The room was cold, the fire on the hearth having been allowed to burn itself out. The sweet scent of lilac water hung heavy in the air, but beneath it Sebastian caught a hint of another odor, a sharp, metallic stench only too familiar to any man who’d ever gone to war.

With a sense of profound foreboding, he tucked the envelope into an inner pocket and stood up. The door to the dressing room stood half ajar. One hand on the pistol in his greatcoat pocket, Sebastian crossed the room to push the door open wider. . . .

And found himself looking at what was left of Mary Grant.