What Angels Fear

Chapter 39

Donatelli was in his studio when Sebastian came through the door.

The artist half turned, his slack mouth agape with shock, the breath whooshing out of him when Sebastian’s shoulder caught him in the gut and brought him down.

“What are you doing? What do you want from me?” the Italian managed to gasp, before Sebastian shoved his forearm up beneath the man’s chin, cutting off his air.

“I understand you’ve been buying yourself some half-longs,” said Sebastian through gritted teeth. “Is that the way you like your women, hmm? You like it when they don’t move, don’t talk back, don’t even breathe?”

Donatelli’s angelic brown eyes went wide. He tried to speak, but all he could get out was a gurgle.

Sebastian eased the pressure on the man’s throat just enough to let him gasp, “No! It’s nothing like that. I do medical illustrations.”

Sebastian made as if to increase his pressure on the man’s throat again. “Gammon.”

“No! I swear it’s true. My last commission was for the female torso.” He made as if to push up from the floor, then went limp again, his features twitching with fear, when Sebastian brought up the small flintlock and laid the muzzle against the man’s temple.

Donatelli licked his lips, his eyes rolling sideways in an effort to watch Sebastian’s finger on that trigger. “If you let me go, I’ll show you. They’re in the back room.”

Sebastian hesitated, then let the man up.

Donatelli’s hand crept to his throat. “Mother of God, you could have killed me.”

Sebastian leveled the flintlock at the artist’s chest. “The illustrations.”

Donatelli nodded. “They’re back here.” He staggered toward the other room. “See?” They were a series of perhaps a dozen, rendering in meticulous detail the torso of a woman in various stages of dismemberment, from a variety of angles.

“I work with a medical student from St. Thomas’s,” said Donatelli, his voice still hoarse, strained. “He does the dissections while I sketch.”

“Now why would a painter who’s suddenly become Society’s newest discovery need to be hawking anatomy sketches to medical journals?”

Donatelli twitched one shoulder in a very Mediterranean shrug. “I began doing it for extra money when I was painting scenes at the theater. I keep it up because it improves my ability to realistically render the human form. I’m not the only painter who studies cadavers. Look at Fragonard.”

Sebastian turned away from the bloody renderings. “Where were you the night Rachel York was killed?” The illustrations might provide the artist with a plausible excuse for buying female human cadavers, but that was all.

The Italian’s eyes went wide. “Me? But . . . Surely you don’t believe that I killed Rachel?”

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

“Why, here, of course. Painting.”

“Anyone with you?”

The Italian tightened his jaw. “No.”

Sebastian paused, his attention caught by a nearby small canvas. It looked like a study for a larger painting, a family portrait. The grouping was of a man and three women, each at a different stage in her life. The matriarch of the family sat in the center. She was thin and wrinkled and stooped with age, but her eyes still shone with such determination and pride that she completely overshadowed the woman to her left, a pale, vacant-faced lady of middle years who was undoubtedly the man’s wife. On the other side, the family’s brown-haired, plain-faced daughter, who looked to be in her early twenties, stared at something just out of sight, as if to disassociate herself from the others. And towering above them all, his arms spread as if both to protect the women and to dominate them, stood a large, jowly man with a florid complexion and fiercely staring eyes that Sebastian recognized as Charles, Lord Jarvis.

Sebastian glanced up to find the artist watching him nervously. “You’re doing a portrait of Lord Jarvis’s family?”

“That’s the study. The portrait itself was finished last spring.”

“When you were still painting theatrical scenery?”

A muscle ticked along the side of Donatelli’s jaw. “Lord Jarvis is known for his generous encouragement of new artists. He’s the man responsible for bringing me to the attention of the ton.”

Sebastian looked back at the family grouping. He was aware of a shadow of a thought flitting about the edges of his consciousness. But when he tried to reach for it, it simply floated away, a pale, mocking chimera that was there, and then gone.

The small flintlock still in hand, Sebastian continued about the room, studying the various canvases propped against the walls, looking for something that would tie all the strange, disparate threads of Rachel’s life and death together.

He stopped suddenly before a haunting painting of a young girl, her wrists tied together over her head, her naked body twisted in agony, her eyes cast heavenward as if to beseech her god for mercy. As he looked closer, Sebastian realized that the girl was Rachel, only younger. Much younger. “That’s Rachel York, isn’t it? As a child.”

Giorgio Donatelli was looking, not at the painting, but at him. “You’re the merchant who was here on Friday. You look different, but the features are the same.” His brows drew together in a troubled frown. “You asked about Rachel then, too. Why?”

There were probably half a dozen things Sebastian could have said. He decided to use the truth. “Because I’m trying to find out who killed her.”

“They say they know who did it. A viscount named Devlin.”

“I am Devlin.”

Sebastian wasn’t sure how he expected the other man to react. Donatelli glanced down at the pistol Sebastian still held in his hand, then away, and nodded once, as if he’d somehow come to this conclusion himself.

“Rachel used to talk to me sometimes,” he said, jerking his chin toward the canvas, “when I was painting her. She’d tell me about her life, about when she first came to London. And before. It’s what gave me the idea for this painting.”

“Her life in Worcestershire?”

Donatelli’s eyes shone dark and fierce. “She was only thirteen when her father died. Her mother was already dead and she had no relatives willing to take her in, so she was thrown on the parish. They sold her as a housemaid.” He sucked in a deep breath that flared his nostrils and expanded his chest. “They do that here, you know. You English, you talk so fine, looking down your noses at the Americans and prosing on about the sin and inhumanity of their African trade. And yet you sell your own children into slavery.”

He paused. “They sold her to a fat old merchant and his wife. She was mad, that woman. Sick in her head. She used to tie Rachel to a post in the cellar and lay her bare back open with a whip.”

Sebastian stared down at the naked, frightened girl in the painting. He was remembering the thin, crisscrossing bands of white lines Paul Gibson had found on Rachel’s back, and the scars on her wrists.

“But what the merchant did to her was even worse.” Donatelli’s voice trembled with emotion. “He used Rachel as his whore. A thirteen-year-old girl child, and he bent her over his desk and took her from behind like a dog.”

“A woman who’s been through something like that, I wouldn’t think she’d have much use for men,” said Sebastian softly.

“She learned to do what she needed to survive.”

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

Donatelli’s gaze shifted away. “No. She never mentioned it.”

“But you knew she was with child.”

It was said as a statement, not a question. To Sebastian’s surprise, Donatelli’s eyes went wide, his lips parting as if on a sudden gasp of fear. “How do you know that?”

“I know. Who was the father? You?”

“No!”

“Who then? Lord Frederick?”

“Lord Frederick?” Donatelli gave a short, sharp laugh. “Hardly. The man’s a Bulgarus.”

It was an old term, Bulgarus; an old term for a man with certain tendencies that were as old as time. Sebastian’s first inclination was to reject the accusation out of hand. Except that Donatelli was too passionate, too transparent to be much of a liar. And it didn’t sound like a lie. “If that’s true, then why was he involved with Rachel?”

“He wasn’t. She was his—how do you say it? His cover. He paid her for the use of her rooms so that he could meet his lover there. A young clerk.”

It was a common enough ruse, especially amongst those in espionage and government: cover up one secret by disguising it as another, a secret so spicy and naughty that if anyone should happen to discover it, they’d never think to look beyond it to the real, more dangerous truth it was intended to disguise. Thus, if Lord Frederick’s visits to Rachel York’s rooms were to become known, people would automatically assume that he’d set up the young actress as his mistress. Shocking, of course, but a common enough activity for a man of his age and wealth. Society would titter and gossip about it, but no one would ever think to look beyond it to the real secret that would destroy him, if it were to become known.

The problem with those kinds of arrangements, however, was that they left one vulnerable to blackmail. And blackmail was often a motive for murder. Except . . . Except that it was hard to imagine a man whose tastes ran to young male lovers being so physically aroused by the act of killing as to rape the dead bodies of his female victims.

Sebastian’s gaze fell on another of Donatelli’s paintings, the one of Rachel as an odalisque, preparing for her bath. For the first time he noticed that the painting also contained the figure of a man, peering out at her from behind a nearby planting of pleached orange trees.

“Tell me again about Bayard Wilcox,” said Sebastian suddenly. “You said he used to watch Rachel, follow her around. But he never actually approached her?”

“Not until last Saturday.”

Sebastian looked up in surprise. “Saturday?”

“At Steven’s in Bond Street. We went there after the play—a group of mainly theater people. At about half past eleven, Bayard arrived with some of his fellow aristos.” Donatelli’s angelic features quivered with remembered revulsion and disgust. “They were falling down drunk. Propping each other up. Laughing like idiots. Then Bayard, he saw Rachel. He went quiet all of a sudden and left the others to come lean against a nearby column and stare at her in that way he had. His friends tried to pry him away, but he wouldn’t budge. So they started teasing him. Said he must be some kind of a eunuch, to stand around simply looking at a woman the way he did. They said that if he had any balls, he’d walk up to her and tell her how he felt about her.”

“So he did?”

Donatelli nodded. “Walked right up and told her he wanted to fuck her. In those exact words. She threw her punch in his face.”

“What did Bayard do?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it. One minute he was blubbering all over himself, saying she was like a goddess to him, and how he couldn’t think of anything but what it would be like to have her naked and beneath him. Then she threw the punch in his face and it was as if he turned into someone else. I mean, his face actually changed—his eyes scrunched together and his lips curled back and his skin grew dark. It was as if he were possessed by someone else. Someone evil.”

Sebastian nodded. He knew what Donatelli was talking about. He’d seen that kind of a change come over Bayard, even when he was a boy.

“If we hadn’t been there,” Donatelli was saying, “I think he’d have killed her on the spot with his bare hands. We had to physically hold him back until his friends finally dragged him away. You could still hear him screaming when he was outside, spewing the most vile obscenities. Saying he was going to kill her.”

“He said that? That he wanted to kill her?”

Donatelli nodded, his face ashen and strained. “He said he’d rip her head off.”