What Angels Fear

Chapter 51

Lord Frederick’s butler seized the brass handle of the library door, his eyes going wide. “It’s locked.”

Sebastian thrust the man aside and kicked out hard. The wood splintered beneath his boot heel and the door slammed open against the wall with a shattering crash.

The room beyond lay in semidarkness. The fire in the grate had been allowed to burn low, and someone had drawn the heavy brocade drapes across the windows. The only light came from a flickering brass oil lamp on the desk, the frosted glass shade casting a soft glow over what was left of Lord Frederick Fairchild.

He lay sprawled back at an unnatural angle in his desk chair, one hand dangling limply toward the carpet. Blood was everywhere—on the polished wooden desktop, on the tufted leather chair, the bookcases and paneled walls beyond. Sebastian thought, at first, that the man who had killed Rachel York and Mary Grant must somehow have made it here to this house before him. Then his gaze fell on the neat little ivory-handled pistol still gripped in Lord Frederick’s clenched hand, and he understood.

Swiping a trickle of mingling rainwater and sweat from his face, Sebastian crossed the room’s Oriental carpet to jerk open the drapes at the windows overlooking the rear garden. The pale light of a rainy winter’s afternoon suffused the room. Fairchild had held the pistol’s muzzle against his temple, shattering the right side of his head into a bloody, pulpy mess. Sebastian was just turning from the window when the man’s chest jerked, his mouth opening as he sucked in air and breathed. He’d blown away the better part of the side of his skull, so that Sebastian could see the shiver of the man’s brain beneath the white bone of his skull and the torn, bloody flesh of his scalp. But he wasn’t dead yet.

“Merciful heavens,” said the butler with a startled gasp, one fist pressing against his lips as he fled the room. From the hall came the sound of someone violently retching.

Lord Frederick took another labored breath. “Should have put the damned muzzle in my mouth,” he whispered.

Sebastian hunkered down beside him. “Do you know who I am?”

A flicker of recognition showed in the man’s eyes. “He had one of my letters. One of my letters to Wesley.”

“Who? Who has the letters?”

“Jarvis.” The man’s shattered head moved restlessly against the bloody leather of his chair. “Showed it to the Prince. Said it had been found amongst Leo Pierrepont’s papers . . . that I was working with Pierrepont to go behind the Prince’s back and make peace with France.” His next breath rattled in his throat. “Not true. Never betrayed my country. Never would . . .”

“But the Prince believed it?”

The man’s eyes squeezed shut as if in a spasm of pain, his voice fading. “Jarvis . . . Jarvis said if I didn’t go quietly, he’d see the letter was made public. Couldn’t let Elizabeth . . . My little girl . . . Ruin her.”

Sebastian leaned forward, one hand wrapping around the chair’s leather-padded arm. “The letter—how did Jarvis get it?”

Fairchild’s eyes stared back at him, wide and sightless.

Sebastian sat back on his heels, his hand still gripping the chair’s arm. He became aware, suddenly, of the insistent shrill of a constable’s whistle and the butler’s voice shouting, “There. He’s in there. In the library.”

Sebastian was on his feet, tossing up one of the rear windows, when he heard the sound of running footsteps crossing the marbled hall. He threw one leg over the windowsill.

“You there! Stop! Stop, I say!”

Slipping through the window, Sebastian landed lightly in a bed of wet, freeze-browned foliage and darkly sodden earth, and broke into a run.

Charles, Lord Jarvis, startled his valet by returning to Berkeley Square shortly before four that afternoon. He wasn’t a physically vain man, Jarvis, but the events at Carlton House that evening would be particularly momentous. And in an age that placed inordinate importance upon appearance, a wise man attended to such things.

Donning knee breeches and silk stockings with a swallow-tailed coat, he resisted his valet’s efforts to lighten his florid complexion with a hint of powder, and made his way downstairs to his library. Jarvis might keep chambers in St. James’s Palace and Carlton House, but his most important papers were here, in Berkeley Square.

He had to admit that he’d been mildly worried at one point, that the sensational manner of that girl’s death might create difficulties. But in the end all had gone off essentially as planned. The looming danger of a Whig government had been averted; Perceval and the Tories would remain in power and the war against atheism, republicanism, and the forces of evil would continue.

Pausing at the base of the stairs, Jarvis lifted a pinch of snuff to his nostrils and breathed in deeply, sighing with satisfaction. There were those, he knew, who couldn’t understand why he resisted the Prince’s strenuous efforts to convince Jarvis himself to form a government. But Jarvis understood what most did not: that men who align themselves openly with one party or policy thereby lose any semblance of objectivity, and that those who seek to exercise their power through office all too often find themselves out of office and therefore out of power. Jarvis’s allegiance was to Britain and her king, not to any party or ideology, and he had no need for the petty flattery and pomp of a premiership. His dominance rested not on some fleeting government position, but on the supremacy of his intellect and the strength of his personality and the selfless wisdom of his unswerving devotion to his country and its monarchy.

Tucking the snuffbox back into his coat pocket, Jarvis opened his library door, surprised to find the heavy drapes at the window still open to the cold, darkening afternoon. A whisper of movement jerked his gaze to his desk, where a young man stood, a roughly-dressed young man with a mud-smeared, rain soaked coat and a neat little Cassaignard pistol.

“Unexpected, but fortuitous,” said Viscount Devlin, his strange amber eyes gleaming as he leveled the pistol at Jarvis’s chest. “Please, do come in.”