What Angels Fear

Chapter 53

Sebastian propped a hip on the edge of Lord Jarvis’s heavily carved Jacobin desk, one leg swinging back and forth as he leveled the Cassaignard flintlock at the fat man’s chest. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

“I never do anything stupid,” said Jarvis, his glance flicking from Sebastian to the long windows overlooking the rear garden, then back again. “You’ve tracked mud on my carpet.”

“So I have. A legacy of my recent conversation with Lord Frederick Fairchild.”

Jarvis leaned his back against the closed door and crossed his arms at his massive chest. “Really? Is that statement meant to be significant?”

“Lord Frederick tells me you presented the Prince of Wales with one of a collection of indiscreet letters written by Lord Frederick to a certain young gentleman in the Foreign Office. Now, as I understand it, you led the Prince to believe this letter was found in the possession of a French agent named Monsieur Léon Pierrepont. Which is curious, don’t you think, given that Rachel York stole those letters from M. Pierrepont’s townhouse shortly before she was murdered last Tuesday?”

Jarvis’s full lips curled up into a smile. “Really?”

“Don’t,” said Sebastian, pushing away from the desk. “Don’t try my patience. I’ve had a long and very fatiguing day.”

Jarvis’s gaze passed, derisively, over Sebastian’s rain-soaked and muddied Rosemary Lane clothing. “Obviously.”

Sebastian plucked a stray wisp of hay from his lapel and let it fall. “How did you find out Rachel York was working for the French?”

“There is very little happens in this town I don’t know about.”

“So you—what? Offered her protection from arrest if she agreed to cooperate with your scheme to discredit Lord Frederick?”

“Traitors’ deaths are such messy, painful affairs. It’s amazing what people will agree to do in order to avoid that kind of unpleasantness.” Jarvis nodded toward a cut-crystal decanter warming on a table beside the hearth. “I trust you won’t shoot me if I should venture to pour myself a glass of brandy?”

A tapestry bellpull hung just to one side of the carved mantel. Sebastian smiled. “Of course not. As long as you remember what I said about Stupid Things.”

He watched the big man cross the room. It did much to explain Rachel York’s nervousness in the weeks leading up to her death, if Jarvis had discovered her association with the French and used it to coerce her into working for him.

Jarvis reached for the brandy decanter and lifted it from its tray with slow, ponderous movements.

“So Rachel stole the letters from Pierrepont to give them to you,” said Sebastian.

“Letter,” said Jarvis, correcting him. “Fair Rachel provided me with one letter only.”

“And the other documents? Did she take those at your directive as well? Or was that her own initiative? Is that why you killed her? Because she’d discovered something she wasn’t meant to know?”

Jarvis huffed a soft laugh. “You don’t seriously think I would stoop to killing some insignificant little bit of muslin, now do you?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Why would I? She’d delivered the letter I needed. I admit it wasn’t as incriminating as I had hoped, but in the end it served its purpose. Quite nicely.”

“You see, that’s one of the things that puzzles me. Rachel York stole some half a dozen of Lord Frederick’s letters from Pierrepont’s townhouse, yet you say she gave you only one. What happened to the others?”

Jarvis’s florid, self-confident face gave nothing away. But Sebastian saw a hint of surprise flicker in the man’s eyes. “I neither know nor care.”

“And here I thought little happens in this town that you don’t know about.” Sebastian watched Jarvis splash a generous measure of brandy into a glass. “You did know, of course, that it wasn’t true, what you told the Prince. Lord Frederick might have been foolishly indiscreet, but he wasn’t dealing with the French.”

Jarvis eased the crystal stopper back into the decanter and set it aside. “Truth is such an overrated commodity. This country could not continue with a mad king on the throne; everyone knew that. We needed this Regency. But the creation of the Regency threatened to provide the Whigs with an opportunity to seize power. And then what? They would have taken the greatest, happiest nation in history—the admiration of the world—and ruined it. All in the name of a set of shallow, presumptuous French principles like ‘democracy,’ and ‘freedom.’ The kind of madness that can only lead to chaos and confusion and the disintegration of all social order. That’s the only truth I’m interested in. The only truth that matters.”

“I heard Prinny announced his government. He’s decided to retain Spencer Perceval and the Tories.”

“That’s right. There’ll be no Whig government, no peace negotiations with the French, no reform of Parliament, no Catholic emancipation.”

“I wouldn’t have thought even Prinny could be induced to turn from his friends so easily.”

Jarvis let out a sharp laugh. “The Prince’s friendship with the Whigs has always stemmed more from a petulant son’s desire to spite his father than from any real dedication to Whiggish causes.”

Sebastian knew it for the truth. Beneath his veneer of easygoing modernity, the Prince of Wales was essentially the same Catholic-hating, autocratic-minded monarchist as his father, George III.

Jarvis shifted closer to the hearth, as if drawn to the warmth. A large canvas heavily framed in gilded wood hung over the mantel, a group portrait of Lord Jarvis with his wife and mother and daughter. Sebastian had seen this portrait before, as a small study in the studio of Giorgio Donatelli.

“You say you had no reason to want to see Rachel York dead,” said Sebastian. “Yet she knew enough to expose all your clever machinations for what they were.”

“Not without exposing herself.”

Sebastian kept his attention, seemingly, on the dramatically swirling colors of Donatelli’s canvas. All the jagged, inconsistent pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place: Leo Pierrepont, patiently spinning a web in which to ensnare the man everyone expected to be the next Whig prime minister, while Lord Jarvis schemed to keep the Whigs from gaining control of the government in the first place. And Rachel York—fiercely passionate, badly frightened—had been caught between them.

“The way I see it,” said Sebastian, “whether you killed her yourself, or had her killed, or simply created the set of circumstances that led to her death, you’re the one who is ultimately responsible for what happened to Rachel York.”

“Am I expected to be overcome with remorse?” Jarvis lifted his brandy glass to his lips. “What difference does the life or death of one stupid little whore make when the future of an empire hangs in the balance?”

Sebastian knew a flash of sheer, potent rage. “It makes a difference to me.”

“Only because you’ve been foolish enough to allow yourself to be saddled with the blame for it.”

Sebastian nodded toward the family portrait over the mantel. “And the commission to Giorgio Donatelli? Was that a part of the payment?”

There was a step in the hall, the soft whisper of a woman’s slippers over marble tiling. Jarvis’s hand inched toward the bell cord. Sebastian drew back the pistol’s safety with a click that reverberated loudly around the room. “That would fall under the heading of Stupid Things to Do, my lord.”

Jarvis froze, just as the door from the hall swung open.

“Your carriage has been brought round, Papa,” said a young woman, stepping into the room. “Do you wish me to tell Coachman John to—”

She was a tall young woman, almost as tall as her father, with ordinary brown hair she wore slung back in an unbecoming bun. One hand still on the knob, she drew up just inside the room with a small gasp that jerked Sebastian’s attention away from the man by the hearth for one, disastrous moment.

And in that moment, Jarvis fell on the bell rope and gave it a hard yank.