What Angels Fear

Chapter 5

His hat clutched in his cold hands, Sir Henry Lovejoy followed a liveried and powdered footman through the echoing, labyrinth-like corridors of Carlton House. A few months ago, Lord Jarvis would have held such an audience at St. James’s Palace, where the poor mad old King George III kept his offices. That Jarvis had now shifted his base here, to the palace of the Prince of Wales, struck Lovejoy as the clearest sign imaginable that a Regency was indeed imminent.

The great man was at his desk, writing, when Lovejoy was ushered into his presence. He acknowledged Lovejoy’s existence with a curt motion of one plump, ringed hand, but he did not glance up or even invite Henry to sit. Henry hesitated just inside the threshold, then went to stand before the hearth. The fire was a small one, the room cavernously large and frigid. Henry held his numb hands out to the flames. From somewhere in the distance came the rhythmic rat-a-tat of a hammer and the clanging of what might be scaffolding. The Prince of Wales was always renovating, whether here at Carlton House or at his Pavilion in Brighton.

“Well?” said Jarvis at last, laying aside his pen and shifting in his chair so that he might regard his visitor. “What have you to report about this sorry business?”

Retracting his cold hands and turning, Lovejoy executed a neat bow, then launched into a precise description of the crime scene, the victim, and the evidence they’d collected so far.

“Yes, yes,” said Jarvis, thrusting up from his chair with an impatient gesture that cut Henry short. “I’ve heard all this from your constable. It’s obvious Lord Devlin must be arrested immediately. Indeed, I can’t conceive why a warrant hasn’t been issued already.”

Lovejoy watched his lordship fumble in his pocket for a delicate ivory snuffbox. He was an unusually large man, standing well over six feet in height and weighing some twenty to twenty-five stone. In his youth, he had been handsome. Beneath the ravages of indulgence and dissipation and the passing of the years, traces of those good looks could still be seen, in the fiercely intelligent gray eyes, the strong, aquiline thrust of the nose, the sensual curve of the mouth.

Lovejoy cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, my lord, I am not convinced the evidence is sufficient to justify such an action at this time.”

Jarvis’s head came up, his eyes narrowing, his fleshy face deepening in hue as he fixed Lovejoy with a hard stare. “Not sufficient? Good God, man. What do you want? An eyewitness?”

Lovejoy drew a steadying breath. “I admit the evidence implicating the Viscount appears on the surface quite damning, my lord. But we really know very little as yet about this woman. We don’t even have a clear idea as to what the killer’s motive might have been.”

Deftly flicking open his snuffbox with one fat finger, Lord Jarvis lifted a pinch to his nostrils, and sniffed. “She was raped, was she not?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“So there’s your motive.”

“Perhaps, my lord. Although the violence of the attack suggests a level of anger, of instability even, which goes beyond simple sexual hunger.”

Jarvis closed the box with a snap and sighed. “Unfortunately, such outbursts of violence are not unknown amongst young gentlemen who have served King and country in war. As I understand it, Devlin has killed on at least two other occasions since his return from the Continent.”

“Affairs of honor, my lord. And his opponents were wounded. Not killed.”

“Nevertheless, the tendency is obviously there.”

His lordship walked away to stand for a moment at a window overlooking the terrace below, his hands clasped behind his back, his profile carefully composed, as if in deep thought. It was a moment before he spoke. “You’re a sophisticated man, Sir Henry. Surely I’ve no need to explain to you what it means, to have the son of a prominent peer—a member of the government, for God’s sake—implicated in such a crime. If we are seen to hesitate”—he swept one well-tailored arm in an expansive gesture toward the streets—“if the crowds out there believe that being born to a position of privilege is enough to allow an Englishman to get away with rape and murder, with sacrilege—” Jarvis broke off, his arm falling back to his side, his voice dropping to a deep, solemn hush. “I was in Paris, you know, in 1789. I’ll never forget it. The sight of blood running in the gutters. Of men’s severed heads, stuck on pikes. Of gentlewomen snatched from their carriages and torn limb from limb by the howling mobs.” He paused, his gaze sharpening suddenly on Lovejoy’s face. “Is that what you want to see here, in London?”

“No. Of course not, my lord,” Lovejoy said hastily. He knew he was being manipulated, knew there were undercurrents to all this that he, a simple magistrate, could never hope to understand. He knew it, yet that didn’t stop the chill that touched his soul, the sick dread that clutched at his vitals. It was every Englishman’s worst fear, that the endless, rampant, mindless carnage of the French Revolution might someday spread across the Channel and destroy everything he held most dear.

“If Lord Devlin is indeed innocent of this terrible crime,” Jarvis was saying, “he will in due course be exonerated and freed. The important thing is to be seen acting now. These are perilous times in which we live, sir. The news from the war is not good. The masses are discontented and sullen, and easily stirred up by radicals. With His Majesty’s health unlikely to improve and a Regency bill even now before Parliament, the very stability of the realm could be at stake. This is no time to be seen to hesitate, to dither and delay. The Prince of Wales wants Devlin arrested, and he wants it done before nightfall.” Jarvis paused. “I trust I can rely upon you to handle the situation with the tact and discretion required.”

It was never easy, bringing a member of the aristocracy to justice. Yet it did happen. It wasn’t so many years since the Fourth Earl Ferrers had been arrested for the murder of his steward, tried before the House of Lords, and hanged. As heir to the Earl of Hendon, Sebastian St. Cyr carried the title of Viscount Devlin as a courtesy title only. “Lord” he might be called, but otherwise the title conveyed upon him none of the legal rights of an actual peerage. Until the day he became Earl of Hendon in his father’s stead, Devlin would not, technically, be a peer. And so he would be tried before the King’s Bench, like any other common criminal, rather than in the House of Lords.

If it came to that, of course.

Lovejoy bowed sharply. “Yes, my lord. I’ll see to it personally.”

An unexpectedly winning, almost gentle smile spread across Lord Jarvis’s face. “Good man. I knew I could count on you.”

His hat gripped tightly before him, Lovejoy bowed himself out of the great man’s presence. But as he turned to walk down that long, ornate corridor, his footsteps echoing hollowly, his heart feeling strangely heavy in his chest, Sir Henry Lovejoy became aware of a growing conviction that he was being used.