What Darkness Brings

Chapter 9

Sebastian was aware of a strange sensation, like a rush of burning liquid that coursed through his veins, tingling his fingertips and dulling all external sound. As if from a long way off, he heard the old man say, “You don’t by chance have a brother, do you, my lord?”

“A brother?” Somehow, Sebastian managed to keep his voice calm and even. “Not living, no.” At least, not to my knowledge, he thought, although he didn’t say it. He turned deliberately toward the darkened parlor beside them. “You say Mr. Eisler was found in here?”

“He was, my lord.” Campbell went to open the faded drapes at the front windows, filling the room with dust and a dim light half-obscured by thick wavy glass coated with the grime of ages. “Sprawled on his back just there. Quite ruined the rug, I’m afraid.”

The chamber was long and narrow and crowded like the rest of the house with a discordant jumble of furniture and art. Sebastian recognized a Rembrandt self-portrait and a Madonna by Fra Filippo Lippi. The carpet on the floor looked like a priceless seventeenth-century silk Isfahan, its far edge disfigured by a large dark stain no one had yet made any effort to clean.

Hunkering down beside it, he breathed in a cloying mixture of dust and blood and a faint but unmistakable whiff of stale burnt powder. Mr. Eisler’s wound had obviously bled profusely. Yet there were no splatters of blood on the nearby wall or on any of the furniture. Sebastian looked up. “How, precisely, was the body oriented?”

The butler came to stand beside him. “He was on his back, as I said, my lord.”

“Yes, but was he facing toward the door? Or away from it?”

“Well, his head was just here”-the old man moved with ponderous slowness, his thin arms waving as if to sketch the position of the body in the air-“with his feet there, nearer the door. So I suppose he must have been turned in that direction when he was shot-wouldn’t you say, my lord?”

“Probably,” said Sebastian, although he’d seen enough men shot in the war to know the force with which a bullet could spin a man around and send him staggering.

He pushed to his feet, his gaze drifting over the strange, shadowy chamber. With its collection of furniture, statues, porcelains, and paintings, the place more closely resembled a storeroom or auction house than a home. “Are all the rooms like this?” Sebastian asked. “Full of furniture and piles of art, I mean.”

“Most of them, yes. Mr. Eisler was something of a collector, you know. I’m afraid Mrs. Campbell gave up trying to fight the dust quite some time ago. People were always. . giving him things.”

From here, Sebastian could make out at least two more Rembrandts, a Caravaggio, and a nearly life-sized marble statue of a horse that looked as if it might have been looted from Constantinople by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. “Mr. Eisler’s friends appear to have been quite generous,” he said, picking his way through the clutter to the far end of the room. Nearly the entire back wall was taken up by a massive old-fashioned fireplace topped by a magnificent chimneypiece carved with mythical beasts and garlands laden with fruit and flowers.

“An interesting piece,” said Sebastian, pausing before it.

“Mmm. They say this house dates back to the time of the Tudors, although for all I know that could just be so much talk.”

Sebastian let his gaze drop to the worn black horsehair sofa pulled up at an angle beside the cold hearth. He could just see the toes of a pair of blue satin slippers peeking out from beneath the bottom cushions.

“Know who those might belong to?” he asked, nodding toward them.

The aged retainer’s jaw sagged. “Good heavens. No.” Bracing his weight on one of the sofa’s rolled arms, he bent to come up with a cheap pair of women’s shoes decorated with gaudy paste buckles and somewhat the worse for wear.

“I take it at least some of Mr. Eisler’s visitors were ladies?” said Sebastian, reaching for one of the shoes. Its owner must have been a tiny thing; the slipper was practically small enough to fit a child.

Campbell cleared his throat and looked decidedly uncomfortable. “Some ladies, some. . not ladies, if you get my drift, my lord?”

Sebastian studied the shoe with a growing sense of puzzlement. He could understand a woman inadvertently leaving behind a hair ribbon or a bangle. But her shoes? How could a woman forget her shoes?

“Were any of Mr. Eisler’s female visitors noticeably-,” he began, only to be interrupted by a thunderous banging on the front door.

“Excuse me, my lord.” Campbell gave a painful bow and moved away to open the front door.

Sebastian let his gaze drift once more around the room. There was another door, he now realized, half-hidden by a curtain and just to the left of the fireplace wall, that looked as if it might lead back to the passage. He was moving to investigate when a man’s gruff, booming voice filled the entry.

“Where is he? I heard he was seen coming here. By God, if he thinks he’s-”

A burly, middle-aged figure appeared in the doorway. He was big and sweaty and bursting with self-importance, his hair prematurely silver but still thick, his full face pink and unlined, his ponderous girth a testament to a life of ease. “Ah! So it’s true.” He brought up a thick hand to point an accusatory finger at Sebastian. “I knew it. I knew it! You’re Devlin, aren’t you? I’d heard you were at Newgate, visiting that bloody scoundrel. Well, let me tell you right now, we don’t need your interference around here. This is Aldgate, not Bow Street; do you hear? Sir Henry Lovejoy might welcome your meddling, but Bow Street has no interest in this case-none at all! So I’ll thank you not to be interfering in what’s none of your business. Do I make myself clear?”

Sebastian calmly raised one eyebrow. “Have we met?”

The man’s lips tightened into a hard, straight line. His eyes were a pale hazel, his cheeks full and crisscrossed with tiny red veins, his neck wreathed with rolls of fat. “I am Leigh-Jones. Bertram Leigh-Jones, chief magistrate at Lambeth Street Public Office. And you, sir, are not welcome here. You’re not welcome here at all. We already caught the scum who did this; you saw him yourself at Newgate.”

“He says he didn’t do it.”

Leigh-Jones let out a rude laugh. “Of course he says he didn’t do it. They all say they didn’t do it. There’s not a guilty man in Newgate, to listen to ’em.” The laugh turned into a sneer. “Your man Yates is no different. Found standing over the body, he was. Oh, he’ll hang, all right. No doubt about it.”

With deliberate, provocative slowness, Sebastian let his gaze slide over the man before him, from his mottled, sweat-streaked face to his clumsily tied cravat and the egg stain on the garish waistcoat that pulled too snuggly across his protuberant belly. He watched the magistrate’s complexion darken and his jaw harden until the man was virtually shaking with fury. Then Sebastian nodded to the old butler and said, “Thank you for your time.”

He turned toward the door, quietly tucking the blue satin slipper out of sight. He’d already made up his mind to return to the house later that night under the cover of darkness, when Campbell and his wife were asleep in their attic rooms.

“You’re not to come back here,” Leigh-Jones shouted after him. “You come back here, and I swear to God, I’ll have you up before me on charges of trespass-viscount or no viscount. You hear me? You hear me?”

Sebastian kept walking.