What Remains of Heaven

Chapter 39

He found Miss Jarvis surrounded by piles of books and papers, and seated at the dark, heavy table in the library of the house on Berkeley Square.

She wore a simple gown of pale yellow cambric made high at the neck and trimmed with delicate touches of white lace, and she had her head bent over some notes she was making, so that the afternoon sunlight streaming in the tall paned window overlooking the garden fell warmly on her brown hair. At Sebastian’s entrance, she looked up and laid aside her quill, her face studied in its calm repose. He searched her even features for some indication that his suspicions might be true. But if she found his presence a cause for concern, she did not show it.

“Lord Devlin,” announced the butler, hovering nervously, obviously uncertain of the wisdom of abandoning her to the company of such a dangerous visitor.

“You can tell him I promise not to abduct you,” said Sebastian, going to where a carafe of Lord Jarvis’s best brandy rested on a tray.

A suggestion of amusement lightened her features. “Thank you, Grisham. That will be all.”

Sebastian poured himself a drink and downed it in one long pull.

“Do help yourself to some brandy,” she said sardonically.

He refilled his glass. “Thank you.”

Her gaze lingered for a moment on his sling. But rather than remark on it, she pushed to her feet and began assembling her papers.

He said, “Embarking on a new project, Miss Jarvis?”

“Actually, it occurs to me that perhaps you are right, that I have focused too single-mindedly on Lord Quillian. So I’ve decided to pursue several other theories.”

He strolled over to study the title of the nearest tome. “Burke’s Peerage? So you’re . . . what? Expanding your list of suspects to include the entire peerage?”

A malevolent gleam darkened her fine gray eyes. She tweaked the book from his grasp and slipped it back on a shelf. “Did you know that before her marriage to Sir Nigel, Lady Prescott eloped with another man?”

“The unsuitable suitor. My dear Miss Jarvis, have you by chance discovered his identity?”

“Not by chance, my lord. But I have discovered his identity. Lieutenant Marc Hatfield, third son of Lord Bixby.”

“Who?”

“Lieutenant Hatfield. He was killed at Yorktown.”

Sebastian stared thoughtfully at his brandy. “In other words, he predeceased Sir Nigel by nearly a year.”

She nodded. “When I first learned of the elopement, I thought the disappointed suitor might have been responsible for Sir Nigel’s death. Obviously, that was impossible.”

There was something about the airy way in which this was said that told Sebastian more than he suspected she’d intended. He took a sip of his brandy and said with quiet amusement, “You thought the unsuitable suitor was Quillian, didn’t you?”

A faint hint of color touched her cheeks, but all she said was, “What happened to your arm?”

“An unpleasant encounter with a butcher and his meat cleaver.”

“A butcher?”

“A man by the name of Jack Slade. Ever hear of him?”

She shook her head. “Should I have?”

“Last Wednesday, you told me you thought someone was blackmailing Bishop Prescott. As it happens, you were correct. Only it wasn’t Quillian. It was Jack Slade.”

“The butcher.”

“The butcher.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“But I am. You see, this particular butcher grew up on the Grange and nursed a powerful grudge against the brothers Prescott. At some point before he got himself transported to Botany Bay for murdering his wife, Mr. Jack Slade came into possession of a powerful secret.”

He was aware of her watching him intently. She said, “And do you know the nature of this secret?”

“No.” He drained his glass and set it aside. “But you do, don’t you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

He walked up to her, close enough that he could smell the faint fragrance of lavender that dusted her shoulders and see the telltale nervous dilation of her pupils. “When you met with the Bishop last Tuesday evening, what precisely did he say that led you to believe he was being blackmailed? And don’t even think about quoting me some pious pap about a friend’s responsibility to honor a man’s confidences even after death. In the past week I’ve been forced to kill three men. I’ve been shot at, horsewhipped, attacked with a meat cleaver, and half drowned. My patience is wearing thin.”

Two tight white lines had appeared to bracket her mouth.

“Tell me,” he said.

She went back to gathering her books, the soft thumps of the bindings slapping together sounding unnaturally loud in the hushed room. He didn’t think she meant to answer him. Then she seemed to come to a decision. She said, “When I arrived at London House Tuesday evening, it was obvious something had occurred to trouble him. At first he simply said he’d received disturbing news. But later, after we’d spoken . . .”

“Yes?” he prompted when she hesitated.

“He said it’s no pleasant thing to be haunted by the secrets of one’s past. And he told me . . . he told me he had fathered a child in his youth.”

“Sir Peter?”

Her head came up. “Sir Peter? Good heavens. I never thought of that. Is Sir Peter his child?”

“I don’t know. But I’ve begun to suspect he might be.”

“I wonder if that’s why Prescott was reading The Libation Bearers?”

“It makes sense, does it not?” He studied her carefully composed features. “What else did the Bishop tell you?”

“Nothing.”

Sebastian looked out the window at the neat, high-walled rear garden, at the breeze-ruffled deep green leaves of the shrubbery, at the blueness of the slice of rain-scrubbed sky. He could think of only one reason for Francis Prescott to have shared this painful burden with Miss Hero Jarvis, and for her to have been so reluctant to reveal it.

He had always thought of her as a formidable, intelligent woman of extraordinary courage and fortitude. But now, standing stiff-backed in the afternoon sunlight streaming in the garden window, she looked suddenly vulnerable, and maybe a little afraid.

“This is not a secret you need hide, or bear alone,” he said quietly. “We can be wed tomorrow by special license. You must allow me to do this, Miss Jarvis. For your sake, and for the sake of the child.”

An angry muscle jumped along her rigid jaw, shattering the image of vulnerability. “You are wrong in your supposition, my lord. There is no child.” And then she said it again, her eyes steady and fierce, as if she could compel him to believe her: “There is no child.”

She reminded him so much of Hendon, fiercely lying in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that the similarity sent a chill over him. “You said yourself you wouldn’t tell me, even if there were.”

She swung away, head held high, back rigid, to jerk the bellpull beside the fireplace. The butler must have been hovering nearby, because he appeared almost instantly.

“Viscount Devlin is leaving,” she said. “Please show him out.”

Sebastian settled his hat on his head. There was just enough uncertainty in his mind to keep him from continuing to press her. But he said, his voice low, “I’m not going to let this go.”

“Call again and you will find me not at home,” she said, and swept from the room.

Sebastian sat on the tumbledown stone wall of the ruined gardens that had once belonged to the original Somerset House, his gaze on the sun-shimmered waters of the river before him. The air was heavy with the hum of insects and the fecund odor of a long-abandoned garden. Two hundred years ago, a mighty renaissance lord had seized this gently sited strip of land and built here a grand palace with graceful parterred gardens and vine-draped terraces. But the old Somerset House was long gone. All that remained, now, was this deserted, overgrown tangle of broken stones and half-dead roses, and a set of hidden, cracked steps leading down to forgotten cellars prone to flood when the tide rushed in.

He pushed the memories of that day from his mind, his eyes narrowing as he watched a wherryman row his fare toward the opposite shore, oars throwing up a spray of water to sparkle in the sun. He had an uneasy sense that time was running out, although he knew that could simply be a product of his own personal frustration and anger and what Kat had once called his characteristic inability to admit defeat.

He kept coming back to something Sir Peter had said in the Jerusalem Gate on the morning after Francis Prescott’s death—something Sebastian had missed, until now. Says something, don’t it, Sir Peter had said, when a man needs to make an appointment to see his own bloody uncle.

Sir Peter claimed last Tuesday’s meeting had been just one more installment in an ongoing argument over a certain dark-eyed opera dancer. Except that would imply that Francis Prescott had sought Sir Peter out, rather than the other way around.

Sebastian knew it could simply be a coincidence that Sir Peter had met with his uncle the day after the Bishop’s angry encounter with Jack Slade on the pavement before London House. But he doubted it.

What would a man like Jack Slade do, Sebastian wondered, if Francis Prescott had refused the butcher’s attempts to extort more money? Sebastian could identify three options: Slade could admit defeat. He could proclaim the Bishop’s secret to the world in angry revenge. Or . . .

Or he could take his dangerous but valuable secret to a new buyer. Lady Prescott, perhaps.

Or her son. Sir Peter Prescott.