When Gods Die

Chapter 18

“It must be a coincidence,” said Paul Gibson some half an hour later. “What can James the Second possibly have to do with that poor young woman’s murder?”

They were in the weed-choked yard that stretched between Gibson’s house and surgery to the front, and the small stone building at the rear he used for dissections and autopsies. Sebastian sat on a nearby stone bench, a pint of ale in hand, while the surgeon busied himself with something boiling in a large pot of water over an open fire pit.

“When it comes to murder, I’m not sure I believe in coincidences,” said Sebastian, dubiously eyeing the contents of that iron cauldron. Gibson gave the pot a brisk turn with a ladle and something surfaced, something that looked suspiciously like a human arm bone. “Please tell me that’s not—”

Gibson looked up and laughed. “Good God, no! This is a sheep’s skeleton I’m rendering for a lecture in comparative anatomy. What did you think? That I’m boiling your murder victim? Anglessey came early this morning to claim his wife’s body. I think he was planning to bury her today, rather than wait for this evening.” Gibson reached to throw another scuttleful of coals on the fire, then wiped his sleeve across his forehead. “And none too soon. It’s bloody hot for June. Too bad you didn’t get here sooner. There were several things I’d like to have shown you.”

Sebastian had seen enough dead bodies during the war. Given a choice, he decided he’d rather try to remember Guinevere Anglessey as the beautiful, vibrant woman she’d once been, without having to reconcile that with images of a dissected cadaver some seventy-two hours dead.

The fire began to smoke and Gibson knelt awkwardly beside it to poke at it with a stick. “If, as you say, the Marchioness left her house in Mount Street by hackney just after nuncheon on Wednesday, then she must have been killed here in London—or someplace very near. There simply wouldn’t have been time for her to have driven all the way down to Brighton.”

“You’re certain she died in the early afternoon?”

Gibson nodded. “Or that morning. No later. My guess is that after she was killed, someone packed her body in ice and loaded it in a cart or carriage and hauled her down to Brighton. After death, the blood in a body responds to the pull of gravity. If a body is left lying on its back for hours immediately after death, then all the blood will pool in the back and on the undersides of the arms and legs, making them appear purple.”

“As happened with Guinevere.”

“Yes.”

Sebastian stared across the yard to where a neglected old rose was blooming its heart out in a sun-spangled froth of delicate pink. The sound of bees could be heard, a low hum that mingled with the whisper of the wind through the chestnut tree overhead. “Was she with child?” he asked.

“I’m afraid so. The child would have been born sometime in November.” Gibson sat back on his heels. “It was a boy, incidentally.”

Sebastian nodded. “And the dagger in her back?”

“Was placed there some hours after she was poisoned.”

Sebastian drew in a quick breath. “Poisoned?”

“I think so. We’ve no test to detect it after death, but I suspect cyanide. Her skin was very pink, if you’ll remember. There is sometimes a lingering bitter-almond scent, but not after so many hours. It acts very quickly—in five or ten minutes with a sufficient dose. The death it produces is quite painful. And very messy.”

“You mean it induces vomiting?”

“Yes. Among other things.”

“But there was no trace of any of that.”

“That’s because after she died, her body was bathed and then redressed—in someone else’s gown.”

Sebastian shook his head, not understanding. “How do you know it wasn’t her gown?”

“That’s easy. It was too small.” Laying aside his stick, Gibson rose with a lurch to disappear into the small stone building. He reappeared again a moment later with the gown in his hands. “Guinevere Anglessey was an unusually tall woman—five-foot-eight at least.” He shook out the folds of green satin and held it up. “This dress was made for a slightly smaller woman—still tall, but probably no more than five-foot-five or -six and less buxom. That’s why the tapes were undone and the sleeves shoved down on her shoulders. It simply didn’t fit.”

Sebastian reached to take the evening gown into his hands. “And her undergarments?”

“There weren’t any.”

Sebastian looked up at his friend. It wasn’t unknown for courtesans—or even ladies such as the scandalous Caroline Lamb—to dispense with the light stays and thin chemise typically worn beneath their filmy gowns. But Lady Anglessey was not of that set.

“When you saw the body Wednesday night,” said Gibson, “was it barefoot?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Did you notice any evening slippers nearby on the floor? Perhaps pushed beneath the settee?”

Sebastian thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “No. But I didn’t look for them.”

Gibson nodded, his lips pressed into a thoughtful line. “I did. There weren’t any in the room. No shoes. No stockings.”

“So what are you saying? Someone poisoned Guinevere with cyanide, waited until she’d succumbed to her death throes, and then bathed her body and dressed it in a green silk evening gown that belonged to someone else?”

“It would seem that way, yes. And they either failed to bring along the necessary undergarments and stockings and slippers, or the ones they brought were too hopelessly small to use.”

“Which would seem to argue either that the murderer was unfamiliar with the size of his victim, or that he failed to think through what he needed.”

Paul Gibson made a face. “I’m not sure which I find the most gruesome. Is it possible that poor woman was killed simply to provide her murderer with a body to be used to embarrass the Regent?”

Sebastian hesitated. “I must admit I find it difficult to credit. Yet I suppose it is possible.”

“But…why? Why kill the wife of a Marquis? Why not simply take some common woman off the streets?”

“Which do you think would cause the greater scandal?”

“There is that, of course.”

Sebastian slid the fine satin of the dress between his gloved fingers. “What I don’t understand is how the devil did our killer manage to get the body into the Pavilion that night?”

“Aye. That’s the rub, isn’t it?”

From the narrow street outside came the lilting cry of a costermonger, Ripe cher-ries! Buy my ripe cher-ries. Sebastian folded the green satin gown into a small package to take away with him. “What have you done with the dagger that was in her back?” he asked.

Gibson went to crouch beside his iron pot. “I don’t have it.”

Sebastian swung around. “What?”

The surgeon looked up, his eyes narrowing against the smoke. “By the time I had made arrangements for the transportation of the body and came back to collect it, the dagger was gone.”