When Gods Die

Chapter 19

Upon consideration, it seemed to Sebastian that there were only two likely explanations for the disappearance of the dagger: either Guinevere’s murderer had contrived in some inexplicable way and for some unknown purpose to return to the Yellow Cabinet and retrieve a weapon he had deliberately left behind, or else—which seemed far more likely—Lord Jarvis himself had removed the dagger. Sebastian could come up with several reasons why the Regent’s unofficial minder might have done so; none reflected well on the man in whose arms Guinevere’s body had been found.

Determined to confront Lord Jarvis, Sebastian drove to Carlton House, where Jarvis’s frightened, pale-skinned clerk insisted his lordship was at home. But when Sebastian arrived at Grosvenor Square, it was to be told by the fey, half-mad Lady Jarvis that she rather thought her lord might be at Watiers. Watiers was still under the impression his lordship was out of town.

Temporarily balked of his quarry, Sebastian decided to pay a visit to the Chevalier de Varden.

ALAIN, THE CHEVALIER DE VARDEN, was a young man of twenty-two not long down from Oxford. He was well liked about Town, although his dashing good looks and tragic history were enough to cause considerable trepidation in the breasts of the mothers of young ladies of a marriageable age. A foreign title was all well and good, but only if there were extensive lands to go with it. The vast estates the young Chevalier was to have inherited from his dead father had all been lost in the Revolution.

Lacking an appreciable income of his own, the Chevalier lived with his mother, Isolde, Lady Audley, in Lady Audley’s town house on Curzon Street. A widow now for the second time, she spent most of the year in London rather than at the isolated Welsh castle that had passed upon the death of her second husband to their son, the new Lord Audley.

Asking for the Chevalier, Sebastian was shown into a small but elegantly furnished withdrawing room filled with afternoon light. There, a slim, fine-boned woman with fiery auburn hair barely touched with gray knelt on the carpet in a secluded corner. Beside her lay a panting, very pregnant collie bitch that looked to be in the final stages of labor.

“I beg your pardon,” Sebastian began, “there must be some mistake—”

“No mistake,” said Lady Audley, looking up. Sebastian supposed she must be somewhere in her midforties, although she appeared younger, with clear, translucent skin and the kind of bone structure that ages well. “I asked that you be brought here. You must forgive me for receiving you like this, but poor Cloe is very near her time and I didn’t want to leave her. Please, have a seat.”

Declining the offer, Sebastian went to stand beside the open windows, his back to the sun.

“I know why you have come,” said Lady Audley, her attention all for the laboring collie. “You think my son had something to do with Guinevere’s death. But you are wrong.”

He watched her slender hands move with gentle compassion over the collie’s sweat-darkened shoulders and quivering flanks. “Let me guess,” he said, remembering how Guinevere’s sister, Morgana, had also known of his interest in the Marchioness’s death. “You, too, are an intimate of Lady Portland.”

“Lady Portland is my daughter, Claire.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Are you familiar, I wonder, with Wales?”

“Not especially, no.”

The collie let out a soft whimper. Lady Audley rested her hand on the dog’s head. “There, there, sweetheart. You’re going to do just fine.” To Sebastian, she said, “Athelstone Hall lies on the northern coast, not far from Audley Castle. Traveling by road the distance between them is some three or four miles. But if one follows the path along the sea cliffs, it’s a journey of only fifteen minutes. Less for a running child.”

“You mean, for a girl child who frequently escaped her governess’s care to run wild about the countryside?”

Lady Audley nodded. “Guinevere’s mother, Katherine, was very kind to me when I first came to live there. When Katherine died…the poor child was nearly inconsolable. No one can take a mother’s place, of course, but I did what I could.”

“I thought Athelstone remarried?”

“Yes. But I’m afraid the new Countess took little interest in her predecessors’ daughters.”

Sebastian studied the elegant woman on the floor beside the birthing bitch. She had narrow shoulders and fine-boned hands, and an air of fragility that he suspected was entirely misleading. “I must confess,” he said, “I expected you to be French.”

“Oh, no,” she said without looking up. “I was born and raised in Devonshire. When I was eighteen, I went to spend the spring of 1786 with my aunt in Paris. You can’t imagine what Paris was like in those days, the endless round of balls and gaiety, music and laughter. I suppose we should have known it couldn’t last.” She gave a little sigh. “But one never does.”

“That was where you met the Chevalier de Varden?”

She sat back on her heels, an unexpectedly soft, sad smile playing about her lips. “Yes. At a banquet at Versailles. We were married within six weeks. I considered myself an extraordinarily fortunate woman—and then, just weeks after the birth of our son, Alain, came the fall of the Bastille.”

Sebastian watched as that haunted smile faded. The year 1789 would not have been an easy one for a gently born Englishwoman married to a French aristocrat.

“It was in the autumn that a mob attacked the château. I managed to escape with Alain through the cellars, but Varden was out riding through the vineyards at the time and…’’ She paused to take a deep, soul-shaking sigh. “They pulled him from his horse and tore him to pieces.”

A shudder convulsed the collie’s swollen belly, her body jackknifing up as the first of her puppies slipped into the world, wet and shining with blood. Lady Audley stared down at it, but Sebastian thought she was seeing something else, a memory she would never forget.

Once, in the Peninsula, Sebastian’s colonel had ordered a Portuguese peasant tied between two horses and then had the horses whipped in opposite directions. Just for fun. He blinked away the memory. “You were fortunate to make it back to England.”

“Fortunate? Yes, I suppose we were. One does what one must.”

At their feet, Cloe went about the task of severing the umbilical cord and cleaning her pup. Lady Audley was silent for a moment, stroking the bitch’s head. Then she said, her voice flat, “I married Audley the following year.”

Sebastian watched the elegant woman before him help with the collie’s birthing. Lady Audley was beautiful even now in middle age. Twenty years ago she must have been stunning as a young, grieving widow. Did marrying the late Lord Audley fall into the category of things one did because one must?

“Tell me about Lady Anglessey’s mother,” he said aloud.

“Katherine?” The question seemed to surprise her. “She looked much like Guinevere, although she was a tiny thing, whereas Guinevere was tall, like her father. They had the same blue-black hair, and those eyes that made you think of a fern-filled mountain glen in spring.” She smiled softly. “And the same passionate, not always wise nature.”

“I’ve heard it said Lord Athelstone lost four wives in childbirth. Is that true?”

“Not exactly. I believe the first died of consumption when her daughter, Morgana, was a year or two old. But the other three died in childbirth, yes. Lord Athelstone was a bear of a man. All three of his daughters were unusually tall, and one assumes the sons would have been even larger. I gave it as my opinion that it was like mating a Yorkie bitch to a Great Dane. His boy babies were so big they were literally killing his wives. And it’s certainly true that he only succeeded in getting a son when he finally had enough sense to take to wife a woman nearly as big as he.”

Cloe was cleaning her pup now, licking it roughly, nudging it with her muzzle. It would be another hour, perhaps more, before a second pup was born. Sebastian said, “Why did you want to see me?”

Lady Audley wiped her hands on the apron she’d tied over her muslin dress and stood. There was a sudden fierceness about her, the aura of a mother willing to do battle to protect her young. “Varden was here with me, all last Wednesday afternoon. If you seek to deflect suspicion from the Prince Regent onto my son, I will not allow you to succeed.”

Sebastian met her hard gaze. “What I seek is the truth.”

She gave an unexpectedly bitter laugh. “The truth? How often do you think we ever really know the truth?”

“According to Lady Quinlan, her sister Guinevere grew up expecting to marry Varden.”

Lady Audley pressed her lips together, then nodded almost reluctantly. “In some ways it was my fault, I suppose. There was only a year between them. I always thought of them much as brother and sister. I never imagined for a moment that Guinevere saw them as something else entirely. But it was a child’s dream, nothing more. They were children. Why, Varden wasn’t even up at Oxford yet when Guinevere married.”

“That was four years ago. Much has changed since then.”

Her head drew back, her eyes sparkling. “I know what you’re implying, but you’re wrong. Guinevere had a passionate nature, but she was also fiercely loyal. She would never have played Anglessey false. Never.”

He wondered if it was significant that her anger flared in defense of Guinevere’s honor and not that of her son. Or was she simply reflecting her society’s very differing attitudes toward male and female sexual adventuring? “I’d be interested to hear what your son has to say.”

Isolde sucked in a deep breath, and for one telling moment, her mask of calm control slipped. He realized that behind this woman’s concern for the laboring collie at her feet lay another fear, deeper and far more troubling.

“My son isn’t here,” she said, suddenly looking tired and much, much older. “I’m afraid he has taken Guinevere’s death quite badly. I haven’t seen him since Thursday morning, when we heard what had happened to her.”