When Gods Die

Chapter 38

Kat spent a restless night. Her dreams were troubled by marching rows of dead soldiers and a bloodstained guillotine that creaked ominously in the wind.

Rising early, she went to stand at the window overlooking the street below. In the clear dawn light she could see the milkmaids making their rounds, the buckets of fresh milk dangling from the yokes across their shoulders.

She had no regrets for the things she had done. The tyranny the French soldiers had brought to the continent of Europe was nothing compared to the horrors Ireland had suffered under the English for hundreds of years now. She would still do whatever she could to hasten the day of Ireland’s liberation. But she could not, in all honesty, accept Sebastian’s love and continue to give aid to the enemy he had risked his life to fight.

She had been torn for a while, but by now she had decided to keep tomorrow’s rendezvous in the Chelsea Physic Gardens with Napoléon’s new spymaster. She intended to tell him the French could no longer rely upon her as a source of information. Whether they would allow her to withdraw her services so easily remained to be seen.

Too nervous to go back to sleep, she decided to get an early start in her search for the maker of Guinevere Anglessey’s death shroud. But in the end, the task was even easier then she expected. Setting out that morning shortly after breakfast, Kat found she had to visit only three fashionable modistes before hitting upon the establishment responsible for the creation of the green satin gown.

“Mais oui, I remember it quite well, thees one,” said Madame de Blois, proprietor of an expensive little shop on Bond Street. “Lady Addison Peebles ordered it from me just thees last season.”

Kat had to bite her lip to keep from saying, Are you certain? The young lady in question was a beautiful but excessively dim-witted heiress who had married Lord Addison Peebles, youngest son of the Duke of Farnham, some two years before. Lord Addison was every bit as vacuous as his bride, to the extent that some members of the ton had taken to calling the couple Lord and Lady Addled and Feeble. It was difficult to imagine either of them having anything to do with what had happened to Guinevere Anglessey.

“Lovely, is it not?” Madame de Blois was saying. “Although hardly the shade of green for a young woman with Lady Addison’s coloring, hmm? I tried to discourage, but she would hear none of it.” The modiste shook her head and made a little tsking sound. “For you, I think, we shall do something in sapphire, yes? And a more daring décolleté, of course.”

Kat gave the woman a wide smile. “Of course.”

SEBASTIAN HAD NEVER UNDERSTOOD the Prince Regent’s fascination with the Stuarts.

He was a prince who longed to be popular, who was genuinely troubled by the boos and hisses that greeted him everywhere. Yet despite mounting public fury over his never-ending debts and monstrous extravagance, he made no effort to reform his indulgent ways. While women and children starved in the streets, the Prince gave lavish banquets at which privileged guests had their choice of more than a hundred different hot dishes. England’s soldiers on the Continent shivered in their ragged uniforms, but the Regent continued to order breeches and waistcoats by the score in sizes so small he would never be able to wear them. The poor of England might be groaning under an ever-increasing, onerous weight of taxes, but that didn’t stop the Prince from petitioning Parliament to pay his gambling debts.

Some believed the Prince was driven by an evil genius, but Sebastian thought the truth was probably far less flattering. Prinny longed to be loved, but he wanted to be loved as he was, without the need to reform the odious ways that made him hated. Given a choice between popularity and continuing his hedonistic, self-obsessed lifestyle, George the hedonist beat out George the prince every time.

Yet with each passing year, his love affair with the Stuarts seemed only to grow. It was as if he both envied and identified with the Stuarts. Once so despised that they had lost the throne of England forever, the Stuarts had nevertheless managed to acquire a patina of romance. Figures of pathos and tragedy, they had become something Prinny himself would never be: the stuff of legends.

But surely the fate of these doomed princes hung over him. Sebastian suspected that mixed in with the fascination and the envy there was also a powerful element of fear: the haunting realization that what had happened to the Stuarts might someday happen to George, as well.

The Prince Regent kept his growing collection of Stuart papers and memorabilia housed in a special room at Carlton House, a room he was only too happy to show off to anyone who happened to ask. Thus it was that Sebastian found himself, later that afternoon, in a room hung in red silk trimmed with gold tassels and carpeted with a rug woven in the Stuart plaid.

“This was carried by Charles the First on his way to the battle of Naseby,” said the Prince, reverently lifting a heavy old-fashioned sword from one of the glass cases that lined the walls. The cases were unlocked, Sebastian noticed; anyone with access to the room could have removed any item at will.

“And this,” said the Prince, his face glowing with pleasure and pride as he held up a faded collar of the Garter, “was worn by James the Second.” His beefy, clumsy fingers trembled as he smoothed the worn material, and for a moment it seemed as if he were lost in some private reverie. Then he roused himself and, padding across the room on his fat legs, he began to talk about the documents he was collecting for a biography of James II he intended to commission.

Sebastian trailed behind him, pausing to admire a display of seventeenth-century jewelry before coming to a halt in front of a case lined with red velvet. There, nestled in a molded depression obviously created especially for it, lay the jeweled Highland dagger Sebastian had last seen embedded in Guinevere Anglessey’s back.

“Ah, I see you’re admiring the dirk,” said the Prince, coming to stand beside him. “It’s a lovely piece, isn’t it? We know it was carried by James the Second, but some suggest it is much older, that it may even have belonged to his great-grandmother Mary, Queen of Scots.”

His gaze lifting from the dagger to the man who owned it, Sebastian studied the Prince’s half-averted face. His features were animated but untroubled, his cheeks ruddy, his almost feminine mouth turned up in a half smile.

That night in the Yellow Cabinet at the Pavilion, the Prince had held the limp body of Guinevere Anglessey in his arms. He must have seen the weapon thrust into her back, must surely have known it as one from his own prized collection. Yet there was no indication now that he remembered the incident at all.

He had a talent, Sebastian had heard, for simply putting from his mind all memory of things he found unpleasant. The dirk had been returned to its proper place in his collection; as far as the Regent was concerned, that was all that really mattered.

The Prince had moved on now, to a shelf of calf-bound books that had once belonged to Charles II. Sebastian watched him, watched the animation in that plump, self-satisfied face. And he couldn’t help but wonder if the Prince remembered the events of that night in the Yellow Cabinet at all.

The room was stiflingly hot, as were the rooms in all of the Prince’s apartments. But at that moment Sebastian felt a chill. Because a man capable of such self-deception, such self-absorbed focus, must surely be capable of almost anything.