When Maidens Mourn

WHEN MAIDENS MOURN

THE SEBASTIAN ST. CYR SERIES

What Angels Fear

When Gods Die

Why Mermaids Sing

Where Serpents Sleep

What Remains of Heaven

Where Shadows Dance

WHEN

MAIDENS

MOURN

A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

C. S. HARRIS

For my cousin

Kaitlyn Johnston

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

“The curse is come upon me,” cried

The Lady of Shalott.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892),

“The Lady of Shalott”

The place at which he stopped was no more than a mound, partly surrounded by a ditch, from which it derived the name of Camlet Moat. A few hewn stones there were, which had escaped the fate of many others…vestiges, just sufficient to show that “here in former times the hand of man had been.”

—Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832),

The Fortunes of Nigel

Chapter 1

Camlet Moat, Trent Place, England

Sunday, 2 August 1812

Tessa Sawyer hummed a nervous tune beneath her breath as she pushed through the tangled brush and bracken edging the black waters of the ancient moat. She was very young—just sixteen at her next birthday. And though she tried to tell herself she was brave, she knew she wasn’t. She could feel her heart pounding in her narrow chest, and her hands tingled as if she’d been sitting on them. When she’d left the village, the night sky above had been clear and bright with stars. But here, deep in the wood, all was darkness and shadow. From the murky, stagnant water beside her rose an eerie mist, thick and clammy.

It should have wafted cool against her cheek. Instead, she felt as if the heavy dampness were stealing her breath, suffocating her with an unnatural heat and a sick dread of the forbidden. She paused to swipe a shaky hand across her sweaty face and heard a rustling in the distance, the soft plop of something hitting the water.

Choking back a whimper, she spun about, ready to run. But this was Lammas, a time sacred to the ancient goddess. They said that at midnight on this night, if a maiden dipped a cloth into the holy well that lay on the northern edge of the isle of Camlet Moat and then tied her offering to a branch of the rag tree that overhung the well, her prayer would be answered. Not only that, but maybe, just maybe, the White Lady herself would appear, to bless the maid and offer her the wisdom and guidance that a motherless girl such as Tessa yearned for with all her being.

No one knew exactly who the White Lady was. Father Clark insisted that if the lady existed at all—which he doubted—she could only be the Virgin Mary. But local legend said the White Lady was one of the grail maidens of old, a chaste virgin who’d guarded the sacred well since before the time of Arthur and Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table. And then there were those who whispered that the lady was actually Guinevere, ever young, ever beautiful, ever glorious.

Forcing herself to go on, Tessa clenched her fist around the strip of white cloth she was bringing as an offering. She could see the prow of the small dinghy kept at the moat by Sir Stanley Winthrop, on whose land she trespassed. Its timbers old and cracked, its aged paint worn and faded, it rocked lightly at the water’s edge as if touched by an unseen current.

It was not empty.

Tessa drew up short. A lady lay crumpled against the stern, her hair a dark cascade of curls around a pale, motionless face. She was young yet and slim, her gown an elegant flowing confection of gossamer muslin sashed with peach satin. She had her head tipped back, her neck arched; her eyes were open but sightless, her skin waxen.

And from a jagged rent high across her pale breast showed a dried rivulet of darkness where her life’s blood had long since drained away.

Chapter 2

London

Monday, 3 August

Driven from his sleep by troublesome dreams, Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, leaned into his outstretched arms, fingers curling around the sill of his wife’s open bedroom window. He’d learned long before of the dangers that lurk in those quicksilver moments that come between darkness and the dawn. When the world hovers between night and day, a man could get lost in his own tortured memories of the past if he wasn’t careful.

He drew a deep, shuddering breath into his lungs. But the dawn was unusually warm, the air too parched and dusty to bring any real relief. He was aware of a sheen of sweat coating his naked skin; a humming like bees working a hive droned behind his temples. The urge to wrap his hand around a cool glass of brandy was strong.

He resisted it.

Behind him, the woman who just four days before had become his Viscountess stirred in her bed. Their marriage was so recent—and the reasons behind it so complicated—that he sometimes found himself still thinking of her not as Hero Devlin but as “Miss Jarvis,” formidable daughter of Charles, Lord Jarvis, the brilliant but ruthless cousin of the King who served as the acknowledged power behind the fragile regency of the Prince of Wales. Once, Jarvis had sworn to destroy Sebastian, however long it might take. Sebastian knew that his marriage to Jarvis’s daughter had not changed that.

Looking over his shoulder, he watched now as Hero came slowly awake. She lay motionless for a moment. Then her eyelids fluttered open and she shifted her head against the pillow to stare at him from across a darkened room hung with blue silk and gilded mirrors and scented with lavender.

“Did I wake you?” he asked. “I am sorry.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Sebastian huffed a soft laugh. There was nothing either indulgent or coquettish about Hero.

She slipped from the bed, bringing with her the fine linen sheet to wrap around her nakedness as she crossed to him. In the darkness of the night, she could come to him without inhibition, a willing and passionate lover. But during the day…

During the day they remained in many ways essentially strangers to each other, two people who inhabited the same house yet were self-conscious and awkward when they chanced upon each other in the hall or met over breakfast. Only at night could they seem to put aside the wary distrust that had characterized their relationship from the beginning. Only in darkness could they forget the deep, dangerous antagonism that lay between his house and hers and come together as man and woman.

He was aware of the gray light of dawn stealing into the room. She hugged the sheet tighter around her.

“You never sleep,” she said.

“I do. Sometimes.”

She tipped her head to one side, her normally tidy brown hair tangled by last night’s lovemaking. “Have you always had such troublesome dreams, or only since marrying the daughter of your worst enemy?”

Smiling faintly, he reached out to draw her to him.

She came stiffly, her forearms resting on his naked chest, creating some distance between them. She was a tall woman, nearly as tall as Sebastian himself, with her powerful father’s aquiline countenance and Lord Jarvis’s famous, disconcerting intelligence.

He said, “I’m told it’s not uncommon for men to dream of war after they’ve returned home.”

Her shrewd gray eyes narrowed with thoughts he could only guess at. “That’s what you dream of? The war?”

He hesitated. “Mainly.”

That night, he had indeed been driven from his bed by the echoing whomph of cannonballs, by the squeals of injured horses and the despairing groans of dying men. Yet there were times when his dreams were troubled not by the haunting things he’d seen or the even more haunting things he’d done, but by a certain blue-eyed, dusky-haired actress named Kat Boleyn. It was an unintentional but nonetheless real betrayal of the woman he had taken to wife, and it troubled him. Yet the only certain way for a man to control his dreams was to avoid sleep.

The daylight in the room strengthened.

Hero said, “It’s difficult for anyone to sleep in this heat.”

He reached up to smooth the tangled hair away from her damp forehead. “Why not come with me to Hampshire? It would do us both good to get away from the noise and dirt of London for a few weeks.” He’d been intending to pay a visit to his estate all summer, but the events of the past few months had made leaving London impossible. Now it was a responsibility that could be delayed no longer.

He watched her hesitate and knew exactly what she was thinking: that alone together in the country they would be thrown constantly into each other’s company. It was, after all, the reason newlywed couples traditionally went away on a honeymoon—so that they might get to know each other better. But there was little that could be termed traditional about their days-old marriage.

He expected her to say no. Then an odd, crooked smile touched her lips and she surprised him by saying, “Why not?”

He let his gaze rove over the smooth planes of her cheeks, the strong line of her jaw, the downward sweep of lashes that now hid her eyes from his sight. She was a mystery to him in so many ways. He knew the formidable strength of her intellect, the power of her sense of justice, the unexpected passion his touch could ignite within her. But he knew little of the life she had lived before their worlds became intertwined, of the girl she had once been or the forces and events that had fashioned her into the kind of woman who could without hesitation or compunction shoot a highwayman in the face.

He said, “We can leave for Hampshire today.”

She shook her head. “I’m to meet Gabrielle Tennyson up at Trent Place this morning. She’s been consulting with Sir Stanley on the excavations of a site on his property called Camlet Moat, and she’s promised to show me what they’ve discovered.”

Sebastian found himself smiling. Hero’s driving passion would always be her clearheaded, logical commitment to reforming the numerous unjust and cruel laws that both handicapped and tarnished their society. But lately she’d also developed a keen interest in the need to preserve the rapidly vanishing legacies of England’s past.

He said, “They’ve discovered something of interest?”

“When you consider that ‘Camlet’ is a recent corruption of ‘Camelot,’ anything they find is intriguing.”

He ran the backs of his fingers along her jawline and smiled when he saw her shiver in the heat. “If I remember my Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory identified Camelot with what is now Winchester.”

She wrapped her hand around his wrist, effectively ending the caress. “Gabrielle thinks Malory was wrong.”

From the street below came the scent of fresh bread and the tinkling bell of the baker’s boy crying, “Hot buns.”

Sebastian said, “Tomorrow, then?”

By now, the golden light of morning flooded the room. Hero took a step back out of the circle of Sebastian’s arms to hug the sheet tighter around her, as if already regretting her commitment. “All right. Tomorrow.”

But it was barely an hour later when a constable from Bow Street arrived at the house on Brook Street with the information that Miss Gabrielle Tennyson had been found dead.

Murdered, at Camlet Moat.

Chapter 3

A small, middle-aged man with a balding pate and a serious demeanor stood at the base of the ancient earthen embankment. He had his hands clasped behind his back, his chin sunk into the folds of his modestly tied cravat. A weathered dinghy lay beside him where it had been hauled up onto the moat’s bank. It was empty now, but a smear of blood still showed clearly along the edge of the gunwale.

Sir Henry Lovejoy, the newest of Bow Street’s three stipendiary magistrates, found himself staring at that telltale streak of blood. He had been called to this murder scene some ten miles north of London by the local magistrate, who was only too eager to hand over his investigation to the Bow Street public office.

Lovejoy blew out a long, troubled sigh. On the streets of London, most murders were straightforward affairs: a drunken navvy choked the life out of his hapless wife; two mates fell out over a dice game or the sale of a horse; a footpad jumped some unwary passerby from the mouth of a fetid alley. But there was nothing ordinary about a murdered young gentlewoman found floating on an abandoned moat in the middle of nowhere.

Miss Gabrielle Tennyson had been just twenty-eight years old. The daughter of a famous scholar, she’d been well on her way to earning a reputation as an antiquary in her own right—a decidedly unusual accomplishment for one of her sex. She lived with her brother, himself a well-known and respected barrister, in a fine house in the Adelphi Buildings overlooking the Thames. Her murder would send an unprecedented ripple of fear through the city, with ladies terrified to leave their homes and angry husbands and fathers demanding that Bow Street do something.

The problem was, Lovejoy had absolutely nothing to go on. Nothing at all.

He raised his gaze to where a line of constables moved along the moat’s edge, their big boots churning through the murky water with muddy, sucking plops that seemed to echo in the unnatural stillness. He had never considered himself a fanciful man—far from it, in fact. Yet there was no denying that something about this place raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Perhaps it was the eerie way the light filtered down through the leaves of the thick stands of beech and hornbeam trees to bathe the scene in an unnatural green glow. Or perhaps it was a father’s inevitable reaction to the sight of a beautiful, dead young woman—a sight that brought back a time of nearly unbearable heartbreak in Lovejoy’s own life.

But he closed his mind to that.

He’d heard of this place, Camlet Moat. They said that once it had been the site of a medieval castle whose origins stretched back to the days of the Romans and beyond. But whatever fortified structures once stood here had long since been dismantled, their stones and mighty timbers carted away. All that remained was a deserted, overgrown square isle a few hundred feet across and the stagnant moat that had once protected it.

Now, as Lovejoy watched, one of the constables broke away from the others to come sloshing up to him.

“We’ve covered the entire bank, sir,” said the man. “All the way around.”

“And?” asked Lovejoy.

“We’ve found nothing, sir.”

Lovejoy exhaled a long breath. “Then start on the island itself.”

“Yes, sir.”

A thunder of horses’ hooves and the rattle of harness drew their attention to the narrow track that curled through the wood to the moat. A curricle and pair driven by an aristocratic young gentleman in a beaver hat and a caped driving coat drew up at the top of the embankment. The half-grown, scrappy-looking young groom in a striped waistcoat who clung to the rear perch immediately hopped down to race to the chestnuts’ heads.

“It’s Lord Devlin, sir,” said the constable, staring slack-jawed as the Earl of Hendon’s notorious son paused to confer with his tiger, then dropped lightly to the ground.

Lovejoy said, “That will be all, Constable.”

The constable cast a last, curious glance toward the top of the slope, then ducked his head. “Yes, sir.”

Lovejoy waited while the Viscount tossed his driving coat onto the curricle’s high seat, then slid down the ancient embankment, the heels of his gleaming Hessian boots digging furrows in the soft leaf litter.

“Sir Henry,” said the Viscount. “Good morning.”

Lean and dark-haired, he was tall enough to tower over Lovejoy. But it was the man’s eyes that tended to draw and hold a stranger’s attention. Shading from amber to a feral yellow, they possessed an animallike ability to see great distances and in the dark. His hearing was exceptionally acute too, which could be disconcerting, even to those who knew him well.

The unusual friendship between the two men dated back some eighteen months, to a time when Devlin had been accused of murder and Lovejoy had been determined to bring him in. From those unlikely beginnings had grown respect as well as friendship. In Devlin, Lovejoy had found an ally with a rare passion for justice and a true genius for solving murders. But more important, Devlin also possessed something no Bow Street magistrate would ever have: an easy entrée at the highest levels of society and an innate understanding of the wealthy and wellborn who inevitably came under suspicion in a murder of this nature.

“My lord,” said Lovejoy, giving a small, jerky bow. “I must apologize for intruding upon what should be for you and your new wife a time of joy and solitude. But when I learned of the victim’s connection to Lady Devlin, I thought you would wish to know.”

“You did the right thing,” said Devlin. He let his gaze drift around the site, taking in the tangled growth of beech and oak, the green-scummed waters of the abandoned moat. “Where is she?”

Lovejoy cleared his throat uncomfortably. “We sent the remains to London an hour or so ago.” Bodies did not keep well in the heat of August.

“To Gibson?”

“Yes, my lord.” No one understood human anatomy or could read the secrets a body might have to reveal about its murderer better than Paul Gibson. Lovejoy nodded to the small boat beside them. “She was found in the dinghy—floating just at the edge of the moat here.”

“You think this is where she was killed?” asked Devlin, hunkering down to study the blood-smeared gunwale.

“I think it probable she was stabbed in the dinghy, yes. But there were no footprints in the damp earth along this stretch of the bank, which leads me to suspect the boat simply drifted here from elsewhere—perhaps from the land bridge that crosses the moat on the eastern side of the island. We understand that’s where it’s normally kept moored. Unfortunately, there are so many footprints in that area that it’s impossible to identify with any certainty those that might belong to the killer.”

Devlin was silent for a moment, his forehead furrowed by a thoughtful frown as he continued to stare at that ugly streak of blood. The Viscount could sometimes be hesitant to commit to an investigation of murder. It was a reluctance Lovejoy understood only too well. More and more, it seemed to him that each death he dealt with, each torn, shattered life with which he came into contact, stole a piece of his own humanity and bled away an irretrievable part of his joy in life.

But surely, Lovejoy reasoned, the connection between this victim and his lordship’s own wife would make it impossible for the Viscount to refuse.

Lovejoy said, “A murder such as this—a young woman brutally stabbed in a wood just north of London—will inevitably cause a panic in the city. And unfortunately, the impulse in these situations is all too often to calm public outrage by identifying a culprit quickly—at the cost of true justice.”

“Are you asking for my help?”

Lovejoy met that strange, feral yellow stare, and held it. “I am, my lord.”

Devlin pushed to his feet, his gaze shifting across the stretch of murky water to where the constables could be seen poking around the piles of fresh earth that edged Sir Stanley’s series of exploratory trenches. In the misty, ethereal light of morning, the mounds of raw earth bore an unpleasant resemblance to rows of freshly dug graves. Lovejoy watched Devlin’s lips press into a thin line, his nostrils flare on a painfully indrawn breath.

But the Viscount didn’t say anything, and Lovejoy knew him well enough to be patient.

And wait for Devlin’s reply.

Chapter 4

Sebastian turned to walk along the crest of the ancient rampart that rose beside the stagnant moat. The shade here was deep and heavy, the blue sky above nearly obliterated by the leafy branches of the stands of old-growth timber that met overhead. A tangle of bracken and fern edged the quiet waters of the moat and filled the air with the scent of wet earth and humus and the buzz of insects.

He’d heard that once this wild tract of woodland to the north of London had been known as Enfield Chase, a royal hunting ground that rang with the clatter of noble hoofbeats, the shrill blast of the huntsman’s horn, the baying of royal hounds. Through these lands had swept King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth and a host of glittering, bejeweled courtiers, their velvet cloaks swirling in the mist, their voices raised in hearty halloos.

But all that had ended long ago. Briars and underbrush had grown up to choke the forest floor, while commoners from the nearby village had carted away the last tumbled stones of whatever grand manor or castle had once stood here. A quiet hush had fallen over the site, unbroken until a beautiful, brilliant, independent-minded young woman with a boundless curiosity about the past had come searching for the origins of a legend—and died here.

He could remember meeting Miss Gabrielle Tennyson only once, a year or so earlier at a lecture on Roman London that he’d attended in the company of the Earl of Hendon. Sebastian recalled her as a striking, self-assured young woman with chestnut hair and an open, friendly smile. He hadn’t been surprised to discover that she and Hero were friends. Despite their obvious differences, the two women were much alike. He found it difficult to think of such a strong, vital woman now lying on a surgeon’s slab, robbed of her life and all the years of promise that had once stretched before her. Difficult to imagine the terror and despair that must have filled her eyes and congealed her heart when she looked her last on this quiet, secluded site.

He paused to stare again at the small wooded isle where a castle named Camelot had once stood. He was aware of Sir Henry Lovejoy drawing up beside him, his homely features pinched and tight, his hands clasped behind his back.

Sebastian glanced over at him. “You said she’d been stabbed?”

The magistrate nodded. “In the chest. Just once that I could see, although Dr. Gibson will be able to tell us with certainty once he’s finished the postmortem.”

“And the murder weapon?”

“Has yet to be found.”

Sebastian eyed the murky water before them. If Gabrielle’s murderer had thrown his knife into the moat, it might never be recovered.

Twisting around, he studied the narrow lane where his tiger, Tom, was walking the chestnuts up and down. “How the devil did she get out here? Any idea?”

Sir Henry shook his head. “We can only assume she must have arrived in the company of her killer.”

“No one in the neighborhood saw anything?”

“Nothing they’re willing to admit. But then, the nearest village is several miles away, and there are only a few isolated houses in the area. Tessa Sawyer—the village girl who found her—came upon the body quite by chance, shortly before midnight.”

“And what was Tessa doing out in the middle of nowhere at night?”

“That is not entirely clear, I’m afraid, given the girl’s garbled and rather evasive replies to our questions. However, I understand that yesterday was some sort of ancient pagan holy day—”

“Lammas.”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Sir Henry. “Lammas. I’m told Camlet Moat has a reputation as a place of magic amongst the credulous. In addition to the apparition of a White Lady who is said to haunt the island, there’s also the ghost of some unsavory Templar knight who is reputed to appear when provoked.”

“I assume you’ve heard there’s also a tradition that this may be the ancient site of King Arthur’s Camelot?”

The magistrate sniffed. “A fanciful notion, no doubt. But yes, I understand Sir Stanley Winthrop became intrigued by the possibility after he purchased the estate last year and discovered Miss Tennyson’s research on the history of the site.”

“You think her murder could in some way be connected to the legends of the island’s past?”

Sir Henry blew out a long, agitated breath. “I wish I knew. We’re not even certain how long Miss Tennyson’s body was lying here before it was discovered. Her brother, Mr. Hildeyard Tennyson, has been out of town for the better part of a fortnight. I’ve sent a constable to interview her servants, but I fear they may not be able tell us much of anything. Yesterday was Sunday, after all.”

“Bloody hell,” said Sebastian softly. “What does Sir Stanley Winthrop have to say about all this?”

“He claims he last saw Miss Tennyson when she left the excavations for home on Saturday afternoon.”

Something in the magistrate’s tone caught Sebastian’s attention. “But you don’t believe him?”

“I don’t know what to believe. He tells us he can’t imagine what she might have been doing up here yesterday. They don’t work the excavations on Sundays.”

Sebastian said, “Perhaps she came up to look around by herself.”

Lovejoy frowned. “Yes, I suppose that’s possible. She may well have surprised some trespasser, and in a panic, he killed her.”

“And then stole her carriage and kidnapped her coachman?”

Lovejoy pulled a face. “There is that.”

Sebastian adjusted the tilt of his beaver hat. “Her brother is still out of town?”

Lovejoy nodded. “We’ve sent word to his estate, but I doubt he’ll make it back to London before nightfall at the earliest.”

“Then I think I’ll start with Sir Stanley Winthrop,” said Sebastian, and turned back toward his curricle.

Lovejoy fell into step beside him. “Does this mean you’re willing to assist Bow Street with the case?”

“Did you honestly think I would not?”

Sir Henry gave one of his rare half smiles, tucked his chin against his chest, and shook his head.

Chapter 5

“There you are, Jarvis,” exclaimed the Prince Regent, his face flushed, his voice rising in a petulant whine as he clenched a sheet of cheap, ink-smeared paper in his fist. “Look at this!” He thumped the offending broadsheet with one plump, beringed hand. “Just look at it.”

His Royal Highness George, Prince Regent of Great Britain and Ireland, lay beside the fireplace in his dressing room, his heavy legs draped off the edge of a gilt fainting couch contrived in the shape of a crocodile upholstered in scarlet velvet. Despite the heat of the day, a fire burned brightly on the hearth, for the Prince had a morbid fear of taking chill.

Having been stricken while still in the midst of his toilet, he wore only a pair of exquisitely fitted yellow unmentionables and a shirt ruffled with an extravagant cascade of lace. It was a style of linen that belonged more to the previous century, but the Prince still occasionally indulged his taste for it, perhaps because it reminded him of the golden years of his youth, when he’d been handsome and carefree and beloved by his people. These days, he needed a corset to contain his ever-increasing girth, the people who’d once cheered him now booed him openly in the streets, and shadowy radicals published seditious broadsheets bemoaning the lost days of Camelot and calling for King Arthur to return from the mists of Avalon and save Britain from the benighted rule of the House of Hanover.

So great had been the Prince’s distress at the reading of this particular broadsheet that his valet had sent for the Prince’s doctor. The doctor, in turn, took one look at the offending verbiage and requested the attendance of the Prince’s powerful and infinitely wise cousin, Charles, Lord Jarvis.

“Calm yourself, Your Highness,” said Jarvis, catching the eye of the Prince’s doctor, who stood nearby. The doctor nodded discreetly and turned away.

“But have you seen this?” wailed the Prince. “They want Arthur to come back and get rid of me!”

Jarvis carefully loosed the broadsheet from the Regent’s clutches. “I have seen it, Your Highness.” Personally, Jarvis suspected the caricature accompanying the tract—which portrayed George as a grossly fat, drunken, overdressed buffoon with the ears of an ass—offended the Prince more than anything. But it was the implications of the appeal for Arthur’s messianic return that concerned Jarvis. “Whoever is responsible for this will be dealt with.”

The Prince’s valet and doctor exchanged quick, furtive glances, then looked away. There was a reason Jarvis was feared from one end of the Kingdom to the other. His network of spies and informants gave him an eerie omnipotence, while those he “dealt with” were seldom seen again.

The doctor stepped forward with a glass of cloudy liquid on a silver tray. “Here, Your Highness; drink this. You’ll feel much better.”

“Who gave this broadsheet to the Prince?” Jarvis demanded in a harsh whisper to the Prince’s valet as His Highness obediently gulped the doctor’s brew.

The valet’s plump, sweat-sheened face went pasty white. “I’ve no notion, my lord. In truth, I do not know!”

Frowning, Jarvis tucked the seditious literature into his coat and bowed himself out of the royal presence.

He was crossing the anteroom of the Prince’s chambers when a pimply, half-grown page sidled up to him and bowed low, his mouth opening and closing as he struggled to speak. But all he succeeded in doing was pushing out a series of incoherent squeaks.

“For God’s sake, boy, out with it,” snapped Jarvis. “As it happens I’ve already eaten, so you needn’t fear I’ll have you for breakfast.”

The boy’s eyes bulged.

Jarvis suppressed a sigh. “Your message; say it.”

The boy swallowed and tried again, the words tumbling out in a rush. “It’s your daughter, my lord. Miss J—I mean, Lady Devlin. She desired me to tell you that she wishes to speak with you, my lord. She awaits you in your chambers.”

No man in England was more powerful than Jarvis. His kinship with the King might be distant, but without Jarvis’s ruthless brilliance and steady wisdom, the House of Hanover would have fallen long ago and the Hanovers knew it. Jarvis had dedicated his life to the preservation of the monarchy and the global extension of the might of England. Another man might have insisted on being named prime minister in return for his services. But Jarvis preferred to exercise his power from the shadows, unconstrained by either tradition or law. Prime ministers came and went.

Jarvis remained.

He found his daughter standing at the long window of the chambers reserved for his exclusive use overlooking Pall Mall. Once, Jarvis had possessed a son—an idealistic dreamer named David. But David had been lost years before to a watery grave. Now there was only Hero: brilliant, strong willed, and nearly as ruthless and enigmatic as Jarvis himself.

She wore a walking dress of dusky blue trimmed with moss green piping, and a jaunty hat with a broad brim turned up on one side and held in place with a silk posy. The sunlight streaming through the paned glass bathed her in a warm golden glow and touched her cheeks with color.

“You’re looking good,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Marriage seems to agree with you.”

She turned to face him. “You’re surprised?”

Rather than answer, he crossed the room to where a candlestick stood on a table beside a wing-back chair. The relationship between father and daughter had always been complicated. They were much alike, which meant she understood him as few others did. But that was not to say that she knew everything there was to know about him.

“What brings you here?” he asked, his attention seemingly all for the task of lighting the candle. He was aware of an air of constraint between them, for her recent marriage to Devlin had introduced a new element and subtly shifted the dynamic in a way neither had yet to confront or reveal.

“What makes you think I came for a purpose other than to see you?”

“Because if this were a gesture of familial affection, you wouldn’t be at Carlton House. You would have come to Berkeley Square. Your mother is well, by the way—or perhaps I should say she is as well as she ever is. She’s quite taken with the new companion you found for her.”

Refusing to be distracted, Hero said, “Gabrielle Tennyson was discovered murdered this morning, at Camlet Moat.” When he kept silent, she said, “You knew?”

He watched the wick of the candle catch, flare up bright. “There is little that happens in this Kingdom that I do not know about.”

“There is also little that happens in this Kingdom that you don’t control.”

He glanced over at her. She stood with her back to the window, her hands curled so that her palms rested on the sill. Through the glass behind her he could see a heavy traffic of carriages, carts, and horses streaming up and down the Mall. He said, “Are you asking if I had her killed?”

“After what I overheard last Friday night, the thought naturally does occur to me.” When Jarvis remained silent, she added impatiently, “Well? Did you?”

“I did not.” He drew the broadsheet from his pocket and thrust it into the candle flame. It blackened and smoked for an instant, then caught fire. “Now the question becomes, do you believe me?”

She held herself quite still, her gaze on his face. “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to tell when you’re lying.”

He tilted the paper as the flames took hold, then dropped it onto the cold, bare stones of the nearby hearth. “I take it Devlin has become involved in the investigation?”

“Lovejoy has asked for his assistance with the case, yes.”

“And will you tell your husband that he should add me to his list of suspects, and why?”

She pushed away from the window, her nostrils flaring with a sharp intake of breath. “I am here because Gabrielle was my friend, not as Devlin’s agent.”

“Perhaps. But that doesn’t exactly answer my question.”

Their gazes met. They’d both known this day would come, when she’d find herself caught between what she felt she owed her own family and what she owed her new husband. Only, he hadn’t expected it to come quite so soon.

She said, “I have no intention of betraying you…if you are telling me the truth.”

He found himself smiling. “But then, in that case, you wouldn’t actually be betraying me, now, would you?” He tipped his head to one side. “And how will your rather headstrong and passionate young Viscount react, I wonder, when he discovers that you have been less than forthcoming with him?”

“I must be true to myself and to what I believe is right. My marriage in no way negates that.”

“And if he doesn’t understand—or fails to agree?”

She turned toward the door. “Then we will disagree.”

She said it evenly, in that way she had. He knew she had analyzed the situation and made her decision calmly and rationally. She was not the kind of woman to waste time agonizing or endlessly analyzing her choices. But that was not to say that the decision had been made lightly or that it would be without emotional consequences. For he had seen the troubled shadows that lurked in the depths of her fine gray eyes. And he knew an upsurge of renewed anger and resentment directed at Devlin, who had put them there.

After she left, he watched the broadsheet on the hearth burn itself out until nothing remained but a blackened ash. Then he went to stand where she had stood, his gaze on the courtyard below. He watched her exit the Palace, watched her climb the steps to her waiting carriage. He watched the carriage bowl away up Pall Mall toward the west, the clatter of her horses’ hooves lost in the tumult of drivers’ shouts and hawkers’ cries and the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels over cobbles.

Turning, he rang for his clerk.

“Send Colonel Urquhart to me,” he said curtly when the man appeared. “Now.”

Chapter 6

The abandoned isle once known as Camelot lay on the northern edge of Trent Place, a relatively new estate dating only to late in the previous century, when the ancient royal chase had been broken up and sold to help pay for the first round of George III’s wars. The properties thus created had proved popular with the newly wealthy merchants and bankers of the city. Sir Stanley, Trent Place’s latest owner, was a prosperous banker granted a baronetcy by the King in reward for his assistance in financing the country’s long struggle against Napoléon.

“One o’ them constables was tellin’ me this Sir Stanley already ’as a ’ouse in Golden Square what makes the Queen’s Palace look like a cottage,” said Sebastian’s tiger, Tom, as they turned through massive new gates to a meticulously landscaped park. “So why’d he need to buy this place too, just a few miles from London?”

The boy was thirteen years old now, but still small and gap-toothed and scrappy, for he had been a homeless street urchin when Sebastian first discovered the lad’s intense loyalty and sense of honor and natural affinity for horses. In a very real sense, Tom and Sebastian had saved each other. The ties that bound lord to servant and boy to man ran deep and strong.

Sebastian said, “The possession of an estate is the sine qua non for anyone aspiring to be a gentleman.”

“The seenkwawhat?”

“Sine qua non. It’s Latin for a condition without which something cannot be.”

“You sayin’ this Sir Stanley ain’t always been a gentleman?”

“Something like that,” said Sebastian, drawing up before what had once been a graceful Italianate villa but was now in the process of being transformed into something quite different by the addition of two vast wings and a new roofline. The pounding of hammers and the clatter of lumber filled the air; near a half-constructed wall, a tall, elegantly tailored gentleman in his early fifties could be seen conferring with a group of brickmasons.

“Keep your ears open around the stables,” Sebastian told Tom as the tiger took the reins. “I’d be interested to hear what the servants are saying.”

“Aye, gov’nor.”

“Devlin,” called Sir Stanley, leaving the bricklayers to stroll toward him.

He was a ruggedly handsome man, his chin square, his cheekbones prominent, his mouth wide and expressive. Despite his years, his body was still strong and powerful, and he had a head of thick, pale blond hair fading gradually to white, so that it formed a startling contrast to his unexpectedly sun-darkened features. The effect was more like what one would expect of a soldier or a nabob just returned from India than a banker.

They said the man had begun his career as a lowly clerk, the son of a poor vicar with sixteen children and no connections. Sebastian had heard that his rise to wealth, power, and influence had been both rapid and brutal and owed its success to his wily intelligence, his driving ambition, and a clear-sighted, unflinching ruthlessness.

“What brings you here?” asked Sir Stanley, pausing beside the curricle.

“I’ve just come from Camlet Moat,” said Sebastian, dropping lightly to the ground.

“Ah. I see.” The flesh of the man’s face suddenly looked pinched, as if pulled too taut over the bones of his face. “Please,” he said, stretching a hand to indicate the broad white marble stairs that led up to the central, original section of the house. “Come in.”

“Thank you.”

“I was with Squire John when he discovered the body,” said Winthrop as they mounted the steps. “He’s our local magistrate, you know. Seems some girl from the village showed up at the Grange in the middle of the night, babbling nonsense about white ladies and magic wells and a dead gentlewoman in the moat. The Squire was convinced it was all a hum—actually apologized for coming to me at the crack of dawn—but I said, ‘No, no, let’s go have a look.’” He paused in the entrance hall, a quiver passing over his tightly held features. “The last thing I expected was to find Gabrielle.”

Sebastian let his gaze drift around the vast, marble-floored entrance hall, with its towering, gilt-framed canvases of pastoral landscapes by Constable and Turner, its ornately plastered ceiling picked out in pastel shades evocative of a plate of petit fours. In an age when it was not uncommon for husbands and wives to call each other by their surnames or titles, Winthrop had just referred to Miss Tennyson by her first name.

And Sebastian suspected the man was not even aware of his slip.

“I’d never seen someone who’d been murdered,” the banker was saying. “I suppose you’ve had experience with it, but I haven’t. I’m not ashamed to admit it was a shock.”

“I’m not convinced anyone gets used to the sight of murder.”

Sir Stanley nodded and turned toward the cavernous drawing room that opened to their left. “It may be frightfully early, but I could use a drink. How about you? May I offer you some wine?”

“Yes, thank you. Sir Henry Lovejoy tells me you don’t work on the island’s excavations on Sundays,” said Sebastian as his host crossed to where a tray with a decanter and glasses waited on a gilded table beside a grouping of silk-covered settees.

Winthrop splashed wine into two glasses. “My wife believes the Sabbath should be a day of rest. On the seventh day, the Lord rested, and so should all of his children.”

“Commendable,” said Sebastian. Through a long bank of tall windows he could see an angular, bony woman he recognized as Lady Winthrop standing at the edge of an old-fashioned garden of box-edged parterres filled with roses. Despite the heat, she wore a long-sleeved sprigged muslin gown made high at the neck and trimmed with only a meager band of lace. She was younger than Winthrop by some fifteen or twenty years, a second wife as plain as her husband was handsome, her eyes small and protuberant and close set, her chin receding, her head thrust forward in a way that made her look forever inquisitive.

Or aggressive.

She was in the process of giving directions to a cluster of gardeners equipped with wheelbarrows and shovels. As Sebastian watched, she waved her arms in extravagant gestures as she delivered her instructions. Piles of rich dark earth and stacks of brick lay nearby; the Winthrops were obviously expanding their gardens as well as their new house. Watching her, Sebastian wondered if Lady Winthrop also referred to Miss Tennyson as “Gabrielle.” Somehow, he doubted it.

Winthrop set aside the decanter to pick up the two glasses. “At first, in her naivety, my wife actually expected the brutes to be grateful. But she soon discovered how mistaken she was. All they do is grumble about being forced to go to church services.”

“It’s required?”

“Of course.” Winthrop held out one of the glasses. “Religion is important to the order of society. It reconciles the lower classes to their lot in life and teaches them to respect their betters.”

“So it does,” said Sebastian, studying the banker’s faintly smiling face as he took the wine handed him. But he was unable to decide whether Winthrop agreed with his wife or quietly mocked her. “So, tell me, do you honestly believe you’ve found King Arthur’s Camelot?” He took a sip of the wine. It was smooth and mellow and undoubtedly French.

“Honestly?” The banker drained his own glass in two long pulls, then shook his head. “I don’t know. But the site is intriguing, don’t you agree? I mean, here we have a place long associated with the kings of England—a place whose name actually was Camelot. I’m told the word is of Celtic origin. It probably comes from ‘Camulus,’ the Celtic god of war. Of course, Miss Tennyson says—said,” he amended hastily, correcting himself, “that it could also mean ‘place of the crooked stream.’ Personally, I prefer to think it is named after the god of war.” Turning away to pour himself more wine, he raised the decanter in silent question to Sebastian.

Sebastian shook his head. He had taken only the one sip.

“The important thing,” said Winthrop, refreshing his own drink, “is that we know the name dates back to well before the time of William the Conqueror. The corruption of ‘Camelot’ to ‘Camlet’ is quite recent, within the last hundred years or so.”

Sebastian studied the older man’s handsome features. His manner could only be described as affable, even likeable. But Sebastian couldn’t get past the knowledge that the previous owner of Trent Place had been forced to sell the estate to Winthrop at a steep loss—and then blown his own brains out the next day.

Sebastian took another sip of his wine. “How did you meet Miss Tennyson?”

“By mere chance, actually, at a lecture presented by the Society of Antiquaries. She’d been doing research on the history of Camlet Moat and approached me when she learned I’d recently purchased the estate. Until then, I’d barely realized the moat existed. But the more I learned about it, the more intrigued I became.”

“And you began the excavations—when?”

“A month ago now. We’d hoped to begin earlier, but the wet spring delayed things.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Far more than I’d anticipated, certainly. Foundations of stone walls five feet thick. Remnants of a forty-foot drawbridge. Even an underground dungeon complete with chains still hanging on the walls.”

“Dating to when?”

“Judging from the coins and painted tiles we’ve come across, probably the thirteenth or fourteenth century, for most of it.”

“I was under the impression King Arthur was supposed to have lived in the fifth or sixth century, after the Roman withdrawal from Britain—that is, if he lived at all.”

“True.” Winthrop turned away to reach for something, then held it out. “But look at this.”

Sebastian found himself holding a corroded metal blade. “What is it?”

“A Roman dagger.” Winthrop set aside his wine and went to open a large flat glass case framed in walnut that stood on its own table near the door. “And look at this.” He pointed with one blunt, long finger. “These pottery vessels are third- or fourth-century Roman. So is the glass vial. And see that coin? It’s from the time of Claudius.”

Sebastian studied the artifacts proudly displayed against a black velvet background. “You found all this at Camlet Moat?”

“We did. The drawbridge and dungeon probably date to the time of the de Mandevilles and their descendants, who held the castle for the Crown in the late Middle Ages. But the site itself is older—much older. There was obviously a fort or villa there in Roman times, which means that in all probability there was still something there during the days of Arthur, after the Romans pulled out.”

Sebastian regarded the other man’s flushed face and shining eyes. “Will you continue digging, now that Miss Tennyson is dead?”

All the excitement and animation seemed to drain out of Winthrop, leaving him pensive. “I don’t see how we can. She’s the one who knew what she was doing—and how to interpret what we were finding.”

“You couldn’t simply hire an antiquary through the British Museum?”

The banker gave a soft laugh. “Given that they all thought Miss Tennyson mad to be working with me on this, I can’t see anyone of stature being willing to risk his reputation by following in her footsteps. And with harvesttime upon us, we were about to quit anyway.”

“Any chance she could have come up yesterday to have a quiet look around the site by herself for some reason? Or perhaps to show it to someone?”

Sir Stanley appeared thoughtful. “I suppose it’s possible, although she generally devoted her Sundays to activities with the boys.”

Sebastian shook his head, not understanding. “What boys?”

“George and Alfred—sons of one of her cousins. I understand the mother’s having a difficult confinement and the father isn’t well himself, so Miss Tennyson invited the lads to spend the summer with her in London. They generally stayed home with their nurse when she came up to the island, but she liked to spend several days a week showing them around London. The Tower of London and the beasts at the Exchange—that sort of thing.”

“So she didn’t come every day when you were digging?”

“Not every day, no; she had some other research she was also pursuing. But she generally came three or four times a week, yes.”

“How would she get here?”

“Sometimes in her brother’s carriage, although she would frequently take the stage to Enfield and get someone at the livery there to drive her out to the moat. In that case, I always insisted she allow me to have one of the men drive her back to London in the afternoon.”

It wasn’t exactly unheard of for a gentlewoman to take the stage, especially for such a short, local trip. Maintaining a carriage, horses, and groom in London was prodigiously expensive; most families kept only one, if that.

“Her brother begrudged her the use of his carriage?”

“Quite the opposite, actually. It irked him to no end when she insisted on taking the common stage rather than using his carriage—said he was perfectly capable of taking a hackney or walking around London himself.”

“But she didn’t always listen?”

Winthrop’s wide mouth curled into a soft smile that faded away into something sad as he shook his head. “She was like that.”

“Like what?”

He went to stand at the long row of windows, his gaze on the scene outside. A few puffy white clouds had appeared on the horizon, but the sun still drenched the beds of roses with a dazzling golden light. The workmen were now bent over their shovels; Lady Winthrop was nowhere to be seen. “She was an unusual woman,” he said, watching the distant clouds. “Strong. Opinionated. Unafraid to challenge the conventions and assumptions of her world. And not given to suffering fools lightly.”

“In other words,” said Sebastian, “the kind of woman who could make enemies.”

Winthrop nodded, his gaze still on the scene beyond the glass.

“Anyone you know of in particular?”

The banker drew a deep breath that expanded his chest. “It seems somehow wrong to be mentioning these things now, when the recollection of a few careless words uttered in anger could easily result in a man standing accused of murder.”

“Are you saying Miss Tennyson quarreled with someone recently?”

“I don’t know if I’d say they ‘quarreled,’ exactly.”

“So what did happen?”

“Well, when I saw her on Saturday…”

“Yes?” prompted Sebastian when the man hesitated.

“I knew something was troubling her as soon as she arrived at the site. She seemed…strained. Jumpy. At first she tried to pass it off as nothing more than a melancholy mood, but I wasn’t fooled.”

“Was she given to melancholy moods?”

“She was a Tennyson. They’re all melancholy, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know. Go on.”

“She said she didn’t want to talk about it. Perhaps I pressed her more than I should have, but in the end she admitted she was troubled by an encounter she’d had the previous day, on Friday. She tried to laugh it off—said it was nothing. But it was obviously considerably more than ‘nothing.’ I don’t believe I’d ever seen her so upset.”

The sound of a distant door opening echoed through the house.

“An encounter with whom?” asked Sebastian.

“I couldn’t tell you his name. Some antiquary known for his work on the post-Roman period of English history.”

“And this fellow disagreed with Miss Tennyson’s belief that your Camlet Moat was the site of King Arthur’s Camelot?”

Winthrop’s jaw tightened in a way that caused the powerful muscles in his cheeks to bunch and flex. For the first time, Sebastian caught a glimpse of the steely ruthlessness that had enabled the banker to amass a fortune in the course of twenty years of war. “I gather he is of the opinion that King Arthur is a figment of the collective British imagination—a product of both our romantic wish for a glorious, heroic past and a yearning for a magical savior who will return to lead us once more to victory and glory.”

“And was this disagreement the reason for Friday’s ‘encounter’?”

“She led me to believe so.”

“But you suspect she was being less than open with you?”

“In a word? Yes.”

Chapter 7

Luick footsteps sounded in the hall, and Winthrop turned as his wife entered the room. She drew up abruptly at the sight of Sebastian, her expression more one of haughty indignation than welcome. It was obvious she knew exactly why he was there.

“Ah, there you are, my dear,” said the banker. “You’ve met Lord Devlin?”

“I have.” She made no move to offer him her hand.

“We met at a dinner at Lord Liverpool’s, I believe,” said Sebastian, bowing. “Last spring.”

“So we did.” It was obvious Lady Winthrop had not found the encounter a pleasure. But then, Sebastian did have something of a reputation for dangerous and scandalous living. She said, “You’re here because of the death of the Tennyson woman, are you? I told Sir Stanley no good would come of this Camelot nonsense.”

Sebastian cast a glance at her husband, but Winthrop’s face remained a pleasant mask. If he was embarrassed by his wife’s boorish behavior, he gave no sign of it.

“I take it you don’t share Sir Stanley’s enthusiasm for the investigation of Camlet Moat?” said Sebastian, draining his wine.

“I do not.”

Winthrop moved to close the lid on the glass case. “My wife is a God-fearing woman who worries that any interest in the island shown by their betters will merely increase the unfortunate predilection of the locals to fall victim to ancient and dangerous superstitions.”

Lady Winthrop threw her husband a quick, veiled look.

“Have you visited the excavations yourself, Lady Winthrop?” Sebastian asked.

“I see no utility in poking about the rubbish of some long-vanished buildings. What’s gone is gone. It’s the fate of mankind that should concern us, not his past. Everything we need to know is written in the Good Lord’s book or in the learned works of theology and morality penned by his inspired servants. It is his intentions that should be the object of our study, not some forgotten piles of stones and broken pots.”

Winthrop said, his voice bland, “May I offer you some more wine, Lord Devlin?”

“Thank you, but no.” Sebastian set aside his glass. “I must be going.”

Neither his host nor his hostess urged him to stay. “I’ll send a servant for your carriage,” said Lady Winthrop.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t have been of more assistance,” said Winthrop a few moments later as he walked with Sebastian to the door and out into the blazing sunshine.

Sebastian paused at the top of the broad steps. “Tell me, Sir Stanley: Do you think it possible that Miss Tennyson’s death could have something to do with your work at Camlet Moat?”

“I don’t see how it could,” said Winthrop, his face turned away, his gaze on the gravel sweep where Tom was just drawing up.

“Yet you are familiar with the legend that Arthur is only sleeping on the isle of Avalon, and that in England’s gravest hour of need he will arise again to lead us to victory.”

The two men walked down the steps. “I find legends endlessly fascinating; tales of noble heroes and beautiful maidens have entranced mankind through the ages. But as an inspiration to murder? I don’t see it.”

Sebastian leapt up to the curricle’s high seat and gathered the reins. “Anything powerful can also be dangerous.”

“Only to those who feel threatened by it.” Winthrop took a step back. “Good day, my lord.”

Sebastian waited until they were bowling away up the drive toward the park’s gateway before glancing over at his tiger and saying, “Well? Anything?”

“It’s a queer estate, this Trent Place,” said Tom, who possessed a knack for inspiring other servants to gossip. “Seems like it changes owners nearly every other year.”

“Not quite, but almost,” said Sebastian. It was typical of new estates. Ancient manors could stay in the same family for centuries, but the new wealth of merchants and bankers frequently went as easily and quickly as it came. “And what is the servants’ general opinion of the current owners?”

“There was some mutterin’ and queer looks, but nobody was willin’ to come out and say much o’ anything. If ye ask me, they’re afraid.”

“Of Sir Stanley? Or his wife?”

“Maybe both.”

“Interesting,” said Sebastian. “And what do they think of the excavations at Camlet Moat?”

“That’s a bit queer too. Some think it’s excitin’, but there’s others see it as a sacra—sacra—” Tom struggled with the word.

“A sacrilege?”

“Aye, that’s it.”

“Interesting.”

Sebastian guided the chestnuts through the park’s massive new gateway, then dropped his hands; the horses leapt forward to eat up the miles back to London. He could see the heat haze roiling up from the hard-packed road, feel the sun blazing down hot on his shoulders. He was intensely aware of the fierce green of the chestnut trees shading a nearby brook, of the clear-noted poignancy of a lark’s song floating on the warm breeze. And he found himself unable to stop thinking of the vibrant, intelligent young woman whose pallid corpse awaited him on Paul Gibson’s cold granite slab, and to whom all the beauties of that morning—or any other morning—were forever lost.

By the time Sebastian drew up before Paul Gibson’s surgery on Tower Hill, the chestnuts’ coats were wet and dark with sweat.

“Take ’em home and baby ’em,” he said, handing Tom the reins.

“Aye, gov’nor.” Tom scrambled into the seat as Sebastian hopped down to the narrow footpath. “You want I should come back with the grays?”

Sebastian shook his head. “I’ll send for you if I need you.”

He stood for a moment, watching the lad expertly wind his way westward through the press of carts and coal wagons. Near the base of the hill, a ragged boy with a drum tapped a steady beat to attract customers to the street seller who stood beside him hawking fried fish. Nearby, a woman with a cart peddled eel jelly, while a thin man in a buff-colored coat watered a nondescript roan at an old fountain built against the wall of the corner house. Then, realizing he was only delaying the inevitable, Sebastian turned to cut through the noisome, high-walled passage that led to the unkempt yard behind Gibson’s surgery.

At the base of the yard lay a small stone outbuilding used by the surgeon both for his official postmortems and for a series of surreptitious dissections performed on cadavers snatched from the city’s graveyards under the cover of darkness by stealthy, dangerous men. As Sebastian neared the open door of the building, he could see the remains of a woman lying on the cold, hard granite slab in the center of the single, high-windowed room.

Even in death, Miss Gabrielle Tennyson was a handsome woman, her features gracefully molded, her mouth generous, her upper lip short and gently cleft, her chestnut hair thick and luxuriously wavy. He paused in the doorway, his gaze on her face.

“Ah, there you are,” said Gibson, looking up. He set aside his scalpel with a clatter and reached for a rag to wipe his hands. “I thought I might be seeing you.”

A slim man of medium height in his early thirties, Paul Gibson had dark hair and green eyes bright with an irrepressible glint of mischief that almost but not quite hid the dull ache of chronic pain lurking in their nuanced depths. Irish by birth, he had honed his craft on the battlefields of Europe, learning the secrets of life and death from an endless parade of bodies slashed open and torn asunder. Then a French cannonball had shattered his own lower left leg, leaving him with a painful stump and a weakness for the sweet relief to be found in an elixir of poppies. He now divided his time between teaching anatomy to the medical students at St. Thomas’s Hospital and consulting with patients at his own private surgery here in the shadows of the Tower of London.

“Can you tell me anything yet?” asked Sebastian, looking pointedly away from what Gibson had been doing to the cadaver. Like Gibson, Sebastian had worn the King’s colors, fighting for God and country from Italy to the West Indies to the Peninsula. But he had never become inured to the sight or smell of death.

“Not much, I’m afraid, although I’m only just getting started. I might have more for you in a wee bit.” Gibson limped from behind the table, his peg leg tap-tapping on the uneven flagged flooring. He pointed to a jagged purple slit that marred the milky flesh of the body’s left breast. “You can see where she was stabbed. The blade was perhaps eight or ten inches long and an inch wide. Either her killer knew what he was doing or he got lucky. He hit her heart with just one thrust.”

“She died right away?”

“Almost instantly.”

Sebastian dropped his gaze to the long, tapered fingers that lay curled beside the body’s hips. The nails were carefully manicured and unbroken.

“No sign of a struggle?”

“None that I’ve found.”

“So she may have known her attacker?”

“Perhaps.” Gibson tossed the rag aside. “Lovejoy’s constable said she was found drifting in a dinghy outside London?”

Sebastian nodded. “On an old moat near Enfield. Any idea how long she’s been dead?”

“Roughly twenty-four hours, I’d say, perhaps a few hours more or a little less. But beyond that it’s difficult to determine.”

Sebastian studied the reddish purple discoloration along the visible portions of the body’s flanks and back. He knew from his own experience on the battlefield that blood tended to pool in the lower portions of a cadaver. “Any chance she could have been killed someplace else and then put in that boat?”

“I haven’t found anything to suggest it, no. The livor mortis is consistent with the position in which I’m told she was found.”

Sebastian’s gaze shifted to the half boots of peach-colored suede, the delicate stockings, the froth of white muslin neatly folded on a nearby shelf. “These are hers?”

“Yes.”

He reached out to finger the dark reddish brown stain that stiffened the delicate lace edging of the bodice. Suddenly the dank, death-tinged air of the place seemed to reach out and wrap itself around him, smothering him. He dropped his hand to his side and went to stand outside in the yard, the buzz of insects loud in the rank grass of the neglected garden as he drew in a deep breath of fresh air.

He was aware of his friend coming to stand beside him. Gibson said, “Lovejoy tells me Miss Jar—I mean, Lady Devlin was acquainted with the victim.”

“They were quite close, yes.”

Sebastian stared up at the hot, brittle blue sky overhead. When the messenger from Bow Street arrived in Brook Street that morning, Sebastian thought he had never seen Hero more devastated. Yet she hadn’t wept, and she had turned down his suggestion that she drive up to Camlet Moat with him. He did not understand why. But then, how much did he really know about the woman he had married?

Hero and this dead woman had shared so much in common—an enthusiasm for scholarship and research, a willingness to challenge societal expectations and prejudices, and a rejection of marriage and motherhood as the only acceptable choice for a woman. He could understand Hero’s grief and anger at the loss of her friend. But he couldn’t shake the uncomfortable sense that something else was going on with her, something he couldn’t even begin to guess at.

Gibson said, “This must be difficult for her. Any leads yet on the two lads?”

Sebastian glanced over at him, not understanding. “What lads?”

“The two boys Miss Tennyson had spending the summer with her.” Gibson must have read the confusion in Sebastian’s face, because he added, “You mean to say you haven’t heard?”

Sebastian could feel his heart beating in his ears like a thrumming of dread. “Heard what?”

“The news has been all over town this past hour or more. The children have vanished. No one’s seen them since yesterday morning.”

Chapter 8

The Adelphi Terrace—or Royal Terrace, as it was sometimes called—stretched along the bank of the Thames overlooking the vast Adelphi Wharves. A long block of elegant neoclassical town houses built by the Adams brothers late in the previous century, the address was popular with the city’s rising gentry class, particularly with Harley Street physicians and successful barristers such as Gabrielle Tennyson’s brother. As Sebastian rounded the corner from Adams Street, he found Sir Henry Lovejoy exiting the Tennysons’ front door.

“You’ve heard about the missing children?” asked Sir Henry, his homely face troubled as he waited for Sebastian to come up to him.

“Just now, from Gibson.”

Sir Henry blew out a long, painful breath. “I needn’t scruple to tell you this adds a very troubling dimension to the case. A very troubling dimension indeed.”

“You’ve found no trace of them?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Right now, we’re hoping the children witnessed the murder and ran away to hide in the woods in fright. The alternative is…Well, it’s not something I’m looking forward to dealing with.”

They turned to walk along the terrace fronting onto the wharves below. The fierce midday sun glinted off the broad surface of the river beside them and the air filled with the rough shouts of bargemen working the river and the rattle of carts on the coal wharf.

“We’ve had constables knocking on doors up and down the street,” said Sir Henry, “in the hopes someone might be able to tell us what time Miss Tennyson and the children left the house, or perhaps even with whom. Unfortunately, the heat has driven most of the residents into the country, and of those who remain, no one recalls having seen anything.”

“Any chance the children could have been snatched for ransom?”

“It’s a possibility, I suppose, although I must confess I find it unlikely. I’m told the children’s father is a simple, impoverished clergyman up in the wilds of Lincolnshire. And while the victim’s brother, Mr. Hildeyard Tennyson, is a moderately successful barrister, he is not excessively wealthy.” Sir Henry rubbed the bridge of his nose between one thumb and finger. “The elder boy, George, is just nine years old, while the younger, Alfred, is turning three. They were here with Miss Tennyson when the servants left yesterday morning, but as far as we’ve been able to tell, that’s the last time any of them were seen.” He hesitated, then added reluctantly, “Alive.”

“And the servants never thought to raise the alarm when neither Miss Tennyson nor the children returned home last night?”

“They thought it not their place to presume to know their mistress’s intentions.”

“Yes, I can see that,” said Sebastian. “And now they’re so frightened of being blamed for the delay in launching a search that it’s difficult to get much of anything out of them?”

“Exactly.” Lovejoy sighed. “Although they may prove more willing to open up to you than to Bow Street.” The warm breeze blowing off the water brought them the smell of brine and spawning fish and the freshness of the wide-open seas. His features pinched, Lovejoy paused to stare out across the barges and wherries filling the river. “I’m heading back up to Enfield now, to organize some men to drag the moat.”

Sebastian said, “Any possibility the children could have been the killer’s intended targets and Miss Tennyson simply got in the way?”

“Merciful heavens. Why would anyone want to kill two innocent children?” Lovejoy was silent a moment, his gaze still on the sun-spangled water, a bead of sweat rolling down one cheek. “But you’re right; it is obviously a possibility. Dear God, what is the world coming to?” He narrowed his eyes against the glare coming off the water and said it again. “What is the world coming to?”

The Tennysons’ housekeeper was a small, plump woman named Mrs. O’Donnell. She had full cheeks and graying hair worn tucked neatly beneath a starched white cap, and she struck Sebastian as the type of woman who in happier times sported rosy cheeks and bustled about with brisk good cheer and a ready laugh. Now she sat crumpled beside the empty hearth in the servants’ hall, a damp handkerchief clutched forlornly in one fist, her eyes red and swollen with tears, her cheeks ashen.

“If only the master had been home,” she kept saying over and over again. “None of this would have happened.”

“How long has Mr. Tennyson been gone?” asked Sebastian, settling onto a hard wooden bench opposite her.

“A fortnight, come Tuesday. He wanted Miss Tennyson and the lads to go into the country with him—get away from all the heat and dirt of the city. But she wouldn’t leave that project of hers.” Mrs. O’Donnell’s nose wrinkled when she uttered the word “project,” as if she spoke of something nasty and improper. It was obvious that for all her geniality, the housekeeper did not approve of Miss Tennyson’s unorthodox interests.

Sebastian said, “I take it you’re referring to the excavations up at Camlet Moat?”

Mrs. O’Donnell nodded and touched her handkerchief to the corner of one eye. “I know it’s not my place to say such things, but, well…It’s not right, if you ask me. Women belong in the home. And now look what’s come of it! Her dead, and those poor lads gone missing. Such bright little fellows, they were. Quick-tempered and full of mischief, to be sure, but charming and winsome for all of that. Why, just yesterday morning before they left for church, Master George gave me a little poem he wrote all by himself.” She pushed up from her seat and went to rummage amongst the litter of recipes and invoices, letters and broadsheets, that covered a nearby table. “It’s here somewhere.…”

“That’s the last time you saw them?” asked Sebastian. “Yesterday morning, when they were on their way to church?”

“It was, yes,” she said, distracted by her search.

“Which church do they normally attend?”

“St. Martin’s, usually.”

“You think that’s where they went yesterday?”

“I don’t see why not, my lord.”

“I’m told Miss Tennyson liked to take the boys on various outings several times a week, particularly on Sunday afternoons.”

“Oh, yes. She was enjoying their visit ever so much. It was lovely to see her with them. Her face would light up and she’d laugh like she was a carefree girl again herself.” A ghost of a smile animated the housekeeper’s features, only to fade away into pinched sorrow. “Course, then there were the times I’d catch her watching them, and she’d go all still and quiet-like, and this look would come over her that was something painful to see.”

“What sort of a look?”

“It was like a…like a yearning, if you know what I mean?”

“You think she regretted not having children of her own?”

“If she did, it was her choice, wasn’t it? I mean, it’s not like she didn’t have plenty of offers. Turned them all down, she did.” The housekeeper straightened, a tattered paper clenched in one hand. “Ah, here it is!” She thrust the page toward him.

Sebastian found himself staring at a single stanza of poetry written in a schoolboy’s best copperplate. He read aloud:

Somewhere the sea, somewhere the sun

Whisper of pain and love untold;

Something that’s done and more undone,

Are only the dead so bold?

He looked up. “George Tennyson wrote this?”

“He did. Oh, it’s all great nonsense, to be sure. But it’s still fine, wouldn’t you say? And he but a boy of nine!”

“Do you mind if I keep it for a day or so? I’ll see it’s returned to you,” he added when she looked hesitant.

“To be sure you may keep it, my lord. Only, I won’t deny I would like to have it back.”

“I understand.” Sebastian tucked the boy’s poem into his pocket. “Do you have any idea how Miss Tennyson and the children planned to spend yesterday afternoon?”

She looked thoughtful for a moment, then shook her head. “No, my lord; I don’t know as I ever heard her mention it. We always lay out a cold collation for the family in the dining room, you see, before we leave for our half day. They eat when they come home from church, before they go out again. We left a lovely spread, with a side of beef and salmon in aspic and a chilled asparagus soup.”

“And did Miss Tennyson and the children eat the meal you left for them on Sunday?”

“Oh, yes, my lord. In fact, the plate with Mrs. Reagan’s oatmeal cookies was completely empty except for a few crumbs.” She plopped back down in her chair, her hands wringing together so hard the fingers turned white. “Oh, if only Mr. Tennyson had been here!” she cried. “Then we’d have known for certain something was amiss when they didn’t come home last night.”

“What time did the servants return to the house?”

“The others were back by seven, although I’m afraid I myself wasn’t in until nearly eight. I spent the day with my sister in Kent Town, you see; her husband’s ever so sick, and Miss Tennyson told me not to worry if I was a bit late. She was that way, you know—so kind and generous. And now—” Her voice cracked and she turned her face away, her throat working silently.

Sebastian said, “Were you concerned when you arrived back and realized Miss Tennyson and the children hadn’t returned themselves?”

“Well, of course I was! We all were. Margaret Campbell—she’s the boys’ nurse, you know—was all for going to the public office at once. She was convinced something must have happened to them. But we had no way of knowing that for certain, and who could ever have imagined that something like this had occurred? I mean, what if Miss Tennyson had simply decided to spend the night with some friends and forgot to tell us? Or she could have received bad news from the boys’ parents and set off with the children for Lincolnshire. To tell the truth, I thought she might even have reconsidered staying in London and decided to join her brother in the country after all. I can tell you, she would not have thanked us if we’d raised a ruckus for naught.”

Sebastian watched her twist her handkerchief around her fist. “Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to do either Miss Tennyson or the boys harm?”

Her puffy face crumpled. “No,” she cried. “None of this makes any sense. Why would anyone want to harm either her or those poor, poor lads? Why?”

Sebastian rested his hand on her shoulder. It was a useless, awkward gesture of comfort, but she looked up at him with pleading eyes, her plump, matronly form shuddering with need for a measure of understanding and reassurance he could not give.

Chapter 9

Leaving the servants’ hall, Sebastian climbed the stairs to the nursery at the top of the Tennyson house.

It was a cheerful place, its walls newly covered in brightly sprigged paper and flooded with light from the rows of long windows overlooking the broad, sun-dappled expanse of the river. The two little boys might have only been visiting for the summer, but it was obvious that Gabrielle Tennyson had prepared for her young cousins’ stay with loving care.

Pausing at the entrance to the schoolroom, Sebastian let his gaze drift over the armies of tin soldiers that marched in neat formations across the scrubbed floorboards. Cockhorses and drums and wooden boats littered the room; shelves of books beckoned with promises of endless hours spent vicariously adventuring in faraway lands. On the edge of a big, sturdy table near the door lay a cluster of small, disparate objects—a broken clay pipe bowl, a glowing brown chestnut, a blue and white ceramic bead—as if a boy had hurriedly emptied his pockets of their treasures and then never come back for them.

A woman’s voice sounded behind him. “And who might you be, then?”

Turning, Sebastian found himself being regarded with a suspicious scowl by a bony woman with thick, dark red hair, gaunt cheeks, and pale gray eyes. “You must be the boys’ nurse, Miss Campbell.”

“I am.” Her gaze swept him with obvious suspicion, her voice raspy with a thick northern brogue. “And you?”

“Lord Devlin.”

She sniffed. “I heard them talking about you in the servants’ hall.” She pushed past him into the room and swung to face him, her thin frame rigid with hostility and what he suspected was a carefully controlled, intensely private grief. “Seems a queer thing for a lord to do, getting hisself mixed up in murder. But then, London folk is queer.”

Sebastian found himself faintly smiling. “You came with the boys from Lincolnshire?”

“I did, yes. Been with Master George since he was born, I have, and little Master Alfred too.”

“I understand the boys’ father is a rector?”

“Aye.” A wary light crept into her eyes.

Seeing it, Sebastian said, “Tell me about him.”

“The Reverend Tennyson?” She folded her arms across her stomach, her hands clenched tight around her bony elbows. “What is there to tell? He’s a brilliant man—for all he’s so big and hulking and clumsy.”

“I’m told he’s not well. Nothing serious, I hope?”

The fingers gripping her elbows reminded him of claws clinging desperately to a shifting purchase. “He hasna been well for a long time now.” She hesitated, then added, “A very long time.” Lingering ill health was all too common in their society, frequently caused by consumption, but more often by some unknown debilitating affliction.

Sebastian wandered the room, his attention seemingly all for the scattered toys and books. “And the boys? Are they hale?”

“Ach, you’d be hard put to find two sturdier lads. To be sure, Master George can be a bit wild and hotheaded, but there’s no malice in him.”

It struck him as a profoundly strange thing for her to say. He paused beside a scattering of books on the window seat overlooking the river. They were the usual assortment of boys’ adventure stories. Flipping open one of the covers, he found himself staring at the name George Tennyson written in the same round copperplate as the poem given him by the housekeeper.

Looking up, he said, “Do you know where Miss Tennyson planned to take her young cousins yesterday?”

The nursemaid shook her head. “No. She told them it was a surprise.”

“Could she perhaps have intended to show them the excavations at Camlet Moat?”

“She could, I suppose. But how would that be a surprise? She’d taken them up there before.”

“Perhaps she’d discovered something new she wanted to show them.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

Sebastian studied the woman’s plain, tensely held face. “What do you think has happened to them, Miss Campbell?”

She pressed her lips into a hard, straight line, her nostrils flaring on a quickly indrawn breath, her forehead creasing with a sudden upwelling of emotion she fought to suppress. It was a moment before she could speak. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I just don’t know. I keep thinking about those poor wee bairns out there somewhere, alone and afraid, with no one to care for them. Or—or—” But here her voice broke and she could only shake her head, unwilling to put her worst fears into words.

He said, “Did you ever hear Miss Tennyson mention the name of an antiquary with whom she had quarreled?”

Margaret cleared her throat and touched the back of her knuckles to her nostrils, her formidable composure slamming once more into place. “A what?”

“An antiquary. A scholar of antiquities. You never heard Miss Tennyson speak of any such person?”

“No.”

“How about the children? Did they ever mention anyone? Anyone at all they might have met in London?”

She stared back at him, her face pale, her eyes wide.

Sebastian said, “There is someone. Tell me.”

“I don’t know his name. The lads always called him ‘the Lieutenant.’”

“He’s a lieutenant?”

“Aye.” Her lip curled. “Some Frenchy.”

“Where did the children meet this French lieutenant?”

“Miss Tennyson would oftentimes take the lads to the park of an evening. I think they’d see him there.”

“They saw him often?”

“Aye. Him and his dog.”

“The Lieutenant has a dog?”

“Aye. The lads are mad about dogs, you know.”

“When did they first begin mentioning this lieutenant?”

“Ach, it must have been six weeks or more ago—not long after we first arrived in London, I’d say.”

“That’s all you can tell me about him? That he’s a Frenchman and a lieutenant—and that he has a dog?”

“He may’ve been in the cavalry. I can’t be certain, mind you, but it’s only since we’ve come to London that Master George has suddenly been all agog to join the Army. He’s forever galloping around the schoolroom slashing a wooden sword through the air and shouting, Charge! and, At ’em, lads!”

“Any idea where this lieutenant might have seen service?”

“To be honest, I didn’t like to pay too much heed to young Master George when he’d start going on about it. Couldn’t see any sense in encouraging the lad. The Reverend’s already told him he’s bound for Eton next year. Besides, it didn’t seem right, somehow, him being so friendly with a Frenchy.”

Sebastian said, “Many émigrés have fought valiantly against Napoléon.”

“Whoever said he was an émigré?” She gave a scornful laugh. “A prisoner on his parole, he is. And only the good Lord knows how many brave Englishmen he sent to their graves before he was took prisoner.”

Sebastian went to lean on the terrace railing overlooking the river. The tide was out, a damp, fecund odor rising from the expanse of mudflats exposed along the bank below as the sun began its downward arc toward the west. An aged Gypsy woman in a full purple skirt and yellow kerchief was telling fortunes beside a man with a painted cart selling hot sausages near the steps. Beyond them, a string of constables could be seen poking long probes into the mud, turning over logs and bits of flotsam left stranded by the receding water. At first Sebastian wondered what they were doing. Then he realized they must be searching for the children…or what was left of them.

He twisted around to stare back at the imposing row of eighteenth-century town houses that rose above the terrace. The disappearance of the two young children added both an urgency and a troubling new dimension to the murder of Gabrielle Tennyson. Had the boys, too, fallen victim to Gabrielle’s killer? For the same reason? Or were the children simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? And if they hadn’t suffered the same fate as their cousin, then where were they now?

Sebastian brought his gaze back to the top of the steps, his eyes narrowing as he studied the thin, drab-coated man buying a sausage from the cart.

It was the same man he’d seen earlier, at Tower Hill.

Bloody hell.

Pushing away from the railing, Sebastian strolled toward the sausage seller. Pocketing the drab-coated man’s coin, the sausage seller handed the man a paper-wrapped sausage. Without seeming to glance in Sebastian’s direction, the man took a bite of his sausage and began to walk away.

He was a tallish man, with thin shoulders and a round hat he wore pulled low on his face. Sebastian quickened his step.

He was still some ten feet away when the man tossed the sausage aside and broke into a run.

Chapter 10

The man sprinted around the edge of the terrace and dropped out of sight.

Sebastian tore after him, down a crowded, steeply cobbled lane lined with taverns and narrow coffeehouses that emptied abruptly onto the sun-splashed waterfront below. A flock of white gulls rose, screeching, to wheel high above the broad, sparkling river.

The genteel houses of the Adelphi Terrace had been constructed over a warren of arch-fronted subterranean vaults built to span the slope between the Strand and the wharves along the river. Sebastian could hear the man’s booted feet pounding over the weathered planking as he darted around towering pyramids of wine casks and dodged blue-smocked workmen unloading sacks of coal from a barge. Then the buff-coated man threw one quick look over his shoulder and dove under the nearest archway to disappear into the gloomy world beneath the terrace.

Hell and the devil confound it, thought Sebastian, swerving around a mule cart.

“Hey!” shouted a grizzled man in a cap and leather apron as the mule between the traces of his cart snorted and kicked. “What the bloody ’ell ye doin’?”

Sebastian kept running.

One behind the other, Sebastian and the drab-coated man raced through soaring, catacomblike arches, the bricks furred with soot and mold and perpetual dampness. They sprinted down dark tunnels of warehouses tenanted by wine sellers and coal merchants, and up dimly lit passages off which opened stables that reeked of manure and dirty straw, where cows lowed plaintively from out of the darkness.

“Who the hell are you?” Sebastian shouted as the man veered around a rotten water butt, toward the dark opening of a narrow staircase that wound steeply upward. “Who?”

Without faltering, the man clambered up the stairs, Sebastian at his heels. Round and round they went, only to erupt into a steeply sloping corridor paved with worn bricks and lined with milk cans.

Breathing hard and fast, the man careened from side to side, upending first one milk can, then another and another, the cans rattling and clattering as they bounced down the slope like giant bowling pins, filling the air with the hot splash of spilling milk.

“God damn it,” swore Sebastian, dodging first one can, then the next. Then his boots hit the slick wet bricks and his feet shot out from under him. He went down hard, slamming his shoulder against a brick pier as he slid back down the slope and the next milk can bounced over his head.

He pushed up, the leather soles of his boots slipping so that he nearly went down again. He could hear the man’s running footsteps disappearing around the bend up ahead.

Panting heavily now, Sebastian tore around the corner and out a low archway into the unexpected sunlight of the open air. He threw up one hand to shade his suddenly blinded eyes, his step faltering.

The lane stretched empty and silent before him.

The man was gone.

After leaving Carlton House, Hero spent the next several hours at a bookseller’s in Westminster, where she selected several items, one of which proved to be very old and rare. Then, sending her purchases home in the charge of a footman, she directed her coachman to the British Museum.

It was at an exhibition of Roman sarcophagi at the British Museum that Hero had first met Gabrielle Tennyson some six years before. Initially, their interaction had been marked more by politeness than by cordiality. Both might be gently born, well-educated women, but they belonged to vastly different worlds. For while the Jarvises were an ancient noble family with powerful connections, Gabrielle Tennyson came from a long line of barristers and middling churchmen—gentry rather than noble, comfortable rather than wealthy.

But with time had come respect and, eventually, true friendship. Their interests and ambitions had never exactly coincided: Gabrielle’s passion had all been for the past, whereas Hero’s main focus would always be the economic and social condition of her own age. Yet their shared willingness to challenge their society’s narrow gender expectations and their determination never to marry had forged a unique and powerful bond between them.

Now Hero, much to her mingling bemusement and chagrin, had become Lady Devlin. While Gabrielle…

Gabrielle was dead.

The bells of the city’s church towers were just striking three when Hero’s coachman drew up outside the British Museum. She sat with one hand resting casually on the carriage strap, her gaze on the towering portal of the complex across the street as she listened to the great rolling clatter and dong of the bells swelling over the city.

Built of brick in the French style with rustic stone quoins and a slate mansard roof, the sprawling mansion had once served as the home of the Dukes of Montagu, its front courtyard flanked by long colonnaded wings and separated from Great Russell Street by a tall gateway surmounted by an octagonal lantern. She watched a man and a woman pause on the footpath before the entrance, confer for a moment, and go inside. Then two men deep in a heated discussion, neither of whom Hero recognized, exited the gateway and turned east.

One after another the bells of the city tapered off into stillness, until all were silent.

Hero frowned. She had come in search of an antiquary named Bevin Childe. Childe was known both for his formidable scholarship and for his fanatical adherence to a self-imposed schedule. Every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday between the hours of ten and three he could be found in the Reading Room of the museum. At precisely three o’clock, he left the museum and crossed the street to a public house known as the Pied Piper, where he ate a plate of sliced roast beef and buttered bread washed down by a pint of good, stout ale. This was followed by a short constitutional around nearby Bedford Square, after which he returned to the Reading Room from four until six. But today, Childe was deviating from his prescribed pattern.

The minutes ticked past. “Bother,” said Hero softly under her breath.

“My lady?” asked her footman, his hand on the open carriage door.

“Perhaps—” she began, then broke off as a stout man in his early thirties dressed in a slightly crumpled olive coat and a high-crowned beaver came barreling through the museum’s gateway, his head down, a brass-headed walking stick tucked under one arm. He had the face of an overgrown cherub, his flesh as pink and white as a baby’s, his small mouth pursed as if with annoyance at the realization that he was nearly ten minutes late for his nuncheon.

“Mr. Childe,” called Hero, descending from the carriage, her furled parasol in hand. “What a fortunate encounter. There is something I wish to speak with you about. Do let’s walk along for a ways.”

Childe’s head jerked up, his step faltering, a succession of transparent emotions flitting across his cherubic features as his desire to maintain his schedule warred with the need to appear accommodating to a woman whose father was the most powerful man in the Kingdom.

“Actually,” he said, “I was just on my way to grab a bite—”

“It won’t take but a moment.” Hero opened her parasol and inexorably turned his steps toward the nearby square.

He twisted around to gaze longingly back at the Pied Piper, the exaggerated point of his high collar pressing into his full cheek. “But I generally prefer to take my constitutional after I eat—”

“I know. I do beg your pardon, but you have heard this morning’s news about the death of Miss Tennyson and the disappearance of her young cousins?”

She watched as the pinkness drained from his face, leaving him pale. “How could I not? The news is all over town. Indeed, I can’t seem to think of anything else. It was my intention to spend the day reviewing a collection of manor rolls from the twelfth century, but I’ve found it nearly impossible to focus my attention for more than a minute or two at a stretch.”

“How…distressing for you,” said Hero dryly.

The scholar nodded. “Most distressing.”

The man might still be in his early thirties—not much older than Devlin, she realized with some surprise—but he had the demeanor and mannerisms of someone in his forties or fifties. She said, “I remember Miss Tennyson telling me once that you disagreed with her identification of Camlet Moat as the possible site of Camelot.”

“I do. But then, you would be sorely pressed to find anyone of repute who does agree with her.”

“You’re saying her research was faulty?”

“Her research? No, one could hardly argue with the references to the site she discovered in various historical documents and maps. There is no doubt the area was indeed known as ‘Camelot’ for hundreds of years. Her interpretation of those findings, however, is another matter entirely.”

“Was that the basis of your quarrel with her last Friday? Her interpretation?”

He gave a weak, startled laugh. “Quarrel? I had no quarrel with Miss Tennyson. Who could have told you such a thing?”

“Do you really want me to answer that question?”

Her implication was not lost on him. She watched, fascinated, as Childe’s mobile features suddenly froze. He cleared his throat. “And your…your source did not also tell you the reason for our little…disagreement?”

“Not precisely; I was hoping you could explain it further.”

His face hardened in a way she had not expected. “So you are here as the emissary of your husband, not your father.”

“I am no one’s emissary. I am here because Gabrielle Tennyson was my friend, and whoever killed her will have to answer to me for what they’ve done to her—to her and to her cousins.”

If any woman other than Hero had made such a statement, Childe might have smiled. But all of London knew that less than a week before, three men had attempted to kidnap Hero; she had personally stabbed one, shot the next, and nearly decapitated the other.

“Well,” he said with sudden, forced heartiness. “It was, as you say, a difference of opinion over the interpretation of the historical evidence. That is all.”

“Really?”

He stared back at her, as if daring her to challenge him. “Yes.”

They turned to walk along the far side of the square, where a Punch professor competed with a hurdy-gurdy player, and a barefoot, wan-faced girl in a ragged dress sold watercress for a halfpenny a bunch from a worn wooden tray suspended by a strap around her neck. A cheap handbill tacked to a nearby lamppost bore a bold headline that read in smudged ink, KING ARTHUR, THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING!

Normally, the square would have been filled with children playing under the watchful eye of their nursemaids, their shouts and laughter carrying on the warm breeze. But today, the sunlit lawns and graveled walks lay silent and empty. Gabrielle’s murder and the mysterious disappearance of the two boys had obviously spooked the city. Those mothers who could afford to do so were keeping their children safely indoors under nervous, watchful eyes.

“I was wondering,” said Hero, “where exactly were you yesterday?”

If Childe’s cheeks had been pale before, they now flared red, his eyes wide with indignation, his pursed mouth held tight. “If you mean to suggest that I could possibly have anything to do with— That—that I—”

Hero returned his angry stare with a calculated look of bland astonishment. “I wasn’t suggesting anything, Mr. Childe; I was merely hoping you might have some idea about Miss Tennyson’s plans for Sunday.”

“Ah. Well…I’m afraid not. As it happens, I spend my Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays at Gough Hall. The late Richard Gough left his books and papers to the Bodleian Library, you see, and I have volunteered to sort through and organize them. It’s a prodigious undertaking.”

She had heard of Richard Gough, the famous scholar and writer who had been director of the Society of Antiquaries for two decades and who had made the Arthurian legends one of his particular areas of interest. “Gough Hall is near Camlet Moat, is it not?”

“It is.”

“I wonder, did you ever take advantage of the opportunity offered by that proximity to visit the excavations on the isle?”

“I wouldn’t waste my time,” said Childe loftily.

Hero tilted her head to one side, her gaze on his face, a coaxing smile on her lips. “So certain that Miss Tennyson was wrong about the island, are you?”

No answering smile touched the man’s dour features. “If a real character known as Arthur ever existed—which is by no means certain—he was in all likelihood a barbaric warrior chieftain from the wilds of Wales whose dimly remembered reality was seized upon by a collection of maudlin French troubadours with no understanding of—or interest in—the world he actually inhabited.”

“I take it you’re not fond of medieval romances?”

She noticed he was staring, hard, at another handbill tacked up on the wall of the house at the corner. This one simply proclaimed, KING ARTHUR, SAVE US!

Hero said, “Who do you think killed her?”

Childe jerked his head around to look at her again, and for one unexpected moment, all the bombastic self-importance seemed to leach out of the man in a way that left him seeming unexpectedly vulnerable—and considerably more likeable. “Believe me when I say that if I could help you in any way, I would. Miss Tennyson was—” His voice quivered and he broke off, his features pinched with grief. He swallowed and tried again. “She was a most remarkable woman, brilliant and high-spirited and full of boundless energy, even if her enthusiasms did at times lead her astray. But she was also very good at keeping parts of her life—of herself—secret.”

His words echoed so closely those of Hero’s father that she felt a sudden, unexpected chill. “What sort of secrets are we talking about?”

“If I knew, they wouldn’t be secrets, now, would they?” said Childe with a faintly condescending air.

Hero asked again, her voice more tart, “So who do you think killed her?”

Childe shook his head. “I don’t know. But if I were intent on unmasking her killer, rather than focus on Miss Tennyson’s associates and activities, I would instead ask myself, Who would benefit from the death of her young cousins?”

They had come full circle, so that they now stood on the footpath outside the Pied Piper. The door beside them opened, spilling voices and laughter and the yeasty scent of ale into the street as two gentlemen emerged blinking into the sunlight and crossed the street toward the museum.

“You mean, George and Arthur Tennyson?” said Hero.

She realized Childe was no longer looking at her but at something or someone beyond her. Throwing a quick glance over her shoulder, Hero found herself staring at the watercress girl from the square. The girl must have trailed behind them and now leaned wearily against a nearby lamppost, her wooden tray hanging heavy from its strap, a wilting bunch of greens clutched forlornly in one hand. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, with golden hair and large blue eyes in an elfin face. Already grown tall and leggy, she was still boy-thin, with only a hint of the breasts beginning to swell beneath the bodice of her ragged dress. And Childe was looking at her with his lips parted and his gray eyes hooded in a way that made Hero feel she was witnessing something unclean and obscene.

As if becoming aware of Hero’s scrutiny, he brought his gaze back to her face and cleared his throat. “As I said. And now, Lady Devlin, you really must excuse me.” Turning on his heel, he strode into the Pied Piper and shut the door behind him with a snap.

Hero stood for a moment, her gaze on the closed door. Then, digging her purse from her reticule, she walked over to the watercress girl. “How much for all your bunches?”

The girl straightened with a jerk, her mouth agape. “M’lady?”

“You heard me. You’ve what? A dozen? Tell me, do you always sell your watercress here, by the museum?”

The girl closed her mouth and swallowed. “Here, or at Blooms-bury Square.”

Hero pressed three coins into the girl’s palm. “There’s a shilling for all your watercress and two more besides. But don’t let me catch you around here again. Is that understood? From now on, you peddle your bundles only at Bloomsbury.”

The girl dropped a frightened, confused curtsy. “Yes, m’lady.”

“Go on. Get out of here.”

The girl took to her heels and fled, the ragged skirt of her dress swirling around her ankles, her tray thumping against her thin body, her fist clenched about the coins in her hand. She did not look back.

Hero watched until the girl turned the corner and the receding patter of her bare feet was lost in the rumble of the passing carriages and carts, the shouts of the costermongers, the distant wail of the hurdy-gurdy player from the square.

But the uneasiness within her remained.

She was about to turn back toward her carriage when she heard a familiar low-pitched voice behind her say, “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find you here, but I must confess that I am.”

Chapter 11

Sebastian stood with one shoulder propped against the brick wall of the pub, his arms crossed at his chest, and watched his wife pivot slowly to face him. The hot sun fell full across a face unusually pale but flawlessly composed.

“Devlin,” she said, adjusting the tilt of her parasol in a way that threw her features into shadow. “What brings you here?”

He pushed away from the wall. “I was hoping to find someone at the museum who could direct me to a certain unidentified antiquary who quarreled recently with Miss Tennyson. I take it that’s the gentleman in question?”

“His name is Bevin Childe.” She stood still and let him walk up to her. “Post-Roman England is his specialty.”

“Ah, the Arthurian Age.”

“Yes. But I wouldn’t let Childe hear you call it that. I suspect you’d get an earful.”

“Mr. Childe is not a fan of Camelot?”

“He is not.”

“How much do you know about him?”

They turned to walk together toward her waiting carriage. “Apart from the fact that he’s a pompous ass?” she said with unladylike frankness.

Sebastian gave a startled laugh. “Is he?”

“Decidedly. As for what I know about him, I’m told his father is a Cambridge don. A doctor of divinity.”

“I wouldn’t have expected such a man to have much to do with Miss Tennyson.”

He watched her brows draw together in a frown. “Meaning?” she asked.

“Meaning that however brilliant or accomplished she may have been, Miss Tennyson not only lacked a formal university education, but she was also female. And there’s no need to scowl at me; I didn’t say I agreed with that sort of prejudice, did I?”

“True. I beg your pardon.”

“What about Childe himself? Is he a clergyman?”

“I believe he was once rather reluctantly destined for the church. But fortunately for Mr. Childe, a maternal uncle managed to acquire a fortune in India and then died without siring an heir. He left everything to Mr. Childe.”

“Fortuitous, indeed—for both Mr. Childe and the church. How do you come to know so much about the gentleman?”

“From Gabrielle. Her brother was up at Cambridge with Childe, and the two men have remained friends ever since—much to Gabrielle’s disgust, given that she has heartily detested the man since she was still in the schoolroom.”

“Any particular reason why?”

“She said he was arrogant, opinionated, self-absorbed, pedantic, and—strange.”

“‘Strange’? Did she ever explain exactly what she meant by that?”

“No. I asked her once, but she just shrugged and said he made her uncomfortable.”

“Interesting. And precisely how large of a fortune did the arrogant and pedantic Mr. Childe inherit?”

“A comfortable enough independence that he is now able to devote himself entirely to scholarship. I gather he currently divides his time between research here at the museum and a project he has undertaken for the Bodleian Library, which entails cataloging the library and collections of the late Richard Gough.”

“That’s significant,” said Sebastian, studying her face. “Why?”

“Because amongst other things, Mr. Gough made a particular study of the Arthurian legends. And his home, Gough Hall, is near Enfield.”

“And Camlet Moat?”

“Precisely.”

Sebastian frowned. “So where does Mr. Childe live?”

“I believe he has rooms in St. James’s Street.”

“He’s unmarried?”

“He is, yes. Gabrielle told me several weeks ago that he had become quite vocal in his disparagement of her conclusions about Camlet Moat. And Childe himself says that they quarreled over the issue again just last Friday. But he also made some rather vague references to Gabrielle’s ‘secrets’ that I found disturbing.”

“Secrets? What secrets?”

“He declined to elaborate.”

They had reached her carriage. Sebastian shook his head at the footman who was about to spring forward; the man stepped back, and Sebastian opened the carriage door himself. “Any chance Childe could have been referring to a certain French prisoner of war with whom Miss Tennyson was apparently friendly?”

Hero turned to face him, her expression one of mingled surprise and puzzlement. “What French prisoner of war?”

“She never talked about him?” Pausing with one elbow resting on the carriage’s open window, he gave her a brief summary of what he’d learned from the servants in the Tennyson household. “You’re certain she never mentioned such a man to you?”

“Not that I recall, no.”

Sebastian let his gaze rove over the shadowed features of her face, the smooth curve of her cheek, the strong, almost masculine angle of her jaw. Once, he would have said she was telling him the truth. But he knew her well enough by now to know that she was keeping something back from him.

He said, “When Bow Street brought word this morning of Gabrielle Tennyson’s death, I was surprised that you had no wish to accompany me to Camlet Moat. In my naivety, I assumed it was because you knew Lovejoy would be discomfited by your presence. But you had another reason entirely, didn’t you?”

She furled her parasol, her attention seemingly all for the task of securing the strap. Rather than answering him, she said, “We agreed when we married that we would respect each other’s independence.”

“We did. Yet your purpose in this is the same as mine, is it not? To discover what happened to Gabrielle Tennyson and her young cousins? Or is something else going on here of which I am not aware?”

She looked up at him, the light falling full on her face, and he saw there neither guile nor subterfuge, but only a tense concern. “You’ve heard the authorities discovered the boys are missing?”

Sebastian nodded silently.

“When I asked Childe who he thought killed Gabrielle, he said that rather than focusing on Gabrielle’s associates, I ought to consider who would benefit from the elimination of the children.”

Sebastian was silent for a moment, remembering a boy’s flowing copperplate and armies of tin soldiers marching silently across a sunlit nursery floor. He refused to accept that the two little boys were dead too. But all he said was, “You’ve met them?”

“Her cousins? Several times, yes. I’m not one of those women who dote mindlessly on children, but George and Alfred are something special. They’re so extraordinarily bright and curious and full of enthusiasm for learning about the world around them that they’re a delight to be with. The thought that something might have happened to them too—” She broke off, and he saw the rare glaze of unshed tears in her eyes. Then she cleared her throat and looked away, as if embarrassed to be seen giving way to her emotions.

“‘Something that’s done and more undone,’” he quoted softly. “‘Are only the dead so bold?’”

Hero shook her head, not understanding. “What?”

“It’s from a poem George Tennyson wrote.” He showed it to her. “Does it mean anything to you?”

She read through the short stanza. “No. But George was always writing disjointed scraps of poetry like that. I doubt it means anything.”

“I’m told the boy’s father has been ill for a long time. Do you have any idea with what?”

“No. But then, I don’t know that much about Miss Tennyson’s family. Her parents died before I knew her. Her brother is a pleasant enough chap, although rather typically preoccupied with his legal practice. He has a small estate down in Kent, which is where he is now. It has always been my understanding that he and Gabrielle were comfortably situated, although no more than that. Yet I believe there may be substantial wealth elsewhere in the family. Recent wealth.”

“Good God,” said Sebastian. “Was Miss Tennyson in some way related to Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt?”

“I believe they are first cousins. You know him?”

“He was several years behind me at Eton.”

His tone betrayed more than he’d intended it to. She smiled. “And you consider him a pretentious, toadying a—” She broke off to cast a rueful glance at the wooden faces of the waiting servants.

“Bore?” he suggested helpfully.

“That too.”

For one unexpectedly intimate moment, their gazes met and they shared a private smile. Then Sebastian felt his smile begin to fade.

For the past fifteen months, d’Eyncourt had served as a member of Parliament from Lincolnshire. A fiercely reactionary Tory, he had quickly managed to ingratiate himself with the block of parliamentarians controlled by Hero’s own father, Lord Jarvis.

Sebastian said, “Why do I keep getting the distinct impression there’s something you’re not telling me?”

She took his offered hand and climbed the step into the waiting carriage. “Would I do that?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She gave a throaty chuckle and gracefully disposed the skirts of her dusky blue walking dress around her on the seat. “Will you tell the coachman to take me home, please?”

“Are you going home?”

“Are you?”

Smiling softly, he closed the door and nodded to the driver. He stood for a moment and watched as her carriage rounded the corner onto Tottenham Court. Then he went in search of the pretentious toadying bore who called himself Tennyson d’Eyncourt.

Chapter 12

Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt was lounging comfortably in one of the leather tub chairs in the reading room of White’s when Sebastian walked up to him.

The MP was considerably fairer than his cousin Gabrielle, slim and gracefully formed, with delicate features and high cheekbones and lips so thin as to appear nearly nonexistent. He had a glass of brandy on the table at his elbow and the latest copy of the conservative journal The Courier spread open before him. He glanced up, briefly, when Sebastian settled in the seat opposite him, then pointedly returned his attention to his reading.

“My condolences on the death of your cousin, Miss Gabrielle Tennyson,” said Sebastian.

“I take it Bow Street has involved you in the investigation of this unfortunate incident, have they?” asked d’Eyncourt without looking up again.

“If by ‘unfortunate incident’ you mean the murder of Miss Tennyson and the disappearance of the young children in her care, then the answer is yes.”

D’Eyncourt reached, deliberately, for his brandy, took a sip, and returned to his journal.

“I’m curious,” said Sebastian, signaling a passing waiter for a drink. “How close is the relationship between you and Miss Tennyson?”

“We are—or I suppose I should say were—first cousins.”

“So the two missing boys are…?”

“My nephews.”

“Your brother’s sons?”

“That is correct.”

“I must confess that, under the circumstances, I am rather surprised to find you lounging in your club calmly reading a journal.”

D’Eyncourt looked up at that, his thin nose quivering. “Indeed? And what would you have me do instead, I wonder? Go charging into the countryside to thrash the underbrush of Enfield Chase like a beater hoping to flush game?”

“You think that’s where the children are liable to be found? At Camlet Moat?”

“How the devil would I know?” snapped d’Eyncourt and returned once more to his reading.

Sebastian studied the other man’s pinched profile. He couldn’t recall many of the younger boys at Eton, but Sebastian remembered d’Eyncourt. As a lad, d’Eyncourt had been one of those ostentatiously earnest scholars who combined shameless toadying with nauseating displays of false enthusiasm to curry favor with the dons. But to his fellow students he was ruthless and vindictive, and quickly acquired a well-deserved reputation as someone who would do anything—and say anything—to get what he wanted.

In those days he’d simply been called “Tennyson,” the same as his cousin and missing nephews. But several years ago he had successfully petitioned the Home Secretary to have his name changed to the more aristocratic d’Eyncourt, the extinct patronym of one of his mother’s ancestors, to which his claims were, to say the least, dubious. It was well-known that his ambition was to be made Lord d’Eyncourt before he was forty.

“You seem oddly unconcerned about their fates,” said Sebastian.

“It is the stuff of tragedy, to be sure. However, none of it alters the fact that my brother and I have never been close. His life is narrowly focused on his benefices in Somersby, whereas I live most of the year in London, where I take my duties at Parliament very seriously indeed. I doubt I would recognize his children if I passed them in the street.”

“Is that why they’ve been staying with Miss Tennyson, their cousin, rather than with you, their uncle?”

D’Eyncourt sniffed. “My wife is not fond of London and chooses to remain in Lincolnshire. I do currently have my sister Mary with me, but I could hardly ask her to undertake the management of two wild, poorly brought-up boys, now, could I?”

“Are they wild and poorly bought up?”

“They could hardly be otherwise, given their parentage.”

“Really?” Sebastian settled more comfortably in his seat. “Tell me about the boys’ father—your brother. I hear he’s not well. Nothing serious, I hope?”

A curious hint of color touched the other man’s high cheekbones. “I fear my brother’s health has never been particularly robust.”

“Can you think of anyone who might benefit from the death or disappearance of his sons?”

“Good heavens; what a ridiculous notion! I told you: My brother is a rector. He holds two livings, which together provide him with a respectable income. But he has always been a hopeless spendthrift, and the foolish woman he married is even worse, with the result that my father is forever being forced to tow them out of the river tick.”

D’Eyncourt’s father was a notorious figure known irreverently as “the Old Man of the Wolds,” thanks to his extensive landholdings in the Wolds, an area of hills and wide-open valleys in the northeast of England. His fortune, while of recent origins, was reportedly huge, deriving largely from a series of astute land purchases and the old man’s ruthless manipulation of anyone unfortunate enough to drift into his orbit.

Sebastian said, “You are your father’s sole heir?”

D’Eyncourt’s thin nostrils flared with indignation. “I am. And may I take leave to tell you that I resent the inference inherent in that question? I resent it very much.”

“Oh, you have my leave to tell me anything you wish,” said Sebastian, stretching to his feet. “Just one more question: Can you think of anyone who might have wished Miss Tennyson harm?”

D’Eyncourt opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it and shook his head.

“You do know of someone,” said Sebastian, watching him closely. “Who is it?”

“Well…” D’Eyncourt licked his thin lips. “You are aware, of course, that my cousin fancied herself something of a bluestocking?”

“I would have said she could more accurately be described as a respected antiquary rather than as a bluestocking, but, yes, I am aware of her scholarly activities. Why?”

D’Eyncourt pulled a face. “Most women who indulge in such unsuitable activities have enough regard for the reputations of their families to adopt a male nom de plume and keep their true identities a secret. But not Gabrielle.”

“My wife also chooses to publish under her own name,” said Sebastian evenly.

D’Eyncourt gave an uncomfortable titter and looked faintly unwell. “So she does. No offense intended, I’m sure.”

Sebastian said, “Are you suggesting that Miss Tennyson’s investigations into the history of Camlet Moat might have contributed in some way to her death?”

D’Eyncourt gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “I know nothing of this latest start of hers. I was referring to a project she undertook some two or three months ago; something to do with tracing the original line of London’s old Roman walls or some such nonsense. Whatever it was, it involved venturing into several of the more unsavory districts of the city. Not at all the proper sort of undertaking for a lady.”

“You say this was two or three months ago?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“So what makes you think it could have anything to do with her recent death?”

“Last week—Thursday, to be precise—I was on my way to meet with a colleague in the Strand when I happened to see Gabrielle arguing with a very rough customer near the York Steps. Thinking her in some sort of difficulty, I naturally approached with the intention of intervening. Much to my astonishment, she was not at all appreciative of my attempts on her behalf. Indeed, she was quite curt. Insisted there was no need for me to concern myself—that the individual I had seen her with was someone she had encountered when she discovered that the foundations of his tavern incorporated some extensive vestiges of the city’s original Roman walls.”

“Did you happen to catch the man’s name?”

D’Eyncourt shook his head. “Sorry. But it shouldn’t be that difficult to discover. I believe she said the tavern was called the Devil’s Head or the Devil’s Tower or some such thing. The man was a most unsavory-looking character—tall, with dark hair and sun-darkened skin, and dressed all in black except for his shirt. I thought at the time he reminded me of someone I know, but I couldn’t quite place the resemblance.”

“What makes you think he was a threat to her?”

“Because of what I heard him say, just before they noticed me walking up to them. He said”—d’Eyncourt roughened his voice in a crude imitation of the man’s accent—“‘Meddle in this and you’ll be sorry. Be a shame to see something happen to a pretty young lady such as yourself.’”

Chapter 13

Sebastian was silent for a moment, trying to fit this incident into everything else he’d been told.

“Of course she tried to deny it,” said d’Eyncourt. “Claimed he’d said no such thing. But I know what I heard. And it was obvious she was more than a little discomfited to be seen talking to this individual.”

Sebastian studied the other man’s narrow, effete features. But d’Eyncourt had spent a lifetime twisting incidents and conversations to serve his own purposes; his face was a bland mask.

Sebastian said, “What do you think it was about?”

D’Eyncourt closed his journal and rose to his feet. “I’ve no notion. You’re the one who dabbles in murder, not I. I have far more important tasks with which to concern myself.” He tucked The Courier beneath his arm. “And now you must excuse me; I’ve a meeting scheduled at Carlton House.” He gave a short bow nicely calculated to convey just a hint of irony and contempt. Then he strolled languidly away, leaving Sebastian staring after him.

“Your drink, my lord?”

The waiter standing at Sebastian’s elbow needed to repeat himself twice before Sebastian turned toward him. “Thank you,” he said, taking the brandy from the waiter’s silver tray and downing it in one long, burning pull.

It was when he was leaving White’s that Sebastian came face-to-face with a familiar barrel-chested, white-haired man in his late sixties. At the sight of Sebastian, the Earl of Hendon paused, his face going slack.

For twenty-nine years Sebastian had called this man father, had struggled to understand Hendon’s strangely conflicted love and anger, pride and resentment. But though the world still believed Sebastian to be the Earl’s son, Sebastian, at least, now knew the truth.

Sebastian gave a slow, polite bow. “My lord.”

“Devlin,” said Hendon, his voice gruff with emotion. “You…you are well?”

“I am, yes.” Sebastian hesitated, then added with painful correctness, “Thank you. And you?”

Hendon’s jaw tightened. “As always, yes, thank you.”

Hendon had always been a bear of a man. Through all his growing years and well into his twenties, Sebastian had been aware of Hendon towering over him in both height and breadth. But as the moment stretched out and became something painful, Sebastian suddenly realized that with increasing age, Hendon was shrinking. He was now the same height as Sebastian, perhaps even shorter. When had that happened? he wondered. And he felt an unwelcome pang at the realization that this man who had played such a vital role in his life was growing older, more frail, less formidable.

For one long, intense moment, the Earl’s fiercely blue St. Cyr eyes met Sebastian’s hard yellow gaze. Then the two men passed.

Neither looked back.

Sebastian found Hero seated at the table in his library, a pile of books scattered over the surface.

She had changed into a simple gown of figured muslin with a sapphire blue sash and had her head bent over some notes she was making. He paused for a moment in the doorway and watched as she caught her lower lip between her teeth in that way she had when she was concentrating. He’d often come upon her thus, surrounded by books and documents at the heavy old library table in her father’s Berkeley Square house. And for some reason he could not have named, seeing her here at work in the library of their Brook Street home made their marriage seem suddenly more real—and more intimate—than the long hours of passion they’d shared in the darkness of the night. He found himself smiling at the thought.

Then she looked up and saw him.

He said, “So you did come home.”

She leaned back in her chair, her pen resting idle in her hand. “I did. And did you find Mr. d’Eyncourt?”

“At White’s.” He went to rest his palms on the surface of the table and lean into them, his gaze on her face. “I need to know the route of London’s old Roman walls. Can you trace me a map, with references to existing streets and landmarks?”

“Roughly, yes.”

He handed her a fresh sheet of paper. “Roughly will do.”

She dipped her pen in the ink. “What is this about?”

As she began to sketch, he told her of his interview with Gabrielle’s cousin. “Do you have any idea what d’Eyncourt may have been talking about?”

“I do, actually. Several months ago, Gabrielle undertook to trace the remnants of the old city walls for a volume on the history of London being compiled by Dr. Littleton.”

Sebastian frowned. “Isn’t that the same volume you’ve been working on?”

“It is. Although I have been looking into the surviving vestiges of London’s monastic houses.” She finished her diagram and slid it across to him. “How exactly do you intend to go about finding this tavern owner?”

He stood for a moment, studying her sketch. She’d actually drawn two wall circuits, one older and smaller than the other. The northern stretch of the oldest wall had run roughly along the course of Cornhill and Leadenhall Street, then down along Mark Lane before turning east to Thames Street and Walbrook. The later, larger circuit ran from the Tower to Aldgate and Bishopsgate, before turning westward to St. Giles churchyard and then veering south to Falcon Square. He traced the line to Aldersgate and Giltspur Street, angling over to Ludgate and the Thames, then eastward back toward the Tower again.

“That’s a lot of wall,” he said, folding the map. “I’ll give it to Tom and see what he can find.”

“You do realize that Gabrielle could have told her cousin a lie to put him off. I don’t think they were exactly close.”

“She may have. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the part about the tavern and the Roman wall, at least, was true.” He nodded to the books scattered across the table’s surface. “What is all this?”

“I’ve been brushing up on my knowledge of King Arthur and Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table.”

He reached for the nearest book, a slim, aged volume covered in faded blue leather, and read the title embossed in gold on the spine. “La donna di Scalotta.” He looked up. “What is it?”

“An Italian novella about the Lady of Shalott.”

He shook his head. “Never heard of it.”

“I wasn’t familiar with it, either. But I remembered Gabrielle telling me she was working on a translation.”

He leafed through the volume’s aged pages and frowned. “I certainly wouldn’t want to try to translate it.” Sebastian’s Italian had come largely from the soldiers, partisans, and bandits he’d encountered during the war and had little in common with the volume’s archaic, stylized language. “When was it originally written?”

“The thirteenth century, I believe.”

“Do you think it might somehow be related to the excavations at Camlet Moat?”

“I don’t believe so, no. Gabrielle was interested in all aspects of the Arthurian legend; this is a relatively unknown part of it.” She turned her head as the sound of the front doorbell echoed through the house. “Are you expecting someone?” she asked, just as Sebastian’s majordomo, Morey, appeared in the doorway.

“A Mr. Hildeyard Tennyson to see you, my lord. He says he is the brother of Miss Gabrielle Tennyson. I have taken the liberty of showing him to the drawing room.”

Chapter 14

Hildeyard Tennyson wore the haggard, stunned expression of a man whose world has suddenly collapsed upon him, leaving him shattered and numb.

Dressed in riding breeches and dusty boots that told of a long, hard ride back to town, he stood beside the front windows overlooking the street, his hat in his hands, his back held painfully straight. Of above-average height, with his sister’s thick chestnut hair and chiseled features, he looked to be in his early thirties. He turned as Sebastian and Hero entered the room, displaying a pale and grief-ravaged face. “My apologies for coming to you in all my dirt,” he said, bowing. “I’ve just ridden in from Kent.”

“Please, sit down, Mr. Tennyson,” said Hero gently. “I can’t tell you how sorry we are for your loss.”

He nodded and swallowed hard, as if temporarily bereft of speech. “Thank you. I can’t stay. I’m on my way up to Enfield to hire some men to help extend the search for the children into the woods and surrounding countryside. But I heard from one of the magistrates at Bow Street that you’ve offered to do what you can to help with the investigation, so I’ve come to thank you…and, I must confess, in the hopes that you might have found something—anything at all—that might make sense of what has happened.” He fixed Sebastian with a look of desperation that was painful to see.

Sebastian went to pour brandy into two glasses. “Sit down,” he said in the voice that had once commanded soldiers into battle. “It will be getting dark soon. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll go home, rest, and give some thought as to where and how your energies can be most efficiently exerted in the morning.”

Tennyson sank into a chair beside the empty hearth and swiped a shaky hand over his face. “I suppose you’re right. It’s just—” He paused to blow out a harsh breath. “It feels so damnably wrong—begging your pardon, Lady Devlin—not to be doing something. I blame myself. I should have insisted Gabrielle and the boys come with me to Kent.”

“From what I know of Gabrielle,” said Hero, taking the chair opposite him, “I’m not convinced you would have succeeded even if you had tried to insist.”

Gabrielle’s brother gave a ghost of a smile. “You may be right. Not even our father could compel Gabrielle to do something she didn’t wish to do. She was always far more headstrong than I, despite being four years my junior.”

“There were only the two of you?” asked Sebastian.

Tennyson nodded. “We had several younger brothers who died when we were children. Gabrielle was quite close to them and took their deaths hard. I’ve often wondered if it wasn’t one of the reasons she was so eager to have George and Alfred come stay with her this summer.”

Sebastian handed him the brandy. “Would you say you and your sister were close?”

“I would have said so, yes.”

“You don’t sound so certain.”

Tennyson stared down at the glass in his hand. “Gabrielle was always a very private person. Lately I’ve had the sense that our lives were diverging. But I suppose that’s inevitable.”

Sebastian went to stand beside the cold hearth, one arm resting along the mantel. “Do you know if she had any romantic connections?”

“Gabrielle?” Tennyson shook his head. “No. She’s never had any interest in marriage. I remember once when I was up at Cambridge and very full of myself, I warned her that if she didn’t get her nose out of books no man would ever want to marry her. She laughed and said that suited her just fine—that a husband would only get in the way of her studies.”

“So you wouldn’t happen to know the name of a French lieutenant she had befriended?”

“A Frenchman? You mean an émigré?”

“No. I mean a paroled French officer. She never mentioned such a man?”

Tennyson stared at him blankly. “Good heavens. No. Are you suggesting she was somehow involved with this person?”

Sebastian took a slow sip of his own brandy. “I don’t know.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“That’s very possible.”

Tennyson scrubbed a hand over his eyes and down his face. When he looked up, his features were contorted with agony. “Who could do something like this? To kill a woman and two children…”

“Your young cousins may still be alive,” said Sebastian. “We don’t know yet.”

Tennyson nodded, his entire upper body rocking back and forth with the motion. “Yes, yes; I keep trying to cling to that, but…” He raised his glass to drink, his hand shaking badly, and Sebastian thought that the man looked stretched to the breaking point.

“Can you think of anyone who might have wished either your sister or the children harm?”

“No. Why would anyone want to hurt a woman like Gabrielle—or two little boys?”

“Some enemy of the boys’ father, perhaps?”

Tennyson considered this, then shook his head. “My cousin is a simple clergyman in Lincolnshire. I’d be surprised if he knows anyone in London.”

Hero said, “Would you mind if I were to have a look at Gabrielle’s research materials, on the off chance there might be some connection between her death and her work at Camlet Moat? I could come to the Adelphi myself in the morning.”

He frowned, as if the possible relevance of his sister’s scholarship to her death escaped him. “Of course; if you wish. I’ll be leaving for Enfield at first light, but I’ll direct the servants to provide you with any assistance you may require. You can box it all up and simply take it, if that would help.”

“It would, yes. Thank you.”

Tennyson set aside his glass and rose to his feet with a bow. “You have both been most kind. Please don’t bother ringing; I can see myself out.”

“I’ll walk down with you,” said Sebastian, aware of Hero’s narrowed gaze following them as they left the room.

“It occurs to me there may be something else you felt reluctant to mention in front of Lady Devlin,” Sebastian said as they descended the stairs.

Tennyson looked vaguely confused. “No, nothing.”

“Any possibility someone could be seeking to hurt you by striking at those you love?”

“I can’t think of anyone,” he said slowly as they reached the ground hall. “Although in my profession one never—” He broke off, his eyes widening. “Merciful heavens. Emily.”

“Emily?” said Sebastian.

A faint suggestion of color touched the barrister’s pale cheeks. “Miss Emily Goodwin—the daughter of one of my colleagues. She has recently done me the honor of agreeing to become my wife, although the death of her paternal grandmother has perforce delayed the formal announcement of our betrothal.”

“You may count on my discretion.”

“Yes, but do you think she could be in danger?”

“I see no reason to alarm her unnecessarily, especially given that the particulars of your betrothal are not known.” Sebastian nodded to Morey, who opened the front door. “But it might be a good idea to suggest that she take care.”

“I will, yes; thank you.”

Sebastian stood in the open doorway and watched the man hurry away into the hot night. Then he went back upstairs to his wife.

“And what precisely was that about?” she asked, one eyebrow raised, as he walked into the room.

Sebastian found himself smiling. “I thought there might be something he was reluctant to discuss in front of such a delicate lady as yourself.”

“Really. And was there?”

“No. Only that it seems he’s formed an attachment to some Miss Goodwin, the daughter of one of his colleagues, and now he’s hysterical with the fear that his sister’s killer might strike against her next. I suspect it’s a fear shared by virtually every father, husband, and brother out there.”

“You think it’s possible Gabrielle’s death could have something to do with her brother’s legal affairs?”

“At this point, almost anything seems possible.”

Tom squinted down at Hero’s map, his lips pursing as he traced the dotted line of London’s old Roman walls, which she had superimposed on her sketch of the city’s modern streets.

“Can you follow it?” asked Sebastian, watching him. He knew that someone at some point had taught Tom to read, before the death of the boy’s father had driven the family into desperation.

“Aye. I think maybe I even know the place yer lookin’ for. There’s a tavern called the Black Devil about ’ere—” He tapped one slightly grubby finger just off Bishopsgate. “It’s owned by a fellow named Jamie Knox.”

Sebastian looked at his tiger in surprise. “You know him?”

Tom shook his head. “Never seen the fellow meself. But I’ve ’eard tales o’ him. ’E’s a weery rum customer. A weery rum customer indeed. They say ’e dresses all in black, like the devil.”

“A somewhat dramatic affectation.” It wasn’t unusual for gentlemen in formal evening dress to wear a black coat and black knee breeches. But the severity of the attire was always leavened by a white waistcoat, white silk stockings, and of course a white cravat.

“Not sure what that means,” said Tom, “but I do know folks say ’e musta sold ’is soul to the devil, for ’e’s got the devil’s own luck. They say ’e ’as the reflexes of a cat. And the eyes and ears of—”

“What?” prodded Sebastian when the boy broke off.

Tom swallowed. “They say ’e ’as the eyes and ears of a cat, too. Yellow eyes.”

Chapter 15

The Black Devil lay in a narrow cobbled lane just off Bishopsgate.

Sebastian walked down gloomy streets lit haphazardly by an occasional sputtering oil lamp or flaring torch thrust into a sconce high on an ancient wall. The houses here dated back to the time of the Tudors and the Stuarts, for this was a part of London that had escaped the ravages of the Great Fire. Once home to courtiers attached to the court of James I, the area had been in a long downward slide for the past century. The elaborately carved fronts overhanging the paving were sagging and worn; the great twisting chimneys leaned precariously as they poked up into the murky night sky.

By day, this was a district of small tradesmen: leather workers and chandlers, clock makers and tailors. But now the shops were all shuttered for the night, the streets given over to the patrons of the grog shops and taverns that spilled golden rectangles of light and boisterous laughter into the night.

He paused across the street from the Black Devil, in the shadows cast by the deep doorway of a calico printer’s shop. He let his gaze rove over the public house’s gable-ended facade and old-fashioned, diamond-paned windows. Suspended from a beam over the door hung a cracked wooden sign painted with the image of a horned black devil, his yellow-eyed head and barbed tail silhouetted against a roaring orange and red fire. As Sebastian watched, the sign creaked softly on its chains, touched by an unexpected gust of hot wind.

Crossing the narrow lane, he pushed through the door into a noisy, low-ceilinged public room with a sunken stone-flagged floor and oak-paneled walls turned black by centuries of smoke. The air was thick with the smell of tobacco and ale and unwashed, hardworking male bodies. The men crowded up to the bar and clustered around the tables glanced over at him, then went back to their pints and their bonesticks and their draughts.

“Help ye, there?” called a young woman from behind the bar, her almond-shaped eyes narrowing with shrewd appraisal. She looked to be somewhere in her early twenties, dark haired and winsome, with a wide red mouth and soft white breasts that swelled voluptuously above the low-cut bodice of her crimson satin gown.

Sebastian pushed his way through the crowd to stand half turned so that he still faced the room. In this gathering of tradesmen and laborers, costermongers and petty thieves, his doeskin breeches, clean white cravat, and exquisitely tailored coat of Bath superfine all marked him as a creature from another world. The other men at the bar shifted subtly, clearing a space around him.

“A go of Cork,” he said, then waited until she set the measure of gin on the boards in front of him to add, “I’m looking for Jamie Knox; is he here?”

The woman behind the bar wiped her hands on the apron tied high around her waist, but her gaze never left his face. “And who might ye be, then?”

“Devlin. Viscount Devlin.”

She stood for a moment with her hands still wrapped in the cloth of her apron. Then she jerked her head toward the rear. “He’s out the back, unloading a delivery. There’s an alley runs along the side of the tavern. The court opens off that.”

Sebastian laid a coin on the scarred surface of the bar. “Thank you.”

The alley was dark and ripe with the stench of rotting offal and fish heads and urine. The ancient walls looming high above him on either side bulged out ominously, so that someone had put in stout timber braces to keep the masonry from collapsing. As he drew nearer, he realized the tavern backed onto the churchyard of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, a relic of a now-vanished priory of Benedictine nuns. He could see the church’s ancient wooden tower rising over a swelling burial ground where great elms moaned softly with the growing wind.

He paused just outside the entrance to the tavern yard. The courtyard looked to be even older than the tavern itself, its cobbles undulating and sunken, with one unexpectedly high wall of coursed flint blocks bonded with rows of red tile. Sebastian could understand why a woman with Gabrielle Tennyson’s interests would find the site fascinating.

Someone had set a horn lantern atop an old flat stone beside a mule-drawn cart filled with hogsheads. The mules stood with their heads down, feet splayed. At the rear of the tavern the wooden flaps of the cellar had been thrown open to reveal a worn flight of stone steps that disappeared downward. As Sebastian watched, the grizzled head and husky shoulders of a man appeared, his footfalls echoing in the wind-tossed night.

Sebastian leaned against the stone jamb of the gateway. He had one hand in his pocket, where a small double-barreled pistol, primed and loaded, partially spoiled the line of his fashionable coat. A sheath in his boot concealed the dagger he was rarely without. He waited until the man had crossed to the cart, then said, “Mr. Jamie Knox?”

The man froze with his hands grasping a cask, his head turning toward the sound of Sebastian’s voice. He appeared wary but not surprised, and it occurred to Sebastian that the comely young woman behind the bar must have run to warn her master to expect a visitor. “Aye. And who might ye be?”

“Devlin. Lord Devlin.”

The man sniffed. Somewhere in his mid-thirties, he had a compact, muscular body that belied the heavy sprinkling of gray in this thick, curly head of hair. Far from being dressed all in black, he wore buff-colored trousers and a brown coat that looked in serious need of a good brushing and mending. His face was broad and sun darkened, with a long scar that ran down one cheek. Sebastian had seen scars like that before, left by a saber slash.

The man paused for only an instant. Then he hefted the hogshead and headed back to the stairs. “I’m a busy man. What ye want?”

The accent surprised Sebastian; it was West Country rather than London or Middlesex. He said, “I understand you knew a woman named Miss Tennyson.”

The man grunted. “Met her. Came sniffin’ around here a while back, she did, prattlin’ about Roman walls and pictures made of little colored bits and a bunch of other nonsense. Why ye ask?”

“She’s dead.”

“Aye. So we heard.” The man disappeared down the cellar steps.

Sebastian waited until he reemerged. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“I told ye, ’twere a while back. Two, maybe three months ago.”

“That’s curious. You see, someone saw you speaking to her just a few days ago. Last Thursday, to be precise. At the York Steps.”

The man grasped another hogshead and turned back toward the cellar. “Who’er told ye that didn’t know what he was talkin’ about.”

“It’s possible, I suppose.”

The man grunted and started down the steep stairs again. He was breathing heavily by the time he came back up. He paused to lean against the cellar door and swipe his sweaty forehead against the shoulder of his coat.

“You were a soldier?” said Sebastian.

“What makes ye think that?”

“It left you with a rather distinctive face.”

The man pushed away from the cellar. “I was here all day Thursday. Ask any o’ the lads in the public room; they’ll tell ye. Ye gonna call ’em all liars?”

Sebastian said, “I’m told Jamie Knox has yellow eyes. So why are yours brown?”

The man gave a startled laugh. “It’s dark. Ye can’t see what color a man’s eyes are in the dark.”

“I can.”

“Huh.” The tavern owner sniffed. “They only say that about me eyes because of the sign. Ye did see the sign, didn’t ye? They also like t’say I only wear black. Next thing ye know, they’ll be whisperin’ that I’ve got a tail tucked into me breeches.”

Sebastian let his gaze drift around the ancient yard. The massive flint and tile rampart that ran along the side of the court was distinctly different from the wall that separated the yard from the burial ground at its rear. No more than seven feet high and topped by a row of iron spikes designed to discourage body snatchers, that part of the wall lay deep in the heavy shadows cast by the sprawling limbs of the graveyard’s leafy elms. And in the fork of one of those trees crouched a lean man dressed all in black except for the white of his shirt. He balanced there easily, the stock of his rifle resting against his thigh.

To anyone else, the rifleman would have been invisible.

Sebastian said, “When he comes down out of his tree, tell Mr. Knox he can either talk to me, or he can talk to Bow Street. I suppose his choice will depend on exactly what’s in his cellars.”

The stocky man’s scarred face split into a nasty grin. “I don’t need to tell him. He can hear ye. Has the eyes and ears of a cat, he does.”

Sebastian turned toward the gateway. The stocky man put out a hand to stop him.

Sebastian stared pointedly at the grimy fingers clenching his sleeve. The hand was withdrawn.

The man licked his lower lip. “He could’ve shot out both yer eyes from where he’s sittin’. And I’ll tell ye somethin’ else: He looks enough like ye t’be yer brother. Ye think about that. Ye think about that real hard.” He paused a moment, then added mockingly, “Me lord.”

Chapter 16

Sebastian walked down Cheapside, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his coat, the hot wind eddying the flames of the streetlamps to send leaping shadows over the shuttered shop fronts and dusty, rubbish-strewn cobbles.

Once, he had been the youngest of three brothers, the fourth child born to the Earl of Hendon and his beautiful, vivacious countess, Sophie. If there had ever been a time in his parents’ marriage that was pleasant, Sebastian couldn’t remember it. They had lived essentially separate lives, the Earl devoting himself to affairs of state while the Countess lost herself in a gay whirl of balls and routs and visits to country houses. The few occasions when husband and wife came together had been characterized by stony silences punctuated all too often with stormy bouts of tears and voices raised in anger.

Yet Sebastian’s childhood had not been an entirely unhappy one. In his memories, Sophie’s touch was always soft and loving, and her laughter—when her husband was not around—came frequently. Her four children had never doubted her love for them. Though unlike each other in many ways and separated in age, the three brothers had been unusually close. Only Amanda, the eldest child, had held herself aloof. “Sometimes I think Amanda was born angry with the world,” Sophie had once said, her thoughtful, worried gaze following her daughter when Amanda stormed off from a game of battledore and shuttlecock.

It would be years before Sebastian understood the true source of Amanda’s anger.

He paused to look out over the gray, sunken tombs and rank nettles choking St. Paul’s churchyard, his thoughts still lost in the past.

In contrast to his gay, demonstrative wife, the Earl of Hendon had been a stern, demanding father preoccupied with affairs of state. But he’d still found the time to teach his sons to ride and shoot and fence, and he took a gruff pride in their prowess. An intensely private man, he had remained a distant figure, detached and remote—especially from his youngest child, the child so unlike him in looks and temperament and talents.

Then had come a series of tragedies. Sebastian’s oldest brother, Richard, was the first to die, caught in a vicious riptide while swimming off the coast of Cornwall near the Earl’s principal residence. Then, one dreadful summer when the clouds of war swept across Europe and the fabric of society as they’d always known it seemed forever rent by revolution and violence, Cecil had sickened and died too.

Once the proud father of three healthy sons, Hendon found himself left with only the youngest, Sebastian. Sebastian, the son most unlike his father; the son on whom the Earl’s wrath always fell the hardest, the son who had always known himself to be a disappointment in every way to the brusque, barrel-chested man with the piercingly blue St. Cyr eyes that were so noticeably lacking in his new heir.

That same summer, when Sebastian was eleven, Hendon’s countess sailed away for a day’s pleasure cruise, never to return. Lost at sea, they’d said. Even at the time, Sebastian hadn’t believed it. For months he’d climbed the cliffs overlooking the endless choppy waters of the Channel, convinced that if she were in truth dead, he’d somehow know it; he’d feel it.

Odd, he thought now as he pushed away from the churchyard’s rusted railing and turned his feet toward the noisy, brightly lit hells off St. James’s Street, how he could have been so right about that and so wrong about almost everything else.

Lying alone in her bed, Hero heard the wind begin to pick up just before midnight. Hot gusts billowed the curtains at her open window and filled the bedroom with the smell of dust and all the ripe odors of a city in summer. She listened to the charlie cry one o’clock, then two. And still she lay awake, listening to the wind and endlessly analyzing and reassessing all that she had learned so far of the grinding, inexorable sequence of shadowy, half-understood events and forces that had led to Gabrielle’s death and the disappearance of her two little cousins. But as the hours dragged on, it gradually dawned on Hero that her sleeplessness had as much to do with the empty bed beside her as anything else.

It was a realization that both startled and chagrined her. Her motives for entering into this marriage had been complicated and confused and not entirely understood by anyone, least of all herself. She was not a woman much given to introspection or prolonged, agonized examination of her motives. She had always seen this characteristic as something admirable, something to be secretly proud of. Now she found herself wondering if perhaps in that she had erred. For who could be more foolish than a woman who doesn’t know her own heart?

A loose shutter banged somewhere in the night for what seemed like the thousandth time. Thrusting aside the covers with a soft exclamation of exasperation, she crossed the room to slam down the sash. Then she paused with one hand on the latch, her gaze on the elegant, solitary figure strolling down the street toward the house.

The night was dark, the wind having blown out most of the streetlights and both oil lamps mounted high on either side of the entrance. But Hero had no difficulty recognizing Devlin’s long stride or the lean line of his body as he turned to mount the front steps.

She knew a wash of relief, although she had been unwilling to acknowledge until now the growing concern his long absence had aroused. Then her hand tightened on the drapery beside her.

They were strangers to each other in many ways, their marriage one born of necessity and characterized by wary distrust leavened by a powerful current of passion, a grudging respect, and a playful kind of rivalry. Yet she knew him well enough to recognize the brittle set of his shoulders and the glitteringly dangerous precision of each graceful movement.

Eleven months before, something had happened in Devlin’s life, something that had driven him from his longtime mistress Kat Boleyn and created a bitter estrangement between the Viscount and his father, the Earl. She did not know precisely what had occurred; she knew only that whatever it was, it had plunged Devlin into a months-long brandy-soaked spiral of self-destruction from which he had only recently emerged.

But now, as she listened to his footsteps climb the stairs to the second floor and heard the distant click of his bedroom door closing quietly behind him, she knew a deep disquiet…

And an unexpected welling of an emotion so fierce that it caught her breath and left her wondrous and shaken and oddly, uncharacteristically frightened.

Tuesday, 4 August

“My lord?”

Sebastian opened one eye, saw his valet’s cheerful, fine-boned face, then squeezed the eye shut again when the room lurched unpleasantly. “Go away.”

Jules Calhoun’s voice sounded irritatingly hearty. “Sir Henry Lovejoy is here to see you, my lord.”

“Tell him I’m not here. Tell him I’m dead. I don’t care what the hell you tell him. Just go away.”

There was a moment’s pause. Then Calhoun said, “Unfortunately, Lady Devlin went out early this morning, so she is unable to receive the magistrate in your stead.”

“Early, you say? Where has she gone?” He opened both eyes and sat up quickly—not a wise thing to do under the circumstances. “Bloody hell,” he yelped, bowing his head and pressing one splayed hand to his pounding forehead.

“She did not say. Here, my lord; drink this.”

Sebastian felt a hot mug thrust into his free hand. “Not more of your damned milk thistle.”

“There is nothing better to cleanse the liver, my lord.”

“My liver is just fine,” growled Sebastian, and heard the valet laugh.

Calhoun went to jerk back the drapes at the windows. “Shall I have Morey tell Sir Henry you’ll join him in fifteen minutes?”

Sebastian swung his legs over the side of the bed and groaned again. “Make it twenty.”

Sebastian found the magistrate munching on a tray of cucumber and brown bread and butter sandwiches washed down with tea.

“Sir Henry,” said Sebastian, entering the room with a quick step. “My apologies for keeping you waiting.”

The magistrate surged to his feet and dabbed at his lips with a napkin. “Your majordomo has most kindly provided me with some much-needed sustenance. I’ve been up at Camlet Moat since dawn.”

“Please, sit down,” said Sebastian, going to sprawl in the chair opposite him. “Any sign yet of the missing children?”

“None, I’m afraid. And that’s despite the hundreds of men now beating through the wood and surrounding countryside in search of them. Unfortunately, Miss Tennyson’s brother has offered a reward for the children—he’s even set up an office in the Fleet, staffed by a solicitor, to handle any information that may be received.”

“Why do you say ‘unfortunately’?”

“Because the result is likely to be chaos. I’ve seen it happen before. A child is lost; with the best of intentions, the grieving family offers a reward, and suddenly you have scores of wretched children—sometimes even hundreds—being offered to the authorities as the ‘lost’ child.”

“Good God,” said Sebastian. “Still, I can understand why he is doing it.”

“I suppose so, yes.” Lovejoy blew out a harsh breath. “Although I fear it is only a matter of time until their bodies are discovered. If the children had merely been frightened by what they saw and run off to hide, they would have been found by now.”

“I suppose you must be right.” Sebastian considered pouring himself a cup of tea, then decided against it. What he needed was a tankard of good strong ale. “Still, it’s strange that if they are dead, their bodies weren’t found beside Miss Tennyson’s.”

“I fear there is much about this case that is strange. I’ve spoken to the rector at St. Martin’s, who confirms that Miss Tennyson and the two children did indeed attend services this past Sunday, as usual. He even conversed with them for a few moments afterward—although not, unfortunately, about their plans for the afternoon.”

“At least it helps to narrow the time of her death.”

“Slightly, yes. We’ve also checked with the stages running between London and Enfield, and with the liveries in Enfield, but so far we’ve been unable to locate anyone who recalls seeing Miss Tennyson on Sunday.”

“In other words, Miss Tennyson and the children must have driven out to Camlet Moat with her killer.”

“So it appears. There is one disturbing piece of information that has come to light,” said Lovejoy, helping himself to another sandwich triangle. “We’ve discovered that Miss Tennyson was actually seen up at the moat a week ago on Sunday in the company of the children and an unidentified gentleman.”

“A gentleman? Not a driver?”

“Oh, most definitely a gentleman. I’m told he walked with a limp and had an accent that may have been French.”

For a gentlewoman to drive in the country in the company of a gentleman hinted at a degree of friendship, of intimacy even, that was quite telling. For their drive to have taken Gabrielle Tennyson and her French friend to Camlet Moat seemed even more ominous. Sebastian said, “I’ve heard she had befriended a French prisoner of war on his parole.”

“Have you? Good heavens; who is he?”

“I don’t know. I’ve yet to find anyone who can give me a name.”

Lovejoy swallowed the last of his sandwich and pushed to his feet. “If you should discover his identity, I would be most interested to know it. I’ve no need to tell you how this latest development is likely to be received. Sales of blunderbusses and pistols have already skyrocketed across the city, with women afraid to walk to market alone or allow their children to play outside. The Prime Minister’s office is putting pressure on Bow Street to solve this, quickly. But if people learn a Frenchman was involved! Well, we’ll likely have mass hysteria.”

Sebastian rose with his friend, aware of a profound sense of unease. He knew from personal experience that whenever Downing Street or the Palace troubled itself with the course of a murder investigation, they tended to be more interested in quieting public hysteria than in seeing justice done. The result, all too often, was the sacrifice of a convenient scapegoat.

Eighteen months before, Sebastian had come perilously close to being such a scapegoat himself. And the man who had pushed for his quick and convenient death was his new father-in-law.

Charles, Lord Jarvis.

Chapter 17

After the magistrate’s departure, Sebastian poured himself a tankard of ale and went to stand before the empty hearth, one boot resting on the cold fender.

He stood for a long time, running through all he knew about Gabrielle Tennyson’s last days, and all he still needed to learn. Then he sent for his valet.

“My lord?” asked Calhoun, bowing gracefully.

To all appearances, Jules Calhoun was the perfect gentleman’s gentleman, elegant and urbane and polished. But the truth was that the valet had begun life in one of the most notorious flash houses in London, a background that gave him some interesting skills and a plethora of useful contacts.

“Ever hear of a man named Jamie Knox?” Sebastian asked, drawing on his gloves. “He owns a tavern in Bishopsgate called the Black Devil.”

“I have heard of him, my lord. But only by repute. It is my understanding he arrived in London some two or three years ago.”

“See what else you can find out about him.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Sebastian settled his hat at a rakish angle and turned toward the door. Then he paused with one hand on the jamb to glance back and add, “This might be delicate, Calhoun.”

The valet bowed again, his dark eyes bright with intelligence, his features flawlessly composed. “I shall be the soul of discretion, my lord.”

Hero had begun the morning with a visit to the Adelphi Terrace.

She found Mr. Hildeyard Tennyson already out organizing the search for his missing cousins. But he had left clear instructions with his servants, and with the aid of a footman she spent several hours bundling up Gabrielle’s research materials and notes. Having dispatched the boxes to Brook Street, she started to leave. Then she paused to turn and run up the stairs to her friend’s bedroom.

She stood for a long moment in the center of the room, her hands clenched before her. She had called Gabrielle friend for six years. But although they had been close in many ways, Hero realized now just how compartmentalized their friendship had been. They had talked of history and art, of philosophy and poetry. Hero knew the pain Gabrielle had suffered at the early loss of her mother and her lingering grief over the brothers who died so young; she knew her friend’s fondness for children. But she did not know Gabrielle’s reason for turning away from marriage and any possibility of bearing children of her own.

It occurred to Hero that she had simply assumed her friend’s reasons mirrored her own. But she knew that assumption was without basis. Gabrielle had challenged the typical role of women in their society by her own enthusiasm for scholarship and her determination to openly pursue her interests. Yet she had never been one to crusade for the kind of changes Hero championed. When Hero spoke of a future when women would be allowed to attend Oxford or to sit in Parliament, Gabrielle would only smile and faintly shake her head, as if convinced these things would never be—and perhaps never should be.

She had certainly never spoken of her friendship with some mysterious French lieutenant. But then, Hero had never mentioned to Gabrielle her own strange, conflicted attraction to a certain dark-haired, amber-eyed viscount. And Hero found herself wondering now what Gabrielle had thought of her friend’s sudden, seemingly inexplicable wedding. They’d never had the opportunity to discuss it.

There were so many things the two friends had needed to discuss—had intended to discuss that morning Hero was to drive up to Camlet Moat. Now Hero was left with only questions and an inescapable measure of guilt.

“What happened to you?” she said softly as she let her gaze drift around her friend’s room to linger on the high tester bed and primrose coverlet, the mirrored dressing table and scattering of silver boxes and crystal vials. The chamber was, essentially, as Gabrielle had left it when she went off on Sunday, not knowing she would never return. Yet Hero could feel no lingering presence here, no whispered essence of the woman whose laughter and dreams and fears this place had once witnessed. There was only a profound, yawning stillness that brought a pricking to Hero’s eyelids and swelled her throat.

Leaving the house, she directed her coachman to the Park Lane home of a certain member of Parliament from the Wolds of Lincolnshire. Only then, as her carriage rocked through the streets of London, did Hero lean back against the soft velvet squabs, and for the first time since she’d learned of Gabrielle’s death, she allowed the tears to fall.

A few carefully worded inquiries at the War Office, the Alien Office, and the Admiralty provided Sebastian with the information that there were literally thousands of paroled French and allied officers in Britain. Most captured enemy officers were scattered across the land in one of fifty so-called parole towns. But some were billeted in London itself.

Prisoners of war from the ranks were typically thrown into what were known as “the hulls.” Rotting, demasted ships deemed too unseaworthy to set sail, the hulls were essentially floating prisons. By day, the men were organized into chained gangs and marched off to labor on the docks and in the surrounding area’s workshops. At night they were locked fast in the airless, vermin-ridden, pestilence-infested darkness belowdecks. Their death rate was atrocious.

But the officers were traditionally treated differently. Being gentlemen, they were credited with possessing that most gentlemanly of characteristics: honor. Thus, a French officer could be allowed his freedom with only a few restrictions as long as he gave his word of honor as a gentleman—his parole—that he would not escape.

“That’s the theory, at least,” grumbled the plump, graying functionary with whom Sebastian spoke at the Admiralty. “Problem is, too many of these damned Frog officers are not gentlemen. They raise them up from the ranks, you see—which is why we’ve had over two hundred of the bastards run off just this year alone.” He leaned forward as if to underscore his point. “No honor.”

“Two hundred?”

“Two hundred and thirty-seven, to be precise. Nearly seven hundred in the past three years. These Frenchies may be officers, but too many of them are still scum. Vermin, swept up out of the gutters of Paris and lifted far above their proper station. That’s what happens, you see, when civilization is turned upside down and those who were born to serve start thinking themselves as good as their betters.” The very thought of this topsy-turvy world aroused such ire in the functionary’s ample breast that he was practically spitting.

“Yet some of the best French officers have come up through the ranks,” said Sebastian. “Joachim Murat, for example. And Michel Ney—”

“Pshaw.” The functionary waved away these examples of ungentlemanly success with the dismissive flap of one pudgy hand. “It is obvious you know nothing of the Army, sir. Nothing!”

Sebastian laughed and started to turn away.

“You could try checking with Mr. Abel McPherson—he’s the agent appointed by the Transport Board of the Admiralty to administer the paroled prisoners in the area.”

“And where would I find him?” asked Sebastian, pausing to look back at the clerk.

“I believe he’s in Norfolk at the moment. I’ve no doubt he left someone as his deputy, but I can’t rightly tell you who.”

“And who might have that information?”

“Sorry. Can’t help you. But McPherson should be back in a fortnight.”

Hero was received at the Mayflower house of the honorable Charles d’Eyncourt by the MP’s married sister, a dour woman in her mid-thirties named Mary Bourne.

Mrs. Bourne had never met Hero and was all aflutter with the honor of a visit from Lord Jarvis’s daughter. She received Hero in a stately drawing room hung with blond satin and crammed with an assortment of gilded crocodile-legged tables and colorful Chinese vases that would have delighted the Prince Regent himself. After begging “dear Lady Devlin” to please, pray be seated, she sent her servants flying for tea and cakes served on a silver tray so heavy the poor butler staggered beneath its weight. She then proceeded, seemingly without stopping for breath, to prattle endlessly about everything from her Bible study at the Savoy Chapel to her dear Mr. Bourne’s concerns for her remaining in the metropolis with such a ruthless murderer on the loose, and followed that up with an endless description of a recent family wedding at which fandangos and the new waltz had been danced, and the carriages decked out in good white satin. “At a shilling a yard, no less!” she whispered, leaning forward confidingly. “No expense was spared, believe me, my dear Lady Devlin.”

Smiling benignly, Hero sipped her tea and encouraged her hostess to prattle on. Mary Bourne bragged (in the most humble way possible, of course) about the morning and evening prayers that all servants in her own household at Dalby near Somersby were required to attend daily. She hinted (broadly) that she was the pseudonymous author of a popular denunciation of the modern interest in Druidism, and from there allowed herself to be led ever so subtly, ever so unsuspectingly, to the subject Hero had come to learn more about: the precise nature of the relationship between Charles d’Eyncourt and his brother, George Tennyson, the father of the two missing little boys.

Charles, Lord Jarvis lounged at his ease in a comfortable chair beside the empty hearth in his chambers in Carlton House. Moving deliberately, he withdrew an enameled gold snuffbox from his pocket and flicked it open with practiced grace. He lifted a delicate pinch between one thumb and forefinger and inhaled, his hard gaze never leaving the sweating pink and white face of the stout man who stood opposite him. “Well?” demanded Jarvis.

“This c-complicates things,” stammered Bevin Childe. “You must see that. It’s not going to be easy to—”

“How you accomplish your task is not my problem. You already know the consequences if you fail.”

The antiquary’s soft mouth sagged open, his eyes widening. Then he swallowed hard and gave a jerky, panicky bow. “Yes, my lord,” he said, and then jumped when Jarvis’s clerk tapped discreetly on the door behind him.

“What is it?” demanded Jarvis.

“Colonel Urquhart to see you, my lord.”

“Show him in,” said Jarvis. He closed his snuffbox with a snap, his gaze returning to the now-pale antiquary. “Why are you still here? Get out of my sight.”

Hat in hand, the antiquary backed out of the room as if exiting from a royal presence. He was still backing when Colonel Jasper Urquhart swept through the door and sketched an elegant bow.

“You wished to see me, my lord?”

The Colonel was a tall man, as were all the former military men in Jarvis’s employ, tall and broad-shouldered, with fair hair and pale gray eyes and a ruddy complexion. A former rifleman, he had served Jarvis for two years now. Until today, he hadn’t disappointed.

“Yesterday,” said Jarvis, pushing to his feet, “I asked you to assign one of your best men to a certain task.”

“Yes, my lord. I can explain.”

Jarvis sniffed and tucked his snuffbox back into his pocket. “Please don’t. I trust the individual in question is no longer in my employ?”

“Correct, my lord.”

“You relieve me. See that his replacement does not similarly disappoint.”

The Colonel’s thin nostrils quivered. “Yes, my lord.”

“Good. That will be all.”

Sebastian spent three frustrating hours prowling the rooming houses, taverns, and coffeehouses known to be frequented by officers on their parole. But the questions he asked were of necessity vague and the answers he received less than helpful. Without knowing the French lieutenant’s name, how the devil was he to find one paroled French officer amongst so many?

He was standing beside the Serpentine and watching a drilling of the troops from the Hyde Park barracks when he noticed a young, painfully thin man limping toward him. A scruffy brown and black mutt with a white nose and chest padded contentedly at his heels, one ear up, the other folded half over as if in a state of perpetual astonishment. The man’s coat was threadbare and his breeches mended, but his linen was white and clean, his worn-out boots polished to a careful luster, the set of his shoulders and upright carriage marking him unmistakably as a military man. His pallid complexion contrasted starkly with his brown hair and spoke of months of illness and convalescence.

He paused uncertainly some feet away, the dog drawing up beside him, pink tongue hanging out as it panted happily. “Monsieur le vicomte?” he asked.

“Yes.” Sebastian turned slowly to face him. “And you, I take it, must be Miss Tennyson’s mysterious unnamed French lieutenant?”

The man brought his heels together and swept an elegant bow. This particular French officer was, obviously, not one of those who had been raised through the ranks from the gutters of Paris. “I have a name,” he said in very good English. “Lieutenant Philippe Arceneaux, of the Twenty-second Chasseurs à Cheval.”

Chapter 18

“We met last May in the Reading Room of the British Museum,” said Arceneaux as he and Sebastian walked along the placid waters of the Serpentine. The dog frisked happily ahead, nose to the ground, tail wagging. “She was having difficulty with the archaic Italian of a novella she was attempting to translate, and I offered to help.”

“So you’re a scholar.”

“I was trained to be, yes. But France has little use for scholars these days. Only soldiers.” He gazed out across the park’s open fields, to where His Majesty’s finest were drilling in the fierce sunshine. “One of the consolations of being a prisoner of war has been the opportunity to continue my studies.”

“This novella you mentioned; what was it?”

“A now obscure elaboration of a part of the Arthurian legend called La donna di Scalotta.”

“The Lady of Shalott,” said Sebastian thoughtfully.

The Frenchman brought his gaze back to Sebastian’s face. “You know it?” he said in surprise.

“I have heard of it, but that’s about it.”

“It’s a tragic tale, of a beautiful maiden who dies for the love of a handsome knight.”

“Sir Lancelot?”

“Yes.”

“Convenient, isn’t it, the way Camelot, Lancelot, and Shalott all happen to rhyme?”

Arceneaux laughed out loud. “Very convenient.”

Sebastian said, “Were you in love with her?”

The laughter died on the Frenchman’s lips as he lifted his shoulders in a shrug that could have meant anything, and looked away. It occurred to Sebastian, watching him, that the Lieutenant appeared young because he was—probably no more than twenty-four or -five, which would make him several years younger than Gabrielle.

“Well? Were you?”

They walked along in silence, the sun warm on their backs, the golden light of the afternoon drenching the green of the grass and trees around them. Just when Sebastian had decided the Frenchman wasn’t going to answer, he said softly, “Of course I was. At least a little. Who wouldn’t be? She was a very beautiful woman, brilliant and courageous and overflowing with a zest for life. While I—” His voice broke and he had to swallow hard before he could continue. “I have been very lonely, here in England.”

“Was she in love with you?”

“Oh, no. There was nothing like that between us. We were friends—fellow scholars. Nothing more.”

Sebastian studied the Frenchman’s lean profile. He had softly curling brown hair and a sprinkling of cinnamon-colored freckles high across his cheeks that gave him something of the look of a schoolboy. At the moment, the freckles were underlaid by a faint, betraying flush.

“When did you last see her?” Sebastian asked.

“Wednesday evening, I believe it was. She used to bring her young cousins here, to the park, to sail their boats on the Serpentine. I would meet them sometimes. The boys liked to play with Chien.”

Sebastian glanced over at the brown and black mongrel, now loping methodically from tree to tree in a good-natured effort to mark all of Hyde Park as his own personal territory. “Chien? That’s his name?” “Chien” was simply the French word for “dog.”

“I thought if I gave him a name, I might become too attached to him.”

The dog came bounding back to the young lieutenant, tail wagging, brown eyes luminous with adoration, and the Lieutenant hunkered down to ruffle the fur around his neck. The dog licked his wrist and then trotted off again happily.

“Looks as if that’s working out well,” observed Sebastian.

Arceneaux laughed again and pushed to his feet. “He used to live in the wasteland near that new bridge they’re building. I go there sometimes to sit at the end overlooking the river and watch the tide roll in and out. He would come sit beside me. And then one day just before curfew, when I got up to leave, he came too. Unfortunately, he has a sad taste for the low life—particularly Gypsies. And a shocking tendency to steal hams. George used to say I should have called him ‘Rom,’ because he is a Gypsy at heart.”

The Lieutenant watched the dog roll in the grass near the water’s edge and his features hardened into grim lines. After a moment, he said, “Do you think George and Alfred are dead too?”

“They may be. Or they could simply have been frightened by what happened to their cousin and run away to hide.”

“But the authorities are looking for them, yes? And Gabrielle’s brother has offered a reward. If that were true, why have they not been found?”

Sebastian could think of several explanations that made perfect sense, although he wasn’t inclined to voice them. Small boys were a valuable commodity in England, frequently sold as climbing boys by the parish workhouses or even by their own impoverished parents. The chimney sweeps were in constant need of new boys, for the work was brutal and dangerous. Even boys who survived eventually outgrew the task. It wasn’t unknown for small children to be snatched from their front gardens and sold to sweeps. Very few of those children ever made it home again.

But the chimney sweeps weren’t the only ones who preyed on young children; girls and boys both were exploited for sexual purposes the very thought of which made Sebastian’s stomach clench. He suspected the trade in children was a contributing factor to Tennyson’s decision to ignore the concerns of the magistrates and post a reward for the boys’ return. Then he noticed the way the Lieutenant’s jaw had tightened, and he knew the Frenchman’s thoughts were probably running in the same direction.

Sebastian breathed in the warm, stagnant aroma of the canal, the sunbaked earth, the sweet scent of the lilies blooming near the shadows of the trees. He said, “Did Miss Tennyson seem troubled in any way the last time you saw her?”

“Troubled? No.”

“Would you by any chance know how she planned to spend this past Sunday afternoon?”

“Sorry, no.”

Sebastian glanced over at him. “She didn’t speak of it?”

“Not that I recall, no.”

“Yet you did sometimes see her on Sundays, did you not?”

Arceneaux was silent for a moment, obviously considering his answer with care. He decided to go with honesty. “Sometimes, yes.”

“Where would you go?”

A muscle worked along the Frenchman’s jaw as he stared out over the undulating parkland and shrugged. “Here and there.”

“You went up to Camlet Moat a week ago last Sunday, didn’t you?”

Arceneaux kept his face half averted, but Sebastian saw his throat work as he swallowed.

One of the conditions of a prisoner’s parole was the requirement that he not withdraw beyond certain narrowly prescribed boundaries. By traveling up to Camlet Moat, the Frenchman had violated his parole. Sebastian wondered why he had taken such a risk. But he also understood how frustration could sometimes lead a man to do foolish things.

“I have no intention of reporting you to the Admiralty, if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Sebastian.

“I didn’t kill her,” said Arceneaux suddenly, his voice rough with emotion. “You must believe me. I had no reason to kill any of them.”

Some might consider unrequited love a very common motive for murder. But Sebastian kept that observation to himself. “Who do you think would have a reason to kill them?”

Arceneaux hesitated, the wind ruffling the soft brown curls around his face. He said, “How much do you know about Camlet Moat?”

“I know that Miss Tennyson believed it the lost location of Arthur’s Camelot. Do you?”

“I will admit that when I first heard the suggestion, it seemed laughable. But in the end I found her arguments profoundly compelling. The thing is, you see, our image of Camelot has been molded by the writings of the troubadours. We picture it as a fairy-tale place—a grand medieval castle and great city of grace and beauty. But the real Camelot—if it existed at all—would have been far less grand and magnificent. There is no denying that Camlet Moat’s name is indeed a recent corruption of Camelot. And it is an ancient site with royal connections that remained important down through the ages.”

“One wouldn’t think so to look at the island today.”

“That’s because the medieval castle that once stood there was completely razed by the Earl of Essex in the fifteenth century, its stones and timbers sold to help finance repairs to the Earl’s family seat at Hertford.”

Sebastian frowned. “I thought the site belonged to the Crown.”

“It has, off and on. But it was for several centuries in the possession of the descendants of Sir Geoffrey de Mandeville.”

Every schoolboy in England was familiar with Sir Geoffrey de Mandeville, one of the most notorious of the robber barons spawned by the chaos of the twelfth century, when William the Conqueror’s grandchildren Matilda and Stephen did their best to turn England into a wasteland in their battle for the throne. Accumulating a band of black knights, de Mandeville pillaged and looted from Cambridge to Ely to the Abby of Ramsey; the treasure he amassed in the course of his bloody career—a king’s ransom in gold and coins and precious gems—had reportedly never been found.

“There is a legend,” said Arceneaux, “that de Mandeville buried his treasure at Camlet Moat. They say that when he was attained for high treason, he hid on the island in a hollow oak tree overhanging a well. The tree broke beneath his weight, and he fell into the well and drowned. Now his ghost haunts the island, guarding his treasure and reappearing to bring death to anyone who would dare lay hands upon it.”

“Don’t tell me you believe this nonsense?”

Arceneaux smiled. “No. But that doesn’t mean that other people don’t.”

“Are you suggesting Gabrielle Tennyson might have been killed by a treasure hunter?”

“I know they had difficulty with someone digging at the site during the night and on Sundays too. The workmen would frequently arrive in the morning to find great gaping holes at various points around the island. She was particularly disturbed by some damage she discovered last week. She suspected the man behind it was Winthrop’s own foreman—a big, redheaded rogue named Rory Forster. But she had no proof.”

“She thought whoever was digging at the site was looking for de Mandeville’s treasure?”

The Frenchman nodded. “My fear is that if she and the lads did decide to go up there again last Sunday, they may have chanced upon someone looking for de Mandeville’s treasure. Someone who…” His voice trailed away, his features pinched tight with the pain of his thoughts.

“When you went with Miss Tennyson to the site, how did you get there?”

“But I didn’t—” he began, only to have Sebastian cut him off.

“All right, let’s put it this way: If you had visited the site last Sunday, how would you have traveled there?”

The Frenchman gave a wry grin. “In a hired gig. Why?”

“Because it’s one of the more puzzling aspects of this murder—Bow Street has yet to discover how Miss Tennyson traveled up to the moat the day she was killed. You have no ideas?”

Arceneaux shook his head. “I assumed she must have gone there in the company of whoever killed her.”

As she did with you, Sebastian thought. Aloud, he said, “I’m curious: Why bring this tale to me? Why not take what you know to Bow Street?”

A humorless smile twisted Arceneaux’s lips. “Have you seen today’s papers? They’re suggesting Gabrielle and the boys were killed by a Frenchman. Just this morning, two of my fellow officers were attacked by a mob calling them child murderers. They might well have been killed if a troop of the Third Volunteers hadn’t chanced to come along and rescue them.”

They drew up at the gate, where Tom was waiting with the curricle. Sebastian said, “What makes you so certain I won’t simply turn around and give your name to the authorities?”

“I am told you are a man of honor and justice.”

“Who told you that?”

The Frenchman’s cheeks hollowed and he looked away.

Sebastian said, “You took a risk, approaching me; why?”

Arceneaux brought his gaze back to Sebastian’s face. He no longer looked like a young scholar but like a soldier who had fought and seen men die, and who had doubtless also killed. “Because I want whoever did this dead. It’s as simple as that.”

The two men’s gazes met and held. They had served under different flags, perhaps even unknowingly faced each other on some field of battle. But they had more in common with each other than with those who had never held the bloodied, shattered bodies of their dying comrades in their arms, who had never felt the thrum of bloodlust coursing through their own veins, who had never known the fierce rush of bowel-loosening fear or the calm courage that can come from the simple, unshrugging acceptance of fate.

“The authorities will figure out who you are eventually,” said Sebastian.

“Yes. But it won’t matter if you catch the man who actually did kill them, first.” The Frenchman bowed, one hand going to his hip as if to rest on the hilt of a sword that was no longer there. “My lord.”

Sebastian stood beside his curricle and watched the Frenchman limp away toward the river, the scruffy brown and black dog trotting contentedly at his side.

Sebastian’s first inclination was to dismiss the man’s tale of ghosts, robber barons, and buried treasure as just so much nonsense. But he had a vague memory of Lovejoy saying something about a local legend linking some ancient Templar knight to the moat.

“Was that the Frog ye been lookin’ for, gov’nor?” asked Tom.

Sebastian leapt up into the curricle’s high seat. “He says he is.”

“Ye don’t believe ’im?”

“When it comes to murder, I’m not inclined to believe anyone.” Sebastian gathered his reins, then paused to look over at his tiger. “Do you believe in ghosts, Tom?”

“Me? Get on wit ye, gov’nor.” The boy showed a gap-toothed grin. “Ye sayin’ that Frog is a ghost?”

“No. But I’m told some people do believe Camlet Moat is haunted.”

“By the lady what got ’erself killed there?”

“By a twelfth-century black knight.”

Tom was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Do you believe in ghosts, gov’nor?”

“No.” Sebastian turned the chestnuts’ heads toward the road north. “But I think it’s time we took another look at Camelot.”

Chapter 19

Alistair St. Cyr, Earl of Hendon and Chancellor of the Exchequer, slammed his palm down on the pile of crude broadsheets on the table before him. “I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all. These bloody things are all over town. And I tell you, they’re having more of an effect than one could ever have imagined. Why, just this morning I overheard two of my housemaids whispering about King Arthur. Housemaids! We’ve heard this nonsense before, about how the time has come for the ‘once and future king’ to return from the mists of bloody Avalon and save England from both Boney and the House of Hanover. But this is different. This is more than just a few yokels fantasizing over their pints down at the local. Someone is behind this, and if you ask me, it’s Napoléon’s agents.”

Jarvis drew his snuffbox from his pocket and calmly flipped it open with one practiced finger. “Of course it’s the work of Napoléon’s agents.”

Hendon looked at him from beneath heavy brows. “Do you know who they are?”

“I believe so.” Jarvis lifted a pinch of snuff to one nostril and sniffed. “But at this point, it’s more than a matter of simply closing down some basement printing press. The damage has been done; this appeal to a messianic hero from our glorious past has resonated with the people and taken on a life of its own.”