When Maidens Mourn

“How the bloody hell could something like this have aroused such a popular fervor?”

“I suppose one could with justification blame the success of the pulpit. When people fervently believe the Son of God will return someday to save them, it makes it easier to believe the same of King Arthur.”

“That’s blasphemy.”

“I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about credulity and habits of thought.”

Hendon swung away to go stand beside the window and stare down at the Mall. “I’ll confess that at first I found it difficult to credit that there are people alive today who could actually believe that Arthur will return, literally. I had supposed these pamphlets were simply tapping into the population’s yearning for an Arthur-like figure to appear and save England. But an appalling number of people do seem to genuinely believe Arthur is out there right now on the Isle of Avalon, just waiting for the right moment to come back.”

Jarvis raised another pinch of snuff and inhaled with a sniff. “I fear the concept of metaphor is rather above the capacity of the hoi polloi.”

Hendon turned to look at him over one shoulder. “So what is to be done?”

Jarvis closed his snuffbox and tucked it away with a bland smile. “We’re working on that.”

Sebastian had expected to find the moat overrun with parties of searchers eager for the chance to collect the reward posted by Gabrielle Tennyson’s brother. Instead, he reined in beneath the thick, leafy canopy at the top of the ancient embankment to look out over an oddly deserted scene, the stagnant water disturbed only by a quick splash and the disappearing ripples left in the wake of some unseen creature. He could hear the searchers, but only faintly, the thickness of the wood muffling the distant baying of hounds and the halloos of the men beating the surrounding countryside. Here, all was quiet in the August heat.

“Gor,” whispered Tom. “This place gives me the goosies, it does.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

“This place could change a body’s mind, it could.”

Smiling, Sebastian handed his tiger the reins and jumped down. “Walk them.”

“Aye, gov’nor.”

A distinct scuffing noise, as of a shovel biting dirt, carried on the breeze. Sebastian turned toward the sound. The site was obviously not as deserted as it had first appeared.

The land bridge to the island lay on the eastern side of the moat. He crossed it warily, one hand on the pistol in his pocket. Sir Stanley had run his excavation trenches at right angles on the far side of the bridge, where at one time a drawbridge might have protected the approach to the now vanished castle.

The rushing sound of cascading dirt cut through the stillness, followed again by the scrape of a shovel biting deep into loose earth. Sebastian could see him now, a big, thickly muscled man with golden red hair worn long, so that it framed his face like a lion’s mane. He had the sleeves of his smock rolled up to expose bronzed, brawny arms, and rough trousers tucked into boots planted wide as he worked shoveling dirt back into the farthest trench.

He caught sight of Sebastian and paused, his chest rising and falling with his hard breathing. He was a startlingly good-looking man, with even features and two dimples that slashed his cheeks when he squinted into the sun. He swiped the back of one sinewy arm across his sweaty face and his gaze locked with Sebastian’s.

“You Rory Forster?” Sebastian asked.

The man slammed his shovel into the dirt pile and wrenched it sideways, sending a slide of dark loam over the edge into the trench. “I am.”

“I take it Sir Stanley has decided to end the excavations?”

The man had a head built like a battering ram, with a thick neck and a high forehead, his eyes pale blue and thickly lashed and set wide apart. “’Pears that way, don’t it?” he said without looking up again.

Sebastian let his gaze drift around the otherwise deserted site. “Where’s the rest of your crew?”

“Sir Stanley told ’em they could go look fer them nippers.”

“You’re not interested in the reward?”

Rory Forster hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and spat. “’Tain’t nobody gonna find them nippers.”

“So certain?”

“Ye think they’re out there, why ain’t ye joinin’ the search?”

“I am, in my own fashion.”

Forster grunted and kept shoveling.

Sebastian wandered between the trenches, his gaze slowly discerning the uncovered remnants of massively thick foundations of what must once have been mighty walls. Pausing beside a mound of rubble, he found himself staring at a broken red tile decorated with a charging knight picked out in white.

He reached for the tile fragment, aware of Forster’s eyes watching him. “Did you come out here this past Sunday?” asked Sebastian, straightening.

Forster went back to filling his trench. “We don’t work on Sundays.”

“No one stays to guard the site?”

“Why would they?”

“I heard rumors you’ve had trouble with treasure hunters.”

Forster paused with his shovel idle in his hands. “I wouldn’t know nothin’ ’bout that.”

Sebastian kept a wary eye on the man’s shovel. “I’ve also heard you and Miss Tennyson didn’t exactly get along.”

“Who said that?”

“Does it matter?”

Forster set his jaw and put his back into his digging again, the dirt flying through the air. Sebastian breathed in the scent of damp earth and decay and a foul, dark smell that was like a breath from an old grave. He said, “I can understand how it might get under a man’s skin, having to take orders from a woman.”

Forster scraped the last of the dirt into the trench with the edge of his shovel, his attention seemingly all for his task. “I’m a good overseer, I am. Sir Stanley wouldn’t have kept me on if’n I wasn’t.”

Sebastian watched Rory Forster move on to the next trench. The man’s very name—Forster, a corruption of “forester”—harkened back to the days when this wood had been part of a vast royal hunting park. His ancestors would have been the kings’ foresters, charged with husbanding the royal game and protecting them from the encroachments of poachers. But those days were long gone, lost in the misty past.

Sebastian said, “Did Miss Tennyson tell Sir Stanley she suspected you were the one vandalizing the site in search of treasure?”

Forster straightened slowly, the outer corner of one eye twitching as if with a tic, the rough cloth of his smock dark with sweat across his shoulders and chest and under his arms. “Ye ain’t gonna pin this murder on me. Ye hear me?” he said, raising one beefy arm to stab a pointed finger at Sebastian. “I was home with me wife all that night. Never left the house, I didn’t.”

“Possibly,” said Sebastian. “However, we don’t know precisely when Miss Tennyson was murdered. She may well have met her death in the afternoon.”

The twitch beside the man’s eye intensified. “What ye want from me?”

“The truth.”

“The truth?” Forster gave a harsh laugh. “Ye don’t want the truth.”

“Try me.”

“Huh. Ye think I’m a fool?”

Sebastian studied the man’s handsome, dirt-streaked face. “You can say what you have to say to me, in confidence. Or you can tell your tale to Bow Street. The choice is yours.”

Forster licked his lower lip, then gave Sebastian a sly, sideways look. “Ye claim it was me what told ye, and I’ll deny it.”

“Fair enough. Now, tell me.”

Forster sniffed. “To my way o’ thinkin’, them Bow Street magistrates ought to be lookin’ into Sir Stanley’s lady.”

“You mean Lady Winthrop?”

“Aye. Come out here Saturday about noon, she did. In a real pelter.”

Sebastian frowned. Lady Winthrop had told him she’d never visited her husband’s controversial excavations. “Was Sir Stanley here?”

“Nah. He’d gone off by then. Somethin’ about a prize mare what was near her time. But Miss Tennyson was still here. She’s the one her ladyship come to see. A right royal row they had, and ye don’t haveta take me word for it. Ask any o’ the lads workin’ the trenches that day; they’ll tell ye.”

“What was the argument about?”

“I couldn’t catch the sense o’ most o’ it. Her ladyship asked to speak to Miss Tennyson in private and they walked off a ways, just there.” Forster nodded toward the northeastern edge of the island, where a faint path could be seen winding through the thicket of bushes and brambles.

“But you did hear something,” said Sebastian.

“Aye. Heard enough to know it was Sir Stanley they was fightin’ about. And as she was leavin’, I heard her ladyship say, ‘Cross me, young woman, and ye’ll be sorry!’”

Chapter 20

“You’re certain you heard her right?” asked Sebastian.

The foreman sniffed. “Ye don’t believe me, ask some of the lads what was here that day. Or better yet, ask her ladyship herself. But like I said, if ye let on ’twas me what told ye, I’ll deny it. I’ll deny it to yer face.”

“Who are you afraid of?” asked Sebastian. “Sir Stanley? Or his wife?”

Forster huffed a scornful laugh. “Anybody ain’t afraid of them two is a fool. Oh, they’re grand and respectable, ain’t they? Livin’ in that big house and hobnobbin’ wit’ the King hisself. But I hear tell Sir Stanley, he started out as some clerk with little more’n a sixpence to scratch hisself with. How ye think he got all that money? Mmm? And how many bodies ye think he walked over to get it?”

“And Lady Winthrop?”

“She’s worse’n him, any day o’ the week. Sir Stanley, he’ll leave ye alone as long as yer not standin’ between him and somethin’ he wants. But Lady Winthrop, she’d destroy a man out o’ spite, just ’cause she’s mean.”

Some twenty minutes later, Sebastian’s knock at Trent House’s massive doors was answered by a stately, ruddy-faced butler of ample proportions who bowed and intoned with sepulchral detachment, “I fear Sir Stanley is not at present at home, my lord.”

“Actually, I’m here to see Lady Winthrop. And there’s no point in telling me she’s not at home either,” said Sebastian cheerfully when the butler opened his mouth to do just that, “because I spotted her in the gardens when I drove up. And I’m perfectly willing to do something vulgar like cut around the outside of the house and accost her directly, if you’re too timid to announce me.”

The butler’s nostrils quivered with righteous indignation. Then he bowed again and said, “This way, my lord.”

Lady Winthrop stood at the edge of the far terrace, the remnants of last night’s wind flapping the figured silks of her high-necked gown. She had been watching over the activities of the band of workmen tearing out the old wall of the terrace. But at Sebastian’s approach she turned, one hand coming up to straighten her plain, broad-brimmed hat as she shot the butler a tight-jawed glare that warned of dire future consequences.

“Don’t blame him,” said Sebastian, intercepting the look. “He denied you with commendable aplomb. But short of bowling me over, there really was no stopping me.”

She brought her icy gaze back to Sebastian’s face and said evenly to the red-faced butler, “Thank you, Huckabee; that will be all.”

The butler gave another of his flawless bows and withdrew.

“My husband is out with the men from the estate searching for the missing Tennyson children,” she said, her fingers still gripping the brim of her hat. “He’ll be sorry he missed you. And now you really must excuse me—”

“Why don’t you show me your gardens, Lady Winthrop?” said Sebastian when she would have turned away. “No need to allow the interesting details of our conversation to distract these men from their work.”

She froze, then forced a stiff laugh. “Of course. Since you are here.”

She waited until they were out of earshot before saying evenly, “I resent the implication that I have something to hide from my servants.”

“Don’t you? You told me yesterday that you never visited the excavations at the moat. Except you did, just last Saturday. In fact, you had what’s been described as a ‘right royal row’ with Miss Tennyson herself.”

Lady Winthrop’s lips tightened into a disdainful smile. “I fear you misunderstood me, Lord Devlin. I said I did not make it a practice of visiting the site; I did not say I had never done so.”

Sebastian studied her proud, faintly contemptuous face, the weak chin pulled back against her neck in a scowl. As the plain but extraordinarily well-dowered only daughter of a wealthy merchant, she had married not once, but twice. Her first, brief marriage to a successful banker ended when her husband broke his neck on the hunting field and left his considerable holdings to her; her second marriage a few years later to Sir Stanley united two vast fortunes. But this second union, like her first, had remained childless, an economic merger without affection or shared interests or any real meeting of the minds.

It must be difficult, Sebastian thought, to be a wealthy but plain, dull woman married to a handsome, virile, charismatic man. And he understood then just how much this woman must have hated Gabrielle Tennyson, who was everything she, Lady Winthrop, was not: not only young and beautiful, but also brilliant and well educated and courageous enough to defy so many of the conventions that normally held her sisters in check.

He said, “And your argument?”

She drew her brows together in a pantomime of confusion. “Did we argue? Frankly, I don’t recall it. Have you been speaking to some of the workmen? You know how these yokels exaggerate.”

“Doing it a bit too brown, there, Lady Winthrop.”

Angry color mottled her cheeks. “I take it that must be one of those vulgar cant expressions gentlemen are so fond of affecting these days. Personally I find the tendency to model one’s speech on that of the lower orders beyond reprehensible.”

Sebastian let out his breath in a huff of laughter. “So why did you visit Camlet Moat last Saturday?”

“Years before the light of our Lord was shown upon this land, England was given over to a terrible superstition dominated by a caste of evil men bound in an unholy pact with the forces of darkness.”

“By which I take it you mean the Druids.”

She inclined her head. “I do. Unfortunately, there are those in our age who in their folly have romanticized the benighted days of the past. Rather than seek salvation through our Lord and wisdom in his word, they choose to dabble in the rituals and tarnished traditions of the ignorant.”

Sebastian stared off down the hill, to where a doe could be seen grazing beside a stretch of ornamental water. “I’ve heard that the locals consider the island to be a sacred site.”

“They do. Which is why I chose to visit Camlet Moat last Saturday. My concern was that the recent focus of attention on the area might inspire the ignorant to hold some bizarre ritual on the island.”

“Because Lammas began Saturday night at sunset?”

Again, the regal inclination of the head. “Precisely.”

“So why approach Miss Tennyson? Why not Sir Stanley?”

“I fear I have not made myself clear. I went to the site in search of my husband. But when I found him absent, I thought to mention my concerns to Miss Tennyson.” The thin lips pinched into a tight downward curve. “Her response was predictably rude and arrogant.”

Those were two words Sebastian had yet to hear applied to Miss Tennyson. But he had been told she didn’t suffer fools lightly, and he suspected she might well have perceived Lady Winthrop as a very vain and foolish woman. He said, “She didn’t think you had anything to worry about?”

“On the contrary. She said she believed the island was a profoundly spiritual place of ancient significance.”

“Is that when you quarreled?”

She fixed him with an icy stare full of all the moral outrage of a woman long practiced in the art of self-deception, who had already comfortably convinced herself that the confrontation with Gabrielle had never occurred. “We did not quarrel,” she said evenly.

There were any number of things he could have said. But none of them would have penetrated that shield of righteous indignation, so he simply bowed and took his leave.

He did not believe for a moment that she had overcome her distaste for her husband’s excavations in order to drive out to the moat and have a conversation that could just as easily have been held over the breakfast table. Instead, she had deliberately chosen a time when she knew Sir Stanley to be elsewhere.

Jealousy could be a powerful motive for murder. He could imagine Lady Winthrop killing Gabrielle in a rage of jealousy and religious zeal. But he could not imagine her then murdering two children and disposing of their bodies somewhere in the wilds of the chase.

Yet as he drove away, he was aware of her standing at the edge of her garden watching him.

And he wondered why.

Sebastian was standing in the middle of his library and studying the new boxes of books and papers that had appeared since that morning when he heard the peal of the front bell. A moment later, Morey paused in the library’s entrance to clear his throat.

“Yes?” prompted Sebastian when the majordomo seemed temporarily at a loss for words.

“A personage to see you, my lord.”

“A personage?”

“Yes, my lord. I have taken the liberty of putting him in the drawing room.”

Sebastian studied the majordomo’s painfully wooden face. Morey normally left “personages” cooling their heels in the hall.

“I’ll be right up,” he said.

The man who stood before the empty fireplace was dressed all in black: black breeches, black coat, black waistcoat, black cravat. Only his shirt was white. He stood with his dark head tilted back as he stared up at the portrait of the Countess of Hendon that hung over the mantel. With the grace of a dancer or fencer, he pivoted slowly when Sebastian entered the room to pause just inside the doorway.

“So we meet,” said Sebastian, and carefully closed the door behind him.

Chapter 21

The man called Jamie Knox was built tall and lean, taller even than Sebastian, with wavy, almost black hair and the yellow eyes of a wolf or feral cat.

Sebastian had been told once that he had his father’s eyes—his real father’s eyes. But he’d always thought he looked like his mother. Now, as he stared at the face of the man who stood across the room from him, he wondered if it was his imagination that traced a resemblance in the tavern owner’s high-boned cheeks and gently curving mouth.

Then he remembered Morey’s strange reaction and knew it was not his imagination.

He crossed to where a decanter and glasses rested on a side table. “May I offer you a brandy?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The inflections were similar to that of the curly-headed man of the night before. The accent was not that of a gentleman.

“Where are you from?” asked Sebastian, splashing brandy into two glasses.

“Shropshire, by way of a rifle regiment.”

“You’re a rifleman?”

“I was.”

Sebastian held out one of the glasses. After the briefest of hesitations, the man took it.

“I fought beside riflemen in Italy and the Peninsula,” said Sebastian. “I’ve often thought it will be Napoléon’s insistence on arming his men with only muskets that will ultimately cause his downfall.”

“You may be right. Only, don’t go telling the French bugger himself, hmm?” Knox took a deep drink of his brandy, his intense yellow gaze never leaving Sebastian’s face. “You don’t look much like your da, the Earl, do you?”

“I’m told I resemble my mother.”

Jamie Knox jerked his chin toward the portrait over the mantel. “That her?”

“Yes.”

He took another sip. “I never knew my father. My mother said he was a cavalry captain. Your father ever in the cavalry?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

A faint gleam of amusement lit up the other man’s eyes. He drained his brandy with the offhand carelessness of a man well accustomed to hard drinking, then shook his head when Sebastian offered him another.

“You came around asking about my conversation with Gabrielle Tennyson last week.”

“So you don’t deny the confrontation occurred.”

“Why should I? She heard I’d uncovered one of those old picture pavements in my cellars, and she kept pestering me to let her take a look at it.”

“You mean, a Roman mosaic?”

“That’s it. Picture of a naked fat man holding a bunch of grapes in one hand and riding a dolphin.”

“You expect me to believe you threatened a woman over a mosaic?”

Knox’s lips curved into a smile, but the glitter in his eyes had become hard and dangerous. He looked to be a few years older than Sebastian, perhaps as much as thirty-three or -four. “I didn’t threaten to kill her. I just told her she’d be sorry if she didn’t back off. Last thing I need is some bloody bluestocking sniffing around the place. Not good for business.”

“Especially if she’s sniffing around your cellars.”

Knox laughed. “Something like that, yes.”

The rifleman let his gaze drift around Sebastian’s drawing room, the amusement slowly dying out of his expression. By Mayfair’s standards, the Brook Street house was not large; the furnishings were elegant but neither lavish nor opulent. Yet as Sebastian watched Knox’s assessing eyes take in the room’s satin hangings, the delicate cane chairs near the bow window overlooking the street, the gently faded carpet, the white Carrara marble of the mantelpiece, he had no doubt that the room must appear quite differently to a rifleman from the wilds of Shropshire than it did to Sebastian, who was raised in the sprawling splendor of Hendon House in Grosvenor Square and the halls and manors of the Earl’s various estates across Britain.

“Nice place you got here,” said Knox, his accent unusually pronounced.

“Thank you.”

“I hear you got married just last week.”

“I did, yes.”

“Married the daughter of Lord Jarvis himself.”

“Yes.”

The two men’s gazes met, and held.

“Congratulations,” said Knox. Setting aside his empty glass, he reached for the black hat he had rested on a nearby table and settled it on his head at a rakish angle. Then he gave a faintly mocking bow. “My lord.”

Sebastian stood at the bowed front windows of his drawing room and watched Jamie Knox descend the front steps and stroll off down the street. It was like watching a shadowy doppelganger of himself.

Or a brother.

Sebastian was still standing at the window some moments later when a familiar yellow-bodied carriage drew up. He watched Hero descend the coach steps with her usual grace and then enter the house.

She came into the room pulling off a pair of soft yellow kid gloves that she tossed on one of the cane chairs. “Ah, good,” she said. “You’re finally up.”

“I do generally try to make it out of bed before nightfall,” he said.

He was rewarded with a soft huff of laughter.

Today she wore an elegant carriage gown of emerald satin trimmed with rows of pintucks down the skirt and a spray of delicate yellow roses embroidered on each sleeve. She yanked at the emerald ribbons that tied her velvet hat beneath her chin and tossed the hat onto the chair with her gloves. “I’ve just come from an interesting conversation with Mary Bourne.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Bourne. She’s sister to both Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt and the Reverend Tennyson, the father of the two missing boys.”

Sebastian frowned. He had a vague recollection of d’Eyncourt mentioning a sister staying with him. “Is she like her brother d’Eyncourt?”

“Oh, no; she’s far worse. She’s a saint, you know.”

Sebastian laughed out loud.

“No, it’s true; I mean that quite literally. She’s a Calvinist. You can have no notion of the misery it brings her, knowing that she alone can look forward to the joys awaiting her in heaven whilst the vast majority of her family is doomed to suffer the everlasting torments of hell.”

“She actually told you that?”

“She did. Personally, I suspect she derives enormous satisfaction from the comfortable conviction that she is one of the chosen elite while everyone around her is doomed to burn. But then, self-perception is not one of her strong suits.”

Sebastian leaned back against the windowsill, his arms crossed at his chest, his gaze on his wife’s face. Her eyes were sparkling and a faint flush rode high on her cheekbones. He found himself smiling. “So why did you go see her? Or were you looking for d’Eyncourt?”

“No. I knew d’Eyncourt would be at Westminster. I wanted to talk to Mary Bourne alone. You see, I’ve been puzzled by the arithmetic.” Hero sank into one of the chairs beside the empty hearth. “D’Eyncourt told you he is his father’s heir, right? Except, d’Eyncourt is only twenty-eight, while little George Tennyson—the elder of the missing boys—is nine years old. That means that if d’Eyncourt’s brother were indeed a younger son, he would need to have sired his own son at the tender age of seventeen. Obviously possible, but unlikely, given that he is in holy orders.”

“So what did you discover?”

“That the boys’ father is actually thirty-four years old.”

Sebastian pushed away from the window. “You’re certain?”

“Are you suggesting the woman might have mistaken the ages of her own brothers? D’Eyncourt is the baby of the family. He’s younger than his brother by a full six years.”

The bells of the abbey were tolling seven when d’Eyncourt emerged from Westminster Hall and turned toward Parliament Street. The setting sun soaked the ancient buildings with a rich tea-colored light and cast long shadows across the paving.

Sebastian fell into step beside him.

The MP cast a quick look at Sebastian, then glanced away without slackening his pace. There was neither surprise nor puzzlement on his smoothly handsome features. “I’ve just received a note from my sister Mary, telling me she enjoyed a visit from Lady Devlin this afternoon. My sister is an earnest but guileless woman. As such she is frequently slow to see the subterfuge in others. It wasn’t until some time after Lady Devlin’s departure that my sister began to ponder the direction their conversation had taken.”

Sebastian showed his teeth in a smile. “Ah, yes; Lady Devlin is quite practiced in the arts of guile and subterfuge, is she not?”

D’Eyncourt pressed his lips together and kept walking.

Sebastian said, “And once Mrs. Bourne realized the indiscretions of her talkative tongue, she immediately sat down and dashed off a note to her baby brother warning him— What, exactly? That you were about to be caught out in a very telling lie?”

D’Eyncourt drew up at the edge of the Privy Gardens and turned to face him, a slim, elegant man with a smug air of self-assurance. “I never claimed to be my father’s firstborn. I simply told you that I am his heir. And that is the truth.”

“His only heir?”

“Yes.”

“How can that be?”

D’Eyncourt’s thin nostrils quivered with indignation. “That is none of your affair.”

Sebastian advanced on him, backing the dandified parliamentarian up until his shoulders slammed against the rough stone wall behind him. “Gabrielle Tennyson’s death made it my affair, you god damned, pompous, self-congratulatory son of a bitch. A woman is dead and two innocent little boys are missing. If you know anything—anything—that can help make sense of what has happened to them—”

“I am not afraid of you,” said d’Eyncourt, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed.

“You should be.”

“You can’t accost me in the streets! What are you imagining? That those two children stand between me and my father’s wealth? Well, you are wrong. My father disinherited my older brother and made me his sole heir when I was six years old. Why else do you suppose my brother took holy orders and now serves as a rector? Because that is his future! Everything my father owns—the estates, the investments—all will in due time pass to me.”

“I can think of only one reason for a man to disinherit his twelve-year-old son and make his youngest child his sole heir.”

Two bright spots of color appeared on d’Eyncourt’s cheeks. “If you are suggesting that my brother was disinherited because he is…because he is not my brother, then let me tell you right now that you are sadly mistaken. My brother was disinherited because by the time he reached the beginnings of puberty it had become obvious to our father that his health and temperament were totally unsuited for the position which would be required of him.”

“But not unsuited to his becoming a rector?”

D’Eyncourt stared back at him. “The requirements of the two callings are utterly dissimilar.”

“So tell me,” said Sebastian, “how has your brother adjusted to having a fortune of some half a million pounds wrested from his grasp?”

“He was, naturally, somewhat aggrieved—”

“Aggrieved?”

“Aggrieved. But he has with time grown more accustomed to his situation.”

“As an impoverished rector at Somersby?”

“Just so.”

Sebastian took a step back.

D’Eyncourt made a show of adjusting his cravat and straightening the set of his coat. “I can understand how it might be difficult for someone of your background to understand, but you must remember that my family’s wealth—while substantial—is only recently acquired. Hence the rules of primogeniture do not apply. My father is free to leave his property as he sees fit.”

“True,” said Sebastian. “But it occurs to me that if your father could change his will once, he is obviously free to do so again—in favor of his two grandsons, this time.”

D’Eyncourt stiffened. “If you mean to suggest—”

“The suggestion is there, whether it is put into words or not,” said Sebastian, and turned away.

Sebastian arrived back at Brook Street to be told that Lady Devlin had already departed for a musical evening in the company of her mother, Lady Jarvis.

“However,” said Morey, bowing slightly, “I believe Calhoun has been most particular to have a word with you.”

“Has he? Then send him up,” said Sebastian, heading for the stairs.

“Well?” asked Sebastian when Calhoun slipped into the dressing room a few minutes later. “Find anything?”

“Not as much as I had hoped, my lord,” said Calhoun, going to lay out Sebastian’s evening dress. “From what I have been able to ascertain, Mr. Knox arrived in London just three years ago. He used to be with the 145th Rifles but was discharged when his unit was reduced after Corunna.”

“So he actually was a rifleman.”

“He was, my lord. In fact, he’s famous for having killed some bigwig Frenchy by shooting the man off his horse at some seven hundred yards. And I’m told he can shoot the head off a running rabbit at more than three hundred yards.” Calhoun paused a moment, then added, “In the dark.”

Sebastian looked up from unbuttoning his shirt. “How did he end up in possession of the Black Devil?”

“Reports differ. Some say he took to the High Toby for a time before he either won the tavern at the roll of the dice or killed the previous owner.” “Taking to the High Toby” was slang for becoming a highwayman. “Or perhaps both.”

“He seems very sensitive about his cellars.”

“That’s not surprising, given the nature of some of his associates.”

“Oh? And who might they be?”

“The name that came up most frequently was Yates. Russell Yates.”

Chapter 22

Sebastian waited beyond the light cast by the flickering oil lamp at the head of the lane. The theater was still closed for the summer, but rehearsals for the upcoming season were already under way. The dark street rang with the laughter of the departing troupe.

He kept his gaze on the stage door.

The night was warm, the wind a soft caress scented by oranges and a thousand bittersweet memories. He heard the stage door open, watched a woman and two men walk toward the street. The woman paused for a moment beneath the streetlight, caught up in conversation with her fellow players. The dancing flame from the oil lamp glinted on the auburn highlights in her thick, dark hair and flickered seductively over the familiar, beloved planes of her face. She had her head thrown back, lost in laughter at one of her friends’ remarks. Then she stilled suddenly, her head turning, her eyes widening in a useless attempt to probe the darkness. And Sebastian knew she had sensed his presence and that the bond between them that had existed all these years, while weakened, had not broken.

Her name was Kat Boleyn, and she was the most celebrated actress of the London stage. Once, she had been the love of Sebastian’s life. Once, he had thought to grow old with her at his side, and to hell with the shocked mutterings of society and the outraged opposition of his father—of the Earl of Hendon, he reminded himself. Then an ugly tangle of lies and an even uglier truth had intervened. Now Kat was married to a flamboyant ex-privateer named Russell Yates, a man with a secret, forbidden passion for his own gender and shadowy ties to the smugglers and agents who plied the channel between England and Napoléon’s France.

Sebastian watched her say good night to her friends and walk up to him. She wore an ivory silk cloak thrown over her shoulders, the hood thrust back in a way that framed her face. He said, “You shouldn’t walk alone at night.”

“Because of these latest murders, you mean?” She turned to stroll beside him up Hart Street. The pavement was crowded with richly harnessed horses and elegant carriages, their swaying lamps filling the air with the scent of hot oil. “Gibson tells me you have involved yourself in the investigation.” He watched her eyebrows pinch together in a worried frown as she said it, for she knew him well. She knew the price he paid with each descent into the dark world of fear and hatred, greed and despair, that inevitably swirled around a murder. Yet even though she knew, intellectually, what drove him to it, she could never quite understand his need to do what he did.

He said, “Don’t worry about me.”

A smile lit her eyes. “Yet you are free to worry about me?” The smile faded as she paused to turn toward him, her gaze searching. She had deeply set eyes, thickly lashed and of a uniquely intense blue that she had inherited from her natural father, the Earl of Hendon. And every time he looked into them, he knew a searing pain that was like a dagger thrust to the heart.

She said, “You’re not here for the sake of auld lang syne, Sebastian; what is it?”

“I’m told Yates has dealings with a tavern owner named Jamie Knox.”

She sucked in a quick breath that jerked her chest. It was an unusual betrayal for an actress who could normally control her every look, every tone, her every word and movement.

He said, “Obviously, you know Knox as well. What can you tell me about him?”

“Very little, actually. He is an intensely private person, cold and dangerous. Most people who know him are afraid of him. It’s an aura he cultivates.”

“You met him through Yates?”

“Yes.” She hesitated, then asked, “He is involved in this murder? How?”

“He was seen arguing with Gabrielle Tennyson several days before she was killed. He claims it was over a Roman mosaic.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“No. But I don’t understand how he fits into anything else I’ve learned, either.”

“I’ll see what I can find out.” The door to a tavern near the corner opened, spilling light and voices and laughter into the street. “Has Knox seen you?”

“Why do you ask?”

Her gaze met his. “You know why.”

They had reached the arch where her carriage awaited. Sebastian said, “A few weeks ago, I met a man in Chelsea who told me I reminded him of a highwayman who’d once held up his carriage on Hounslow Heath.”

“You believe that was Knox?”

“I’m told he took to the High Toby for a time after he left the Rifles. I wouldn’t want to think there are three of us walking around.”

He said it lightly, but his words drew no answering smile from her. She said, “I know you’ve had men on the Continent, searching for your mother. Have they found her?”

“No.”

“You can’t simply…let it go, Sebastian?”

He searched her pale, beloved face. “All those years when you didn’t know the identity of your father, if you thought you had the truth within reach, could you have…‌let it go?”

“Yes.” She did smile then, a sweet, sad smile. “But then, my demons are different from yours.” Reaching up on tiptoe, she brushed her lips against his cheek, then turned away. “Good night, Sebastian. Keep yourself safe.”

He walked down increasingly empty streets. The sky above was dark and starless, the air close; the oil lamps mounted high on the dark, looming walls of the tightly packed, grimy brick houses and shops flickered with his passing. At one point he was aware of two men falling into step behind him. He tightened his grip on the walking stick he carried tucked beneath one arm. But they melted away down a noisome side alley, their footfalls echoing softly into the night.

He walked on, rounding the corner toward Long Street. He could hear the thin, reedy wail of a babe somewhere in the distance, the jingle of an off-tune piano, the rattle of carriage wheels passing in the next block. And from the murky shadows of a narrow passageway up ahead came a soft whisper.

“C’est lui.”

He drew up just as the same two men burst from the passage and fanned out to take up positions, one in front of him, the other to his rear. Whirling, Sebastian saw the glint of a knife in the hand of one; the other, a big, fair-haired man in dark trousers and high leather boots, carried a cudgel he slapped tauntingly against his left palm.

“Watch!” shouted Sebastian as the man raised the club over his head. “Watch, I say!”

Before the man could bring the club down, Sebastian rushed him, the walking stick whistling through the air toward the assailant’s head. The man threw up his left arm, blocking Sebastian’s blow at the last instant. The impact shattered the ebony shaft of the walking stick, shearing it off some eight inches from Sebastian’s fist. But the shock of the unexpected counterattack was enough to send the man staggering back. He lost his footing and went down.

His companion growled, “Bâtard!”

“Watch!” shouted Sebastian again, swinging around just as the second man—smaller, leaner, darker than his companion—lunged, his knife held in an underhanded grip.

Sebastian tried to parry the man’s thrust with the broken shaft of the walking stick and felt the blade slip off the wood to slice along his forearm. Then the man on the ground closed his hands around Sebastian’s ankle and yanked.

Lurching backward, Sebastian stumbled over the fallen man and went down, bruising his hip on a loose cobblestone as he rolled. Swearing long and hard, he grabbed the cobblestone as he surged up onto his knees.

The man with the cudgel took a swipe. Sebastian ducked, then came up to smash the stone into the side of his attacker’s head with a bone crushing twunk. The man reeled back, eyes rolling up, the side of his face a sheet of gore. Panting hard, Sebastian reached into his boot and yanked his own dagger from its hidden sheath.

The knife clenched in one hand, the bloody rock still gripped in the other, he rose into a low crouch. “Come on, you bastard,” he spat, his gaze locking with that of his remaining assailant.

The man was clean-shaven and relatively young, no more than thirty, his coat worn but clean, his cravat simply but neatly tied. He licked his lower lip, his gaze flicking from Sebastian to the still figure lying between them in a spreading pool of blood.

His nostrils flared on a quickly indrawn breath.

“Well?” said Sebastian.

The man turned and ran.

Sebastian slumped back against the brick wall, his injured arm cradled against his chest, his blood thrumming in his ears, his gaze on the dead man beside him.

Chapter 23

“Ghastly,” said Sir Henry Lovejoy, peering down at the gory head of the dead man sprawled on the pavement at their feet. The watch had arrived, panting, only moments after the attack on the Viscount, who sent the man running to Bow Street, just blocks away. Now Sir Henry shifted his glance to Lord Devlin. “Who is he? Do you know?”

“Never saw him before,” said Devlin, stripping off his cravat to wind around his bleeding arm.

“And his companion who fled?”

“Was also unfamiliar to me.”

Lovejoy forced himself to look more closely at the dead man. “I suppose they could have been common footpads after your pocketbook.”

“They could have been.”

“But you don’t think so. I must confess, he does not exactly have the look of a footpad.”

“He’s also French.”

“French? Oh, dear; I don’t like the sound of that. Do you think there could be some connection between this incident and the Tennyson murders?”

“If there is, I’ll be damned if I can see it.” Devlin looked up from wrapping his arm. “Have you found the children’s bodies, then?”

“What? Oh, no. Not yet. But with each passing day, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that they could still be alive.” Lovejoy nodded to the men from the dead house who had arrived with a shell, then stood watching them shift the body. “We’ve begun to look into the backgrounds of the various men involved in the excavations up at the moat. Some disturbing things are coming to light about this man Rory Forster.”

Devlin finished tying off the ends of his makeshift bandage. “Such as?”

“He’s said to have quite a temper, for one thing. And he’s not above using his fists on women.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Of course, his wife backs up his claim that he was home with her Sunday afternoon and evening. But I wouldn’t put it beyond him to bully her into saying it. The problem is, I don’t see how he could possibly be the killer.”

Devlin flexed the hand of his injured arm, testing it. “Why’s that?”

“Because if he is, how did the Tennysons get up to the moat in the first place? The logical conclusion is they could only have driven up there in the company of their murderer.”

“The same could be said of Sir Stanley Winthrop. If he is the killer, then how the devil did the Tennysons get to Enfield?”

Lovejoy cleared his throat. “My colleagues at Bow Street are of the opinion that it is ridiculous even to suggest that Sir Stanley might be involved in any way.”

Devlin laughed. “There’s no doubt it would negatively impact the nation’s war effort, to have one of the King’s leading bankers arrested for murder.”

Lovejoy studied the blood seeping through the Viscount’s makeshift bandage. “Don’t you think you should perhaps have that properly attended to, my lord?”

Devlin glanced down and frowned. “I suppose you’re right. Although I fear the coat is beyond help.”

“You’re certain you heard them speaking French?” asked Paul Gibson, his attention all for the row of stitches he was laying along the gash in Sebastian’s arm.

“I’m certain.” Sebastian sat on a table in the front room of Gibson’s surgery. He was stripped to the waist, a basin of bloody water and cloths set nearby.

Gibson tied off his stitches and straightened. “I suppose it could have been a ruse to mislead you.”

“Somehow I don’t think the intent was to allow me to live long enough to be misled. I suspect my questions are making someone nervous.”

Gibson reached for a roll of bandages. “Someone French, obviously.”

“Or someone involved with the French.”

“There is that.”

“Of course,” said Sebastian, watching his friend work, “just because my questions are making someone nervous doesn’t necessarily mean that particular someone is the killer. He could simply have something to hide.”

“Yet it does tell you this ‘someone’ isn’t afraid to kill to keep his secrets.”

“Powerful men usually do have a lot of secrets…and there are several powerful men whose names seem to keep coming up in this.”

Gibson tied off the bandage and frowned. “Who else besides d’Eyncourt and Sir Stanley?”

Lord Jarvis, Sebastian thought, although he didn’t say it. He slipped off the table and reached for his shirt. “Isn’t that enough?” He pulled the shirt on over his head. “Have you finished the autopsy of Miss Tennyson’s body?”

“I have. But I’m afraid there’s not much more I can tell you. She was stabbed through the heart sometime Sunday. No other sign of injury. Whoever killed her made no attempt to force himself on her.”

“Well, at least the poor woman didn’t need to suffer that.”

Gibson scratched behind his ear. “There is one thing I noticed that may or may not prove relevant.”

Something in his voice caused Sebastian to look up from buttoning his shirt. “Oh? What’s that?”

“I said she wasn’t forced before her death. But then, neither was she a maiden.”

Sebastian expected Hero to have long since retired for the night. Instead, she was sitting cross-legged on the library floor surrounded by a jumbled sea of books and papers. She had her head bent over some manuscript pages; a smudge of ink showed along the edge of her chin, and she was so intent on what she was doing that he suspected she hadn’t even heard him come in.

“I thought you had planned a musical evening with your mother,” he said, pausing in the doorway.

She looked up, the brace of candles burning on a nearby table throwing a soft golden light over her profile and shoulders. “That finished hours ago. I decided I might as well get started looking at Gabrielle’s research materials. I can’t help but think that the key to what happened to her and the boys is here somewhere.” She looked up, her eyes narrowing at the sight of his arm reposing in a sling. “You’re hurt.”

“Nothing serious. Two men jumped me in Covent Garden and tried to kill me.”

“And you consider that not serious?”

He went to sprawl in a chair beside the empty hearth. “The attempt to kill me was definitely serious. The wound to my arm is not.”

“Who were they?”

“I don’t know for certain about the one I killed, but the one who got away was swearing at me in French.”

She was silent for a moment, lost in thoughts he could only guess at. She was far too good at hiding away bits of herself. Then she pushed up from the floor and went to pour a glass of brandy that she held out to him, her gaze on his face. “There’s something else that you’re not telling me,” she said. “What is it?”

He took the brandy. “Am I so transparent?”

“At times.”

She sank into the chair opposite and looked at him expectantly. He was aware of the lateness of the hour, of the quiet darkness of the house around them, and of the absurd hesitation he felt in speaking to his own wife about the sexuality of her dead friend.

“Well?” she prompted.

“Paul Gibson finished the postmortem of Miss Tennyson’s body. He says she was not a virgin.”

He watched her lips part, her chest rise on a sudden intake of breath. He said, “You didn’t know?”

“No. But then, we never discussed such things.”

“Yet the knowledge still surprises you.”

“It does, yes. She was so determined never to marry.”

“She may have been involved in a youthful passion long forgotten.”

Hero tipped her head to one side, her gaze on his face. “Are such youthful passions ever forgotten?”

“Perhaps not.”

She rose to her feet, and for a moment he thought he caught a glimpse of the soft swelling of her belly beneath the fine muslin of her gown. Then he realized it was probably an illusion, a trick of the light or the drift of his own thoughts. For it was the child growing in her belly—conceived in a moment of fear and weakness when together they had faced what they’d thought was certain death—that had brought them here, to this moment, as husband and wife.

She went to pick up the papers she’d been reading, including a notebook whose pages showed signs of much crossing and reworking. He said, “What is that?”

“Gabrielle’s translation of The Lady of Shalott.”

“Ah. I’ve discovered the identity of the Frenchman she befriended, by the way. He’s a cavalry officer named Philippe Arceneaux.”

She looked around at him. “You found him?”

“I’d like to take credit for it, but the truth is, he found me. He says they met in the Reading Room of the British Museum. He was helping her with the translation.”

Hero stood very still, the notebook in her hand forgotten. “Do you think he could have been her lover?”

“He says no. But he admits he was at least half in love with her. He seems to have made a practice of timing his walks in the park to coincide with when she took the boys to sail their boats on the Serpentine. And a week ago last Sunday, he drove up to Camlet Moat with her to see the site—although he’ll never admit it since it was a flagrant violation of his parole.”

She fell silent, her gaze fixed on something far, far away.

“What is it?” he asked, watching her.

She shook her head. “I was just thinking about something Gabrielle told me once, perhaps a month or more ago.”

“What’s that?”

“She asked if I ever had the sense that I was missing something—something important in life—by choosing to devote myself to research and writing, rather than marrying. She said lately she’d begun to feel as if she were simply watching life, rather than actually living it. She said it was as if she spent her days staring at the pale shadows of other people’s lives reflected in a mirror—entertaining at first, perhaps, but ultimately empty and unsatisfying. And then she said…”

“Yes?”

“She said, ‘Lately, I find I’ve grown half sick of shadows.’”

Her gaze met his. He was aware, again, of the stillness of the night around them. And he found himself thinking of the exquisite softness of her skin, the silken caress of her heavy dark hair sliding across his belly, the way her eyes widened in wonder and delight when he entered her. He gazed deep into her wide, dark eyes, saw her lips part, and knew her thoughts mirrored his own.

Yet the latent distrust that had always been there between them now loomed infinitely larger, fed by the unknown currents swirling around Gabrielle Tennyson’s death and the lingering poisons of Jarvis’s unabated malevolence and Sebastian’s own tangled, sordid past. They had come to this marriage as two wary strangers united only by the child they had made and the passion they had finally admitted they shared. Now it seemed they were losing even that. Except…

Except that wasn’t quite right, either. The passion was still there. It was their ability to surrender to it that was slipping away.

He said, his voice oddly husky, “And what did you tell her, when Gabrielle asked if you ever had the sense you were missing something in life?”

A ghost of a smile touched her lips. “I lied. I said no.”

He thought for one aching moment that she would come to him. Then she said, “Good night, Devlin,” and turned away.

The next morning, a constable from Bow Street arrived to tell Sebastian that one of his Covent Garden attackers had been identified. The dead man’s name was Gaston Colbert, and he was a French prisoner of war free on his parole.

Chapter 24

Wednesday, 5 August

Jarvis was at his breakfast table when he heard the distant peal of the bell. A moment later, Hero entered the room wearing a shako-styled hat and a walking dress of Prussian blue fashioned à la hussar with epaulettes and double rows of brass buttons up the bodice. She yanked off her gloves as she walked.

“Good morning,” Jarvis said, calmly cutting a piece of steak. “You’re looking decidedly martial today.”

She came to flatten her palms on the table and lean into them, her gaze hard on his face. “Last night, two men tried to kill Devlin. Do you know anything about that?”

He laid his knife along the top edge of his plate. “It is my understanding that the assailant whom Devlin dispatched with his typically lethal efficiency was a French officer on his parole. What makes you think the incident has anything to do with me?”

“Because I know you.”

Jarvis took a bite of steak, chewed, and swallowed. “I confess I would not be sorry to see someone remove your husband from the landscape. But am I actively attempting to put a period to his existence? Not at the present moment.”

She held herself very still, her gaze still searching his face. “Do you know who is?”

“No. Although I could speculate.”

She drew out the nearest chair and sat. “So speculate.”

Jarvis carved another slice of meat. “You’ve noticed the broadsheets that have appeared around town of late, calling for King Arthur to return from Avalon and lead England in its hour of need?”

“Do you know who’s behind them?”

“Napoléon’s agents, of course.”

“And are you suggesting these agents have set someone after Devlin? Why?”

“Those who make it a habit of poking sticks into nests of vipers shouldn’t be surprised when one of those vipers strikes back.”

“You think that if Devlin finds whoever is behind the broadsheets, he’ll find Gabrielle’s killer?”

Jarvis reached for his ale and took a deep swallow. “It might be interesting.”

“And convenient for you—if Devlin should manage to eliminate them.”

He smiled. “There is that.”

She collected her gloves and rose to her feet.

Jarvis said, “Have you told Devlin of my interaction with Miss Tennyson last Friday evening?”

Hero paused at the door to look back at him. “No.”

Her answer surprised and pleased him, and yet somehow also vaguely troubled him. He let his gaze drift over his daughter’s face. There was a bloom of color in her cheeks, an inner glow that told its own story. He said suddenly, “You do realize I know why you married him.”

Her lips parted on a sudden intake of breath, but otherwise she remained remarkably calm and cool. “I can’t imagine what you mean.”

“Your former abigail confessed her observations on your condition before she was killed.” When Hero only continued to stare at him, he said, “Is the child Devlin’s?”

Her pupils flared with indignation. “It is.”

“Did he force himself upon you?”

“He did not.”

“I see. Interesting.”

She said, “The situation is…complicated.”

“So it seems.” He reached for his snuffbox. “And the child is due—when?”

“February.”

Jarvis flipped open the snuffbox, then simply held it, half forgotten. “You will take care of yourself, Hero.”

Her eyes danced with quiet amusement. “As much as ever.”

He gave her no answering smile. “If anything happens to you, I’ll kill him.”

“Nothing is going to happen to me,” she said. “Good day, Papa.”

After she had gone, he sat for a time, lost in thought, the snuffbox still open in his hand. Then he shut it with a snap and closed his fist around the delicate metal hard enough that he heard it crunch.

Lieutenant Philippe Arceneaux was playing chess with a hulking mustachioed hussar in a coffee shop near Wych Street when Sebastian paused beside his table and said, “Walk with me for a moment, Lieutenant?”

The black and brown dog at Arceneaux’s feet raised his head and woofed in anticipation.

“Monsieur!” protested the mustachioed Frenchman, glaring up at him. “The game! You interrupt!”

The hussar still wore the tight Hungarian riding breeches and heavily decorated but faded dark blue dolman of his regiment. At each temple dangled braided love knots known as cadenettes, with another braid behind each ear. The cadenettes were kept straight by the weight of a gold coin tied at the end of each braid, for Napoléon’s hussars were as known for their meticulous, flamboyant appearance as for their ruthlessness as bandits on horseback.

“It’s all right,” said Arceneaux in French, raising both hands in rueful surrender as he pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. “I concede. You have thoroughly trounced me already. My situation is beyond hope.”

Sebastian was aware of the hussar’s scowl following them to the coffee shop’s door.

“Who’s your friend?” Sebastian asked as they turned to stroll toward the nearby church of St. Clements, the dog trotting happily at their heels.

“Pelletier? Don’t mind him. He has a foul disposition and a worse temper, but there’s no real harm in him.”

“Interesting choice of words,” said Sebastian, “given that two of your fellow officers tried to kill me in Covent Garden last night.”

Arceneaux’s smile slipped. “I had heard of the attack upon you.” He nodded to the arm Sebastian held resting in a sling. “You were wounded?”

“Not badly. Yet I now find myself wondering, why would two French officers on their parole want to kill me?”

Arceneaux stared at him, eyes wide. “You think I know?”

“In a word? Yes.”

Chien let out a soft whine and Arceneaux paused to hunker down and ruffle the animal’s ears. After a moment, he said, “I make a living teaching French to small boys and working as a translator for a Fleet Street publisher. It earns me enough to keep a garret room in a lodging house, just there.” He nodded to a nearby lane. “My father is able to send money from time to time. But his life is hard too. He owns a small vineyard near Saint-Malo. His best customers were always the English. War has not been good for business.”

“What exactly are you saying?”

Arceneaux pushed to his feet. “Only that men whose profession is war can sometimes find that their most lucrative employment involves using their…professional skills.”

“For whom?”

The Frenchman shook his head. “That I do not know.” They continued walking, the dog frisking ahead. Arceneaux watched him a moment, then said, “There’s something I didn’t tell you about before—something I think may explain what happened to you last night. When I said I last saw Gabrielle on Wednesday, I was not being exactly truthful. I also saw her Friday evening. She was…very distressed.”

“Go on.”

“She said she had discovered something…something that both angered and frightened her.”

“What sort of ‘thing’ are we talking about here?”

“A forgery or deception of some sort. She warned me that it was for my own protection that she not tell me more. All I know is that it was connected to the Arthurian legend in some way.”

“A forgery?”

“Yes.”

“And why the devil didn’t you tell me this before?”

Arceneaux’s face had grown so pale as to appear almost white. “She said it was more than a simple forgery. The motive behind it was not monetary.”

“Did she say who was involved?”

“There was some antiquary she had quarreled with over it, but I believe he was only a pawn. Someone else was behind the scheme—someone she was afraid of. Which surprised me, because Gabrielle was not the kind of woman to be easily frightened.”

“This antiquary—did she tell you his name?”

Arceneaux shook his head.

But it didn’t matter. Sebastian knew who it was.

Chapter 25

It took a while, but Sebastian finally traced Bevin Childe to an exhibition of ancient Greek pottery being held at the Middle Temple in a small hall just off Fountain Court.

He was bent over with his plump face pressed close to the glass of a cabinet containing an exquisite redware kylix. Then he looked up to see Sebastian regarding him steadily from a few feet away and his mouth gaped. He jerked upright, his gaze darting right and left as if seeking some avenue of escape.

“No,” said Sebastian with a soft, mean smile. “You can’t run away from me.”

The antiquary gave a weak, sick laugh. Then his jaw hardened. “I have no intention of running. I have heard about you, Lord Devlin. My conversation with your wife was bad enough. I am staying right here. You can’t hurt me in a hall full of people.”

“True. But do you really want them to hear what I have to say?”

Childe stiffened. “If you expect me to understand what you mean by that rather mystifying pronouncement, I fear you are doomed to disappointment.”

Sebastian nodded to the ceremonial cup before them. “Lovely piece, isn’t it? It certainly looks authentic. Yet I knew a man with a workshop outside of Naples who could turn out a dozen of these in a week. Forgeries, of course, but—”

Childe hissed. “Shhh! Keep your voice down.” He cast another quick look around. A fat man with a protuberant mouth and full lips was staring at them over his spectacles. “Perhaps,” said Childe, “it would be better after all if we were to continue this conversation outside.”

They walked along Middle Temple Lane, toward the broad expanse of the Temple gardens edging the Thames. Once the precinct of the Knights Templar, the Inner and Middle Temples now served as two of the city’s Inns of Court, those professional associations to which every barrister in England and Wales belonged. The morning sun soaked the upper reaches of the medieval walls around them with a rich golden light. But here, in the shadows of the closely packed buildings, the air was still cool.

Sebastian said, “I’ve discovered that your argument with Miss Tennyson last Friday had nothing to do with the location of Camelot. It was over a forgery. And don’t even attempt to deny it,” he added when Childe shook his head and took a deep breath.

Childe closed his mouth, his fingers playing with the chain that dangled from his watch pocket. His small gray eyes were darting this way and that again, as his frightened brain worked feverishly to analyze what Sebastian knew and how he might have come to know it. With every dart of those frantic eyeballs, Sebastian suspected the man was revising and editing what he was about to say.

“What forgery?” Sebastian asked.

Childe chewed the inside of his cheek.

“God damn you; a woman is dead and two little boys missing. What forgery?”

Childe cleared his throat. “Are you familiar with the discovery of the bodies of King Arthur and Guinevere in Glastonbury Abbey in 1191?”

“Not really.”

Childe nodded as if to say he had expected this ignorance. “According to the medieval chronicler Gerald of Wales, King Henry the Second learned the location of Arthur’s last resting place from a mysterious Welsh bard. The King was old and frail at the time, but before his death, he relayed the bard’s information to the monks of Glastonbury Abbey. Following the King’s instructions, the monks dug down between two ancient pyramids in their churchyard. Sixteen feet below the surface they came upon a split, hollowed-out log containing the bodies of a man and a woman. Above the coffins lay a stone slab, attached to the bottom of which was an iron cross. The cross bore the Latin inscription ‘Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur with Guinevere his second wife, in the Isle of Avalon.’”

“Convenient,” said Sebastian. “Almost as if those who buried him looked into the future a few hundred years and knew that someday those monks would be digging up good King Arthur, so they made certain to include in their engraving all the information anyone might need to make the identification complete.”

“Just so,” said Childe with a slight bow. “Needless to say, the monks collected the newly discovered bones and reburied them, first in the abbey’s Lady Chapel, then beneath the high altar in a marble coffin provided by King Edward in 1278.”

“Along with the cross?”

“Of course. It was attached to the top of the sepulchre. But when the abbey was destroyed in the suppression of the monasteries under Henry the Eighth, the bones of King Arthur and his Queen disappeared. For a time, the cross was reportedly kept in the parish church of St. John the Baptist. But it, too, eventually disappeared, probably during the time of Cromwell.”

“And what precisely does any of this have to do with Miss Tennyson?”

Childe cleared his throat. “As you know, I have been occupied in cataloging the library and collection of the late Richard Gough. Amongst his possessions I discovered an ancient leaden cross inscribed with the words ‘Hic Iacet Sepultus Inclitus Rex Arturius in Insula Avalonia.’”

“Nothing about Guinevere?”

Childe gave another of his little bows. “Just so. Reports on the exact inscription have always varied slightly.”

“How large a cross are we talking about here?”

“Approximately one foot in length.”

“Where the devil did it come from?”

“That I do not know. As far as I have been able to ascertain, the cross came into Gough’s possession—interestingly enough, along with a box of ancient bones—in the last days of his life, when he was unfortunately too ill to give them the attention they deserved. However, Gough apparently believed the cross to be that which the monks discovered in the twelfth century.”

“And Gough believed the bones were those of Arthur and Guinevere? You can’t be serious.”

“I am only reporting on the conclusions reached by Gough himself. There is no more respected name amongst antiquaries.”

“I take it Miss Tennyson did not agree with Gough’s conclusions?”

Childe sighed. “She did not. Last Friday, she drove out to Gough Hall to view the cross and the bones. The bones are undeniably of great antiquity, but she instantly dismissed the cross as a modern forgery. When I begged to differ with her—”

“You did? I was under the impression you considered Arthur a wishful figment of the collective British imagination.”

Childe puffed out his chest. “I may personally doubt the validity of the various tales which have grown up around some obscure figure who may or may not have actually lived. However, I have nothing but respect for the scholarship of Mr. Richard Gough, and I would consider it unprofessional to cavalierly dismiss the relic out of hand, simply because it does not conform to my preconceived notions.”

“So what happened with Miss Tennyson?”

“We argued. Heatedly, I’m afraid. Miss Tennyson became so incensed that she seized the cross from my hands and hurled it into the lake.”

“You were walking beside a lake? Carrying a foot-long iron cross?”

Childe stared at him owlishly. “We were, yes. You could hardly expect Miss Tennyson to enter the house to view the artifact. I may have known her since she was in pigtails, but it still would not have been at all proper. So we chose instead to walk in the park. Gough Hall has a lovely—and unfortunately very deep—ornamental lake.”

“Unfortunate, indeed.”

“Needless to say, her intemperance in positively flinging the cross into the lake enraged me. I fear I flew into quite a passion myself. Heated words were exchanged, and she departed in high dudgeon. I never saw her again.”

Sebastian studied the stout man’s flushed, self-satisfied face. He was obviously quite pleased with the tale he had concocted. But where the actual truth lay was impossible for Sebastian to guess. He said, “I assume the servants at Gough Hall can corroborate your story?”

“There is only an elderly caretaker and his wife in residence at the moment, but I have no doubt they will vouch for me, yes. Old Bentley even helped me drag a grappling hook along the edges of the lake. But we gave it up after an hour or so. I fear the cross is lost—this time forever.”

“You believe it was genuine?”

“I believe it was the cross presented to the world by the monks of Glastonbury in 1191, yes.”

Which was not, Sebastian noted, precisely the same thing.

He watched a cluster of legal students hurry across the gardens, their black robes flapping in the hot wind. “You say Miss Tennyson was angry?”

“She was, yes. It’s a very choleric family, you know.”

“And melancholy.”

“Melancholy, yes.”

From here they could see the broad expanse of the sun-dazzled river, the massive bulk of the bridge, and the warehouses and wharves of the opposite bank. Sebastian said, “There’s just one thing I don’t understand.”

“Oh?”

“What in the incident you describe could possibly have made her afraid?”

Childe’s smug smile slipped. “Afraid?”

“Afraid.”

Childe shook his head. “I never said anything about her being afraid.”

“That’s because you left out the part about the dangerous forces with a nonmonetary motive.”

A sudden gust of hot wind stirred the branches of the beeches overhead, letting through a shaft of golden sunlight that cut across Childe’s face when he turned to stare blankly at Sebastian. “I’m sorry; I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t?”

“No.” Childe cleared his throat and nodded to the arm Sebastian still had resting in a sling. “You injured yourself?”

“Actually, someone tried to kill me last night; do you have any ideas about that?”

Childe’s jaw went slack. “Kill you?”

“Mmm. Someone who doesn’t like the questions I’m asking. Which tells me that Gabrielle Tennyson had good reason to be afraid. Whatever is going on here is dangerous. Very dangerous. It’s not over yet, and it looks to me as if you’re right in the middle of it. You might want to consider that, next time you’re tempted to lie to me.”

The antiquary had turned a sickly shade of yellow.

Sebastian touched his good hand to his hat and smiled. “Good day, Mr. Childe. Enjoy the rest of your pottery exhibition.”

Chapter 26

Twenty minutes later, Sebastian turned his curricle into Bow Street to find the lane ahead clogged by a raucous, tattered mob that spilled out of the public office to overflow the footpath and completely block the narrow carriageway. Ragged men and gaunt-cheeked women clutching an assortment of howling, filthy, malnourished children jostled and shoved one another in a frantic melee swirling around a small, bespectacled magistrate endeavoring to push his way through the motley crowd.

“Lord Devlin!” called Sir Henry Lovejoy, determinedly turning his steps toward the curricle.

“What the devil is all this?” asked Sebastian as Tom jumped down to run to the frightened chestnuts’ tossing heads.

Lovejoy staggered against the side of the carriage, buffeted by the surging crowd. “It’s been like this since yesterday. We’ve been positively besieged by parents offering up their children for Mr. Tennyson’s reward—everything from babes in arms to sturdy lads of twelve and fourteen. Even girls. And this is only the overflow. Tennyson has hired a solicitor with chambers near Fleet Street to whom anyone with information is supposed to apply.”

“My God,” said Sebastian, his gaze traveling over the desperate, starving mass. “No indication yet of what actually happened to the Tennyson children?”

Lovejoy blew out a long, tired breath and shook his head. “It’s as if they simply vanished off the face of the earth.”

The magistrate gave a lurch and almost fell as a wild-eyed, pock-scarred woman clutching what looked like a dead child careened into him. He righted himself with difficulty. The crowd was becoming dangerous. “Have you discovered anything of interest?”

“Not yet,” said Sebastian. As much as he trusted Sir Henry, when it came to murder investigations, Sebastian had learned to play his cards close to his chest. “I was wondering if you could provide me with the direction of the girl who found Miss Tennyson’s body.”

“You mean, Tessa Sawyer? She lives with her father a few miles to the southwest of the moat in a village called Cockfosters. I believe the mother is dead, while the father is something of a layabout. Why do you ask?”

“I have some questions I thought she might be able to answer.”

Sebastian was aware of the magistrate giving him a long, steady look. But Lovejoy only nodded and took a step back into the shouting, jostling crowd.

Cockfosters proved to be a tiny village consisting largely of a church, an aged inn, and a few villas and scattered cottages lying to the west of Camlet Moat.

Following directions given by the curate at the village church, Sebastian drove up a rutted track to a tumbledown thatched cottage of whitewashed, rough-coursed stone that lay on the far edge of the hamlet. A young girl of some fifteen or sixteen years of age was in the dusty, sunbaked yard pegging up clothes on a line stretched between a corner of the house and a half-dead mulberry tree. A slim, tiny thing with baby-fine brown hair and eyes that looked too big for her face, she hummed a fey, haunting tune as she worked, so lost in her own world that she seemed oblivious to the elegant curricle drawing up outside her gate.

Sebastian jumped down into the dusty lane and felt a shooting jolt of pain in his arm, for he had dispensed with the sling on the drive out to Enfield. He paused a brief moment to catch his breath, then said, “Excuse me, miss; are you Tessa Sawyer?”

“Oh!” The girl jerked, her hands clenching the wet shirt she held to her chest, her nostrils flaring in alarm. “Ye startled me, ye did.”

“I beg your pardon.” Sebastian paused with one hand on the gate’s rusty latch. “May I come in?”

The girl dropped a nervous curtsy, her eyes widening as she glanced from Sebastian to the carriage waiting in the sun-soaked lane, its high-bred chestnuts flicking their tails at the flies. “Oh, yes, sir. But if yer lookin’ fer me da, he’s not here. He’s out helpin’ search for the bodies of them dead boys, he is.”

Sebastian had to whack his hip against the gate to get it to open. “Actually, you’re the one I wished to speak to. What makes you think the boys are dead, Tessa?”

Tessa shook her head in some confusion. “It’s what everyone’s sayin’, isn’t it? I mean, it stands to reason, don’t it?”

Sebastian let his gaze drift around the yard. A few scrawny chickens pecked halfheartedly at the bare earth, while a brown goat with a bell around its neck nuzzled a pile of rubbish beside the remnants of an old stone shed. If there had ever been any glass in the cottage’s windows, it was long gone, the unpainted shutters hanging at drunken angles. From the looks of the worn, moldy thatch, Sebastian had no doubt the roof leaked when it rained.

He said, “Did you see any sign of the children when you were at the moat Sunday night?”

Tessa shook her head. “No, sir. I didn’t see nor hear nothin’ ’cept a little splash. And I can’t rightly say what that was. It coulda been a water rat, or maybe a frog.”

“Had you ever seen the lady in the boat before?”

Tessa swallowed, her face becoming pinched. “Just once.”

“Really? When was that?”

“Last week, sometime. I think maybe it was Sunday.”

“You mean, this past Sunday?”

“No. The Sunday before.”

“You saw her at the island?”

“Oh, no, sir. She came here, she did—to Cockfosters.”

Sebastian knew a flicker of surprise. “Do you know why?”

Tessa sucked her lower lip between her teeth and bit down on it, her gaze drifting away.

“Tell me,” said Sebastian.

She drew in a quick breath. “She come here lookin’ fer Rory Forster. Lit into him somethin’ fierce, she did, just outside the smithy’s.”

“Forster lives in the village?”

“On a farm, to the east of here. Didn’t ye know?” Sebastian’s ignorance obviously shocked her. “Most o’ the men doin’ the diggin’ at the moat come from Trent Place. But Sir Stanley hired Rory on account of how he once worked for some famous gentleman down in Salisbury.”

“You mean, Sir Richard Colt Hoare? At Stonehenge?”

The girl looked at him blankly. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“And what precisely was Miss Tennyson’s interest in Forster?”

Tessa turned away and began pegging up the shirt. “I weren’t there for most of it.”

“But you did hear about it afterward, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” Sebastian prodded when the girl remained mute.

Tessa smoothed her hands down over the worn cloth. “Folks say she was mad at Forster for tearin’ out the linin’ of the island’s well. They say somebody turned it into a muddy mess.”

“A well?”

She nodded, her face hardening. “He shouldn’t have done that. It’s a special place.”

“Special in what way?”

She threw him a quick, sideways glance. “You know what it’s like when you sit in a really old church and you’re all alone, and it’s quiet and the sun’s streamin’ through the stained-glass windows and you just feel this…this kind of peace and joy settle over you? That’s what it’s like at the White Lady’s well.”

“What White Lady?”

“The White Lady. I’ve never seen her meself, but others have. She guards the well. She always has.”

Sebastian studied the girl’s fine-boned face, the wistful look in her big hazel eyes, and resisted the urge to point out that the White Lady of Camlet Moat had obviously failed to guard her well from some treasure hunter’s shovel. He’d heard of the well maidens, ancient nature spirits said to guard the sacred wells and springs of Britain and Ireland. Although belief in the well maidens predated Christianity, it had never completely disappeared, and small shrines to the well maidens could still be found scattered across the countryside. Somehow, it seemed all of a piece with everything else he’d learned about the island that it should have a sacred well too. He realized Miss Tennyson must have come upon the destruction when she visited the island in the company of Arceneaux and the children.

He said, “Did she drive to the village in a gig? With a man and two children?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where would I find Forster?”

Tessa sniffed and jerked her head back toward the crossroads. “He married the Widow Clark just last year. Her farm’s on the edge of the old chase.”

Sebastian touched his hat and swept the girl an elegant bow. “Thank you, Miss Sawyer. Good day.”

Turning away, he was reaching for the gate’s latch when Tessa said suddenly, “You know, I did hear the last part of what Miss Tennyson said to Rory.”

Sebastian swung to face her. “Oh? And what was that?”

“She told him she was going to ask Sir Stanley to fire him.”

“And did you hear Rory’s response?”

“Aye. He said that weren’t a good idea. And when she asked him if he was a-threatenin’ her, he said—” Tessa broke off, all color leaching from her cheeks.

“What did he say?”

The girl swallowed. “He said yes.”

Chapter 27

Sebastian found Rory Forster clearing rocks from a grassy field edged by a small stream.

Reining in beneath the shade cast by a spreading elm, Sebastian paused to watch as the man heaved a watermelon-sized stone up onto the pile in the bed of the low cart beside him. The cart’s brown mule stood placidly in the afternoon heat, ears twitching as Sebastian left the curricle in Tom’s care and climbed over the stile.

“Good afternoon,” Sebastian called.

Straightening with another large gray stone clutched in both hands, Forster threw a quizzing glance at Sebastian, then dropped the rock into the cart. “Wot ye doin’ here? Didn’t ye hear? The diggin’ at Camlet Moat is finished. I don’t work fer Sir Stanley no more and I got nothin’ else to say to ye.”

Sebastian brushed away a fly buzzing about his face. “When we spoke the other day, you forgot to mention your confrontation with Miss Tennyson a week ago last Sunday. Here, in Cockfosters. Outside the smithy’s.”

“Me brother’s the smithy—like our da was before him.”

“Which I suppose explains how Miss Tennyson knew where to find you.”

Forster turned away to stoop down and grasp another rock.

Sebastian said, “The incident was witnessed by half the village.”

Forster grunted. “Aye. She were a feisty thing, that woman. She could squawk all she wanted, but I knew that in the end she wasna gonna go to Sir Stanley. She’d no proof of anything.”

“Maybe she recently discovered something. Maybe that’s why you killed her.”

Forster heaved another rock up and over the side of the cart. “I told ye and the magistrate both: I was home with me wife Sunday.”

Sebastian stared off to where the field sloped gently toward a line of chestnuts growing along a small watershed to the west. The air was hot, the pasture a bright emerald green and scattered with small daisies. The scene was deceptively peaceful, with an air of bucolic innocence that seemed to have no place for passion and greed. Or murder.

He said, “Do you believe Sir Geoffrey de Mandeville hid his treasure on the island?”

Forster glanced over at him and smiled, the dimplelike slashes appearing in his tanned cheeks. “De Mandeville? Nah. But did ye never hear of Dick Turpin?”

“Dick Turpin? You mean, the highwayman?”

“Aye. Him as once worked Finchley Common. Used to hide out at the island, he did. His uncle Nott owned the Rose and Crown by the Brook, across the chase at Clay Hill. Seems to me, if there’s treasure on that island, it’s more likely Dick Turpin’s than some old knight what’s been dead and gone for who knows how many hundreds of years.”

“Is that what you were looking for? A highwayman’s gold?”

Forster reached for his mule’s reins. “Never claimed it were me. All I’m sayin’ is, Turpin’s story is well-known about here. Coulda been anyone lookin’ for what he mighta hid.”

“So why did Miss Tennyson accuse you?”

Forster urged the mule forward a few feet, then stopped to reach for another stone. “She didn’t like me much. Never did.”

“And you didn’t like her,” said Sebastian, keeping his eyes on the hefty rock in Forster’s hands.

“I won’t deny that. She threatened to tell Sir Stanley I was the one who tore apart the well. But she had no proof and she knew it.”

“So why did you threaten her?”

“I didn’t. Anyone who tells you different is either makin’ stuff up or jist repeatin’ crazy talk he heard.” Forster slammed the rock down on the growing pile, then paused with his fists propped on his lean hips, his breath coming hard, his handsome, sun-browned face and neck glistening with perspiration. “I been doin’ me some thinkin’. And it occurs to me that meybe Sir Stanley has more to do with what happened to the lady than I first suspicioned.”

“Odd, given that yesterday you seemed more intent on casting suspicion on Sir Stanley’s wife, Lady Winthrop, than on Sir Stanley himself.”

“I told ye, I been doing me some thinkin’. It occurs to me this might all have somethin’ to do with the way Sir Stanley likes to fancy himself one of them ancient Druids.”

“A Druid,” said Sebastian.

“That’s right. Dresses up in white robes and holds heathen rituals out at the island. I know for a fact Miss Tennyson seen him doin’ it just the other day. He coulda been afraid she’d give away his secret.”

“Couldn’t have been much of a secret if you knew about it.”

Forster’s eyes narrowed with unexpected amusement. He laid a finger beside his nose and winked, then turned away to stoop for another stone.

Sebastian said, “And how precisely do you know that Miss Tennyson saw Sir Stanley enacting these rituals?”

Forster hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and spit it into the grass. “Because I was there meself. Last Saturday evening, it was, long after we’d finished work for the day. Sir Stanley was at the island in his robes when Miss Tennyson comes back—”

“How?” interjected Sebastian.

“What do ye mean, ‘how’?”

“You said Miss Tennyson came back. So was she walking? In a gig? Who was driving her?”

“She come in a gig, drivin’ herself.”

It was the first Sebastian had heard of Gabrielle Tennyson driving herself. It was not unusual for a woman to drive in the country without a groom. But Gabrielle would have driven out from London, which was something else entirely. He said, “Did she do that often? Drive herself, I mean.”

“Sometimes.”

“So you’re saying she arrived at the island and found Sir Stanley about to engage in some sort of ancient ritual?”

“That’s right. Just before sunset, it was.”

“Did either of them know you were there?”

“Nah. I was hid behind some bushes.”

“And what precisely were you doing at the island?”

“I’d forgot me pipe.”

“Your pipe.”

Forster stared at Sebastian owlishly, as if daring Sebastian to doubt him. “That’s right. Went back for it, I did. Only then I seen Sir Stanley in his strange getup, so I hid in the bushes to see what was goin’ on.”

“And you were still hiding in the bushes when you saw Miss Tennyson drive up?”

“I was, yes.” Forster turned away to reach down for a big, jagged rock. “I couldn’t hear what they was sayin’. But there’s no doubt in me mind she seen him and that rig he was wearin’.”

“And then what happened?”

“I don’t know. I left.”

“So you’re suggesting—what, precisely? That Sir Stanley was so chagrined by Miss Tennyson’s discovery of his rather unorthodox behavior and belief system that he lured her back to the island on Sunday and killed her?”

“I ain’t suggestin’ nothing. Just tellin’ ye what happened, that’s all.”

“I see. And have you told anyone else about this encounter?”

“No. Why would I?”

“Why, indeed?” Sebastian started to turn away, then paused as a thought occurred to him. “One more question: Did you discover anything unusual or interesting in the course of the excavations at the island last Saturday?”

Forster frowned. “No. Why?”

“I’m just wondering why Miss Tennyson would return to the island, first on Saturday evening, then again on Sunday.”

“That I couldn’t say.”

“You’ve no idea at all?”

“No.” Forster reached for his mule’s reins.

“What precisely did you discover Saturday?”

“Just an area of old cobblestones—like a courtyard or somethin’.”

“That’s all?”

“Ain’t nothin’ to kill a body over, is it? Well, is it?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so,” said Sebastian. “Except for one thing.”

Forster wrapped the reins around his fists. “What’s that?”

“Miss Tennyson is dead.”

“And them two nippers,” said Forster.

“Are they dead?” Sebastian asked, his gaze hard on the countryman’s beard-shadowed face.

“They ain’t been found, have they?”

“No,” said Sebastian. “No, they have not.”

“Ye think ’e’s tellin’ the truth?” Tom asked as Sebastian leapt up into the curricle’s high seat.

Sebastian glanced back at his tiger. “How much did you hear?”

“Most o’ it.”

Sebastian gathered his reins. “To be frank, I’m not convinced Forster has the imagination required to invent such a tale entirely out of whole cloth. But do I believe him? Hardly. I suspect he went out to the island that night on a treasure-hunting expedition. But he may indeed have seen something.” He turned the horses’ heads toward Enfield Chase. “I think I’d like to take a look at this sacred well.”

The island lay deserted, the afternoon sun filtering down through the leafy canopy of old-growth elms and beech to dapple the dark waters of the moat with rare glints of light.

“Ain’t nobody ’ere,” whispered Tom as Sebastian drew up at the top of Camlet Moat’s ancient embankment. “I thought they was still lookin’ for them two boys.”

“They are. But I suspect they’ve given up hope of finding any trace of them around here,” said Sebastian, his voice also low. Like Tom, he knew a reluctance to disturb the solemn peace of the site.

Without the scuffing sounds from Forster’s shovel or the distant shouts of the searchers they’d heard the day before, the silence of the place was as complete as if they had strayed deep into a forgotten, enchanted forest. Sebastian handed his reins to the tiger and jumped lightly to the ground, his boots sinking into the soft leaf mold beside the track. One of the chestnuts nickered, and he reached out to caress the horse’s soft muzzle. “Walk ’em a bit. I shouldn’t be long.”

“Aye, gov’nor.”

He crossed to the island by way of the narrow land bridge. The trenches dug by Sir Stanley’s workmen had all been filled in, leaving long, narrow rows of mounded dark earth that struck Sebastian as bearing an unpleasant resemblance to the poor holes of churchyards. But he knew that in a year or so, the grass and brush of the island would cover them again, and it would be as if no one had ever disturbed the site.

Sebastian paused for a moment, his gaze drifting around the abandoned clearing. One of the more troublesome aspects of this murder had always been the question of how Gabrielle Tennyson—and presumably her cousins—had traveled up to the moat that fateful Sunday. The discovery that Gabrielle sometimes drove herself here in a gig opened up a host of new possibilities.

It was an unorthodox thing for a young woman to do, to drive herself into the countryside from London. Perhaps she thought that at the age of twenty-eight she was beyond those restrictions. Or perhaps she considered the presence of her nine-year-old cousin and his brother a sufficient sop to the proprieties. But if the Tennysons had driven themselves here that fatal day, the question then became, What the bloody hell happened to the horse and gig? And why had no liveryman come forward to say he had hired the equipment to them?

Sebastian turned to follow the path he’d noticed before, a faint trail that snaked through the brambles and brush to the northeastern corner of the island. It was there, in a small clearing not far from the moat’s edge, that he found what was left of the old well.

Once neatly lined with dressed sandstone blocks, the well now looked like a dirty, sunken wound. Ripped from the earth, the old lining stones lay jumbled together with wet clay and shattered tiles in a heap at the base of a gnarled hawthorn that spread its bleached branches over the muddy hole. From the tree’s branches fluttered dozens of strips of tattered cloth.

Sebastian drew up in surprise. They called them rag trees or, sometimes, clootie trees. Relics of an ancient belief whose origins were lost in the mists of time, the trees could be found at sacred places to which suppliants with a problem—be it an illness, grief, hardship, or unrequited love—came to whisper a prayer and leave a strip of cloth as a token offering that they tied to the branches of the tree. As the cloths rotted in the wind and sun and rain, the suppliants’ believed their prayers would be answered, their illnesses cured, their problems solved. Rag trees were typically found beside sacred wells or springs, for dipping the cloth in holy water was said to increase the power of the charm.

He understood now why Tessa had ventured out to Camlet Moat by moonlight.

He watched as a hot breeze gusted up, flapping the worn, weathered strips of cloth. And he found himself wondering how many other villagers came here to visit the island’s sacred well.

Quite a few, from the look of things.

He went to hunker down beside the pile of muddy stones. The desecration of the well had obviously occurred quite recently. But it was impossible to tell if the man—or men—who’d done this had found what they were looking for.

A faint sound drew Sebastian’s head around as his acute hearing distinguished the distant clatter of approaching hooves, coming fast. He listened as the unseen horse and rider drew nearer, then checked. A man’s low voice, asking a question, drifted across the water, followed by Tom’s high-pitched reply.

Sebastian stayed where he was and let the current owner of Camelot come to him.

Chapter 28

Dressed in the supple doeskin breeches and well-cut riding coat of a prosperous country gentleman, Sir Stanley Winthrop paused at the edge of the clearing, his riding crop dangling from one hand. “Lord Devlin. What brings you here?”

Sebastian pushed to his feet. “You didn’t tell me the island was the site of a rag tree.”

“I suppose I didn’t consider it relevant. Surely you don’t think it could have something to do with Gabrielle’s death?”

Sebastian turned to let his gaze rove over the ancient hawthorn with its tattered, weathered offerings. “It’s an interesting superstition.”

“You consider it a superstition?”

Sebastian brought his gaze back to the banker’s face. “You don’t?”

“I think there are many things on this earth we don’t understand, and the power of the human will is one of them.”

Sebastian nodded to the pile of muddy stones at his feet. “When did this happen?

“Gabrielle found it this way when she came up here a week ago. There’s an old legend that Geoffrey de Mandeville buried his treasure beneath the well.”

“Any idea who’s responsible?”

“Some ignorant fool, I’m afraid. Obviously searching for gold.”

“De Mandeville’s gold? Or Dick Turpin’s?”

“Ah, you’ve heard the stories about Turpin as well, have you?” Winthrop stared down at the muddy mess, and Sebastian caught a flash of the steely rage he’d glimpsed briefly once before. “Unfortunately, both have become associated with the island.”

“Did Miss Tennyson tell you who she thought had done it?”

“She told me that she had her suspicions. But when I pressed her to elaborate, she said she had no real proof and was therefore hesitant to actually accuse anyone.”

“She never said she suspected your foreman, Rory Forster?”

“She suspected Rory? No, she didn’t tell me. How very disturbing.”

Sebastian studied the other man’s face. But Winthrop once more had his emotions carefully under control; the even features gave nothing away. Sebastian said, “Why didn’t you tell me Miss Tennyson returned to the island the evening before she died? Or that you were here that evening too?”

Winthrop was silent for a moment, as if tempted to deny it. Then he pursed his lips and shrugged. “If you know we were here, am I to take it you also know why?”

“I’m told you have an interest in Druidism. That you came here last Saturday dressed in white robes to enact a pagan ritual in observance of Lammas. Is that true?”

A faint glimmer of amusement shone in the other man’s eyes. “What precisely are you imagining, Lord Devlin? That Gabrielle came upon me by chance and I was so horrified to be discovered that I murdered her to keep her quiet?”

“It has been suggested.”

“Really? By whom?”

“You know I can’t answer that.”

“No, I suppose you can’t.”

“Are you interested in Druidism?”

“Does it shock you that I should have an interest in the religions of the past?”

“No.”

Winthrop raised an eyebrow in surprise. “In that you are unusual. Believe me.”

Sebastian said, “And did Miss Tennyson share your interest in the religion of our ancestors?”

“She shared my interest, yes. I can’t, however, say she shared my belief.”

“Do you believe?”

Again that faint gleam of amusement flickered in the banker’s light gray eyes. “I believe there are many paths to wisdom and understanding. Most people are content to find the answers to life’s questions in the formal dogmas and hierarchies of organized religion. They find comfort in being told what to believe and how to worship.”

“And you?”

“Me? I find my peace and sense of meaning in ancient places such as this”—Winthrop spread his arms wide, his palms lifted to the sky—“with the trees and the water and the air. The exact beliefs of our ancestors may be lost, but the essence of their wisdom is still here—if you listen to the whispers on the wind and open your heart to our kinship with the earth and all her creatures.”

“Is Lady Winthrop aware of your beliefs?”

Winthrop’s hands dropped back to his sides. “She is aware of my interest.”

Which was not, as Winthrop himself had pointed out, the same thing at all. Sebastian said, “I gather Lady Winthrop’s own religious beliefs are rather…orthodox.” And rigid, he thought, although he didn’t say it.

“We must each follow our own individual paths.”

Sebastian studied the older man’s craggy face, the chiseled line of his strong jaw, the fashionably cut flaxen hair mixing gracefully with white. He found it difficult if not impossible to reconcile this talk of spiritualism and harmony with what he knew of the hard-driven banker who had amassed a fortune by financing war and ruthlessly crushing anyone who stood in his way.

As if sensing Sebastian’s doubt, Winthrop said, “You’re skeptical, of course.”

“Do you blame me?”

“Not really. It’s no secret that my life has been spent in the pursuit of money and power. But men can change.”

“They can. Although it’s rare.”

Winthrop went to stand beside the dark waters of the moat, his back to Sebastian, the tip of his riding crop tapping against his thigh as he stared across at the opposite bank. “I once had five children; did you know? Three girls and two boys, born to me by my first wife. They were beautiful children, with their mother’s blue eyes and blond curls and winsome ways. And then, one by one, they died. We lost Peter first, to a fever. Then Mary and Jane, to measles. I sometimes think it was grief that killed my wife. It was as if she just faded away. She died less than a month after Jane.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sebastian softly.

Winthrop nodded, his lips pressed together tightly. “I married again, of course—a most brilliant alliance to the widow of a late colleague. I knew she was likely to prove barren since she’d never given my colleague children, but what did it matter? I still had two children. When I bought Trent Place last year, I believed I’d finally achieved everything I’d ever wanted. Then my last two children died within weeks of each other. Elizabeth caught a putrid sore throat; then James fell and broke his neck jumping his hack over a ditch. There are just too many ways children can die. And when I buried James…” Winthrop’s voice cracked. He paused and shook his head. “When I buried James, I realized I’d dedicated my life to amassing a fortune, and for what? So that I could build my family the most elaborate monument in the churchyard?”

Sebastian remained silent.

After a moment, Winthrop gave a ragged laugh. “The current Lady Winthrop is of the opinion that my grief over the loss of my children has affected the balance of my mind. Perhaps she is right. All I know is that I find neither peace nor comfort in the righteous dogmas of her church, whereas in a place like this—” He blew out a long, painful breath. “In a place like this, I find, if not peace, then at least a path to understanding and a way to come to grips with what once seemed unbearable.”

“And Miss Tennyson? Did she come to Camlet Moat at sunset last Saturday to participate in…whatever it was you were here to do?”

“Participate?” Winthrop shook his head. “No. But she was interested in observing. I may feel no compulsion to advertise my spiritual beliefs, but neither am I ashamed of them. So you see, if you are imagining that I killed Miss Tennyson because she discovered my interest in Druidism, you are wrong.”

Sebastian said, “Were you romantically involved with her?”

Winthrop looked genuinely startled by the suggestion. “Good God, no! I’m practically old enough to have been her father.”

Sebastian shrugged. “It happens.”

“Not in this instance. There was nothing of that nature between us. We were friends; I respected her intelligence and knowledge and the strength of her will. If my own daughters had lived, I like to think they would have grown up to be like her. But that is how I thought of her—as a daughter.”

From what Sebastian had learned of Miss Tennyson, she was the kind of woman who tended to intimidate and alarm most men, rather than inspire them to admiration. But there were always exceptions.

He said, “I’m told Miss Tennyson sometimes drove herself out here in a gig. Is that true?”

“Sometimes, yes. She didn’t do it often, though.” Winthrop gave a soft smile that faded rapidly. “When her brother complained about her habit of taking the stage, she said she always threatened to take to driving herself instead.”

“But she did drive herself out here Saturday evening?”

“She did, yes.”

“Do you think it is possible she drove herself out here Sunday, as well?”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

The wind gusted up again, fluttering the weathered strips of cloth on the rag tree. Sebastian said, “What else can you tell me about Sir Geoffrey de Mandeville?”

Winthrop frowned. “Mandeville?” The sudden shift in topic seemed to confuse him.

“I understand he’s said to haunt the island.”

“He is, yes. Although the local legend that claims he drowned in this well is nonsense. He was killed by an arrow to the head at the siege of Burwell Castle—miles from here.”

“Where is he buried?”

“At the Temple, in London.”

Sebastian knew a flicker of surprise. “So he was a Knight Templar.”

“The association is murky, I’m afraid. They say that the Knights Templar came to him when he lay dying and flung their mantle over him, so that he might die with the red cross on his breast.”

“Why?”

“That is not recorded. All we know is that the Templars put de Mandeville’s body in a lead casket and carried him off to London, where his coffin hung in an apple tree near the Temple for something like twenty years.”

“A lead coffin? In a tree?”

“That’s the tale. He’d been excommunicated, which meant the Templars couldn’t bury him in their churchyard. Those were dark times, but there’s no denying de Mandeville was an exceptionally nasty piece of work.”

“‘Those were the days when men said openly that Christ slept and his saints wept,’” said Sebastian softly, quoting the old chroniclers.

Winthrop nodded. “In the end, the Pope relented. The edict of excommunication was lifted and the Knights Templar were allowed to bury him. You can still see his effigy on the floor of the Temple today, you know.”

“Unusual,” said Sebastian, “if he wasn’t actually a Templar.”

“It is, yes.”

“And the belief that his treasure lay at the bottom of this well?”

Winthrop was silent for a moment, his gaze on the muddy hole the well had now become. “Tales of great treasure often become associated with sacred sites,” he said. “The memory of a place’s importance can linger long after the true nature of its value has been forgotten. Then those who come later, in their ignorance and greed, imagine the place as a repository of earthly treasures.”

“You think that’s what happened here?”

“Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing, is there? But the association of Camelot, the Templars, and the tales of lost treasure is definitely intriguing.”

“Intriguing?” said Sebastian. “Or deadly?”

Sir Stanley looked troubled. “Perhaps both.”

Hero spent the rest of the morning sorting through the stacks of Gabrielle Tennyson’s books and papers, looking for something—anything—that might explain her friend’s death.

She couldn’t shake the conviction that the key to Gabrielle’s murder lay here, in the piles of notes and translations the woman had been working on. But Gabrielle’s interests had been so wide-ranging, reaching from the little-known centuries before the Celts through the time of the Romans to the dark ages that befell Britain following the collapse of the Empire, that wading through her research was a formidable undertaking.

It was when Hero was studying Gabrielle’s notes on The Lady of Shalott that a loose sheet of paper fluttered to the floor. Reaching down to pick it up, she found herself staring at a handwritten poem.

Bid me to weep, and I will weep

While I have eyes to see:

And having none, yet I will keep

A heart to weep for thee.

Bid me despair and I’ll despair,

Under that cypress tree:

Or bid me die, and I will dare

E’en Death, to die for thee.

Thou art my life, my love, my heart

The very eyes of me,

And hast command of every part,

To live and die for thee.

Hero leaned back in her seat, her hand tightening on the paper, the breath leaving her lungs in a rush as a new and totally unexpected possibility occurred to her.

Chapter 29

Hero was curled up with a book in an armchair beside the library’s empty hearth, a volume of seventeenth-century poetry open in her lap, when Devlin came to stand in the doorway. He brought with him the scent of sunshine and fresh air and the open countryside.

“What happened to your sling?” she asked, looking up at him.

“It was in my way.”

“Now, there’s a good reason to stop wearing it.”

He huffed a soft laugh and went to pour himself a glass of wine. “Did Gabrielle ever mention an interest in Druidism to you?”

“Druidism? Good heavens, no. Why on earth do you ask?”

He came to stand with his back to the empty fireplace. “Because it turns out that she went back out to Camlet Moat at sunset the night before she died, to watch Sir Stanley enact some pagan ritual at an ancient sacred well on the island. Drove herself there, in fact, in a gig.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I wish I wasn’t. But Rory Forster saw her there, and Sir Stanley himself admits as much.”

“What was Forster doing at the island at sunset?”

“According to Rory? Retrieving a forgotten pipe—and hiding in the bushes. Although I suspect it far more likely that he went there with the intent of digging for buried treasure and was perplexed to discover he wasn’t going to have the island to himself that night.”

“Treasure?”

“Mmm. Buried by either Dick Turpin or a Knight Templar, depending upon which version one believes. Exactly a week before she was killed, Miss Tennyson stormed into Cockfosters and publicly accused Rory of ripping out the lining of the island’s sacred well.”

“In search of this treasure?”

Devlin nodded. “According to the legend, Sir Geoffrey de Mandeville hid his ill-gotten gains beneath the bottom of the well, and his spirit is supposed to appear to frighten away anyone who attempts to remove it. But his ghost must have been asleep on the job, because I checked, and someone recently made a right sorry mess of the thing.”

“You say she confronted Rory a week ago Sunday?”

He drained his wine. “The timing is interesting, isn’t it? That’s the day she was out there with Arceneaux. Then, just a few days later, she drove out to Gough Hall and had a stormy argument with Bevin Childe. She was a very confrontational and contentious young woman, your friend.”

Hero smoothed a hand down over her skirt. “So you spoke to Bevin Childe?”

“I did. He claims to have discovered something called the Glastonbury Cross amongst Richard Gough’s collections. I’m told it’s the cross that was said to have marked the graves of King Arthur and Guinevere at the abbey. Have you ever heard of it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it seems Miss Tennyson was convinced the cross was a modern forgery, and in the midst of a rather violent argument with Childe, she seized the cross and threw it in a lake.”

She was aware of him watching her intently. “What a…strange thing to do,” she said, keeping her voice level with effort.

He frowned and came to take the seat opposite her. “Are you all right, Hero?”

“Yes, of course; just tired.”

“Perhaps, under the circumstances, you’re doing too much.” He said it awkwardly; the coming babe, despite being the reason for their marriage, was something they never discussed.

She made an inelegant sound of derision. “If by ‘the circumstances’ you are referring to the fact that I am with child, let me remind you that gestation is a natural occurrence, not a dread debilitating disease.”

“True. Yet I do take special care of my mares when they are with foal.”

At that, she laughed out loud. “I don’t know if I should be flattered or insulted by the comparison.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement. “Oh, flattered, definitely.”

Their gazes met, and the moment stretched out and became something intimate and unexpected.

She felt her cheeks grow warm, and looked away. “How did you come to learn of Gabrielle’s confrontation with Childe over the cross?”

“Lieutenant Arceneaux told me.”

“Arceneaux? Now, that’s interesting.” She picked up the sheet of parchment she’d discovered and held it out to him. “I found this with Gabrielle’s papers.”

“‘Bid me to weep, and I will weep,’” he read, “‘while I have eyes to see.’” He looked up at her. “You know the poem?”

“No. But it does sound familiar, doesn’t it? I believe it may be from one of the Cavalier poets.” She closed the poetry book and set it aside. “But so far I haven’t been able to find it.”

“It’s the last three stanzas from Robert Herrick’s ‘To Anthea, Who May Command Him Anything.’”

Her eyes widened. “You know it?”

He smiled. “That surprises you, does it? Did you imagine I spent all my time riding to hounds and drinking brandy and trying to pop a hit over Gentleman Jackson’s guard?”

She felt an answering smile tug at her lips. “Something like that.”

“Huh.” He pushed up and went to compare the bold hand of the poem to the flowing copperplate that filled Gabrielle Tennyson’s notebooks. “This doesn’t look like her writing,” he said after a moment.

“It’s not.”

He glanced over at her. “You know whose it is?”

She came to extract one of the notebooks from the pile. “Here. Look at the translation of The Lady of Shalott Gabrielle was working on; you’ll see the handwriting of the poem matches that of the alterations and notations someone else made in the margins of her work. I think the poem was given to her by Philippe Arceneaux.”

Devlin studied the notations, his lips pressing into a tight line.

Hero said, “Do you think the Lieutenant was more in love with her than he led you to believe?”

“‘Thou art my life, my heart, my love,’” he quoted, setting the translation aside. “It rather sounds that way, does it not? Not only that, but I’d say Miss Tennyson was in love with him too.”

Hero shook her head. “How can you be so certain?”

He looked down at the creased sheet he still held in his hand. “Because she kept this.”

Lieutenant Philippe Arceneaux and his scruffy little dog were watching a cricket match at Marylebone Park Fields on the northern outskirts of the city when Sebastian came to stand beside him.

A warm sun washed the grass of the nearby hills with a golden green. They could hear the lowing of cows, see a hawk circling lazily above the stand of oaks edging the field. The batsman scored a run and a murmur of approval rippled through the crowd of spectators.

Sebastian said, “You’ve acquired a fondness for cricket, have you? You must be one of the few Frenchmen ever to do so.”

Arceneaux huffed a low laugh. “Most of my fellow officers consider it incomprehensible, but yes, I have.”

“I gather you’ve also acquired a fondness for our Cavalier poets.”

“Pardon?”

“‘A heart as soft, a heart as kind, / A heart as sound and free / As in the whole world thou canst find / That heart I’ll give to thee,’” quoted Sebastian softly as the bowler delivered the ball toward the batsman.

“A lovely piece of poetry,” said Arceneaux, his attention seemingly all for the bowler. “Should I recognize it?”

“It’s from a poem by Robert Herrick.”

“No ball,” called the umpire.

The relentless August sun beat down on the open field, filling the air with the scent of dust and hot grass. Arceneaux held himself very still, his features wooden, his gaze on the fielders.

Sebastian said, “The same poem you copied out and gave to Miss Tennyson.”

The Frenchman’s throat worked as he swallowed. A sheen of perspiration covered his newly sun-reddened face. “You found it, did you?”

“Lady Devlin did.”

“How did you guess it was from me?”

“The handwriting matches the notations you made on Miss Tennyson’s translation of The Lady of Shalott.”

“Ah. Of course.”

They turned to walk away from the crowd and take the lane that curled toward the rolling countryside stretching away to the north. The dog trotted on ahead, tongue lolling happily, tail wagging. Sebastian said, “I hope you don’t intend to insult my intelligence by attempting to continue denying the truth.”

Arceneaux shook his head, his gaze on the herd of cows grazing placidly in the grassy, sunbaked pasture beside them. At the top of the slope, a stand of chestnuts drooped in the airless heat, their motionless leaves a vivid green swath against an achingly clear, forget-me-not blue sky. “You want the truth, my lord? The truth is, I fell in love with Gabrielle the first time I saw her. I was in the Reading Room at the museum going over some old manuscripts, and I just happened to look up and…there she was. She was standing beneath the high windows of the Reading Room, waiting for an attendant to hand her the book she wanted, and…I was lost.”

“She returned your affections?”

He gave an odd smile. “She didn’t fall in love with me at first sight, if that’s what you’re asking. But we quickly became good friends. We’d go for walks around the gardens of the museum and argue passionately about the competing visions of love in the two sections of the Roman de la rose or the reliability of the various medieval chroniclers. She was several years older than I, you know. She used to tease me about it, call me a little boy. I suspect that if I’d been her own age or older, she would never have allowed our friendship to progress the way it did. But as it was, she felt…safe with me. She told me later she’d fallen in love with me before she’d even realized what was happening.”

“Did you ask her to marry you?”

“How could I? Situated as I am, a prisoner of war?” He pointed to the mile marker in the grass beside the road. “See that boundary? Under the terms of my parole, I am allowed to go no farther.”

“Yet you did venture beyond it, the day you and Gabrielle went up to Camlet Moat.”

Sebastian expected the man to deny it again. Instead, he gave a halfhearted shrug and said, “Sometimes…sometimes men succumb to mad impulses, I suppose, of frustration and despair and a foolish kind of bravado. But…how could I ask her to be my wife? How could I ask any woman to share such a circumscribed life, perhaps forever?”

“Yet some paroled French officers do marry here.”

“They do. But they don’t marry women like Gabrielle Tennyson. I loved her too much to ask her to live in a garret with me.”

“She had no independence of her own?”

The Frenchman swung to face him. “Good God. Even if she had, what do you take me for?”

“You would hardly be the first man to live on his wife’s income.”

“I am not a fortune hunter!”

“I never said you were.” Sebastian studied the other man’s boyish, tightly held face and asked again, “Did you ask her to marry you?”

“I did not.”

Arceneaux turned away, his gaze following the dog, who now had his nose to the ground, tail flying high as he tracked some fascinating scent to the prickly edge of the hedgerow, then sat down and let out a woof of disappointment and frustration.

Sebastian said, “I think you’re still lying to me, Lieutenant.”

Arceneaux gave a ragged laugh. “Oh? And would you blame me if I were?” He flung his arm in an expansive arc that took in the vast urban sprawl stretching away to the south. “You know the mood of hysteria that has swept over the city. Tell all those people Gabrielle Tennyson had a French lover and see what sort of conclusions they leap to. They’d hang me before nightfall.”

“Were you lovers? And I mean that in every sense of the word.”

“Monsieur!” Arceneaux held his head high, his nostrils flaring with indignation, his hands curling into fists at his sides.

“I should tell you that a postmortem has been performed on Miss Tennyson’s remains.” Sebastian hesitated. “We know she was no maid.”

“Why, you—”

Sebastian flung up a forearm to block the punch Arceneaux threw at his jaw.

“Bâtard!” spat Arceneaux when Sebastian grabbed his wrist and held it.

Sebastian tightened his grip, his lips peeling away from his teeth as he leaned in close, enunciating his words with careful precision. “God damn it. Cut line, Lieutenant. Whose honor do you imagine I’ve insulted? Yours?” To suggest that a gentleman had seduced a woman he was unable or unwilling to marry was indeed a grave insult. “Because this isn’t about you, Lieutenant—”

“If you think I care about that—”

“And it isn’t about Gabrielle Tennyson’s honor, either,” Sebastian continued, ignoring the interruption. “It’s about finding the man—or woman—who killed her, and who probably killed those two little boys with her. So tell me, what do you know of Miss Tennyson’s interactions with Sir Stanley?”

“For the love of God, what are you suggesting now?” Arceneaux jerked back hard against Sebastian’s hold.

Sebastian let him go. “Take a damper, would you? I’m asking because when an attractive young woman and an older but still virile man are thrown often into each other’s company, people talk.”

“Who?” Arceneaux’s fists clenched again. “Who is suggesting there was anything between them?”

“Lady Winthrop, for one. The woman was obviously more than a little jealous of the time Miss Tennyson spent with her husband.”

The Frenchman spat in distain. “Lady Winthrop is a fool.”

“Is she?”

“She lost her husband long ago, only not to Gabrielle. She lost him to his grief over his dead children, and to his passion for the past, and to the whispered wisdom of the Druids.”

“So Miss Tennyson knew about Sir Stanley’s interest in the Druids, did she?”

“She did. I told you, they were friends—good friends. But nothing more.”

Sebastian studied the French officer’s fine-boned, scholarly face. “And you had no concerns about the woman you loved spending so much time in another man’s company?”

“I did not. Does that surprise you? Was it not your William Shakespeare who wrote of the ‘marriage of true minds’?”

“‘If this be error and upon me proved,’” quoted Sebastian, “‘I never writ…’”

“‘Nor no man ever loved.’” Arceneaux straightened his cravat and smoothed the front of his worn coat with painful dignity. “I loved Gabrielle, and I knew she loved me. I never doubted her. Not for a moment.”

“And you know of no other man in her life?”

“No!”

“Do you know anything about her previous suitors?”

Arceneaux frowned as he watched Chien prance contentedly toward them, ears cocked. “I know there was one man—a suitor who pressed her repeatedly to marry him. Nothing she said seemed to dissuade the man. It was very odd.”

“Who was this?”

“She didn’t tell me his name, although I gathered he was a friend of the family.”

“So her brother would likely know him?”

“I should think so, yes. The man was quite open in his pursuit of her. She told me he’d been dangling after her for years—even used to send her sweets and collections of love poems when she was still in the schoolroom.”

“That sounds rather…distasteful.”

“She found it so, yes.”

Chien ran one happy, panting circle around them, then dashed off again after a sparrow chirping on the branch of a nearby rambling rose.

Sebastian said, “Did Miss Tennyson ever tell you why she was so determined never to wed?”

Arceneaux watched the sparrow take flight, chattering in annoyance. Chien paused with his tail up, ears on the prick. “It is not so unusual, is it, amongst women who have decided to devote themselves to scholarship?”

Chien came trotting back to stick his cold wet nose under Sebastian’s hand. Sebastian let his hand drift down the dog’s back. There had been a time when Hero, too, had sworn never to wed. She had only agreed to become his wife because she’d discovered she carried his child—and even then he’d had the devil’s own time convincing her. He thought he could understand Miss Tennyson sticking resolutely to her choice.

Yet the sense that the Frenchman was lying remained with him.

Chapter 30

Jarvis stood at the edge of the terrace, a glass of champagne balanced in one hand as he let his gaze drift over the sweating men in tails and snowy cravats who chatted in desultory tones with gaily laughing ladies wearing filmy muslins and wide-brimmed hats. The sun was devilishly hot, the champagne warm. Normally Jarvis avoided such affairs. But this particular al fresco party was being hosted by Lady Elcott, the Prince’s latest flirt, and Jarvis was here in attendance on the Prince.

A faint apprehensive fluttering amongst the crowd drew Jarvis’s attention to a tall, familiar figure working her way across the terrace toward him. She wore a striking gown of cream silk trimmed in black and a black velvet hat with a cockade with black and cream feathers. She was not in any sense the most beautiful woman present, but she still managed to draw every eye.

“And here I thought you’d given up the frivolous amusements of society in order to join your husband in his sordid passion for murder investigations,” said Jarvis as Hero paused beside him.

“I told you my involvement in this has nothing to do with Devlin. Gabrielle Tennyson was my friend, and whoever killed her will have to answer to me.” She let her gaze, like his, slide over the ladies and gentlemen scattered across the lawn below. “Apart from which, I see no reason to view the two pursuits as mutually exclusive.”

“Society and murder, you mean? You have a point. If truth were told, I suspect you’d probably find that Lady Elcott numbers more murderers amongst her guests than you’d be likely to find down at the corner pub…although I doubt any of these worthies will ever find themselves in the dock for their crimes.”

She brought her gaze back to his face. “You do realize I now know about the Glastonbury Cross.”

“Do you?” He took a slow sip of his champagne. “And what, precisely, do you ‘know’ of it?”

His response was obviously not what she had hoped for. Her eyes narrowed, but she covered her disappointment by taking a sip of her lemonade.

He smiled. “You learned this game from me, remember? And I’m still better at it than you. Shall I tell you precisely what you know? You know that amongst the late Richard Gough’s collections, Bevin Childe found a box of ancient bones and a graven artifact he identified as the Glastonbury Cross. You also know that Miss Tennyson, when she heard of Childe’s discovery, dismissed the cross as a modern forgery and—in a rather alarming fit of unbridled choler—threw the item in question into the lake.”

Hero returned his smile with one of her own. “Actually, I’ve figured out a bit more than that. I’ve been looking into those broadsheets you were telling me about—the ones expressing a longing for the ‘once and future king’ to return and lead the English to victory by ridding us of the unsatisfactory usurpers currently on the throne.” She glanced over to where the Prince Regent, red-faced and sweating, his coat of Bath superfine straining across his back, had his face and shoulders hunched over a mounded plate of buttered crab. “I can see how the expression of such sentiments might be causing distress in certain circles, even if, as you intimated, the broadsheets were originally the work of French agents. These things can sometimes take on a life of their own. And while we like to think our own age too sophisticated to give heed to such legends, the truth is that far too many people out there are still both ignorant and woefully credulous—and all too ready to believe in a miraculous savior.”

“How true.”

A warm wind gusted up, shifting the spreading branches of an elm overhead and casting dancing patterns of light and shadow across the strong features of her face. She said, “Some six hundred years ago, Henry the Second was also troubled by restless subjects who yearned for Arthur to return from the dead and save them. Fortunately for him, the monks of Glastonbury Abbey stepped into the breach with their well-timed discovery of what they claimed were King Arthur and Guinevere’s bones.”

“Most fortuitous, was it not?” said Jarvis with a smile.

“Mmm. And how injudicious of good old King Henry the Eighth to lose such a valuable national treasure in his scramble to take over the wealth of the church, thus allowing all those nasty rumors to start up again.”

“Shockingly careless of him,” agreed Jarvis, consigning his champagne glass to a passing waiter.

“Yet history does sometimes have a way of repeating itself…or should I say, rather, that it can be made to repeat itself? Particularly if a certain courageous young woman who threatens to get in the way is removed.”

Jarvis drew a figured gold snuffbox from his pocket and flipped it open with one finger.

Hero watched him, her gaze on his face. “Gabrielle was not the type of woman to frighten easily. Yet before she died, she was afraid of someone. Someone powerful. I think she was afraid of you.”

He raised a pinch of snuff to one nostril and sniffed. “She had a unique way of showing it, wouldn’t you say?”

Hero leaned into him, the polite society smile still curving her lips, her voice low. “I think Gabrielle was right: That cross is a forgery. I think you somehow coerced Childe into claiming he had discovered the fake cross amongst Gough’s collections, in the hopes that news of its recovery would help dampen these dangerous murmurs calling for King Arthur’s return. After all, if it worked for the Plantagenets a few hundred years ago, why shouldn’t it work now?”

“Why not, indeed?”

“The one thing I haven’t figured out yet is how you convinced Childe to cooperate.”

“Really, Hero; perhaps you should consider giving up this budding interest in murder investigations and turn your hand instead to writing lurid romances.” He saw something he couldn’t quite read flicker in her eyes, and closed his snuffbox with a snap. “I told you, I did not kill your troublesome friend.”

When she remained silent, he gave a soft laugh. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Almost. But not entirely.” She tilted her head to one side. “If you considered it necessary, would you have killed her—even knowing she was my friend?”

“Without hesitation.”

“And would you tell me?”

“Before, yes. Now…I’m not so certain.”

“Because of Devlin, you mean?”

“Yes.” He let his gaze drift once more across the assembly of hot aristocrats. “And are you regretting it? Your decision to be less than forthcoming with your new husband, I mean.”

“No.”

He brought his gaze back to her face. “So sure, Hero?” he asked, and saw her color deepen.

She said, “I don’t believe you deliberately had Gabrielle killed. But can you be so certain you are not indirectly responsible?”

Father’s and daughter’s gazes locked, and held.

“Darling!”

Hero turned as Lady Elcott fluttered up to them trailing a cloud of filmy lime organza and yards of cream satin ribbon. She rested the tips of her exquisitely manicured fingers on Hero’s arm and arched her overplucked brows. “You came! What a delight! Did you bring that wicked husband of yours with you?”

“Not this time,” said Hero.

“Excuse me,” said Jarvis with a bow, moving adroitly to the Prince’s side in time to prevent him from starting on a second plate of crab.

When he looked back toward the edge of the terrace, Hero had managed to escape their hostess’s clutches and disappear.

Sebastian found Paul Gibson leaning over the stone platform in the center of the outbuilding behind his surgery. He whistled softly as he worked, his arms plunged up to the elbows in the gory distended abdomen of a cadaver so bloated and discolored and ripe that it made Sebastian gag.

“Good God,” he said, his eyes watering as the full force of the foul stench engulfed him. “Where the devil did they find that one?”

“Pulled him out of Fleet Ditch, at West Street. Caught up under the bridge, he was, and from the look of things, he was there a good long while.”

“And no one smelled him?”

“There’s an abattoir at the corner. I suppose the odors just sort of…mingled.” The surgeon grinned and reached for a rag to wipe his hands and arms. “So what can I do for you, then? And please don’t tell me you’re sending me another corpse, because I’ve already got two more to deal with when I’m through with this one.”

“No more corpses.” Retreating to the sun-blasted yard, Sebastian stood hunched over with his hands braced on his thighs as he sucked fresh air into his lungs. “Just a question, about Gabrielle Tennyson. You said she was no longer a maid. Any chance she could have been with child?”

“No trace of it that I saw.”

“Would you be able to tell for certain? I mean, even if she wasn’t very far along?”

“Let’s put it this way: If she was far enough along to know it, I’d know it.”

Sebastian straightened, then swallowed quickly as another whiff of the cadaver hit him. “Bloody hell. I don’t know how you stand it.”

Gibson gave a soft chuckle. “After a while, you don’t notice the smell.” He thought about it a moment, then added, “Usually.”

“I wasn’t talking about just the smell.”

“Ah.” The Irishman’s gaze met Sebastian’s, the merriment now gone from his face. “The thing of it is, you see, by the time I get them, they’re just so much tissue and bone, and that’s what I focus on—that’s the mystery I need to unravel. I don’t need to dwell on the fear and pain they must have experienced during whatever happened that landed them on my table. I don’t need to pry into whatever betrayal and hurt, or anger and despair was in their lives. That’s what you do. And to tell you the truth, Devlin, I don’t know how you do it.”

When Sebastian remained silent, Gibson rested a hand on his shoulder, then turned back toward the stone outbuilding and its bloated, decaying occupant.

“Was he murdered?” Sebastian called after him. “The man on your table in there, I mean.”

Gibson paused in the open doorway to look back at him. “Not this one. Tumbled into the water drunk and drowned, most likely. I doubt he even knew what hit him—which is probably not a bad way to go, if you’ve got to go.”

“I suppose it does beat some of the alternatives.”

Gibson grunted. “You think Gabrielle Tennyson and her young cousins were killed by a man who was afraid he’d planted a babe in her belly?”

Sebastian started to remind him that no one knew for certain yet that either Alfred or George Tennyson was dead. Then he let it go. Surely it was only a matter of time before one of the search parties or some farmer out walking with his dog came upon the children’s small bodies half submerged in a ditch or hidden beneath the leaf mold in a hollow left by a downed tree?

He shook his head. “I don’t know. At this point, anything’s possible.”

“Poor girl,” said Gibson with a sigh. “Poor, poor girl.”

The setting sun was painting purple and orange streaks low on the western horizon by the time Sebastian reached the Adelphi Buildings overlooking the Thames. He was mounting the steps to the Tennyson town house when he heard his name called.

“Lord Devlin.”

Turning, he saw Gabrielle’s brother striding across the street toward him. “Have you some news?” asked Hildeyard Tennyson, his strained features suffused with an agonized hope.

“I’m sorry; no.”

Tennyson’s lips parted with the pain of disappointment. He’d obviously been out again looking for the children; dust layered his coat and top boots, and his face was slick with sweat and tinged red by too many hours spent beneath a hot sun.

“You’re still searching the chase?” asked Sebastian as they turned to walk along the terrace overlooking the Thames.

“The woodland and the surrounding farms and fields, yes. But so far, we’ve found nothing. Not a trace. It’s as if the children vanished into the mist.” The barrister blew out a long, ragged breath. “Simply…vanished.”

Sebastian stared off over the river, where the sinking sun spilled a wash of gold across the water. Barges loaded with coal rode low and dark in the water; a wherryman rowing his fare across to Lambeth plied his oars. The splash of his wooden panels threw up arcs of droplets that glistened like diamonds in the dying light.

Tennyson followed Sebastian’s gaze, the circles beneath his eyes dark as he watched the wherryman’s progress across the river. “I know everyone, from the magistrates and constables to the farmers and workmen I’ve hired, thinks the boys must be dead. I hear them speaking amongst themselves. They all think they’re looking for a shallow grave. But they don’t let on to me.”

Sebastian kept his gaze on the water.

After a moment, Tennyson said, “My cousin—the boys’ father—is on his way down from Lincolnshire. He’s not well, you know. I just hope to God the journey doesn’t kill him.” He hesitated, then added, “Or the inevitable grief.”

Sebastian found it difficult to meet the other man’s strained, desperate eyes. “You told me the other day your sister had no interest in marriage.”

“She didn’t, no,” said the barrister slowly, obviously struggling to follow Sebastian’s train of thought. “She quite fixed her mind against it at an early age. Our father blamed her attitude on the influence of the likes of the Misses Berry and Catherine Talbot. But the truth is, Gabrielle was far more interested in Roman ruins and the inscriptions on medieval tombstones than in bride clothes or layettes.”

“Nevertheless, she must have attracted some suitors over the years.”

“Some, yes. But without encouragement, few stayed around for long.”

“Do you remember any who were more persistent than the others?”

Tennyson thought about it a moment. “Well, I suppose Childe held out longer than most. But— Good God; no one could suspect him of such a deed.”

“Childe? You mean, Bevin Childe?”

“Yes. You know him? Frankly, I would have thought if anyone had a chance with Gabrielle, it would be Childe. I mean, the man has both a comfortable independence and a passion for antiquities that matched her own. She’d known him since she was still in the schoolroom—indeed, he claims he first fell in love with her when she was little more than a child in pigtails and a torn flounce. But she would have none of him.”

“How did he take her rejection of his suit?”

A touch of amusement lit up the barrister’s haggard features. “Frankly? With incredulity. No one could ever accuse Childe of having a low opinion of himself. At first he was convinced she was merely displaying what he called ‘a becoming degree of maidenly modesty.’ Then, when he was finally brought to understand that she was not so much shy as merely disinterested, he credited her lack of enthusiasm to an imperfect understanding of his worth. I’d never before realized what an insufferable bore the man could be. I’m afraid he made quite a cake of himself.”

“When did he finally get the hint?”

“That his suit was hopeless? I’m not certain he ever did. She was complaining about him shortly before I left for Kent.”

“Complaining about his disparagement of her theories about Camlet Moat, you mean?”

“No. About his continued refusal to accept her rejection of his suit as final.”

Chapter 31

Bevin Childe was feeling his way down the unlit stairs from his rooms in St. James’s Street when Sebastian stepped out of the shadows of the landing to grab the scholar by the back of his coat with both fists and swing him around to slam him face-first against the wall.

“Merciful heavens,” bleated the antiquary as his protuberant belly thwumped into the paneling. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. My purse is in the inner pocket of my coat. You’re welcome to it, sir, although I must warn you that you will find there scant reward for this brutish act of violence upon my person.”

“I am not interested in your bloody purse,” growled Sebastian.

“Devlin?” The antiquary went limp with relief. “Is that you?” He attempted to twist around but found himself frustrated when Sebastian tightened his grip. “Good God; I imagined you a cutpurse.” He stiffened with gathering outrage. “What is the meaning of this?”

Sebastian kept his voice low and deadly calm. “I should perhaps have warned you that when it comes to murder, I am not a patient man. And you, Mr. Childe, are sorely trying my patience.”

“There are laws in this country, you know. You can’t simply go around accosting gentlemen in their lodgings. It’s not legal. It’s not right. It’s not—not the done thing!”

Sebastian resisted the urge to laugh out loud. Instead, he leaned into the antiquary until the man’s plump face was squished sideways against the elegantly paneled wainscoting. “You didn’t tell me you were a suitor for Miss Tennyson’s hand. A disgruntled and annoyingly persistent suitor.”

“Well, it’s not the sort of thing a gentleman does go around talking about, now, is it? I mean, a man has his pride, don’t you know?”

“So you’re saying your pride was offended by Miss Tennyson’s rejection of your suit?”

Childe quivered, as if suddenly becoming aware of the pit yawning at his feet. “I don’t know if I’d say that, exactly.”

“Then what would you say? Exactly?”

“Women such as Miss Tennyson must be delicately wooed. But I’m a persistent man. I’ve no doubt my suit would eventually have prospered.”

“You’ve no doubt.”

“None.” Childe’s voice had grown in confidence to the point of sounding smug.

“So you would have me believe you didn’t know she’d recently fallen in love with a dashing young cavalry officer she met at the British Museum?”

“What?” Childe tried again to twist around, but Sebastian held him fast. “I don’t believe it! Who? Who is this man? This is nonsense. You’re making that up. It’s impossible.”

“You’d better hope I don’t discover that you did know.”

Childe blanched. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” said Sebastian, shifting his grip, “that there is a certain kind of man who doesn’t take kindly to the realization that the woman he’s decided to honor by making her his wife has scorned his courtship not because she was shy and needed to be ‘delicately wooed,’ but because she quite frankly preferred another man to him. What does it take to drive a man like you to violence, Childe? Hmm? A threat to your scholarly reputation? Or an affront to your manhood? How would you react, I wonder, if the very same woman who’d humiliated you as a suitor then threatened to destroy your credibility as an antiquary? Would that be enough to compel you to murder?”

Perspiration glistened on the man’s forehead and clustered in droplets on the end of his nose. A foul odor of sweat and fear rose from his person, and his voice, when he spoke, was a high-pitched crack. “This is madness. Miss Tennyson and I disagreed about the authenticity of the cross in Gough’s collection; that is all. My credibility as an antiquary was never threatened in any way.”

“Then why—”

Sebastian broke off at the sound of the street door opening below. Men’s voices, slurred by drink, echoed up the stairwell. He loosed his hold on the antiquary and took a step back.

“I’m not through with you. When I find out more, I’ll be back. And if I discover you’ve been lying to me, I can guarantee you’re going to regret it.”

Sebastian returned to Brook Street to find Hero perusing an improving pamphlet written by one Ezekiel Smyth and entitled Satan, Druidism, and the Path to Everlasting Damnation.

“Good God,” he said. “What are you reading?”

She laughed and cast it aside. “Believe it or not, this piece of sanctimonious drivel was written by George and Alfred Tennyson’s aunt, Mary Bourne.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, but I am. She also attends a weekly Bible study class with one Reverend Samuel at the Savoy Chapel. Another member of the study group is none other than Lady Winthrop.”

He reached for the pamphlet and flipped through it. “Now, that’s interesting.”

“It is, isn’t it?” She looked over at him, her eyes narrowing. “You’ve split the shoulder seam of your coat; what have you been doing?”

He glanced down at his coat. “Ah. I hadn’t noticed. It could have been when Lieutenant Arceneaux tried to draw my cork for insulting the honor of the woman he loved—”

“How did you do that?”

“By asking if he lay with her. He says he did not, incidentally.”

“Do you believe him?”

“No. He did, however, provide me with one bit of information which proved to be valuable: It seems Mr. Bevin Childe was a suitor for Miss Tennyson’s hand—an annoying suitor who refused to take no for an answer. According to Hildeyard, the man has been in love with Gabrielle since she was a child.”

Hero stared at him. “Did you say, since she was a child?”

“Yes; why?”

But she simply shook her head and refused to be drawn any further.

Thursday, 6 August

By 9:50 the next morning, Hero was seated in her carriage outside the British Museum, a sketch pad open on her lap and her pencils sharpened and at the ready.

She had no illusions about her artistic abilities. She was able to draw a fairly credible, easily recognizable likeness of an individual. But her sketches were competent, nothing more. If she were a true artist, she could have sketched Bevin Childe from memory. As it was, that was beyond her.

And so she waited in the cool morning shade cast by the tall fronts of the town houses lining Great Russell Street. At exactly 9:58, a hackney pulled up outside the Pied Piper. His movements slow and ponderous in that stately way of his, Mr. Bevin Childe descended from the carriage, then stood on the flagway to pay his fare.

He cast one disinterested glance at the yellow-bodied carriage waiting near the museum, then strode across the street, his brass-handled walking stick tucked up under one arm.

Within the shadows of her carriage, Hero’s pencil scratched furiously, capturing in bold strokes the essence of his likeness.

As if somehow aware of her intense scrutiny, he paused for a moment outside the museum’s gatehouse, the high points of his shirt collar digging into his plump cheeks as he turned his head to glance around. Then he disappeared from her view.

She spent the next ten minutes refining her sketch, adding details and nuances. Then she ordered her coachman to drive to Covent Garden.

The man’s jaw sagged. “I beg your pardon, m’lady, but did you say ‘Covent Garden’?”

“I did.”

He bowed. “Yes, m’lady.”

Chapter 32

Sebastian was alone at his breakfast table reading the latest reports on the Americans’ invasion of Canada when a knock sounded at the entrance. He heard his majordomo, Morey, cross to open the front door; then a dog’s enthusiastic barking echoed in the hall.

Sebastian raised his head.

“Chien! No!” someone shouted. “Come back!”

Morey hissed. “Sir! I really must insist that you control your— Oh, merciful heavens.”

A scrambling clatter of nails sounded on the marble floor in the hall, and a familiar black and brown mongrel burst into the room, tail wagging and tongue lolling in confident expectation of an enthusiastic reception.

“So you’re proud of yourself, are you?” said Sebastian, setting aside his paper.

“Chien!” Lieutenant Philippe Arceneaux appeared in the doorway. “I do most profusely beg your pardon, my lord. Chien, heel!”

“It’s all right,” Sebastian told the anxious majordomo hovering behind the French officer. “The Lieutenant and his ill-mannered hound are both known to me. And no, you are not to take that as an invitation to further liberties,” he warned as the dog pawed at his gleaming Hessians. “Mar the shine on my boots, and Calhoun will nail your hide to the stable door. And if you think that an idle threat, you have obviously not yet made the acquaintance of my valet.”

“He might be more inclined to believe you,” observed Arceneaux with a smile, “if you were not pulling his ears.”

“Perhaps. Do come in and sit down, Lieutenant. May I offer you some breakfast? And no, that question was not addressed to you, you hell-born hound, so you can cease eyeing my ham with such soulful intent.”

“Thank you, my lord, but I have already eaten—we have both eaten,” he added, frowning at the dog. “Shame on you, Chien; you have the manners of a tatterdemalion. Come away from there.”

The dog settled on his hindquarters beside Sebastian’s chair and whined.

“Obedient too, I see,” observed Sebastian, draining his tankard.

“He likes you.”

“He likes my ham.”

Arceneaux laughed. Then his smile faded. “I have brought him with me because I have a request to make of you.”

Sebastian looked up from scratching behind the dog’s ears. “Oh?”

“It seems to me that if I could take Chien up to Camlet Moat, there’s a good possibility he might pick up some trace of Alfred and George, something to tell us where they’ve gone or what has happened to them. Something the authorities have missed. He was very fond of the children.”

Sebastian was silent for a moment, considering the implications of the request. “Sounds like a reasonable idea. But why come to me?”

“Because I am not allowed to journey more than a mile beyond the boundaries of the city. But if you were to square it with the authorities and go with us…”

Sebastian studied Arceneaux’s fine-boned, earnest face, with its boyish scattering of freckles and wide, sky blue eyes. “Why not? It’s worth a try.” He pushed to his feet. “See what you can do to keep your faithful hound out of the ham while I order my curricle brought round.”

A bored clerk at the Admiralty, the government department in charge of all prisoners of war, grudgingly granted permission for Arceneaux to leave London in Sebastian’s custody. As they left the crowded streets of the city behind, Sebastian let his hands drop; the chestnuts leapt forward, and Chien scrambled upright on the seat between the two men, his nose lifted and eyes half closed in blissful appreciation of the rushing wind.

Sebastian eyed the mongrel with a healthy dose of skepticism. “Personally, I wouldn’t have said he numbered any bloodhounds amongst his diverse and doubtless disreputable ancestry.”

Arceneaux looped an arm over the happy animal’s shoulders. “Perhaps not. But the boys used to play hide-and-seek with him, and he was always very good at finding them.”

Sebastian steadied his horses. “When you drove Miss Tennyson and the lads out to the moat last week, did you take Chien with you?”

“I never said I—”

“Just answer the bloody question.”

Arceneaux let out a huff of resignation. “We did, yes.” A faint smile of remembrance lightened his features. “Chien leapt into the moat after a duck and then rolled around in the loose dirt beside the trenches. Gabrielle told him he was not welcome up there ever again.”

The Frenchman fell silent, his grip on the dog tightening as he stared off across the sun-drenched fields, his own thoughts doubtless lost in the past. It wasn’t until they had reached the overgrown woods of the chase that he said, “I’ve been thinking and thinking, trying to come up with some reason for her to have taken the boys there again this past Sunday.” He shook his head. “But I can’t.”

“Did you know that Bevin Childe had in his possession a lead cross that was said to have come from the graves of King Arthur and Guinevere?”

“Mon dieu. You can’t mean the Glastonbury Cross?”

“That’s it. Childe claims to have found it along with a box of old bones amongst the collections he’s been cataloging at Gough Hall. But Miss Tennyson was convinced it was a recent forgery.”

“Is that what she was talking about? But…if that’s all it was, why wouldn’t she have told me?”

“I was hoping perhaps you could help explain that. I gather the controversy surrounding the discovery of Arthur’s grave in the twelfth century is considerable?”

Arceneaux nodded. “The problem is, it all seems just a shade too tidy. At the time, the Anglo-Norman kings were facing considerable opposition to their attempts to conquer Wales, and much of that resistance used Arthur as a rallying cry. The country people still believed in the old legends—that Arthur had never really died and would one day return from the mystical Isle of Avalon to expel the forces of evil.”

“With the Normans and the Plantagenet kings being identified as the forces of evil?”

“Basically, yes. The thing of it was, you see, there was no grave anyone could point to and say, ‘Here lies King Arthur, dead and buried.’ That made it easy for people to believe that he hadn’t actually died—and could therefore someday return. So the grave’s discovery was a true boon to the Plantagenets. They could then say, ‘See, Arthur is dead. Here is his grave. He’s not coming back. We are his rightful heirs.’”

“Why Glastonbury Abbey?”

“Well, at one time the site of Glastonbury actually was a misty island surrounded by marshland, which helps give some credibility to the association with Avalon. But what makes the monks’ discovery particularly suspect is that at the time they claimed to have found Arthur’s grave, the abbey church had just burned down and their chief patron and benefactor—Henry the Second himself—had died. They needed money, and what better way to increase their pilgrim traffic than with the discovery of the burial site of King Arthur and his queen?”

“In other words, it was all a hoax.”

“It’s tempting to see it that way. The problem is, if it was simply a scheme to increase the abbey’s revenue, then the monks didn’t do a very good job of advertising their find. And the way the burial was described—sixteen feet down, in a hollowed-out log—sounds oddly appropriate to a sixth-century burial. One would have thought that if they were manufacturing a hoax, the monks in their ignorance would have come up with something a bit more…” He hesitated, searching for the right word.

“Regal?” suggested Sebastian, guiding his horses onto the narrow track that led to the moat.

“Yes.”

“I’m told the cross disappeared during the Commonwealth.”

“It did, although it was reportedly seen early in the last century.”

“In other words, Bevin Childe could conceivably have found the Glastonbury Cross amongst the collection he’s been cataloging—leaving aside the question of whether it was actually manufactured in the twelfth century or the sixth.”

“Theoretically, I suppose he could have.”

“So why was Miss Tennyson convinced it was a recent forgery?”

Arceneaux looked out over the shady glade surrounding the moat. “I don’t know. I gather Childe believes the cross to be genuine—at least to the twelfth century?”

“So he claims.”

“Where is it? Would it be possible for me to see it?”

Sebastian drew up near the land bridge to the island, the horses snorting and sidling nervously. Tom jumped down and ran to their heads.

“Unfortunately, no. Childe claims Miss Tennyson threw it into Gough Hall’s ornamental lake the Friday before she died.”

“She did what?”

Sebastian dropped to the ground, his boots sinking into the soft earth. “I gather she had something of a temper?”

“She did, yes.” Arceneaux climbed down more carefully, the dog bounding after him. “But it still seems a strange thing to have done.”

Sebastian started to say, “Maybe she—” Then he broke off, his gaze caught by a dark, motionless shape floating at the edge of the moat’s stagnant green waters. The dog stopped in his tracks, the fur on his back rising as his lips pulled away from his teeth and a deep, throaty growl rumbled in his chest.

Arceneaux rested a hand on Chien’s head, his own voice a whisper. “What is it?”

“Stay here,” said Sebastian, sliding down the embankment to the water’s edge.

The man’s body floated facedown in the algae-scummed water, arms flung stiffly to its sides. Splashing into the murky shallows, Sebastian fisted his hand around the collar of the brown corduroy coat and hauled the body up onto the bank, the bracken and ferns crushing beneath his boot heels and the dead man’s sodden, squelching weight.

“Is he dead?” Arceneaux asked, holding the dog at the top of the ancient earthen works. “Who is it?”

Sebastian hesitated a moment, his breath coming uncomfortably hard. The man’s clothes were rough, his boots worn, his golden red hair worn a bit too long. Hunkering down beside the body, Sebastian slowly rolled it over.

The man flopped onto his back with a sodden plop, arms flailing outward, to reveal a pale, dripping face and blankly staring eyes. A water-blurred stain discolored the torn, charred front of his leather jerkin and smock.

Sebastian sank back on his heels, one hand coming up to adjust his hat lower over his eyes as he blew out a long breath. “It’s Rory Forster.”

Chapter 33

The local magistrate proved to be a foul-tempered, heavy-featured squire named John Richards.

Well into middle age and running comfortably to fat, Squire John was far more interested in his hounds and the joint his cook was preparing for his dinner than in all the sordid, tedious requirements of a murder investigation. When Tom—upon discovering that Sir Stanley and his lady had removed to London for a few days—carried Sebastian’s message to the Squire, the tiger had a hard time convincing the man to leave his cow pasture.

The Squire now stood on the shady bank of the moat, one beefy hand sliding over his ruddy, sagging jowls as he stared down at the waterlogged body at his feet. “Well, hell,” he muttered, his brows beetling into a fierce scowl. “Truth be told, I was more than half convinced your tiger was making up the whole tale when he came to me. I mean, two bodies found floating in Camlet Moat in one week? Impossible, I’d have said. But here’s another one, all right.”

“At least this one’s local,” observed Sebastian.

The Squire drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his bulbous nose. “But that’s the worst part of it, you see. Can’t imagine Bow Street interesting themselves in the murder of some blacksmith’s son from Cockfosters.” A hopeful gleam crept into his watery gray eyes. “Unless, of course, you think this might have something to do with that young gentlewoman we found here last Sunday?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised but what it does.”

The Squire brightened. “I’ll send one of the lads off to London right away.” A flicker of movement drew his attention across the moat, to where Philippe Arceneaux was methodically crisscrossing the island with Chien bounding enthusiastically at his side. The Squire wiped his nose again, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Who did you say that fellow was?”

“My dog handler.”

“That’s your dog?”

“It is.”

“Huh. Fellow’s got a Frenchy look about him, if you ask me. They’re saying it was a Frenchman who killed that gentlewoman, you know. What is this fellow doing with that dog, exactly?”

“I was hoping the dog might pick up some trace of the missing Tennyson children.”

When the Squire still looked doubtful, Sebastian added, “It’s a…a Strand hound. They’re famous for their ability to track missing persons. This one is particularly well trained and talented.”

“Well trained, you say?” asked the Squire, just as Chien flushed up a rabbit and tore off after it through the underbrush.

Behind him, Arceneaux shouted, “Chien! À moi. Imbécile.”

“He is sometimes distracted by the local fauna,” Sebastian admitted.

The Squire sniffed. “Best keep him away from Forster here. Don’t reckon Bow Street would fancy dog prints all over the place.”

Sebastian hunkered down again to study the dead man’s charred clothing and gaping raw wound. The flies were already busy, and he brushed them away with his hand. He didn’t need Gibson to tell him that the man had been shot—and at close quarters. But whatever other secrets the dead man had to reveal would need to wait for the anatomist’s examination. After a moment, Sebastian said, “I’m told Forster married a local widow this past year.”

“That’s right. Rachel Clark, of Hollyhock Farm. I sent one of the lads over there to warn her, just in case what your tiger was telling me turned out to be true.” The Squire sniffed again. “She could’ve done a sight better, if you ask me. Very prosperous property, Hollyhock Farm. But then, there’s no denying Forster was a handsome man. And when it comes to good-looking men, it’s a rare woman who doesn’t make a fool of herself.” The Squire’s lips pursed as he shifted his brooding gaze to Sebastian. “Course, it’s even worse when they deck themselves out like a Bond Street beau and drive a fancy sporting carriage.”

Sebastian cleared his throat and pushed to his feet. “Yes, well…I’d best remove my Strand hound and his handler before they contaminate the scene.” He motioned to Arceneaux, who dragged Chien from where he was now intently following the hopping progress of a toad and hauled the reluctant canine off toward the curricle.

For one moment, Sebastian considered as a courtesy telling the Squire of his intention to visit the twice-widowed Rachel of Hollyhock Farm. Then the Squire added darkly, “And a title, of course. Just let a man have looks and a title, and when it comes to the ladies, it doesn’t matter what sort of a dastardly reputation the sot might have.”

Sebastian touched his hat and bowed. “Squire John.”

As they drove away, he was aware of the Squire still standing at the water’s edge, the shade of the ancient grove pooling heavily around him, one meaty hand swiping the air before his face as he batted at the thickening cloud of flies.

“I would like to apologize,” said Arceneaux stiffly, one hand resting around the damp, happy dog as they drove toward Hollyhock Farm. “I put you through all this, and for what? Chien found no trace of the boys. Nothing.”

Sebastian glanced over at him. “It was worth a try.”

The Frenchman stared straight ahead, his face troubled. “None of this makes any sense. What could have happened to them? How could they have simply disappeared like this? And why?”

But it was a question Sebastian could not begin to answer.

Hero found the area around Covent Garden’s vast square crowded with a swarm of fruit and vegetable sellers. Vendors’ cries of “Ripe cher-ries, sixpence a pound” and “Buy my primroses, two bunches a penny” echoed through the narrow streets; the scent of freshly cut flowers and damp earth and unwashed, closely packed bodies hung heavily in the air. As they pushed their way closer to the market, the coachman was forced to check his horses to a crawl.

She kept her gaze focused straight ahead, ignoring the pleading cries of the urchins who leapt up to press their faces against her carriage windows and the roar of laughter from the ragged crowd gathered around a Punch and Judy show on the church steps. By day, the classical piazza laid out before St. Paul’s by Inigo Jones was the site of London’s largest produce market. But later, when the shadows of evening stretched across the cobblestones and the square’s motley collection of stalls and lean-tos closed for the night, willing ladies in tawdry satins with plunging necklines and husky crooning voices would emerge to loiter beneath the colonnades and soaring porticos and hiss their lewd invitations to passersby.

Slowly inching through the throng, the carriage finally swung onto King Street and then drew up before a once grand mansion now divided into lodgings. Hero lowered her hat’s veil and waited while her footman knocked on the house’s warped, cracked door. It wasn’t until the door was opened and the large, familiar form of Molly O’Keefe, the house’s mistress, filled the entrance that the footman came to let down the carriage steps.

The two women had come to know each other months earlier, when Hero was researching a theory on the economic causes of the recent explosion in the number of prostitutes in the city. Clucking at the sight of her, Molly whisked Hero into a dilapidated hall with stained, once grand paneling and a broken chandelier that dangled precariously overhead, then slammed the door in the faces of her gawking neighbors. “Yer ladyship! Sakes alive, I ne’er thought to be seeing ye again.”

“Molly, I need your help,” said Hero, and drew the portrait of Bevin Childe from her sketch pad.

Chapter 34

True to its name, Hollyhock Farm proved to be a rambling brick cottage with a low slate roof and white-painted windows surrounded by a riot of hollyhocks and lavender and fat pink cabbage roses as big as Sebastian’s fist. At the edge of the garden curled a lazy stream spanned by an old, honeysuckle-draped wooden bridge. A flock of white geese waddling along the stream’s banks looked up, the warm wind ruffling their feathers, their necks arching in alarm as Chien stood up on the curricle’s seat and let out a woof in their direction.

“Do try to keep that hell-born hound out of the geese, will you?” said Sebastian, dropping lightly to the gravel verge outside the garden.

“Chien,” whispered Arceneaux, pulling the dog’s head around. “Behave.”

Sebastian had expected to find the widow of Hollyhock Farm surrounded in her grief by family and neighbors. But she was alone in her garden, her arms wrapped across her chest, the skirts of her simple muslin gown brushing the trailing plantings of lady’s mantle and alyssum as she paced the cottage’s flagstone paths. She was obviously past the first blush of youth, perhaps even a year or two older than her dead husband, but still slim and attractive, with softly waving golden hair and a sweet, heart-shaped face.

“Mrs. Forster,” said Sebastian, drawing up a few feet away from her. “If I might have a word with you?”

The face she turned to him was dry-eyed, a pale mask of shock and grief and something else—something that looked suspiciously like relief, as if she were slowly wakening from a seductive nightmare. She nodded and swallowed hard, her throat cording with the effort. “They’re saying Rory might be dead. That his body was found by some London lord out at Camlet Moat. Is it true, then?”

“It is, yes. I’m sorry. Please allow me to offer my condolences on the loss of your husband.”

She sucked in a deep breath that shuddered her chest. But otherwise she struck him as remarkably composed. “Thank you.”

“I know the timing is awkward, but would you mind if I asked a few questions?”

She shook her head and drew in another of those shaky breaths. “No. Although I don’t know what I can tell you that would be of any use to you. I didn’t even know Rory was going out to the moat this morning. He said he was planning to work on the roof of the cow shed. Lord knows it’s needed mending these past six weeks or more.”

“I would imagine things have been rather neglected around the farm, with your husband working for Sir Stanley at Camlet Moat.”

She turned to walk along the path, Sebastian beside her. “I told him he was going to need to give up that nonsense for the harvest. But…”

“He was reluctant to quit?”

“He said he could hire Jack Williams to take his place around here for half what he was making with Sir Stanley. But a farm needs more than hired men. It’s one of the reasons I—” She broke off and bit her lip.

It’s one of the reasons I married him. The unsaid words hung in the air.

Pausing beside a rose-covered arch, she let her gaze drift to the slowly sliding waters of the stream. She was obviously better bred than her husband, her farm prosperous. She would have been quite a catch for a blacksmith’s younger son.

Sebastian drew up beside her. “Sir Stanley has given up the excavations and filled in the trenches,” he said. “So why would your husband go out to the moat this morning?”

She threw him a quick glance. Then her gaze skittered away, but not before he saw the leap of fear in her eyes.

“Did he go out to the moat last Sunday?” asked Sebastian.

“Rory? Oh, no. He was here with me, all night.”

“He told you to say that, didn’t he?”

She shook her head, her face pinched.

“You can’t do your husband any harm by admitting the truth now. He’s dead. But the more we know, the better chance we’ll have of finding who killed him.” Sebastian hesitated, then said again, “He went to the moat Sunday, didn’t he?”

Her voice was a painful whisper. “He warned me not to tell anyone. Made me swear to keep his secret.”

And probably threatened to beat her if she let the truth slip, Sebastian thought. Aloud, he said, “What time did he leave the farm last Sunday?”

She pressed a tight fist against her lips. “Not long before sunset. Even though it was Sunday and there wasn’t likely to be anyone about, he still thought it best to wait till late.”

“Do you know why he went?”

Her lip curled. “On account of the treasure, of course. He was mad for it. Much rather dig useless holes in the dirt out there than dig the new well we needed here.”

“What time did he come home?”

“About midnight, I suppose. All wet, he was. Said he’d lost his footing and slipped into the moat. I was that put out with him. But he told me to shut up. Said we were going to be rich—that I was going to have fine silks and satins, and my own carriage, just like Squire John’s lady.”

“Do you think he actually found something?”

“If he did, he didn’t come home with any of it; I can tell you that much.” A faint hint of color touched her cheeks. “I checked his pockets, you see, after he fell asleep. Of course, he could’ve hid it someplace again, before he came in.” She paused, then added, almost bitterly, “And now he’s gone and got himself killed.”

“Had you noticed him behaving in any way out of the ordinary these last few days?”

She thought about it a moment, then shook her head. “Not unless you count going into London yesterday.”

“Did he often go to London?”

“Never knew him to do it before.”

A shout drew Sebastian’s attention to the stream, where Chien could be seen advancing on the geese in a low crouch, his tail tucked between his legs, his eyes fixed and focused.

Sebastian said, “Did he tell you why he went?”

“No. Although he was in a rare good mood when he came home. I hadn’t seem him in such high spirits since the days when he was courting me.” At the memory, a softness came over her features, then faded.

Arceneaux’s voice drifted up from the banks of the stream. “Chien.”

Sebastian asked quickly, “Is there anything else you can tell me that might help?”

She shook her head just as Arceneaux shouted, “Chien! Mon dieu. No!”

The message from Molly O’Keefe reached Hero late that afternoon.

She returned to Covent Garden just as the slanting, golden light of early evening was beginning to flood the mean, narrow streets. The residents of Molly’s lodging house were already stirring.

“What have you found?” Hero asked Molly as a raucous trill of laughter floated from somewhere on the first floor above and two blowsy women pushed past them toward the lodging house door. The lodging house was not a brothel, although there was no denying that many of its occupants were Cyprians. But these women took their customers elsewhere, to establishments known as “accommodation houses.”

One of the Cyprians, a black-haired woman in feathers and a diaphanous silver-spangled gown, smacked her lips and cocked one hip provocatively at Hero. “Shopping for a bit o’ muslin to raise yer old sod’s flag, are ye, me lady? Bet I can do the trick. Do you like to watch?”

“Thank you, but no,” said Hero.

“Lizzy, ye foulmouthed trollop,” hissed Molly, flapping her apron at the woman. “Ye mind yer bloody manners and get out o’ here.”

Lizzy laughed and disappeared into the night with a jaunty backward wave of one white hand.

“I’ve a girl by the name of Charlotte Roach waiting for ye in me sitting room,” said Molly, drawing Hero toward the rear of the house. “Although if truth be told, I’m not certain a gently bred lady such as yerself should be hearing wot she’s got to say.”

“Nonsense,” said Hero. “You should know by now that I am not so easily shocked.”

Molly paused outside the closed door, her broad, homely face troubled. “Ye ain’t heard wot she’s got to say yet.”

Charlotte Roach couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old. She had a thin, sharp-boned face and straw-colored hair and pale, shrewd eyes rimmed by short, sparse blond lashes. Her tattered gown of pink and white striped satin had obviously been made for someone both older and larger, and then cut down, its neckline plunging to expose most of the girl’s small, high breasts. She sat in an unladylike sprawl on a worn settee beside Molly’s empty hearth, a glass of what looked like gin in one hand, her lips crimped into a tight, hard line that didn’t soften when Hero walked into the room. She looked Hero up and down in frank appraisal, then glanced over at Molly. “This the gentry mort ye was tellin’ me about?”

“I am,” said Hero.

Charlotte brought her gaze back to Hero’s face, one grubby finger reaching out to tap the sketch of Childe lying on the settee beside her. “’E yer Jerry sneak?”

“If by that you mean to ask if the man in that sketch is my husband, then the answer is no.” With slow deliberation, Hero drew five guineas from her reticule and laid them in a row across the surface of the table before her. “This is for you…if you tell me what I want to know. But don’t even think of trying to sell me Grub Street news, for I’ll know a lie if I hear it.”

A flash of amusement shone in the girl’s pale, hard eyes. “What ye want to know, then?”

“When was the last time you saw this gentleman?”

The girl took a long swallow of her gin. “That’d be goin’ on two years ago, now. I ain’t seen ’im since I was at the Lambs’ Pen, in Chalon Lane.”

Hero cast a quick glance at Molly. She had heard of the Lambs’ Pen, a discreet establishment near Portland Square that catered to men who liked their whores young—very young. Two years earlier, Charlotte Roach couldn’t have been more than thirteen. Even though the girl was only confirming what Hero had already suspected, she felt her flesh crawl. With effort she said, “Go on.”

“’E used t’come into the Lambs’ Pen the first Monday o’ the month. Always the first Monday, and at nine o’clock exactly. Ye coulda set yer watch by ’im. A real rum duke, ’e was.” Charlotte sucked her lower lip between her teeth, her gaze drifting back to the shiny guineas laid in a row across the top of the table. “Anythin’ else ye want t’ ’ear?”

Swallowing the urge to simply give the girl the money and leave, Hero went to sink into the broken-down chair opposite her. “I want to hear everything you know about him.”

Chapter 35

Hero paused at the entrance to the Reading Room of the British Museum, her gaze sweeping the rows of clerics, physicians, barristers, and antiquaries hunched over their books and manuscripts. The room was dark, with rush matting on the floor and a dusty collection of stuffed birds that seemed to peer down at her from above.

Bevin Childe was not there.

“Miss. I say, miss.” A bantam-sized, plumpish attendant in a rusty black coat and yellowing cravat bore down on her, his hands raised in horror, his voice hushed to a hissing whisper. “This room is not part of the museum tour. Only registered readers are allowed in the library. You must leave. Leave at once.”

Hero let her gaze sweep over the little man with a look that not only stopped him in his tracks, but also caused him to stagger back a step. “I am Lady Devlin,” she said calmly. “Lord Jarvis’s daughter.”

“Lord J—” The man broke off, swallowed, and gave a shallow titter. “Oh…Lady Devlin, of course!” He bowed so low his bulbous nose practically touched his knees. “How—how may we assist you?”

“I require a word with Mr. Bevin Childe.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Childe is in one of our private research rooms.”

“Then if you would be so kind as to direct me to him?”

“I’m afraid Mr. Childe does not like to be disturbed when— I mean, of course, Lady Devlin. This way, please.”

He led her down a cramped corridor and around a dogleg to pause before a closed, peeling door. “Mr. Childe is here, my lady,” he whispered, his somewhat prominent front teeth digging into his lower lip. “Shall I announce you?”

“Thank you, but I’ll announce myself. You may leave us.”

A wave of relief wafted across his lumpy features. “Yes, my lady. If you should require anything—anything—please do not hesitate to call.”

Hero waited until he had bowed himself back down the corridor. Then she turned the door’s handle and quietly pushed it open.

The room was small, lit only by a high dusty window, and hemmed in by piles of crates and overflowing shelves. Seated in a straight-backed chair, Bevin Childe had his head bent over the tattered pages of a manuscript held open on the table before him by a velvet-covered, sausage-shaped weight. He had a pen in one hand and was running the index finger of the other down a row of figures. Without even looking up, he said tartly, “You are disturbing my concentration. As you can see, this room is already engaged. Kindly remove yourself at once.”

Hero shut the door behind her and leaned against it.

Childe continued frowning down at the figures, apparently secure in the assumption that he was once more alone. She walked across the room and drew out the chair opposite him.

“Did you not hear what I said?” His head jerked up. His myopic gaze focused on Hero and he dropped his pen, the loaded nib splattering a blot of ink across the pages of his notes. “Good heavens. Not you again.”

Smiling, she settled herself in the chair and leaned forward, her elbows on the table, her chin propped on her hands. “What a nice, private place for a comfortable little chat. How fortuitous.”

He half rose to his feet.

“Sit down,” said Hero.

He sank back into his seat, hands splayed flat on the surface of the table before him, lips puckering out in a scowl that clenched his eyebrows together. “When will you and your husband simply leave me alone?”

“As soon as you stop lying to us.”

Childe stiffened. “I’ll have you know that I am a respected scholar. A very respected scholar! Nothing I have told you is false. Nothing!”

“Really? You told me your argument with Miss Tennyson last Friday was a scholarly disagreement over her identification of Camlet Moat as Camelot. That certainly wasn’t true. The quarrel was over the Glastonbury Cross.”

His face reddened. “Miss Tennyson was a very contrary woman. After a point it becomes difficult to correctly separate these choleric episodes in one’s mind.”

“I might believe you if she hadn’t ended that particular confrontation by hurling the cross into the lake. That strikes me as a comparatively memorable moment.”

Childe pressed his lips into a tight, straight line and glared at her from across the table.

Hero settled more comfortably in her chair, her hands shifting to the reticule in her lap. “I can understand why you were selected to play the starring role in this little charade. Your skepticism toward all things Arthurian is well-known, which means that for you to be the one to step forward and present the Glastonbury Cross and a box of crumbling bones—particularly with the added fiction that they were found amongst Richard Gough’s collection—would obviously help to make the discovery more believable.”

“This is an outrage!” blustered Childe. “Why, if you were a man I would—”

“You would—what, exactly? Challenge me to a duel? I’m a very good shot, you know.”

“To the best of my knowledge,” said Childe through clenched teeth, “the cross I discovered in Mr. Gough’s collection is the very same artifact presented to the world by the monks of Glastonbury in 1191. As it happens, the scholarly community will soon have the opportunity to judge for itself. The cross has been recovered from the lake and will be made available for inspection next week.”

“Having a new one made, are you?”

Childe leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. “I see no reason to dignify that statement with a response.”

Hero smiled. “But there’s another reason you were selected for this charade; is that not so, Mr. Childe? You see, I kept thinking, Why would a respected scholar possessed of a comfortable independence lend himself to such a scheme? And then it came to me: because you have a deep, dirty little secret that makes you vulnerable to blackmail.”

Childe shifted uncomfortably, his jaw set.

“That’s why you killed Gabrielle, isn’t it? Not because she somehow discovered the true origins of your so-called Glastonbury Cross, or because she spurned your suit, but because she found out about your taste for little girls.”

He jerked, then sat very still. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the Lambs’ Pen. And don’t even think about trying to deny it. They keep very good records, you know. And—”

Childe came up out of his seat, his face purple and twisted with rage, one meaty hand flashing toward her. “Why you bloody little—”

Hero drew a small brass-mounted flintlock muff pistol from her reticule, pulled back the hammer, and pointed the muzzle at his chest. “Touch me and you’re dead.”

He froze, his eyes flaring wide, his big, sweaty body suspended over the table, his chest heaving with his agitated breathing.

“If you will recall,” she said calmly, “I did mention that I am a very good shot. True, a weapon of this size is not particularly accurate, but then at this distance it doesn’t need to be. Now, sit down.”

He sank slowly, carefully back into his chair.

“You, Mr. Childe, are a fool. Did you seriously think that I would closet myself in private with a man I believe could be a murderer and not come armed?”

Having been red before, his face was now pasty white. “I did not murder Miss Tennyson.”

“You certainly had a motive—several, actually. You have just displayed a shocking propensity for violence toward women. And last Sunday, you were at Gough Hall in the afternoon and in your rooms in St. James’s Street that night. You could easily have killed Gabrielle and her young cousins while traveling between the two.”

“I wouldn’t do that! I would never do that!”

“And why, precisely, should I believe you?”

Childe swallowed.

Hero rose, the gun still in her hand. “Stand up, turn around, and put your hands on the boxes in front of you.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked, throwing a quick glance at her over his shoulder as he moved to comply.

“Keep your eyes on the wall.”

“But what are you going to do?”

Hero opened the door behind her. “That depends largely on you, does it not?”

“What does that mean?”

She heard him repeat the question again when she was halfway down the hall.

“What are you going to do?”

By the time Sebastian made it back to London, the setting sun was casting long shadows through the streets.

He found Hero seated at the bench before her dressing table. She wore an elegant, high-waisted evening gown of ivory silk with tiny slashed puff sleeves and an inset of rose silk laced with a crisscross of ivory down the front, and she had her head bowed as she threaded a slender ribbon of dusty rose through her crimped hair. He leaned against the doorframe of her dressing chamber and watched as the flickering candlelight played over her bare shoulders and the exposed nape of her neck. And he knew it again, that baffling swirl of admiration and desire combined with a troubling sense that he was losing something he’d never really had. Something that was more than passion and far, far different from obligation or honor or duty.

She finished fastening the ribbon in place and looked up, her gaze meeting his in the mirror. Whatever she saw there caused her to nod to the young abigail waiting to assist her. “That will be all, Jane; thank you.”

“Yes, miss,” said the woman, dropping a curtsy.

Sebastian waited until Jane left; then he came into the room and closed the door. “Rory Forster is dead. I found him floating in Camlet Moat.”

“Good heavens.” Hero swung around to stare at him. “What happened to him?”

“He was shot point-blank in the chest. Sometime this morning, I’d say. Gibson should have the body by now, although I’d be surprised if he’s able to tell us much more.”

“But…why was he killed?”

“I had an interesting conversation with Rory’s widow, who owns a prosperous farm to the east of the old chase. She married the man just last year, and if you ask me, she was well on her way to regretting the bargain. Forster might have been a handsome devil, but he seems to have been far more interested in searching for buried treasure than in taking care of things around the farm. I suspect he also wasn’t above using his fists on his wife when she angered him…and his kind anger easily and often.”

“Maybe she’s the one who shot him.”

Sebastian huffed a surprised laugh. “I confess that thought hadn’t occurred to me. But I think it more likely Rory was trying to blackmail someone and ended up getting his payment in the form of a bullet.”

“You think he knew who killed Gabrielle? But…how?”

“According to the Widow Forster, Rory took his shovel out to Camlet Moat at sunset on Sunday and came back later that night soaking wet and full of big talk about buying her silks and satins and a carriage to rival the Squire’s lady. At the time she seems to have thought he must have found some of the island’s famous treasure.”

“When in fact he’d witnessed the brutal murder of a woman and two children?”

“I suspect so. The first time I spoke to him, he laughed at the men out looking for the Tennyson boys. He said no one was going to find ‘them nippers.’”

“Because he knew they were already dead,” said Hero softly. “Dear God.”