Where Serpents Sleep

Chapter 31

Sebastian sat for a time on the terrace of the gardens overlooking Whitehall Stairs. The patches of blue sky and Sintermittent sunshine of that morning had vanished behind thickening piles of gray clouds that shaded to black in the distance. The river flowed dark and choppy before him, whipped by the wind into white-flecked waves. A wherryman halfway across the Thames worked his oars with a strong, steady rhythm, the plash of his paddles hitting the water carrying clearly in the strengthening breeze.

Sebastian kept remembering the expression on Cedric Fairchild’s face when first told of his sister’s death in Covent Garden. The shock of denial had been all too readily apparent—that natural human tendency to disconnect when first confronted with the death of a loved one, the wailing mental No! that is common to all. Yet Fairchild had displayed neither disbelief nor confusion when told of his sister’s presence in Covent Garden. That brief bristling at the mention of the Magdalene House had all been for effect, because Cedric Fairchild had known only too well what his sister had become.

Tristan Ramsey had told him.

Sebastian slid off the low wall, his gaze lifting to the dark thunderclouds churning overhead. He understood why Cedric would attempt to keep the truth of his sister’s disgrace to himself, even after her death. What he couldn’t understand was why Rachel’s brother, like her betrothed before her, had simply walked away and abandoned her to her fate.

Rachel’s brother was cupping wafers at Menton’s, his right arm extended, steady and true, when Sebastian walked up to him. “One would think you’d have had all the target practice you needed in Spain,” said Sebastian when Cedric Fairchild turned away from the firing range.

“It doesn’t hurt to keep one’s hand in,” said Cedric. He had stripped down to his shirtsleeves and waistcoat to shoot. Now, handing his pistol to the attendant, he reached for his dark blue coat.

“You sold out and came back to London because of Rachel, didn’t you?” said Sebastian, watching the former lieutenant shrug into his coat. “Who told you she was missing? Ramsey?”

Cedric straightened his collar, his eyes narrowing. “Actually, it was our sister Lady Sewell.” A sudden burst of laughter from a group of men entering the room brought his head around.

“Walk with me,” said Sebastian.

Buffeted by a cool wind, they strolled up the Mall toward Cockspur Street, with the rolling green swath of St. James’s Park stretching away to their right behind Carlton House and its gardens. “There used to be a leper hospital there,” said Cedric, looking across the park toward the river. “Did you know? It was a pretty insalubrious place at the time, all swamps and marsh-land. They say a fair number of lepers from the hospital are still buried there. Every now and then the royal gardeners dig up some poor bastard’s skull or thighbone.”

Sebastian stared out across the carefully tended greens and clipped hedges of the gardens and the park beyond it. Beneath the cloudy afternoon sky, the park had assumed a cold, somber aspect.

“They were outcasts,” said Cedric. “Shunned even by their families. Some were tradesmen, peasants, and laborers. But there were also noblemen, scholars . . . artists. It didn’t matter. What they had been was superseded by what they’d become. Something diseased and rotting. A threat to society.”

Sebastian shifted his gaze to the man beside him. “Is that how you thought of your sister?”

Cedric let out his breath in a harsh grating sound. “No. But it’s how she thought of herself.”

“You went to see her after Tristan Ramsey told you where he’d found her?”

Cedric’s face was ashen. “I tried to get her to come away with me.” His lips flattened. “She refused.” Tristan Ramsey had said much the same thing; but in Cedric’s case, Sebastian was inclined to believe it was true. “She said she was where she belonged. That house—” He broke off, swallowed. “It was horrible seeing her there.”

“Did she tell you why she ran away?”

Cedric shook his head. “I asked. She refused to say.”

They turned their steps toward Charing Cross and Northumberland House and Gardens beyond it. “I still don’t understand how she ended up there,” said Cedric. He threw a sideways glance at Sebastian, pale features suddenly flushing dark with anger. “But I swear to God, if you breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll kill you.”

Sebastian said, “Do you think it’s possible she was in love with another man? I mean someone other than Ramsey. Someone who lured her away from home, then abandoned her?”

Cedric thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat, his shoulders hunched. “I admit I thought it possible. When I pressed her to leave with me, she just threw back her head and laughed. She said she was in love with that Lincolnshire fellow. The one who owns the house.”

Sebastian cast Cedric a sharp sideways glance. “You believed her?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t look like a woman in love to me. If anything, I’d say she was afraid.”

“Of Kane?”

“I think she was afraid he’d kill her if she tried to leave. She said he’d killed before—other women who had tried to leave him. I told her she was being irrational. That we could protect her from the likes of some Covent Garden thug.” He paused. “She just told me to go away and not come back.”

“And so you did?”

“What else could I do? She refused to talk to me anymore. When I went back last Saturday, they told me she was no longer there.” He brought up both hands to scrub them across his face, his shoulders hunched. “I thought they were lying—that she just didn’t want to see me again. But a part of me was terrified something must have happened to her.”

“What made you think that?”

Cedric knotted the fingers of his hands together, as if he were in prayer. “I don’t know. It was just a feeling I had.” He hesitated. “I remember this one time in Spain, just before Ciudad Rodrigo. A fellow by the name of Hobbs took out a patrol. They were late coming back. We’d had one of those bloody awful rains that can come up out of nowhere in the Peninsula. Everyone was convinced they’d just used the storm as an excuse to spend the afternoon in a bodega somewhere.”

“But you didn’t think so?”

“No.” Cedric stared off across the gardens. “They’d been ambushed. We found them not two miles outside camp. They’d been set upon by peasants with pitchforks and scythes.” His face contorted with the memory. “They were literally ripped apart.”

Both men were silent for a moment, lost in visions of the past, of men bloodied and torn by cannon fire and bayonets as well as by pitchforks and scythes. Sebastian said, “Did you tell Lord Fairchild that you’d found your sister?”

Cedric let out a sound that was like a laugh, only devoid of all humor. “My father?” He shook his head. “My father isn’t well. It would kill him, if he knew what had happened to Rachel.”

“Sometimes not knowing is worse than knowing.”

“Not this time.”