Where Shadows Dance

Chapter 38

After leaving the Turkish Ambassador’s residence, Hero made a brief stop in Bond Street to pick out a pair of pale blue satin slippers for the wedding. Then she directed her coachman to Great Russell Street.

“Monsieur de La Rocque?” she called, pushing open the heavy door to his establishment.

Her voice echoed through the empty cluster of interconnected rooms lined floor to ceiling with shelf after shelf of moldering books.

“Oh, Miss Jarvis,” whispered Marie, hovering close beside her, her face pale as she followed Hero from one overcrowded room to the next. “Should we even be here? I mean—”

“Don’t be absurd, Marie,” said Hero firmly. “There is nothing the least—” She broke off, her gaze fixed on the single, worn brown shoe poking out at an odd angle from beneath the curtain of a nearby archway.

“Stay here,” she ordered the maid and thrust aside the curtain.

The defrocked priest lay sprawled on his back, arms flung wide, his swollen tongue protruding from a discolored, puffy face, his bloodshot eyes wide and staring. A wire had been wrapped so tightly around his neck that it cut into the flesh.

She heard a soft sigh behind her and turned in time to see her abigail’s eyes roll back in her head as the woman collapsed in an insensate heap.

Ignoring her, Hero went to crouch beside the Frenchman’s body. Reaching out, she pressed her fingertips to one out-flung wrist. He was still faintly warm.

She heard the creak of a hinge and a light tread on the old floorboards at the front of the shop. Spinning around, she saw Devlin draw up in the curtained archway. His gaze traveled from her to de La Rocque and back again.

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

She spread an expressive hand toward the corpse. “I came to speak to Monsieur de La Rocque. Unfortunately, as you can see, he is dead.”

Devlin’s gaze shifted to the crumpled maid. “And your abigail?”

“Tiresome woman. She’s gone off in a faint.”

“Imagine that,” he said dryly, hunkering down beside the maid. “Have you a vinaigrette in your reticule?”

“No. I never faint.”

“Of course not,” he said, gently tapping the woman’s pale cheeks.

“If you wake her up, she’s liable to start screaming,” Hero warned.

“True. But it must be done.”

The abigail stirred, her eyelids fluttering open. She drew in a shaky gasp and looked confused, her gaze focusing on Devlin’s face. Then she turned her head, saw de La Rocque’s awful purple countenance, and started screaming.

“Now, now; enough of that,” said Hero briskly, going to help Devlin coax the woman to her feet.

The screaming continued. Over the woman’s head, Devlin’s gaze met Hero’s. “There’s an inn several doors down. Perhaps you can entrust her to the care of the landlord’s wife?”

Hero nodded. “Come, Marie,” she said, grasping the maid’s arm in a firm grip and suppressing the impulse to box the silly creature’s ears as she steered her toward the door. “Hush, now; there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Hang on a minute,” said Devlin, scrounging around in a nearby desk for paper, a quill, and ink. He dashed off a quick note, folded it and affixed a wafer, then wrote, Sir Henry Lovejoy across the front. “Have the landlord send one of his lads with this to Bow Street.”

Leaving Devlin hunkered down beside the dead body, Hero hectored and bullied the now hysterical abigail to the nearby inn, where she consigned her to the gentle ministrations of the clucking landlady. On her return, she found Devlin systematically going through drawers and cupboards in a rear office. “Discover anything?” she asked.

He moved on to one of the towering bookcases. “Not yet.”

“Like some help?”

He looked over at her in surprise. “Please.”

She started on the lower shelf. “What precisely are we looking for?”

“You’ll know when you find it.”

But at the end of another twenty minutes, she was hot, dusty, and empty-handed.

“It would take days to go through all these books,” she said, shoving a tooled copy of Plutarch’s Lives back onto a shelf.

“At least,” agreed Devlin, moving on to the next case.

Pushing the hair off her forehead with the back of one gloved hand, Hero went to crouch again beside the dead Frenchman. “Fascinating,” she said, studying the purple spots on his face, the deep scratches on his neck—left, she now realized, by his own fingernails as he clawed frantically at the constricting ligature. “I’ve never seen someone who was strangled.”

Devlin glanced over at her. “Have you no sensibility, Miss Jarvis?”

She looked up. “None at all, I’m afraid. Why? Does that disturb you?”

“Actually, it relieves me.”

She bent to have a closer look at the wire wrapped around de La Rocque’s neck.

“What is it?” asked Devlin, watching her.

“This wire. It’s not ordinary wire. It’s silver wrapped around silk.”

“What the hell?” He left the shelves to come hunker down beside her.

She looked up at him. “I believe it’s a harp wire.”

“A harp wire?”

“Mmm. Which suggests your murderer may be the husband of a woman who plays the harp—or the woman herself.”

Devlin looked doubtful. “Could a woman strangle a man?”

“If she were tall enough and strong enough, I don’t see why not.” Hero nodded to the bloated-faced corpse beside them. “De La Rocque was not an excessively large man.”

“True.”

She said, “Harp players typically develop calluses on their fingertips. Did you happen to notice the hands of any of the females implicated in your investigation?”

“Actually, there aren’t that many women involved in this.”

“But there are some.”

“There’s your cousin, Miss Sabrina Cox. Does she play the harp?”

“Sabrina? You can’t be serious. She’s a tiny woman. And full of sensibility.”

“Her brother is not.” He regarded her steadily. When she remained silent, he said, “Well? Does Miss Cox play the harp?”

Hero stared back at him. It had been only days since she visited her young cousin and held Sabrina’s hands in hers. Yet to her chagrin, she could not recall noticing either if the girl’s fingertips were calloused or even if there had been a harp in the room. She said, “To be honest, I don’t know; but I can find out. What about some of the other females involved?”

“I’ve met the Turkish Ambassador’s wife, but I confess I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to her fingertips.”

Hero decided to keep her own recent visit to the Ambassador’s residence to herself. She said, “Would a Turkish woman be likely to play the harp?”

“Why not? Do you think they don’t have harps in the seraglios of the East?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Hero, “not having ever been in a seraglio.” She studied him thoughtfully. “Have you?”

“I have not.”

“Besides,” she added, “Yasmina plays the ude. And she is also very tiny.”

“Ramadani is not. And I have it on the best authority—his own—that he’s partial to the garrote.”

“He told you that?”

“He did. He also—” He broke off as the sounds of a carriage and men’s voices carried from the front of the building.

“Ah,” said Hero, pushing to her feet. “Bow Street has arrived.”

She was aware of him studying her with an inscrutable expression on his face. He said, “Your father isn’t going to like this—your involving yourself in another murder, I mean.”

She gave her skirts a businesslike twitch that released a small cloud of dust. “Considering that we are soon to be wed, he’s going to have to get used to it, isn’t he?”

At that, Devlin gave a surprised huff of laughter. “You do have a point.”

His smile faded, their gazes meeting as awareness of all that their coming marriage would mean settled on them both.

Then Sir Henry Lovejoy drew up in the doorway, his gaze riveted on the corpse’s swollen purple countenance as he said with a gasp, “Merciful heavens!”