Who Buries the Dead

Chapter 2

Monday, 22 March, the hours before dawn

The child lay curled on his side in a cradle near the hearth, his tiny pink lips parted with the slow, even breath of sleep. He had one tightly clenched fist tucked up beneath his chin, and in the firelight the translucent flesh of his closed eyelids looked so delicate and fragile that it terrified his father, who stood watching him. Someday this infant would be Viscount Devlin and then, in time, the Earl of Hendon. But now he was simply the Honorable Simon St. Cyr, barely seven weeks old and oblivious to the fact that he had no more real right to any of those titles than his father, Sebastian St. Cyr, the current Viscount Devlin.

Devlin rested the heel of one outthrust palm against the mantelpiece. His breath came harsh and ragged, and sweat sheened his naked flesh despite the air’s chill. He’d been driven from his sleep by memories he generally chose not to revisit during daylight. But he could not stop the images that came to him in the quiet hours of darkness, visions of dancing flames, of a woman’s tortured body writhing in helpless agony, of soft brown hair fluttering against the waxen flesh of a dead child’s cheek.

The past never leaves us, he thought. We carry it with us through our lives, a ghostly burden of bittersweet nostalgia threaded with guilt and regret that wearies the soul and whispers to us in the darkest hours of the night. Only the youngest children are truly innocent, for their consciences are still untroubled, their haunted days yet to come.

He shuddered and bent to throw more coal on the fire, moving carefully so as not to wake the sleeping babe or his mother.

When Sebastian was a child, it had been the custom for the infants of the aristocracy and the gentry to be farmed out to wet nurses, often not returning to their own families until they were two years of age. But it was becoming more common now for even duchesses to choose to nurse their own offspring, and Hero, the child’s mother and Sebastian’s wife of eight months, had been adamantly against hiring a wet nurse.

His gaze shifted to the blue silk-hung bed where she slept, her rich dark hair spilling across the pillow. And he felt it again, that nameless wash of apprehension for this woman and this child that he dismissed as lingering wisps from his dream and fear born of a guilt that could never be assuaged.

A clatter of hooves and the rattle of carriage wheels over granite paving stones carried clearly in the stillness of the night. Sebastian raised his head, his body tensing as the carriage jerked to a halt and a man’s quick, heavy tread ran up his front steps. He heard the distant peal of his bell, then a gruff, questioning shout from his majordomo, Morey.

“Message for Lord Devlin,” answered the unknown visitor, his voice strained by a sense of urgency and what sounded very much like horror. “From Sir Henry, of Bow Street!”

Sebastian threw on his dressing gown and slipped quietly from the room.