Who Buries the Dead

Chapter 55

The globe of the oil lamp on the table near the door exploded in a shower of glass.

“Get down!” shouted Sebastian, lunging toward Hero and Simon as he saw her fall.

“Hero. .” Crouching low, he caught her up in his arms, ran his hands over her and felt the warm stickiness of blood. “Mother of God, you’re hit. Where? Simon-”

“We’re all right,” said Hero, her eyes dark and wide, the now screaming child cradled close. “It’s just cuts from the flying glass.”

He looked over at the Frenchwoman huddled behind a nearby chair. “Claire?”

Claire’s terrified gaze met his, and she nodded.

He pushed up. “Stay here.”

“Devlin!” he heard Hero shout as he tore across the entry hall and wrenched open the front door.

A cold, wind-driven rain stung his face and whipped at the tails of his coat as he pelted down the wet front steps. He could see the aged workman pushing his cart toward Bond Street, head down against the storm, the wheels of the cart bouncing over the paving stones. Then he must have heard Sebastian’s running footsteps, because he threw a quick glance over his shoulder. His hair had been liberally smeared with gray ashes, and the oddly lopsided grimace he’d once affected was gone, leaving him almost unrecognizable.

“Flynn!” shouted Sebastian.

The one-eyed man reached beneath his coat.

Sebastian dove sideways behind the front steps of the house beside him as Diggory Flynn ripped off his eye patch and brought up a long-barreled pistol to fire. The shot ricocheted off the iron railing beside Sebastian’s head, sparks showering the night.

“You son of a bitch,” swore Sebastian, scrambling to his feet again.

Flynn abandoned the workman’s cart and took off running.

Sebastian tore after him.

The former observing officer was both shorter and older, and Sebastian gained on him rapidly. Reaching out with his left hand, he grabbed Flynn’s right shoulder and spun him around to drive his fist into the middle of the man’s face, feeling bone and teeth give way in a blood-slicked crunch.

“You bastard,” swore Sebastian. “You could have killed my wife and son.”

“You moved!”

Without losing his hold on the man’s shoulder, Sebastian buried his fist in Flynn’s gut, then caught him under the chin with a punishing right hook.

Flynn’s head snapped back, the force of the blow wrenching his coat from Sebastian’s grasp. The man stumbled, tripped on the kerbstone, and went down hard on his rump.

Sebastian slipped his knife from his boot and advanced on him. “The same way you killed my brother.”

“Brother?” Flynn scrambled backward on his hands and buttocks, his face smeared with blood. “What brother?” His shoulder bumped against the area railing of the house behind him and he reached to haul himself up.

“Jamie Knox,” said Sebastian, grabbing a fistful of the man’s coat front and swinging him around to slam his back against the house wall.

“But I-”

Sebastian pressed the knife blade against his throat.

Flynn’s eyes widened and he swallowed hard, blood dripping off his chin from his broken nose and mouth. “Don’t kill me.”

Sebastian shook his head, his lips curling away from his teeth. “Name one good reason why I shouldn’t.”

Flynn’s chest jerked on a ragged, quickly indrawn breath. “I can give you Oliphant.”

The French overture to Haydn’s last piano sonata thundered with an energetic and passionate verve as Sebastian threaded his way through Lady Farningham’s crowded reception rooms. It was her second musical evening of the Season, and it seemed that all of fashionable London had come to hear her latest Italian virtuoso. The more intent listeners were seated in the rows of gilded chairs drawn up before the pianoforte. But most of the guests circulated freely, drinking and eating and chatting in small clusters.

Sinclair, Lord Oliphant, was standing beside one of the ornate pilasters in the drawing room, his gaze fixed on the pianist, when Sebastian walked up behind his former colonel and said quietly, “I have Diggory Flynn. He’s willing to testify that you paid him to kill Jamie Knox.”

Oliphant kept his eyes on the musician, not even bothering to turn his head as he said, “I never did any such thing.”

Lady Oliphant was too far away to hear their words, but she looked over at Sebastian and frowned pointedly.

Sebastian kept his voice low. “True; you paid him to kill me. But Knox died.”

“Diggory Flynn is scum. No one will believe him. Do you honestly think a jury would take the word of a smuggler against that of a peer of the realm?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Like Oliphant, Sebastian kept his attention seemingly focused on the performer. “The thing is, you see, your man shot at me tonight with my wife and son standing beside me. Jarvis’s daughter and grandson. The only reason I haven’t already killed you is because they weren’t hurt. But don’t expect Jarvis to be swayed by such technicalities. You’ll be lucky if you live long enough to stand trial.” He watched as that perpetual, confident smile slid slowly from Oliphant’s face. “I suppose you could try to run. But I don’t think you’ll get far.”

He bowed his head toward Oliphant’s scowling wife. “My lady,” he said, and turned to walk out of the room and out of the house.

As he descended the front steps, he noticed one of the tall, dark-haired former hussar officers employed by Jarvis waiting across the rain-drenched street. For a moment, their gazes met. Then he heard Tom’s shout.

“Gov’nor! Oy, gov’nor.”

He could see the tiger threading his way through the crowd of gawkers that always formed around such events.

“Gov’nor,” said the boy, struggling to catch his breath as he skidded to a halt at the base of the steps. He held out a somewhat grubby calling card. “A lad just brung this from Bucket Lane!”

It was one of Sebastian’s own cards. He flipped it over to see that someone had written on the back in a childish hand.

Plees help. Juba

“I think it’s a trap,” said Tom.

They were in a hackney headed toward Fish Street Hill. The rain had eased up for the moment, but water still dripped from the eaves of the mean houses and shops they passed, and a cold wind buffeted the old carriage.

“Of course it’s a trap,” said Sebastian, his gaze on the soaring tower of the church of St. Magnus that loomed over the bridgehead and Billingsgate Market. He’d expected Knightly to try to silence him. And he had worried about the safety of Juba and Banjo. What he hadn’t foreseen was that the killer would use the woman and child to bait a trap for Sebastian.

He wondered if life really spun in circles, or if it was simply some trick of the human mind that made people see patterns where none truly existed. The last time women and children had been put at risk because of him, he had failed to save them. He’d spent the last three years seeking some sort of redemption for that failure and had found a measure of solace in his efforts on behalf of other victims of human evil.

But now it was happening all over again.

Tom shook his head. “So why ye goin’ there?”

“Because if I don’t, Juba and her son will die.”

Lit only by the occasional glimmer of a tallow candle showing through a grimy window, Bucket Lane lay dark and wet and deserted beneath the stormy sky.

“What we gonna do?” whispered Tom as they slipped down the lane to draw up in a shadowy doorway.

Centuries old, Juba’s house had only two stories and was built so that the upper floor jutted out over the lower. It contained just two rooms per floor, with a different family living in each room. The front room of the upper story was dark. But the flickering, smoky light of a tallow candle showed through the thin, ragged curtain of the ground-floor room.

“I want you to go inside, slowly count to ten, and then knock on the first door to your left. Just be certain to flatten yourself against the wall before you reach over to knock, and jerk your hand back quickly. I wouldn’t put it past Knightly to shoot through the door rather than open it.”

“And then what?”

“And then I want you to run into the street and keep running, no matter what happens.”

“But. . gov’nor!”

“You heard me.”

The boy hung his head. “Aye, gov’nor.”

Sebastian watched the tiger let himself in the house’s battered street door, and began to count.

One, two. .

A single large shadow seated at the trestle table near the door showed through the worn cloth of the curtain. Knightly? Probably. But if so, then where were Juba and Banjo?

Three, four. .

He told himself the woman and boy couldn’t already be dead. Surely Knightly would leave them alive until he had Sebastian?

Five, six. .

Leaping up, Sebastian caught hold of one of the beams supporting the cantilevered upper story where it jutted out above the window.

Seven, eight. .

Kicking his legs, he began to swing back and forth, gathering momentum.

Nine, ten.

He heard the tiger’s knock, heard the sound of a bench being pushed back, saw the shadow rise to its feet. Then he kicked back hard with his legs and let go of the beam as he swung forward again toward the house.

He crashed through the window feetfirst in a shower of broken glass and shattered framing. Coming down hard on his feet, he lost his balance and fell to his knees. He saw Juba crouched on the pallet near the hearth, her son clutched in her arms. Saw Knightly spin toward him, the barrel of a flintlock pistol wavering as he brought up his other hand to steady it.

Sebastian threw himself sideways, jerked his own pistol free as he fell, and fired.

In the confined space of the small room, the pistol’s report was deafening, an explosion of smoke and flame and blood. Juba screamed. Knightly staggered back, slammed into the table, and crumpled slowly to the floor.

The door from the hall burst open and Tom catapulted into the room.

“Bloody hell; I told you to run,” swore Sebastian.

Tom drew up short, his eyes wide, his breath coming hard and fast. Swiping one sleeve across his nose, he edged closer to Knightly’s now still body. “Gor. Ye plugged ’im right through the eye, ye did. Is ’e dead?”

Sebastian pushed to his feet, brushing broken glass from his clothes as he walked over to stare down at the Baronet’s slack face. “Yes.”

He bent to pick up the dead man’s pistol, then went to hunker down beside Juba and Banjo, still pressed up against the corner by the hearth. “You both all right?”

She nodded, her face slack, her pupils wide with terror. “I didn’t want to send you that note. But he said he’d kill Banjo if I didn’t.”

Sebastian shook his head. “Don’t blame yourself. I’m the one who inadvertently put you at risk.”

She gazed beyond him, to where Sir Galen Knightly lay sprawled with one carefully manicured hand flung out so that it lay curled against the worn paving stones of her house.

She said, “Is he really my half brother?”

Sebastian shook his head. “I’m not sure we’ll ever know.”