Who Buries the Dead

Chapter 8

Hoping that Paul Gibson had made some progress in the postmortem of Preston’s body, Sebastian turned his horses toward the Tower of London, where the Irishman kept a small surgery in the shadow of the grim medieval fortress’s soot-stained walls.

The friendship between Sebastian and the former regimental surgeon dated back nearly ten years, to the days when both men wore the King’s Colors and fought the King’s wars from Italy to the West Indies to the Peninsula. Then a cannonball took off the lower part of Gibson’s left leg, leaving him racked with pain and tormented by an increasingly serious opium addiction. In the end, he’d left the Army and come here, to London, where he divided his time between his surgery and teaching anatomy at the city’s hospitals. He knew more about the human body than anyone Sebastian had ever met, thanks in part to an ongoing series of illicit dissections performed on cadavers filched from the area’s churchyards by resurrection men.

Until that January, Gibson had lived alone. But he now shared the small, ancient stone house beside his surgery with Alexi Sauvage, a beautiful, enigmatic, and unconventional Frenchwoman who was as damaged in her own way as Gibson.

Rather than chance an encounter with her, Sebastian cut through the narrow passage that ran along Gibson’s house and led to the unkempt yard at the rear. Overgrown with weeds and a mute witness to the secrets buried there, the yard stretched down to a high stone wall that abutted the single-room outbuilding where Gibson performed both his legally sanctioned autopsies and his covert dissections. Through the open door, he could hear the Irishman singing softly under his breath, “Ghile Mear ‘sa seal faoi chumha, ‘S Éire go léir faoi chlócaibh dubha. . ”

The headless, naked body of Stanley Preston lay on the high stone table in the center of the room. When Sebastian’s shadow fell across it, Gibson broke off and looked up. “Ah, there you are, me lad,” he said, exaggerating his brogue. “Thought I’d be seeing you soon enough.”

He was only several years older than Sebastian, but chronic pain had already touched his dark hair with gray at the temples and dug deep lines in his face. His opium addiction hadn’t helped either, although Sebastian noticed he didn’t look quite as emaciated as he had lately.

Pausing in the doorway, Sebastian let his gaze drift around the cold room until he located Preston’s head, cradled in an enameled basin on a long shelf. In the last twelve hours, the face seemed to have sunk in on itself, taking on a waxy, grayish tinge.

Sebastian swallowed and brought his gaze back to the rest of the cadaver. A small purple slit, clearly visible against the alabaster flesh, showed high on the man’s chest.

“He was stabbed?” said Sebastian. “Why the hell didn’t I see that?”

“Probably because he was so drenched in blood from his head being taken off. And because he was stabbed in the back. What you’re seeing is where the tip of the blade came all the way through his body-but not by much, I’d say. It just barely sliced his waistcoat. If you’ll help me turn him over, I’ll show you.”

“That’s quite all right; I’ll take your word for it.”

Gibson grinned.

“So that’s what killed him?” said Sebastian.

“It might have, eventually. But not right away. I suspect he fell when he was stabbed, and his killer finished him off by slitting his throat.” Gibson paused. “Obviously, he got a wee bit carried away and completely cut off the head.”

“With what? Any idea?”

“My guess is a sword stick; the stab wound in the back is the right size. I’d say your killer ran him through with the sword stick, then used the same blade to slit his throat, slashing down as the poor man lay on the ground. Could be he wasn’t intending to cut off the head-he was just trying to make sure Preston was dead.”

“So why did he then pick up the head and put it on the bridge?”

“Ah. Nobody told me that part.”

Sebastian studied the ragged, truncated flesh of the cadaver’s neck. He’d lopped off more heads than he cared to remember with a heavy cavalry sword swung from the back of a horse. But to chop the head off a man lying on the ground with a slim sword stick must surely be considerably more difficult. “How easy is it to cut off a head like that?”

“Not easy at all, evidently. Took whoever did it at least a dozen blows, maybe more.”

“Lovely.” Sebastian turned to stare out at the yard. The cloud cover from last night’s storm was beginning to show signs of breaking up, but the sunlight was still weak and fitful. As he watched, a woman came out of the house and paused for a moment on the back stoop. She was small and slight, with a head of fiery red hair and the kind of pale skin more often seen in Scotland than in France. Her gaze met his, and he saw her nostrils flare, her lips tighten into a flat line as she picked up a basket and trowel and moved to where he realized someone was nurturing a small plot of sweet peas and forget-me-nots along the house’s rear wall.

Sebastian said, “Does Madame Sauvage know you’ve spent the last few years planting this yard with the remains of your dissections?”

“Aye, I told her. She says all the more reason to clean it up.”

Sebastian leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb and watched her. He knew some of her history, but not all of it. Born in Paris in the days before the Revolution, she’d trained as a physician in Italy. But because Britain refused to license female physicians, she was allowed to practice in London only as a midwife. Like Gibson, she was in her early thirties and by her own account had already gone through two husbands and two lovers.

All were now dead-one of them by Sebastian’s hand.

Gibson said, “And how is young master Simon St. Cyr?”

“He’s an angel-until the clock strikes six in the evening, at which point he starts screaming bloody murder and is impossible to console until nearly midnight.”

“Colicky, is he? It’ll soon pass.”

“I sincerely hope so.”

The surgeon grinned and limped over to stand beside him. Gibson’s gaze rested, like Sebastian’s, on the woman now working the rich black soil near the house. “I’ve asked Alexi to marry me a dozen times,” he said with a sigh, “but she won’t hear of it.”

“Does she say why not?”

“She says all of her husbands have died.”

So have her lovers, thought Sebastian, although he didn’t say it.

He shifted to study his friend’s lean, pain-lined face. “She said she could do something to help with the phantom pains from your missing leg.” His pain-and his opium addiction. “Has she tried?”

“She keeps wanting to, but it sounds daft to me. How can a box with mirrors possibly do any good?”

“It’s worth making the attempt, isn’t it?”

The Irishman simply shook his head and turned back to his work. “I’ll let you know if I find anything else.”

Sebastian nodded and pushed away from the doorframe.

But as he followed the narrow path to the gate, he was aware of Alexi Sauvage’s gaze on him, silent and watchful.

It often seemed to Sebastian that trying to solve a murder was somewhat akin to approaching a figure in the mist. At first an indistinct, insubstantial blur, the murdered man or woman began to take form and emerge in detail only as Sebastian came to see the victim through the eyes of the various people who had known, loved, or hated him.

At the moment, virtually all Sebastian knew about Stanley Preston was that the man was cousin to the Home Secretary, a widower and father of two who owned plantations in Jamaica and was not in the habit of trying to fondle the pretty young barmaid at the local pub. Before he approached the dead man’s grief-stricken daughter, Sebastian felt the need to learn more. And so his next stop was the home of Henrietta, the Dowager Duchess of Claiborne.

One of the grandes dames of Society, the Duchess had long maintained a relentless interest in the personal lives and antecedents of everyone who was anyone. Since she also possessed an awe-inspiring memory that deemed few details too trivial not to be retained forever, he couldn’t think of anyone in London better able to tell him what he needed to know about Mr. Stanley Preston.

Born Lady Henrietta St. Cyr, elder sister of the current Earl of Hendon, she was known to the world as Sebastian’s aunt, although she was one of the few people aware of the fact that the relationship between them was in name only. She lived alone with an army of servants in a vast town house on Park Lane, in Mayfair. Technically, the house belonged to her son, the current Duke of Claiborne, who resided at a far more modest address in Half Moon Street. An amiable, somewhat weak-willed gentleman now of middle age, he was no match for the Dowager Duchess, who had every intention of dying in the house to which she had come as a bride some fifty-five years before. She was proud, nosy, perceptive, arrogant, judgmental, opinionated, and wise, and one of Sebastian’s favorite people.

He found her ensconced in a comfortable chair beside her drawing room fire, an exquisite cashmere shawl draped about her stout shoulders and a slim, blue-bound book in her hands.

“Good heavens, Aunt Henrietta,” he said, stooping to kiss one subtly rouged and powdered cheek. “Have I caught you reading a novel?”

Rather than put the book aside, she thrust one plump finger between the pages to mark her place. “I bought it to see what all the fuss is about-it has quite taken the ton by storm, you know. But I must confess to finding it unexpectedly diverting.”

Sebastian went to stand before the fire. “Who wrote it?”

“No one knows. That’s partly what makes it so delicious. It’s simply ascribed to ‘the author of Sense and Sensibility.’ And no one has yet to discover who she is.”

He reached to pick up one of the other two volumes resting on the table beside her and read the title. “Pride and Prejudice. Whoever it is obviously likes alliteration.”

“And she has the most devastatingly wicked wit. Listen to this.” She opened the book again. “‘They were in fact very fine ladies. . had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people of rank; and were therefore in every respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others. They were of a respectable family in the north of England, a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than that their brother’s fortune and their own had been acquired by trade.’”

“Devastating, indeed. I wonder, could you tear yourself away from this delightful tale long enough to tell me what you know of Mr. Stanley Preston?”

“Stanley Preston?” she repeated, looking up at him. “Whatever for?”

“You haven’t seen the morning papers?”

“No; I’ve been reading this book. Why? What’s happened to him?”

“Someone cut off his head.”

“Good heavens. How terribly gauche.”

“Frightfully so. What do you know of him?”

She laid the book aside, open and facedown, although he noticed she gave it one or two reluctant glances before she brought her attention back to him. “Well, let’s see. The family is old-he’s from the Devonshire Prestons, you know, although his is a rather insignificant, cadet branch.”

“Yet his cousin is Lord Sidmouth.”

She waved a dismissive hand; obviously, the Home Secretary’s antecedents did not impress her. “Yes, but Sidmouth himself was only recently raised to the peerage. His father was a mere physician.”

“So where did Preston acquire his wealth?”

“His father married a merchant’s daughter. The woman was dreadfully vulgar, I’m afraid, but quite an heiress. The elder Preston invested her inheritance in land in the West Indies and did very well for himself, as a result of which he was able to marry his own son-Stanley-to the daughter of an impoverished baron.”

“Wealth acquired from trade being seen as something vile and shameful that can be magically cleansed by investment in land-even when that land happens to be worked by slaves?”

She frowned at him. “Really, Sebastian; it’s not as if he were engaged in the slave trade. Slavery is perfectly legal in the West Indies. The French tried to do away with it, and look what happened to them. A bloodbath!”

“True,” said Sebastian. “What was the name of this baron’s daughter? I gather she’s dead?”

“Mmm. Mary Pierce. Lovely young woman. In the end, the marriage was surprisingly successful; Preston positively doted on her. But she died in childbirth some seven or eight years ago. I’ve often wondered why he never remarried. He’s still quite attractive and vigorous for his age.”

“Not anymore.”

“Don’t be vulgar, Devlin.”

He gave a soft huff of laughter. “Tell me about the daughter. What’s her name?”

“Anne. She must be in her early twenties by now. Still unmarried, I’m afraid, and in serious danger of being left on the shelf. Not that anyone is exactly surprised.”

“Why? Is she ill-favored?”

“Oh, she was pretty enough when she was young, I suppose. But Preston never did move in the highest circles, and Anne has a tendency to be rather quiet-and a tad strange, to be frank.”

“Strange? In what way?”

“Let’s just say she’s more like her father than her mother. And of course it hasn’t helped that her portion from her mother is not large.”

“I was under the impression Preston’s holdings in Jamaica are substantial.”

“They are. But that will all go to the son.”

“I assume the man was a Tory?”

“I should hope so. Although unlike Sidmouth, I don’t believe he was overly interested in affairs of state. His passion was collecting.”

“Collecting? What did he collect?”

“Curiosities of all sorts, although mainly antiquities. He had a special interest in items that once belonged to famous people. I’m told he has a bullet taken from the body of Lord Nelson after Trafalgar, a handkerchief some ghoulish soul dipped in Louis XVI’s blood at the guillotine. . that sort of thing. He even has heads.”

Sebastian paused in the act of leaning down to throw more coal on the fire. “Heads? What sort of heads?”

“Those with historical significance.”

“You mean, people’s heads?”

“Mmm. I’m told he has Oliver Cromwell, amongst others. But don’t ask me who else because I’ve never seen them. They say he keeps them displayed in glass cases and-” She broke off. “How did you say he died?”

“Someone cut off his head.”

“Dear me.” She readjusted her shawl. “I take it you’ve involved yourself in this murder investigation?”

“I have, yes.”

“Amanda won’t like it. That girl of hers is starting her second season, and Amanda blames you for Stephanie’s failure to go off last year.”

Sebastian’s older sister, Amanda, was not one of his admirers. He said, “From what I observed, I’d say my niece was enjoying her first season far too much to settle down and bring it all to an end.”

“Yes, I’m afraid she’s your mother all over again.”

When Sebastian remained silent, she picked up her book and said, “Now, go away. I want to get back to my reading.”

He laughed and kissed her cheek again. “If you’re not careful, Aunt, people are going to start accusing you of being bookish.”

“Never happen.”

He turned toward the door. But before he reached it, she said, “Is it wise, involving yourself in this murder, Devlin? You’ve a wife and child to think of now.”

He paused to look back at her. “I am thinking of them. Whoever did this is not someone I want roving the city.”

“We pay constables and magistrates to take care of that sort of thing.”

“I don’t believe that means the rest of us can simply abdicate all responsibility for our own safety.”

“Perhaps. Yet. . why you, Devlin? Why?”

But he only shook his head and left her there, her attention once more captured by the pages of her book.