Why Kings Confess

Chapter 33

That night, in his dreams, Sebastian breathed again the familiar scent of orange blossoms. Except this time the laughing shouts of the children were far away, like a haunting portent of things to come. This time, he felt the sharp edge of a too-tight rope biting deep into the flesh of his wrists and a hot, sticky wetness that trickled down the side of his face from the gash near his eye.

The moonlight was the color of bleached pewter, the air frigid with the sudden chill that darkness can bring to the mountains even after a warm spring day. He sat with his legs sprawled awkwardly before him, his bound hands wrenched painfully behind his back. The ground beneath him was bare, hard-packed earth. A fitful wind bent the crooked limbs of the trees overhead and filled the night with dancing, grotesque shadows.

He could smell wood smoke and the tantalizing aroma of roasting meat, hear the murmured voices of tired soldiers. The burnt-out shell of what had once been a gracious villa sprawled nearby, its empty arched windows glowing orange from the light of scattered campfires kindled within the lee of its protective stone walls.

The woman was careful not to get too close to him. Her skin was kissed golden by the sun, her hair a halo of fire in the night. She wore the rough trousers and rugged shirt of a Spanish peasant, with a bandolier slung across the fullness of her breasts. She looked like a Spanish guerrillero, but she was not. She was French, like the men who had captured him.

She said, “He won’t let you die easily.”

Sebastian gave her a smile that was supposed to be cocky but, thanks to his split lip and swollen face, probably came out lopsided. “Is that why you’re here? To spare me the delights your Major Rousseau has planned for me in the morning? Out of the goodness of your heart, I assume?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Your colonel betrayed you. You do realize that, don’t you?”

He deliberately widened his smile and felt the cut at the corner of his mouth crack open and bleed again. “I don’t believe you.”

“Then you are a fool.”

“Most men are, sooner or later.”

She’d been hunkered down before him, arms draped over her knees in the posture of one who has spent many nights around a campfire. Now she pushed to her feet. “It doesn’t need to end this way.”

“With my death? I think that’s a foregone conclusion.”

“True. Yet death can come with agonizing, unbearable slowness. Or it can come quickly. . when there is no need to prolong it.”

Sebastian forced himself to hold her gaze, his voice calm, although his guts were roiling with the knowledge of the horror her words promised. “I’ll think about your offer.”

“Don’t think too long.”

She took a step back, then another and another, careful not to turn away until she was far beyond his reach, as if there weren’t two guards with their muskets trained on him, as if he weren’t tied up like a hog ready for slaughter.

The pounding of the blood in Sebastian’s ears had grown so loud that he could no longer hear the rush of the wind through the cedars overhead or the melancholy song of a lark heralding the coming of the day. Then he opened his eyes to find a familiar room filled with the soft light of early dawn.

He turned his head to see Hero asleep beside him, her dark hair tumbled around her face, her lashes long and dark against the flesh of her cheeks. Yet the emotions from the distant past remained so intense that he had to suck in a deep, shaky breath in an attempt to ease them.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, his curled fists pressing into the softness at his sides. He felt Hero’s splayed hand warm against the small of his bare back.

“Bad dreams again?” she asked quietly.

“Yes.”

He rose to his feet.

She watched him walk across the room. “Going someplace?”

“I want to talk to Alexandrie Sauvage’s woman again.”

She pushed up on her elbow. “At this hour?”

“The sun’s nearly up.”

“Devlin-”

He turned to look back at her.

“When you knew Alexandrie Sauvage before, in Portugal. . was she your lover?”

He went to kneel beside her on the bed, his knees denting the mattress at her hip, his gaze locked with hers. “No. I killed her lover.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise he would have killed me.”

“Then she can’t blame you for it.”

“If she killed me-even in self-defense-would you blame her for it?”

Hero didn’t even blink. “Yes. Forever.”

Tuesday, 26 January

The frigid morning air smelled of coal smoke and fresh horse droppings and roasting coffee. Sebastian pushed his way through the early crush of apprentices, tradesmen, and women wrapped in their warmest shawls with the handles of market baskets looped over their arms, their breath showing white in the misty air. Heavy gray clouds pressed down on the city, obscuring the feeble light of the rising sun and promising more snow or a biting sleet. He was crossing the square toward Alexi’s house when one of the women he’d spoken to before, a street vendor, called out to him from behind her stall.

“She’s back, y’know.”

Sebastian paused beside the stall, the warm odor of eel pies rising from the tray before him. “You mean Madame Sauvage?”

“Aye. Came back just last night, she did. Got a big gash on the side o’ her head-just here.” She tilted her head and put up a hand encased in a darned wool glove to touch the matted gray hair above her ear. “Says she don’t know who done it, but we all know.”

“Oh? Who’s that?”

“That cabinetmaker, Bullock! That’s who. Any fool can see that.”

“You mean the man who holds her responsible for the death of his brother?”

“That’s right.”

“And how, precisely, does he blame her for the death of a man who succumbed to gaol fever?”

“She’s the one accused Abel Bullock of murder, she did.”

“Whom had he murdered?”

“His own wife, that’s who. Mattie was her name. Now, I’m not sayin’ she were anythin’ like an angel-she had a tongue on her could blister the hide off a mule, and she was a bit too fond of the gin, if ye know what I mean? But then, what woman wouldn’t be, if’n she had to put up with the likes of Abel Bullock?”

“What happened?” Sebastian asked.

“Mattie come to Madame Sauvage one night maybe three, four weeks ago. A sight she was, with both eyes black and a split lip and hurtin’ so bad she could hardly walk. Madame Sauvage had delivered Mattie’s last babe, ye see, so I guess Mattie figured she could trust her. Claimed she’d tumbled down the stairs, but any fool could take one look at her an’ see she’d been worked over by a man’s fist. Kicked her too-right in her belly. Madame Sauvage did what she could, but some things can’t be fixed. Died, she did. Somethin’ ruptured inside her.”

“There was an inquest?”

“Aye. Problem was, the Bullock brothers, they both swore she’d fallen down them steps. And though there was plenty what heard her screaming an’ Abel cursin’ her and hittin’ on her, folks was too scared to step forward and say it.”

“Afraid of the Bullock brothers, you mean?”

The woman dropped her voice and leaned forward, her eyes opened so wide he could see the white rimming her gray irises. “Mattie weren’t the first them two ’ave killed.”

“So what happened?”

“Madame Sauvage come forward. Said there weren’t no doubt but what Mattie’d had a beatin’, and that before Mattie breathed her last, she said her husband had done it.”

“And the coroner believed her?”

“She was real persuasive, she was. They committed Abel to Newgate to stand trial. Not for manslaughter, but murder.”

“He died of gaol fever before he came to trial?” asked Sebastian, his head tipping back as he studied the attic windows in the Dutch-like roofline of the corner house.

“He did. And ever since, Sampson Bullock’s been telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s gonna make her pay. He says-” She broke off, her mouth sagging open, her head turning as a low rumble reverberated across the square.

Sebastian saw a flash of light behind the windows on the fourth floor of the corner house. A concussive blast shattered the morning calm, splintering windows and sending roof tiles and singed rafters exploding upward on a massive white plume of billowing smoke.

Then a hail of gritty dust and glass and burnt debris rained down on the screaming crowd in the square.