Why Kings Confess

Chapter 49

After leaving his aunt Henrietta’s Mayfair house, Sebastian spent the next several hours in St. Katharine’s, talking to the residents of Cat’s Hole and Hangman’s Court. He was working on a theory that was still missing too many parts to be even remotely feasible, and he was beginning to wonder if he was driven more by his own prejudices and presumptions than anything else.

He finally found a half-blind, gin-soaked ex-soldier who claimed he’d seen a couple of strangers near Hangman’s Court the night Pelletan was killed. But his descriptions were vague, and he said the two men didn’t seem to be together. The soldier also swore that if there’d been a woman there too, he’d have noticed her and remembered her.

Sebastian wasn’t so sure.

He was standing on London Bridge, his elbows on the stone parapet, his gaze on the cold, mist-swirled waters below, when Ambrose LaChapelle walked up to him.

“You’re a hard man to find,” said the Frenchman.

Sebastian shifted his gaze to the man beside him. “I didn’t know you were looking for me.”

Today the courtier wore the polished Hessians, buckskin breeches, and elegant greatcoat of a man about town. Only the soft curls peeping out from beneath the brim of his top hat reminded one of Serena Fox.

Sebastian said, “Last night, you told me you didn’t know who might want to kill you. Change your mind?”

“Let’s just say your wife changed my mind.”

“Lady Devlin?”

LaChapelle stood with his gloved hands clasped behind his back, his gaze on the forest of masts that filled the river below the bridge. After a moment, he said, “How much has Madame Sauvage told you of her brother’s childhood?”

“You mean on the Ile de la Cite?”

“No; before that.”

Sebastian studied the courtier’s exquisite, fine-boned face. “I didn’t know there was a ‘before that.’”

The Frenchman nodded, as if Sebastian had only confirmed what he’d already known or at least suspected. “Until the summer of 1795, Philippe-Jean Pelletan had only one child, a girl named Alexandrie. But then one day in early June, he returned to his house on the Ile de la Cite bringing with him a small boy. He claimed the lad was his own son-a love child, born of a secret affair some ten years before. He told his curious neighbors that the boy and his mother had been imprisoned during the Terror. The mother died, so Pelletan was now bringing the child home to raise as his own.”

“Are you saying that child was Damion?”

“He was, yes. Needless to say, there were whispers. Philippe-Jean had been a widower for some years. So why had no one ever heard of this boy? Not only that, but the child was quite fair, whereas the elder Pelletan had black hair and dark brown eyes.”

A cold gust of wind blew the mist against Sebastian’s face. He smelled the river and the dankness of the bridge’s ancient wet stones, and the smoke from a hundred thousand coal fires burning unseen in the fog-shrouded city. “What are you suggesting? That Philippe-Jean Pelletan was somehow complicit in a scheme that successfully rescued the Dauphin and substituted a dead or dying child in his place? That Damion Pelletan wasn’t his son at all, but the Lost Dauphin of France? You can’t be serious.”

“Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying I believe it myself. But that doesn’t mean the possibility has not been suggested by others.”

Sometimes a piece of information was like a solitary candle kindled in a dark, empty room, burning bright but useless. Yet there were times when its light made sense of what had until then remained subtly inexplicable or unseen. Sebastian said, “So that’s why both the Comte de Provence and Marie-Therese went out of their way to consult with Damion Pelletan. It had nothing to do with their health at all; they wanted to see for themselves how much he resembled the dead Prince. And what was their conclusion?”

The Frenchman shrugged. “In my experience, we tend to find resemblances where we look for them-whether in truth they exist or not. After so many years, who could say with any certainty?”

Sebastian thought about the body he’d seen lying on Gibson’s slab, the high, sloping forehead and prominent nose so much like Marie-Therese’s-or a thousand other people’s. If Provence and Marie-Therese had gone looking for a resemblance, they would have found it. He said, “How did the Bourbons come to know the details of Damion Pelletan’s childhood?”

“You think we have no contacts in Paris?”

“I’ve no doubt you do-although as I recall, the Comte de Provence would have me believe those ‘contacts’ somehow failed to tell him the purpose of Harmond Vaundreuil’s visit to London.”

LaChapelle simply gave a faint smile and shrugged.

The plash of a wherryman’s oars carried to them through the fog. When it came to powerful motives for murder, Sebastian suspected that preserving one’s position in the line of succession to a throne probably ranked right up there near the top-even when the throne in question was temporarily occupied by a Corsican usurper. The reappearance of the Lost Dauphin would completely overthrow the claims of the current aspirants to the French crown-and Marie-Therese’s chances of someday becoming queen.

“Of course,” LaChapelle was saying, “there is no real proof, one way or the other.”

“To your knowledge.”

“To my knowledge,” LaChapelle conceded. “However, given what is at stake, the mere possibility might have been enough to put Pelletan’s life in danger.”

Sebastian watched the courtier shift his gaze to the piers at the base of the bridge, where the river churned and swirled in deadly eddies. If the Comte d’Artois had been in London, Sebastian would have suspected him in an instant, for the youngest of the three Bourbon brothers could be as cruel and vicious as he was vain and self-indulgent. But Artois was far away, in Scotland, while if the wheelchair-bound, uncrowned King himself were involved, Sebastian found it difficult to understand why LaChapelle would have believed himself the target of the attack in Birdcage Walk.

Sebastian said, “Why try to kill you? I can understand killing Foucher-and mutilating his body-in the hopes of frightening Vaundreuil into abandoning the peace negotiations. But why you?”

“Perhaps because of what I know-or suspect.”

“Someone told me of a child born to Lady Giselle during the Terror-an infant that did not survive. How did that baby die?”

LaChapelle lifted his gaze to meet Sebastian’s. He was a man who had witnessed life at its most barbaric, who had no illusions about his fellow men or the depths of depravity of which they were capable. Yet Sebastian caught a glimpse of fear in his eyes-the kind of fear instinctive to all men when confronted with evidence of a certain kind of callous inhumanity that bordered on madness.

“She smothered it.”