Why Mermaids Sing

Chapter 44

“Oh, Sebastian. I am so sorry,” said Kat later that night, when he told her of his interview with his father.

She lay in his arms, her glorious auburn hair spilling over his naked shoulder and down her back. He tangled his fingers in her hair, smoothing it away from her face. “It could have been worse.”

“Do you think he’ll change his mind?”

“No.”

She put her hands on his shoulders, rising so that he looked up into her face. And what he saw there, for just an instant, brought a yawning uneasiness to the pit of his stomach.

Then her head dipped, her lips parting as she kissed him. “Make love to me,” she whispered.

He swept his hands down her back, pulling her tight against him. “Every day for the rest of my life.”

Sometime later, he awoke to the sounds of the night, the rumbling of a night soil cart on Harwich Street, the distant cry of the watchman. He lay for a few moments wondering what had awakened him, letting his gaze drift over the curving cheek and gently parted lips of the sleeping woman beside him. Smiling, he was just drifting off to sleep again when an oddly muffled crack from the back of the house made him open his eyes.

The servants had long since retired to their attic bedrooms. There should have been no one downstairs. He sat up, his breath coming hard and quick as he listened to the distant creak of floorboards, the thump of someone bumping into unseen furniture in the dark.

Sebastian slid from the bed, his bare feet noiseless as he crept toward the door. Pausing at the fireplace, he selected a heavy poker from the rack of tools. Behind him, Kat stirred, then stilled.

Slowly, he opened the door to the hall. The house lay in darkness, the heavy drapes at the windows blocking the faint glow of the waning moon and the streetlamps outside. He could hear footsteps now, on the stairs from the ground to the first floor, the scuff of boots, the rubbing of cloth. Two men, Sebastian decided, maybe three.

He hadn’t expected Jarvis to move so quickly, so directly, against them. The poker gripped in both hands like a cricket bat, Sebastian crept to the top of the stairs, then paused. He’d have preferred to fight the intruders on the first floor, farther away from Kat, but he didn’t have enough time to make it safely down the stairs and take up a position. And so he waited and let them come to him. It wasn’t until he felt a draft of cool air move across his skin that he realized he was utterly naked.

The intruders reached the first-floor hall and turned toward the steps to the second floor, coming into his line of vision. They moved carefully, like men groping blindly in the darkness. But Sebastian had the night vision of a cat. He saw two men, one of medium height and build and wearing a slouch hat, the other taller, bulkier. Both carried stout cudgels. It seemed a crude form of attack for a man of Jarvis’s ilk. But then, Jarvis would want to make the attack look random, the work of housebreakers surprised in the act.

They were on the second set of stairs now, the smaller man in the lead, the other some two or three steps behind him. Sebastian tightened his grip on the poker and waited. He waited until the first man reached the top stair. Lunging out of the shadows, Sebastian swung the poker with full force against the side of the intruder’s head.

The impact made a sickening popping sound, iron smashing through flesh and bone. The man himself uttered only a small sigh, his cudgel clattering to the floor as the force of the blow spun him around and sent him toppling backward to thump down one stair after the other.

His companion flattened himself against the wall, his eyes wide. For one brief instant, Sebastian looked into the man’s white face. Then the man screamed and dropped his club. Whirling, he bolted back down the stairs.

Sebastian chased after him, leaping over the bloody, lifeless sprawl of the first housebreaker near the base of the stairs. The second intruder hit the landing on the fly, then shot down the stairs to the ground floor. From overhead came the sound of Kat’s voice. “Devlin? Where are you? What is it?”

Sebastian kept running. The intruder careened through the dining room, knocking over chairs, crashing into the sideboard. Sebastian reached the dining room doorway just in time to see the man dive through the broken window to the terrace.

“Devlin?”

“Call for the watch,” Sebastian shouted up the stairs. He leapt over an upended chair in his path, then skidded to a halt beside the open window, wary of blundering into an ambush. But he could see the intruder already crossing the garden, running for the back gate. Still carrying the poker, Sebastian stepped gingerly through the broken window and dropped to the terrace.

“Watch!” he cried, raising his voice. “Watch, I say!” Pelting across the terrace to the garden, he saw the intruder jerk open the gate and dart through it.

Sebastian chased him up the mews, the cobbles smooth and slick beneath his bare feet, the night air cold against his naked skin. The glow of a hastily lit lantern showed from the rooms over the stables. A second light flickered to life across the way.

“Watch!” Sebastian cried again as the man ducked through the arch and swerved left.

Still gripping the poker, Sebastian erupted through the arch, then hesitated. The street before him stretched quiet and empty in the misty lamplight. Pursing his lips, he blew out his breath and said, “Son of a bitch.”

The shrill of a whistle brought his head around. The bulky figure of the neighborhood’s night watchman blundered around the corner from Harwich Street, his whistle gripped between his teeth, his lantern swinging wildly. “What’s this? What’s this? What’s this?” he cried, breathing heavily. “I say, young man. Your clothes! If a lady were to chance to see you—” He broke off, his eyes opening wide with recognition. “Goodness. My lord. ’Tis you.”

“Two men broke into Miss Boleyn’s house. I chased one of them here. Did you see where he went?”

The watchman lifted his gaze to the rooftops and kept it there. “I heard running footsteps, my lord. But I never saw anyone.”

“Check up and down the street. He may have ducked down someone’s area steps, or be hiding in the shadows of a doorway.”

The watchman kept his gaze carefully averted. “Yes, my lord.”

Sebastian started to turn away, but hesitated long enough to say, “By the way, there’s a dead body at Miss Boleyn’s house. You’ll need to send someone to deal with it.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Sebastian swung back toward Kat’s house. As he crossed the garden, he could see the house ablaze with lights, hear a crescendo of female voices coming from inside. Climbing through the window again, he rummaged through the sideboard until he found a tablecloth to drape around his hips.

He found Kat, Elspeth, and the cook clustered in the first-floor hall. The man Sebastian had hit with the poker lay near the base of the stairs from the second floor. Blood splattered the walls of the stairwell and the banister, and soaked into the carpet. Sebastian took one look at what was left of the man’s head and wished he’d thought to bring another tablecloth.

Kat came to stand beside him, her hands wrapping around his arm as she stared down at the man at her feet. Her face was white, but he suspected it was more from anger than fear. “It’s Jarvis, isn’t it? He sent these men.”

Sebastian forced himself to take another look at the face of the man he’d killed. He studied the even features, the fan of smile lines at the edges of the widely staring eyes, and knew a flicker of surprise. “No. It’s the man who threatened me outside my aunt’s house last Monday.” Hunkering down, he searched quickly through the man’s pockets, but found nothing of interest. “This had nothing to do with Jarvis. Lord Stanton, perhaps, or Sir Humphrey Carmichael, or perhaps someone else who doesn’t like the questions I’ve been asking. But not Jarvis.”

“How many were there?”

“Two. The other one got away.” He turned to head upstairs. “I need to get some clothes on. The watch should be here soon to deal with this fellow.”

She followed him, carefully lifting the hem of her dressing gown as she stepped over the bloody corpse on her stairs. “You’re certain it’s the same man you saw before?”

“Yes.” He pulled his shirt over his head and reached for his breeches. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Where are you going?”

“To have a little talk with Lord Stanton.”

The sun was still a mere promise on the horizon when Sebastian popped the lock on the library window of Lord Stanton’s Park Street town house and dropped inside.

He moved easily through the darkened house, hugging the wall on his way up the stairs to keep the steps from creaking. Lady Stanton had been advised by her doctors to retire to the country in an attempt to ease her prostration of grief. Only one of the bedrooms on the second floor—an opulent chamber overlooking the rear garden—was occupied.

Lord Stanton slept on his back in a gilded tester bed with red velvet hangings. Beneath the figured red coverlet, his heavy chest rose and fell rhythmically, his lips parting with each exhalation. Snagging a lyre-backed chair, Sebastian brought it, reversed, close to the bed’s edge and straddled the seat. He pressed the muzzle of his small flintlock pistol into the hollow beneath the man’s jawbone and waited.

The rhythmic breathing stopped on a strangled gasp. Stanton’s eyes flew open, then fixed, wide, on the pistol.

Sebastian showed his teeth in a smile. “I trust you can see well enough to know what this is?”

Stanton nodded, his tongue flicking out to moisten his lips.

“Someone tried to kill me tonight. Not just me, but my future wife, as well. That was a serious error.”

Stanton’s voice was admirably strong and controlled. “If they told you I hired them, they lied.”

Sebastian frowned. “Odd. I don’t recall mentioning that there was more than one of them. But as it happens, there were two. One is now a bloody mess on Miss Boleyn’s staircase. The other, regrettably, escaped.”

Something flashed in the Baron’s eyes, then was gone.

“This is the second time in the past few days that someone has tried to kill me. I must say, it’s getting rather fatiguing.”

“You’re obviously making yourself unpopular.”

“So it would seem. I keep thinking about our encounter in Whitehall the other day. You struck me at the time as a man with a secret, a terrible secret he was willing to do almost anything to keep from becoming known.”

Stanton stared back at him, his lips pressed tight, his narrowed eyes radiating hatred and contained fury.

Sebastian leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper. “I don’t know it all yet, but I’m getting close. At this point, I’m thinking it doesn’t matter whether it was you or Sir Humphrey Carmichael or someone I haven’t even met yet who sent those men into Miss Boleyn’s house. But if any of you threatens her again in any way, you’re dead. It’s as simple as that.”

“You’re mad.”

“I doubt you’re the first to think so.” Sebastian withdrew the gun and stood.

“I could call the watch on you,” said Stanton, his fists tightening on the covers at his chest.

Sebastian smiled and backed toward the door. “You could. But that would direct attention precisely where you don’t want it, now, wouldn’t it?”