What Angels Fear (28 page)

Chapter 38

S
ir Henry Lovejoy paused in the dressing room doorway and stared down at what was left of Mary Grant. They hadn’t covered the body yet, and the smell of her blood hung thick in the air. He was glad he hadn’t had a chance to eat his supper yet.

“There’s no doubt this time as to who did it,” said Edward Maitland.

Lovejoy glanced back at his constable. “There’s not?”

“We have a witness.” Maitland flipped open his notebook and turned it toward the golden pool of light cast by one of the oil lamps they’d lit. “A Mrs. Charles Lavery. She saw Lord Devlin leaving the building this afternoon.”

“She’s sure it was Devlin?”

“Said she knows the Viscount. Her husband served with Devlin in Spain.” Maitland closed his notebook with a snap. “No doubt he’s our man, sir.”

Lovejoy crouched down beside the dead woman and studied her face. She was young, but not particularly attractive. Nothing like Rachel York. “Why this woman? Why go through all the bother of tracking her down?”

“She knew Rachel York had gone to St. Matthew’s that night to meet him.” Maitland shrugged his expensively tailored shoulders. “So he kills her to shut her up.”

“But she’d already told us about that.” Lovejoy’s gaze drifted around the disordered room. “What else did she know, I wonder? And what do you suppose he was looking for?”

“Money,” Maitland suggested. “Or something to sell. Jewelry perhaps.”

“We’re dealing with the heir to an earldom here. Not some petty thief.”

“Still, he must be getting short of the ready by now, for all that. A man’s gotta eat.”

“Hmm. Perhaps. Yet Rachel York’s reticule had also been searched, if you’ll remember.” Lovejoy pushed to his feet, his knees creaking. “I wonder,” he said, half to himself. “I wonder . . .”

There was something peculiarly soothing about the sight and sound of a fire. Kat Boleyn sat with her feet curled up beneath her, her head tipped back against the silk upholstery of her drawing room sofa, her gaze on the flickering flames before her as she listened to the voice of the man she’d once loved telling her about his visit to St. Jude’s Foundling Home.

And about Mary Grant.

“It’s not your fault,” Kat said when Devlin had finished and fell silent beside her. “It’s not your fault that he got to her first.”

“No. I know it’s not,” he said, his gaze on the fire.

“In a way, you’re this killer’s victim, too.”

“I know it’s not my fault,” he said again.

“But you’re still feeling guilty.”

He looked up to meet her gaze. A hint of a wry smile touched his lips, then faded as he sucked in a deep breath. “I suppose because in some way I can’t begin to understand, this all has to do with me. I keep circling around it, catching glimpses of it, but I can’t seem to grasp it. And in the meantime, these women are dying.”

She touched his shoulder and he turned toward her, his fingers digging into her arm as he buried his face against her breasts. She felt a shudder rip through him, then he lay still.

Disturbed by the tumult of her own feelings, she touched her hand, lightly, to his hair, just above the nape of his neck. “It’s odd, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “All those years Rachel went every Monday afternoon to St. Jude’s, and I never knew about it.”

He shifted so that his cheek lay against the bare flesh of her chest where it showed above the bodice of her gown, and his hand rested high on her stomach. “She was with child. Did you know?”

Kat’s fingers stilled in his hair. “No. I didn’t know. It happens sometimes. Even when one is careful.”

The tip of his finger traced a delicate pattern against the thin silk of her gown, spreading a warm glow that seemed to start from deep within her. And she marveled at the effect this man’s touch could have on her. Even when she didn’t want it to. Even when she tried to steel herself against it.

He said, “The Reverend Finley seems to think she was in love with someone.”

Kat’s hand closed over his, stopping that slow, seductive motion. “You think she was killed because of the baby?”

“Perhaps. But it doesn’t explain the rape. Or what was done to Mary Grant.” He lifted his head to look at her. “How well do you know Lord Frederick?”

As a friend of the Prince of Wales, Lord Frederick was a frequent guest at the kind of functions to which women like Kat were invited. She supposed she probably knew the man better than Devlin, who wasn’t of that set and had spent so many years out of the country besides. She linked her fingers with Sebastian’s, although even that simple touch filled her with a confusion of feelings she didn’t want and didn’t need.

“I wouldn’t have said he’s capable of that kind of violence,” she said after a moment’s thought. “In fact, I’d say he’s one of those rare men who actually
likes
women, if you know what I mean? The kind who enjoys women’s company, who likes talking to them about things such as fashion and music and art. He has a daughter, Elizabeth, who married the Earl of Southwick’s eldest son just last month. You can tell by the look on his face whenever he talks about her how much he adores her.”

“She’s his only child, isn’t she?”

Kat nodded. “His wife died almost fifteen years ago, but in all that time, he’s never remarried, never set up a mistress.”

“And yet he suddenly drifts into a casual liaison with a woman who just might be passing information to the French? It doesn’t make sense.” He propped himself up on one elbow so that he could draw a heavy paper from the inner pocket of his coat and hand it to her. “Is this Rachel York’s handwriting?”

Kat found herself holding an envelope, a blue envelope with the words
Lord Frederick Fairchild
written across it in Leo Pierrepont’s bold scrawl.

“No,” she said, handing the envelope back to Sebastian and meeting his gaze squarely. “At least, I don’t think so. I don’t recognize it.”

He tucked the envelope away.

“Where did you get it?” she asked.

“I found it in Mary Grant’s rooms.”

“Empty?”

“Yes.”

He ducked his head, his lips brushing the tender flesh just below her collarbone, his hands going aroving to all the secret places that made her heart race and her breath catch. All the places he had discovered so long ago and apparently not forgotten.

She’d thought she could hold her heart aloof. She’d meant to hold her heart aloof. But an unexpected, unwanted flood of tender emotions and deep, unacknowledged wants brought the sting of tears to her eyes and lent an urgency to the hunger with which her body rose up to meet his.

The next morning, Sebastian received a message from Paul Gibson, to the effect that a certain gentleman of their acquaintance had some information Sebastian might find interesting. This gentleman had agreed to meet Sebastian in Green Park at ten that morning, at the southeast corner.

Wary of a possible trap, Sebastian arrived at the rendezvous early, only to find the park’s open fields populated by nothing more than a dozen dairy cows and their attendants. Not until half past ten did the tall, cadaverously thin man appear, wearing striped trousers and a jaunty red kerchief, and bringing with him a faint, indefinable odor of decay that seemed to emanate from him with each step.

Jumpin’ Jack Cochran hawked up a mouthful of phlegm, spat, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I ’ear tell you’s lookin’ for some nonmedical gent what’s interested in buyin’ half-longs.”

“That’s right,” said Sebastian. He counted out five pounds, folded them into a roll, and handed it over.

Jumpin’ Jack licked his lips, jammed the money deep into his coat pocket, and rubbed his mouth again. “I had me just such a request about a month or so ago, from a feller claimin’ he was an artist, although I thought at the time he was a queer ’un.”

“Do you remember his name?”

Jumpin’ Jack let out a laugh that turned, quickly, into a cough. “You don’t go askin’ folks’ names in this business. But I’d know the feller agin if’n I was to see him. Young, he was, with a head o’ dark curly hair, just like a girl’s. My Sarah, she was moonin’ about the place for days after she saw him. Said he was like the angels in them paintings hangin’ over the side altars in Trinity Church.” Cochran spat again. “You’d think the girl’d have more discretion, her being a proper Englishwoman and him some heathen foreigner.”

Sebastian felt his pulse quicken in anticipation. “He was a foreigner?

“Aye. From Italy or some such place. Or so he said. They all sound pretty much the same to me.”

“Where did you deliver the goods? Do you remember?”

“Aye. Almonry Terrace, it was. In Westminster.”

Chapter 39

D
onatelli was in his studio when Sebastian came through the door.

The artist half turned, his slack mouth agape with shock, the breath whooshing out of him when Sebastian’s shoulder caught him in the gut and brought him down.

“What are you doing? What do you want from me?” the Italian managed to gasp, before Sebastian shoved his forearm up beneath the man’s chin, cutting off his air.

“I understand you’ve been buying yourself some half-longs,” said Sebastian through gritted teeth. “Is that the way you like your women, hmm? You like it when they don’t move, don’t talk back, don’t even
breathe
?”

Donatelli’s angelic brown eyes went wide. He tried to speak, but all he could get out was a gurgle.

Sebastian eased the pressure on the man’s throat just enough to let him gasp, “No! It’s nothing like that. I do medical illustrations.”

Sebastian made as if to increase his pressure on the man’s throat again. “Gammon.”

“No! I swear it’s true. My last commission was for the female torso.” He made as if to push up from the floor, then went limp again, his features twitching with fear, when Sebastian brought up the small flintlock and laid the muzzle against the man’s temple.

Donatelli licked his lips, his eyes rolling sideways in an effort to watch Sebastian’s finger on that trigger. “If you let me go, I’ll show you. They’re in the back room.”

Sebastian hesitated, then let the man up.

Donatelli’s hand crept to his throat. “Mother of God, you could have killed me.”

Sebastian leveled the flintlock at the artist’s chest. “The illustrations.”

Donatelli nodded. “They’re back here.” He staggered toward the other room. “See?” They were a series of perhaps a dozen, rendering in meticulous detail the torso of a woman in various stages of dismemberment, from a variety of angles.

“I work with a medical student from St. Thomas’s,” said Donatelli, his voice still hoarse, strained. “He does the dissections while I sketch.”

“Now why would a painter who’s suddenly become Society’s newest discovery need to be hawking anatomy sketches to medical journals?”

Donatelli twitched one shoulder in a very Mediterranean shrug. “I began doing it for extra money when I was painting scenes at the theater. I keep it up because it improves my ability to realistically render the human form. I’m not the only painter who studies cadavers. Look at Fragonard.”

Sebastian turned away from the bloody renderings. “Where were you the night Rachel York was killed?” The illustrations might provide the artist with a plausible excuse for buying female human cadavers, but that was all.

The Italian’s eyes went wide. “
Me
? But . . . Surely you don’t believe that I killed Rachel?”

Sebastian kept his gaze steady on the other man’s face. “Where were you?”

“Why, here, of course. Painting.”

“Anyone with you?”

The Italian tightened his jaw. “No.”

Sebastian paused, his attention caught by a nearby small canvas. It looked like a study for a larger painting, a family portrait. The grouping was of a man and three women, each at a different stage in her life. The matriarch of the family sat in the center. She was thin and wrinkled and stooped with age, but her eyes still shone with such determination and pride that she completely overshadowed the woman to her left, a pale, vacant-faced lady of middle years who was undoubtedly the man’s wife. On the other side, the family’s brown-haired, plain-faced daughter, who looked to be in her early twenties, stared at something just out of sight, as if to disassociate herself from the others. And towering above them all, his arms spread as if both to protect the women and to dominate them, stood a large, jowly man with a florid complexion and fiercely staring eyes that Sebastian recognized as Charles, Lord Jarvis.