Authors: C.S. Harris
He abandoned the gray in a warm stall on the edges of St. Giles. It was a notorious district, St. Giles, into which pursuing constables had been known simply to disappear forever. London’s authorities avoided it.
The Black Hart Inn lay at the end of a mean little lane known as Pudding Row, in an area of crooked streets and rickety old medieval buildings that seemed to lean against one another for support, their upper floors jutting out over unpaved passages running foul with open gutters. A low, half-timbered relic, the inn had leaded front windows through which only a faint glow of light spilled out into the night. Sebastian paused in the shadow of the doorway, his head turning as he listened.
The rain had stopped, but with the coming of darkness the temperature had plummeted, sending most of London’s residents scurrying indoors. He could hear the distant screech of iron-rimmed wheels and the dull monotony of a church bell sounding someone’s death knell, and nothing more. Pushing open the door, he went inside.
A heavy medley of smells washed over him, of ale and tobacco, of bitter coal smoke and hot grease and rank, stale sweat. The common room was dark, the guttering dips casting only a dim light that flickered over walls and low beamed ceilings blackened with age. Men in fustian and corduroy stood with elbows propped on the counter or lounged about scarred tables and benches. They looked up as Sebastian entered, the roar of their talk and laughter ebbing, their sunken eyes suspicious, watchful. He was a stranger here, and strangers in such places were never welcome.
Pushing his way to the counter, he bought a tankard of ale and ordered dinner. The bread would be adulterated with chalk and alum, the beef rancid and gristly, but he would find little better in this district and he’d eaten nothing since the breakfast he’d shared that morning with Christopher at a public house not far from the Heath.
There was a fire at one end of the room. Sebastian made his way toward it, his tankard in hand. The general swirl of noise had resumed, although he was aware of resentful eyes following him, of an air of tense wariness. Furtive shadows moved across the walls as two or three men sidled quietly from the room.
Sebastian was halfway across the sawdust-covered floor, winding his way between packed, unwashed bodies, when a boy of perhaps eight or ten brushed against him.
“A natty lad,” said Sebastian, his voice dangerously cheerful as he deftly retrieved his purse from the boy’s fist. The unexpected loss of his prize caused the young thief to hesitate so that, dropping the purse into an inner pocket, Sebastian managed to collar the lad and haul him back around, all without setting down the tankard or spilling a drop of ale. “But not a particularly skilled one, I’m afraid.”
Every eye in the room was trained upon them and Sebastian knew it. Yet the atmosphere was more one of watchful expectation than of hostility. A market beadle from Covent Garden, a big, ponderous man with a stained waistcoat and three chins, stood up from a nearby table to wipe the back of one meaty hand across his wet lips. “Aye, he’s an anabaptist, that one.” A low ripple of laughter traveled around the room, for it was a name given to young pickpockets who’d been caught in the act and subjected to the rough-and-ready punishment of being dumped in the nearest pond. “Want we should rechristen him?”
The lad kept his chin firm and his gaze steady, but Sebastian felt a shudder travel up the boy’s thin frame. For a homeless child, a dunking in a freezing pond on a night like this could mean death.
“I’ve no doubt he could use the ablution,” said Sebastian, his words greeted by more laughter. “But the boy’s done no real harm.” Opening his fist, Sebastian let the thin, ragged cloth of the urchin’s shirt slide through his fingers. “Go on,” he added, jerking his head toward the door when the boy hesitated. “Get out of here.”
Instead of running, the boy stood his ground, his dark, unexpectedly bright eyes traveling over Sebastian in open, thoughtful assessment. “On the lam, are you?”
Sebastian paused with his tankard halfway to his mouth. “I beg your pardon?”
The boy was older than Sebastian had first taken him to be—probably more like ten or twelve—and obviously observant enough to notice that beneath the mud and blood, Sebastian’s greatcoat was exquisitely tailored, and of a fine cloth that had been new just hours ago. “What’d you do? Lose all your blunt and bolt afore they could shut you up in the Never-Wag? Or did you kill a man in a duel?” One small, bony hand reached out to finger the dark, telltale stain on Sebastian’s chest. “Me, I think you killed somebody.”
Sebastian took a long, deep swallow of his ale. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Ho. And why else would such a swell cove be stopping at a dive like the Black ’Art? You answer me that.”
A prepubescent young girl with thin shoulders and a shank of straight, colorless hair appeared from the back rooms to dump the contents of her tray on the table in front of Sebastian. He stared at the small loaf of suspiciously white bread, the plate of unidentifiable meat awash in ladlefuls of congealing fat, and felt his appetite ebb.
“You should tuck that purse of yers somewhere out o’ sight and out o’ reach,” said the urchin as Sebastian seated himself at the table. “You know that, don’t you? It’s like an open invitation, bulgin’ out yer coat all obvious-like. In fact, it’s criminal, I’d say, to be temptin’ honest lads into mischief like that.”
Sebastian glanced up, his fork halted halfway to his mouth. “And when were you ever an honest lad?”
The boy laughed out loud. “I like you,” he said, his gaze drifting to the plate of food before Sebastian. A quiver passed over his features, a spasm of desperate want quickly hidden. “I tell you what: got a proposition for you, I do. If’n you’re agreeable, I could ’ire meself out to you for, say, ten pence a day? Show you the ropes o’ this part of town, I could. Be your general factotum. A fine gentleman like yerself shouldn’t be without a servant.”
“True.” Sebastian chewed a mouthful, swallowed. “But I’m the strangest creature. I have a decided aversion to being fleeced by those in my employ.”
The boy sniffed. “Well, if’n yer dead set on holdin’ that against me,” he said, his voice dripping reproach, his feet dragging as he turned away.
“Wait a minute.”
The boy swung back around.
“Here.” Picking up the hunk of bread, Sebastian tossed it to the boy, who caught the small loaf deftly with one hand. Sebastian grunted. “You’re a better catch than a foist. Now get going.”
K
at Boleyn had first met Rachel York on the banks of the Thames, on a snowy December night just over three years ago. Rachel had been fifteen then, heartbreakingly young and full of despair. Kat had been all of twenty, but already the toast of London’s stage for several years, her own secrets and painful past hidden beneath fine jewels and practiced smiles.
And so it was to the Thames that Kat Boleyn went that Wednesday night, to toss a bunch of yellow roses from the center of London Bridge and watch dry-eyed as they drifted apart and slowly sank beneath the river’s black waves. Then she turned purposefully away.
The clouds still hung low over the city, but with the coming of night, the rain had eased off into a fine mist. When she was a little girl, Kat had loved the mist. She’d lived in Dublin then, in a whitewashed house facing an open green edged with chestnuts and giant oaks. One of the oaks, older than all the others, had great spreading branches that reached nearly down to the ground. Even before she started school, Kat’s father had taught her to climb that tree.
She always thought of him as her father, even though he wasn’t. But he was the only father she’d ever known, and he encouraged her to do things that sometimes frightened her mother.
“Life is full of scary things,” he used to tell Kat. “The trick is not to let your fears get in the way of your
living
. Whatever else you do, Katherine, don’t settle for a life half-lived.”
Kat had tried to tell herself that, the day the English soldiers came. The mist had been thick that morning, and heavy with the acrid scent of burning. She’d stood in the dim morning light and repeated her father’s words to herself over and over again as they dragged her mother kicking and screaming from that pretty little white house. They’d made Kat watch what they did to her mother that day, and they’d made Kat’s father watch, too. And then they’d hanged them, side by side, Kat’s mother and father both, from the oak at the edge of the green.
Those days belonged to a different lifetime, to a different person. The woman who now drove her phaeton and pair at a smart clip through London’s lamp-lit streets called herself Kat Boleyn, and she was one of the most acclaimed actresses of the London stage. The velvet pelisse she wore that evening was a bright cherry red, not a smoke-smudged gray, and she wore a string of pearls at her throat, rather than a black band of mourning.
But she still hated the mist.
Reining in before the townhouse of Monsieur Léon Pierrepont, Kat handed the ribbons to her groom and stepped down, easily, from her high-perch seat. “Walk them, George.”
“Yes, miss.”
She paused on the footpath to stare up at the classical façade before her, lit softly by the gleam of flickering oil lamps. Like so much else about Leo Pierrepont, this house on Half Moon Street was carefully calculated to create just the right impression: large, but not too large, elegant, and with a touch of the faded grandeur to be expected from a proud nobleman now forced to live in exile. When one lived a life that was, essentially, a lie, appearances were everything.
She found him alone, in his dining room, just sitting down to a table laid for one with fine china and gleaming silver and the sparkle of old crystal. He was a slim, delicately built man upon whom the passing years, however difficult they might have been, nevertheless seemed to have rested easily. His face was largely unlined, his light brown hair barely touched with gray. Kat had never known his precise age, but given that he’d been almost thirty when driven from Paris by the Reign of Terror, she knew he must be in his late forties by now.
“You shouldn’t have come,” Leo said, his attention seemingly all for his soup.
Kat jerked off her gloves and tossed them with reticule, pelisse, and hat onto a nearby chair. “Whose reputation are you afraid will be compromised, Leo? Mine, or yours?”
He glanced up, gray eyes gleaming with a faint smile. “Mine, of course. You have no reputation left to lose.” He signaled for the servants to leave them, then sat back. The smile faded. “You’ve heard what happened to Rachel, I suppose?”
Kat pressed her flattened palms against the tabletop and leaned into them. Beneath the silk bodice of her gown, her heart thudded hard and fast, but she managed to keep her voice calm, steady. “Did you do it?”
If he had, he wouldn’t admit it; Kat knew that. But she wanted to watch his face while he denied it.
Leo dipped his spoon into his soup and brought it carefully to his lips. “Come now,
ma petite
. Even if I had wanted Rachel dead, do you seriously think I would have killed her in such a spectacular fashion? In a
church
? From what I understand, the walls were practically painted with her blood.”
Kat watched his long, slim hands reach for a piece of bread. “One of your minions could have got carried away.”
“I choose my minions more carefully than that.”
“So who killed her?”
A shadow touched the Frenchman’s features, a brief ghost of concern that Kat almost—
almost
—believed might be genuine. “I wish I knew.”
Kat turned away, her quick, long-legged stride carrying her across the room and back again.
Leo shifted his weight in his chair and watched her. “Ring for another glass,” he said after a moment. “Have some wine.”
“No thank you.”
“Then at least stop pacing up and down the room in that fatiguing way. It’s not good for my digestion.”
She hesitated beside the table, but she did not sit. “Who was Rachel scheduled to meet last night?”
Picking up a knife, Leo calmly spread his bread with butter. “No one that I’m aware of.”
“What would you have me believe then, Leo? That she went there
to pray
?”
“It’s what people generally do in a church.”
“Not people like Rachel.” Kat went to stand before the hearth and stare unseeingly at the glowing coals. There was always danger in this game they played; they all knew that. But whoever had met Rachel last night was more than dangerous; he was evil. And what he’d done could threaten them all. “They’ll be looking into her death—the authorities, I mean. They could stumble across something.”
“Careful,
ma petite
,” said Leo, reaching for his glass. “The walls have ears.” He took a slow swallow of his wine, then frowned. “But no, I don’t think the authorities will learn anything that need concern us. I went past her lodgings this morning as soon as I heard what had happened, but the constables were there. I’ll go back tonight and make certain she left nothing that could be incriminating.”
“You could be too late. They might have found something already.”
Leo huffed a soft laugh. “You can’t be serious. This is London, not Paris. They’re fools, these Englishmen. So afraid of the danger to their liberties posed by a standing army that they’d rather see their cities overrun with thieves and murderers than establish a proper police force. Those constables won’t have found anything. Besides”—He thrust another piece of bread in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed—“they think they already know who did it.”
Kat swung to face him. “You said you didn’t know who killed her.”
“I don’t know who killed her. But the London authorities think they do. He’s doubtless under arrest even as we speak. Some viscount with a reputed propensity for slaughtering his fellow men. He has a strange name. Something like Diablo, or Devil, or—”
“Devlin?” Her breath coming uncharacteristically shallow and fast, Kat left the fireplace and walked up to Leo, her gaze searching his face.