“That was the France of 1792, of Robespierre and the Jacobins and the Terror. Not the France of Napoléon and the Grand Empire. It’s not unusual for those who love France to see the Emperor as a savior rather than—”
“A monster?”
“Well, yes.” Sebastian found himself wondering for how long Angelina had been an agent of the French. Since the days of the Directoire, perhaps? When she’d been in Venice and Spain?
When she’d known his mother?
“It still doesn’t make sense,” said Miss Jarvis. “If Angelina Champagne killed Lindquist and de La Rocque, and Sir Hyde killed Yasmina, then who killed Alexander Ross and Ezekiel Kincaid?”
“Ross’s Russian friend, Colonel Dimitri Chernishav. The problem is, I can’t prove it. And even if I could, the bastard has diplomatic immunity.”
Chapter 50
B
y the time Sebastian had finished with all the inevitable unpleasantness attending the violent deaths of an Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs and a French spy, a stormy, windblown darkness was falling over the city.
Arriving at Colonel Dimitri Ivanovich Chernishav’s lodgings in Westminster, he found a two-wheeled covered cart drawn up in the pool of fitful light cast by the oil lamps mounted high on the walls of the Adingdon Buildings. Dressed in a long, flowing cape and with a silver-headed walking stick tucked up under one arm, the Russian was supervising the loading of a small ship’s desk onto the back of the mule-drawn cart.
“Going someplace?” asked Sebastian, eyeing the pile of portmanteaux, bandboxes, and trunks that still littered the flagway.
Chernishav looked around. “I’ve been recalled to Russia.”
“Oh? Problems?”
“My father. I fear he is gravely ill.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Chernishav acknowledged his condolences with a small bow. “There is a ship leaving for St. Petersburg with the morning tide. The
Staryy Dub
.”
“How fortuitous.” Sebastian studied the Russian’s florid, pleasant face. “You’ve heard about the deaths of Sir Hyde Foley and Angelina Champagne, I presume?”
“I have heard the dozen or so different versions of the tale making the rounds of the clubs, yes. None of them entirely accurate, I’ve no doubt, although one can of course guess at the truth. Poor Alexander. Who’d have thought he’d fall victim to the French here, in London, of all places?” Chernishav shook his head, his lips pressed into a sad smile. “At least you have brought him a measure of justice.”
“Not quite. You see, neither Foley nor Angelina Champagne killed Alexander Ross.” Sebastian paused. “You did.”
The Russian gave an incredulous laugh and turned to hand a bandbox up to the waiting man in the cart. “What possible reason could I have to kill Alexander?”
“You were never supposed to meet him at Cribb’s Parlour that night. Instead, he was waiting for you at his lodgings—at around eight, not midnight—and you found him very much at home and alive. He invited you in, perhaps even offered his old friend a glass of wine. After all, he’d just learned from Ezekiel Kincaid that the United States had declared war on Britain and he was doubtless concerned about what effect this new development would have on Russia’s chances of cementing an active alliance with Britain. Ross liked Russia; he had good memories of his time there and he wanted to see British troops deployed to help stop Napoléon from reaching Moscow. He had tried but failed to get in contact with Foley, so it makes sense he’d be anxious to discuss this latest development with his old friend.” Sebastian paused. “He didn’t expect his old friend to thrust a stiletto blade into the base of his skull.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Chernishav, turning to toss a portmanteau into the back of the cart.
Sebastian said, “I suppose it was an act of desperation, a spur-of-the-moment decision to kill Ross before he had a chance to pass his information on to his superiors at the Foreign Office. The ironic thing is, I’m not convinced Sir Hyde Foley wouldn’t have ordered Ross to keep the information to himself, even if Ross had lived long enough to report to him. But you had no way of knowing that, and I suppose it was a risk you felt you couldn’t afford to take. So when your good friend turned his back on you—perhaps to pour you another drink?—you quietly slipped your stiletto from your walking stick and drove it into the base of his skull. Then you stripped the bloody clothes from your good friend’s body, placed him in bed to make it look as if he had died naturally, and carried the bloodstained clothing away with you. You figured you could trust Jasper Cox to guard the secret for his own reasons, but you weren’t so sure about Ezekiel Kincaid. So you tracked him to the Bow and Ox in Rotherhithe and sent him a note purportedly from Jasper Cox, asking that he come to the St. Helena tea gardens—”
“This is preposterous!”
“Where you waylaid him and killed him, too. Probably also unnecessary, under the circumstances, but you’re nothing if not thorough. You drove his body to Bethnal Green wrapped in a tarp on the floor of your curricle and dumped him in a ditch. Then you had Ross’s bloodstained clothing cleaned and, after Sir Gareth Ross had returned to his home in Oxfordshire, you slipped the items back into his cupboards. Nice attention to detail, by the way. The only thing that confused me for a while was the intruder I encountered in Ross’s room. Then I realized he was probably sent to make certain Ross hadn’t left any written record of what he’d learned from Kincaid.”
Chernishav had given up all pretense of loading the cart. “An interesting theory,” he said. “Except of course it is only that—a theory, with no proof. You’re grasping, Devlin. And why? Madame Champagne is dead. Let it all end with her.”
Sebastian shook his head. “Taking the copy of the French War Minister’s dispatches from Ross’s rooms was a mistake. So was dumping Kincaid’s body in Bethnal Green. It was dark that night, but not that dark. You were seen.”
The Russian’s nostrils flared on a quickly indrawn breath. “This is nothing more than a pitiful attempt to disrupt relations between our two countries by unjustly accusing me of this barbarous crime. Yet even if it were true—which it is not—you forget that I am a member of my country’s diplomatic posting. According the Diplomatic Privileges Act of 1708, your law can’t touch me. I have diplomatic immunity.” He reached for a bulky portmanteau, his fist tightening around the handles as he straightened. “When the
Staryy Dub
sails in the morning, I will be on it.”
His gaze on the silver-headed walking stick tucked under the Russian’s arm, Sebastian showed his teeth in a smile. “Your third mistake was in trying to distract me by kidnapping Miss Hero Jarvis. No one has immunity from Jarvis ... or me.”
Chernishav swung the leather portmanteau at Sebastian’s head.
Sebastian threw up his arms and caught the heavy blow with a block, staggering as the impact reverberated through his body. He saw the flash of the Russian’s boot heel aimed at his groin and leapt backward, crashing into the pile of bandboxes and trunks. He stumbled and went down.
The Russian tossed the portmanteau at him and turned and fled into the gathering gloom.
“Hell and the devil confound it,” swore Sebastian, bandboxes tumbling around him as he struggled to his feet.
He could hear the clatter of boot heels on cobbles as the Russian darted up the passage that ran along the side of the Adington Buildings. Sebastian pelted after him into a damp, narrow alley that erupted onto a deserted wharf littered with coiled hemp and piles of crates and a cluster of white gulls that rose up, screeching, as Chernishav raced across the weathered planks.
This was a part of Westminster where the stately streets surrounding the Houses of Parliament and the abbey degenerated rapidly into a warren of age-blackened houses. Distilleries and blacksmiths’ forges and scrap ironmongers’ shops opened onto coal yards and a long string of wharfs where barges from the counties upriver unloaded everything from hay to stone and timber. Now, in the rapidly descending darkness, the waterfront stood empty, the barges riding at low tide and battened down against a storm that sent streaks of lightning flickering over the roiling horizon.
With Sebastian some thirty feet behind him, Chernishav sprinted across an open stretch of planking to where the looming high walls of a riverside brewery rose, dark, soot-streaked brick against a rapidly darkening sky. The heavy, pungent smell of fermentation and hops mingled with the scent of tar and the smells coming off the water. Rows of casks turned on their sides and stored in towering stacks three and four high threw dark shadows across the yard. Chernishav ducked between the rows of casks, and a sudden stillness settled over the deserted waterfront.
The Russian had stopped.
Sebastian drew up sharply as thunder pealed slowly across the water. Then his preternatural hearing caught the quiet hiss of a well-oiled blade being pulled from its sheath.
He crept forward, his senses alert to the least flicker of movement, the betraying whisper of an indrawn breath. He had just reached the end of the first row of barrels when he heard the faint scrape of wood against wood. He leapt back and felt a gust of wind as the wall of casks beside him began to move.
They crashed down around him in a rolling, clattering, bouncing cascade of shattering staves and ringing iron. A dog began to bark hysterically, its chain rattling; a watchman shouted in the distance.
Sebastian caught the patter of footsteps running away fast. He clambered over the piles of shifting, broken barrels in time to see the Colonel disappear around the edge of the brewery.
Bloody hell.
He chased the Russian through a stone wharf, with its towering walls of roughly quarried granite and sandstone, and into the yard of a pottery factory. A flash of lightning lit up the waterfront, limning a long rambling building of rough brick with a low-slung tile roof and towering twin chimneys. Sebastian drew up abruptly at the base of a high, platformlike shelf that stretched along the end of the building and was stacked with massive earthenware pots.
The Colonel had stopped running again.
Sebastian heard a soft thump followed by a faint
clink
, as of unglazed, fired clay tapping against its neighbor. Looking up, he grasped the edge of the wide shelf above his head and carefully levered his weight onto the high platform. The rain was falling harder now, pocking the heaving dark surface of the river and pinging noisily against the stacks of pots and urns, pipes and culverts. Moving quietly, he swung up onto the overhanging roof, then rose to a crouch.
Beneath the smooth leather soles of his boots, the old tiles were wet and slippery with moss. He moved cautiously up over the ridge of the roof. He could feel the residual heat from the kilns’ soaring chimneys warm on his back as he hunkered low at the far edge of the slope.
From here he looked down on the wide raised platform that ran along the back of the workshop. At the far edge of the platform, Chernishav waited, motionless, his form all but lost in the shadows cast by the hundreds and hundreds of four-foot lengths of fat drainpipe stored on end beside him. A jagged arc of lightning flashed across the sky, and Sebastian saw the gleam of the stiletto in the Russian’s hand. Around them, the rain poured, filling the air with the scent of wet clay.
Loosening his own dagger in its sheath in his boot, Sebastian dropped to the near edge of the shelf below. The impact shook the nearest row of drainpipes. Sebastian gave them a helpful shove.
They toppled slowly, the first row falling against the next, which in turn collapsed onto the next row until the entire mass of drainpipes tumbled over like dominoes in a rolling crescendo of clattering, shattering earthenware. Chernishav swung around, saw the wall of pipe crashing toward him, and leapt off the platform into the yard below.
Sebastian landed in a crouch a few feet from him, his dagger in his hand. The Russian pirouetted gracefully, his stiletto extended like a foil, his left arm curled in the classic fencing pose.
“So,” said Chernishav, his teeth bared in a smile. “Here we are.”
“You fence, I take it?” said Sebastian.
“Since childhood,” said Chernishav, flexing his wrist. “I hear you were a cavalry officer. Unfortunately, your saber is a little short.”
“So’s your foil,” said Sebastian.
“True.”
The two men circled each other warily. They were equally matched, of much the same height and build, both well trained in the arts of war. But each held a very different type of blade. The Russian’s stiletto was a thrusting weapon with no edge, while Sebastian’s dagger had carefully honed edges but was considerably shorter.
Chernishav struck first, lunging forward like a fencer thrusting with a foil, his stiletto aimed for Sebastian’s heart.
Sebastian sidestepped the thrust, dancing away easily to the right, his boots sliding over the muddy wet cobbles of the pottery yard. Lightning played across the heavy clouds pressing down on the waterfront; the rain pounded.
“The advantage is mine, I think,” said Chernishav. “You don’t have to do this, you know. Why make Miss Jarvis a widow before you have the opportunity to make her your wife?”
“You’d have me simply walk away?”
“Why not?”
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Sebastian said, “I told you why not.”
With a grimace, Chernishav struck again. Again, Sebastian skittered to the right. The repetition was deliberate; he was setting up the expectation of the pattern in the Russian’s mind.
The Colonel lunged a third time, expecting Sebastian to once more fall away to the right. Only this time, instead of dancing away, Sebastian stepped into the Russian’s lunge. It was a street fighter’s trick: Clamping his left fist around the man’s right wrist, Sebastian yanked the Colonel forward and stepped in to plunge his dagger up under the man’s sternum. Driving straight toward the heart.