When Maidens Mourn (34 page)

“Devlin?”

He turned to find Hero standing in the doorway. She still wore the ivory gown with the dusky pink ribbons, and he wondered if she had awakened and dressed to come in search of him, or if she had not yet made it to her bed.

He had stripped off his torn, blood-soaked coat and waistcoat, but he still wore his ruined shirt, his collar askew. “My God,” she said, her eyes widening when she saw him. “You’re covered in blood.”

“It’s not mine. Philippe Arceneaux is dead.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Why would I kill him? I liked him.”

She walked out into the rain, the big drops making dark splotches on the fine silk of her dress as she reached up to touch his cheek. “You’re hurt.”

“Just scratched.”

“What happened?”

“Whoever killed Arceneaux shot him from a distance of three hundred yards. In the dark.”

“Who can shoot accurately at such a distance?”

“A Bishopsgate tavern owner and ex-rifleman named Jamie Knox, for one.”

“Why would a tavern owner want to kill Arceneaux?”

“I don’t know.” He stared out over the wind-tossed garden, a jagged flash of lightning splitting the sky. The rain poured about
them. “There’s too much I don’t know. And because of it, people keep dying.”

“It’s not your fault. You’re doing everything you can.”

He looked at her again. “It’s not enough.”

She shook her head, an odd smile hovering about her lips. In the darkness, her eyes had a strange, almost luminous quality. The rain ran down her cheeks, dripped off the ends of her wet hair, soaked the bodice of her gown so that her high, round breasts showed clearly through the thin silk of her gown.

His voice hoarse, he said, “You’re ruining your dress. You need to go inside.”

“So do you.”

Neither of them moved.

Slowly, she slipped her hand behind his neck, her thumb flicking across his throat in a soft caress, her gaze tangling with his. Then, her eyes wide-open, she tilted her head and touched her lips to his.

He opened his mouth to her, drank deeply of her kiss, swept his hands up her back. He felt her tremble. But before he could pull her to him, she slipped away from him.

She paused at the door to look back. He saw a succession of raw, naked emotions flash across her face—guilt and regret and a fierce, hopeless kind of longing. She said, “When this is all over, we need to…begin again.”

The rain pounded down on him, the wind billowing his wet, bloodstained shirt and plastering his hair to his head. He was aware of the lateness of the hour, the fullness of her lips, the unexpected raw wanting that surged through him for this woman who was his wife, the mother of his unborn child…and his enemy’s daughter.

He said harshly, “And what if it’s never over?”

But she had no answer, and long after she had gone, the question remained.

Friday, 7 August

The next morning, the rain was still falling out of a gunmetal gray sky when Sebastian climbed the steps of the elegant Mayfair town house of his sister, Amanda, Lady Wilcox.

The door was opened by Lady Wilcox’s well-trained and normally stoic butler, who took a step back and said, “My lord Devlin!” in a voice pregnant with consternation and a touch of fear.

“Good morning,” said Sebastian, handing his hat, gloves, and walking stick to the butler before heading for the stairs. “I assume my sister is still in the breakfast room?”

“Yes, but…My lord—”

Sebastian took the steps two at a time. “Don’t worry; I’ll announce myself.”

He found his sister seated at a small table overlooking the rain-washed rear gardens, an empty plate before her. She’d been reading the
Morning Post
but looked up at his entrance, a delicate pink floral teacup arrested halfway to her puckered lips.

“Good morning, Amanda,” he said cheerfully.

She set the cup down with enough force to send its contents sloshing over the rim. “Good God. You.”

The first child born to the Earl of Hendon and his beautiful, errant countess, Amanda had never been a particularly attractive woman. She had inherited her mother’s slim, elegant carriage and striking golden hair. But there was a bluntness to her features that she owed to Hendon, and at forty-two she had reached an age at which her disposition showed quite clearly on her face.

She wore a simple morning gown of dove gray made high at the waist and edged along the neckline with a dainty ruffle of lace, for she had been widowed just eighteen months and was not yet completely out of mourning. The role Sebastian had played in the death of her husband was a subject brother and sister did not discuss.

She reached for her tea again, her lips turning down at the corners as she took a sip. “What do you want?”

Without waiting for an invitation he suspected would not be forthcoming, Sebastian drew out the chair opposite her and sat. “And I’m delighted to see you too, dear sister.”

She gave a delicate sniff. “I’ve heard you’re doing it again—that you’ve involved yourself in yet another murder investigation, this time of some mere barrister’s sister, of all things. One might have hoped that your recent nuptials would put an end to this plebeian nonsense. But obviously such is not the case.”

“Obviously not,” said Sebastian dryly.

She sniffed again but said nothing.

He let his gaze drift over the familiar features of her face, the tightly held lips, the broad, slightly bulbous nose that was so much like her father’s, the piercing blue St. Cyr eyes that had come to her, too, from her father. He was her brother—or at least, her half brother, her only surviving acknowledged sibling. And yet she hated him with a passion so raw and visceral that it could at times steal his breath.

As Hendon’s firstborn child, she would have inherited every-thing—land, wealth, title—had she been a boy. But because she was a girl, she had been married off with only a dowry—a handsome one, to be sure, but still a mere pittance compared to all that would someday pass to Sebastian. Her two children, Bayard, the new Lord Wilcox, and Stephanie, his eighteen-year-old sister, were Wilcoxes; by the laws of male primogeniture, they had no claims on the St. Cyr estates.

It was the norm in their society. And yet for some reason, Amanda had always felt cheated of what she still somehow stubbornly believed in her heart of hearts should by rights have been hers. Even Richard and Cecil, Hendon’s first- and second-born sons, had earned her resentment. But her true hatred had always been reserved for Sebastian. For she had known—or at least suspected—from the very beginning that this last son born to the Countess of Hendon had not in truth been begotten by the Earl.

She set her teacup down again. “Whatever it is you are here for, say it and go away so that I can read my paper in peace.”

“I’m curious about the December before I was born; how well do you remember it?”

She twitched one shoulder. “Well enough. I was eleven. Why do you ask?”

“Where did Mother spend that Christmas?”

She thought about it for a moment. “Lumley Castle, near Durham. Why?”

Sebastian remembered Lady Lumley quite well, for she’d been one of his mother’s particular friends, nearly as gay and beautiful—and faithless—as the Countess herself.

He saw Amanda’s eyes widen, saw the faintly contemptuous smile that deepened the grooves bracketing her mouth, and knew that she understood only too well his reason for asking. “I can do sums, Sebastian. You’re trying to figure out who her lover was that winter. Well, aren’t you?”

Pushing up, he went to stand at the window overlooking the garden, his back to her. In the rain, the daylight was flat and dim, the shrubbery a sodden green, the slate flagstones of the terrace dark and shiny wet. When he didn’t respond, she gave a sharp laugh. “An understandable exercise, given the circumstances, but unfortunately predicated upon the assumption that she took only one lover at a time. She could be quite shameless, you know.”

Her scornful words sent a surge of raw fury through him. It startled him to realize that no matter how much Sophie had lied to him, no matter how cruel and destructive her betrayal and abandonment, the protective urge he’d felt for her as a boy still flared in him.

“And that Christmas?” he asked, keeping his voice level with difficulty, his gaze still fixed on the scene outside the window.

“I actually can’t recall.”

He watched the long canes of the arbor’s climbing roses bend
in the wind, watched the raindrops chase each other down the window glass.

Amanda rose to her feet. “You really want to know who begat our mother’s precious little bastard? Well, I’ll tell you. It was her groom. A lowly, stinking
groom
.”

Turning, he looked into her familiar, pinched face and didn’t believe her. Refused to believe her.

She must have read the rejection of everything she’d said in his eyes, because she gave a harsh, ringing laugh. “You don’t believe me, do you? Well, I
saw
them. That autumn, on the cliffs overlooking the sea, in Cornwall. He was lying on his back and she was riding him. It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever witnessed. Jeb, I believe his name was. Or perhaps Jed, or something equally vulgar.”

He stared into his sister’s hate-filled blue eyes and knew a revulsion so intense as to be physical. “I don’t believe you,” he said out loud.

“Believe it,” she sneered. “I see him every time I look at you. Oh, his hair might have been darker than yours, and he might not have been as tall. But there has never been any doubt in my mind.”

A sudden gust of wind blew rain against the window with a startlingly loud clatter.

He wanted to say,
Was the groom a Gypsy?
But he couldn’t so betray himself to this cold, angry woman who hated him more than she’d ever hated anyone in her life. So instead he asked, “What happened to him?”

“I neither knew nor cared. He went away. That was all that mattered to me.”

Sebastian walked to the door, then paused to look back to where she still stood, her hands clenched at her sides, her face red and twisted with hatred and some other emotion.

It took him a moment to recognize it, but then he knew.

It was triumph.

Sir Henry Lovejoy hesitated at the entrance to the Bow Street public office, his face screwing into a grimace as he stared out at the ceaseless torrent driven sideways by the force of the wind. Water sluiced in sheets from the eaves, swelled in the gutters, pinged off the glass of the building’s tall windows. Sighing, he was about to unfurl his umbrella and step out into the deluge when he became aware of a gentleman crossing the street from the Brown Bear toward him.

A tall, military-looking gentleman, he seemed oblivious to the elements, the numerous shoulder capes on his coat swirling about him as he leapt the rushing gutter. “Ah, Sir Henry, is it not?” he said, drawing up on the flagway. “I am Colonel Urquhart.”

Swallowing hard, Lovejoy gave a jerky bow. The Colonel was well-known as Jarvis’s man. “Colonel. How may I help you?”

“I’m told you are heading up the search for the killer of the Tennyson family.”

“I am, yes. In fact, I was just about to—”

Urquhart tucked his hand through Lovejoy’s elbow and drew him back into the public office. “Let’s find someplace dry and private where we can have a little chat, shall we?”

I
t had become Kat Boleyn’s habit of late to frequent the flower market on Castle Street, not far from Cavendish Square. She’d discovered there was a rare, elusive peace to be found amidst the gaily colored rows of roses and lavender and cheerful nosegays. Sometimes the beauty of a vibrant petal or the faintest hint of a familiar scent was so heady it could take her far back in time to another place, another life.

The morning’s rain had only just eased off, leaving the air cool and clean and smelling sweetly of damp stone. She wandered the stalls for a time, the handle of her basket looped casually over one arm. It wasn’t until she paused beside a man selling small potted orange trees that she became aware of being watched.

Looking up, she found herself staring at a tall gentlewoman in an exquisitely fashioned walking gown of green sarcenet trimmed in velvet. She had her father’s aquiline nose and shrewd gray eyes and a surprisingly sensuous mouth that was all her own.