When Maidens Mourn (33 page)

Pausing at the jagged end of the wall, he slipped his flintlock pistol from his pocket and quietly eased back the hammers on both barrels. He could hear the distant clatter of the carriages on the Strand up above, feel the powerful thrumming of his own blood in the veins of his neck. He took a deep breath. Then he burst around the end of the broken wall, his pistol pointing down into the foundations of the guard tower, his finger already tightening on the first trigger.

But the tower was empty, the weeds within it matted and scattered with debris. The shooter had vanished into the night, leaving only the Baker rifle leaning mockingly against the worn, ancient stones.

S
ir Henry Lovejoy was not fond of heights.

He stood well back from the jagged edge of the bridge’s last, half-constructed arch, his legs splayed wide against the powerful buffeting of the growing wind. He could see the river far below, the dark waters churning and frothing against the rough temporary coffer dams. The air was thick with the smell of the inrushing tide and the damp mudflats of the nearby bank and the coppery tang of freshly spilled blood.

“What did you say his name was?” Lovejoy asked, his gaze on the dead man sprawled in the lee of the bridge’s half-built cornice.

Devlin stood beside him, his evening clothes torn and dusty and soaked dark with the dead man’s blood. In one hand he gripped a Baker rifle, his fingers showing pale against the dark forestock. “Arceneaux. Lieutenant Philippe Arceneaux, of the Twenty-second Chasseurs à Cheval.”

Grunting, Lovejoy hunkered down to study the French officer’s fine-boned features, the sensitively molded lips and lean cheeks. In death, he looked shockingly young. But then, Lovejoy thought, by
the time a man reaches his mid-fifties, twenty-four or -five can seem very young indeed.

Pushing to his feet, he nodded briskly to two of the men he’d brought with him. Between them, they heaved the Frenchman’s body up and swung it onto the deadhouse shell they would use to transport the corpse through the city streets.

“You’ve no idea of the identity of the shooter?” Lovejoy asked Devlin.

“I never got a good look at him. He was firing from the ruins of the old guard tower. There, to the right.”

“Want I should go have a look?” asked Constable Leeper, a tall beanpole of a man with an abnormally long neck and a badly sunburnt face.

Lovejoy nodded. “Might as well. We’ll see better in the daylight, but we ought to at least do a preliminary search now.”

As the constable turned to go, Devlin stopped him, saying, “The Lieutenant had a medium-sized brown and black dog that the rifleman shot. I’ve searched the riverbank for him myself without success. But if you should happen to come upon him—and if he should still be alive—I would like him taken to someone capable of caring for his wounds.”

“Aye, yer lordship,” said the Constable, his torch filling the air with the scent of hot pitch as he headed back down the bridge.

Lovejoy squinted into the murky distance. From here, the near bank was only a confused jumble of dark shapes and indistinct shadows. “Merciful heavens. The ruins of that tower must be three hundred yards away.”

Devlin’s face remained impassive. “Very nearly, yes.”

“If I hadn’t seen the results myself, I would have said that’s impossible. In the daylight it would be phenomenal; how could anyone even
see
a target over such a distance at night, let alone hit it?”

“If he had good eyesight, good night vision, and a steady finger, he could do it. I’ve known sharpshooters who could hit a man at seven hundred yards, if the man is standing still and it’s a sunny day.”

Something in the Viscount’s voice drew Lovejoy’s gaze to him. He stood with his back held oddly rigid, his face stained with blood and dust and sweat.

Lovejoy said, “Are you certain Arceneaux was the shooter’s intended target? He did continue firing at you, after all.”

“He did. But that was only to keep me pinned down long enough for him to get away. I think he killed the man he came here to get.”

With a succession of grunts, the two men from the parish lifted the shell to their shoulders and headed back toward the riverbank. Lovejoy picked up the lantern and fell into step behind them, the rubble of the half-constructed bridge crunching beneath his feet. “Am I to take it this Lieutenant Arceneaux is the young Frenchman who befriended Miss Gabrielle Tennyson?”

“He is,” said Devlin. “Only, I gather they were considerably more than friends.”

“Tragic.”

“It is, yes.”

“And you have no notion at all who could have done this, or why?”

Devlin paused beside the ruins of the ancient palace, his strange yellow eyes glinting in the fitful light from Lovejoy’s lantern as he stared into the darkness.

“My lord?”

Devlin glanced over at him, as if only suddenly reminded of Lovejoy’s presence. “Excuse me, Sir Henry,” he said with a quick bow and turned away.

“My lord?”

But Devlin was already gone, his long legs carrying him easily up the dark, rubble-strewn bank, the rifle in his hand casting a slim, lethal shadow across the night.

Sebastian strode into the Black Devil with the Baker rifle still gripped in his fist. His shirt front and waistcoat were drenched
dark red with Arceneaux’s blood; his cravat was gone. His once elegant evening coat hung in dusty tatters. He’d lost his hat, and a trickle of blood ran down one side of his dirty, sweat-streaked face.

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints,” whispered the buxom, dark-haired barmaid as Sebastian drew up just inside the door, the Baker propped at an angle on his hip, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the smoky, low-ceilinged room.

“Where’s Knox?” he demanded, his words carrying clearly over the skittering of chairs and benches, the thumps of heavy boots as the tavern’s patrons scrambled to get out of his way.

The girl froze wide-eyed behind the bar, her lips parted, the half-exposed white mounds of her breasts jerking and quivering with her agitated breathing.

“Where the bloody hell is he?” Sebastian said again.

“You do favor the dramatic entrance, don’t you?” said a sardonic voice from a doorway that opened off the back of the room.

Sebastian turned. His gaze met Knox’s across the now empty expanse of the public room, twin pairs of yellow eyes that shared an ability to see great distances and at night with an accuracy that struck most normal men as inhuman.

Or evil.

Sebastian laid the Baker on the scarred surface of the bar with a clatter. “I’m returning your rifle.”

A faint smile curled the other man’s lips. “Sorry. Not mine. Did someone lose it?”

“Where were you an hour ago?”

Jamie Knox advanced into the room, still faintly smiling. He wore his usual black coat and black waistcoat and black cravat, his face a dark, handsome mask. “Here, of course. Why do you ask?”

“Ever meet a Frenchman named Philippe Arceneaux?”

“Arceneaux?” Knox frowned as if with the effort of concentration. “Perhaps. It’s rather difficult to say. I own a tavern; many men come here.”

“Lieutenant Philippe Arceneaux.”

“Does he say I know him?”

“He’s dead. Someone shot him through the heart tonight from a distance of some three hundred yards. Know anyone who could make a shot like that?”

“It’s a rare talent. But not unheard of.”

“Your friend tells me you can shoot the head off a running rabbit at more than three hundred yards. In the dark.”

Knox glanced over to where the wide-eyed girl still stood behind the bar. “Leave us.”

She let herself out the front door, pausing on the threshold to throw him a last, questioning glance that he ignored. The public room was now empty except for the two men.

Knox sauntered behind the bar and reached below the counter for a bottle of brandy. “You’ve obviously been talking to my old mate, Jack Simpson.” He eased the stopper from the brandy. “He’ll also tell you that I can catch a will-o’-the-wisp out of the air and hear the whispers of the dead. But just between you and me, I wouldn’t be believing everything he says.”

Sebastian wandered the room, his gaze drifting over the low-beamed rafters, the massive old stone fireplace, and broad hearth. “I’ve heard it said you won this place at the roll of the dice—or that you killed a man for it. Which was it?”

Knox set the bottle and two glasses on the counter beside the Baker. “Like I said, you don’t want to be believing everything you hear about me.”

“I also hear you were at Corunna. Lieutenant Arceneaux was at Corunna, as well. Is that where you met him?”

“I never met your Lieutenant Arceneaux, God rest his soul.” Knox poured brandy into the two glasses and tucked the bottle away. “Here. Have a drink.”

“Thank you, but no.”

Knox laughed. “What do you think, then? That I’m trying to
do away with you?” He pushed both glasses across the bar. “There. You choose one; I’ll drink the other. Will that allay your superstitions?”

Moving deliberately, Sebastian came to select one of the glasses of amber liquid.

His yellow eyes gleaming, Knox lifted the other to his lips and drank deeply. “There. Now, shall we wait to see if I drop to the floor and start thrashing about in my death throes?” He took another sip, this time letting the brandy roll around on his tongue. “It’s good stuff, this. Comes from a château just outside Angoulême.”

“And how did it make its way into your cellars?”

Knox smiled. “Would you have me believe you’ve no French brandy in your cellars, then?”

“Arceneaux hailed from Saint-Malo, another wine region. He told me once his father owned a vineyard. Perhaps that’s how you met him.”

Knox was no longer smiling. “I told you. I never met him.”

“I’ll figure it out eventually, you know.”

“When you do, come back. But as it is, you’ve nothing against me but conjecture.”

“So sure?”

“If you had anything you thought might begin to pass as proof, I’d be down at Bow Street right now, talking to the magistrates. Not to you.”

“Thanks for the brandy.” Sebastian set his glass on the bar and turned toward the street.

“You’re forgetting your rifle,” Knox called after him.

“Keep it. You might need it again.”

The tavern owner laughed, his voice ringing out loud and clear. “You remember how I told you my father was a cavalry officer?”

Sebastian paused with one hand on the doorjamb to look back at him.

Knox still stood behind the bar. “Well, I lied. My mother never knew for certain which of the three bastards she lay with had planted me in her belly. She was a young barmaid named Nellie, you see, at the Crown and Thorn, in Ludlow. According to the woman who raised me, Nellie said her baby’s da could’ve been either an English lord, a Welsh captain, or a Gypsy stableboy. If she’d lived long enough, she might have recognized my actual sire in me as I grew. But she died when I was still only a wee babe.”

Sebastian’s skin felt hot; the abrasions on his face stung. And yet he knew the strangest sensation, as if he were somehow apart from himself, a disinterested observer of what was being said.

Knox said, “I saw the Earl of Hendon in Grosvenor Square the other day. He looks nothing like me. But then, it occurs to me, he don’t look anything like you, either. Now, does he?”

Sebastian opened the door and walked out into the warm, wind-tossed night.

T
he storm broke shortly before dawn, with great sheets of rain hurled through the streets by a howling wind and thunder that rattled the glass in the windowpanes with all the savage power of an artillery barrage.

Sebastian stood on the terrace at the rear of his Brook Street house, his outstretched arms braced against the stone balustrade overlooking the garden. He had his eyes closed, his head tipped back as he let the rain wash over him.

When he was a very little boy, his mother used to take him for walks in the rain. Sometimes in the summer, if it was warm, she’d let him out without his cap. The rain would plaster his hair to his head and run off the tip of his nose. He’d try to catch the drops with his tongue, and she wouldn’t scold him, not even when he waded and splashed through every puddle he could find, squealing as the water shot out from beneath his stomping feet.

But his favorite walks were those they took in the rain in Cornwall, when the fierce winds of a storm would lash the coast and she’d bundle him up and take him with her out to the cliffs.
Together they would stand side by side, mesmerized by the power of the wind and the fury of the waves battering the rocks with an awe-inspiring roar. She’d shout,
Oh, Sebastian; feel that! Isn’t it glorious?
And the wind would slam into her, rocking her back a step, and she’d laugh and fling wide her arms and close her eyes, surrendering to the sheer exhilaration of the moment.

So lost was he in the past that he failed to mark the opening of the door behind him. It was some other sense entirely that brought him the sudden certainty that he was no longer alone.