What Angels Fear (9 page)

L
ord Stoneleigh slept facedown in her bed, his eyes closed, his breathing heavy and even.

At some point during the night he’d shoved down the fine linen of her bedcovers in a fit of restlessness. Kat Boleyn propped herself up on her elbow and let her gaze travel over the broad, naked back and tight buttocks of the man beside her. He’d be a handsome man, if it weren’t for that hint of weakness about the chin. They weren’t usually so young, the men she took to her bed.

Kat rested her cheek on one palm. She’d been playing the part of this man’s mistress for four months now. At first she’d found his youthful ardor and the presents he showered upon her mildly diverting. But he was beginning to bore her. And with the Prince soon to be made Regent, staunch Tories such as Stoneleigh wouldn’t be of much use any longer. She was considering setting her sights on Samuel Whitbread, widely expected to be given an important portfolio once the passage of the Regency Bill allowed the Prince to form a new Whig government.

Yawning softly, Kat slid from Stoneleigh’s side. At least the older ones rarely stayed the night. She didn’t like it when they stayed. Now she’d have to play the part of the lover again when he awoke—at least until she could get him out of the house. Morning performances were not her best.

She slipped her bare arms into a silk wrapper and cast another glance at the tousled blond head on her pillow. She supposed he thought he had the right, since he paid the rent on the house. What he didn’t know was that the agent to whom he sent the rent money every month actually worked for Kat. In the past five years, she’d managed to buy up the mortgage not only on this house, but on three other such properties. Men were such fools. Especially the ones with proud old family names, and old money.

Quietly letting herself out the bedroom, she padded down the stairs. The drawing room was dim, the fire on the hearth unlit, the peach-colored satin drapes still drawn at the windows. The upper housemaid, Gwen, had obviously expected her mistress to sleep until noon or later. Kat went to throw open the heavy drapes and heard a voice from out of the past say, “You’re awake early.”

She spun about, one hand flying up, ridiculously, to clutch together the gaping neck of her wrap. As if her naked body hadn’t once been as familiar to this man as his was to her. As if he hadn’t touched every inch of her with his lips, and his tongue, and his incredibly gentle, clever hands.

Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, stood beside the empty hearth, one shoulder propped against the mantel, a boot heel hooked over the cold grate. He’d taken off his greatcoat and thrown it onto the back of a nearby chair. In the misty light of another dreary winter morning, he looked unkempt and dissolute and dangerous. A day’s growth of beard shadowed his cheeks, and he had a nasty gash across one side of his forehead.

She’d seen him, of course, in the ten or so months since he’d been back in England—seen him in the crowd at the theater and, once, in New Bond Street. But always from a distance. They’d both been careful to keep a distance between them.

“How did you get in?”

He pushed away from the mantel and came at her, the lines bracketing his unsmiling lips deepening, although not with amusement. Cynical lines that hadn’t been there before. “You don’t ask why I’m here.”

Once, he’d been her heart, her soul, her reason for living. Once, she’d have given up anything for him. Anything. But that was six years ago, and she was as different from that love-obsessed young girl as she was from the laughing child who’d once climbed an oak tree on the edge of a sun-filled Irish green.

He stopped before her, close enough that she could see the shadow of his day’s growth of beard and the exhaustion that pulled his features taut. Close, but not too close. Still it seemed there was to be a distance kept between them.

“Do you need money?” she asked. “Or simply an introduction to a trustworthy band of smugglers who aren’t particular about the identity of the passengers they carry across the Channel?”

He shook his head. “Do you really think I would run?”

No, he wouldn’t run. She might not know all that had happened to this man during those brutal years he was away. But she still knew this about him.

He appeared to have slept in his clothes. His cravat was gone, and what looked like dried blood stained the white cuffs of his shirt. “You look terrible,” she said.

The Sebastian she’d known, once, would have laughed at that. He didn’t. His gaze sought hers, captured it. “Tell me about Rachel York.”

His eyes were as frighteningly animalistic as she had remembered. She swung away to settle down beside the cold hearth and set to work lighting a fire. She told herself it was natural that he had come here, to ask about Rachel. She and Rachel had been starring together in the Covent Garden production of
As You Like It
. He would know that. There was no reason to worry that he knew anything else.

“According to word on the streets, Rachel’s maid is saying she went to St. Matthew’s last night to meet you.” Kat glanced back at him. “Did she?”

He shook his head.

“They say they found your pistol on her body.”

“Really?” His eyes opened a fraction wider, but that was the only reaction he betrayed. “How curious.”

When had he become so adept, she wondered, at hiding his feelings? “They also say the constable you stabbed still lives, although he won’t for long. Did you know?”

“I didn’t stab him.”

“Just like you didn’t kill Rachel?”

A corner of his mouth twitched. “If you really believed I’d killed Rachel York, you’d be swinging that poker at my head.”

Kat sat back on her heels, the poker idle in her hands, her gaze on the man beside the window. “Why do you want to know about Rachel?”

“Because it seems to me that the only hope I have of working my way out of this wretched tangle is to discover who the hell did kill her.” He went to the table where she kept a brandy decanter, poured himself a drink, and knocked it back in one long pull. “Any ideas as to who might have wanted to see Rachel York dead?”

She’d thought about it, of course. Thought about who, besides Leo and his associates, could have been responsible. Rachel hadn’t been particularly well liked amongst the theatrical community; she’d been too focused and driven—and too successful—not to stir up petty resentments and rivalries. But Kat could think of only one man angry enough, and violent-tempered enough, to attack a woman so brutally, so passionately.

“There is someone. . . .” Kat paused, then said the name in a rush. “Hugh Gordon.”

Devlin looked around in surprise. “Hugh Gordon?” A tall, darkly handsome man with a deep voice and the ability to move an audience to tears with a simple gesture, Hugh Gordon was London’s most popular male actor since John Kemble.

“Rachel caught his eye her first day at the theater. She was flattered, of course. He helped her career enormously when she was starting out. She may even have fallen in love with him, for all I know. There was talk at one point of marriage. But then he became more possessive. Controlling. More . . . violent.”

“You mean, he hit her.”

Kat nodded. “She left him after about a year.”

Devlin reached for the decanter. “I don’t imagine a man with Hugh Gordon’s amour propre would take kindly to that.”

“He threatened to kill her.”

“You think he could do a thing like this?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

He poured another drink, then simply stood there, regarding it thoughtfully. “What about the men in her life since Gordon?”

Beside her, the coals glowed red hot with warmth. Kat kept her gaze trained on the fire. “She’s had flirtations with a number of men, from Lord Grimes to Admiral Worth. But I don’t think any man has had her in his keeping.”

She was aware of his assessing gaze upon her. “Do you know what part of the country she was originally from?”

“Some village in Worcestershire. I don’t remember the name. Her father was the vicar there, but he died when she was about thirteen, and she was thrown onto the parish. They apprenticed her as a housemaid to a local merchant.”

Kat paused. It was one of the things the two women had in common, the similarity of their pasts. The shared memory of wheals left by a whip on bare, tender young flesh. Of rough hands bruising struggling, frantic wrists. The sharp thrust of pain, and the dull, endless ache of a humiliation and degradation that went on and on.

Kat set aside the fireplace tools with a clatter and stood up. “When she was fifteen, she ran away.”

He was watching Kat closely. He knew some of what had happened to her, after her mother and father had been killed. More than she’d ever told anyone else. “That’s when she came to London?”

“Of course,” said Kat, keeping her voice steady. “Like all young girls hoping to start a new life.”

It was an old story, of young women—sometimes girls as young as eight or nine—tricked into the flesh trade by the legion of procuresses who preyed on the innocent and vulnerable. Rachel had fallen into one’s clutches before she’d even left the stagecoach.

“You met her when she started at the theater?”

Kat shook her head, a soft, sad smile tugging at her lips. “We met on London Bridge. It was December, if I remember correctly. A few days before Christmas. I talked her out of jumping.”

“And found her work as an actress?”

Kat shrugged. “She was bright, with a good accent and exactly the kind of face and body men like. She was a natural.”

“So what was she doing at St. Matthew of the Fields on Tuesday night? Do you know?”

Kat shook her head. “I wouldn’t have said she was religious.”

He came toward her, those strange amber eyes fixed, uncomfortably, on her face. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Kat gave a soft, practiced laugh. “I can’t think what you mean.”

He reached out, his fingertips hovering just above her cheek, as if he’d meant to touch her, then thought better of it. “You’re afraid of something. What?”

She forced herself to stand very, very still. “Of course I’m afraid. Rachel and I share many of the same friends and associates.”

She watched his lips move as he spoke. “The Kat Boleyn I knew didn’t scare so easily.”

“Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”

“Obviously not,” he said dryly, and turned away. “How well did you know Rachel?”

“I was probably closer to her than anyone, but even I didn’t know her all that well.” Kat paused, struggling to put some of what he needed to know into words. “Rachel might have been only eighteen, but life had scarred her. Toughened her. There was a calculating side to her. She could be cold—ruthless even, if she had to be.”

“You two had much in common, did you not?”

The stab of hurt his words brought was so swift and unexpected, it nearly stole Kat’s breath. She hadn’t thought he still possessed the power to touch her heart—hadn’t thought that anyone did. She glanced toward the hall. The house was silent, the hush broken only by the clatter of a horse’s hooves on the street outside and the mingling cries of the street vendors:
Chairs to mend
, and,
Buy my trap. Buy a rattrap
. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

He smiled then, a faint narrowing gleam of the eyes that she remembered only too well. “What’s the matter? Afraid Lord Stoneleigh will awaken and find you gone? I shouldn’t think he’ll stir for another hour or more.”

“How did you know—”

“That he’s here? I saw his walking stick and top hat in the entry.”

The walking stick and top hat might have told Devlin she had company, but it wouldn’t have given him the name of the man in her bed. That information, she knew, he must have acquired beforehand. It shouldn’t have mattered. She told herself she didn’t care. And yet, disconcertingly, she did.

“So you came via the entry, did you?” she said, keeping her voice light.

He had a habit, she was noticing, of answering her questions with one of his own. “Where did Rachel keep her rooms?”

“Dorset Court. But you can’t go there,” she added quickly, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Why not? If this maid is saying Rachel went to St. Matthew’s to meet me, I need to know why.”

“The authorities are watching the house.”

He tilted his head, his puzzled gaze searching her face. “How do you know that?”

She knew that because Leo had come to the theater last night, after the performance, and told her. Under the circumstances it wouldn’t be prudent, he’d said, for him to be seen there. And so he had come to Kat with a request, framed as a suggestion: that Kat might have her own reasons for making certain that Rachel had left behind nothing incriminating.

“It’s known.” She paused, then said with studied casualness, “I could go there myself. Talk to the maid. Perhaps even look around and see what I can find. Rachel kept an appointment book. That might tell us something.”

He came to stand before her. “You?”

She lifted her head to meet his gaze. It had occurred to Kat that in Devlin she just might have found a potentially valuable ally, someone who had even more interest than she in tracking down the man who had met Rachel in that church. The trick would be in seeing that he learned what was needed to catch Rachel’s killer, but nothing more. “You know I can do it,” she said.

He knew. He knew about the years she had spent as a young girl in one of London’s most notorious rookeries, training as a pickpocket and a thief. And a whore.

She thought he might refuse. Instead he said, “All right. Although I can’t help but wonder why.”

“For auld lang syne?” she suggested.

“Maybe. And maybe because you’re scared. Even if you won’t say why.”

She thought for a moment that this time he would touch her. Then a faint thump from overhead drew her gaze toward the hall. “You must go,” she said quickly. “Come by tomorrow morning, early. I’ll tell you then what I’ve learned.”

“Uh-uh.” A hint of amusement deepened the lines beside his mouth. “I’ll find you.”

She let a slow smile spread across her face. “Why? Don’t you trust me?”