When Gods Die (12 page)

“I’ve heard it said Lord Athelstone lost four wives in childbirth. Is that true?”

“Not exactly. I believe the first died of consumption when her daughter, Morgana, was a year or two old. But the other three died in childbirth, yes. Lord Athelstone was a bear of a man. All three of his daughters were unusually tall, and one assumes the sons would have been even larger. I gave it as my opinion that it was like mating a Yorkie bitch to a Great Dane. His boy babies were so big they were literally killing his wives. And it’s certainly true that he only succeeded in getting a son when he finally had enough sense to take to wife a woman nearly as big as he.”

Cloe was cleaning her pup now, licking it roughly, nudging it with her muzzle. It would be another hour, perhaps more, before a second pup was born. Sebastian said, “Why did you want to see me?”

Lady Audley wiped her hands on the apron she’d tied over her muslin dress and stood. There was a sudden fierceness about her, the aura of a mother willing to do battle to protect her young. “Varden was here with me, all last Wednesday afternoon. If you seek to deflect suspicion from the Prince Regent onto my son, I will not allow you to succeed.”

Sebastian met her hard gaze. “What I seek is the truth.”

She gave an unexpectedly bitter laugh. “The truth? How often do you think we ever really know the truth?”

“According to Lady Quinlan, her sister Guinevere grew up expecting to marry Varden.”

Lady Audley pressed her lips together, then nodded almost reluctantly. “In some ways it was my fault, I suppose. There was only a year between them. I always thought of them much as brother and sister. I never imagined for a moment that Guinevere saw them as something else entirely. But it was a child’s dream, nothing more. They were children. Why, Varden wasn’t even up at Oxford yet when Guinevere married.”

“That was four years ago. Much has changed since then.”

Her head drew back, her eyes sparkling. “I know what you’re implying, but you’re wrong. Guinevere had a passionate nature, but she was also fiercely loyal. She would never have played Anglessey false. Never.”

He wondered if it was significant that her anger flared in defense of Guinevere’s honor and not that of her son. Or was she simply reflecting her society’s very differing attitudes toward male and female sexual adventuring? “I’d be interested to hear what your son has to say.”

Isolde sucked in a deep breath, and for one telling moment, her mask of calm control slipped. He realized that behind this woman’s concern for the laboring collie at her feet lay another fear, deeper and far more troubling.

“My son isn’t here,” she said, suddenly looking tired and much, much older. “I’m afraid he has taken Guinevere’s death quite badly. I haven’t seen him since Thursday morning, when we heard what had happened to her.”

Chapter 20

L
ate that night, sometime after the watch had called out
Two o’clock on a fine night and all is well,
an unexpectedly cool breeze sprang up, carrying with it the promise of rain before morning.

Sebastian lay in Kat Boleyn’s silk-hung bed and listened to the wind set the branches of the nearby chestnut tree to tapping against the front of the house. Rolling onto his side, he let his gaze drift over the sleeping woman beside him, following the strong angle of her jaw, the gentle curve of her breast just visible beneath the tumble of her hair.

The wind gusted up again, rattling the windows and setting the bed curtains to shifting in the sudden cold draft. Reaching out, he drew the coverlet over Kat’s bare shoulder and smiled. His love for this woman swelled within him, filling him with a warm feeling of peace and the same stunned awe that he’d known for seven years now, ever since the day he’d first held her in his arms and tasted the intimation of heaven that was her kiss.

He wondered where it came from, that comfortable conviction Lady Audley shared with so many in their society, the belief that the passions of the young are insignificant whirlwinds, temporarily intense, perhaps, but never enduring. He’d been one-and-twenty when he and Kat first met, while she had been barely sixteen.

She stirred beside him, as if disturbed by his wakefulness. Moving carefully so as not to rouse her further, he slid from her side and went to stand, naked, at the window overlooking the front of the house. Drawing back the drapes, he stared down at an empty street lit only fitfully by a half-moon already disappearing rapidly behind a scuttling of clouds.

He heard a whisper of movement as she came up behind him. “Why can’t you sleep?” she asked, slipping her arms around his waist.

He turned in her embrace, holding her close. “I was thinking about Guinevere Anglessey. About the life she must have known growing up in Wales.”

“It can’t have been easy,” Kat said softly, “losing her mother so young.”

Sebastian drew her closer, his cheek resting against her hair. They were all marked in an unseen but hurtful way, he thought, the motherless children of the world. Guinevere had been little more than a babe when she lost her mother; Sophie Hendon had sailed away to a watery grave the summer Sebastian was eleven, while Kat had been twelve or thirteen when her own mother and stepfather had been killed. He knew some of what had happened on that dark day, but not all of it. “At least she still had a home,” said Sebastian, thinking of all Kat herself had lost on that misty Dublin morning. “And her father.”

“He doesn’t seem to have concerned himself overly much with her.”

Sebastian was silent for a moment, remembering his own father’s bitter withdrawal on that long-ago summer of death. “Perhaps. Yet he cared enough not to want to see her married to a penniless young man.”

Kat tilted her head to look up at him. “Yes. But for her sake? I wonder. Or his?”

“Morgana claims Athelstone didn’t force her sister to marry Anglessey. That the Marquis was Guinevere’s own choice.”

“Perhaps she decided that if she couldn’t have the man she loved, she might as well marry for wealth and a title.”

Sebastian felt the shiver that ran through her as she spoke. He rested his hip against the windowsill so that he could circle her with the warmth of his body, the warmth of his love. “I wonder how Varden felt about that?” he said softly.

She rested comfortably against him. “It doesn’t seem to have blighted his life. He’s often at the theater with a crowd of other young bucks, laughing and eyeing the dancers. Watching him, one would say he hadn’t a care in the world.”

“He seems to have taken Guinevere’s death hard enough.”

“Well he would, wouldn’t he? They were childhood friends.”

He ran his hands up her sides, enjoying the feel of her bare flesh beneath his touch. “They might very well have been more than that. Still.”

She rested her arms on his shoulders so that she could look again into his face. “You think Varden is the lover Bevan Ellsworth claims fathered Guinevere’s child?”

He threaded his fingers through her hair, combing it back from her forehead. “We don’t know for certain she even had a lover. It’s not something I’m prepared to take on Bevan Ellsworth’s word.”

She was quiet for a moment, thinking, and he watched her. He loved the way her mind worked. In a world where women learned from an early age to affect an air of helpless ignorance, Kat was a strong, intelligent woman and she wasn’t afraid to show it.

At least not with him.

Finally, she said, “What I don’t understand is, where does the Prince Regent fit into any of this?”

Sebastian blew out a long breath. “I suppose it’s possible her murder was completely cold-blooded—that her killer’s sole purpose was simply to use her to cast suspicion upon the Prince Regent and increase his unpopularity. But if that were true, then why select Guinevere Anglessey as the victim? Why not Lady Hertford, or one of the other women with whom Prinny has been closely linked?”

“Perhaps she was simply…convenient.”

Sebastian ran his hands up and down her arms, his gaze on the night-darkened window beside them. Somewhere out there…somewhere, in some corner of this sprawling, dangerous city, lay the answer to what had happened to Guinevere Anglessey, and why. If he only knew where to look. “It would help if Lovejoy could find out where she went in that hackney.”

“Her abigail might know.”

By now the clouds had completely covered the moon, plunging the street below into a gloomy darkness only faintly illuminated by the feeble glow of the streetlamps. A shadow seemed to detach itself from the house at the corner, a phantom of a shape that was there and then gone.

“What is it?” Kat asked when Sebastian leaned forward, his hand tightening on the drapes beside them.

“I thought I saw something. A man watching the house.”

“It’s just shadows. The trees moving in the wind.” She pressed her chilled body close to his. “Come back to bed.”

He wrapped his arms around her, lending her the heat of his own body. He nibbled at her neck, breathed softly against her ear. But what he said was “I need to go home. It’s late.”

“Stay,” she whispered, her naked body moving suggestively against his, her hands roving over him with a lover’s familiarity. “I like waking up to find you still beside me.”

“You could wake up beside me every morning if you’d marry me.”

He felt her stiffen in his arms. She drew back to meet his gaze, the playful eroticism fading from her eyes to be replaced with something stark and painful. “You know why I can’t do that.”

He knew why she thought she couldn’t do that. They’d been through it all a thousand times before, yet he still couldn’t stop himself from saying, “Why? Because I am a viscount and you are an actress?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

He pushed out a harsh, frustrated breath. “You realize, don’t you, that if Guinevere had been allowed to marry the man she loved, she’d probably still be alive today.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I know that I—”

She silenced him with her kiss, taking his face between her hands, her fingers digging into his cheeks as she moved her mouth over his in desperate gulps. “Don’t,” she said, her voice rough, her breath warm against his face.

He knew she loved him. It shone in her eyes, was there with each trembling breath. And it struck him as the cruelest of ironies that if she had loved him less, she would have married him.

Wordlessly, she threaded her fingers through his, drawing him away from the window toward the warm embrace of her bed. And he went with her, because the shadows in the darkened street below were simply the trees moving in the wind, and it was hours still until dawn.

He had time. Time to convince her that she was wrong, that far from ruining his life by marrying him, she was the only thing that could save him. He still had time.

He told himself they had all the time in the world.

H
IS SLEEP WAS OFTEN TROUBLED
by dreams, haunting recurrent images of red-coated phalanxes of soldiers, their faces coated with dust, their lips tightly set as they marched toward death. Of stone walls battered and blackened by the howling shriek of artillery. A child’s cry. A woman’s scream. The buzzing stench of death. The remains of men and horses so dismembered as to become indistinguishable.

But that night he dreamed of Kat. She lay upon his bed, dressed in her bridal finery. The golden light of the bedside candle cast flickering shadows across the pale perfection of her features, the delicate flesh of her closed eyelids. He knelt beside her, the silken hangings of his bed whispering softly around him. Yet he knew no joy, only the pain of tears that swelled his throat but refused to fall.

Confused, he reached out to close his hand over hers, and then he understood. Because her hands were cold beneath his, and when he kissed her, her lips did not respond; her eyes did not open. Her eyes would never open again. And he knew then that her wedding finery had become her shroud.

He awoke with a jerk, his breath coming hard and fast, his heart pounding uncomfortably in his chest. Turning his head, he found her asleep beside him, her hair spilling dark and beautiful about a cheek flushed with life, her breath sweet against his face. And still he had to touch her, to feel her body warm beneath his hands.

In the hushed light of dawn she stirred, reaching for him even before her eyelids fluttered open. She skimmed her palms down his arms to his bare hips. He buried his face in her hair, breathed in the familiar scents of rose water and the sweet essence of this woman, and felt his love for her like a throbbing ache in his heart.

She was warm with sleep but softly pliant against him, murmuring gentle words as his hand found her breast. She wrapped one leg around him, sliding her foot up his calf in invitation. He rolled on top of her, her hand guiding him inside her.

He closed his eyes, trailed a line of kisses down her neck as he moved gently within her. She was warm and alive and in his arms, and still he knew a deep and abiding fear that would not be stilled.

Chapter 21

S
ebastian’s valet was an earnest, softly rounding man named Sedlow who had been in Sebastian’s employ for just over a year. The man was a genius at repairing the ravages a night on the town could wreak upon a gentleman’s coat, and could coax an enviable shine from top boots worn hard on the hunting field. But when Sebastian appeared later that morning with a brown-paper-wrapped package containing a pair of badly cut trousers and an old-fashioned greatcoat such as a Bow Street Runner might wear, Sedlow paled and recoiled with horror.

“
My lord
. You can’t seriously mean to appear in those rags
in public
.”

Pausing in the act of tying an unfashionably dark and coarse neckcloth, Sebastian glanced over at his valet. “They’re hardly rags. And I don’t intend to drop into White’s in this rig, if that’s what you fear.”

“But…someone could still see you.”

Sebastian raised one eyebrow. “Do you fear such a sighting might do irreparable damage to my reputation?”

Sedlow sniffed. “
Your
reputation? No, my lord. Noblemen are allowed to be eccentric.”