When Gods Die (31 page)

“You told her about the necklace?”

“Yes.” He held up the necklace so that the triskelion swung slowly on its chain, tracing a short arc through the darkness. “She was puzzled, but not surprised.”

Kat studied the shadowed lines and angles of his profile, but he had all his emotions locked away someplace where she couldn’t see them. “Perhaps the implications escaped her.”

One corner of his mouth lifted in a tight smile. “Oh, no. Amanda is nothing if not quick. She might have been puzzled that my mother would give up something she’d always held dear, but it never occurred to her to question what happened that day off the coast of Brighton.”

Kat drew in a deep breath. “What are you saying, Sebastian?”

He turned his head to look directly at her, and for one unguarded moment she saw it all—the bewildered mingling of anger and hurt, confusion and pain. “Amanda knows. She’s always known.” He let out a soft huff of laughter that held no humor. “That pleasure outing—the sinking of the yacht—it was all for show. My mother didn’t drown that summer. She simply left. She left my father and she left me. But she didn’t die.”

His hand closed over the necklace, his knuckles showing white in the first light of dawn. “She didn’t die.”

Chapter 53

A
manda was seated at her breakfast table, the
Morning Post
spread out beside her plate, when her brother strolled unannounced into the room. She didn’t look up.

The Countess of Hendon’s silver-and-bluestone necklace hit the newsprint beside her, the unexpected slap startling her enough that it was only with effort that she avoided flinching.

Holding herself composed, she lifted her gaze to Devlin’s. The blaze of emotion she saw there was so raw and powerful that her gaze veered away again before she could quite stop it.

“She’s still alive, isn’t she?” he said.

Amanda drew in a deep, steadying breath and defiantly stared into his terrible yellow eyes. “Yes.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since that summer.”

He nodded, as if she’d only confirmed what he’d already suspected. “And Hendon?”

“He knows, of course. He has known from the very beginning. He helped to arrange it.”

She saw a flicker of—what? Surprise? Pain?—in the depths of those strange, animalistic eyes. “And why wasn’t I told?”

Amanda gave him a wide, malicious smile. “I suggest you ask Hendon.”

I
T WASN’T OFTEN
Sebastian allowed his thoughts to drift back to that long-ago summer, the summer before he turned twelve. It had been hot, days of unrelenting blue sky and a sizzling golden sun that turned the crops to dust in the fields. Wells that had never failed in a hundred years or more ran dry.

The Countess of Hendon had spent most of that spring and summer at the family’s principal seat in Cornwall. His mother loved London, loved the excitement and mental stimulation of the political salons as much as the endless round of balls, breakfasts, and shopping expeditions that occupied most women. But Hendon considered London an unhealthy place for women and children, especially when the streets turned dry and dusty and the air hung close. His involvement in affairs of state might keep Hendon himself tied to Whitehall and St. James’s Palace, but that year he insisted that his wife retire to Cornwall, and that Sebastian and his brother Cecil join her there when they came down from Eton.

Sebastian tried to recall how Sophie had occupied herself that summer, but his memories were of tramping the fields and woods with Cecil and swimming in the forbidden cove below the cliffs. In his recollections, she was an atypically distant figure seen riding out each morning on her neat bay hack. He had one clear image of an afternoon’s tea served on the sun-splashed terrace, Sophie’s smile bright yet still somehow…distant. And then, in July, the family had gone to spend the month in Brighton.

Sophie adored Brighton, reveling in the concerts on the Steyne and the balls at the Castle and Ship. But that year, even Brighton was hot and dusty, and crowded with those anxious to escape from the stifling, unhealthy interior. Hendon grumbled that Brighton had grown as foul and noisome as London, and threatened to send the Countess and their sons back to Cornwall. The Countess alternately stormed and wept, begging to be allowed to stay.

And so they had stayed, until the morning in mid-July when Sebastian’s brother Cecil awoke flushed and feverish. By nightfall he had become delirious. The best doctors were called in all the way from London. They shook their heads and prescribed bloodletting and calomel, but Cecil’s fever continued to climb. Two days later he was dead, and Sebastian found himself the new Viscount Devlin, his father’s only surviving son and heir.

There followed tense weeks filled with loud voices and angry accusations. But whenever he was around Sebastian, Hendon kept a strange, tight silence. It was as if he couldn’t comprehend why Fate had taken his first- and second-born sons and left him only the youngest, the one least like their father.

For Sebastian, those days remained a painful blur. But he could remember quite clearly the sunny morning Sophie Hendon sailed away on what was supposed to have been a simple day’s outing with friends.

And never came back.

T
HE PAIN OF THAT SUMMER
fueled Sebastian’s anger now as he took the steps to his father’s house on Grosvenor Square.

He found Hendon in the entrance hall, headed for the stairs. The Earl was dressed in breeches and top boots, his crop in one hand, and it was obvious he’d only just come in from his morning ride. “What is it?” he asked, his gaze on Sebastian’s face.

Sebastian crossed the hall to throw open the door to the library. “This is a conversation we need to have in private.”

Hendon hesitated, then came away from the stairs. “Very well.” He walked into the room and tossed his crop on the desk as Sebastian closed the door. “Now, what is it?”

“When were you planning to tell me the truth about my mother?”

Hendon swung around, his expression guarded and wary. “Which truth is that?”

“Bloody hell.” Sebastian let out his breath in a sharp, humorless laugh. “Are there so many lies? I mean the truth about what happened seventeen years ago in Brighton. Or should I say, what
didn’t
happen. Is she still alive today? Or do you even know?”

Hendon held himself very still, as if carefully considering his answer. “Who told you?”

“Does it matter? You should have told me yourself—long before I asked you about the necklace.”

Hendon blew out a long, slow breath. “I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

The Earl drew his pipe from a drawer, his movements slow and deliberate as he filled the bowl with tobacco and tamped it down with his thumb. “She’s still alive,” he said after a moment. “Or at least she was as of last August. Every year she delivers to my banker a letter briefly detailing the major political and military events of the previous twelve months. Once we have proof she still lives, I send her annual stipend.”

Sebastian was aware of a fine trembling going on inside him. He couldn’t have said if the discovery Sophie still lived, after seventeen years of his thinking her dead, brought him relief or only fueled his rage. “You pay her? Why? To stay away?”

“It’s not such an unusual arrangement. Couples who can no longer live together frequently agree to live apart. Look at the Duke and Duchess of York.”

“The Duchess of York didn’t fake her own death.”

Hendon went to kindle a taper and hold it to his pipe. “Your mother…she was involved with another man. For her to have lived with him openly here in England would have ruined my standing in the government. She agreed to go abroad in return for my granting her an annual stipend.”

Sebastian was silent for a moment. Had there been a man that summer—a special man? Impossible to remember. There were always men around Sophie Hendon. “Why didn’t you simply divorce her?” he said aloud, searching his father’s heavily featured face. “What does she have on you?”

Hendon met his gaze and held it. “Nothing I intend to tell you.”

“My God. And the necklace?”

“I honestly don’t know how Guinevere Anglessey came to be wearing that necklace. I suppose it’s possible your mother gave it to someone over the years.”

Sebastian doubted it. Sophie Hendon had never been a particularly superstitious woman, but she had believed in that necklace and in its power. “Where is she now?”

Hendon sucked on his pipe, kindling the tobacco. “Venice. Or at any rate, that’s where I send the money. The acquaintances she went out with that day—the ones who helped coordinate the accident—they were Venetians.”

The air filled with the sweet smell of burning tobacco. Sebastian stood at one of the long windows overlooking the square. “All those years,” he said, half to himself, “all those years of missing her, of mourning her…and it was all a lie.” He was aware of his father coming to stand behind him, although he didn’t turn his head.

“If she could have taken you with her,” said Hendon, his voice gruff, “I think she would have. Of all her children, I always thought her love for you was the most intense.”

Sebastian shook his head, his gaze on the scene outside the window. A boy and a girl of ten or twelve were running with a hoop, their laughing voices carrying lightly on the morning breeze. He’d had that sense himself, growing up. Sophie Hendon had loved all her children, but until today Sebastian would have said he’d held a special place in her heart. Yet she had left him.

He was aware of a yawning inner ache that twisted his guts and brought a bitter taste to his mouth. A heavy silence stretched between them, a silence Sebastian ended by slamming one hand down on the sill and swinging away from the window to face his father again. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me the truth? You let me think she was dead. Every day, I went up on those cliffs looking for her. Hoping it was all a mistake and I’d see her come sailing home. But in the end I gave up. I believed what you had told me. And it was all a bloody lie!”

Sebastian stared at his father. The Earl’s jaw worked back and forth, but he said nothing.

“Why?”

“I thought it for the best.”

“For whom? You, me, or her?”

“For all of us.”

Sebastian brushed past his father and headed for the door. “Well, you were wrong.”

Chapter 54

T
he Dowager Duchess of Claiborne awoke with a start, one hand groping up to catch her nightcap before it slid over her eyes. A tall, shadowy figure moved across the floor of her artificially darkened bedchamber. She gave a faint gasp, then sat up in bed, her cheeks flushing with the heat of indignation when she recognized her only surviving nephew.

“Good heavens, Devlin. You nearly gave me an apoplectic fit. What are you doing here at this ungodly hour? And why are you glaring at me in such a fashion?”

He came to stand beside the carved footboard of her massive Tudor bedstead, his lean figure held taut. “Seventeen years ago, Sophie Hendon did not die in a boating accident. She simply left her husband and surviving children behind and sailed away. Tell me you didn’t know.”

Henrietta let out a sigh. She wished she could deny it. Instead, she said, “I knew.”

He swung abruptly away, going to jerk open one of the heavy velvet drapes at the window and letting in a stream of bright morning sunshine that made Henrietta groan. She brought up a hand to shade her eyes, and sat up straighter. “I thought at the time you deserved to be told the truth. But it wasn’t my decision to make.”

“I’m told she left with a man. Is that true?”

She stared at the rigid set of his shoulders. “Yes.”

He nodded. “As I recall, there were other men in her life. Had been for years. Why did she decide to leave with this one?”

“The others were distractions—or tools of revenge. I can only assume this one was different somehow.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t recollect his name. He was a poet, I believe. A most romantic-looking young man.”

“A Venetian?”

“There was some Venetian connection. But the young man himself was French.”

“He was younger than she?”

“Yes.”

“You met him?”

Henrietta twitched at the high embroidered collar of her nightdress. “He was quite the darling of society that spring. Although, if I remember correctly, he left Town early.”

“Where did he go? Cornwall?”

“Evidently.”

Devlin brought up one hand to rub his eyes. Looking at him, Henrietta thought he looked older—and more exhausted—than she could remember having seen him. “Do you know where she is now?” he asked.

“Your mother? No. We were never close, and we certainly didn’t keep in contact after she left. I don’t believe even Hendon knows precisely where she went, although he sends money to her every year.”

“Why? He’s certainly not doing it out of the goodness of his heart. She obviously knows something. Something he’s willing to pay to keep quiet. What is it?”

The Duchess of Claiborne looked into her nephew’s troubled eyes, and for the first time that morning told him a blatant lie. “I honestly don’t know.”

S
IR
H
ENRY
L
OVEJOY WAS ANNOYED.
He was making little headway in his attempt to capture the man the press had taken to calling the Butcher of St. James’s Park. He had the magistrates from Bow Street interfering in his investigation of the Carmichael murder. And now he was having to take time away from pursuing several promising leads to deal with an irate foreign embassy and a decidedly peeved Foreign Office.

Leaving Whitehall, Lovejoy hailed a hackney and went to see Viscount Devlin.

He found Devlin just preparing to mount his front steps. “I need to speak to you, my lord,” said Lovejoy, executing a small bow on the footpath.

The Viscount was looking unusually pale and distracted. He hesitated, then said crisply, “Of course,” and led the way into his library. “Please have a seat, Sir Henry. How may I help you?”