Chapter 25

"How old is this nevy of yers?" Tom asked.

They were walking along Haymarket. The air was cold, the kind of damp, penetrating cold that sank bone deep. Wisps of dirty mist drifted across the cobblestones, wrapped around the half-dead plane trees in a small, nearby square. By nightfall, the yellow fog would be back, thick and pungent and bitter.

"Twenty. Maybe twenty-one," said Sebastian. "His mother is my elder sister."

Tom glanced up at him. "You don't like 'im much, do you?"

"He was the kind of little boy who got a kick out of tearing the heads off live turtles." That, and worse. Sebastian shrugged. "I may be prejudiced. He could have grown out of it."

"They'd don't, usually," said Tom, his jaw set tight and hard, as if to ward off memories too savage to be recalled. And Sebastian wondered again at the life the boy must have led, before he'd tried to lift Sebastian's purse in the common room of the Black Hart.

A bath, a change of clothes, a few good nights' sleep, and a consistently full belly had wrought a startling transformation in the boy. From what Sebastian had been able to gather, Tom had been alone on the streets for at least two years. Of his life before that, the boy seldom spoke.

"Why?" Sebastian asked suddenly, his gaze on the boy's sharp-featured, freckled face. "Why in God's name have you decided to throw in your lot with a man in my situation? I can't believe it's for a shilling a day, when you could earn many times that by simply lodging information against me at Bow Street."

"I would never do that!"

"Why not? Many would. Perhaps most."

The boy looked troubled. "There's lots o' bad things 'appen in this world. Lots o' bad things what 'appen, and lots o' folks what do bad things. But there's good, too. Lots o' good. Me mum, before they put her on that ship for Botany Bay, she told me never to forget that. She said that things like 'onor, and justice, and love are the most important things in the world and that it's up to each and every one of us to always try to be the best person we can possibly be." Tom looked up, his nearly lashless eyes wide and earnest. "I don't think there's many what really believes in that. But you do."

"I don't believe in any of that," Sebastian said, his voice harsh, his soul filled with terror by the admiration he saw shining in the young boy's eyes.

"Yes, you do. Only, you thinks you shouldn't. That's all."

"You're wrong," said Sebastian, but the boy simply smiled and walked on.

They turned onto Grange Street, each lost in his own thoughts. Sebastian kept turning over and over in his mind all that he had learned about the woman he stood accused of killing. It seemed to Sebastian that the essence of the woman who had been Rachel York continued to elude him. It was as if each of the men he'd spoken to so far—Gordon, Pierrepont, Donatelli—had shed light on a facet of her life only. Sebastian had caught glimpses of Rachel as a new young actress, full of passionate rhetoric about revolution and the rights of man; of Rachel as a mistress, seductive, compliant; of Rachel as an artist's model, beautiful and yet, ultimately, two-dimensional, an image onto which the viewer could project his own fantasies and illusions.

Only from Kat had Sebastian picked up a sense of anything beyond that famous face and sensuous body—the Rachel York who'd once been a young child, alone and afraid and abused by a society that had no care for its weaker or less fortunate members. And yet Kat's rendering, too, had been blurred, incomplete, an image of Rachel as seen from a distance. He needed to see Rachel through the dispassionate eyes of someone who had known, intimately, all the various aspects of her life, the pattern of her days.

What he needed, Sebastian decided, was to talk to that maid, Mary Grant.

Stopping abruptly, he swung to face Tom. "I want you to find someone for me, a woman named Mary Grant. She used to be Rachel York's maid. But she cleaned the place out right after her mistress died, so she's probably living pretty high at the moment."

Tom nodded. "What's she look like, this Mary Grant?"

"I haven't the slightest idea."

The boy laughed, his eyes gleaming with anticipation. He wasn't just good at this sort of thing, Sebastian was beginning to realize; Tom enjoyed it.

"Right then," he said, one hand coming up to anchor his hat to his head. "I'm off. But you watch yer back," he called as he dashed away. "You hear?"

Kat drew the folds of her black mantle more closely about her and hastened her step. The air was cold and damp, the gray clouds over the rooftops pressing down heavy and low. She should have called a hackney, she decided, just as a man's darkly coated form loomed up before her. She let out a small gasp of surprise, quickly stifled.

"This isn't like you, Leo," she said, keeping her voice light. "You must be nervous if you've taken to slinking around London."

Leo Pierrepont fell into step beside her. "Did you manage to get into Rachel's rooms?"

"Last night."

"And?"

"As you said, there was nothing incriminating."

A narrow line appeared between the Frenchman's brows. "You checked the compartment in the bedroom mantel?"

"Of course. It contained Rachel's appointment book. Nothing more."

"You're quite certain? You searched everywhere?"

"There was nothing else to search. Rachel's maid cleaned the place out. Down to the walls."

"Her maid?" Something in Leo's tone made Kat look over at him. "What's the woman's name?"

"Mary Grant. Why? What did you think I might find there?"

Instead of answering her, he said, "I had an unpleasant conversation last night with your young viscount. Somehow or other he's found out I was paying for Rachel's rooms."

"Hugh Gordon told him."

"Gordon? How the devil could he have known?"

"One can only assume he heard it from Rachel."

Leo's intense gray eyes narrowed as he searched Kat's face. "He's been in contact with you, has he? Devlin, I mean."

Kat shrugged and quickened her pace. "One could say he has a vested interest in discovering who killed Rachel."

"And you're helping him?" Leo reached out a hand to touch her shoulder, stopping her. "Be careful, mon amie . He might find out some things you'd rather he didn't learn."

Kat swung to look up at him. "I'm always careful."

A smile quirked up one side of the Frenchman's thin, tight lips. "Except with your heart."

Kat stood very still. " Especially with my heart."

There were only so many places a young man of Bayard's crowd could be found in London on a cold, foggy January afternoon.

Sebastian finally ran his nephew to ground at the Leather Bottle, a tavern near Islington that was popular with cutpurses and highwaymen, and the bored, rich young men who liked to rub shoulders with them and learn their thieves' cant and make believe for a few, gin-soaked hours that their lives had, if not meaning, then at least excitement and challenge.

It was early enough that the crowd in the tavern was still thin. A few of the men looked up at Sebastian's entrance, but he had dressed for the part, taking as his model the dashing young gentleman of the highway who had attempted some months back to hold up his carriage one night on Houndslow Heath.

Bayard was at the bar, laughing and talking too loudly with two or three of the gangly, socially maladroit young men with whom he tended to associate. Bayard was very much his father's son, brown haired and weak chinned and already inclined even at his young age to run to flesh.

Ordering a glass of blue ruin, Sebastian leaned in close to his nephew and poked the muzzle of the Cassaignard between his ribs. Bayard froze.

"That's right," whispered Sebastian, his voice pitched low and rough. "This is a pistol, and it will go off if you do anything—I repeat, anything —stupid."

Bayard's eyes rolled frantically sideways.

"No, don't turn around. And stop looking like you just shit your pants or some such thing. We wouldn't want to alarm your friends, now would we? You need to smile."

Bayard gave a sick giggle that came out sounding more like a half-choked hysterical sob. "Who are you? What do you want from me?"

"We're going to walk together, very slowly, to that table over there, near the far corner. You're going to sit down first, and I'm going to sit opposite you, and we're going to have a nice little chat." Sebastian reached for his drink, but the muzzle never left Bayard's side. "Walk, Bayard."

Bayard walked, his legs trembling and unsteady.

"Now sit."

Bayard sat. Sebastian took the rickety, straight-backed chair opposite. The light in the tavern was murky, the few small windows obscured by grime, the tallow dips dim and foul smelling. A heavy odor of sweat and tobacco and spilled gin filled the air.

"Now," said Sebastian, smiling, "you need to try very, very hard not to forget that I have a gun pointed at your crotch."

Bayard nodded, his eyes widening as he got a good look at Sebastian for the first time. "Good God. It's you. Whatever are you doing in that rig? You look like a bloody bridle cull."

Sebastian smiled. "An appropriate getup, don't you think, for one in danger of cutting a caper upon nothing?"

Sebastian watched, bemused, as Bayard's fear slowly dissipated beneath the onslaught of a deep and powerful fury. "I heard it was you," he said, enunciating the words through clenched teeth, " you who killed her."

"You're forgetting the pistol, Bayard," said Sebastian as his nephew half rose from the table.

Bayard sank back into his chair, his gaze locked on his uncle's face. "Did you do it? Did you? Did you kill Rachel?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing."

" Me ? But I love her." The present tense of the verb wasn't lost on Sebastian. "Besides, it's your flintlock they're saying was found on her body."

"And yet it's you who's been preying on the poor woman since before Christmas."

Bayard's eyes widened, that brief flash of anger sliding away as the fear surged again. " Preying on her? What are you saying? I never touched her! Why, I never even managed to summon up the courage to approach her. The one time I found myself face-to-face with her, I was so overcome I couldn't open my mouth."

"You never actually spoke to her?"

"No! Never."

Sebastian leaned back in his seat. "When was the last time you saw her?"

Bayard worried his lower lip between his teeth. "Monday night, I think. I went to her performance. But that was all! I swear."

"You're sure?"

"Yes, of course."

Sebastian stared across the table at his nephew. As a child, Bayard had been not only spoiled and cruel, but also dangerously, almost pathologically untruthful. He wondered how much, if any, the boy had changed. "Where were you Tuesday night?"

Bayard might be self-indulgent and weak, but he wasn't stupid. His eyes widened. "You mean, the night Rachel was killed?"

"That's right."

"We planned to spend the evening in Cribb's Parlor." He jerked his head toward the two men still leaning on the bar, their attention focused on the mammoth breasts of the woman slinging gin behind the counter. "Robert and Gil and I. We'd been here—at the Leather Bottle—most of the afternoon, so we were pretty well lit by the time we got there."

"You were there all night?"

"Well, actually, no." He scrubbed one hand across his face, as if to wipe away an unpleasant memory. "I started feeling unwell."

"You mean you shot the cat."

A deep stain of mortification and resentment colored the younger man's cheeks. "All right. Yes. Robert and Gil were hauling me out of there when what should we do but run smack up against my father. It was damned embarrassing, I can tell you that. He insisted on taking me home. I must have passed out in the carriage because the next thing I know, I'm in my own bed and he's hauling off my boots and prosing on about how lucky I am that my mother didn't see me."

"What time was that?"

Bayard looked confused. "What time was what?"

"At about what time did you pass out?"

Bayard shrugged one shoulder. "I couldn't say for certain. Early. Around nine, I suppose."

Sebastian studied his nephew's red, sulky face. It would take time, but it should be easy enough to trace Bayard's movements through the course of Rachel York's final day. If he were telling the truth.

"Wait a minute," Bayard said suddenly, sitting forward. "I did see Rachel on Tuesday. It must have been about midway through the afternoon, when I swung by the theater on my way here. I was hoping I might get a glimpse of her, and there she was."

"At the theater?" Sebastian frowned, trying to remember Rachel's schedule for the afternoon before her death. "They were rehearsing?"

"No, no. She wasn't actually at the theater, you see. She was in the goldsmith's across the street. I wouldn't even have noticed her except for the way he was shouting—"

"He?"

"That actor. You know the one? He was doing Richard III at Covent Garden when it burned down."

"You mean Hugh Gordon?"

"Yes, that's him."

"You're certain?" said Sebastian, frowning. What was it Hugh Gordon had said at the Green Man? I haven't spoken to her for six months or more .

Bayard nodded vigorously. "I'd have recognized his voice even if I hadn't seen him."

"They were quarreling?"

"I don't know about that. But I could see he had her by the arm and he was leaning into her, all threatening-like. I was about ready to go in there and ask him what the devil he thought he was doing, treating a lady that way, when he gave her a little shake and let her go."

"You didn't hear anything he said?"

"Not so's I remember. Except at the very end, right before he turned away. He said—" Bayard broke off, a strange, arrested expression narrowing his eyes and slackening his jaw.

From somewhere at the back of the room came a sharp breaking of glass, followed by an outburst of laughter. "What?" said Sebastian, his gaze on his nephew's face. "What did Gordon say?"

"He said he'd make her pay."