Chapter 30

The snow began before midday.

Sebastian walked through crooked medieval streets. Ice filmed over the water standing in the open gutters. A ragged women hurried past him, her shawl-wrapped shoulders hunched against the weather, her breath white in the cold, dank air. He walked until the smell of the river was thick in his nostrils and seagulls cried overhead. Beneath his feet the cobblestones turned slippery with the snow that fell in great wet flakes from out of a yellow-white sky.

Cutting between a boarded-up warehouse and a high stone wall, he climbed down a short flight of ancient steps to where the Thames stretched out before him, thick and brown and wide, the wind strong enough now to kick up little whitecaps and fill the air with the scent of the distant sea. Even with the cold and the snow, the river teemed with boats, lighters and culls, and barges and hoys heading downriver to Gravesend and the open sea beyond. It was the lifeblood of the city, this river, and yet how often had he gone through the movements of his days within scant blocks of it and remained essentially oblivious to its existence for weeks on end.

He'd known it was there, of course, yet because it intruded so little on his life, it was easy to ignore, like the distant wailing of hungry children in the night, or the muffled rumble of the parish carts making their early morning rounds, collecting the endless supply of white-wrapped bundles that fed the poor holes of St. Stephen's and St. Andrew's, St. Pancreas and the Spitalfields Churchyard.

Easy to ignore, too, was the existence of those dark, unassuming houses in Field Lane and Covent Garden, where for a few coins a man could buy the right to unlock a room and do whatever he liked to the shivering, frightened child or sobbing woman he would find there; houses where whips cracked and bodies twisted in agony, where there was no hope, no God, only endurance and the ultimate deliverance of death. Whatever perversion a man lusted after, he could buy in this city, for a price.

The snow was falling harder now, and faster. Sebastian looked up, letting the small white pellets sting the cold skin of his face. What was becoming a recurrent fear swelled within him, the fear that he was never going to clear himself of this terrible crime of which he'd been accused. And what then? he wondered. What if Rachel York's killing had been nothing more than a random act of violence? What if he could never find the man who had slashed her throat and sated his lust upon her dead, bleeding body? What then of his promise to see justice done, for her and for himself?

He'd told himself her killer must have been someone close to her, someone who knew she would be waiting alone and vulnerable in that church so late at night. And yet Sebastian realized now he'd been wrong, that her killer could simply have seen her in the streets and followed her, watched as she lit the holy candles on the altar and then come at her out of the darkness, a lethal and intimate stranger.

Sebastian rubbed a hand across his eyes, aching now from lack of sleep. After he'd left his father's house in Grosvenor Square, he'd spent what was left of the night walking the slowly lightening alleys and byways of the city. He kept turning what his father had told him over and over again in his mind, trying to figure out what Rachel York could have been selling that his father would be so desperate to buy that he agreed to meet her in a deserted church in the dark of the night.

He'd sworn it wasn't blackmail, but Sebastian had to acknowledge that that could be mere quibbling, a question of semantics only. Whatever it was, Hendon wanted it badly enough that he'd forced himself to overcome his horror and search Rachel York's bloody, mutilated body in hopes of finding it.

Yet he hadn't found it. Which could mean either that her killer now had it, or that Rachel York had never brought it to St. Matthew's in the first place.

Then again, Sebastian couldn't discount the possibility that his father was lying, that Hendon had found it and taken it, after all.

An unexpected chill shook him. Sebastian turned up his collar against the cold. Hendon's refusal to talk baffled him. After all these hours of walking the streets, of turning over one possibility after another in his mind, Sebastian was still no closer to understanding. It was only now, as he watched the snowflakes falling thick and fast from a lowering sky, that he was able to admit to himself that beneath the confusion and rage coursing through him every time he thought about his interview with his father, what he felt most powerfully was a deep and abiding sense of hurt. For try as he might, he found it impossible to imagine a secret so important that a father would place its preservation above the life and freedom of his only surviving son.

That afternoon, Sebastian paid an interesting visit to the small goldsmith's shop across the street from Covent Garden Theater. He was just turning away when he spotted Tom, whittling on a block of wood with a small pocketknife as he waited in the protective lee of the theater's wide porch.

"What are you doing here?" said Sebastian, walking up to him.

"Waitin' for Miss Kat. She knows someone she reckons might be able to put me onto this Mary Grant's whereabouts, but she figures it'd be better if'n she were to introduce me to the cove 'erself."

"Ah," said Sebastian, who knew something of the kind of "friends" Kat had from her early days in London. Leaning forward, he peered at the quadruped taking shape beneath the boy's nimble fingers. "What is it?"

"A 'orse," said the boy, proudly holding it aloft.

"Like horses, do you?"

Tom nodded. "I always thought it'd be just grand to be one o' them tigers, sittin' up behind some sportin' gentleman in 'is curricle, watchin' 'im tool a pair of prime 'igh steppers."

Sebastian personally had little use for the current vogue for employing children as grooms. But as he looked down into the boy's shining eyes, he found himself saying, "Once I fight my way clear of this wretched mess I'm in, I could take you on as a tiger. If you're interested."

Tom's eyes narrowed. His face was wary and guarded against disappointment, but his breathing had quickened, his jaw going slack with awe. "You got a curricle?"

Sebastian laughed and stepped out into the street. "That I do."

"Got a tiger?"

"Not yet."

The boy nodded, struggling to contain a grin. "Where you off to, then?"

Sebastian turned up his collar against the snow. "To have another talk with Hamlet."