Chapter 42

There were only two constables, both on the wrong side of forty, one tall and bone lean, the other slow and fleshy.

The first was halfway up the stairs when Sebastian's fist caught him under the jaw with an audible smack that closed the man's mouth and sent him arm-wheeling backward.

"I say," blustered the second, just before Sebastian buried his fist in the man's soft gut. His eyes widened, and he doubled over with a wheezing whooph .

Bayard was standing at the base of the stairs, his derisory, self-satisfied smile fading fast. "You little bastard," said Sebastian, and punched him, too, just for the bloody hell of it, on his way out the door.

After that, Sebastian spent the next several hours attempting to disprove Bayard's alibi, only to discover that Bayard and his two companions had indeed spent the afternoon and evening of the previous Tuesday getting conspicuously and roaringly drunk at the Leather Bottle in Islington. Their subsequent arrival at Cribb's Parlor, followed by their hasty departure, had been equally spectacular and memorable. In fact, the doorman distinctly remembered helping to load the insensible young gentleman into his father's carriage. He even remembered the time, for the city's church bells had begun to toll nine o'clock just as the carriage pulled away.

Tom found Sebastian in a coffeehouse near the Rose and Crown, a tankard of ale cradled in his left hand, a bloodstained handkerchief wrapped around the knuckles of his right.

"What'd you do to yer hand?"

"I hit something."

"A bone box, you mean?" Tom said with a grin, and slid onto the opposite bench, a paper-wrapped Cornish pasty clutched in one fist. "Find out something on yer nevy?"

Sebastian took a long, slow swallow of ale. "That he has an ironclad alibi."

Tom looked up from tearing the paper off his pasty. "A what?"

"An alibi. Verifiable proof that he was somewhere else at the time of the crime. In this instance, passed out insensible in his father's arms." Sebastian stretched back on the bench. "My pool of suspects is rapidly diminishing. Bayard had the motive and means but not, apparently, the opportunity to commit murder. Georgio Donatelli had the opportunity but no motive that I can see—apart from the fact that nothing we've learned about the man suggests he's capable of such extreme violence. Lord Frederick claims he was with the Prince of Wales at the time of the killings, and while I haven't had a chance to verify that, I would assume at any rate that a man of his inclinations would be unlikely to indulge in our killer's particular form of necrophilia."

"Necro-what?"

Sebastian glanced over at the boy's open, inquisitive face. "Never mind that one."

"There's still the Frenchman," said Tom. He paused to take a bite of his pasty, but swallowed quickly before continuing. "And that actor, Hugh Gordon. All you got is 'is word for it that 'e was 'ome studyin' his lines that night."

"A love affair that went bad two years ago seems an unlikely motive for murder, but you're right, it wouldn't hurt to look into his movements that night. Why don't you ask around, see if any of his neighbors remember seeing him that night."

Tom nodded and swallowed the last of his pasty. "I got somethin' interesting on yer Lord Frederick. 'E went to see a friend last night. A young friend what 'as rooms in Stratton Street, over Marylebone way."

Sebastian drained his tankard and pushed it aside. "Who is he?"

"Folks around there didn't seem to know—I take it 'e 'asna lived there long. So I followed 'im this morning."

"And?"

"'Is name is Davis. Wesley Davis. Turns out 'e's a clerk. At the Foreign Office."

It was the hour of the fashionable promenade in Hyde Park, the hour when everyone with pretensions to being anyone was careful to be seen there, walking, trotting sedately along the Row on a showy hack, or bowling up the avenue in a suitably stylish curricle, phaeton, or barouche. The weather hadn't been particularly favorable lately, but that morning's bleak sunshine had melted what was left of the snow, helped along by a stiff wind that was still blowing hard enough to keep away the stinking, yellow London fog. Society's finest were out in droves, bundled up to their stiff upper lips against the cold.

Sebastian kept his hat pulled low and his scarf wrapped about his lower face, but his scruffy appearance still attracted more attention than he would have liked as he waited patiently beside the footpath, some twenty yards away from where Lord Frederick had paused to speak to a fawning matron and her blushing young daughter.

He might be nearly fifty and a younger son, but Lord Frederick was still considered quite a catch, for all that. His first wife had, unfortunately, left most of her considerable fortune tied up in trust for their daughter, but everyone knew that the chances were more than even that the man would be made prime minister in just a few days' time. True, he'd shown no disposition to remarry in all the years since his wife's tragic death, but the recent marriage of his dearly loved only daughter had raised hopes in the bosoms of the Metropolis's mamas—as well as among more than a few of Society's more attractive widows. Surely, they reasoned, the need for female companionship would at long last inspire Lord Frederick to look about him for a wife—especially when one considered the pressing need for someone to play the part of his political hostess.

Of course, they didn't know about the existence of one Mr. Wesley Davis of Stratton Street.

Smiling smoothly, Lord Frederick extricated himself from the clutches of the two ambitious ladies, tipped his hat, bowed, and continued up the footpath. He wore buff-colored doeskin breeches and a many-caped Garrick, and carried an ivory-handled ebony walking stick that swung idly in one hand as he headed toward Park Lane.

Sebastian fell into step beside him. "I've a flintlock in me pocket big enough to blow a hole in yer gut the size o' a dinner plate, so don't ye be getting any fancy ideas about hollerin' out, or tryin' to skewer me with the fancy little sword ye got hidden in that cane o' yers," Sebastian added when the man's fist tightened around his walking stick.

Fairchild relaxed his hold on the stick's ivory handle, but his expression remained calm and defiant. "Surely you don't expect to get away with armed robbery in broad daylight in the middle of Hyde Park?"

"I don't want yer boung and geegaws. All's I wants is for us to have us a little chat. Over there." Sebastian nodded toward a wooden bench set back amongst the shrubbery. "Beneath that chestnut tree."

Lord Frederick hesitated a moment, then stepped off the footpath into the long wet grass.

"Sit down real easy-like," said Sebastian, when Fairchild reached the bench and turned to look back expectantly. "And drop that walking stick. That's right. Now kick it over here."

Keeping a watchful eye on the man on the bench, Sebastian reached for the cane at his feet. The mechanism that released the ivory handle from the ebony shaft was easy enough to find. The shaft fell away with a well-oiled hiss, revealing a gleaming, two-edged blade. "Nasty little piece of work, this," he said, in his own voice and diction.

Lord Frederick set his handsome, square jaw. "The streets are dangerous places these days."

Sebastian laughed and loosed the scarf from about his lower face. "You've no idea how dangerous."

A mingling of recognition and shock sagged the other man's face. "Oh, God. You're Devlin, aren't you?" He swallowed, a new kind of wariness narrowing his eyes, replacing the initial slackness of surprise. "What do you want from me?"

"The truth would be nice. For a change." Sebastian played with the sword stick in his hand, learning the weight of it, testing the balance. "I'll save us some time, shall I, by telling you what I already know? For instance, I know that whatever else you were doing with Rachel York, you weren't tupping her."

Lord Frederick gave a sharp laugh. "Don't be absurd. What do you think I was doing in her rooms twice a week?"

"Pleasuring a young clerk from the Foreign Office named Wesley Davis."

Fairchild sat silent. He managed to keep his features composed, but the fear was there, like a shadow darkening his soft gray eyes.

"It's the reason you never remarried, isn't it?" said Sebastian. "Because while you might enjoy chatting with the ladies about gardens and furniture design and the latest sonata, you've never had the least interest in taking any of them to bed."

For a moment, Sebastian thought the man meant to continue denying it. Then his shoulders sagged, the skin around his eyes tightening as if in a wince, and he said softly, "Who else knows?"

"That's what I'm wondering." Sebastian considered the sword. It was double edged and very, very sharp. "Rachel was blackmailing you, was she? Her silence, in exchange for whatever little secrets the French might be interested in getting their hands on."

Fairchild's head jerked back. "What? Good God. I would never do such a thing." He sucked in a deep, angry breath that flared his nostrils. "What do you think? That because I favor peace with the French that makes me a traitor? I'm against this war because it is destroying our country, not because I sympathize with Napoleon." He flung out one arm in an expansive sweep that encompassed the East End of London, his voice taking on the stentorian tones of a speaker in Parliament. "Look around you. Children are dying of starvation in our streets. Men by the tens of thousands have been thrown off the land their families worked for generations, while women who once made a decent living are now reduced to selling themselves in alleyways and under bridges. The price of a pound of bread has doubled in the last twenty years, while a typical working man's wages have fallen to almost half what they once were. And for what? So that a handful of industrialists and merchants can grow rich by lending their money to the government and equipping the armies that will be used to put the old crowned tyrants of Europe back on their thrones?"

It could have been an act, a performance intended to deceive, but Sebastian didn't think so. The man's entire being was practically throbbing with indignation and the fierce determination of the hopeless idealist. "Are you telling me Rachel York never asked you to pass her sensitive information?"

Fairchild stared back at him, eyes widening with a horrified kind of revelation. "Good God. What is it you think? That I killed her? That she was threatening to blackmail me, so I shut her up?"

"I might," said Sebastian, still playing with the sword, "except for one thing."

"What's that?"

"Whoever killed her, raped her."

"Heavens." Fairchild clasped his hands together between his knees, and stared down at them for a moment. "I didn't know. Poor Rachel."

He said it as if she had been his friend. And it came to Sebastian that, in some strange way, they probably were friends, this gentle, troubled nobleman and the woman who had gone every Monday afternoon to sing to the babies in St. Jude's Foundling Home.

After a moment, Fairchild looked up and said, "Are you quite certain she was working for the French?"

"No. But everything I've found seems to point in that direction."

Fairchild pursed his lips and pushed out a long, troubled breath. "A few weeks ago, Wesley's rooms were broken into. He had these letters I'd written him—probably something like half a dozen of them. " A faint hint of color tinged his cheeks. "It was a foolish thing to have done, I know that now."

"The letters were taken?" said Sebastian, wondering if this Wesley Davis had also played a part in setting up Lord Frederick for blackmail.

Fairchild nodded. "I was sick with worry. Rachel and I talked about it. She promised she'd deny everything if someone tried to use the letters against me, although we both knew it would do precious little good if it did come to that. Then last Friday, she came to me. She said she'd discovered who had the letters and she knew someone who could get them back for me. Steal them, actually."

"For how much?"

"Three thousand pounds."

It was less than what she'd demanded from Hendon. And it came to Sebastian that there might very well have been others she'd approached; other rich, powerful men, one of whom might have decided to kill rather than pay for the secrets she had to offer.

He studied the man who sat slumped on the bench, lost in his own thoughts. "Do you think she's the one who took the letters from Davis's rooms in the first place?"

"Rachel?" Lord Frederick considered this a moment, then shook his head. "I don't think so. Although the last few weeks, she seemed afraid of something. I don't know what. She talked about going away, starting over someplace else."

It fit with what the others had told him, Hugh Gordon and the Reverend Finley at St. Jude's. "When were you supposed to meet her? Tuesday?"

Fairchild's chest lifted with a weighty sigh. "I only wish I had. It's what she wanted, but it wasn't easy for me to raise that kind of money. I asked her to give me until Wednesday." He scrubbed one hand across his face, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "I was still getting the money together when I heard she'd been killed."

"So who has the letters now?"

His hand fell back to his side. He looked haggard. Frightened. "I wish I knew. As soon as I heard what had happened to Rachel, I went past the lodging house where she kept her rooms. I had some notion of going up and looking for them, but the constables were there. I didn't dare stop."

Sebastian nodded. So Fairchild had gone to Dorset Court that day. But if he hadn't gone up to search Rachel's rooms, then who had?

Fairchild jerked up from the bench and took an agitated step away before whirling back around. "If those letters are made public, I'll be ruined. Absolutely ruined."

Sebastian studied him dispassionately. "Did Rachel tell you who had the letters?"

A faint flush touched the man's high, aristocratic cheekbones. "Yes. Leo Pierrepont."

"Of course," said Sebastian. "I should have known."

At the far end of the Row, a young blade on a showy, white-marked chestnut sent his mount cavorting. Sebastian lifted his head and watched the chestnut's four white stockings flash in the thin winter sunlight. And he knew it again, that tantalizing sensation of a thought hovering somewhere on the edges of consciousness, just beyond his grasp.

"Exactly who had she found to steal the letters from Pierrepont? Did she say?"

The other man shook his head. "All I knew was that it had to be done while Pierrepont was out of town for the week, at Lord Edgeworth's country house down in Hampshire. She was hoping to be gone by Thursday, before Pierrepont had a chance to come back and find the letters missing. I could be wrong, but had the impression..."

"Yes?"

"He's the one she was afraid of. The one she was running away from."

Sebastian glanced down at the gleaming blade in his hands. The sword stick was a common enough weapon amongst London's noblemen. Sebastian's own father carried one, while Leo Pierrepont was known to have an extensive collection.

Sebastian slid the blade back into its sheath with a quiet hiss. Lord Edgeworth had hosted a party at his Hampshire estate the week before, Sebastian knew; as a part of that set, Pierrepont had undoubtedly been invited. But if he'd been planning to spend the week, something must have changed his mind, for he'd come back in time to host a dinner party on Tuesday night.

The night Rachel York was killed.