Chapter 5
Sebastian walked out of Lord Ashworth’s house to find Curzon Street packed with street hawkers and apprentices jostling tradesmen and shopkeepers and what looked like more than a few of the dead man’s curious aristocratic neighbors.
What he didn’t see was his curricle.
He eventually discovered his tiger watering the chestnuts at a trough outside a pub at the corner of Clarges. The boy was simply staring into space, his gaze fixed unseeingly on nothing in particular.
“M’lord,” said Tom, collecting himself with a jerk when Sebastian walked up to him. “I didn’t see ye! I’m that sorry, I am. I shoulda—”
Sebastian leapt up to the curricle’s high seat and collected the reins. “It’s all right, Tom. Believe it or not, I am capable of walking a couple of blocks without suffering undue fatigue.”
The boy scrambled up to his perch. “Is ’e—is Ashworth dead?”
“Very.”
“Ye know who offed ’im?”
“Not yet.”
“Ye ask me, whoever killed ’im done the world a favor, gettin’ rid o’ that cove.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you.”
“So ye ain’t gonna bother tryin’ t’ figure out who done it?”
Sebastian turned his horses toward his sister’s house in St. James’s Square. “Unfortunately, the brutal murder of a marquis’s son is something the authorities can’t simply ignore. That means they’re going to need to arrest someone. And if the palace gets too insistent, it won’t matter if the person they finger is guilty or innocent, as long as he hangs.” He paused, aware of the quiet but insistent whisper of a disturbing possibility, and added, “He, or she.”
Sebastian’s relationship with his sister, Amanda, the Dowager Lady Wilcox, had never been easy.
Of the four children born to the marriage of the Fifth Earl of Hendon and his beautiful, errant Countess, Amanda was the eldest. If she’d been a boy, she would automatically have become Viscount Devlin and heir to Hendon’s vast lands and titles. Instead, as a girl, she’d watched that honor go first to her brother Richard and then, after his death, to Cecil. Sebastian knew she’d resented both Richard and Cecil, although she’d never hated either of those two long-dead siblings the way she’d always hated her youngest and only surviving brother, Sebastian. But then, she was twelve years his senior, which meant she’d been old enough to know some painful truths about Sebastian’s birth that had until recently eluded him.
A widow now for three years, she lived in an elegant town house on St. James’s Square that technically belonged to her son, Bayard, the current Lord Wilcox. But the young Baron was a troubled soul still firmly under the control of his mother. Knowing what he did of Bayard Wilcox, Sebastian suspected that was a good thing.
Her ladyship’s impressive front door was guarded by a grim-faced butler named Crowley who bowed to Sebastian and said stiffly, “I beg your pardon, my lord, but I still have orders not to admit your lordship to the house.”
“I know.” Sebastian handed the man his hat anyway. “Is Lady Ashworth with my sister?”
“She is, my lord. There’s been”—the butler hesitated, the hat clutched in both hands as he obviously debated how much information to divulge to his employer’s estranged brother—“an incident.”
“I am aware of Ashworth’s murder, if that’s what’s worrying you. I’ll wait while you inform my sister and niece that I have some information they urgently need to hear. I suspect you’ll find Lady Wilcox changes her mind about seeing me.”
The butler looked doubtful but showed Sebastian to a small withdrawing room and went off to convey his message to her ladyship. On his return, he bowed again and said, “This way, my lord.”
He led Sebastian to a pleasant morning room where Amanda and her daughter sat near a window overlooking the rear gardens. The remnants of a half-eaten breakfast littered the table before them, as if Lindley’s message had interrupted their meal.
Amanda was well into her forties now. Like their mother, the beautiful but infamous Countess of Hendon, she was built slim and graceful, her golden hair still little touched by gray. But her blunt facial features were those of her father, the Earl, as were her startlingly blue eyes. Lately she’d taken to wearing gowns of silver or the pale gray of half mourning in honor of her dead husband, a nasty man she’d intensely hated and certainly did not miss.
Her nineteen-year-old daughter, the newly widowed Lady Ashworth, sat with her hands gripping the delicate arms of her chair.
Like her mother, Stephanie was golden-haired and elegantly built, with the same intensely blue St. Cyr eyes. But unlike Amanda, the girl had avoided inheriting Hendon’s less attractive features. Instead, she looked startlingly like her errant grandmother—ethereally beautiful, alluring, and recklessly wild to the point of self-destruction. Studying her pale but tightly composed face, Sebastian found himself wondering not for the first time about the exact nature of the sequence of events that had led her to marry Ashworth seven months before.
“If you’ve come here simply to gloat,” said Amanda without any greeting, “you can turn around right now and leave.”
Ignoring his sister, Sebastian met his niece’s gaze and said, “I won’t pretend to be sorry he’s dead, Stephanie. But I am sorry for any distress his death causes you.”
“Delicately put, Uncle,” said Stephanie. “Do you know how he died?”
“Yes. Do you?”
She shook her head. “The Marquis’s message to Mama was tactful to the point of abstruseness. I take it that’s because the truth is rather lurid?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Oh, stop being so namby-pamby and tell us,” snapped Amanda.
“Very well. He was found bound hand and foot to his bed, naked. It’s a bit hard to tell at this point, but from the looks of things, I’d say someone took a hatchet to his chest.”
“Good God,” said Amanda. “What a fool to put himself in such a vulnerable position.”
Sebastian watched his niece. Her chest lifted with a quickly indrawn breath, but otherwise her expression didn’t alter. He said, “You don’t appear surprised.”
She met his gaze squarely. “I know what he was like.”
Since neither woman had invited him to sit, he went to stand before the hearth, one arm resting along the mantel. “Do you have any idea who might have killed him?” he asked Stephanie.
“Someone who disliked him?” she suggested, her nostrils quivering with a pinched look. “That should narrow the list of suspects down to virtually everyone who ever dealt with him.”
The faint, niggling whisper of misgiving Sebastian had experienced earlier now flared into full-blown concern. She was too calm, too . . . prepared. “Where were you last night, Steph?”
“Merciful heavens.” Amanda pushed to her feet and took several steps toward him with a haste that set her silver mourning gown to swishing about her ankles. “Precisely what are you suggesting?”
Sebastian kept his gaze on Stephanie. “You know the question is going to come up,” he said softly. “Where were you?”
Her hands spasmed on the arms of her chair. “Home. Asleep.”
“Can anyone verify that?”
Her chin came up. “I was alone, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Amanda’s hand flashed through the air in a sharp, dismissive gesture. “Seriously, Devlin? She’s barely a month out from childbirth. What do you mean to imply?”
“The twins sleep with their wet nurses?” he asked Stephanie.
“Yes.”
Amanda’s lips curled into a sneer. “You don’t seriously think my daughter would turn herself into a milk cow?”
It was a barb directed at Sebastian’s own wife, Hero, who had nursed their young son herself. He ignored the taunt and said to Stephanie, “When did you last see your husband?”
“It must have been a week ago, at least—if not more.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
“I would caution you to be careful not to lie. Not when the subject is murder.”
“I am not lying. Ashworth married me to satisfy his father’s increasingly insistent demands for an heir, and as soon as he learned I was with child, he was as happy to ignore me as I was to be left alone. And I am now frankly quite overjoyed to be a widow.”
“A truth I suggest you keep to yourself.”
Stephanie tilted her head to one side, a strange smile tightening her lips. “Really, Uncle? And yet you just advised me not to lie.”
“About your movements, never. But I believe your joy at widowhood can be safely concealed.”
Amanda let out a huff of disgust. “You aren’t seriously suggesting anyone would dare suspect Stephanie? Stephanie?”
“I’m afraid it’s highly possible, given that Ashworth appears to have been killed by a woman.” He watched Stephanie’s eyes widen and said, “That frightens you. Why?”
“Of course it frightens me. Mother might believe I won’t be suspected, but I fail to share her confidence.”
Her voice cracked when she said it, giving him a glimpse of the quiet terror she was struggling so valiantly to keep hidden. And he felt momentarily overwhelmed by a rush of his lifelong affection for this beautiful, vibrant, troubled young woman. He said gently, “If you know anything—anything at all—that might shed some light on what happened to Ashworth, you must tell me.”
She pushed up from her chair and went to stand staring out at the garden, one hand resting on the windowsill. “I don’t know anything.”
He studied her half-averted profile. “I’ll help you in every way I can, Stephanie. But you must be honest with me.”
“We don’t need your help,” said Amanda, going to give the bell a sharp tug. “One of the footmen will show you out.”
Sebastian met his sister’s stony gaze. “I hope to God you’re right.” To Stephanie, he said, “If you need me, you know where to find me.”
She stared back at him, and he saw something flicker in the shadowy depths of the girl’s vivid blue eyes.
Then she turned her face away and said nothing.
Sebastian went next to the Grosvenor Square residence of Alistair James St. Cyr, the Fifth Earl of Hendon, for many years now Chancellor of the Exchequer and the man known to the world as his father. But according to Hendon’s butler, the Earl had departed for Oxford two days before.
After leaving a carefully worded note, Sebastian drove back to his own house in Brook Street. “Stable them for now,” he told Tom, handing the boy the reins. “And grab yourself something to eat while you’re at it. I have a feeling this is going to be a long day.”
“Aye, m’lord.”
Sebastian watched the boy drive off, then turned to mount the steps to the house. “Is Lady Devlin in?” he asked his majordomo, handing the man his driving coat, hat, and gloves.
“I believe she’s in the library, my lord,” said Morey.
“Ah. Thank you.”
Sebastian found his wife, Hero, leaning over the library table, so focused on the map she had spread out to study that she didn’t hear his approach. He paused for a moment in the doorway, a faint smile playing over his lips as he quietly watched her.
She was an extraordinarily tall woman—nearly as tall as he, with a Junoesque build, warm brown hair, and strong, slightly masculine features. She was also one of the most brilliant people he knew, fiercely logical and passionately devoted to identifying and righting the injustices of their world. For some time now, she’d been writing a series of articles on the poor of London—an endeavor that profoundly irritated her father, the King’s omnipotent cousin, Charles, Lord Jarvis. As the real power behind the Prince of Wales’s fragile Regency, Jarvis terrified nearly everyone in the kingdom. But not Hero.
She’d been Sebastian’s wife for going on two years, but she was still a wonder to him. She’d come into his life at a particularly dark period, when he’d lost, first, the woman he’d loved for years, and then his own sense of who and what he was. Now he couldn’t imagine his world without her. Sometimes in the haunted darkness of the night, the fear of losing her or their young son, Simon, could come upon him out of nowhere with a ferocity that took his breath and scared the hell out of him. He suspected it always would.
She looked up then, saw him, and smiled.
“New project?” he asked, pushing away from the doorframe.
“I’m thinking about writing an article on the street scavengers—mainly the pure finders and rag-and-bone pickers, but perhaps also the night-soil men, if I get up the nerve.” The night-soil men were the laborers who emptied the city’s hundreds of thousands of cesspits and privies, and always reeked of their occupation.
“Sounds lovely,” said Sebastian, going to pour himself a brandy.
“Is it true?” she asked, watching him. “Ashworth is dead?”
Sebastian eased the stopper from the brandy carafe. “He is. Hacked to death while tied naked to his bed. They’ll never keep that tidbit out of the papers.”
“Poor Stephanie. How is she taking it?”
“With unnerving aplomb.”
Hero watched him set aside the decanter and reach for his glass. “You can’t seriously suspect Stephanie of murder?”
He took a slow sip of his brandy and felt it burn all the way down. “I wish I didn’t.”
“Is she capable of that sort of violence?”
“If pushed? I think so. I imagine a man such as Ashworth would drive almost any wife to want to murder him.”
Hero walked over to take a sip of his brandy, then handed him back the glass. “I’ll never understand why she married him.”
“Because she was three months gone with child and couldn’t bear to face the consequences.”
Hero gave a wry smile. “That I can appreciate. I suppose what I can’t understand is why she involved herself with such a man in the first place.”
“Well, he was a marquis’s heir, extraordinarily rich, and undeniably handsome in a rakish, dangerous sort of way. He could also come across as quite charming when he wanted to.”
Hero made a face. “I suppose.”
He took another sip. “According to Stephanie, the list of people who wanted Ashworth dead is virtually endless.”
“No doubt. Where do you propose to start?”
“With someone who knew the man well and yet somehow still managed to like him.”
“I suppose there must be someone.”
“Oh, there is.” Sebastian drained the rest of his drink in one long pull and set the glass aside. “I went to school with him.”