Chapter 12
The ancient cobbled lane that separated young Princess Charlotte’s dilapidated residence from the gardens of her father’s grand palace was known as Stone Cutters’ Alley. On leaving Carlton House, Sebastian had to pass through the classical colonnade that guarded the palace’s forecourt from the street, turn right, and walk past four tall houses before turning right again into the narrow lane. At one time the Prince of Wales had sought to seize the lane in order to expand his palace. But Stone Cutters’ Alley provided the only public approach to St. James’s Park from Pall Mall, and so great was the popular outcry that he was forced to give up the scheme.
When he reached the surprisingly dilapidated brick wall that sheltered Warwick House’s Renaissance courtyard from the lane, Sebastian paused, his eyes narrowed against the snow. The fresh white blanket gave the scene a simple, peaceful air. But he knew that was deceptive. The young Princess was separated physically and in almost every other way from her father, the Regent, yet her position as second in line to the throne made access to her both rare and coveted. And corridors of power were always dangerous.
He tipped back his head, his gaze scanning the brick house’s upper floors, and saw a curtain move at one window. It shifted for only an instant and then hung still. But he knew someone had been watching him.
The sound of the house’s front door opening and closing carried clearly in the snowy hush. Sebastian heard the crunch of footsteps crossing the snow-filled yard toward him. The solid wooden gate’s heavy iron latch twisted with a creak and the gate jerked inward to reveal an older man in an exquisitely tailored cassock and old-fashioned periwig.
He looked to be in his late sixties, with swooping heavy brows that drew together in a fierce frown. “What precisely do you think you are doing?” demanded the prelate, his long, prominent nose twitching. “I don’t know who you are or why you are here, young man, but you’d best move on before I—”
“The name is Devlin,” said Sebastian, calmly handing the man his card.
The prelate broke off, his thin-lipped little mouth going slack as he took the card. “Ah. My lord.” Mouth tightening, he gave a curt, begrudging bow. “I beg your pardon. I did not recognize you.” He sniffed. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Bishop of Salisbury, Preceptor to Her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte.”
“Bishop,” said Sebastian with a polite bow. He had heard of the Right Reverend Doctor John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury. With a reputation as a humorless, vain, self-important clergyman, Salisbury had coordinated the Princess’s education for nearly ten years. He had an affected manner of speaking and a strange way of pronouncing the word “bishop,” so that it came out sounding like “bish-UP.” Sebastian had heard that Charlotte, who heartily detested the humorless man and possessed a gift for mimicry, had long ago nicknamed him “the Great Up.”
The Great Up sniffed again. “I noticed someone loitering in the lane and thought it best to move them along.”
“Oh?”
“Can’t be too careful, what?” said the Bishop. “Not when one considers what happened to Mrs. Ambrose.”
“So you don’t believe she simply slipped on the ice?” said Sebastian.
“Oh, no, no, of course I believe it.” The Great Up gave an incredulous scoff that told Sebastian the Bishop knew only too well why Sebastian was here. “To suggest otherwise would be ridiculous.”
“Would it?”
“But of course!”
“Did you see her yesterday?”
“I did, yes. We encountered each other in the entrance hall just as she was leaving.”
“What time was this?”
“Must have been shortly after noon, I suppose.”
“You spoke to her?”
“Briefly. We exchanged a few pleasantries, nothing more.”
“Do you know where she planned to go after leaving Warwick House?”
“Sorry, no; I couldn’t say.” The Bishop gave an exaggerated sigh. “Shocking to think that only a few hours later she was dead. A timely reminder to us all to be prepared to meet our Maker at any moment.”
Sebastian was beginning to understand why the young Princess found the prelate so annoying. “Do you know if she had any enemies?”
“Enemies?” The Great Up drew back his head in an exaggerated gesture of disbelief nicely combined with obvious disapproval. “Of course not.”
“No?”
“She was a pianist!”
“Pianists don’t have enemies?”
The Bishop’s full cheeks darkened. “Jane Ambrose slipped in the snow, hit her head, and died. To suggest anything more nefarious is at work here is not only frivolous, but it is also irresponsible and—given the woman’s relationship to the Princess—dangerous nearly to the point of sedition.”
“Sedition? Seriously?”
The Great Up glared at Sebastian in righteous silence.
Sebastian touched his hat. “Thank you, Bishop. You’ve been . . . most helpful.”
The prelate responded with a stiff bow, took a step back, and closed the old heavy gate with a reverberating crash.
Sebastian stood still for a moment, the snow falling gently around him. He was about to turn away when he became aware of an elegant young woman in a fur-trimmed pelisse and a jaunty Swedish hat emerging from the public footpath that wound up from St. James’s Park. She was an extraordinarily tall woman, nearly as tall as he, with strong, handsome features and the aquiline nose of her father, Lord Jarvis.
“Good heavens,” said Hero, blinking against the falling snow as she came up to him. “What are you doing here?”
“I was about to ask you the same question.”
“I’ve been watching an Italian harpist ice-skate.”
“And that’s an explanation?”
She linked her mittened hand through his proffered arm and smiled. “It is.”
They turned their steps toward Brook Street while she told him what she had learned from her friend Miss Kinsworth and her subsequent conversations with the Dutch courtier and the harpist Valentino Vescovi.
“So, which of the two men do you think is telling the truth?” Sebastian asked, his gaze on her profile. “Van der Pals? Or Vescovi?”
She shook her head. “I’m not convinced either of them is. Although if I had to put money on one or the other, I’d pick the Italian harpist over the decorative Dutch courtier any day.”
“Because what he told you agrees better with what you heard from your friend Miss Kinsworth?”
“Partially. But I suspect it also has something to do with my profound aversion to handsome young men who believe themselves so charming that no female can resist them.”
“Ah.”
Hero looked troubled. “Could van der Pals have killed Jane simply because she’d exposed his attempts to convince her to spy on Princess Charlotte? He did say she’d be sorry if she betrayed him.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him. Except, how did he know Jane told someone? Unless of course your Miss Kinsworth wasn’t actually as silent as she claims.”
Hero gazed off across the snow-filled intersection of Piccadilly and Bond Street, her features troubled.
“What?” he asked.
“I just wish I were more convinced that Ella Kinsworth was being completely honest with me. Don’t misunderstand me—I believe her to be a good, honorable woman. But when you serve as lady companion to a princess, you can’t always be as truthful as you’d like.”
The snow was coming down harder now, filling their world with a whirl of white. “I can’t believe the Regent is seriously considering marrying his daughter to Slender Billy,” said Sebastian, squinting up at the heavy sky.
She glanced over at him. “Orange was with Wellington in the Peninsula when you were there, was he not?”
“He was.”
“So you knew him?”
“I did.”
“And van der Pals as well?”
Sebastian nodded. “The two were inseparable.”
“Meaning?”
His gaze met hers. “Meaning a great deal. But I’m afraid it’s not something one can discuss in the middle of Bond Street—even if most of the shops are shuttered because of the snow.”
“Oh, dear. And does it have anything to do with why you were at Carlton House seeing my father?”
“Ah. You figured that out, did you?”
He told her then about his meeting with Jane’s bereaved husband and the pianist’s puzzling dismissal by Nathan Rothschild.
He did not tell her that Jarvis had essentially threatened to have him killed.
“For a simple musician,” said Hero as they turned up a snow-filled, strangely silent Brook Street toward home, “Jane Ambrose lived an unexpectedly dangerous life.”
“When you deal with people like the Rothschilds and the royal family,” said Sebastian, “life is never simple.”
It was late in the afternoon by the time Sebastian met with his friend Paul Gibson at the surgeon’s favorite tavern near the Tower.
“Sorry I wasn’t there to help with the inquest last night,” said Gibson, the pupils of his Irish green eyes noticeably small despite the dimness of the ancient Tudor tavern. “With both Alexi and me working, we might have found something before the palace came to seize the body.”
“I doubt there was much more to find,” said Sebastian, taking a deep drink of his ale.
“So, have you discovered how that poor woman came to be lying in the middle of a snow-filled lane?”
“No.” Sebastian leaned back in his seat, aware of a growing sense of frustration, of having spent the entire day grasping at the insignificant outer edges of Jane Ambrose’s life without ever coming close to capturing the essence of the woman she was or understanding why she was dead. “As far as we know, the last person to see Jane Ambrose alive was one of Princess Charlotte’s women, who chanced to look out a window of Warwick House around midday and see Jane crossing the courtyard toward the gate. But after that . . .” Sebastian paused. For some reason he could not explain, that moment haunted him. He kept imagining the slender, sad young woman, dressed in mourning for her dead children, walking across a neglected courtyard as the snow began to fall and going—where? Where the hell had she gone? And why?
“Nothing?” said Gibson.
“Not a bloody thing. I don’t know where she was killed, when she was killed, or basically anything that happened to her from the time she left Warwick House until Hero and Madame Sauvage stumbled over her body in Shepherds’ Lane. I can’t even figure out what the hell she was doing in Clerkenwell.” Sebastian took another deep drink. “Clerkenwell, of all places.”
“Alexi says she was wearing her pelisse when she died.”
Sebastian nodded. “Which means she was probably outside when she was killed. Although since she wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves, it’s also possible she was simply preparing to go out—or had only recently come inside. As to why or how she burnt her fingers . . . I’ve not the slightest idea.”
Gibson shook his head. “Who would want to kill a thirty-three-year-old pianist?”
Sebastian grunted. “More people than you might expect. At the moment my list of suspects includes her husband, an Italian harpist, a Dutch courtier, and Nathan Rothschild.”
“Rothschild? You can’t be serious?”
“I wish I weren’t. I was inclined to doubt it myself until a certain royal cousin warned me quite explicitly that looking too closely into the German financier’s affairs would be hazardous to my health.”
Gibson drained his ale and set the tankard aside with a dull clunk. “Bloody hell. You think Jarvis himself could be involved in this?”
Sebastian met his friend’s worried gaze. “I’m afraid so.”
“Does her ladyship know?”
“Not yet.”
Gibson shook his head and said again, “Bloody hell.”