Chapter 38
By the time Sebastian reached him, Valentino Vescovi was struggling to prop himself up on his elbows, his breath coming in short, painful gasps.
“Where are you hurt?” said Sebastian, kneeling beside him in the snow.
The Italian’s harsh features contorted with pain. “Bastardo . . . Stuck a knife in my back.”
“Who? Who did this?”
“Don’t know. Couldn’t see. Most of his face was hidden.”
Sebastian looked up to find one of his young footmen staring at them, his mouth slack with horror. “Don’t just stand there, damn it! Run to the house and get some men to help carry him inside.”
“Y-yes, my lord,” stammered the footman, and took off running.
Vescovi coughed, and Sebastian carefully eased one arm beneath the man’s shoulders to raise his head and support his weight. “Why would someone want to kill you?”
“I was coming to see you. Tell you about the . . . about the letters.”
Vescovi’s eyes started to slide closed, and Sebastian tightened his grip on the man’s shoulders. “Hold on. As soon as we get you into the house, I’ll send—”
But Vescovi’s eyes were no longer sliding closed; they were still and staring, and Sebastian knew he was dead.
Sometime later, Sebastian stood with Sir Henry Lovejoy at the snowy intersection of Bond and Brook Streets.
“A second of Princess Charlotte’s music instructors found dead in the street?” said Lovejoy, his shoulders hunched against the cold as he stared down at the dead man in silence. “Why?”
“I wish I knew.”
Lovejoy shook his head in bewilderment. “The palace will never be able to quiet the speculation this time.”
“That doesn’t mean they won’t try.”
“No,” said Lovejoy with a sigh. “No, it doesn’t.”
They sent the harpist’s body off to Paul Gibson’s surgery. Then, at Sebastian’s suggestion, they took a couple of Lovejoy’s constables and went to search Valentino Vescovi’s room at the Percy Arms in Red Lion Square.
The innkeeper muttered and grumbled about being dragged from his fireside for something that could just as easily have waited until morning. He was still grousing about being disturbed when he threw open Vescovi’s room. Then he broke off to clutch at his nightcap as it started to slide. “Merciful heavens,” he said, his voice rising into a squeak. “What is this?”
The room had been ruthlessly searched, the mattress dragged from the bed and slit open, drawers emptied and their contents strewn about the floor. Even the Italian’s spare clothes had been slashed, as if the searcher thought something might have been hidden in their seams and linings.
“Whatever were they looking for?” said Lovejoy, pausing in the doorway.
Sebastian went right to the Italian’s harp. The instrument’s beautifully worked frame had been hopelessly smashed. “I’ve no idea.”
They searched the room themselves anyway, on the off chance Vescovi’s killer had missed something in his haste.
They found nothing.
Wednesday, 2 February
Dawn was spilling a weak golden light down the snowy canyon of Brook Street when Hero came to stand in the doorway to the library, a cup of tea held in one hand. “Did you sleep at all?” she asked Devlin.
He looked up from where he leaned against his desk, staring at something in his hand. “A bit.”
“Liar.”
He gave a lopsided smile and set aside whatever he’d been holding.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Jane Ambrose’s locket.”
“Ah.” She came to hand him the cup. “Here. This is for you. Drink it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can I talk you into some breakfast?”
He took a sip of the tea and grimaced. “Not hungry.” He pushed away from the desk and went to stand at the window, his gaze on the long icicles that glittered in the cold sunshine. “What in all of this am I missing?” He brought one clenched fist down on the windowsill. “Bloody hell! I still don’t know where she actually died, how or why she burnt her fingers, or even who raped her a day or two before she was killed. Something must tie it all together. And now Vescovi is dead, and it’s damnably hard not to hold myself in some measure responsible.”
“Why? Because you underestimated the importance of the communication between Princess Charlotte and her mother?”
Devlin nodded. “And yet I can’t think of anything that could be in the letters Vescovi carried that would motivate someone to kill over it. What could Charlotte have said? That she regrets allowing her father to trick her into this betrothal? That Caroline is working with her Whig friends to find a way to stop it? None of that is exactly a secret.”
“No,” she agreed. “But why else would someone kill Vescovi?”
Sebastian drained his tea and set it aside. “Damned if I know.”
An hour later, Sebastian received a note from Kat Boleyn telling him she had found Edward Ambrose’s mistress.
“Her name is Emma Carter,” said Kat as she and Sebastian walked along the stalls of Covent Market. The icy, ferocious cold still held the city in its grip, but the roads from the countryside were finally passable enough that some supplies were beginning to trickle in. “She used to be an opera dancer before Ambrose set her up in rooms in Tavistock Street. Almost no one knows about her. He must be extraordinarily discreet in his visits to her.”
“He couldn’t afford to have his wife find out,” said Sebastian, his gaze scanning the shivering, desperate crowd. “Not when she was the one actually writing his operas.”
“Was she really?”
“She was indeed. How long has Ambrose had this woman in keeping?”
“Three years.”
“Three years? He has been discreet.”
Kat put out a hand, stopping him as she lowered her voice. “That’s her there—in the cherry red pelisse.”
Sebastian studied the woman who stood at a stall mounded high with carrots and potatoes. She was a tiny thing, surely no more than nineteen or twenty, with a pretty round face and dusky curls that peeked from beneath a fur-trimmed hat. As she turned away from the stall, her pelisse flared open, exposing a heavily pregnant belly.
“Good God,” he said softly. “She’s with child.”