Chapter 43
Sebastian’s knock at the door of the rooms Edward Ambrose kept for his mistress in Tavistock Street was answered by a young housemaid no more than twelve or thirteen years old. She was a gangly thing, all arms and legs, with a head of rioting dark hair inadequately constrained by a mobcap. She was evidently so surprised to see an unknown gentleman standing at her mistress’s door that she simply stared at him, mouth agape.
“Is your mistress at home?” said Sebastian.
The girl closed her mouth and nodded, eyes going wide.
Sebastian handed her his card. “Kindly tell her Lord Devlin would like a word—”
“Who is it, Molly?” Emma Carter came from a distant room, trailing a length of delicate white knitting. At the sight of Sebastian, she drew up abruptly. “Oh,” she said, her free hand creeping up to cup her heavy belly. The way she was looking at him told Sebastian she not only knew who he was, but also had some idea as to why he was here.
She wore a high-waisted figured muslin gown with long sleeves and a pink shawl, and she looked lovely, frightened, and very, very young. Her accent was good enough to make Sebastian wonder what had brought her to this.
He said, “If I might have a word with you, Miss Carter? I need to ask you some questions about Jane Ambrose.”
“But I don’t know anything about what happened to her,” she whispered, her nostrils flaring with alarm. “I swear it.”
“Did she come here last Tuesday or Wednesday?”
Emma Carter and her housemaid exchanged quick, anxious glances.
Sebastian said, “She did, didn’t she? What did she say?”
The young woman’s breathing had become so agitated she was shaking with it. Her lips parted, but she seemed to find it impossible to say anything.
“Miss Carter? What did she say?”
It was the housemaid who answered. “She didn’t say nothin’. She jist stood there and looked at mistress. Then she whirled around and left.”
“That’s it?”
Mistress and housemaid both nodded.
“Did you tell Edward Ambrose she had come?”
Emma Carter shook her head no even as her housemaid was nodding yes.
“When did you tell him?” demanded Sebastian, his gaze hard upon her even as her features crumpled with her tears. “And don’t even think about lying to me again.”
“The next day. Wednesday,” said the young woman in a broken voice. “Wednesday evening.”
“And did you see him again that Thursday?”
“No. He was supposed to come in the afternoon, but he didn’t.”
“Did he ever tell you why not?”
“He said something came up. He didn’t tell me what.”
“Thank you,” said Sebastian. As he turned away, he found himself wondering what would happen to this heavily pregnant young woman if the father of her unborn child were convicted of murdering his wife.
Then he caught the horror in Emma Carter’s frightened brown eyes, and he knew the same thought had already occurred to her.
Sebastian walked the icy streets of the city, his thoughts turning over everything he’d just learned and everything he thought he’d known before.
In the last month of a life cut tragically short, Jane Ambrose had inadvertently made some nasty, formidable enemies: Lord Jarvis, Nathan Rothschild, and the courtier Peter van der Pals. All were hard men who wouldn’t hesitate to kill a beautiful young pianist if she got in their way. She had moved through a dangerous swirl of greed and palace intrigue that Sebastian suspected he still didn’t completely understand. But he was coming increasingly to suspect that her death might actually have been the result of forces that were for the most part considerably more personal.
What would happen, he wondered, if a woman who’d recently buried both her children were to discover that her husband was about to have a child by his young mistress—a mistress he maintained in grand style on money earned from the operas she herself had secretly written?
What would she do?
Sebastian found himself coming back to what Jane had told Liam Maxwell the afternoon before she died: Our society asks women to give up too much, but nothing is going to change as long as we keep meekly doing what is expected of us. When Sebastian first heard those words, they struck him as oddly out of character for the woman he thought he was coming to know. But that was before he’d learned all that had happened to Jane Ambrose in the twenty-four hours before that strange conversation, from van der Pals’s brutal rape in a Savile Row alley to her discovery of her husband’s pregnant mistress. When considered in that context, Jane’s statement to Liam Maxwell sounded like the dawning resolution of a woman who’d had enough. Who’d had enough of hiding her talent from the world because of her sex. Who was weary of denying a love that had been slowly deepening over ten long years. Who no longer believed she should endure a loveless marriage to an abusive husband simply because that’s what her religion and society expected of a wife.
So what had she done? Sebastian wondered. Confronted Ambrose? Threatened to leave him?
It wasn’t difficult to imagine how a man such as Edward Ambrose, deeply in debt and known for hitting his wife, would react. And if he hit her hard enough that she fell and fatally struck her head?
A man like Ambrose would never admit what he had done.
The housemaid who answered the door of Ambrose’s Soho Square town house looked less sorrowful than the last time Sebastian had seen her, but more anxious.
“My lord,” she said, bobbing a quick curtsy. “If’n yer here t’ see Mr. Ambrose, he’s in his library. He’s been in there forever, but he don’t take kindly to us interruptin’ him when he’s working like this, and I don’t dare disturb him.”
“That’s quite all right,” Sebastian said pleasantly as he simply walked past her toward the library door. “I’ll interrupt him myself.”
“But, my lord—”
She broke off in a gasp and threw her apron up over her face as Sebastian thrust open the door without knocking.
It was the unexpected chill that hit him first—the chill and the ripe smell of blood. Edward Ambrose lay sprawled on his back beside the library’s cold hearth, one knee bent awkwardly beneath him, his arms flung out at his sides. His mouth was slightly agape, his eyes wide, as if he were startled by something. But the eyes were already filmed and flattening, and a dark sea of blood stiffened the front of the torn white silk waistcoat from which protruded the handle of an elegant dagger.
The housemaid, who had crept up to peek around Sebastian’s side, dropped her apron and began to scream.