Chapter 51
It was almost dark by the time Sebastian reached the banks of the frozen Thames. The now-bedraggled strings of gaily colored flags and lanterns danced fitfully in the warming wind, but hundreds of fairgoers still thronged the ice, their shouts and laughter mingling with the cries of roving hawkers. The smell of ale and roasting mutton and hot spice cakes hung heavy on the damp air.
“Ye think it’s ’er brother what killed ’er, don’t ye?” said Tom when Sebastian drew up at the foot of Queen Street to hand him the reins.
Sebastian turned to give the boy a long, steady look. “I do. Although I’m afraid I can’t explain my reasoning to you.”
Tom nodded, his face flat. He might not know the exact train of Sebastian’s thoughts, but he was clever enough to grasp the implications of their movements that day. “‘Ow they ever gonna put ’im on trial if it’s got somethin’ to do with the Princess and they don’t want nobody t’ know about it?”
Sebastian dropped lightly to the slushy ground. “I don’t think they will.”
A heavy, wet snow was falling again, big clumpy flakes that hovered perilously close to rain. Sebastian could see gaps here and there in the double lines of tents, booths, and stalls, where some of the more prudent tradesmen had obviously begun to mistrust the ice and withdrawn. But the crowds were still thick. Half-grown boys with dogs at their heels mingled with tradesmen and apprentices, stout matrons and merchants in high-crowned hats, clusters of giggling serving girls and roving bands of seamen from the ships frozen fast at the docks. There was a raucous, almost frantic note to the noisy merrymaking, as if most sensed this would be the Frost Fair’s last night and were determined to make the most of it.
He found a couple of apprentices working Somerset’s old wooden press, turning out souvenir cards while Somerset himself guarded the piles of books and stationery from possible thieves. “Still doing a good business, I see,” said Sebastian, walking up to him.
Somerset’s eyes crinkled with his soft, sad smile. “Can’t complain.”
“May I speak with you for a moment?”
Somerset nodded to one of the apprentices to take his place. “Of course.”
“I know what happened to your sister,” said Sebastian as the two men turned to push their way down the crowded promenade.
Something shifted behind the printer’s eyes, something swift and calculating and quickly hidden by half-lowered lids. “You do? Well, that’s encouraging. Was it her husband, then?”
“Actually, no.”
“Oh?”
“It was you.”
Somerset drew up and swung to face him, the light from the torches flanking a nearby dance tent falling golden across his features. A burst of shouts and laughter and the high-pitched, urgent screech of a fiddle filled the night. “Is this some sort of sick jest?”
“Hot pies!” shouted a passing boy selling mutton pies from a tray slung by a strap around his neck. “Pies, fresh and hot!”
Sebastian kept his gaze on the printer. “The day she died, Jane discovered by chance that you’d been in Hampshire at the time the Hesse letters were stolen. She went to your print shop, presumably intending to confront you with what she suspected. Only you weren’t there. And so she searched your office, looking for the letters. She must have known you well, because she found them, didn’t she? Then she lit a fire in your stove so she could burn them. That’s when—”
“This is madness! Whatever makes you think—”
“That’s when you came in. You realized what she was doing and you struck her, knocking her aside so you could pull the letters from the flames. The way I figure it, she must have picked up the burning letters with her bare hands—singeing her fingers—and thrust them back into the fire. So you pushed her away again. Only, this time when she fell, she hit her head on the side of the stove. And it killed her.”
The torches beside them hissed and smoked as a clutch of drunken soldiers reeled past, voices warbling, “O’er the hills and o’er the main—”
Somerset swallowed hard. “No. You’re wrong. Do you hear me? You’re wrong.”
“The ironic thing,” said Sebastian, watching him carefully, “is that what happened to Jane that day wasn’t murder. It was manslaughter. If you hadn’t panicked, you could even have passed it off as a simple accident by saying she’d slipped on the wet floor and hit her head. No one would have suspected anything. Except because of those bloody letters, you did panic. You were so desperate to get rid of her body that you hauled her through the snowstorm up to Clerkenwell and dumped her in the middle of Shepherds’ Lane. And it might have worked—except you had the wrong day for her lessons there, and one of the women who found her had the medical training to realize that the lack of blood meant she must have died someplace else.”
“You’re wrong,” said Somerset again, breathing so hard and fast his chest was jerking. “It was Ambrose. I can’t prove it, but it had to be him. He was a lying, cheating, foul-tempered bastard who beat her for years. Years! Of course it was he.”
Sebastian shook his head. “Ambrose was all that and more. But he wasn’t a murderer. Unlike you.”
“Apples! Hot apples!” shouted an aged, stoop-shouldered woman with a steaming basket she thrust toward them. “Buy me hot apples, gentlemen?”
Somerset’s gaze darted sideways. Jaw tightening, he yanked the basket from the woman’s arms, threw its contents in Sebastian’s face, and ran.
The apples rested on a grate above a pan of coals, and Sebastian squeezed his eyes shut and flung up one crooked elbow to protect his face. He felt the shower of hot embers sting his skin, smelled the pungent reek of burning wool as the glowing coals and hot grate tumbled down the front of his greatcoat. A horde of laughing urchins descended on him to scramble after the fruit rolling at his feet.
“Me apples!”
“Bloody hell,” swore Sebastian as one of the children knocked into the old woman and sent her staggering against him.
Steadying her, Sebastian paused long enough to thrust a couple of shillings into the woman’s hand, then turned and half tripped over a joyfully barking dog. “Bloody hell,” he said again.
Christian Somerset was already seventy-five to a hundred yards ahead, plowing up the crowded promenade like the prow of a ship through debris-thick waters. Shaking off the old woman, the children, and the dog, Sebastian took off after him just as a stout butcher stepped backward out of a nearby mulled wine tent and slammed into Sebastian hard enough to make him grunt.
“Oye! Why don’t ye watch where yer goin’ there?” the man shouted after Sebastian as he ran on. “Bloody nobs!”
Sebastian kept going, past cook stalls and trinket booths and tents of tattered canvas that flapped in the wet wind. The snow was turning to rain now, and he nearly collided with a pretty woman in a fur-trimmed hat who’d stopped suddenly to look up at the sky and laugh, her face wet in the torchlight. Swerving, his feet slipping and sliding in the slush, he pelted past the Punch and Judy show. The children turned to laugh and point, the puppet master pivoting Judy to call after him in a high-pitched voice, “Tsk-tsk. Young gentlemen! Always in a hurry!”
With Sebastian now gaining on him, Jane’s brother ducked through a beer tent, pausing just long enough to snatch up a tankard of ale and lob it at Sebastian before streaming out the far end.
“Oye!” yelped the bereft drinker as Sebastian ducked.
Erupting out the back of the tent, he caught his foot on one of the stakes holding up the canvas and nearly went down. “Shit,” he swore, stumbling against the mound of icy snow that formed the edge of a nearby skittles alley just as Somerset yanked the heavy wooden ball from the hands of one of the players and threw it at Sebastian’s head.
Sebastian feinted sideways, his slush-encrusted boots sliding on the smooth ice of the alley to send him smashing into the skittles. The pins went flying, and a roar of indignation rose from the players.
Jumping the far edge of the alley, he ran on, ducking beneath a young lady soaring high on a swing. Up ahead, he saw Somerset swerve onto one of the Frost Fair’s short side “streets.” Sebastian raced after him, past a last straggling shoemaker’s and a toy stand. And then they were in the open, heading out across the river’s ragged, uneven ice toward the opposite bank.
A small rivulet of water still ran down the middle of the river. Farther upstream, the gap had been bridged with planks, with boatmen there to hand fairgoers across for a small fee. But there were no planks or boatmen here, and as Somerset neared the center of the river he was forced to veer right again, running straight toward the looming stone arches of London Bridge.
Sebastian pelted after him, his breath coming in hard gasps, his boots slipping and sliding on the melting ice. Out here, away from the Frost Fair, the world was white: white sky, white ice, white snow, with a thin black ribbon of water surging beside them as they ran on and on.
They’d almost reached the bridge when a loud crack-crack cut through the night. A chorus of screams arose from the distant fair as a massive section of the ice sheared off in front of them with a roaring crash. Skidding to a halt at the edge of the ice, Somerset swung around, his gaze darting frantically from side to side as he fought to draw in air.
“End of the line,” said Sebastian.
Somerset shook his head, his chest shuddering with the intensity of his breathing. The rain poured down around them. “If you want me, you’re going to have to kill me. I’ve seen men hanged. I’m not dying like that.”
“They’ll never put you on trial,” said Sebastian. From the distance came more shrieks and cries of alarm as another loud crack echoed across the frozen river and fairgoers and booth keepers alike started a frantic rush toward solid ground. “They can’t afford to let anyone know about the Princess’s letters.”
The printer gave a ragged laugh. “So you’re saying—what? That Lord Jarvis will simply send one of his henchmen to Newgate to garrote me in my sleep? I suppose that’s better than hanging. Marginally.”
“Why the hell didn’t you just admit what had happened to your sister that day and face the music?”
Somerset took a step back, then another, his gaze never leaving Sebastian’s face. “I can’t go to prison again. If you’d ever been in prison, you’d understand that.”
“So instead you murdered Edward Ambrose? Just so you could cast suspicion away from you and onto your best friend?”
Somerset’s nostrils flared wide, his eyes wild. “I’m not proud of what I did.”
“What about Valentino Vescovi? Did you kill him, too?”
“Good God, no. Why would I?” He swiped the cuff of one sleeve across his face. “I didn’t mean to kill Jane. I loved her. She was my sister! She was all I had left in this world. Don’t you understand that?”
“Yes.”
Another series of massive cracks sounded, and the ice heaved and buckled at their feet. What had minutes before been a small rivulet in the center of the river was now a wide yawning gap. A chunk of ice with a shack advertising brandy balls went spinning past, a gray-faced man clinging to one of its upright timbers screaming, “Help! Somebody help me!” The air echoed with the terrified shrieks from the ruined Frost Fair.
Somerset took another step back, then another, the ice beneath him groaning as he edged closer to the cold, rushing black water.
“Don’t do this,” said Sebastian.
Somerset gave him a strange, wobbly smile. “Why not? You think I should fear for my immortal soul? If I have one, it’s damned already for what I’ve done. And if not, then at least I’ll end it all at a time and in a manner of my own choosing.”
If Sebastian were to lunge forward and haul Somerset back from the edge, he might have been able to save him. But for what? A few miserable days in prison that would end all too quickly in hideous certain death?
Something flickered across the other man’s face. “Thank you,” said Jane’s brother. Then he stepped back off the edge of the ice into the cold, dark water. He made only a small splash and sank quickly, coming up once with a gasp before being carried off on the swirling current.
The screams and shouts of the panicked fairgoers had for one suspended moment faded from Sebastian’s awareness; now they came roaring back. Turning, he sprinted for the riverbank, his feet slipping on the slushy surface, the ice cracking and collapsing behind him, the rain cold in his wet face. His world narrowed down to endless ice and wind-driven rain and the ragged rush of his breath rasping in and out. Then hands were reaching out to grasp him, haul him in, steady him as he sagged. Safe. He was safe.
Whirling, his breath a raw agony, he turned to stare out over the heaving, broken ice and black water.
Somerset was gone.