H is Royal Highness George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales and Regent of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, looked out at the bejeweled, highborn crowd overflowing his palace’s stifling-hot reception rooms and smiled. His color was high and his eyes sparkled with pleasure, for the Regent was in fine spirits on this, the third day of the Allied Sovereigns’ visit to London.
At the Regent’s invitation, a glittering assortment of Europe’s hereditary ruling families had descended on London to celebrate the recent defeat of Napoléon: the Tsar of Russia and his sister the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg; King William of Prussia and his sons; Princes Metternich and Leopold and dozens of other, lesser princes and war heroes. The city was lit in a glorious three-day Illuminations of Joy, and the streets were constantly filled with jubilant, cheering crowds. The fact that they were cheering not the Prince of Wales but his royal guests had yet to penetrate the Regent’s overweening sense of amour propre.
“It’s quite the defining event of the Season. Wouldn’t you agree, Jarvis?” said the beaming royal.
“Undoubtedly, sir,” said Charles, Lord Jarvis, the Prince’s most trusted advisor and distant cousin as well as the real power behind Wales’s fragile Regency.
“Everyone is saying it was a stroke of genius, my inviting all the Allied Sovereigns here for a grand visit to commemorate our victory.”
Those who knew their self-absorbed Prince were actually predicting he would quickly tire of sharing the attention he so desperately coveted. But Jarvis wasn’t about to tell him that. “They are indeed, sir.”
The Prince’s smile faded as he watched the Tsar’s beautiful, proud, ostentatious sister Catherine, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, go down the line of a country dance. “Does it look to you as if she dislikes music? You remember when she told me she doesn’t like music and made me stop the orchestra I had playing at my banquet in her honor?”
“Perhaps she only dislikes music when she’s dining,” suggested Jarvis. Privately he suspected the Grand Duchess’s announcement had been made to spite the Regent, who’d been bragging about personally selecting the pieces to be played with each course of the banquet.
“Possible, I suppose. Still, it’s odd, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well, she is Russian.”
“There is that.”
Jarvis let his gaze drift over the gathering of the Kingdom’s wealthiest and most powerful and found his attention settling on his own daughter, Hero. She was exceptionally lovely tonight in a silver silk gown of half-mourning worn in memory of her dead mother. Her looks were not of a type he admired. Jarvis preferred blond, petite women with winning ways, whereas Hero was brown haired, alarmingly tall, and far too masculine in both her features and her interests. But he had to admit that marriage and motherhood had improved her.
Her choice of husband still rankled him to no end.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said with a bow to the Prince.
The crowd parted before him easily, for Jarvis was a large man as well as being so powerful—well over six feet tall and fleshy, with a penetrating gray stare and a well-earned reputation for being utterly ruthless. “I don’t see that scapegrace husband of yours,” he said, coming up to his daughter. “Is it too much to hope you’ve finally decided to dispense with him?”
The gray eyes she had inherited from him lit up with amusement. “Good evening, Papa. As it happens, something came up. He hopes to be able to join me here later.”
Jarvis frowned. “It’s never a good sign when you use that airy tone.”
She laughed out loud, but he noticed her attention had strayed to the small cluster of people around Gilbert-Christophe de LaRivière, the Count de Compans. A close confidant of both the newly restored French King Louis XVIII and his brother Charles, the Count was acting as a kind of surrogate for the absent Bourbons, who had already returned to Paris to claim their throne.
“It was LaRivière’s wife that Nicholas Hayes was convicted of killing all those years ago, was it not?” said Hero.
“It was. Her name was Chantal, and she’s been dead for over eighteen years now. Why the sudden interest?”
“A man believed to be Nicholas Hayes has just been found murdered up in Somer’s Town.”
“Impossible,” said Jarvis, his gaze going to where Ethan Hayes, the Third Earl of Seaforth, was deep in conversation with a man who had his back to them. “Nicholas Hayes died a convict in New South Wales in 1799.”
“Evidently not.”
As Jarvis watched, a familiar lean, dark-haired man in his early thirties walked up to Seaforth and said something in the Earl’s ear.
Jarvis said, “I take it Devlin has involved himself in this murder. In Somer’s Town, did you say? What a dreadfully plebeian locale.”
The Earl of Seaforth hesitated a moment, then turned to walk away with Devlin.
Hero said, “It does look as if the dead man really is Nicholas Hayes, doesn’t it?”
Jarvis shifted his gaze to where the Prince Regent now stood in conversation with the Count de Compans. Without even looking at Hero again, he said, “Excuse me,” and walked away.