Chapter 48
G ilbert-Christophe de LaRivière was drinking a glass of port in solitary splendor at his own table when Sebastian walked into the Frenchman’s dining room, trailed by the Count’s French butler frantically sputtering, “Mais, monsieur le vicomte! Vous n—”
LaRivière’s languid gaze met Sebastian’s. Then he glanced at the butler now wringing his hands and said, “Leave us.” Leaning back in his chair, the French Count took a slow sip of his port. “Bit high-handed even for you, isn’t it, Devlin?”
Sebastian shut the door in the butler’s face. “We need to talk. Now.”
LaRivière waved one slim white hand in the general direction of the two long rows of empty chairs. “By all means, do have a seat.”
“Thank you, but I’ll stand.”
A faint suggestion of a smile hovered about the Frenchman’s thin lips. “As you wish.”
“You know why I’m here?”
“I presume it has something to do with the events that gave rise to the rather hysterical message I recently received from Lord Seaforth.”
“Something. But not all.”
“Oh? Do tell.”
Sebastian wandered the room, taking in the gleaming walnut wainscoting, the exquisite Venetian chandelier, the heavy Sheffield plate. The life-sized painting of one of the most beautiful women Sebastian had ever seen.
“Your wife?” said Sebastian, pausing before the portrait.
“My late wife.”
She was breathtakingly exquisite. She’d been painted with her glorious fair hair loose and unpowdered and her gown slipping off her shoulders in a style that was reminiscent of the Restoration era. Her face was heart-shaped, her enormous eyes a brilliant violet, her mouth full and pouting and seemingly made for kisses and everything sinful. It was a beguiling combination of innocence and seduction, vulnerability and power that had beckoned more than one man to his doom.
“She was lovely,” said Sebastian.
“That she was,” agreed the Frenchman, still lounging at his ease.
“Was she a willing participant in your little seduction schemes? I wonder. Or did you force her compliance?”
“Oh, Chantal enjoyed seducing men, believe me.” Again, that faintly derisive aristocratic smile. “You’ve been talking to someone, have you?”
“Several people.”
The Count gave a very Gallic shrug. “It was inevitable, I suppose.”
“Is that why you tried to have me killed?”
The amusement deepened. “Did someone try to kill you? How . . . distressing.”
“That they tried? Or that they failed?”
“What do you think?”
Sebastian continued his perambulation of the room. “Eighteen years ago you set your lovely wife to seduce a green young man with a promising career at the Foreign Office. He tumbled desperately in love with her and in due course also tumbled into bed with her. At which time you—playing the part of the outraged husband, no doubt to perfection—charged in and caught them in flagrante. It’s an old, rather tired game, but it still works, doesn’t it? The husband threatens a crim. con. case that would both disgrace and bankrupt the victim, and the victim begs to settle out of court. Only, in this instance the victim had no money. He did, however, have access to information—information that could be passed on to Paris. Not for ideological reasons, mind you, but for vulgar monetary gain.”
LaRivière sipped his port. He was no longer smiling. “I see you judge us harshly—an easy thing to do, no doubt, when one has never seen their country ripped apart and destroyed by revolution. We did what we had to do to survive. Vulgar and otherwise.”
“You were living in this house at the time. It’s not as if you’d been forced to take refuge in a chicken coop.” Sebastian had seen French countesses and duchesses reduced to living in old barns.
“Believe me,” said LaRivière, “it was not nearly so well-appointed twenty years ago.”
“Your two masters have paid you well, have they?”
“Well enough. I also made some extraordinarily wise investments.”
“Based on tips passed to you by your two masters?”
“Perhaps.”
Sebastian resumed walking. “Unfortunately for you, the same sensibilities that made the first of the young men in question susceptible to Chantal’s seductive wiles also meant that playing the role of traitor to his own country preyed upon him to a disastrous extent. He quickly fell apart and was dismissed from the Foreign Office.”
“I presume you’re going someplace with this?”
“I am; bear with me. Your first victim having thus lost his usefulness, you then set your sights on Crispin Hayes. Except this time you chose poorly. Oh, he was every bit as susceptible as his friend to Chantal’s seductions—she must have been an extraordinarily talented woman. But when you came barging in and played your practiced role as the outraged husband, Crispin didn’t react quite the same way as his friend—perhaps because his friend had tried to warn him about Chantal.”
LaRivière gave a regretful sigh. “I should have killed McHenry as soon as he was dismissed from the Foreign Office.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t.”
“A miscalculation on my part. I feared his death might arouse unpleasant suspicions.”
“And yet that apprehension didn’t stop you from killing Crispin.”
LaRivière took a slow sip of his wine. “I didn’t, you know—kill him, I mean. I’m not saying I didn’t consider it. But he beat me to it by killing himself. The dupe was utterly besotted with Chantal, convinced that she loved him with a fervor to equal his own and was looking to him to save her from her evil husband—me. Then he discovered he’d been played for a rank fool and he couldn’t bear it. Some men find that sort of shame impossible to live with, I’m afraid. It was his own frailty and damaged sense of amour propre—combined I suppose with the pain of unrequited love—that drove him off that bridge.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Again, the shrug. “Believe as you wish. It makes no difference.”
“Was that why Nicholas came here that night? Because he thought you’d killed his brother? Or was the argument all about Chantal?”
“I really don’t recall.”
“Oh, you recall, all right. You argued, one of you pulled a pistol—I’m assuming that was you—and in the ensuing struggle the pistol went off and Chantal was killed.”
“That’s one theory.”
Sebastian came to rest his hands flat on the tabletop and leaned into them. “You’re lucky Nicholas Hayes didn’t shout the truth about your treason to anyone and everyone who would listen.”
“Ah, but by then your estimable father-in-law had already made his move. Jarvis convinced the noble young man to keep quiet for the sake of both his brother and king and country—and, presumably, for the sake of his own skin. I wonder when he realized his mistake. As they were loading him on the transport to Botany Bay? What a fool he was.”
“You’re suggesting, I take it, that Nicholas had reason to want to kill Jarvis as well?”
“I would, if I’d been treated so shabbily. Wouldn’t you?”
Sebastian pushed away from the table. “Perhaps. Except that I sincerely doubt Jarvis knew Nicholas Hayes had returned to England. But you knew.”
“I did. However, so did a number of other people.”
“Oh? Whom did you tell?”
“No one. But as you are doubtless already aware, neither the Earl of Seaforth nor Theodore Brownbeck was anywhere near so reticent.”
“So why didn’t you try to kill Nicholas?”
LaRivière gave what sounded like a genuinely startled laugh. “Perhaps I’ve mellowed in my old age.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“Oh, believe me, I have. Eighteen years ago I was desperate. You may consider yourself a moral, ethical, and honest man—loyal and true and all that rot, as you English like to say. But you have no idea how you would behave in adversity. No idea at all.”
“I spent six years at war. You think I haven’t faced adversity?”
LaRivière’s eyebrows arched. “Perhaps you have. And would you have me believe that you have done nothing of which you are ashamed? I’ve heard whispers of things that happened in Portugal . . . when was it? Four years ago?”
Four years before, Sebastian had beaten a French captain to death with his bare hands. The raw, surging bloodlust of that night—and the unspeakable events that had led up to it—still haunted Sebastian’s dreams. But all he said was “Did you kill Nicholas Hayes?”
“And if I said I did not, would you take me at my word?”
“No.”
“I thought not. But the truth is, I didn’t kill him. On the evening in question, I dined with the Regent before attending his Carlton House reception for the Allied Sovereigns.”
“You could have hired someone to do your killing for you.”
“I could have. But I did not.”
“Again, I don’t believe you.”
LaRivière made a soft tssking sound and shook his head. “Such an untrusting person you are. Tell me, my lord, do you fence?”
“Yes.”
“We must have a match sometime.”
“I think not.”
“No? A pity, but as you wish.” LaRivière drained his glass, then held the stem between two fingers and twisted it back and forth so that the fine-cut crystal caught the candlelight and danced it across his cold, dark eyes. “Why do you do it, anyway? Devote yourself with such indefatigable passion to this quest to catch the killer of someone you never even met.” He glanced over at Sebastian. “That’s an honest question, by the way. I genuinely would like to know.”
“For the same reason I would step in to stop a man from whipping a tired horse, or a cruel child from tormenting a stray dog. Because it’s the right thing to do.” And because I believe we are all connected, every living thing one to the other, so that I owe to each what I would owe to myself. But he didn’t say that.
LaRivière shook his head as Sebastian turned toward the door, obviously finding the concept too alien to comprehend. “What a waste of a life.”
But Sebastian only laughed.
That night, Sebastian lay awake long after the last gentleman’s carriage had rattled up the street, long after the creatures of the dark settled down into silence with a final furtive rustling and the wind died in the hours before dawn.
“You can’t stop thinking about it all, can you?” said Hero, rolling over to rest her hand on his chest.
He slipped his arm beneath her to gather her close. “No.” He had told her some but not all of what he had learned that day. Jarvis’s role in the events of eighteen years ago he had kept to himself.
She said, “I think Seaforth did it. I think he killed Nicholas but missed Ji, so the next morning he hired someone to find the boy and eliminate him.”
“Seaforth spent the afternoon at White’s. Lovejoy’s men confirmed it.”
“You don’t think he could somehow have left and come back without anyone noticing?”
“Possibly.” Sebastian buried his face in the heavy fall of her warm, soft hair. “I wish we could find that child.”
“We came so close today,” said Hero. “Thank God I was there, even if he did then slip away. Do you believe Seaforth has indeed called off those men?”
“Surely he knew I wasn’t making an idle threat. Although I plan to pay him another visit in the morning, just to impress the point.”
But by morning, the Third Earl of Seaforth was dead.