Later that night, after dinner, Sebastian stood before the open windows in the drawing room, a glass of port cradled in one hand, his gaze on the moonlit street below.
“What is it?” asked Hero, coming to stand beside him.
He turned to face her. “I’m trying to absorb the fact that out there right now, off the coast of Devon, Napoléon Bonaparte is pacing back and forth on the deck of a British warship. A British warship.”
“It does seem unreal, doesn’t it? Do you think Jarvis will prevail?”
“In preventing the more vindictive souls amongst us from letting Prinny hand Napoléon over to the Bourbons to be hanged, you mean?” Sebastian drained his glass. “I sincerely hope so. That’s the last thing the world needs at the moment.”
“What is Hendon’s position? Do you know?”
He went to pour himself more wine. “No, but I imagine it’s much the same as Jarvis’s.”
She was silent for a moment, her gaze on a dowager’s aged carriage rolling slowly up the street. “It all seems so . . . useless. Untold millions of lives disrupted or destroyed by twenty-five years of revolution and war, and for what? So that everything can be put back the way it was before? I keep thinking about the tragedy of Laura’s life—separated from the man she loved by the war and her father’s greed, forced to marry to please her family, then finding herself at the mercy of a cold, brutal man who used his fists on her.”
“Did you ever see bruises on her?”
“No. He must have been careful to hit her where it wouldn’t show.” She paused. “I’m not sure why that makes it seem worse, but somehow it does. I suppose because it’s so . . . calculated.”
Sebastian took a slow sip of his wine. “If Laura McInnis were the only victim of this murder, Sir Ivo would be at the top of my list of suspects. But any man calculating enough to hit his wife only where the bruises won’t show isn’t going to lose his temper and shoot her in front of their young daughter—whom he hits by mistake.”
Hero looked thoughtful. “What if it wasn’t a mistake? What if he was angry at both his wife and his daughter?”
“And followed them out to Richmond with the intent of killing both and then posing their bodies in a way designed to make everyone think it the work of whoever killed Lovejoy’s family fourteen years ago?”
“It’s possible, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is, yes. In which case the question becomes, Why would a man be so filled with rage at his sixteen-year-old daughter as to want to kill her?”
Hero gave a faint shake of her head. “I can’t imagine. Emma wasn’t out yet, so it isn’t as if she could have been refusing an advantageous match he’d arranged for her. Has anyone from Bow Street interviewed the girl’s governess?”
“I don’t know, but it would definitely be worth hearing what she has to say. Did Emma join her mother in her work with the Foundling Hospital?”
“No, she didn’t. I remember Laura saying something once to the effect that Emma was upset because she wanted to, but Sir Ivo refused to allow her to involve herself in ‘all that nonsense.’ He was afraid it would hurt her chances on the Marriage Mart.”
“I suppose it could—with a certain kind of man.”
“A man like her father, you mean.” Hero turned her head, her gaze caught by something in the street below. She said, “There’s a hackney stopping before the house. And unless I’m mistaken, the man getting out of it is one of Sir Henry’s constables.”
Sebastian swore softly as the man rang a peal at the bell below. They heard the exchange of voices in the entrance hall; then a stocky man in a buff-colored coat whom Sebastian recognized as Constable Higgins labored up the stairs in Morey’s wake.
“Message from Sir Henry, my lord,” said Higgins with a jerky bow, holding out a twisted note.
“What is it?” asked Hero as Sebastian spread it open.
Sebastian ran his gaze down the magistrate’s quickly scrawled message, then crumpled the paper in his hand. “There’s been another murder—this time in St. James’s churchyard, Piccadilly.”