That afternoon, Sebastian drove over to Tower Hill to find the door to Gibson’s old stone outbuilding thrown open to the afternoon breeze and Gilly Harper’s small, pallid body lying on the raised stone slab in the center of the room. But it was Alexi Sauvage, not Gibson, who set aside her scalpel with a clatter as Sebastian crossed the garden toward her.
A Frenchwoman in her thirties, she was built small and thin, with a head of untamable fiery hair and a fine-boned face with pale, almost translucent skin. Her relationship with Sebastian was complicated. Once, years before in the mountains of Portugal, he had killed the French lieutenant who was her lover and she had promised to take his life in revenge.
“I have not finished quite yet,” she said now, a lock of her hair falling into her eyes as she looked up so that she had to brush it back with the swipe of one curled wrist. “But I think there is not much else to be learned.”
“Where’s Gibson?”
Her normally expressive features flattened, became unreadable. “I don’t know. Down by the river, perhaps? Prostrate before one of the ancient altars in St. Katharine’s? His leg is hurting and he keeps refusing to take anything for it—even a small dose. Except of course it will reach the point where he won’t be able to bear either the pain or his opium cravings any longer, and then he’ll take more than he should.”
“Why?”
A muscle jumped along her tight jaw. “Why do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think,” said Sebastian with more emotion than he’d intended. “He looks worse now than he ever did. I thought he’d agreed to let you try to help him. So why hasn’t it happened?”
“You’re a man; can’t you guess?”
“No, damn it!”
She looked at him with still, solemn brown eyes swimming with scorn and something else he couldn’t quite read. “He is as afraid the sessions I want to try with him will work as he is afraid they won’t. Because if they work, he’ll have no excuse to keep taking the opium, and he’s afraid he won’t be able to stop. So he wants to get off the opium before we even try.”
“Bloody idiot,” said Sebastian, slapping one palm against the doorframe beside him. “It would be a hell of a lot easier for him to resist the opium if he weren’t in pain!”
“I know that. You know that. Even he knows that. But for a sex that prides itself on logical thinking, you lot have a bad habit of letting pride and stubbornness and what you English like to call ‘sheer bloody-mindedness’ get in the way of sensible behavior.”
That wasn’t something Sebastian wanted to argue. He said instead, “What can I do?”
“I don’t know. Try talking to him? Perhaps you can get through to him. I can’t.”
Sebastian nodded, his gaze dropping to the dead girl on the slab between them. After a moment, he said, “Have you learned anything at all?”
“Nothing beyond the basics. She was stabbed five times by someone who was probably holding the knife in an overhand position, so that he was striking down, not up.”
“So not a professional.”
“Not unless he was deliberately trying to disguise his skill. The weapon was also larger than a dagger. Whoever he—or, I suppose, she—was, they can’t have escaped being covered in blood. Although if they were wearing a coat or cloak, obviously they could have thrown that away.”
Sebastian was silent, his gaze on the dead girl’s thin face, the corn silk–fine hair that framed it fluttering in the breeze that wafted in through the open door.
Alexi said, “You knew the girl was abused by someone at one time? She has . . . many scars.”
Sebastian nodded. “Yes, she was originally apprenticed to a cheesemonger who was extraordinarily cruel to her. It was Lady McInnis who fought to have her removed from the woman and given to a new mistress.”
“Interesting. So what do you know about this cheesemonger?”
Sebastian looked up to meet her hard gaze. “Not enough.”