Chapter 21
Sebastian spent the next hour or two combing the Tower Hamlets and surrounding area, from St. Katharine’s and Tower Wharf to St. Dunstan’s and a certain ancient Tudor pub, looking for Gibson. In the end, frustrated, he returned to his friend’s surgery to find Gibson sprawled in one of the overstuffed chairs beside the parlor’s cold hearth, his sweat-stained cravat askew, his head lolling to one side, the pupils of his eyes tiny, telltale pinpricks.
“Devlin,” he said, looking up with a hazy smile. “You back? Alexi said you’d been here looking for me. Pour yourself a drink and have a seat. You don’t mind if I don’t get up, do you?”
Sebastian stayed where he was, one hand curling around the edge of the door beside him, torn between a raging desire to pull the surgeon up out of that damned chair and shake him, and the equally powerful urge to wrap his arms around his friend and weep. His voice cracked as he said, “Leg hurting, is it?”
“Not so much anymore.”
“That’s good.” Sebastian drew a deep breath. “Where’s Alexi?”
“I don’t know. She went out. Said she told you about . . . the girl. Can’t remember her name.”
“Gilly Harper.”
“That’s right. Gilly.” Gibson gave a faint shake of his head. “Need to stop whoever’s doing this, Devlin. Before he kills again. Wish . . . wish . . .” His chest lifted with his breath, and whatever he’d been about to say was lost as his eyes slid out of focus.
Walking over to him, Sebastian rested one hand, gently, on his friend’s thin shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” he said quietly. “You just take care of yourself. You hear me? Please take care of yourself.”
Then he turned and left, his heart heavy in his chest and his eyes stinging with what he realized were unshed tears.
“He’s going to kill himself if he keeps this up, isn’t he?” said Hero as they took the boys for a walk later in Grosvenor Square. The day was still warm and sunny, the soft breeze sweetly scented by roses and damp earth, the boys shouting cheerfully as they raced ahead along the winding gravel paths.
“Yes,” said Sebastian. “But if Alexi can’t make him see sense, I’ll be damned if I know how to do it.”
Hero was silent for a moment, her gaze on the laughing boys, and he knew by her stricken expression that her thoughts were drifting back, inevitably, to the foster mother she’d interviewed near Richmond Park. He said, “You really think this Prudence Blackadder has been killing the babies left in her care?”
“She either kills them or she deliberately lets them die. I don’t see how there can be an innocent explanation. I mean, I know foundlings and orphans put out to foster do die at an alarming rate, but that woman cheerfully oozed evil. What I don’t understand is how she can have been allowed to get away with such a thing for so long.”
Reaching out, he took her hand in his and felt her fingers tighten around his. “She gets away with it because no one cares,” he said. “The workhouses assume most of the infants they send out into the country will die, so why would anyone be suspicious when they do? In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if your Mr. Fry is less than pleased whenever any of the parish’s infants somehow manage to survive to the age of four and come back to the workhouse.”
“The local vicar must surely realize what she’s been doing—or at least guess.”
“Perhaps—if she was telling the truth when she said they give all the children a ‘good Christian burial.’ But they do live on a farm, and the river is not far away.”
“What a horrid thought.” She paused, her brows drawing together in a frown as she watched the boys hunker down to examine a dandelion growing beside the path. “As a motive for murder, having someone accuse you of regularly killing the children left in your care must surely rank right up there near the top.”
“I’d say so, yes—as would being a society darling threatened with having it known that you abandoned one of your own by-blows to such a fate.”
She turned her head to look at him. “You think Blackadder was telling the truth about Basil Rhodes?”
“It seems rather too fantastical of a lie for the man to have invented on the spur of the moment, wouldn’t you say?”
“There is that. I wonder how Laura came to know of it.”
“It is curious. It’s not as if McInnis and Rhodes run in the same set. Not only is Rhodes about as far from a sporting man as you can get, but he’s a good ten to fifteen years younger than either Laura’s brother or her husband. He’s my age.”
“You know him?”
“Oh, I know him. We were at Eton together.”
Her eyes crinkled with a smile at whatever she heard in his voice. “Ah. Not one of your favorite people, I take it?”
“He’s the sort of man who’s always smiling, who works hard to make everyone like him and comes across as enthusiastic and full of good cheer. But—at least as a boy—he had a nasty tendency to turn churlish when he felt he wasn’t being given special treatment. I used to wonder if he really was the natural son of the Prince of Wales or simply expected people to behave as if he were.”
“Oh, he’s one of the Prince’s bastards, all right. Prinny is extraordinarily proud of him.”
“He certainly looks like Prinny—and to a certain extent acts like him, too. As much as he likes to play the bouncing, exuberant buffoon, I’ve always suspected that beneath it all is someone with an outsize sense of entitlement and a grudge against the world for not giving him everything he wants and thinks he deserves.”
“Could he kill?”
Sebastian met her gaze. “I’ve heard him boasting of what he called the ‘delectation’ of bedding women who have to do whatever he tells them to do because he owns them. Of holding the lives of men and women in his hands. So I’d say yes, I think he could kill.”
That evening, Sebastian trolled the pleasure haunts popular with the men of the Upper Ten Thousand, from Cribb’s Parlour and Limmer’s to Covent Garden and Drury Lane, looking for Mr. Basil Rhodes. He finally came upon the Regent’s natural son in the vestibule of White’s, surrounded by a circle of cronies listening to his humorous account of a recent encounter with a Devonshire bull.
“So what did you do then, Rhodes?” said one of the men, laughing.
“Do?” said Basil Rhodes, his lips curling into an imp’s smile, his unruly auburn hair falling into his eyes as he turned to face his questioner. “I quitted the field of honor in my opponent’s favor—which translates into: I ran like hell! Personally, I’m all with Falstaff on this. Discretion is definitely the better part of valor.”
The group around him laughed, and someone slapped him on his rounded back. But even as he fielded his friends’ ribald jests, it was obvious the man was aware of Sebastian leaning against a nearby doorframe, watching him. After a moment he detached himself from his circle and walked over to where Sebastian was standing.
“Haven’t seen you here in a while, Devlin. Why do I get the distinct impression you’re looking for me?”
“Acute of you,” said Sebastian, pushing away from the doorframe.
Rhodes looked startled for a moment, then let loose one of his braying laughs. “Well, I must admit that’s not something I hear very often.”
A full-faced, short-necked bear of a man with the Regent’s slightly protuberant blue eyes and fleshy build, Rhodes habitually kept his flyaway auburn hair too long and combed forward, so that it was always falling into his eyes. His evening coat and pantaloons were expertly tailored, but he wore them negligently, so that he gave off a rumpled appearance that belied his considerable wealth. The late Peter K. Rhodes—a tall, thin, dark-haired man who looked nothing like his purported son—had died a rich man, having turned the simple Jamaican estate given to him as a wedding gift by the Prince of Wales into a vast sugar empire.
“There’s a reason I didn’t join the rest of you lot up at Cambridge and Oxford, remember?” Rhodes said, his smile widening.
“As I recall, that was because you thought your time would be better spent out in Jamaica learning how to run your father’s plantations.”
Rhodes laughed again, although less heartily this time. “That, too; that, too. It’s a different world out there, you know.”
“So it is,” said Sebastian. “Walk with me a ways? There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.”
“Of course,” said Rhodes, his genial smile firmly in place as the two men turned down St. James’s Street, toward the old Tudor palace. “I was forgetting, you were in the West Indies yourself, weren’t you?”
“For a time. With the Army.”
“Beautiful, isn’t it? Paradise on earth.”
“For some, I suppose. Although not for the tens of thousands of enslaved men and women whose backbreaking labor makes it a paradise for those who keep them like animals. For them, it’s a brutal life of cruelty and exploitation that ends all too often in an early, unmarked grave.”
Rhodes slewed around to look at him. “Ah, I remember now. How passionate you were on the subject of slavery and the slave trade when we were lads! Still haven’t got past it, have you?”
“Did you think I was likely to?”
“When you put it that way, I suppose not.” His eyes narrowed as he squinted up at a streetlamp sputtering beside them. “But I presume you haven’t sought me out to pontificate on the evils of bondage.”
“Actually, I’m here because I’m told you knew Lady McInnis.”
The other man’s habitual half smile froze. “Not well, no.”
“But you did know her?”
“I suppose you could say I did—the way one knows all the people one is forever meeting at balls and routs and dinners and such. But she wasn’t exactly in my style, if you know what I mean?”
“Not really. Exactly what do you mean?”
Rhodes pulled a comic face. “Never did have much patience for women who devote themselves to ‘good works.’ They make for bloody uncomfortable company, if you ask me.”
“Is that why you quarreled with her last Saturday in Bond Street?”
Rhodes sucked in a quick breath, then let out a startled bark of laughter, his soft blue eyes widening. “Heard about that, did you? Someone’s been busy.”
“So what was the quarrel about?”
“Damned if I can recall,” he said heartily. “Bloody restless woman, she was. Always going on about something unpleasant—foundlings and climbing boys and all sorts of other societal ills one would really rather not think about.”
“I’m told she accused you of abandoning one of your by-blows to a farm out near Richmond with a reputation for killing the infants left in their care.”
Rhodes drew up abruptly and swung to face him. “Where the bloody hell did you get that?”
“Are you saying it’s not true?”
“Of course it’s not true!”
“You never had anything to do with Prudence and Joseph Blackadder?”
Rhodes raised one meaty fist to jab a shaky finger at Sebastian. “I see what you’re trying to do here, my friend. But let me tell you right now, that’s a cock that won’t fight. Laura McInnis was an interfering, sanctimonious bloody pain in the ass who obviously made the mistake of pestering someone she shouldn’t have. But I had nothing to do with what happened to her. You hear me? Nothing.”
“So where were you Sunday afternoon?”
“Not that it’s any of your bloody business, but as a matter of fact I was attending a pugilistic match that day.”
“A mill?” said Sebastian, smiling. “I’d no idea you’d developed an interest in the Fancy.”
Rhodes had half turned away, but at that he swung back with a huff of laughter. “I can’t believe you,” he said, one hand coming up to press against his forehead. “You really think I’d shoot a woman—a woman and her daughter!—because she found out I was less than excited that some stupid wench presented me with a baseborn brat she claimed was mine? Even if it were true—which it is not!—why would I care? And if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re a fine one to talk.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Rhodes let out another snort of laughter. “You think we haven’t all seen that boy you’ve taken into your household? Cheeky, that—foisting one of your bastards onto your own wife.”
Sebastian had heard the whispers, of course. He supposed they were inevitable, given the resemblance between Patrick and Simon. But all he said was, “Patrick is the orphaned son of a man to whom I owe my life. That is all.”
Basil Rhodes smiled, poked his tongue into his cheek, and winked. “Of course.”
Sebastian forced himself to take a deep, steadying breath and let it out slowly. “Be that as it may, you never did tell me how you came to know Lady McInnis well enough to engage in an argument with her in the middle of Bond Street.”
The other man waved one languid hand through the air in a vague gesture. “I suppose she must have been introduced to me by a mutual friend.”
“But you’ve no recollection of the subject of the argument?”
“To be honest, I barely recall having encountered the blasted women. But she was damned opinionated, you know. Opinionated and nosy. From what we’re hearing happened to her, one assumes she must have made the mistake of picking on the wrong person.”
“You wouldn’t have any idea who that person might be, would you?”
“Me? Good God, no.” A burst of laughter and loud voices drew his attention to a group of men clustered at the door of one of the clubs down the street. “And now you really must excuse me. I see some friends I’ve been meaning to meet up with.”
“Of course.”
Sebastian stood for a moment, watching Rhodes walk toward his friends. As he drew nearer to them, he called out a greeting, threw his arms wide, and did a little dance step that drew another round of laughter.
Basil Rhodes might claim to have forgotten the subject of his disagreement with Laura McInnis, but he hadn’t tried to deny that the argument in Bond Street had taken place—which told Sebastian it must have been spectacular enough to have drawn a significant crowd.
And that meant that someone, somewhere, might be able to recall its subject.