Chapter 38
Major Zacchary Finch, his right arm still resting in its sling, was cupping wafers at Manton’s Shooting Gallery on Davies Street when Sebastian came to lean against a nearby wall. The Major glanced over at him, then took careful aim with the pistol held in his good hand and fired, striking the wafer dead center.
“You’re left-handed?” said Sebastian.
“No. But I broke my right arm once as a boy, so I’ve been through this before.” Finch handed the pistol to the attendant and said, “That will be all, thank you.” Then he turned to Sebastian. “I assume you’re here for a reason?”
Sebastian pushed away from the wall. “We need to talk.”
They walked down Bond Street, toward Piccadilly. The wind was picking up, bunching the thickening masses of gray clouds overhead and sending loose playbills and broadsheets fluttering down the street.
Sebastian said, “I’m told you quarreled with Lady McInnis a few days before she was killed. Is that true?”
The Major was silent for a moment, his features stony as he stared out at the press of phaetons, wagons, carts, and carriages clogging the street beside them. Then a muscle flexed along the side of his tight jaw. “It is, yes. But how the devil did you find out about it?”
“What was the quarrel about?”
“Does it matter now?”
“It might.”
Finch pushed out a harsh, painful breath. “She had bruises”—he touched first one shoulder, then the other, with his left hand—“here, and here. He gave them to her—McInnis, I mean.”
Sebastian nodded. “They were noted in the autopsy. But if—as you claim—you weren’t having an affair, I’m curious as to how you came to see them.”
“I didn’t see them. Well, not at first, I mean. But I chanced to put my hands on her shoulders one day, and she winced. When I asked what was the matter, she tried to pretend it was nothing, but I could tell she was lying.” A ghost of a smile touched his lips and then was gone. “Laura was always such a hopeless liar. The gown she was wearing had one of those wide scooped necklines, so it was a simple enough thing to gently push the cloth aside. The bruises were clear imprints of his fingers, where he’d obviously dug them into her when he’d gripped her hard and shaken her.”
“Did you know he used to hit her?”
“I didn’t know before then, no. But once I saw the bruises, it made sense of some of the things she’d said to me in the past.”
“And that’s what you fought about? The bruises?”
“That’s what started it. I was furious. Seeing how he’d hurt her like that, I . . . I lost my head. Went on a rant about how I was going to call him out and kill him.” He swallowed hard. “It . . . frightened her. She was frantic—begged me not to. She was afraid I’d either kill him and be hanged for it, or be killed myself. So I said, ‘Then come away with me, Laura. Please. Now.’ ” He paused. “That’s when she started to cry. She said she wanted to be with me more than anything in the world, but she couldn’t leave Emma and Thisbe.” A faint line of color showed high on his cheekbones. “I’m ashamed to admit I wasn’t even thinking about the girls when I said it—what her going away would mean for them. But then Laura, she swore—” His voice cracked, so that he had to pause again for a moment before he could go on. “She swore that once the girls were wed, she would leave England with me and never look back.”
“Thisbe is only twelve. Were you willing to wait another six or eight years?”
“If I had to. I’ve loved Laura for as long as I can remember. It isn’t as if my love was going away.”
Sebastian studied the other man’s half-averted profile. “How long were you a prisoner of war?”
“Four years.”
“You were exchanged?”
“No, I escaped. I found out Laura had been told I was dead, and I was afraid of what might happen if I didn’t get back to her.” He hesitated, then said quietly, “But by then it was already too late.”
“That was—what? Sixteen? Seventeen years ago?”
Finch looked over at him. “You find it hard to believe that I loved her from afar for so long?”
Sebastian thought of his own younger self, and of the beautiful Irish actress he’d loved for years. He shook his head. “No.”
The Major was silent for a moment, his gaze on a blind street musician coaxing a lilting melody from a battered old flute at the corner. “I don’t want you to get the idea that I came back to London last year planning to start something up with Laura again, because I didn’t. But then I ran into her by chance one day on the Strand, and it was as if the years fell away. For both of us.”
“When did McInnis find out she was seeing you?”
“I told you before, I didn’t know that he had discovered it. We were always so careful. She was terrified that if he thought she was having an affair, he’d send her away from Thisbe and Emma. You know what our laws are like: Children belong to their fathers.” Something cold and flinty flickered in the depths of his narrowed eyes. “The quarrel they had the day he gave her those bruises—I’m wondering if that’s what it was about.”
“She never said?”
“No.”
“Did Laura know Sir Ivo had a mistress?”
Finch nodded. “Oh, yes, she knew.”
“Do you have any idea how she found out?”
“No. I never asked.” He paused. “If Emma hadn’t been killed that day, too, you’d have a damned hard time convincing me that McInnis wasn’t the man responsible.”
“Did Laura ever talk to you about Emma?”
Finch looked over at him, but whatever he thought of the question didn’t show on his face. “Some. I know Laura was worried about her. She was a brilliant girl—she read widely, everything from Plato and Marcus Aurelius to Condorcet and Mary Wollstonecraft, and she had a tendency to chafe at the restrictions imposed on her by both her sex and her social class. From a few things Laura let drop, I gathered she didn’t get on well with her father.”
“What about Malcolm’s fencing master? Did Laura mention him?”
“The Jamaican? She did, yes. She thought him an amazingly talented young man, and I know she worried that because of his heritage he wouldn’t be given the opportunities he deserved. Why do you ask? What has he to do with anything?”
Sebastian shook his head, unwilling to voice his thoughts aloud, especially not to this man. “Nothing that I know of at this point.”
Sebastian found himself turning over everything he’d learned as he walked alone back up Bond Street. The various pieces of Laura McInnis’s life were beginning to fall into place, and the picture they formed was disturbing.
He had no way of knowing if Laura and Major Finch were lovers or not; the truth was, reality didn’t actually matter. What mattered was that Sir Ivo McInnis believed that his wife had taken a lover—had in fact accused her of it, no doubt digging his fingers into her shoulders and shaking her hard when she denied it. Had she then thrown his own infidelity up at him—the rich widow people were saying he’d marry if only his wife were dead?
Probably.
Was that when he’d decided to kill her? Kill both her and their freethinking daughter, who had formed a forbidden relationship with her brother’s brilliant but totally ineligible Jamaican fencing master?
Perhaps.
So why choose Richmond Park as the site of the killings? Why pose his victims’ bodies in a way that echoed the half-forgotten murders of fourteen years before? To deflect suspicion?
It fit. But Sebastian knew only too well that just because an answer seemed to fit didn’t mean it was true.
He had almost reached Brook Street when he heard a man’s voice calling his name. “Lord Devlin! I say, Lord Devlin!”
Turning, Sebastian found one of Lovejoy’s constables leaping from a hackney carriage to hurry toward him. “Thank goodness I caught you,” said the man, breathing heavily. “There’s been another murder, my lord! In Hyde Park this time.”
“Who is it? Who’s been killed?”
“It’s Miss Arabella Priestly’s abigail. And the killer very nearly got Miss Priestly herself, too.”