Chapter 48
Run, Tom!” shouted Sebastian, his whip cracking as he sent the thong flashing out to cut deeply across Green Coat’s upper face and eyes.
The man screamed, the pistol discharging into the air as his horse reared up, throwing him.
“You bastard,” swore the man on the dapple gray, reaching awkwardly to jerk a flintlock from his waistband.
Rising up, Sebastian threw himself at the man, knocking him from the saddle. They went down together, the big oaf hitting the ground first, with Sebastian on top of him. The man’s pistol went flying, the impact driving the breath from his chest with a painful oooff that left him gasping for air.
Rolling away from him, Sebastian snatched up the fallen pistol, thumbed back the hammer, and pivoted to shoot Green Coat in the chest as the man picked himself up from nearby and charged, blood streaming from the cut across his face.
The green-coated man spun around, took one step, and collapsed.
“Lieutenant!” shouted the man from the dapple gray, his face twisting into a snarl as he lumbered to his feet, fists clenched. Sebastian dropped the spent pistol, yanked his dagger from the sheath in his boot, and sent it whistling through the air.
The blade hit the man in the throat and sank deep.
For a moment he wavered, his eyes widening, his features going slack with shock. He sank to his knees, reaching out with one splayed hand that fluttered back to his side as he flopped forward onto his face and lay still.
“Gor,” whispered Tom from where he stood holding the reins of the nervous, snorting chestnuts above their bits and making soft, soothing noises. “Are they dead?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Sebastian, breathing heavily as he pushed to his feet. “But I told you to run, damn it.”
“I couldn’t leave the horses, gov’nor!”
Sebastian grunted and went to turn over the big man. He flopped onto his back, his mouth open, his eyes empty.
Swiping one crooked forearm across his sweat-dampened face, Sebastian went to crouch down beside the green-coated man. The bullet had caught him high in the chest. He wasn’t dead yet, but he soon would be.
“Who sent you?” said Sebastian, slipping an arm beneath the man’s head so he wouldn’t choke on his own blood.
The man reached up to grab Sebastian’s coat, the hand spasming with pain.
“Tell me,” said Sebastian. “For God’s sake, why protect him now?”
The man looked up at him with pain-filled, anguished eyes. Sebastian saw a tear form in the corner of one eye to roll down his blood-splattered cheek, his shattered chest heaving as he struggled to get the words out. “B . . . b . . .”
Sebastian could feel the man beginning to go limp in his arms. “Basil? Basil Rhodes? Is that it?” Or was the man trying to say bastard? “Who sent you?” shouted Sebastian again.
But the man stared up at him with dead, vacant eyes.
The authorities of Bethnal Green were not pleased to have their Sunday disturbed by two killings. It was a long time before Sebastian made it back to Brook Street. By then, Hero had taken the boys to visit Hendon in Berkeley Square. So he changed his dusty, torn clothes, left her a message, and had his black mare saddled to ride out to Richmond Park.
He went first to the keeper’s cottage, where he found the keeper’s wife, Sally Hammond, feeding the ducks down by the pond. Cato Coldfield’s black-and-white dog, Bounder, lay a short distance away, his head on his paws and his ears limp.
“How’s he doing?” asked Sebastian, nodding toward the dog.
“Oh, poor Bounder. It’s gonna take him time to adjust, no getting around that. I’ll hear him whining sometimes and know he’s missing Cato.” She gave a faint shake of her head. “That man was a nasty brute—no reason not to call him what he was, even if he is dead. But there’s no denying he was always good to his dogs, and they loved him.” She paused, then added, “Gotta give the devil his due when it’s due.”
Sebastian studied her plump, sad face. “Who do you think killed him?”
“Me?” She looked vaguely surprised by his question. “How would I know, my lord?”
“An irascible man like that must have made more than his fair share of enemies.”
The woman stared out over the wind-ruffled gray waters of the pond, her eyes hidden by half-lowered lashes. “I can’t say many people liked him.” She hesitated, then added, “To be honest, I don’t know if I can think of anyone who liked him. But to take a gun and shoot him? Who would do that? There aren’t many people around here even own a gun.”
“Did you ever see Coldfield himself with a gun?”
She nodded. “He had one a long time ago. But it’s been years.”
“How many years?”
“Fourteen, to be exact. I know because it was back before that first woman and her daughter were shot and killed in the park. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always thought Cato was the one who did it—because I knew he had this big old double-barreled flintlock pistol. But then, after the murders, I never saw it again. Always figured he must’ve hid it someplace.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Cato? Why, this past Thursday, it was. He came around here looking for my Richard—said he had something he wanted to tell him. But Richard had gone into town after some wire he needed, so he never did talk to him. And then the next thing we knew, you came here with Bounder, saying the man was dead.”
“Do you know if Cato could write?”
Sally Hammond stared at him blankly. “I don’t think so, but I can’t say I know for certain, my lord. Why?”
“Just wondering. When you saw Cato on Thursday, how was he? Did he seem agitated in any way? Worried?”
“Well, you met the man, didn’t you? I mean, he was always more’n a bit agitated. That’s the way he was. But he was in a rare taking that day, no denying that. Said some boy’d been askin’ him all sorts of questions about the killings fourteen years ago—about the way the bodies were laid out and exactly how they’d been killed, and how Cato thought it must’ve been done.”
Sebastian felt something twist deep in his gut. “Did he say who this boy was?”
“No. Just called him either ‘the lad’ or ‘some nob’s get.’ That’s all. Struck me as more’n a bit strange, seein’ as how he made it sound like this had happened back before the second lady and her daughter were killed.”
Sebastian stared across the pond toward the keeper’s cottage, where a rustic bench surrounded by roses and hollyhocks and lavender stood against one whitewashed wall. He had a vivid, painful memory of sitting there while he talked to Arabella, and of watching her bare fingers ruffle the fur of the kitten in her lap.
Aloud, he said, “Did Cato happen to mention how old this boy was? Or maybe describe him in any way?”
“No, my lord. Like I said, he didn’t have much to say about the boy himself, only the questions the lad had been asking. Spooked Cato, it did. He was always a superstitious one, so lookin’ back on it, I guess maybe he saw it as a bad omen.” She stared at Sebastian, her features pinched with worry. “Surely you don’t think that boy could’ve had anything to do with what happened in the park?”
Sebastian looked her in the eye and lied. “No, of course not.”
He went next to the deserted, death-haunted meadow beside the quietly purling stream. The ground here was still damp from the recent rains, the air clean and fresh and filled with a glorious chorus of birdsong from the surrounding chestnuts and oaks.
His mare’s reins held slack in one hand, Sebastian went to stand in the center of the meadow. All traces of what had happened here barely a week before were now gone. The heavy rains had washed away the blood that once stained the blades of grass and bare earth; time, rain, and sunshine had obliterated the impression once left by a cheerful plaid picnic rug. The rug, abandoned crockery, and picnic basket had all been carried off by a man who was now dead.
The mare shook her head, jangling the bridle, and Sebastian reached out to pat the horse’s neck. “Even the sense of what happened here is fading, isn’t it, girl?”
Leila shook her head again.
Turning away, he tied the mare’s reins to a low tree branch and started to search.
It took him the better part of an hour, but he finally found what he was looking for wadded up and thrust into the hollow of a tree: a pair of small white gloves folded together like stockings.
His mouth uncomfortably dry, Sebastian carefully unrolled the gloves. They were still faintly damp from the recent rains, but the tree’s hollow had mostly sheltered them. They were expensive gloves, crafted of the finest kid, exactly what the daughter of a viscount might wear when going on a picnic to Richmond Park. The bloodstains on the fingers and palms were now old and dark. But the pattern of the stains was essentially what one would expect if their wearer had helped her brother pose the bodies of her aunt and cousin in a posture precisely calculated to echo that of an infamous murder from fourteen years before.
Sebastian’s last stop was the modest manor house of Mr. Thomas Barrows, Esquire, where he found the barrister’s two sons sitting side by side on the top rail of a paddock fence and watching a dapple gray mare and her pretty new foal graze peacefully nearby.
“I’m here because I need you to tell me again exactly what you heard and saw that day in Richmond Park,” said Sebastian after the brothers had greeted him warily. “From the very beginning.”
The brothers looked at each other, their faces drawn and tense. Then Harry sucked in a deep breath and said, “Of course, my lord.”
Sebastian took them through it all—their arrival at the park; their talk and careless laughter as they drank wine beneath the clear blue sky; the shocking, unmistakable crack of first one pistol shot, then the next.
“I know you said you thought the shots were so close together that they must have come from a double-barreled pistol because there wouldn’t have been time for anyone to reload. But are you quite certain the shots came from the same gun?”
Harry stared at him. “You mean, could we have heard one man firing two different guns, or maybe two men firing two guns, rather than one man firing a double-barreled pistol?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”
Harry swallowed. “I suppose it is possible, my lord. Although I never thought . . . I mean, I guess I assumed . . .” His voice trailed away.
“Can you try to think back? See if you can recall what the two shots sounded like?”
Harry closed his eyes, his nostrils flaring as he fell silent for a moment. Then he opened his eyes and shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t remember clearly enough to say for certain.”
Sebastian looked at the younger brother. “How about you, Ben?”
“No, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
“That’s all right,” said Sebastian. He was painfully aware of the stricken look on the brothers’ faces, but he couldn’t stop yet. “Tell me about after you found the bodies, when the children came up.”
Harry cupped one hand over his nose and mouth, then let it fall. “Oh, God. I wish . . . I really wish we could have stopped them sooner than we did. I’ll never forget the expression on that girl’s face when she stared across the meadow and saw . . . that.”
“How close did they get?”
“Close enough to see the bodies, I’m afraid, sir. And then the girl . . . She opened her mouth like she was going to scream, even though she couldn’t seem to make a sound. That’s when Ben and I realized we needed to keep them from getting any closer.”
“So neither one came close enough to touch the bodies of their aunt or cousin?”
The boys looked shocked at the suggestion. “Oh, no, sir.”
“I didn’t think so,” said Sebastian, “but I wanted to be certain. I know their father is very grateful that you took care of his children the way you did.”
Harry dropped his gaze to the ground. “I think we could have done better, sir. I mean, if only we could have stopped them from seeing it at all.”
Sebastian reached out to rest his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up. You didn’t even know the children were there until they appeared, so how could you have stopped them? You did what needed to be done.” He gripped Harry’s shoulder, then let him go. “Thank you for taking the time to talk to me again, and I’m sorry to have had to ask you to remember a day I know you’d much rather forget.”
“We’re never going to be able to forget that day, my lord,” said Ben softly. “Never.”