It didn’t take Sebastian long to track Marie-Claire Blanchette to rooms in a Stuart-era building on the south side of Golden Square. The fortune-teller was obviously better known than he’d realized.
At one time, Golden Square had been the height of fashion and home to bishops, noblemen, and diplomats. Now it was one of the “fading” districts fated to fall on the wrong side of the Regent’s New Street.
Madame Blanchette answered the door herself, a small, straight-backed woman with thick, iron gray hair, relatively unlined olive skin, and the kind of pronounced bone structure that meant she was still striking, even in her fifties. She wore a lavender brocade gown made in a style popular perhaps twenty-five years before, with pearl-drop earrings and a pearl-studded cross that looked like something that might have been brought back from Byzantium by a member of the Fourth Crusade. She stared at him a moment, her dark eyes unblinking and thoughtful, as if she were assessing him to see how he measured up to her image of him. Then she said, “I expected you sooner,” and stood aside for him to enter.
“Saw it in the cards, did you?” said Sebastian, his gaze drifting around a room that seemed oddly dislocated in time and space. Several of the chests and one of the chairs were dark and medieval-looking, a table inlaid with mother-of-pearl reminded him of something from Damascus, while the paintings on the wall were strange scenes of tempest-driven seas, wind-tossed moons, and one bizarre image of a man hanging upside down. Everywhere he looked, there were groupings of crystals and candles and bells and other strange objects he couldn’t begin to identify.
Her eyes narrowed with what looked like amusement. “You don’t believe in the cards, monsieur le vicomte?”
So absorbed was he in his inspection of the room that it took him a moment to realize she was responding to his own question. He hadn’t introduced himself, but then, there appeared to be no need. He said, “I neither believe nor disbelieve.”
“A man with an open mind. You’ve no idea how rare that truly is.” Limping badly, she led the way to a small settee covered by a worn, early eighteenth-century tapestry, asked him to sit, then took the chair opposite—an ancient thing of dark wood whose high back was carved with mythical creatures and naked men writhing in either ecstasy or pain. “But to answer your question, no, I did not need the cards. There are times when simple reasoning ability suffices to tell us all we need to know.”
Her English was very good, fluent and easy but pleasantly inflected with what sounded like a genuine French accent.
“Yes, I really am French,” she said, as if he had spoken the thought aloud. “I have been in your country since 1805. Which makes it . . .” She paused, as if doing the sums. “Nine years now.”
“Impressive. Why do you use cards if you can simply read minds?”
“People find the cards more believable. And they do help to focus one’s thoughts.” Again that gleam of amusement in the depths of her dark brown eyes. “But you said that facetiously, yes?”
“Perhaps.”
She leaned back in the chair, her hands resting lightly on wooden arms carved into the shape of lions’ paws, her gaze on his face. “You’re here to learn about Giselle?”
“Giselle is the woman you accused Ashworth of raping?”
“Giselle was my daughter.”
She rose awkwardly and disappeared with her halting step into an adjoining chamber. She returned a moment later with a small framed portrait of a young woman. “She was sixteen when this was painted three years ago,” said Madame Blanchette, turning the painting to face him. She did not hand it to him.
The girl was lovely, with luxurious dark hair, deep-set brown eyes, a small chin, and a seductive mouth. Looking at her, Sebastian felt a surge of sadness mixed with rage—rage at men like Ashworth, whose wealth and privilege enabled them to careen through the world, taking what they wanted, utterly heedless of the lives they were destroying in the process. Rage at the society that allowed such things to happen. Rage at the senselessness of it all.
“The anger this stirs within you?” said Giselle’s mother. “Multiply that by infinity, and you’ll have some concept of how I feel.”
“How did it happen?”
She set the portrait with loving care atop a nearby bureau. “Giselle worked as a shopkeeper’s assistant at a jeweler’s on Bond Street. Ashworth saw her there and decided he wanted her.”
Sebastian drew a heavy breath. He was remembering what Ashworth’s butler had told him. His lordship’s tastes varied on a whim, from ladies of quality to bits of muslin to whatever pretty shopkeeper’s assistant happened to catch his fancy.
“At first he tried to seduce her. He could be a most charming man, you know. Giselle was no fool; she knew what he wanted. But because he was a wealthy nobleman, she needed to be careful. She couldn’t go too far in discouraging him without risking her job. And good positions are so difficult to find these days.”
“Which jewelry store was this?”
“Vincent’s,” she replied without hesitation. “I asked him later why he didn’t protect my daughter. I expected him to say he hadn’t known about Ashworth. But you know what Mr. Vincent said to me? He said, ‘You can’t seriously expect me to have risked alienating a potential customer.’”
“Mr. Vincent obviously didn’t know about Ashworth’s habit of not paying his bills,” said Sebastian. “And now his potential customer is dead.”
“That he is. But I did not kill him.” She tipped her head to one side, her gaze still hard on his face. “That is why you are here, is it not?”
“Tell me what Ashworth did to her,” said Sebastian.
A spasm of pain crossed the Frenchwoman’s face before being smoothed away out of sight. “Very well. As I said, first he sought to woo her with flattery and presents; he even promised to set her up in fine rooms as his mistress. She never wavered. So one evening last October, he caught her in the shop when she was alone, pushed her into the back room, and forced himself on her there. Took her bent over a counter like a dog.”
“Why do you think he was so obsessed with her?”
“Because he wanted her, but she kept telling him no. I don’t think it happened to him often. He was so very rich and handsome.”
“And charming.”
“Yes, most charming.”
Madame Blanchette settled in her strange chair again, her hands folded together in her lap. The pose looked relaxed and at peace, but it was not; her hands were clasped together so tightly, the knuckles were white. There was a crackle of energy about her that hadn’t been there before; a kind of hard, lethal purposefulness that was nearly palpable. And he found himself thinking, This woman could kill. In fact, he knew somehow with a deep certainty that she had killed in the past.
“I have killed men in my life,” she said, again fallowing his thoughts with eerie accuracy. “One I stabbed. Another I pushed to his death off a cliff. But that was years ago, in France, in self-defense. I won’t deny that I wanted Ashworth dead. But I did not kill him.”
Why not? Sebastian wanted to ask. Instead, he said, “Your daughter killed herself?”
Madame Blanchette nodded. “In December. I did everything I could to help her come to terms with what he had done to her. But she couldn’t shake the overwhelming sense of shame and degradation he’d made her feel. And then she realized she was with child by him. She felt as if she had been impregnated with the devil’s spawn—that the child she was carrying could someday grow up to be a monster, just like its father. So she threw herself in the Thames.”
The sudden silence in the room was like a hum in his ears, a hum both punctuated and oddly accentuated by the sound of his own beating heart and the slow, strained breathing of a grieving mother.
After a moment, Madame Blanchette said, “The coroner was kind. The inquest concluded she must have lost her way and fallen into the water in the heavy fog. Death by misadventure, they called it. But I knew the truth.”
“So she was given a Christian burial?”
“She was, yes. At St. James’s churchyard in Piccadilly.”
“I think I would have killed him,” said Sebastian.
The faintest suggestion of a smile hovered about the Frenchwoman’s dark, knowing eyes. “I’ve no doubt you would have. But death is easy—a moment of heartsick, frightened realization that all is about to be lost, and then nothing. I wanted him to suffer longer. Far longer.”
“Not all deaths are easy,” said Sebastian. In his six years of war, he had seen countless men die after screaming in agony for days. Countless men, and one innocent woman of God whose suffering still haunted him . . .
“True,” she said. “But mere physical pain wouldn’t have been enough. I wanted him to suffer social ostracism. Humiliation. Degradation. The loss of everything he held most dear. I had only just begun. Whoever killed him robbed me of my revenge.”
Sebastian felt a whisper of unease that was like a cold breath on the back of his neck. “So, who do you think killed him? Did you ask your cards?”
Rather than answer him, she said, “If I gave you a name, now, would you believe me?”
“No,” he admitted.
She smiled. “There is a man—a man named Sid. Lord Ashworth used to pay this man to do his dirty work. He is dangerous, but Ashworth in his hubris alienated him. Infuriated him.”
“Sid—what?”
“That I cannot tell you.”
Sebastian noticed she didn’t say she did not know. “You’re suggesting this ‘Sid’ killed him?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I suspect you will find him interesting for more than one reason.”
“Meaning?”
“When you find him, you will understand.” Madame Blanchette pushed to her feet and went to open the door for him. Their conversation was at an end.
“What if I don’t find him?” asked Sebastian, pausing at the door.
“You will. And afterward, we will talk more.”