By the time Sebastian reached Tower Hill, the strengthening sun was already chasing away the morning chill as the heavy cloud cover overhead shifted and began to break up. Reining in his pair of matched chestnuts at the doorstep of the ancient, low-slung stone building that housed Gibson’s surgery, he took a deep breath and caught the unmistakable odor of rotten fish wafting on the breeze.
“ ’Oly ’ell,” said Tom, scrambling up to the curricle’s high seat to take the chestnuts’ reins. “Stinks as bad as Billingsgate, it does.”
Sebastian hopped down to the narrow cobbled lane. “Very nearly. Walk them, why don’t you? I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
“Aye, gov’nor.”
Rather than knock at the front door, Sebastian cut through the narrow passage that ran along the side of the old stone house to a rickety wooden gate that led directly to the high-walled enclosure at the rear.
Once the house’s ancient yard had been a neglected, weed-choked wasteland where Gibson quietly buried the remains of the cadavers he dissected by night in the same room he used by day to perform his official postmortems. By British law, only the bodies of executed criminals could be dissected, and there were never anywhere near enough of those to go around. And so any surgeon or student wishing to expand his understanding of human anatomy or practice a new surgical technique was forced to turn to the Resurrection Men or Sack ’Em Up Boys, as they were sometimes called: ruthless, unsavory gangs who stole newly buried bodies from the city’s churchyards and sold them for a hefty price. Gibson was one of their best customers.
But over the last two years, the enigmatic Frenchwoman who now shared Gibson’s house and bed had been slowly transforming the space into a restful garden. Any bones she came upon were collected and then deposited in a grotto-like ossuary she’d built against one wall. Sebastian had never asked Gibson what he did now with the remains of the bodies he dissected. But as Sebastian followed the winding path that led to the outbuilding at the base of the yard, he noticed that Alexi Sauvage had added a wooden cross above the entrance to the grotto and was burning a small candle there. He’d never thought of her as a practicing Catholic, but he realized now that she must be—at least in some sense.
As he neared the foul-smelling outbuilding’s open door, he yanked his handkerchief from his pocket and held it pressed against his nose.
“Bit ripe, isn’t it?” said Gibson, looking up from where he stood doing something Sebastian didn’t want to think about to the body that lay on the granite slab before him.
“It’s bloody stomach churning. I don’t know how you stand it.”
The Irishman’s eyes crinkled with amusement. The skin of his face had a definite grayish tinge to it, the pupils of his eyes were suspiciously small, and he needed a shave, but he appeared unfazed by either the smell or the sight of the mutilated corpse before him. “You get used to it.”
Sebastian drew up strategically just outside the entrance to the room. “I’ll take your word for it,” he said with a grin.
The friendship between the two men—the Irish anatomist and the Earl’s heir—was an unusual one, dating back more than ten years to a time when both men wore the King’s colors and fought the King’s wars from Italy to the West Indies and beyond. They’d fought and bled together; laughed and cried; knew most of each other’s deepest and most troubling secrets, and would give their lives for each other. There wasn’t anyone besides Hero to whom Sebastian was closer, and it cut him to the quick to see his friend slowly killing himself one bloody grain of opium at a time.
Now Sebastian cast a swift glance at the dead man’s gory face and mutilated groin, then looked pointedly away. “Where did this come from?”
Gibson reached for a rag and wiped his hands. “The Thames. From the looks of things, I’d say he was probably thrown into the river Saturday night or Sunday morning. The only reason he wasn’t dragged quietly out to sea by the tides is because he somehow got caught around the anchor chain of a merchantman, and they hauled him in when they were getting ready to set sail.”
“Surely the River Police don’t expect you to identify him.”
“No.” Gibson tossed the rag aside. “But as it happens, I have.”
“You have?”
Gibson nodded. “Meet Major the Honorable Miles Sedgewick, younger son of the late Third Marquis of Stamford and brother to the current holder of that esteemed title. I’m told he was once an exploring officer for Wellington in Portugal and Spain. Did you know him?”
“I knew him,” said Sebastian. Then he wondered what his friend heard in his voice, because Gibson’s eyes narrowed.
“I take it you didn’t care much for the man?”
Sebastian forced himself to look again at what was left of Miles Sedgewick, searching that scarred torso and shattered face for some trace of the handsome, deceitful nobleman’s son he’d once known. “He was brave to the point of being fearless, cunning and clever and very, very good at what he did. He could be gay and charming and almost irresistibly likable. But underneath it all, he was a treacherous, untrustworthy bastard who’d do anything to get what he wanted. And I do mean anything.”
“Alexi says much the same.”
Sebastian was aware of the sound of a woman’s footsteps crossing the garden toward them. “She knew him?”
Gibson scratched behind his ear. “It seems he sometimes used aliases. One of them was Miles Sauvage.”
Sebastian stared at him. “Are you telling me—”
“That’s right,” said Alexi Sauvage, coming up behind him. “He was my husband.”
Sebastian turned to face her. He’d first met this woman five years before, in the rugged mountains of Portugal, when he—like Miles Sedgewick—was serving as an exploring officer for Wellington. It was there, in the shadow of the ill-fated Convent of Santa Iria, that he’d killed the man she loved and she’d sworn to kill him in revenge. He still didn’t trust her—didn’t trust her not to someday stick a knife in his back and didn’t trust her not to hurt Gibson enough to destroy him.
Now their gazes met and clashed, and he said, “You told us your husband was dead.”
Rather than answer him, she simply looked beyond him, to the mangled corpse on that slab. Her face was hard, closed; he could not begin to guess what she was thinking.
She said, “Did you ever wonder what happened to me after Santa Iria?”
“No,” he admitted.
A faint smile touched her lips. “Of course not. Why would you?”
“So tell me now,” he said.
She was silent for so long, he didn’t think she was going to answer him. Then her slim white throat worked as she swallowed, and she said, “All right. I will.”