Chapter 14
That night, Sebastian dressed in a motley collection of old clothes culled from the secondhand stalls of Rosemary Lane and rubbed dirt from the garden onto his cheeks and forehead.
“Wouldn’t it be safer to visit the Weird Sisters during the day?” said Hero, watching him disorder his stylishly cut hair.
He met her gaze in the mirror. “Perhaps. But I suspect I’ll learn more after dark.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “Although you might also be less likely to come back alive.”
Sebastian reached for his walking stick and, with a deft turn of his wrist, drew a small sword from its hidden sheath. “That’s what this is for.”
Lying just to the north of the theater district of Covent Garden, the area known as St. Giles had its origins in a twelfth-century leper colony dedicated to St. Giles, the patron saint of lepers, outcasts, vagabonds, and cripples. It was an association that haunted the area still. For centuries St. Giles had been the last resort of those driven so low in life that they had no place else to go, particularly refugees from Ireland and France and what were known as “St. Giles blackbirds,” servants from Africa abandoned by their former “masters” and forced to turn to begging to survive. Most constables refused to venture into the area’s dangerous warren of mean alleyways, narrow streets, and dark courts, for those who did rarely came out alive. This was the haunt of pickpockets, housebreakers, and footpads, of murderers and prostitutes and pawnbrokers, a mean, stinking maze of crumbling gin shops and filthy “cadging houses,” where multiple families lived packed into damp cellars, open sewers fouled the streets, and cesspits overflowed.
Pulling his battered old hat low over his eyes, Sebastian took a hackney to Long Acre, slouching in one corner of the aged carriage as he let himself sink into the role he was about to play. By the time he reached his destination, the confident attitude of the lord’s son was gone; his posture and demeanor, his gait, the very way he held his head, were those of a poor man down on his luck. It was a trick he’d learned as a much younger man from a woman he’d once loved, a beautiful actress named Kat Boleyn, and it had served him well in the Army when he’d done the kinds of things gentlemen weren’t supposed to do. Except of course that gentlemen did do them—they simply didn’t talk about it.
He paid off the hackney, then slipped unnoticed through dark, noisome streets crowded with ragged, broken men; desperate, half-naked mothers clutching dying babies; and thin, ragged children with filthy matted hair and hollow-eyed stares. Not far from the ancient Church of St. Giles, the lane he followed emptied into what was known as Seven Dials, a mean circle where seven narrow streets converged to form a star pattern that had long attracted astrologers and alchemists. It was there, at the apex of one of the intersections, that Sibil and her sisters had set up a shop they called Wilde and Weird.
Pushing open the ancient building’s warped, weathered door, Sebastian found himself in the low-ceilinged common room of what must have once been a pub. Now, narrow shelves crowded with dark vials and various other strange and vaguely ominous-looking objects hemmed the room, while pungent bunches of dried herbs and feathers dangled from the smoke-darkened beams overhead. Behind the former pub’s counter stood a small, plump woman of perhaps thirty-five, her brown hair just beginning to fade to gray, her eyes small and dark and watchful. She was dressed in a heavy purple brocade gown from the previous century with ropes of thick, improbable pearls nestled in its lace-edged square neckline, and had one elbow propped on the counter’s worn surface so that she could rest her chin in her palm. “May I help you?” she asked in a bored voice.
“Good evening,” he said, making no attempt to disguise his cultured accent.
She straightened with a jerk as something flared in her eyes, a peculiar combination of avarice and interest mixed with what might have been fear. “Lose your way in the streets, did you, my fine sir?”
“Not exactly.”
“No? So—what? Looking for a love potion, are you?”
He let his gaze drift again around that peculiar collection of objects on display, the skulls of various sizes and species, the strange crystals and waxen images and hideous, primitive-looking masks. Then a soft step and the swish of a curtain brought his gaze back to the counter, where a second woman now joined the first. This one was taller and thinner, with sculpted high cheekbones, unusual green eyes, and soft, sensuous lips touched by a knowing smile. A thin red scar sliced down one side of her cheek and chin to curl around her neck, but she was still strikingly attractive, even beautiful.
“I don’t think it’s love that’s brought Lord Devlin to us, Astrid,” said Sibil Wilde in a husky, ruined voice.
He met the former actress’s gently mocking gaze. “You know who I am, do you?”
“Of course. I’ve been expecting you.” Like her sister, Sibil Wilde wore a gown of the fashion of a different century. Except this was no relic from a secondhand shop but what looked like a finely made red velvet costume from a production of Romeo and Juliet. The front of the thinly padded bodice was styled with a low point and embroidered with gold thread; the wide sleeves were slashed and lined and ornamented with puffs at the shoulders, while the full velvet overskirt was trimmed with gold braid and fell open to reveal a figured silk underdress.
“Of course,” he said, and she laughed.
Still holding his gaze, she took a step back to part the curtain behind her. “Won’t you come this way?”
For a moment he hesitated, and she laughed again. “I won’t murder you, I promise. At least not yet.” Her accent was noticeably different from her sister’s, shaded with a slight burr of the north but nevertheless the voice of a woman of the stage who, whatever her origins, has successfully learned to disguise them.
“And that’s supposed to reassure me?” he said, his fist tightening around his sword stick as he followed her down the short, shadowy corridor to a surprisingly opulent chamber paneled in dark walnut, with an ancient carved sandstone fireplace surround and a particularly fine crystal chandelier overhead that filled the room with a soft flickering light.
“Well, that and the sword hidden in your walking stick.”
He smiled. “Your sister doesn’t sound Scottish. And yet, you do.”
She circled around to the far side of the cloth-covered round table that stood in the center of the room. “We had different mothers—all three of us. My mother was from Edinburgh, while Astrid’s mother was from Wiltshire. You haven’t met Rowena, but her mother was a mulatto from Jamaica.”
She settled in one of the table’s heavily carved high-backed chairs, then gestured toward the chair that faced it. “Please, have a seat.”
“Thank you, but I prefer to stand.”
“As you wish.” She drew a deck of cards from a pocket hidden in her voluminous skirts and cut it neatly. “I know why you’re here.”
“Do you?”
She shuffled the cards together with a neat, practiced flourish. “It’s a peculiar interest for a gentleman of your station—solving murders, I mean. Why do you do it? I wonder. For the intellectual challenge? The excitement of facing danger? Or is it the thrill of solving a puzzle that appeals to you?”
“Nothing so complicated. I simply happen to believe that the victims of murder deserve justice.”
She drew a deep breath that flared her nostrils, and it was as if the scar on her cheek darkened, became more menacing. “Not all dead men deserve justice.”
“Are you suggesting Miles Sedgewick might be one of them?”
She let the cards fly in a professional shuffle, then sent them whirling back again. “I didn’t say that.”
“How did you happen to know him, anyway?”
“He used to come for readings.”
“Of his stars? Or the cards?”
“Both, although he preferred the cards.”
“So what did you see in his cards?”
Her smile firmly back in place, she gave a slight shake of her head. “My readings are like a Papist confessional: I don’t reveal the secrets I learn.”
“Even when the man you told them to is dead?”
“Especially then.”
Sebastian found his gaze drawn to a hollow blue glass ball that hung over the mantel of the room’s empty hearth. It was some six or seven inches in diameter, its lower half filled with a layer of salt strewn with what looked like lavender and marigold buds, bits of moss and cinnamon bark, and chips of amethyst and obsidian.
“It’s called a witch’s ball,” she said, following his gaze. “Have you ever seen one before?”
“Not quite like that.” He paused. “I understand Sedgewick had a particular interest in folklore—especially that involving witches. Do you know why?”
She shrugged. “Why not? It’s fascinating, don’t you think?”
He came to wrap his hands around the carved top of the chair facing her and leaned into it. “Who do you think killed him?”
She stared up at him, meeting his gaze openly. But she was an actress with years of experience, and he could not begin to read her. “I have no idea. Who told you to ask me?”
“A friend.”
“A friend of Sedgewick’s, or of yours?”
“Both.”
She nodded. “McPherson, I assume.” She paused, a slow smile curling her lips when Sebastian said nothing. “He has a very beautiful wife named Isabella; did you know?”
“Yes. I assume that’s supposed to be relevant in some way?”
“You tell me. They say Sedgewick had his face shot off and his sex organs removed. Is it true?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“It’s known.”
“Not by many.”
“Obviously by more than you think.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
For a moment, the room was silent except for the shuffling of the cards. Then she said, “So tell me this: Did you know Sedgewick well?”
“I knew him four years ago.”
She shrugged. “I doubt he’d changed much since that time. Some men grow from the experiences they encounter in life, while others are diminished. Which it is sometimes depends on the character of the man, but not always. Sometimes it’s the nature of the experiences that determines the outcome.”
“And Sedgewick?”
“With Sedgewick, I’d say life didn’t so much change him as . . .” She paused as if searching for the right word. “Accentuate him.”
“In a good or a bad way?”
“I suppose that depends on your perspective.” She set the deck of cards on the surface of the table before her, cut it three times, then looked up at him. “Shall I read for you now?”
He took a step back and dropped his hands to his sides. “No, thank you. Next time, perhaps.”
She reassembled the deck. “Very well. But do be careful leaving here, won’t you? The neighborhood can be . . . dangerous.”
“And yet you choose to live here.” Most of the residents of St. Giles were there because they had no place better to go, but that obviously wasn’t true for the Weird Sisters.
“It adds a certain mystique—an aura of danger that people like.”
“I can see that. Except the danger isn’t simply a part of the mystique; it’s real.”
“Perhaps. But people around here are afraid of us. They leave us alone.”
“Yet the same can’t be said of your customers.”
“Those who can afford it know to take precautions.”
“And the others?”
She shrugged. “I suppose some of them might end up in the Thames with their throats slit.”
“You’re suggesting that might be what happened to Sedgewick?”
“Hardly.” She leaned back in her throne-like chair, a smile touching her lips, the candlelight shimmering on what looked like a very real diamond that dangled from the gold chain around her neck. “When was the last time you knew a footpad to steal a man’s privates?”
“I suppose it depends on what he wanted them for,” said Sebastian, and saw her smile slip.