Page 22 of Who Cries for the Lost

“Damn,” whispered Devlin softly, the features of his face tightening as he stared out across the sunlit park toward the south.

She knew what he was thinking: that in just a few days, tens of thousands of men, including friends he’d known and fought beside for years, would face death. And yet because of his inability to regain the strength in his wounded leg in time, he wouldn’t be there at their side. All he could do was sit and wait to hear the news of the momentous events that were about to happen.

Reaching out, she rested her hand, lightly, on his arm. But all she said was, “It makes the timing of Sedgewick’s death particularly interesting, wouldn’t you say?”

He brought his gaze back to her. “It does indeed. I wish we knew precisely why he was in Vienna. You don’t think his wife knows?”

Hero shook her head. “She seems to think he went there mainly to visit some castle famous for a ghastly series of witchcraft trials. I suppose it’s possible she was being disingenuous, but I don’t think so... or at least, not in that.”

“You think she knows about Alexi Sauvage?”

“I’m not sure. She was shocked and upset by Sedgewick’s death, obviously—who wouldn’t be when her husband’s mutilated body has just been hauled out of the Thames? But I don’t know if I’d say she is grieving, precisely. She may not know about Alexi, but I’d be surprised if she’s entirely ignorant of her husband’s habits. She doesn’t strike me as particularly intelligent or learned, but she’s not stupid. And I don’t think she’s still so lost in love as to close her eyes to the signs of his straying.”

“Hence her failure to report him missing for days?”

“It would explain it.”

“Do you know if Jarvis saw Sedgewick before he died?”

She shook her head. “He wouldn’t say.”

“Interesting. It suggests he’s being less than honest when he says he doesn’t know who killed Sedgewick, or why.”

“Well, I noticed he didn’t say he doesn’t care who killed the man.”

“That I can believe. If Sedgewick was on a mission to Vienna—whether at the behest of Bathurst, Castlereagh, or Jarvis himself—then I’ve no doubt Jarvis actually cares a great deal.” He was silent for a moment, carefully maneuvering his curricle around a skinny, pimply youth in a phaeton with a blowsy black mare that was more interested in the grass at the side of the road than in her master’s commands. Then he said, “The Bourbons have a well-earned reputation for sending their assassins to quietly stab—or garrote—those they want silenced, with the victims’ bodies then being tossed into the Thames. If they saw Sedgewick—or the information he carried—as a threat, then I can see them ordering him killed. Although I’d be even more likely to suspect them if his body hadn’t been mutilated. That suggests something more personal is going on here.”

“Perhaps,” said Hero. “Although to some people, all politics is personal, and that’s particularly true of the Bourbons.”

“It is indeed.”

She stared out across the tops of the plane trees, their leafy green canopies shifting restlessly now with the growing wind. “What I don’t understand is where the headless corpse Gibson showed you fits into all this.”

“As you said, it’s always possible the two killings are completely unrelated.”

“Yes, but what are the odds?”

“Probably not good,” he admitted. “But it is possible.”

She brought her gaze back to his face. “Remember those Austrian witch trials Eloisa was telling me about—the ones Sedgewick was so interested in? She says that many of the victims had their hands cut off before they were killed, and then their bodies were decapitated.”

Devlin reined in sharply and turned to face her. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“No,” said Hero. “Neither do I.”

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.

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