Page 39 of Who Cries for the Lost

Pushing aside the memories, he worked his way backstage to find Kat in her dressing room, still struggling into her costume. Her gaze met his in the mirror, and she smiled.

“Wonderful timing,” she said. “Make yourself useful and finish doing this thing up, will you? I know why you’re here, by the way.”

He set to work fumbling with her tapes and hooks. “I take it you’ve seen Hendon?”

“Are you surprised?”

“No. But you don’t seem particularly alarmed by what I assume he had to tell you.”

“About my name being on this list Miles Sedgewick is supposed to have brought back from Vienna?” She turned to face him as he did up the last of her fastenings. “You think I should be? Jarvis already knows what I used to do.”

“Except it’s not Jarvis who has the list—or so he says, and in this, at least, I’m inclined to believe him.”

“Perhaps. But a list of names is meaningless without any sort of proof—unless of course one is willing to simply set about cold-bloodedly eliminating everyone on it. And while I wouldn’t put that past Jarvis, he knows better than to try to move against me. We have each other in check, remember?”

Sebastian searched her beautiful, familiar features—the exotic tilted eyes, the childlike nose, the wide, sensual mouth. She was an actress and a good one, but he had a feeling she was more worried than she was trying to let on. “What other names are likely to be on such a list?”

“You know I can’t tell you that. Besides...” She turned away again to pick up the brush from her dressing table. “I’ve been out of all that for years. I might know the names of some of the older players, but not the newer ones.”

“What can you tell me about the Wilde Sisters?”

She drew the brush through her cascading waves of auburn hair, silent for a moment, as if choosing what to say. “Well, to begin with, they’re not actually sisters.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” He watched as she set the brush aside and began weaving a green velvet ribbon through her hair. “I’ve heard that Sibil Wilde used to be the mistress of the Count d’Artois. Is that true?”

“It is, yes. He had her in keeping for years, until some crazed admirer went at her with his knife. The attack ruined her voice and left her face badly scarred. That’s when she left the theater. She disappeared for a time, then I heard she’d set up shop in St. Giles with two other women. She was most famous for her work in the Scottish Play, so I suppose it’s inevitable that people took to calling them the Weird Sisters.”

He smiled. “Please tell me you don’t believe that old superstition. You’re not even onstage and you still won’t say M—”

She moved quickly to press her fingers against his lips. “Don’t. Don’t say it.”

“All right, I won’t.”

She turned away to finish tying off her ribbon, her gaze meeting his in the mirror. “Why do you ask?”

“Her name came up in relation to Sedgewick. And then when I paid her a visit last night, someone with a French accent and an overgrown henchman in tow jumped me in an alley and threatened me with all manner of calamities if I didn’t quit asking questions.”

She turned to face him, her arms falling back to her sides.

“What?” he asked, studying her suddenly solemn face. “What is it?”

“I’ve been told—don’t ask by whom—that after the attack ruined her face and voice, Artois set her up as the Bourbons’ London spymaster.”

“How reliable is this unidentified source?”

“Very. Sibil gathers much of her information the way all cartomancers do, by adroitly pumping her customers for clues and bribing their servants or paying people to listen to their gossip in the markets. And she supplies women to gentlemen in sensitive positions and gets information that way. But I’ve heard she also works with one of Artois’s assassins—although I understand she doesn’t really control him, exactly.”

Sebastian felt his mouth go dry. Just under a year ago, a man working to help Sebastian find his mother had been fished out of the Thames with a garrote around his neck. Sebastian had always suspected the murder was the work of one of the Bourbons’ assassins, but he hadn’t been able to prove it and hadn’t even come close to identifying the assassin. “What do you know about him? The assassin, I mean.”

“Not a great deal. As far as I can tell, no one knows much of anything about him. They call him Gabriel, but that’s probably not his real name.”

“Does he use a garrote or a dagger?”

“As I understand it, he’s fond of both,” said Kat.

“Lovely.”

He saw a waft of fear wash over her features before she could control it. She said, “You think that’s who killed Sedgewick? The Bourbons? To get their hands on this list?”

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