Page 40 of Who Cries for the Lost

“Perhaps. Although it seems a bit excessive to kill him for it, let alone mutilate him. And none of this explains the headless man who was also pulled from the Thames a couple of days ago.”

She shook her head. “I can’t see Gabriel—or any other assassin working for the Bourbons—bothering to take the time to mutilate his victims.”

“Not if his purpose is merely to eliminate them. But if his masters are intent on spreading fear or sending a message? Perhaps.”

“A message to whom?”

Sebastian met her troubled gaze. “I can’t begin to imagine.”

After Devlin had gone, Kat sank onto the stool before her dressing table, the candles in the small room flickering in a draft, her gaze on her reflection in the mirror.

It was never going to go away, she realized with a sinking kind of despair. This danger of being caught out, of being exposed and made to pay for what she’d once done.

At the time, she hadn’t cared; a part of her had even found the danger exciting. And when she did know fear, it had still been a price she’d been willing to pay for the country she loved. She’d long ago made a vow that while she might feel fear, she would never allow it to control her life, and for many years she’d managed to keep that vow. But now the heady excitement and hopes of those days were both gone—the days when she’d thought that a French victory could lead to a free Ireland. But the fear—ah, the fear was still with her.

Maybe I’m getting old, she thought, leaning forward to study her reflection closer, looking for signs of telltale lines. But all she saw was a haunted, pale woman who stared back at her with wide, frightened eyes.

She’d spoken the truth when she told Devlin that most of the names on such a list would be unknown to her. But she had no doubt that she knew some of them—or at least one of them.

And that green-eyed, dimpled Irishman needed to be warned.

Quickly.

Chapter 23

That night, Sebastian dreamt of Paris. But the Paris of his dream was not the war-damaged, dismal city of today; it was the Paris he’d visited once as a child, when his mother was still alive, before revolution and the forces that sought to stop it had torn both the city and their entire world apart. In his dream, the sun shone warm and golden, the sky was a balmy blue, the gilded carriages of an age-old aristocracy the stuff of fairy tales as they whisked their privileged, powdered, and patched occupants from the grand mirrored halls of Versailles to the marble steps of the Comédie-Française.

Even as a child he’d been aware of the stark contrast between the extravagances of obscene wealth he could see around him juxtaposed with the unimaginable depths of poverty and despair of which he caught only glimpses. But those harbingers of the horrors to come did not intrude upon his dream. In his dream, a blossom-scented breeze played gently through the limbs of the leafy chestnuts along the Seine to cast a shifting pattern of dappled shadows across the sun-sparkled water. It was there, by the banks of the river, that he saw his mother, the sun warm on her golden hair, her lips parting in a smile as she watched a white swan shepherd her downy hatchlings across the grass toward the water. Then she turned toward Sebastian. And even though a part of him knew it for a dream, he felt a wild upsurge of joy at seeing her again, so young and carefree and alive. Her eyes gentle with love, the smile still curling her lips, she reached for him. Except when she touched his cheek, her hand turned blue and icy with death, and he awoke with a start, his breath rasping in his throat and his chest jerking as he stared through the darkness at the familiar satin of the bed hangings above.

He sat up, the cold of the night air biting the bare flesh of his chest and arms, for the fire had died down to mere glowing embers on the hearth. He went to feed it, then stood for a time watching the flames lick at the new fuel.

The people who killed Sebastian’s mother had been French. Their motives and which of France’s multiple murderous political and dynastic factions they identified with had seemed important at one time. But he’d eventually come to understand that it wasn’t, that anything they might have once believed in had long ago been adulterated or destroyed by twenty-five years of bloody internecine conflict and the desperate struggle to survive it. All that mattered in the end was the shaft of cold steel they’d buried in his mother’s back before lifting her up over the worn stone parapet of an ancient Parisian bridge to send her hurtling toward the wasteland below.

She would have been conscious through it all, and Sebastian sometimes found himself re-creating in his mind what her last moments must have been like. The mist cold against her upturned face; the sight of the cloud-churned night sky above; the silver sheen of lamplight glinting on the wind-ruffled black waters of the Seine as the ground rushed up to meet her. The breath-stealing thud of impact and the shrieking agony of splintering bones.

How long had she lain there in the darkness, alone and in pain and struggling to breathe as she felt her life’s blood ebbing away? Had she been afraid when she heard the sound of approaching footsteps, only to turn her head and see the face of her last surviving son wavering above her? Had she known he was really there? he wondered. Or had she taken him for a mere figment of her imagination, conjured up by some alchemy of impending death to comfort her as she began her long journey into whatever lay beyond? And he wondered, had his presence comforted her? Or had he simply reminded her, painfully, of the choices she’d made, of the beloved people, places, and things she’d left behind long ago? Of the years he had lived without her in his life and of all that she had missed?

He heard the rustle of the bedclothes behind him as Hero came to slip an arm around his side and press her body close to his. He wondered if she knew where his dreams had taken him, because for a moment she simply held him, lending him the comfort of her love and presence. Then she said, “You’re thinking it’s them, aren’t you? The French, I mean. Either Napoléon or the Bourbons?”

“It’s certainly a very strong possibility, isn’t it?” He turned to draw her into his arms and hold her closer. “But at the same time, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps I’m coming at this all wrong. What if both murders were completely random—the work of some madman who has nothing at all to do with spies or assassins or one of the women Sedgewick seduced and destroyed?”

“Do you really believe that?”

“No. But I do think there’s a tendency for the human mind to organize life into neat patterns even when none actually exist. And that means I can’t discount it as a possibility.” He held her in silence for a moment, his hand running up and down the strong curve of her back. “What if the killer stripped and mutilated his victims and hid their identities as a way to torment the men’s loved ones even more? Since he didn’t remove Sedgewick’s shirt, the killer probably didn’t even realize there were distinctive scars on his body that someone might recognize. So when he killed again, he tried to make certain that wouldn’t happen.”

“By stripping his next victim completely and then cutting off his head and hands, you mean?”

“It worked, didn’t it? No one knows who the man is.”

“Yes. Except why hasn’t this second victim been reported missing?”

“That’s the part that doesn’t fit either scenario—either the one with a sick, random killer or the one in which the second killing is linked to the first by something we don’t understand because we don’t know who he is.”

Hero pressed her forehead to his, her warm breath mingling with his. She said, “I keep coming back to the fact that Sedgewick told Isabella about Fouché’s list—but he didn’t tell anyone else. What if someone in the government—or one of our allies—thought he might sell or somehow betray the contents of the official correspondence he’d been dispatched to bring back?”

He met her troubled gaze. “Someone like Jarvis, you mean?”

“Well, I can’t see either Castlereagh or Bathurst ordering one of their own men killed. But I wouldn’t put it past Jarvis.”

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