Page 4 of Who Cries for the Lost

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.”

Chapter 4

She’d been born on the Île de la Cité in the heart of Paris, the daughter of an esteemed French physician and surgeon named Philippe-Jean Pelletan. As a young girl she’d dreamt of becoming a physician herself, although such a thing was no more possible in France than it was in England. And so at the age of sixteen she’d traveled to Italy, where those of her sex were allowed to study medicine. It was there, at the University of Bologna, that she met and married a brilliant young French medical student named Antoine Beauclerc. At the end of their studies he joined the French Army to tend to the medical needs of the soldiers of the Republic, and Alexi went with him. When Beauclerc was killed, Alexi simply stayed with the regiment and took his place.

Sebastian had first encountered her in the spring of 1810, in a high mountain pass between Portugal and Spain. He’d been on a mission for a colonel he should have known better than to trust, while she’d been with the band of French cavalry who captured him. By then she was wearing rugged trousers, a wide-brimmed hat, and two bandoliers slung across her chest, and she had taken a new lover, a lieutenant named Jean Tissot. In a desperate, ultimately futile attempt to save the doomed women and children of the nearby convent of Santa Iria, Sebastian had escaped—killing the man she loved in the process. That was when she’d sworn not to rest until she killed Sebastian in revenge.

And even though she’d been with Gibson for over two years, Sebastian still wasn’t quite certain she’d given up the idea.

“You remember Major Rousseau?” she said to him now.

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