Page 94 of Who Cries for the Lost

Sebastian laughed and reached back to take her hand. “Here.”

They drew up at the point where they had found Sedgewick’s boot. The pile of driftwood that once stood there had been torn apart by Lovejoy’s constables in their search of the area. But they hadn’t found anything else that seemed out of place.

“I wonder what was here before,” said Hero, her head falling back as she let her gaze wander to the ruins that stood on the bank above. “Before they built the tannery, I mean.”

“You think they might have burned witches here?”

“Perhaps.” She nodded to where St. Paul’s loomed above the clustered rooftops of the city on the far side of the river, its dome and towers silhouetted black now against the fading sky. “It is across the river from the cathedral. Or they could have used this spot for a ‘swimming test’ of women accused of being witches. They used to strip them of their clothes, tie them up, and toss them in the river to see if they’d float—the idea being that since witches had supposedly rejected the sacrament of baptism, the water would then reject them.”

“Lovely.”

“Isn’t it? Although I think I’d rather go through that than have them strip me and prick me all over to see if I had some ‘devil-tainted’ place that didn’t bleed.”

“Maybe,” said Sebastian. “As long as they managed to haul you out of the river before you drowned.”

“Yes, but even if the river didn’t ‘reject’ me, they’d still probably burn me—on the off chance the river might have made a mistake.”

Sebastian was silent for a moment, his gaze on the wide expanse of the Thames now turning pewter in the dying light. “There’s been a hell of a lot of evil done in God’s name.”

“Yes,” she said simply.

They turned to climb the bank to where the abandoned pits and half-collapsed buildings of the old tannery stood dark and brooding in the gathering gloom. The air smelled of rust and dirt and sun-warmed grass, the long, rank weeds bending softly in the evening breeze. They’d almost reached the ivy-smothered walls of the old abandoned warehouse when the clatter of hoofbeats and a jingle of harness jerked Sebastian’s attention toward the lane, where a familiar hackney drawn by a single horse was turning in through the tannery’s old broken gateposts.

“What is it?” said Hero as he caught her arm and drew her back into the shadows cast by the crumbling brick building.

“A hackney,” he said quietly. “And unless I’m mistaken, the jarvey driving it is the same fellow involved in a certain lethal encounter in Oxford Street.”

They could see it quite clearly now, the horse’s head dark against the purpling sky as the hackney drew up inside the tannery’s broken gates. The near door opened and a gentleman in a round hat and trousers hopped down, dragging with him a young woman in a dashing hat with a curled brim and a fashionably cut high-waisted muslin gown topped by a deep forest green spencer. She stumbled when she hit the uneven ground, and he jerked her arm hard enough that she let out a soft cry, quickly bit off.

“If yer gonna be long,” said the jarvey, “how about I go ’ave me somethin’ t’ drink and come back and get ye when yer done ’ere?”

Turning toward him, the gentleman drew a small pistol from his pocket, wordlessly leveled the muzzle at the hackney driver’s head, thumbed back the hammer, and fired.

Hero sucked in her breath in a quiet gasp as the night exploded with a burst of flame and smoke. The bay between the shafts snorted and threw back its head, sidling nervously, while the driver pitched sideways off his seat to hit the hard earth with a quiet thump.

“I can’t see from this distance,” she whispered. “Is that Tiptoff?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s the woman?”

Slim and well formed, with cascading rich dark hair, the woman had her head turned so that Sebastian couldn’t see her face. Then Tiptoff tightened his grip on her arm, jerking her around, and Sebastian felt his heart slam hard up against his ribs.

“It’s Kat. Kat Boleyn.”

Chapter 54

Does his pistol have one barrel or two?” whispered Hero.

“One.” Sebastian looked at her. “Why?”

“Good. Then he won’t be able to shoot me when I walk out there and cheerfully talk to him like an oblivious idiot while you work your way around the back of the building and jump him.”

“No,” said Sebastian.

She glanced over at him. “Do you have a better idea?”

He thought about it. “No.”

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