Page 35 of What Cannot Be Said

“He’s the sort of man who’s always smiling, who works hard to make everyone like him and comes across as enthusiastic and full of good cheer. But—at least as a boy—he had a nasty tendency to turn churlish when he felt he wasn’t being given special treatment. I used to wonder if he really was the natural son of the Prince of Wales or simply expected people to behave as if he were.”

“Oh, he’s one of the Prince’s bastards, all right. Prinny is extraordinarily proud of him.”

“He certainly looks like Prinny—and to a certain extent acts like him, too. As much as he likes to play the bouncing, exuberant buffoon, I’ve always suspected that beneath it all is someone with an outsize sense of entitlement and a grudge against the world for not giving him everything he wants and thinks he deserves.”

“Could he kill?”

Sebastian met her gaze. “I’ve heard him boasting of what he called the ‘delectation’ of bedding women who have to do whatever he tells them to do because he owns them. Of holding the lives of men and women in his hands. So I’d say yes, I think he could kill.”

?That evening, Sebastian trolled the pleasure haunts popular with the men of the Upper Ten Thousand, from Cribb’s Parlour and Limmer’s to Covent Garden and Drury Lane, looking for Mr.Basil Rhodes. He finally came upon the Regent’s natural son in the vestibule of White’s, surrounded by a circle of cronies listening to his humorous account of a recent encounter with a Devonshire bull.

“So what did you do then, Rhodes?” said one of the men, laughing.

“Do?” said Basil Rhodes, his lips curling into an imp’s smile, his unruly auburn hair falling into his eyes as he turned to face his questioner. “I quitted the field of honor in my opponent’s favor—which translates into: I ran like hell! Personally, I’m all with Falstaff on this. Discretion is definitely the better part of valor.”

The group around him laughed, and someone slapped him on his rounded back. But even as he fielded his friends’ ribald jests, it was obvious the man was aware of Sebastian leaning against a nearby doorframe, watching him. After a moment he detached himself from his circle and walked over to where Sebastian was standing.

“Haven’t seen you here in a while, Devlin. Why do I get the distinct impression you’re looking for me?”

“Acute of you,” said Sebastian, pushing away from the doorframe.

Rhodes looked startled for a moment, then let loose one of his braying laughs. “Well, I must admit that’s not something I hear very often.”

A full-faced, short-necked bear of a man with the Regent’s slightly protuberant blue eyes and fleshy build, Rhodes habitually kept his flyaway auburn hair too long and combed forward, so that it was always falling into his eyes. His evening coat and pantaloons were expertly tailored, but he wore them negligently, so that he gave off a rumpled appearance that belied his considerable wealth. The late Peter K. Rhodes—a tall, thin, dark-haired man who looked nothing like his purported son—had died a rich man, having turned the simple Jamaican estate given to him as a wedding gift by the Prince of Wales into a vast sugar empire.

“There’s a reason I didn’t join the rest of you lot up at Cambridge and Oxford, remember?” Rhodes said, his smile widening.

“As I recall, that was because you thought your time would be better spent out in Jamaica learning how to run your father’s plantations.”

Rhodes laughed again, although less heartily this time. “That, too; that, too. It’s a different world out there, you know.”

“So it is,” said Sebastian. “Walk with me a ways? There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.”

“Of course,” said Rhodes, his genial smile firmly in place as the two men turned down St. James’s Street, toward the old Tudor palace. “I was forgetting, you were in the West Indies yourself, weren’t you?”

“For a time. With the Army.”

“Beautiful, isn’t it? Paradise on earth.”

“For some, I suppose. Although not for the tens of thousands of enslaved men and women whose backbreaking labor makes it a paradise for those who keep them like animals. For them, it’s a brutal life of cruelty and exploitation that ends all too often in an early, unmarked grave.”

Rhodes slewed around to look at him. “Ah, I remember now. How passionate you were on the subject of slavery and the slave trade when we were lads! Still haven’t got past it, have you?”

“Did you think I was likely to?”

“When you put it that way, I suppose not.” His eyes narrowed as he squinted up at a streetlamp sputtering beside them. “But I presume you haven’t sought me out to pontificate on the evils of bondage.”

“Actually, I’m here because I’m told you knew Lady McInnis.”

The other man’s habitual half smile froze. “Not well, no.”

“But you did know her?”

“I suppose you could say I did—the way one knows all the people one is forever meeting at balls and routs and dinners and such. But she wasn’t exactly in my style, if you know what I mean?”

“Not really. Exactly what do you mean?”

Rhodes pulled a comic face. “Never did have much patience for women who devote themselves to ‘good works.’ They make for bloody uncomfortable company, if you ask me.”

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