Page 62 of What Cannot Be Said

“No, I escaped. I found out Laura had been told I was dead, and I was afraid of what might happen if I didn’t get back to her.” He hesitated, then said quietly, “But by then it was already too late.”

“That was—what? Sixteen? Seventeen years ago?”

Finch looked over at him. “You find it hard to believe that I loved her from afar for so long?”

Sebastian thought of his own younger self, and of the beautiful Irish actress he’d loved for years. He shook his head. “No.”

The Major was silent for a moment, his gaze on a blind street musician coaxing a lilting melody from a battered old flute at the corner. “I don’t want you to get the idea that I came back to London last year planning to start something up with Laura again, because I didn’t. But then I ran into her by chance one day on the Strand, and it was as if the years fell away. For both of us.”

“When did McInnis find out she was seeing you?”

“I told you before, I didn’t know that he had discovered it. We were always so careful. She was terrified that if he thought she was having an affair, he’d send her away from Thisbe and Emma. You know what our laws are like: Children belong to their fathers.” Something cold and flinty flickered in the depths of his narrowed eyes. “The quarrel they had the day he gave her those bruises—I’m wondering if that’s what it was about.”

“She never said?”

“No.”

“Did Laura know Sir Ivo had a mistress?”

Finch nodded. “Oh, yes, she knew.”

“Do you have any idea how she found out?”

“No. I never asked.” He paused. “If Emma hadn’t been killed that day, too, you’d have a damned hard time convincing me that McInnis wasn’t the man responsible.”

“Did Laura ever talk to you about Emma?”

Finch looked over at him, but whatever he thought of the question didn’t show on his face. “Some. I know Laura was worried about her. She was a brilliant girl—she read widely, everything from Plato and Marcus Aurelius to Condorcet and Mary Wollstonecraft, and she had a tendency to chafe at the restrictions imposed on her by both her sex and her social class. From a few things Laura let drop, I gathered she didn’t get on well with her father.”

“What about Malcolm’s fencing master? Did Laura mention him?”

“The Jamaican? She did, yes. She thought him an amazingly talented young man, and I know she worried that because of his heritage he wouldn’t be given the opportunities he deserved. Why do you ask? What has he to do with anything?”

Sebastian shook his head, unwilling to voice his thoughts aloud, especially not to this man. “Nothing that I know of at this point.”

?Sebastian found himself turning over everything he’d learned as he walked alone back up Bond Street. The various pieces of Laura McInnis’s life were beginning to fall into place, and the picture they formed was disturbing.

He had no way of knowing if Laura and Major Finch were lovers or not; the truth was, reality didn’t actually matter. What mattered was that Sir Ivo McInnis believed that his wife had taken a lover—had in fact accused her of it, no doubt digging his fingers into her shoulders and shaking her hard when she denied it. Had she then thrown his own infidelity up at him—the rich widow people were saying he’d marry if only his wife were dead?

Probably.

Was that when he’d decided to kill her? Kill both her and their freethinking daughter, who had formed a forbidden relationship with her brother’s brilliant but totally ineligible Jamaican fencing master?

Perhaps.

So why choose Richmond Park as the site of the killings? Why pose his victims’ bodies in a way that echoed the half-forgotten murders of fourteen years before? To deflect suspicion?

It fit. But Sebastian knew only too well that just because an answer seemed to fit didn’t mean it was true.

He had almost reached Brook Street when he heard a man’s voice calling his name. “Lord Devlin! I say, Lord Devlin!”

Turning, Sebastian found one of Lovejoy’s constables leaping from a hackney carriage to hurry toward him. “Thank goodness I caught you,” said the man, breathing heavily. “There’s been another murder, my lord! In Hyde Park this time.”

“Who is it? Who’s been killed?”

“It’s Miss Arabella Priestly’s abigail. And the killer very nearly got Miss Priestly herself, too.”

Chapter 39

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