Page 70 of What Cannot Be Said

?Basil Rhodes was in the elegantly appointed back room of an exclusive tailor’s shop on Bond Street, looking over a selection of fine woolens spread out on a mahogany table for his inspection, when Sebastian walked up to him.

“Oh, Lord, not you again,” said Rhodes, rolling his eyes.

“You weren’t expecting me?”

“Is there a reason I should have been?”

“When you claim to have been attending a mill out in Moulsey Hurst at the time of a murder, and yet the Fancy was actually meeting at Copthall Common, one might anticipate provoking some puzzlement.”

Rhodes gave him a broad grin. “Did I say Moulsey Hurst? I meant Copthall, of course. How silly of me.”

Sebastian met the hovering tailor’s anxious gaze and said, “Leave us.”

“I say,” bleated Rhodes as the tailor blanched, then backed away, bowing low, through the curtain and disappeared. “Of all the high-handed—”

“So tell me this,” said Sebastian, cutting him off. “Exactly who was fighting on Sunday?”

The Prince’s favorite natural son waved one plump, elegantly gloved hand through the air. “That Black American, obviously. And I’ve no doubt you know the name of the other fellow—the one everyone’s always talking about. I confess I don’t follow such things too closely, but I assume you do.”

“Which man won?”

Rhodes tittered. “You don’t seriously expect me to remember the fellow’s name, do you?”

“I thought you might have some idea. But given that one man was Black and the other white, you should at least be able to remember that. So which was it?”

Rhodes blinked. “The white man, of course.”

“Good guess. You had a fifty-fifty chance, after all. But as it happens, you’re wrong.”

Rhodes blinked again, his jaw sagging.

Sebastian said, “So where were you, in reality?”

Rhodes closed his mouth and swallowed. “I told you: I was at Copthall Common. But I left early.”

“With whom?”

“What do you mean, ‘with whom’?”

“You would have me believe you went by yourself? In a hired coach? When you cared so little about the fight that you didn’t even bother to learn the names of the contestants—or who won?”

Rhodes straightened his shoulders and affected an air of outraged dignity. “My companions are none of your affair.”

“Perhaps not. Although I suspect Bow Street might be interested in knowing the answer to that question.”

Basil Rhodes threw back his head and laughed. “Do you seriously think my father would allow some upstart magistrate—appointed by a member of his own government, remember—to harass me? Me?”

“Probably not,” said Sebastian pleasantly. “But no one appointed me. Which means no one can call me off.”

Rhodes quit laughing, his face hardening as he brought up one hand to poke the air between them with a pointed finger. “You do realize I know precisely why you’re doing this.”

“You do?”

“I’ve heard about you—about your radical ideas; your sympathy for everything from republicanism to such revolting concepts as universal manhood suffrage.”

“Not only manhood suffrage,” said Sebastian with a quiet smile.

Rhodes’s eyes bulged. “Good God.”

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