Page 59 of What Angels Fear

No, Sebastian thought; she wouldn’t have gone back to Worcestershire. “Was there a man in her life, do you think? A man she maybe was afraid of?”

Most of the children were in the chapel now. Only three or four stragglers remained, hurried along by Matron Snyder, who cast a quick, disapproving glance at the two men.

The Reverend Finley turned toward the open chapel doors. “We never spoke of such things, of course, but I’d have said yes, Rachel was in love with someone—although I don’t think it was anyone she was afraid of. She had that look a woman gets when she’s happy in love.” A sad, almost wistful smile touched the old man’s lips. “You might think I’m too old to recognize that look, but we were all young once, you know.”

Sebastian walked through the cold, windblown streets of Lambeth to the banks of the Thames, where he took a scull that carried him across the river to the steps just below Tower Hill. From there it was but a short distance to Paul Gibson’s surgery.

He found his friend wrapped in a tattered quilt and sitting in a cracked leather armchair beside the parlor fire, his staring gaze fixed on the glowing coals.

“Leg bad, is it?” said Sebastian, sinking onto the ragged chair opposite.

“A wee bit.” Gibson looked up, his eyes bright with the unholy fires of the opium eater. It was an addiction far too many wounded men carried home with them from the war. Normally the Irishman could keep his compulsion under control, but there were times when memories of what he’d seen in the war would loom unbearable or the remnants of shrapnel in his leg would twist and bleed, and he would disappear for days into a drug-induced fog. “But I’ve finished your postmortem, never fear.”

“And?”

Gibson shook his head. “Nothing more, I’m afraid. If she’d been brought to me directly, there might have been some sort of evidence. But as it is...”

Sebastian nodded, swallowing his disappointment. He’d known it was a long shot. “I was wondering if you could get in touch with Jumpin’ Jack for me.”

“Cochran?” Gibson huffed a soft laugh. “Looking to steal another body, are you?”

Sebastian grinned and shook his head. “It’s information I’m interested in this time. I’m wondering if those in the resurrection trade have heard of anyone expressing a specific interest in female corpses.”

Paul Gibson nodded thoughtfully. “Think to come at your man from that angle, do you?”

“It’s worth a try.” Sebastian pushed to his feet, his hand grasping his friend’s shoulder for a moment before he turned toward the door. “I’ll drop by again in a few days. See how you’re getting on.”

He was reaching for the knob when Gibson stopped him by saying, “There is one thing my more complete examination of the body did reveal. It may or may not have a bearing on your investigation.”

Sebastian swung back around. “What was that?”

“Rachel York was in what the ladies refer to as a delicate situation.”

Sebastian felt a sudden twist, deep down in his gut. He thought about what the Reverend Finley had told him, about Rachel York coming to St. Jude’s Foundling Home every Monday afternoon to hold the babies and sing to them, so that they wouldn’t die from lack of love. Had she known? And if she had known, what must her last thoughts have been, when she felt her killer’s knife slash across her throat, again and again?

“How far along was she?” Sebastian asked, his voice oddly hoarse.

“Almost three months, I’d say. Enough that she would surely have known she was carrying a child.”

Chapter 36

Sebastian was nursing a tankard of ale in the public room at the Rose and Crown when Tom burst in from the street, bringing with him a blast of icy air scented with coal smoke.

“I found ’er,” he said, his voice high and tight with exaltation. “I found yer Mary Grant. And she musta done weery well with that stuff she lifted from her old mistress, weery well indeed, ’cause she’s livin’ as high as you please—in Bloomsbury, no less.”

Rachel York’s erstwhile maid had taken rooms in a lodging house facing a respectable street just south of Russell Square. By the time Sebastian got there, the sky was a flat white that promised more snow before nightfall.

Conscious of a surge of anticipation and hope he tried to damp down, Sebastian climbed the neat staircase to the first floor. The door was to his left, as Tom had said it would be. But when Sebastian rapped sharply on the freshly painted panels, it creaked open beneath his touch.

“Miss Grant?” he called, his voice echoing in the stillness. He pushed the door open wider and stepped inside.

He was standing in a parlor filled with the cherrywood furniture and gilt-framed mirrors and expensive oddities that had once belonged to Rachel York. All had been thoroughly, savagely ransacked.

Mirrors and pictures had been torn from the walls and smashed; chairs lay overturned, their stuffing spilled out across the rumpled rug. Drawers had been pulled from bureaus, their contents strewn about in what appeared to have been a wild, frantic search.

Sebastian closed the door behind him with a snap that sounded unnaturally loud in the early afternoon hush. He walked from one room to the next. Impossible to know what the intruder had been searching for, or if he had found it. But when Sebastian entered the bedroom, he thought he knew at least part of the answer to that question. For here, only half the room lay in disarray; the rest had not been touched.

Sebastian walked to the chest of drawers that stood on the far side of the room, its bottom four drawers still intact. Lacy, feminine things spilled from the top drawer where it lay broken on the carpet. It was the logical place to have begun a search of this kind; women were always tucking secret things away amongst their undergarments. Whoever Mary Grant’s intruder was, he was obviously new to this game.

---