Page 60 of What Angels Fear

Sebastian hunkered down beside the broken drawer, his attention caught by the corner of what looked like a piece of blue paper that had fallen or been kicked so that it lay almost completely hidden beneath the chest’s frame. Easing the edge of the paper from beneath the wood, Sebastian found himself holding a blue envelope across which someone had written in a bold, masculine-looking scrawl, Lord Frederick Fairchild.

He was one of the most prominent, articulate Whigs in the House, Lord Frederick, urbane and witty and—unlike most of the Prince of Wale’s set—remarkably temperate. When the Prince was sworn in as Regent in a few days’ time, it was commonly assumed that Fairchild would be selected to help form the new Whig government.

Sebastian stared thoughtfully at the blue envelope in his hands. Here, surely, was the “F” referred to in Rachel York’s red leather-covered book. Could Lord Frederick even be the father of her unborn child? And maybe her murderer?

The room was cold, the fire on the hearth having been allowed to burn itself out. The sweet scent of lilac water hung heavy in the air, but beneath it Sebastian caught a hint of another odor, a sharp, metallic stench only too familiar to any man who’d ever gone to war.

With a sense of profound foreboding, he tucked the envelope into an inner pocket and stood up. The door to the dressing room stood half ajar. One hand on the pistol in his greatcoat pocket, Sebastian crossed the room to push the door open wider....

And found himself looking at what was left of Mary Grant.

Chapter 37

She lay sprawled on her back, her eyes wide and sightless, her torn, bloodied clothes shoved up to reveal flesh gleaming pale and naked in the fading light. Her throat had been hacked so savagely that her head had nearly come off.

Sebastian stood just inside the doorway, his gaze traveling around the small, wainscoted room. He hadn’t seen the Lady Chapel at St. Matthew of the Fields after Rachel York’s killer had left her there, but he imagined it must have looked much like this, the blood splattered high and wide across the surrounding walls until it ran down the paneling in thin rivulets, the killer’s bloody handprints standing out stark and damning on the bare white flesh of the dead woman’s spread thighs.

There was nothing Sebastian could do for this woman now, but he crouched beside her anyway and touched his fingertips to her bloodstained cheek. She was still faintly warm.

He sat back on his heels, his hands gripping his knees as he gazed down into those pale, unseeing eyes. She was younger than he’d expected her to be, probably no more than twenty-five or thirty, with flaxen hair and a sallow complexion and the kind of sharp, small features one saw often on the streets of London. She must have thought she was a downy one, awake on every suit. She’d seen a chance to take everything that had once belonged to her mistress—the fine furniture, the expensive clothes and jewels—and she’d seized it. She must have thought she’d hit upon a way to set herself up for a good long while.

Except that all she’d really done was set herself up for murder.

Sebastian stared at the bloody handprints on Mary Grant’s thighs. The pattern was the same for both women: first the kill, then the sexual assault. It spoke of a man driven to murder by a desire to slake a peculiar, sick kind of lust. Except that the link between the two women could only mean that their killings weren’t random: whoever had killed Rachel York had not come upon her simply by chance in the Lady Chapel of St. Matthew of the Fields. He had sought her out. And then he had tracked down her maid, Mary Grant, and killed her, too.

But why? Why?

What if the sexual use of the women’s bodies had been, not the reason for the killing, but an effect, a release of the excitement and bloodlust generated by the act of killing? Mary Grant could have been killed because she surprised her murderer in the act of searching her rooms, or because she had known something that might have identified him as Rachel York’s killer.

Or had the killer marked both women for death for some other reason entirely?

Sebastian fingered the envelope in his pocket. Whether it had been dropped by mistake or been left, deliberately, so that it might be found, the involvement of a man such as Lord Frederick Fairchild in this affair was ominous. The two women had been linked to a French spy ring, while Lord Frederick was the man most likely to be named the next prime minister of England when his dear friend, the Prince of Wales, took over as Regent....

A whisper of movement brought Sebastian’s head jerking around, but it was only the heavy satin drapes at the window, shifting in a sudden draft. He could hear the wind outside, picking up now. It would be dark soon.

He pushed to his feet. He knew the urge to cover Mary Grant’s bloody, abused body, to shield her from the staring, assessing eyes that would in time find her, but he forced himself to turn away and leave her rooms essentially the way he had found them.

He was letting himself out the street door when he brushed past a stout matron who paused to look straight up into his face. And in that brief instant before he turned away to hurry down the front steps, he recognized her, and saw, in turn, the flicker of recognition in her eyes.

“My lord!” she called after him. “That is you, isn’t it? Lord Devlin?”

Sebastian kept walking, his hat pulled low, his shoulders hunched against the cold. But his heart had begun to pound, and he was cursing silently to himself.

Her name was Mrs. Charles Lavery, and she was the widow of a colonel who’d served with Sebastian in the Peninsula. She would think, for now, that she had been mistaken, that she’d simply seen a stranger who happened to remind her in some vague way of the young viscount she’d once known. She’d tell herself she was silly not to have noticed sooner the shabbiness of his clothing, the touches of gray where his hair showed beneath his hat. But when they found Mary Grant’s body, as they surely would, Mrs. Lavery would recall this chance encounter.

And tighten the noose around Sebastian’s neck.

“I don’t get it,” said Tom, his small face pinched with the effort of assembling his thoughts. They were in a hackney carriage, the light from the streetlamps flickering over the worn leather upholstery as they turned down Pall Mall, heading toward St. James’s.

“Lord Frederick is a Whig,” said Sebastian, struggling to explain early nineteenth-century English politics in a way that might make sense to a child of the streets. “But for the last twenty years or so, the Tories have dominated the government.”

Tom shoved his fists deep into the pockets of the warm coat Sebastian had bought him and made a rude noise through his nose. “Not much to choose between the lot of them, if’n you was to ask me.”

Sebastian smiled. “In many ways, you’re right. But in general, the Tories see themselves as staunch defenders of the country’s established institutions, such as the monarchy and Church of England, which means they’re against any kind of change, especially things like religious toleration and parliamentary reform—”

“Things the Whigs is for?”

“Basically. And unlike the Tories, the Whigs are against continuing the war with Napoleon.”

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