Page 13 of What Angels Fear

Sebastian took a long, deep swallow of his ale. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Ho. And why else would such a swell cove be stopping at a dive like the Black ’Art? You answer me that.”

A prepubescent young girl with thin shoulders and a shank of straight, colorless hair appeared from the back rooms to dump the contents of her tray on the table in front of Sebastian. He stared at the small loaf of suspiciously white bread, the plate of unidentifiable meat awash in ladlefuls of congealing fat, and felt his appetite ebb.

“You should tuck that purse of yers somewhere out o’ sight and out o’ reach,” said the urchin as Sebastian seated himself at the table. “You know that, don’t you? It’s like an open invitation, bulgin’ out yer coat all obvious-like. In fact, it’s criminal, I’d say, to be temptin’ honest lads into mischief like that.”

Sebastian glanced up, his fork halted halfway to his mouth. “And when were you ever an honest lad?”

The boy laughed out loud. “I like you,” he said, his gaze drifting to the plate of food before Sebastian. A quiver passed over his features, a spasm of desperate want quickly hidden. “I tell you what: got a proposition for you, I do. If’n you’re agreeable, I could ’ire meself out to you for, say, ten pence a day? Show you the ropes o’ this part of town, I could. Be your general factotum. A fine gentleman like yerself shouldn’t be without a servant.”

“True.” Sebastian chewed a mouthful, swallowed. “But I’m the strangest creature. I have a decided aversion to being fleeced by those in my employ.”

The boy sniffed. “Well, if’n yer dead set on holdin’ that against me,” he said, his voice dripping reproach, his feet dragging as he turned away.

“Wait a minute.”

The boy swung back around.

“Here.” Picking up the hunk of bread, Sebastian tossed it to the boy, who caught the small loaf deftly with one hand. Sebastian grunted. “You’re a better catch than a foist. Now get going.”

Chapter 10

Kat Boleyn had first met Rachel York on the banks of the Thames, on a snowy December night just over three years ago. Rachel had been fifteen then, heartbreakingly young and full of despair. Kat had been all of twenty, but already the toast of London’s stage for several years, her own secrets and painful past hidden beneath fine jewels and practiced smiles.

And so it was to the Thames that Kat Boleyn went that Wednesday night, to toss a bunch of yellow roses from the center of London Bridge and watch dry-eyed as they drifted apart and slowly sank beneath the river’s black waves. Then she turned purposefully away.

The clouds still hung low over the city, but with the coming of night, the rain had eased off into a fine mist. When she was a little girl, Kat had loved the mist. She’d lived in Dublin then, in a whitewashed house facing an open green edged with chestnuts and giant oaks. One of the oaks, older than all the others, had great spreading branches that reached nearly down to the ground. Even before she started school, Kat’s father had taught her to climb that tree.

She always thought of him as her father, even though he wasn’t. But he was the only father she’d ever known, and he encouraged her to do things that sometimes frightened her mother.

“Life is full of scary things,” he used to tell Kat. “The trick is not to let your fears get in the way of your living. Whatever else you do, Katherine, don’t settle for a life half-lived.”

Kat had tried to tell herself that, the day the English soldiers came. The mist had been thick that morning, and heavy with the acrid scent of burning. She’d stood in the dim morning light and repeated her father’s words to herself over and over again as they dragged her mother kicking and screaming from that pretty little white house. They’d made Kat watch what they did to her mother that day, and they’d made Kat’s father watch, too. And then they’d hanged them, side by side, Kat’s mother and father both, from the oak at the edge of the green.

Those days belonged to a different lifetime, to a different person. The woman who now drove her phaeton and pair at a smart clip through London’s lamp-lit streets called herself Kat Boleyn, and she was one of the most acclaimed actresses of the London stage. The velvet pelisse she wore that evening was a bright cherry red, not a smoke-smudged gray, and she wore a string of pearls at her throat, rather than a black band of mourning.

But she still hated the mist.

Reining in before the townhouse of Monsieur Léon Pierrepont, Kat handed the ribbons to her groom and stepped down, easily, from her high-perch seat. “Walk them, George.”

“Yes, miss.”

She paused on the footpath to stare up at the classical façade before her, lit softly by the gleam of flickering oil lamps. Like so much else about Leo Pierrepont, this house on Half Moon Street was carefully calculated to create just the right impression: large, but not too large, elegant, and with a touch of the faded grandeur to be expected from a proud nobleman now forced to live in exile. When one lived a life that was, essentially, a lie, appearances were everything.

She found him alone, in his dining room, just sitting down to a table laid for one with fine china and gleaming silver and the sparkle of old crystal. He was a slim, delicately built man upon whom the passing years, however difficult they might have been, nevertheless seemed to have rested easily. His face was largely unlined, his light brown hair barely touched with gray. Kat had never known his precise age, but given that he’d been almost thirty when driven from Paris by the Reign of Terror, she knew he must be in his late forties by now.

“You shouldn’t have come,” Leo said, his attention seemingly all for his soup.

Kat jerked off her gloves and tossed them with reticule, pelisse, and hat onto a nearby chair. “Whose reputation are you afraid will be compromised, Leo? Mine, or yours?”

He glanced up, gray eyes gleaming with a faint smile. “Mine, of course. You have no reputation left to lose.” He signaled for the servants to leave them, then sat back. The smile faded. “You’ve heard what happened to Rachel, I suppose?”

Kat pressed her flattened palms against the tabletop and leaned into them. Beneath the silk bodice of her gown, her heart thudded hard and fast, but she managed to keep her voice calm, steady. “Did you do it?”

If he had, he wouldn’t admit it; Kat knew that. But she wanted to watch his face while he denied it.

Leo dipped his spoon into his soup and brought it carefully to his lips. “Come now, ma petite. Even if I had wanted Rachel dead, do you seriously think I would have killed her in such a spectacular fashion? In a church? From what I understand, the walls were practically painted with her blood.”

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