Page 31 of What Angels Fear

She didn’t say how she’d known about that compartment. He glanced up at her, then down at the book. It was fairly new, less than a fifth of its pages having been used.

And most of those first pages were now missing.

“The front pages have been cut out,” he said, running one finger along the ragged edges.

The clouds overhead shifted fitfully with the wind. The rain had cleared away the city’s nearly perpetual blanket of yellow fog, allowing rare glimpses of a distant full moon. In the shimmer of moonlight, her face appeared pale and faintly troubled. “It’s almost as if she knew something might happen to her.”

“Assuming it was Rachel who did it.” Sebastian thumbed through the dozen or so pages that were left. They covered little more than the previous week. “You think she was protecting someone?”

“I don’t know. It seems a reasonable explanation, doesn’t it?”

There was another explanation, of course: that Kat Boleyn had cut the pages out herself. Only, if there’d been something here she hadn’t wanted Sebastian to know about, why bother to give him the book at all? Why not simply destroy the thing and claim it had never been found? Why even offer to go to Rachel York’s rooms in the first place? To keep him from discovering whatever secret had been written on those missing pages? But why? Why?

“Have you looked at what’s left?” he asked.

She nodded. “I’ve put notations beside the names I recognized. Most of them are people connected in some way with the play.”

“Any of them have a reason to wish Rachel harm?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Besides, we had a performance the night she died. We were all at the theater.”

Here was an aspect of Rachel York’s murder that hadn’t occurred to him. “All of you except for Rachel. Why wasn’t she there?”

“Her understudy went on in her place. Rachel sent word at the last minute, saying she was ill.”

“Did she do that often?”

“No. I can’t think of another instance. Rachel was never ill.”

Sebastian glanced quickly through the remaining pages. They mainly contained notations for meetings with the likes of hairdressers and seamstresses. But one name appeared on virtually every day. “Who’s Giorgio?”

“I think it might be Giorgio Donatelli. He helped design and paint the scenery when we did The School for Scandal last year. But he’s become increasingly popular as a portrait painter since then. He’s had commissions from the Lord Mayor and several members of the Prince of Wales’s inner circle. I don’t know why Rachel would be seeing him.”

“What do you know of him?”

“Not much, except that he’s young, and rather romantic-looking. He’s Italian.”

“Our young man with the key?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like Rachel to give any man the key to her rooms.”

Sebastian started to put the book in his pocket, but she reached out and touched his arm, stopping him.

“You didn’t look to see if she’d written down her Tuesday night appointment at St. Matthew of the Fields.”

Somewhere in the night, a tomcat howled, a deep throaty caterwaul of primal beastiality. Sebastian met the gaze of the woman beside him. “Did she?”

“Yes.”

There was a ribbon, stitched into the binding for use as a place marker. The book opened easily to its last entry.

At the top of the left-hand page, in a neat, well-schooled copperplate, Rachel York had written Tuesday, 29 January 1811. Sebastian scanned that day’s entries. She’d had a lesson with a dancing master at eleven that morning, another appointment near the theater at three. Then he saw the words St. Matthew’s and, beside that, a name.

St. Cyr.

Chapter 22

Later that night, alone in his small chamber at the Rose and Crown, Sebastian lit a candle, slipped the leather-bound book from his pocket, and settled down in the room’s single, straight-backed wooden chair to read.

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