Page 7 of What Angels Fear

“The seat for Upper Walford is empty.”

Sebastian choked on his drink. “You can’t be serious.” His father continued to stare at him. Sebastian lowered his glass. “Good God. You are serious.”

“Why not? It would give you something to do besides drinking and gaming and sleeping with other men’s wives. And we could use a man of your abilities in the Commons.”

Sebastian subjected his father to a long study. “Afraid Prinny means to bring in the Whigs if he’s made Regent, are you?”

“Oh, the Prince of Wales will be made Regent, make no mistake about that. It’s only a question now of form, and timing. But he’ll find he runs up against stiff opposition if he attempts to circumvent the Tories and resurrect the Ministry of All Talents. Or something worse.”

“Not so stiff as you might wish, obviously, if you’re trying to recruit me as a candidate.”

The Earl lowered his gaze to his own glass, turning it slowly in his palm so that the cut facets reflected the light from the lamps that burned even now, at midday, against the foggy gloom. “One might consider it a duty, in such perilous times as these, to join right-thinking men in defense of national interest, property, and privilege.”

“I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to you that if I were in Parliament, I might actually choose to challenge the sacred traditions of property and privilege, and champion instead the heresies of Jacobinism, atheism, and democracy?”

Lord Hendon swallowed the remainder of his brandy in one long gulp and set the glass aside. “Even you wouldn’t be such a fool.” Without bothering to ring for the footman, he strode to the door, only pausing with his hand on the knob to glance back and say, “Think about it.”

Sebastian stood at the window, one hand holding aside the heavy green velvet as he watched his father’s powerful, familiar figure disappear into the swirling fog. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, or an effect of the mists, but his father suddenly looked older and more tired than Sebastian remembered him being. And he knew a twist of regret, an urge to reach out and stop his father, to somehow make things right between them. Except that things could never really be right between them because Sebastian could never be what his father wanted him to be, and they both knew it.

He was reminded again of that long-ago, laughter-filled morning on the slopes above the cove. Alistair St. Cyr hadn’t been there that summer. Even in those days, the Earl had spent most of his time in London. But he’d come home the next day, his face tight with grief, to hold the pale, lifeless body of his eldest son and heir clutched in his arms.

With Richard dead, the title of Viscount Devlin, like the position of heir apparent, had passed to the second son, Cecil. Only Cecil had died, too, just four years later. Then all of Alistair St. Cyr’s hopes, all his ambitions and dreams had fallen on the boy who’d never been meant to be the heir, the youngest and least like his father of them all.

With a shrug, Sebastian let the curtain drop and turned toward the stairs.

He’d made it almost to his bedroom when his majordomo came hurrying down the hall. “My lord, I must speak with you. We’ve had the constables here this morn—”

“Not now, Morey.”

“But my lord—”

“Later,” said Sebastian, and firmly shut the door.

Chapter 5

His hat clutched in his cold hands, Sir Henry Lovejoy followed a liveried and powdered footman through the echoing, labyrinth-like corridors of Carlton House. A few months ago, Lord Jarvis would have held such an audience at St. James’s Palace, where the poor mad old King George III kept his offices. That Jarvis had now shifted his base here, to the palace of the Prince of Wales, struck Lovejoy as the clearest sign imaginable that a Regency was indeed imminent.

The great man was at his desk, writing, when Lovejoy was ushered into his presence. He acknowledged Lovejoy’s existence with a curt motion of one plump, ringed hand, but he did not glance up or even invite Henry to sit. Henry hesitated just inside the threshold, then went to stand before the hearth. The fire was a small one, the room cavernously large and frigid. Henry held his numb hands out to the flames. From somewhere in the distance came the rhythmic rat-a-tat of a hammer and the clanging of what might be scaffolding. The Prince of Wales was always renovating, whether here at Carlton House or at his Pavilion in Brighton.

“Well?” said Jarvis at last, laying aside his pen and shifting in his chair so that he might regard his visitor. “What have you to report about this sorry business?”

Retracting his cold hands and turning, Lovejoy executed a neat bow, then launched into a precise description of the crime scene, the victim, and the evidence they’d collected so far.

“Yes, yes,” said Jarvis, thrusting up from his chair with an impatient gesture that cut Henry short. “I’ve heard all this from your constable. It’s obvious Lord Devlin must be arrested immediately. Indeed, I can’t conceive why a warrant hasn’t been issued already.”

Lovejoy watched his lordship fumble in his pocket for a delicate ivory snuffbox. He was an unusually large man, standing well over six feet in height and weighing some twenty to twenty-five stone. In his youth, he had been handsome. Beneath the ravages of indulgence and dissipation and the passing of the years, traces of those good looks could still be seen, in the fiercely intelligent gray eyes, the strong, aquiline thrust of the nose, the sensual curve of the mouth.

Lovejoy cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, my lord, I am not convinced the evidence is sufficient to justify such an action at this time.”

Jarvis’s head came up, his eyes narrowing, his fleshy face deepening in hue as he fixed Lovejoy with a hard stare. “Not sufficient? Good God, man. What do you want? An eyewitness?”

Lovejoy drew a steadying breath. “I admit the evidence implicating the Viscount appears on the surface quite damning, my lord. But we really know very little as yet about this woman. We don’t even have a clear idea as to what the killer’s motive might have been.”

Deftly flicking open his snuffbox with one fat finger, Lord Jarvis lifted a pinch to his nostrils, and sniffed. “She was raped, was she not?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“So there’s your motive.”

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