C Harris - Where Shadows Dance

“Did Ross entertain women of the street?”

“Not in his rooms. I’ve no notion how he conducted himself elsewhere.”

“How long did this woman stay?”

“Twenty minutes? Perhaps half an hour. No more. She left very quickly.”

“She came by carriage?”

Madame Champagne shook her head. “Hackney, of course.”

Sebastian nodded. St. James’s Street was the gentlemen’s preserve. For a gentlewoman simply to walk down St. James’s Street was considered a social solecism. But for a woman of quality to be seen entering a gentleman’s lodgings, alone, would mean swift and certain ruin. No wonder the woman—whoever she was—had taken care to hide her face. “And then?”

“An hour or two after the woman’s departure, a gentleman in evening clothes went up.”

“And he arrived—how?”

“Walking. But there’s no use asking me anything more about him because I really couldn’t tell you. He wore a hat pulled low and an opera cape with the collar turned up, and he took care to keep his head down.”

Sebastian smiled. “One of Ross’s ‘dangerous men’?”

“Exactly.”

“He stayed how long?”

“Longer than the woman. An hour. Perhaps longer. I’d say it was close to nine or ten when he left.”

“There’s nothing you can tell me about him?”

“Not really. He was neither remarkably tall nor short, corpulent nor excessively thin. His clothes were very much those of a gentleman—silk stockings and knee breeches. Oh—and he carried a walking stick.”

Sebastian himself possessed an elegant ebony walking stick. The silver handle was artfully contrived to conceal a stiletto. He said, “Mr. Ross himself never stepped out that evening?”

“If he did, I didn’t see him.”

“Is there another way out?”

“There is a door to the court, but it doesn’t lead anywhere.” Madame Champagne sipped her coffee for a moment, then said, “Ross had one more visitor that night.”

“Oh?”

She nodded. “Shortly before I retired for the evening, another gentleman went up. But he came back down almost immediately.”

“You mean, as if he had found Mr. Ross not at home?”

“Yes. Or as if Mr. Ross were already dead.”

S ebastian studied the Frenchwoman’s fine-boned face, the single, half-hooded eye. “And how was this second gentleman dressed?”

“Much the same as the first. Evening cape and knee breeches.”

“Could they have been the same man?”

She frowned, as if considering this. Then she shook her head. “I do not believe so. They moved differently. Or at least, it must have seemed so to me at the time, for it never occurred to me that they might be the same man.”

Sebastian said, “Had you seen these men visit Mr. Ross before?”

“Them, or men like them.”

“But you’ve no idea who they might be?”

She started to say something, then hesitated.

“What?” he prompted.

She leaned forward. “Men may hide their faces but forget that their accents can tell their own story ... to those who know how to listen.”

“What kind of accents are we talking about?”

“Mainly Russian. But also Swedish and Turkish. And the occasional Frenchman, of course.” She kept her gaze on his face. “You’re wondering how I could know, yes?”

He gave a wry smile. “I doubt I would be able to identify a Swedish or a Russian accent. Or distinguish a Turk from, say, a Greek.”

“My father was an official at Versailles when I was a child. I grew up surrounded by accents from all over Europe—and beyond. It was a game my brother and I played, imitating them.”

Sebastian watched her nostrils flare on a quickly indrawn breath and he knew without being told that her brother, like her husband, was dead. He said, “You knew none of these men?”

“I recognized one of the Russians—a colonel attached to the embassy, by the name of Colonel Dimitri Chernishav. I understand he and Ross were friends from Ross’s time in Russia.”

The name meant nothing to Sebastian. “Anyone else?”

She made a face. “Well, there’s Antoine de La Rocque.”

“Who is he?”

“Once, he was a priest. He fled France in the first wave, more than twenty years ago now. He has something of a reputation as a collector of rare, old books. He has opened part of his collection to the public—to the paying public, of course, although he claims that is only to keep out the riffraff.”

“Where is this?”

“Great Russell Street, near the museum. Although he can frequently be found prowling the bookstalls in Westminster Hall.”

“Could de La Rocque have been one of the men you saw that night?”

“He visited Alexander Ross regularly. But was he one of the men I saw that night?” Again, that enigmatic smile. “Who knows?”

Sebastian was beginning to suspect she knew considerably more than she was willing to reveal. But all he said was, “The second man—the one you say went upstairs and came back down again so quickly—at what time was this?”

“Somewhere around half past midnight. It was shortly before I retired for the night. I keep rooms in another house I own near here,” she explained, “on Ryder Street. So it is always possible someone could have arrived to see Monsieur Ross after I left here. Or Monsieur Ross himself may have stepped out. I would not know.”

Sebastian pushed to his feet. “You’ve been most helpful, Madame; thank you.”

She gazed up at him thoughtfully. “Yet you wonder why, when I know your reason for asking these questions, I have given you the name of one of my countrymen—a fellow émigré. Hmm?”

He had, in fact, been wondering exactly that.

The skin beside her remaining eye crinkled with her smile. “For some time now, those of us in the émigré community have suspected that there is a traitor in our midst. One who claims to despise Napoléon and all the while secretly passing information back to Paris.”

Sebastian had heard such rumors. He said, “You think de La Rocque could be the traitor?”

She pressed her lips together and shrugged. “He claims he fled France to avoid being put to death as a nonjuring priest.” Tens of thousands of priests had fled Revolutionary France rather than take the antipapal oath of religion; those who stayed faced either death or deportation to a penal colony. “Yet he will also laugh and tell you he lost his faith in God at the age of ten. Both cannot be true.”

“That doesn’t make him a traitor,” Sebastian said.

“No. But it makes him a liar. Remember that when you speak to him.”

Hero Jarvis sat at the heavy oak table in the library of the Jarvis town house on Berkeley Square. She held a pen in one hand; piles of maps and books lay scattered about her. She had intended to devote the afternoon to a survey she was preparing on the few surviving traces of London’s lost monastic houses. But the ink had long ago dried on the nib as she stared unseeingly at the garden beyond the room’s tall windows.

She’d told Lord Devlin the truth when she said it had been her intention never to marry. She might work hard to change England’s draconian marriage laws and the unconscionable powers granted husbands over their wives, but she was realistic enough to know that real change was still generations away. And so she had poured the energy that other women her age devoted to their families into studies and articles and draft legislation. She’d told Devlin she intended to continue her efforts, and she did. But she was no fool, and she suspected her life was about to change in ways she couldn’t begin to imagine and didn’t want.

There was also the matter of who would take over from Hero the management of her father’s big house on Berkeley Square. Hero’s grandmother, the Dowager Lady Jarvis, had long ago retired to her rooms on the second floor and rarely ventured forth to do more than complain or criticize; Hero’s own mother, Annabelle, Lady Jarvis, was so feeble both physically and emotionally that the mere thought of trying to select a menu or deal with tradesmen was enough to send her tottering toward her couch, vinaigrette in hand.