C Harris - Where Shadows Dance

Jarvis remained silent. Then he said, his voice calm, “I take it this is some sort of a jest. A vulgar wager, perhaps, or—”

“You know it is not,” said Sebastian, turning onto Whitehall.

“You would have me believe that Hero has agreed to this? Hero?”

“Yes.”

“Preposterous.”

“Ask her.”

Jarvis’s large fist tightened around the seat’s iron railing. “And if I refuse my consent?”

Glancing sideways, Sebastian studied the older man’s florid, closed face. The thought of having Lord Jarvis as his father-in-law alarmed him almost as much as the concept of taking Hero Jarvis to wife. He said, “I assume you know your daughter better than that. She is determined to wed, with or without your approval.”

Jarvis let out a sound somewhere between a grunt and a snort. “Why are you doing this?”

Sebastian met Jarvis’s fierce stare. He tried to remind himself the man was a father, with a father’s concerns. “Believe me when I say that my motives are nothing except honorable.”

Jarvis turned his head away. “Pull up here.”

Sebastian reined in his horses and waited while the Baron clambered down from the high seat. “The Archbishop’s chapel in Lambeth. Thursday. Eleven o’clock. Be there or not, as you choose,” he said, and drove off to retrieve his groom.

Paul Gibson limped up Tower Hill, increasingly conscious of a faint but unmistakable stench of putrefying flesh that intensified as he drew closer to his small stone house and the adjoining surgery.

He was met at the entrance by his housekeeper, a squarefaced, foul-tempered matron named Mrs. Federico. “I’m a housekeeper, I am,” she squawked, flapping her stained apron at him. “A housekeeper! Not some bleedin’ sexton.”

“And a wonderful housekeeper you are, too, Mrs. Federico,” lied Gibson, turning on the Irish and giving her a cajoling smile. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

ʺHmph ,ʺ she said, stomping after him down the narrow hall. “I told them, ‘I want nothin’ to do with that thing.’ But did they listen? No. ‘Do you have a key to the buildin’ out the back?’ they ask me. ‘Not bloody likely,ʹ says I. ‘Why, just keepin’ his house and cookin’ his meals is more than a Christian ought to be asked to do,’ says I. ‘Have you seen what he keeps in those jars of his?’ says I.”

Gibson poured a tankard of ale from the pitcher in the kitchen and headed out the back door. The jars—or, more properly, their contents—were the excuse Mrs. Federico used to avoid cleaning most of the rooms in the house. He said, “I take it someone’s brought me a body, have they?”

“If you want to call it that. ‘Then we’ll just have to wait for him,’ they says, like the thing ain’t smellin’ bad enough to put the whole neighborhood off its dinner.”

Gibson grunted.

She followed him out onto the back stoop. “I’ve already had Mel Jacobs here complainin’. And Mrs. Cummings too. Worse than a bloody charnel house, it is.” She stopped at the top of the steps. “You don’t pay me enough for this,” she shouted after him as he cut across the unkempt yard. “You hear? You don’t pay me enough!”

He found the constables waiting for him in the narrow strip of shade cast by the small outbuilding’s stone walls. One was a gnarled, grizzled old codger who looked to be missing most of his teeth. The other, a burly, ruddy-faced man, pushed to his feet with a sympathetic grin as Gibson walked up to them.

“Present for ye,” said the constable, nodding toward the canvas-covered shell at their feet. “From Bow Street. Sir Henry Lovejoy.”

Hunkering down beside the shrouded form, Gibson flipped back the canvas. “Good God.”

“Sorry. Guess I shoulda warned ye.”

“The smell should have done that,” said Gibson, his gaze riveted by the bloated, discolored, insect-ravaged face.

“Quite a sight, ain’t he?”

“Is it a he?” asked Gibson. At this point, it was difficult to tell.

“Well, it’s wearin’ a gentleman’s clothes, all right. Found him in a ditch in Bethnal Green, we did. Sir Henry wants to know what ye can tell him about how the gentleman died—and maybe a bit about who he is, while yer at it.”

“Unidentified, is he?”

“‘Fraid so.” The constable gave him a concise outline of the body’s discovery. Then he nodded to the outbuilding’s padlocked door and said, “Want we should help ye move him inside?”

Gibson pushed to his feet. “Please. Just, ah ... give me a moment first.”

Unfastening the lock, he slipped through the partially open door and quickly pulled a sheet over what was left of Mr. Alexander Ross.

Lady Jarvis’s reaction to the news of her daughter’s approaching nuptials was at first incredulous, then hysterically joyous.

“Married! ” she squealed, leaping up from her daybed to throw her arms around Hero. Since Hero stood over five foot ten and Lady Jarvis barely topped five feet, the embrace was somewhat awkward. “Oh, Hero .” She dragged Hero down onto the daybed beside her. “And here I’d no notion. Do tell me everything .”

Hero shifted uncomfortably. She loved her mother dearly, but this was not a tale she ever intended to divulge to anyone. “There isn’t much to tell, actually.”

“How can you say such a thing? When I must have heard you insist a thousand times or more that you were determined to end your days an old maid.”

“Yes, well ... There are certainly undeniable advantages to the married state.” She searched her mind to come up with one. “This obligation to drag a maid with me wherever I go, for example; I find it beyond fatiguing.”

Lady Jarvis looked puzzled for a moment, then gave a shaky laugh. “The things you do say, Hero.” Her smile faded and she reached up to touch her fingertips to her daughter’s cheek almost wistfully. “I do hope you will be happy, child.”

Hero took her mother’s dainty hand between her own larger, more capable ones. “I’m quite certain that I shall be. Lord Devlin is above all else a gentleman.”

“And so handsome! And dashing .”

“Yes, he is certainly that,” said Hero dryly. She felt her mother’s hand tremble within hers and hastened to add, “And you mustn’t worry about how you shall contrive to manage without me, for I intend to find a companion for you—someone who’ll be able to see to your comfort as well as assist with the household affairs. And of course I shall be able to visit often. It’s no great distance, after all, from Brook Street to Berkeley Square.”

“Don’t be silly. Now is not the time for you to be worrying about me.”

“I shan’t worry about you. But I have every intention of continuing to concern myself with your happiness and well-being.”

Lady Jarvis tightened her grip on her daughter’s fingers. “You know this is the answer to my prayers. For I don’t scruple to tell you that I had quite given up hope of ever seeing you settled.”

Hero sank her teeth into her lower lip and forced herself to keep silent.

“And grandchildren ,” gushed Lady Jarvis, her eyes shining. “I do hope we won’t have long to wait.”

“I trust not,” said Hero.

It was some hours later, when Hero was gathering together her papers in the library, that she heard her father’s heavy tread in the hall and turned to find him standing in the doorway.

“Is it true, then?” Lord Jarvis demanded without preamble, his gaze hard on his daughter’s face. “What Devlin tells me?”

“It is.” Hero went back to the task of assembling her papers. “I hope you mean to wish me happy, Papa. But I expect you know me well enough to realize that I shall marry, with or without your blessing.”