C. Harris - Who Buries the Dead

Jarvis leaned forward, his hand coming up to stay the footman who had moved to close the door. “I don’t like Hero’s involvement in this affair; it’s too dangerous.”

“Hero lives her own life as she sees fit-as well you know.”

Something flared in the powerful man’s eyes. “If anything should happen to either my daughter or my grandson because of this ridiculous obsession of yours, you won’t live long enough to mourn them.”

Then he settled back, turned his face away, and signaled his coachman to drive on.

Sebastian drove his curricle to the Home Office, where he learned from a helpful clerk that Lord Sidmouth was in Downing Street and would surely be closeted with the Prime Minister for the rest of the day on a matter of supreme urgency that the clerk refused to particularize.

“Think ’e’s avoiding ye?” asked Tom when Sebastian took the reins again, then paused to stare thoughtfully toward the river.

“Perhaps. But perhaps not.”

The discovery that an undetermined number of royal relics-including the head of King Charles I-were missing from the chapel at Windsor Castle had added a bizarre new twist to the murder of Stanley Preston. It seemed probable that whoever stole the relics did so with the intent of selling them to Preston, either directly or-more likely-through some unknown middleman. Could that explain Preston’s presence at the bridge on such a cold, wet night? Was he there to take possession of the stolen relics?

The problem with that theory was that such items were typically delivered to their wealthy purchasers’ doorsteps, discreetly hidden inside straw-filled tea chests. Not handed over under cloak of darkness at the end of a deserted lane. Yet the presence of Charles I’s coffin strap at the murder scene suggested an undeniable link. Had the relics been dangled before Preston as clever bait to lure him to some out-of-the-way spot where he could be murdered? Why was the engraved strap left at the scene? Deliberately? Or by accident?

And where was the King’s purloined head?

Still pondering these questions and more, Sebastian turned his horses toward Knightsbridge and a ramshackle hostelry called the Shepherd’s Rest.

Captain Hugh Wyeth was playing solitaire at a table in the crowded taproom, a half-empty tankard of ale at his elbow, a deck of cards held in his left hand, his right arm resting in a sling. He looked up when Sebastian approached his table, his gaze assessing, guarded.

“You’re Devlin?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Wyeth set his deck of cards upside down amidst the ruins of his game. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Six years of war coupled with the pain of a severe injury and long recovery had etched lines in the captain’s once boyish face. But he was still, as Jane Austen had noted, devastatingly handsome in his regimentals, with black hair and blue eyes and lean, sun-darkened features. He gaze never left Sebastian’s. “I didn’t kill Stanley Preston.”

“I imagine it would be rather difficult to cut off a man’s head with your arm incapacitated,” said Sebastian, nodding to the sling.

“So it would-if I were right-handed. As it happens, I am not.”

“Ah.”

A group of laughing officers, some on crutches, others looking more hale, crowded into the taproom. Sebastian said, “Are you capable of walking?”

The captain rose to his feet. “Of course. It’s mainly my arm that’s still not working right. But I hope to be able to rejoin my regiment soon.”

“Where were you wounded?” Sebastian asked as they left the inn and cut across Knightsbridge toward the Life Guards barracks and the park beyond.

Wyeth stumbled as he stepped off the kerb, his lips tightening in a fleeting grimace as he regained his balance. “San Muñoz, last fall.”

“You’re certain you’re up to walking?” asked Sebastian, watching him.

“My leg gets stiff if I sit for too long, that’s all.”

They cut between the officers’ stables and the riding school, the tall brick buildings casting cold, dark shadows across the ground.

Sebastian said, “I take it Miss Preston warned you to expect me?”

“She did, yes. She’s terrified I’m going to be blamed for her father’s death.”

“Because Preston objected to your friendship?”

A gleam of self-deprecating amusement showed in the captain’s pain-shadowed face. “Oh, I don’t think he’d have had too much difficulty with our friendship . It was the prospect of something more serious that he found intolerable.” He watched a troop of new recruits leading their horses from the stables to the riding school, his smile fading as the clatter of shod hooves over cobbles echoed between the crowded buildings. “Look-I understand now just how presumptuous it was of me all those years ago to ask someone as young as Anne was then to share my life; to expect her to follow the drum and face all the hardships and dangers that come with being an Army wife. But at the time. .” He hesitated, then shrugged. “We were both so young, and I was so very proud of my new colors-proud and utterly blind to how foolish it would have been for a woman with her prospects to throw herself away on a poor vicar’s son from the fens of East Anglia.”

The words were right: contrite, respectful of conventions, resigned. And yet. .

And yet, Sebastian could sense the anger thrumming through the captain’s lean, battle-hardened frame. Anger at himself, for his lack of major advancement in the Army. Anger at the fates, for the impoverished birth that was none of his doing. Anger at society, for the barriers it had thrown up to keep him from marrying the woman he loved. He hid it well, but the anger was there, deep-seated and powerful.

Powerful enough to drive him to cut off a man’s head while in the grip of a murderous rage?

Perhaps.

“Your parents are still there?” asked Sebastian. “In East Anglia?”

“No. My mother died not long after I was sent overseas, and my father passed away six months ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ve an older sister living here, in Knightsbridge. That’s why I came to London. She hasn’t the room to put me up in her house, but it’s good to at least have her nearby.” He cast Sebastian a sideways glance. “I didn’t come to London expecting to see Anne again, if that’s what you’re thinking. To be honest, I imagined she must have married someone else years ago.”

“But you did see her.”

“We encountered each other-quite by chance-in Bond Street one morning.” He swallowed hard, as if he found it necessary to choke back an upsurge of emotion before he could continue. “I thought I’d managed to forget her; truly, I did. But then I saw her, and it was as if all those years just. . melted away.”

Sebastian stared off across the park to where a nursemaid was playing catch with her two young charges. He himself had loved passionately and unwisely as a very young man, and come home from war to discover his love for the beautiful, brilliant actress Kat Boleyn still as intense-and still as hopelessly, impossibly wrong in the eyes of society. It was a love that had come close to destroying him.

That might well have destroyed him, if it hadn’t been for Hero.

He said, “How did Preston find out you were in London again?”

“Some busybody spied Anne walking with me in the park last week and told him. He confronted Anne, and she confessed the truth.”

“Which is?”

“That our feelings have not changed.”

Sebastian watched one of the little boys catch the ball, then tumble over backward, his delighted laughter carrying on the breeze. Captain Wyeth’s frank confession gave the lie to what Anne Preston had told him just that morning. Was Wyeth more honest? Sebastian wondered. Or simply clever enough to realize that claims of mere friendship were unlikely to be believed?