C. Harris: Who Buries the Dead

“What makes you so certain it wasn’t footpads?”

She lifted her chin. “Why, I could see his pocket watch, couldn’t I? Danglin’ from its chain like he was just checkin’ the time. Ain’t no footpad gonna go t’ all the trouble of cuttin’ off a feller’s head and then leave his watch like that.”

“Mr. Preston’s greatcoat was unbuttoned when you saw him?”

She frowned. “Well, I guess it musta been. Didn’t really think about it, but, yeah, I reckon it was.”

Sebastian made inquiries at the stables, but Cian O’Neal hadn’t come to work that morning. He eventually tracked the lad to a tumbledown cottage off Wilderness Row, where he lived with his widowed mother and five younger siblings.

Sebastian’s knock was answered by the lad’s mother, a rail-thin, worn-down woman with gray-threaded hair who looked sixty but was probably younger than forty, judging by the squalling infant in her arms.

“Beggin’ your pardon, me lord,” she said, dropping a curtsy when Sebastian explained who he was and the purpose of his visit, “but I’m afraid you won’t be gettin’ much sense out of Cian. He didn’t sleep a wink all night-just sat in the corner by the fire and shivered. Some constable come by here from Bow Street and tried to talk to him a bit ago, and the poor lad started babblin’ all sorts of nonsense about havin’ seen the Dullahan.”

Sebastian had heard of the Dullahan. A figure in Irish folklore said to be a horseman dressed all in black and astride a black, fire-breathing stallion, he rode the darkened lanes and byways, carrying his own head in his hand. According to legend, whenever the Dullahan stops, a man, woman, or child dies.

Sebastian said, “I’d like to try talking to him.”

He knew by the worry pinching the woman’s face that she’d rather have denied him. But she belonged to a class whose members had been trained since birth to obey their “betters.”

She dropped a curtsy and stood back to let him enter.

The cottage was clean but wretchedly poor, with low, heavy beams, a swept dirt floor, and a worm-eaten old table with benches that looked as if they’d been knocked together from scrap wood picked up off the street. Of one room only, the place had a mattress in an alcove half-hidden behind a tattered curtain and a pegged, roughly hewn ladder that led up to a loft.

Cian O’Neal sat on a low, three-legged stool before the fire, his shoulders hunched forward, his hands thrust together between his tightly clasped knees. He was a fine-looking lad of seventeen or eighteen, big and strapping and startlingly handsome, with clear blue eyes and golden hair that curled softly against his lean cheeks. He kept his attention fixed on the fire, as if oblivious to Devlin’s approach. But when his mother touched him on the shoulder, he jerked violently and looked up at her with wide, terrified eyes.

“Here’s a lord come to talk to you, Cian,” she said gently. “About last night.”

The boy’s gaze slid from her face to Sebastian. A spasm passed over his features, the chest beneath his thin smock jerking visibly with his quick, agitated breathing.

Sebastian said, “I just want to know if you saw anything-heard anything-that might help us figure out what happened last night.”

The boy opened his mouth, the air rasping in his constricted throat as he drew a deep breath that came out in a high-pitched, terrified scream.

Sebastian pressed a coin into the poor woman’s hand and left.

“You aren’t seriously suggesting that I might somehow know who killed Stanley, or why? Good God!”

Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth and Home Secretary of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, stood with his hands clenched at his sides, his gaze on the big man who sat at his ease in a tapestry-covered armchair beside the empty hearth of his Carlton House chambers.

Charles, Lord Jarvis, fingered the handle of a diamond-studded quizzing glass he’d lately taken to wearing on a riband around his neck. “You would have me believe you do not?”

“Of course not!”

Jarvis pursed his lips. He was an unusually large man, impressive in both height and breadth, his face fleshy, his lips full and unexpectedly sensual, the aquiline nose he’d bequeathed to his daughter, Hero, lending a harsh cast to his face. Addington might be Home Secretary while Jarvis carried no official title, but Jarvis was by far the more powerful man. He owed his preeminence not to his kinship with the King-which was distant-but to the brilliance of his mind and the unflinching ruthlessness of the methods he was willing to use to protect the power and prestige of the monarchy at home and the interests of Britain abroad. The only thing that had kept the Prince Regent from suffering the same fate meted out to his fellow royals across the Channel was Jarvis, and most people knew it.

Jarvis raised his quizzing glass to one eye and regarded the Home Secretary through it. “You would have me believe this murder has nothing to do with you?”

“Nothing.”

“The man was your cousin.”

A faint, telltale line of color appeared high on the Home Secretary’s cheekbones. “We were not. . close.”

“And his death in no way involves any affairs of state?”

“No.”

Jarvis let the quizzing glass fall. “You’re quite certain of that?”

“Yes!”

Jarvis rose to his feet. “You relieve my mind. If you should, however, discover you are mistaken, you will of course alert me at once?”

Sidmouth’s jaw tightened. He was in his mid-fifties now, his once dark hair turning silver, his waist grown thick, the flesh of his hands and face as soft and pale as any pampered gentlewoman’s. But he had the jaw of a butcher or a prizefighter, strong and powerful and pugnacious. “Of course,” he said.

“Good. That will be all.”

Sidmouth bowed curtly and swept from the room.

A moment later, the tall, dark-haired former hussar major who had been waiting in the antechamber appeared in the doorway. His name was Peter Archer, and he was one of several former military officers in Jarvis’s employ.

“Sidmouth is hiding something,” said Jarvis. “And I want to know what it is.”

A faint smile curled the major’s lips as he bowed. “Yes, my lord.”

Hoping that Paul Gibson had made some progress in the postmortem of Preston’s body, Sebastian turned his horses toward the Tower of London, where the Irishman kept a small surgery in the shadow of the grim medieval fortress’s soot-stained walls.

The friendship between Sebastian and the former regimental surgeon dated back nearly ten years, to the days when both men wore the King’s Colors and fought the King’s wars from Italy to the West Indies to the Peninsula. Then a cannonball took off the lower part of Gibson’s left leg, leaving him racked with pain and tormented by an increasingly serious opium addiction. In the end, he’d left the Army and come here, to London, where he divided his time between his surgery and teaching anatomy at the city’s hospitals. He knew more about the human body than anyone Sebastian had ever met, thanks in part to an ongoing series of illicit dissections performed on cadavers filched from the area’s churchyards by resurrection men.

Until that January, Gibson had lived alone. But he now shared the small, ancient stone house beside his surgery with Alexi Sauvage, a beautiful, enigmatic, and unconventional Frenchwoman who was as damaged in her own way as Gibson.

Rather than chance an encounter with her, Sebastian cut through the narrow passage that ran along Gibson’s house and led to the unkempt yard at the rear. Overgrown with weeds and a mute witness to the secrets buried there, the yard stretched down to a high stone wall that abutted the single-room outbuilding where Gibson performed both his legally sanctioned autopsies and his covert dissections. Through the open door, he could hear the Irishman singing softly under his breath , “Ghile Mear ‘sa seal faoi chumha, ‘S Éire go léir faoi chlócaibh dubha. . ”