C. Harris - Who Buries the Dead

“I take it you fall into the latter category?”

Thistlewood gave another of his odd chuckles. “Reckon I do. And you too.”

“Me?”

“Why else would you do what you do? Look for murderers, I mean.”

Sebastian started to deny it. If asked, he’d have said his dedication to finding a measure of justice for the victims of murder had far more to do with guilt and a need for redemption than with a fear of death. And yet. .

He watched as the curiosity collector crumpled the last of his bread and scattered it in the water. The branches of the elms overhead cast shifting patterns of light and shade across the waves washing gently against the riverbank; the air smelled of damp earth and the wild mint that grew in the hollows between the gnarled roots. He listened to the splash of a wherryman’s oars farther out on the Thames, heard the squeals and laughter of children playing in a nearby pasture. And he was forced to acknowledge that, in a sense, Thistlewood was right. Except it wasn’t his own death Sebastian feared but the death of those he loved, lest they be forced to pay with their own lives for the lives of the women and children he’d failed to save.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Thistlewood asked suddenly. “Surely you have-you being in the Army and all.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I attend the hangings at Newgate, sometimes. I watch the hangman pull that lever and I think, What must it feel like, to kill someone? To know that one minute they’re living and the next they’re not, and it’s you who’s done that.” He looked at Sebastian expectantly, his lips pulled back in a hopeful, almost eager half smile.

But Sebastian only shook his head, unwilling to satisfy the man’s ghoulish curiosity.

Until that moment, Sebastian would have said he doubted that Thistlewood had anything to do with the recent string of murders. Despite Thistlewood’s lies, despite the public arguments and intense professional and personal jealousy, Sebastian had largely discounted him as a suspect, instead becoming more and more convinced that the grisly killings were the work of someone hired by Sinclair Oliphant or Priss Mulligan, or perhaps even by Preston’s own daughter, Anne.

Now he wasn’t so sure.

Mica McDougal leaned against his donkey cart, his beefy arms crossed at his chest, first one cheek, then the other puffing out with air as he stared thoughtfully at Hero.

“Stanley Preston? Ain’t ’e the cove what got ’is ’ead cut off out at Bloody Bridge?”

Hero nodded. “He visited Bucket Lane just hours before he was killed. I’m trying to find out why he went there and whom he saw.”

McDougal squinted up at the thick gray clouds scuttling in overhead to rob the day of its promise of warmth and sunshine. A cold wind had kicked up, ruffling the feathers of the gulls screaming overhead and intensifying the odor of raw fish that rose from both the man and his cart. “Ye thinkin’ maybe some coster done fer ’im?”

“No; not at all. But two other people who knew Preston and saw him that day are now dead too. Which means that whoever Preston visited in Bucket Lane could very well be in danger. Only he-or she-might not know it.”

McDougal brought his gaze back to her face. “Well, I can look into it, m’lady. But I can’t guarantee they’ll be willin’ t’ talk t’ ye.”

“I know. Just. . whoever it is, please try to help them understand that their lives might be threatened. If they know anything-anything at all-it’s important for them to come forward.”

He rasped one palm across the several days’ worth of beard shading his jaw. “I’ll try, my lady. I’ll try.”

The rain was already beginning to fall by the time Hero made it back to Brook Street, a fine but hard-driven rain that swirled in wind-whipped eddies between the tall town houses and stung the tender bare skin of her face.

She had just stepped from her carriage and was about to mount the front steps when she saw Devlin round the corner from Bond Street, the capes of his black greatcoat flapping in the wind, his hat tipped low against the downpour.

“Devlin,” she called, and he looked up, his face lean and unsmiling. Then his strange yellow eyes widened, his body jerking as the crack of a rifle shot reverberated between the tall row houses.

A shiny wet stain bloomed dark against the darkness of his coat.

“No!” Hero screamed.

The bullet’s impact spun him around. He grasped the iron railing of a nearby house’s area steps. Tried to stay upright. Crumpled slowly to his knees.

“Oh, my God. ” Hero ran, hands fisted in her skirts. Her world narrowed down to a gray wet canyon where the only sound was a desperate gasping she dimly recognized as her own, and the only color the red splash of Devlin’s blood.

“Sebastian.”

She dropped to her knees beside him, hands reaching for him. He lay curled on his side away from her, the rain washing over his pale face. She touched his shoulder and he turned toward her. She saw the confusion in those familiar yellow eyes, the pain that convulsed the features that were so like Devlin’s. But it wasn’t Devlin.

It was Jamie Knox.

Sebastian reached home just as Pippa, the barmaid from the Black Devil, was coming down the front steps. She had a paisley shawl drawn up over her head and a child of perhaps a year on her hip. At the sight of Sebastian she paused, her arms tightening around the child, so that he squirmed in protest.

“It’s your fault!” she screamed, tears mingling with the rain on her face. “I told him no good would come of it, but would he listen to me? No. He never listened t’ me.”

Sebastian stared at the child in her arms. It was a boy, with fine-boned features and a small, turned-up nose and the same yellow eyes that stared back at Sebastian from his own mirror.

From his own infant son.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

Her laugh was raw, torn; not really a laugh at all. “You sayin’ you don’t know? He’s layin’ up there in one of your own fancy beds, dyin’ because of you, and you don’t know ?”

He grabbed her arm more roughly than he’d intended. “Knox?”

She jerked away from him. “You tell him- You tell him, I won’t stay and watch him die.” And she pushed past him, her head bowed against the rain, her shoulders convulsing with her sobs as the boy gazed back at Sebastian with a solemn, intense stare.

Gibson was coming out of the guest bedroom at the end of the hall when Sebastian reached the second floor.

“How is he?”

The surgeon rubbed his eyes with a spread thumb and forefinger. “I’ve done what I can. The bullet ripped through his lungs and lodged beside his heart. He’s bleeding inside, and there’s no way to stop it. At this point, it’s just a matter of time.”

“Surely there’s some hope-a chance-”

Gibson shook his head. “Lady Devlin thinks whoever shot him mistook Knox for you.”

Sebastian felt an aching hollowness open up inside him, carved out by denial and rage and a hideous, familiar sense of guilt. “Where was he?”

“Just steps from your front door.” Gibson started to say something else, then stopped.

“What?” asked Sebastian.

“It’s just. . the resemblance is uncanny.”

“Yes,” said Sebastian, and turned toward the bedroom.

He found Knox lying with his eyes closed, so ashen and still that for a moment Sebastian thought him already dead. Then he saw the rifleman’s bare, bandaged chest jerk, heard the labored rasp of a dying man’s breath.

Hero sat nearby, her fingers laced together in her lap, her eyes sunken and stark, as if she’d just been given a glimpse into the yawning mouth of hell. “He was coming to see you,” she said softly.