C. Harris: Who Buries the Dead

“They rarely do,” observed Knightly, swinging his walking stick back and forth.

“True,” said Sebastian. “It seems that shortly after his arrival in Jamaica, our young heir impregnated and was forced to marry the daughter of a prominent local landowner. Unfortunately, the young man barely lived long enough to see his son take his first steps before succumbing with his bride to a yellow fever epidemic.”

“Yes, I’m afraid yellow jack has long been a terrible scourge in the warmer American colonies. But. . is there a point to this tale?”

“There is. You see, the father’s death meant the orphaned babe was now the Baronet’s new heir. The grandfather wanted the child raised in England, and the uncle finally agreed to bring him.”

Knightly kept his gaze on the wind-tossed trees in the park beyond the palace, his jaw set hard, and said nothing.

“The child had lost his wet nurse along with his parents,” said Sebastian, weaving together what he’d learned from Juba with what he’d been told by the Duchess of Claiborne, “and was being nursed by one of the uncle’s own slaves-a pale-skinned quadroon named Cally whose babe had died in the same epidemic. Cally was by all accounts a beautiful woman, so beautiful the uncle was rumored to have made her his mistress. When the uncle and the child set sail for England, Cally came with them.”

Knightly pursed his lips in a way that sucked in his cheeks, his gaze fixed relentlessly straight ahead.

“Now, here’s where it gets interesting,” said Sebastian. “Before he died, Douglas Sterling told Stanley Preston that he believed the real heir to the baronetcy had actually died in the epidemic along with his mother and father. That the child brought to England was in fact the child of the slave woman, Cally, and the uncle-”

“It’s a lie!” Nostrils flaring with the agitation of his breathing and both fists tightening on the handle of his walking stick, Knightly drew up abruptly and swung to face Sebastian. “You hear me? It’s all a lie.”

Thunder rumbled long and ominously close as Sebastian studied the older man’s rigid, angry face. “It may well be. But Dr. Douglas Sterling was a physician, which meant he was in a position to know if something irregular had occurred. I can’t explain why he kept silent all these years-perhaps he only suspected a switch had been made and was unable to prove it. But when he arrived back in London after a lengthy visit to his daughter to find Stanley Preston anxious to marry his daughter to that very child-long since grown to manhood and now in possession of a baronetcy to which he might actually have no real claim-I think Sterling decided to share his suspicions with Preston. Preston, of course, reacted to the tale with all the horror to be expected of a man obsessed with wealth and birth-not to mention a biblically inspired conviction in the superiority of the European race. It was you, after all, who told me of Preston’s aversion to miscegenation. Remember?”

Knightly fingered the catch on his walking stick-a walking stick that in all likelihood concealed a long, thin sword.

Watching him carefully, Sebastian said, “That morning, shortly after the doctor left, Preston called a hackney and went to Fish Street Hill. That’s where the old woman who’d once served as the child’s nurse now lives, you see; in Bucket Lane. When the child’s uncle returned to Jamaica, he left Cally behind to care for the boy. Only, when the lad was just three years old, Sir Maxwell dismissed her.” Sebastian paused. “If the child truly was hers, the separation must have caused her unimaginable agony. Although perhaps she consoled herself with the thought her son was growing up the heir to a baronet.”

“It’s not true,” said Knightly, his features dark and twisted with rage. “You hear me? None of it is true.”

“I hope not,” said Sebastian. “Because if it is true, then when you killed the old woman, Cally, you killed your own mother.”

The twin rows of Pall Mall’s lampposts lent a golden cast to the strengthening rain. Knightly stared straight ahead, his jaw clenched tight.

Sebastian said, “She denied it, you know. When Preston came to see her that day, Cally swore you were Beau Knightly’s son. That it was her own child who’d died in the yellow fever epidemic. And after Preston left, when the daughter she’d had by a London costermonger questioned her, she still denied it. So perhaps it is nothing more than an old doctor’s muddled suspicions. But three people are still dead because of it-four if you count the virger, Toop, who simply had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The rain was falling harder now, large drops that pinged on the iron handrail beside them and ran down the Baronet’s hard, sun-darkened cheeks. “You’re mad. Do you hear me? Utterly mad.”

Sebastian shook his head. “When he left Bucket Lane, Stanley Preston went to confront you, didn’t he? I’ve no doubt you denied it all to him, just as you’re denying it to me now. Why didn’t you kill him then, I wonder? Did the conversation take place somewhere too public? Is that why you decided to wait and kill him later that night when he went to meet Rowan Toop at Bloody Bridge? You did know of that meeting, didn’t you?”

Knightly gave a harsh, ringing laugh. “Try telling this tale to the magistrates and see how far you get without any proof. You have none. You hear me? You have nothing.” The laugh ended abruptly, his face twisting into something ugly as he brought up one hand to point a warning finger at Sebastian over the silver head of his swordstick. “But you breathe one word of this nonsense in the clubs- one word -and I swear to God, I’ll call you out for it.”

Sebastian studied the other man’s angry, pinched face, looking for some trace of the elegant bone structure that the old slave woman, Cally, had bequeathed to her daughter and grandson. But he could see only the slablike Anglo-Saxon features of a typical Englishman. “You’re right; I don’t have any proof yet. But I will.”

And then he walked away, leaving the Baronet staring after him, the silver-headed walking stick gripped tightly in his hands.

“What precisely are you trying to do?” asked Hero, later, staring at him. “Provoke Knightly into killing you?”

Sebastian walked over to where a carafe of brandy stood warming beside the library fire. “I’m hoping he’ll try. Because he’s right; I can’t prove he killed Preston. I can’t prove he killed any of them. The only thing I can do is rattle him enough that he does something stupid.”

“And if he should by some strange, inexplicable chance succeed in killing you?”

He looked over at her with a crooked smile. “Then you’ll know I was right.”

She made an inelegant noise deep in her throat and rose from the library table where she’d been working on her article. “If you are right about Knightly-which at this point is still an if -then how do you explain Diggory Flynn?”

Sebastian poured a measure of brandy into a glass and set aside the decanter. “I think Oliphant decided he needed to kill me as soon as he returned to London, and he hired Diggory Flynn to do the job.”

“Because he thought you intended to kill him?”

“Yes.” He went to stand at the library window, his brandy cradled in one hand as he stared out at the storm. “And if I had killed the bastard, Jamie Knox would still be alive today.”

A jagged sizzle of lightning lit up the nearly deserted wet street and silhouetted the dark rooftops of the opposite houses against the roiling underbelly of the storm clouds overhead. He could see a workman struggling to lash down the tools in his handcart, the lightning limning a pale, rain-washed face cut by the strap of an eye patch as the old man squinted up at the sky. Then the flash subsided, leaving the scene in near total darkness, and Sebastian realized the gusting wind must have blown out most of the oil lamps on the street.