C. Harris - Why Kings Confess

He found Cat’s Hole crowded with beggars and seamen and vendors selling everything from pickled eggs and salted herrings to cracked old shoes and mended tin pots. The air was thick with the smell of the river and overflowing bog houses and unwashed humanity. His knock on the door at the end of the corridor off Hangman’s Court went unanswered for so long he was beginning to think Claire Bisette had moved away. Then the door swung slowly inward to reveal the sad-eyed woman he remembered from the other night.

“I’m sorry to bother you again,” he said, removing his hat. “But I wonder if I might ask you a few more questions about the night Dr. Damion Pelletan was killed?”

He realized she was younger than he’d first taken her to be, probably closer to thirty than forty. She had her dark blond hair pulled back into a neat bun, and the wild look of unimaginable anguish he remembered had been replaced by a quiet kind of hopeless despair that was in its own way even more heartbreaking to witness.

She nodded and stepped back to allow him to enter. “Monsieur.”

The room was as cold and forlorn as it had been the first time Sebastian had seen it. And he knew without being told that she had spent the money he’d given her not on fuel or food for herself, but on securing a proper burial for her dead child.

As if aware of the drift of his thoughts, she squared her shoulders with a ghost of pride and said, “What was it you wished to know?”

“I realize this might be a difficult question to answer since you’d never met Damion Pelletan before that night, but. . did he seem at all agitated in any way? Angry? Or perhaps even afraid for some reason?”

Her eyes narrowed. Instead of answering, she said, “How is Alexi Sauvage?” The question was not the non sequitur it might have seemed.

“She is much improved. Unfortunately, the blow to her head has affected her memory. She recalls little from that night. Which is why I was hoping you might be able to help us piece together what happened, and why.”

The Frenchwoman continued to stare at him for a moment longer. But the answer seemed to satisfy her. She went to stand at a small cracked window overlooking the dark, narrow courtyard below. “I found him a most gentle, generous man, and he could not have been kinder to me. But. .”

“But?” prompted Sebastian.

“Since your last visit, I’ve been trying to recall everything that was said that night. He and the doctoresse were arguing-and I don’t mean about Cecile.”

“Do you remember what about?”

“The conversation was held in undertones, but I heard enough to understand that the disagreement was over a woman. Not a patient, but someone from Dr. Pelletan’s personal life.”

“A woman?”

She nodded. “I had the impression the woman was someone from his past who is now wed to another. I could be wrong-it was all said in whispers, and I was so very distracted-but I had the impression he wanted this woman to leave her husband.”

“And Alexandrie Sauvage thought that would be a mistake?”

“She did, yes.”

“Did she say why?”

“If she did, I did not hear it. When your child is ill. .” Her voice trailed away.

Claire Bisette was a woman whose life had been crowded with unimaginable hardships and sorrows. For the sake of her child, she had kept going, struggling every day to find food, to survive. But now, with Cecile dead, it was as if something had died within her too. And Sebastian knew it was her will to live.

He said, “When was the last time you ate?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It does not matter.”

“It does.” He removed one of his cards from his pocket and held it out to her. “My wife is due to be confined shortly and is in need of a nursemaid for our first child. She would prefer to engage someone older and better educated than those typically sent by the employment agencies. I realize that such a position is far below the station to which you were once accustomed, but it is a beginning.”

Rather than take the card, she shook her head, one hand running self-consciously down the side of her ragged, old-fashioned gown. “I could not possibly present myself to your wife looking like this.”

“A lack of proper clothing is easily remedied, unlike deficiencies in education, experience, and character.”

When she refused to take the card, he laid it on the wooden mantel of the cold hearth. “I’ll tell Lady Devlin to expect you,” he said, and then left before she could hand it back to him.

• • •

Sebastian tried to remember what Alexandrie Sauvage had told him about Lady Peter Radcliff. But when he thought about it, he realized he couldn’t recall having discussed the beautiful, sad-eyed Frenchwoman with Damion Pelletan’s sister at all. When she’d been fighting for her life in the aftereffects of concussion and possible pneumonia, he could understand the omission. But he found it difficult to believe that a woman truly interested in finding her brother’s killer would fail to disclose his dangerous interest in another man’s wife.

Lady Peter’s reasons for failing to reveal the true extent of her involvement with the young French doctor were considerably easier to understand.

• • •

Lord Peter Radcliff’s beautiful French-born wife was watching her little brother race two gaily colored wooden sailboats across the narrow strip of ornamental water in Green Park when Sebastian walked up to her. A blustery wind scuttled a tumble of gray clouds overhead, sending shifting patterns of light and shadow across the ruffled surface of the water and billowing the cloth sails of the crudely fashioned boats. “Noel,” Lady Peter called, laughing. “I think the blue one is going to win.” Then she froze, the merriment dying from her eyes as she turned her head to see Sebastian.

She wore a fur-trimmed pelisse of dark hunter green wool made high at the throat and long in the sleeves. And it occurred to Sebastian that even on balmy days she invariably stayed away from styles that revealed too much of her skin.

But nothing could disguise the livid bruise that rode high on her left cheekbone.

L ady Peter stood very still, only her shoulders jerking with the agitation of her breathing as she watched Sebastian walk up to her. And he found himself wondering why she feared him so much.

She said, “Why are you here? What do you want from me?”

“Only some information about Damion Pelletan.” He shifted his gaze to the mock naval race before them. “Who made the boats? Lord Peter?”

She shook her head. “Noel. He has ambitions to go to sea.”

“It can be a lucrative career,” said Sebastian.

“It can also be a deadly one-even when England is not at war, as it is now.”

“England will always be at war with someone, somewhere.”

“True.” He was aware of her gaze lifting from the boats to his face. “But you didn’t come here to discuss my brother’s future career options, did you, Lord Devlin?”

He watched the two boats skim across the choppy surface of the water. “You told me you grew up next door to Damion Pelletan, in Paris.”

“Y-yes,” she said warily, obviously unsure where he was going with this.

“How well did you know his sister, Alexi?”

“Alexi?” She let out her breath in a soft sigh, as if relieved by the seemingly innocuous direction of the conversation. “Not well. She was six years older than I, and very serious. She always dreamt of becoming a physician. She had little use for dolls or needlework or silly little girls like me.”

“She went to the University of Bologna to study?”

Lady Peter nodded. “She was just sixteen. Dr. Philippe had an uncle there, and she went to stay with him.”