C. Harris - Why Kings Confess

For nine years. Nine years. .

“Bloody hell,” said Sebastian. He was seeing a blond, green-eyed boy sailing two painted wooden boats across the water, while his sister watched him with a mother’s intense love and pride. “It’s Noel Durant, isn’t it? The boy isn’t Lady Peter’s ‘brother’; he’s her son. By Damion Pelletan.”

She turned to stare at him, her face slack with astonishment. “You knew?”

He shook his head. “No. I’d assumed Pelletan came to London because he’d somehow learned of Lord Peter’s treatment of his wife. But he came because of the boy, didn’t he? How did he ever happen to learn the truth?”

“From an old priest whose deathbed he attended in Paris. The priest was delirious. At first Damion thought he was only rambling nonsense. Except the more he heard, the more the old man’s words came to make sense.”

“Julia Durant knew she was with child before she left Paris?”

“She did, yes.”

“Then why the hell didn’t she tell the man she claimed to love?”

“Because she was sixteen. Because she was afraid. Because her father had assured her the family’s flight from France would be temporary. Only, it wasn’t.”

“And so she found herself a refugee in London,” Sebastian said softly. “Unwed, and growing increasingly heavy with child. The poor girl.”

Alexandrie Sauvage nodded. “Once the general and his wife realized what was happening, they kept Julia out of sight. They knew that if the truth ever became known, she would be hopelessly ruined. Madame Durant was young enough to pretend to be with child herself. I’m told she even went so far as to strap a pillow to her belly when she appeared in public. In due time, the child was born and presented as General Durant’s son.”

“He had no other children?”

“Two older sons. Both died fighting Napoleon.”

Sebastian had always wondered why the aging French general married his only daughter to a man like Lord Peter Radcliff. Yes, Radcliff was a duke’s son, handsome and brilliantly connected. But a general with Durant’s experience with men must surely have seen his son-in-law for the vain, self-absorbed dissolute he was.

Now it all made sense.

Sebastian said, “Does Radcliff know?”

“About Noel, you mean? I’m not certain.”

“Yet you knew.”

“Julia told me before she left Paris. She told me in confidence, and I swore I’d never tell anyone.”

“Did Pelletan know Radcliff beats her?”

“Before he came? No. But it didn’t take him long to figure it out. That’s when he tried to convince her to go back to Paris with him-for her sake, as well as for the boy’s.”

“How did he discover you’d been aware of the child all along?”

“Something Julia said to him. He was furious. I tried to make him understand that it was a secret told to me in confidence. How could I have betrayed it? But he wouldn’t listen.”

“Yet he went with you to St. Katharine’s, to see the sick child?”

“Damion was a physician. He would never put his own personal emotions ahead of the well-being of a patient. He went with me. But he was in a passion. We were still arguing about it after we left Hangman’s Court.”

Sebastian studied her tightly held features. It explained why, if someone were following them, they hadn’t heard the footsteps until it was too late. But while it might, believably, give Lord Peter Radcliff a stronger reason to kill his wife’s former lover, it did nothing to explain the deaths of either Karmele or Colonel Foucher.

He said, “Do you think Lady Peter was still in love with Damion?”

“I think she was, yes.”

“Yet she was reluctant to return with him to Paris?”

“She said she’d made a commitment to Lord Peter-a commitment she couldn’t go back on.”

“Despite the fact he beat her?”

“I’ve known women to make excuses for men who beat them so badly they died.”

“You mean like Abel Bullock’s wife?”

“Yes.”

Sebastian studied her calm, proud face. She was the kind of woman who had long ago turned her back on society’s expectations for one of her sex. She had studied medicine at an Italian university and joined her physician-husband in following Napoleon’s Grand Army. And when he died, she’d taken a lieutenant as her lover and continued ministering to the medical needs of the soldiers. How she had then ended up with an English captain as her husband, Sebastian could only guess. But the realization that Gibson was falling daily more and more under her spell twisted at Sebastian’s guts and made him want to shake some sense into his friend.

He said, “Why are you here? I mean here, at Gibson’s.”

He expected her to deliberately misunderstand his question, to make excuses and claim the need for a place of refuge. Instead, she said, “Someone needs to help him.”

“Gibson? He’s doing just fine. Or at least, he was.” Before you came into his life.

“If you mean he was doing a fine job of killing himself, you are right. Do you have any idea what long-term use of opium does to the human body? Especially at the levels at which he has been taking it.”

“He doesn’t go overboard that often.”

“How do you know?”

Sebastian opened his mouth, then closed it. The truth was, he’d seen little of Gibson these past four months or more.

He said, “The man is in pain. How do you expect him to live with that?”

“I can help him with the pain, if he will only let me.”

“The way you helped the children and nuns of Santa Iria?”

Her head jerked back as if he’d slapped her. “I didn’t know. .”

“Yes, you did. You knew. And you let it happen.”

Her voice was a harsh tear. “If the blood of those children is on my hands, it’s on yours too.”

“Yes. The difference between you and me is that I’ve never denied it.”

She stared back at him, and the death-haunted memories of that long-ago Portuguese spring were like a hushed presence in the room with them.

He said, “Paul Gibson is my friend. I won’t let you destroy him.”

“Destroy him?” She gave a ringing laugh. “What in God’s name do you think I’m going to do to him? Pluck out his heart and his soul?”

“How many husbands and lovers have you had? How many are still alive?”

She didn’t answer, but the flesh of her face pulled taut across the bones and her eyes darkened with the power of some emotion he couldn’t quite define.

He settled his hat on his head and turned toward the door.

He was about to close it behind him when she took a quick step forward, one hand fisted in her grimy apron, the other coming up to thrust back the lock of vibrant hair that had tumbled onto her forehead. “Four. I’ve had four. Two lovers, two husbands. And you are right; all are dead. And all but the last were killed by Englishmen .” She practically spat the last word at him.

“What happened to the last one?” he asked. “What happened to Captain Miles Sauvage?”

But she simply wrenched the door from his grip and slammed it in his face.

G ibson was leaning against the slab in the center of the small stone outbuilding at the base of the yard, his arms smeared with gore up to the elbows, when Sebastian came to stand in the entrance.

What was left of Colonel Andre Foucher lay faceup on the slab, his body naked and eviscerated, his ruined eyes hideous in the glare of the lantern Gibson had lit against the morning gloom.

“Ah, there you are,” said the surgeon, laying aside his scalpel and reaching for a rag to wipe his hands. “There’s something I wanted you to see. Here; help me turn him over.”