C. Harris - What Darkness Brings

“Why show it to me?”

Knox hesitated. “Let’s just say I consider Russell Yates something of a friend.”

Sebastian studied the other man’s hard, sun-darkened face. He didn’t doubt for a moment that Knox had a damned good reason for showing him the manuscript, although he suspected friendship wasn’t part of it. But all he said was, “Who do you think killed Eisler?”

Knox leaned back in his seat and crossed his outthrust boots at the ankles. “I’d say there’s probably somewhere between five hundred and a thousand men-and women-in this town who wanted to see that bastard dead. With odds like that, it’s inevitable that he was eventually going to run up against someone willing to do more than just wish. But if you’re asking me for names. . I haven’t any.”

“Except for Senor Ferdinand Arroyo?”

Knox brought his tankard to his lips and drank. “Last I heard, Arroyo was in Caen.”

Sebastian closed the aged manuscript’s fragile cover and rose to his feet. “Thank you.”

“Take it,” said Knox, leaning forward to push the manuscript across the table toward him. “I’ve no use for it. It’s not like I read Hebrew.”

“You could sell it.”

“The old-book business never appealed to me. Take it. If you can find someone to read it for you, you might find it. . useful.”

Sebastian wondered what a three-hundred-year-old manuscript could tell him about last night’s murder of a diamond merchant. But he wrapped the aged volume in its oilcloth covering again and tucked it beneath his arm. “I’ll see it’s returned to you.”

Knox shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Sebastian had almost reached the door when Knox stopped him. “You said Eisler’s butler remembered me.”

Sebastian paused to look back at him. “That’s right.”

“I never gave him my name.”

“He didn’t know your name. But he remembered what you looked like.”

Knox widened his eyes. “His powers of description must be something to be wondered at.”

“He said you looked enough like me to be my brother.”

“Ah.”

The two men’s gazes met and held. Neither spoke, for there was no need. One might be the son of the beautiful, faithless Countess of Hendon, while the other was the bastard child of a Ludlow barmaid, but the resemblance between them was as undeniable as it was inexplicable.

Sebastian walked out of the Black Devil to find a woman waiting for him in a fashionable high-perch phaeton drawn by a dainty white mare. She had her famous auburn-shot hair tucked up beneath a shako-style hat, and a veil hid most of her face. But he would have recognized Kat Boleyn anywhere.

He paused for a moment, aware of an unpleasant tightening in his chest. Then he stepped up to the kerb. “How did you know where to find me?” he asked.

Rather than answer, she turned to the liveried groom at her side. “Wait for me here, Patrick.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, yielding his place to Sebastian.

“Yates told me you’d been to see him this morning,” she said as Sebastian vaulted up into the high seat beside her. “I wanted to thank you for offering to help.”

“For God’s sake, Kat. As if I wouldn’t? Why the bloody hell didn’t you come to me instead of Hendon?”

She gave her horses the office to start, her gaze on the lane ahead. “You know why.”

“If you’re worried about Hero, I think you underestimate her.”

She remained silent, her attention all for the task of guiding the mare between a brewer’s wagon and a coal cart.

He said, “You didn’t tell me how you knew where to find me.”

“It was more in the order of a good guess. Yates says Knox was involved in smuggling goods into the country for Eisler. Only, he doesn’t know what.”

Sebastian shifted his grip on the oilcloth bundle in his hands. “According to Knox, it was books. Strange old manuscripts written mainly in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.”

She threw him a quick, incredulous glance. “Old books? But. . why?”

“He seems to have been something of a collector, our Mr. Eisler.”

“The man was a bastard.”

“That too.”

She swung sharply around the corner. “Does Knox know anything about Eisler’s death?”

“He says he doesn’t.”

“But you don’t believe him?”

“He’s not exactly a pillar of rectitude and responsibility.”

“True.”

Sebastian let his gaze travel over her exquisite, familiar features. He had fallen in love with her when she was sixteen and he barely twenty-one. So long ago now, long before Hendon’s machinations had driven them apart not once, but twice. Before Sebastian joined the army and saw death, destruction, and savage cruelty on a scale that had come close to expunging his humanity and withering his soul. Before Kat began feeding information to the French in an effort to aid Ireland, the land of her birth. Before she’d married Russell Yates in a desperate maneuver to save herself from the vindictive wrath of Charles, Lord Jarvis, who’d promised her torture and an ugly death.

Sebastian knew her marriage to Yates had never been-could never be-more than one of convenience. Yates’s association with the most beautiful, most desirable woman of the London stage was for him a tactic to quiet the whispers about his sexuality, while Kat, in exchange, gained the protection of whatever damaging information Yates held against Jarvis. It was a marriage devoid of both sexual attraction and romantic love. But Sebastian knew that over the past year the two had nevertheless become friends-good friends. And Kat had always been fiercely loyal to her friends.

Yet Sebastian couldn’t shake the feeling there was something more to her concern, a subtle nuance that eluded him.

He said, “You told me once that Yates has evidence against Jarvis-evidence of something that would ruin him if it became known.”

“Yes.”

“It should be in Jarvis’s best interest to see that no harm comes to Yates. If anyone has the power to get the charges against him dropped, it’s Jarvis. So why hasn’t he done it?”

She drew in a deep, troubled breath, a subtle betrayal that was unusual for her.

“What?” he asked, watching her.

“Jarvis visited Yates in his cell last night. Yates says he came to reassure him that he was in no danger.”

“But you don’t believe him?”

She shook her head, her lips pressed into a tight line as she turned her horse back onto Bishopsgate. “Yates used to think the evidence he has against Jarvis could protect us both. Only, I’m not so sure.”

Sebastian knew a sense of profound disquiet. If given a choice between saving Kat and saving himself, he had little doubt which Yates would choose.

But all he said was, “How well did you know Eisler?”

“I didn’t. But I’ve been asking around. Word on the street has it he was killed by a Parisian named Jacques Collot. Collot likes to claim he fled France during the Revolution because his monarchist principles were revolted by the excesses of republican and democratic fervor. But from what I’m hearing, the truth is probably considerably less flattering.”

Sebastian frowned. “What was his connection to Eisler?”

“Let’s just say Eisler wasn’t exactly careful about the origins of the jewels he bought. He also had a tendency to cheat the people he did business with.”

“You think he cheated Collot?”

She drew up outside the Black Devil again, where her groom was rushing to finish eating a paper-wrapped sausage he’d bought from a nearby cart. “They say Collot was heard raging about Eisler in a tavern just two nights ago-swore next time he saw the man he was going to kill him.”