C. Harris - What Darkness Brings

Sebastian hunkered down beside his friend’s body. The two men had met nearly ten years before as subalterns, when Sebastian bought his first commission as a raw cornet and Wilkinson had just won promotion to the same rank. The son of a poor vicar who’d served with the common soldiers as a “gentleman volunteer” for three long years before a vacancy opened up, Wilkinson made no attempt to hide his good-humored scorn for the young Earl’s heir, whose wealth enabled him to step straight into a rank Wilkinson himself had had to fight to earn. Sebastian won the older man’s respect only slowly; friendship between them had taken even longer. But it had come.

Wilkinson still wore the proud swooping mustache of a cavalry officer. But his clothes were those of a gentleman down on his luck, the cuffs of his shirt neatly darned at the edges, his coat showing the effects of one too many brushings. Once, he’d been a strapping officer, tanned dark by the sun and full of life. But years of illness had wasted his once powerful body and left his skin sallow and sunken. Reaching out, Sebastian touched his friend’s cheek, then brought his hand back to rest on his own thigh, fingers curled. “He’s stone-cold. He must have been here all night.”

“So it would seem. Hopefully Paul Gibson will be able to tell us for certain after the postmortem.”

Like Sebastian and Wilkinson, Gibson had once worn the King’s colors. A regimental surgeon, he’d honed his craft on the charnel-house battlefields of Europe. No one was better at ferreting out the secrets a dead body might have to tell-which was why Gibson was the last person Sebastian wanted examining this body.

He swiped one hand across his beard-roughened face. “Is that necessary? I mean, if he died of the fever. .”

Lovejoy looked vaguely surprised. Normally, Sebastian was a vocal proponent of the still relatively new and highly controversial practice of autopsying the bodies of victims of murder or suspicious death. “Still best to be certain-wouldn’t you say, my lord? Although I don’t doubt you’re right. From the looks of things, he sat down on the bench to rest and suffered a seizure of some sort. Poor man. One wonders what possessed him to push himself by walking so far. And at night, after the park was closed.”

Sebastian was afraid he knew only too well why Wilkinson had chosen to lose himself in the farthest reaches of the park, after hours. But he felt no need to share that fear with Lovejoy.

He pushed to his feet. “How’s his wife taking it?”

Lovejoy cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Badly, I’m afraid. I understand he also leaves a child?”

“Emma. She’s only just turned four.”

“Tragic.”

“Yes.” Sebastian was suddenly aware of an intense exhaustion combined with an urgent need to hold his own wife in his arms and simply bury his face in the soft fragrance of her dark hair. He was a man who had been married less than six weeks, and he’d just spent the entire night away from his wife’s bed.

Nodding to the magistrate, he turned toward his waiting curricle. The larks in the nearby elms were in full throat, the light strengthening, the mist beginning to lift. But as he crossed the meadow, he noticed a familiar figure walking toward him with a dark top hat and greatcoat glistening from the morning dew.

Tall and barrel-chested, with a big head and blunt features, Alistair St. Cyr, Fifth Earl of Hendon and Chancellor of the Exchequer, was in his late sixties now. Once, Hendon had boasted of three strong sons. Then death had taken the eldest, Richard, and the middle son, Cecil, leaving Hendon with only the youngest, Sebastian-the son who was least like the Earl and who had always seemed to confuse and dismay him.

The son who was not, in fact, Hendon’s child, although that was a truth only lately and disastrously revealed.

Sebastian was still the Earl’s heir and, as far as the world knew, his son. The few who knew otherwise had their own reasons for keeping quiet. But since the truth’s painful revelations that May, Sebastian and Hendon had publicly exchanged only the most formal and brief of greetings. In private, they had not spoken at all. For Hendon to seek Sebastian out now could only mean trouble. Sebastian’s thoughts flew, inevitably, to his new wife and the child she carried within her.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” he demanded without preamble as the men came up to each other.

Hendon swiped one meaty palm across his lower face, and Sebastian realized with shock that, like Sebastian, the Earl had yet to shave that morning. “I take it you haven’t heard the news?”

“What news?”

“Russell Yates has been committed to Newgate to stand trial for murder.”

Sebastian exhaled a long breath and stared out over the nearby, breeze-ruffled treetops. He had only a passing acquaintance with Yates, a flamboyant and somewhat enigmatic ex-privateer who’d taken London society by storm. But Yates’s wife. .

The beautiful, talented, vital woman who was Yates’s wife had once been the love of Sebastian’s life-until he lost her to Hendon’s twisted trail of lies and half-truths and soul-shattering revelations.

“Murder?” said Sebastian. “Of whom?”

“A diamond merchant by the name of Daniel Eisler.”

“Never heard of him.”

Hendon shifted his lower jaw from side to side in that way he had when considering a problem or when dealing with something or someone who violated his carefully drawn moral codes. “In that, you are fortunate. The man was vile.”

“Have you seen Kat?”

Hendon nodded. “She came to me at once, hoping that I could somehow use my influence to intervene. But this is beyond me, I’m afraid.” He paused, as if considering his next words carefully. “I’ve never claimed to understand this marriage of hers to Yates. But I do know she has become exceedingly close to the man this past year. She’s. . worried.”

“Kat?” Kat Boleyn was not a woman who frightened easily.

Hendon said, “I realize that in the past I have been critical-perhaps even dismissive-of your obsession with murder and justice. All of which makes it rather hypocritical of me to be asking for your help in this now. But from what I’ve been able to discover, the case against Yates is strong. There’ll be a coroner’s inquest sometime this week, but there’s no doubt but what they’ll support the magistrate’s findings.”

“Are you certain he didn’t actually do it?”

“Kat insists he is innocent. Although from the looks of things, the only hope he has of escaping the hangman’s noose is if you can somehow manage to figure out who the real killer is.” Hendon cleared his throat uncomfortably, his voice tense. “Will you do it?”

“I’d do anything for Kat. You know that.”

For Kat. Not for you. The unsaid words hung in the air between them.

Hendon’s vivid blue eyes blinked. St. Cyr eyes, they called them, for they had been the hallmark of the family for generations. Kat had eyes like that.

Sebastian’s own eyes were a strange, feral-like yellow.

Hendon said, “I must make it clear that she did not want me to ask you to do this.”

“Why the hell not?”

“You know why.”

Sebastian met the Earl’s frank gaze. He knew it wasn’t simply Sebastian’s own recent marriage that had given Kat pause; it was a matter of whom he had married.

And it troubled him profoundly to realize that the woman he’d loved for most of his adult life had felt she couldn’t come to him when she needed him the most.

Russell Yates was one of those rare men who defied both the expectations and the conventions of his world and yet somehow still managed to prosper.