SEBASTIAN ARRIVED at his own neatly stuccoed town house at Number 41 Brook Street just as the last streaks of orange and pink were slowly leaching from the sky and the lamplighters were beginning to make their rounds. Changing into evening dress, he directed his carriage to an imposing mansion on Park Street that belonged to his only surviving aunt, the Dowager Duchess of Claiborne. Technically, the house was owned by the eldest of Aunt Henrietta’s three sons, the current Duke of Claiborne. But she had the poor sod so thoroughly terrified that he had meekly left her in possession of the place and moved his own growing family into a small house on Half Moon Street.
Sebastian found his aunt descending the house’s grand staircase, the famous Claiborne rubies at her throat, a massive lavender turban decorated with red feathers swaddling her gray head. She paused halfway down the steps, one white-gloved hand groping to raise the quizzing glass she always wore on a gold chain around her neck. “Good heavens, Devlin. What are you doing here?”
“Hello, Aunt Henrietta,” he said, running lightly up the steps to kiss her cheek with genuine affection. “What a shockingly extravagant hat.”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” she said gaily. “Claiborne would have loathed it.”
Hendon’s senior by five years, she had been married at the tender age of eighteen to the heir to the Duke of Claiborne. It was considered quite a feat of matrimonial maneuvering at the time, for the former Lady Henrietta St. Cyr had never been a particularly attractive female, even when young. She had Hendon’s broad, fleshy face and barrellike body, and the same belligerent habit of staring people out of countenance. She made a grand duchess.
“I was just on my way to the Setons’ dinner party,” she said, leaning her weight on the silver-headed cane she carried mainly for effect. “As of my last reckoning, Claiborne has been dead two years and six hours. I gave the man four children, fifty-one years of marriage, and two full years of mourning. And now I intend to enjoy myself.”
“I wasn’t aware of the fact you ever did anything else,” said Sebastian, following her into the drawing room.
She gave a delighted chuckle. “Pour me some wine. No, not that paltry stuff,” she directed when he reached for the ratafia. “The port.”
She took an enthusiastic sip of her wine and fixed him with a steady stare over the top of her glass. “Now, what’s this Hendon tells me about you involving yourself in the death of that poor, unfortunate woman down in Brighton?”
Sebastian nearly choked on his own wine. “When did you see my father?”
“Today, in Pall Mall. They’ve all come back to London—Perceval and Hendon, Prinny and Jarvis, even that ridiculous Comte de Lille, as he calls himself—although how he can expect anyone to consider him the rightful king of France when he hasn’t even got the gumption to call himself Louis XVIII is more than I can see. Anyway, it seems Prinny’s taken such a turn over what happened in the Pavilion that his doctors thought it best to remove him from Brighton for a time. Not that he’s likely to get much rest at Carlton House, what with all the preparations for this grand fete he’s giving next week. Imagine! Giving a grand dinner to celebrate your ascension to the Regency. Might as well celebrate the poor old King’s descent into madness. I’ve a good mind not to go.”
It was an idle threat, as Sebastian well knew. The Prince Regent’s grand fete was certain to be the most talked-about social event of the decade. Aunt Henrietta would never miss such a spectacle.
She paused to draw breath and take another sip of her wine, which gave Sebastian the opportunity to say, “Tell me, Aunt, what do you know of Lady Guinevere?”
She looked up, a sparkle in her vivid blue eyes. “So that’s why you’re here, is it? Interested in discovering if the poor child was hiding some nasty little secret?”
“Her or someone close to her.”
“Well, let me see…. ’’ His aunt went to settle herself in a comfortable chair beside the empty hearth. “She was wellborn on her father’s side. He was the Earl of Athelstone, you know. A LeCornu. The family goes back to the Conqueror.”
Sebastian smiled. Bright, caustic, and irrepressibly inquisitive, Aunt Henrietta was one of the grandes dames of society. She might have been in mourning for two years, but nothing short of her own death would interfere with her ability to keep abreast of the latest on-dits. “And her mother?”
Aunt Henrietta frowned. “I don’t know much about her. She was the Earl’s second wife, I believe. Or was it his third? At any rate, she didn’t survive long enough for him to bring her to London.”
“Good God. How many wives did he have?”
“Five. The man was a regular bluebeard. The first four all died in childbirth. Gave him nothing but girls, too, which is why, I suppose, he kept at it. Managed it in the end, though. The new Earl’s about ten, I believe.”
Sebastian thought about the vibrant, brilliant young woman he had met at Hendon’s dinner table. What must it have been like for her, he wondered, growing up with a succession of stepmothers and a father desperate for a son?
“Lady Guinevere came out the same year as Emily’s eldest, you know,” his aunt was saying. At the mention of her daughter Emily, Aunt Henrietta’s lips pursed into a frown. As far as Aunt Henrietta was concerned, Emily had not married well, an act of folly for which her mother had never forgiven her.
“She was quite the sensation of the Season—I mean Lady Guinevere, of course, not Emily’s eldest. I’m afraid that poor child takes after Emily far too much to ever have had much of a chance of going off well, even if she had been well dowered, which, of course, she was not. But Guinevere! She was quite the toast of the town. Not much of a fortune there, either, I must admit, but the girl was a regular diamond of the first water, with plenty of spirit. A bit too willful, perhaps, for some, but then I’m not one who’s partial to these mealymouthed misses one encounters far too often these days.”
“Any scandal attached to her name?”
“None that I ever heard of.”
“None? A beautiful, vivacious twenty-one-year-old woman, married to an unwell, sixty-seven-year-old man? No whispers of a young lover?”
The very suggestion seemed to affront his aunt. “I should think not. Headstrong and unorthodox Lady Guinevere might have been, but she was no shameless hussy, however I hear things looked on Wednesday last in the Pavilion. She knew what was expected of a woman of her station, and it’s a shabby creature indeed who indulges in that sort of thing before she has managed to present her lord with an heir.”
Sebastian took a slow sip of his wine. “You say she has sisters?”
“Two who survived, each from different mothers. The youngest must still be in the schoolroom in Wales. But you may know the eldest, Morgana. She was never the beauty Guinevere was, I’m afraid, and she has the disposition of a Rottweiler. It’s amazing she managed to marry at all, let alone do it as well as she did.”
Sebastian smiled. “Who’d she catch?”
“Lord Quinlan. Of course, he’s a mere baron as opposed to a marquis, and his fortune can’t begin to compare to Anglessey’s, but still. Until Guinevere married so splendidly, Morgana was considered to have done quite well for herself. Athelstone’s estates were never particularly extensive, and he didn’t manage them as well as he might have. Neither of the girls had much in the way of a dowry. I believe Athelstone settled everything he could on the boy.”
Again, her words hinted at a less-than-idyllic childhood. What kind of animosities must have brewed in the schoolroom of that death-haunted estate on the coast of Wales, Sebastian wondered; three girls from three different mothers, the eldest plain and ill natured, the middle one beautiful and appealing? He suddenly wanted very much to hear what Morgana might have to say about her sister.