“In his cups again, was he?”
“From the sounds of things, yes.” Sebastian went to check the locks on the long windows. All were intact. But then, if someone had access to the Pavilion, it would have been easy enough to open one of the windows from the inside. How many people had attended last night’s musical evening? he wondered. The presence of the dispossessed French royal family had attracted even those who normally avoided the Pavilion; the reception rooms had been packed.
His eyes narrowing against the sun’s bright glare, Sebastian stared off across the park. It would take an extraordinary amount of sangfroid to carry a dead body across the Pavilion’s open grounds in the midst of one of the Prince’s musical evenings. Unless…
Unless, of course, the body had been moved to the Yellow Cabinet from someplace else inside the Pavilion.
“From the pattern of lividity,” Gibson said thoughtfully, “the body was obviously left lying on its back for several hours before someone slipped that blade into her.”
“What?” Sebastian looked around in surprise. He’d noticed the lack of blood in the room and simply assumed it was because the actual murder had taken place somewhere else. It had never occurred to him that Guinevere Anglessey had already been dead when she was stabbed. “But if the dagger didn’t kill her, then what did?”
“There’s no way to tell. Not without a proper autopsy.” Gibson looked up. “Any chance of it?”
Sebastian let out his breath in an ironic huff. “You certainly won’t get the local magistrate to commission one. He’s already decreed the lady’s death a suicide.”
“Suicide? How on earth did he come up with that?”
“The Regent’s physicians have concurred.”
Gibson was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I see. Anything to avoid casting suspicion on the Prince. Do you think her husband could be persuaded to order a postmortem?”
“I suppose that depends on whether or not the Marquis of Anglessey had something to do with her murder.”
Gibson reached to draw a white sheet over the body at his feet. “He does seem a likely suspect, does he not? What do you know of him?”
“Anglessey? He’s generally considered a sober enough man—keeps his estates in good order, and divides his time between them and affairs at the House of Lords. Or at least,” Sebastian added, “he was considered sober until his latest marriage.”
Paul Gibson glanced over at him in surprise. “Was she so unsuitable?”
“By birth, no. Only by age. Anglessey is a year or two older than my father.”
“Good God.”
“It would give Anglessey a motive both to kill his wife and to attempt to implicate the Prince in her murder, if Anglessey discovered the Prince was cuckolding him.”
“Was she one of the Prince’s paramours?”
“I honestly don’t know. The Prince claims they were barely acquainted.”
“But you don’t believe him.”
“He’s lying about something. I just don’t know what.”
Gibson began collecting his scattered instruments to stow them in his black leather bag. “Did you actually see this note the Prince says he received?”
“No. It’s gone missing.”
“By accident, or by design, I wonder.” Gibson pushed up to a stand, staggering slightly as his weight shifted to his wooden leg. “More’s the pity. I should think if you could discover the origins of that note, you’d likely have your killer.”
“Perhaps. Although I suspect our killer is much too clever to be caught so easily.”
Sebastian became aware of Paul Gibson’s intense green eyes studying him. “What’s any of this to do with you, Sebastian?”
With anyone else, Sebastian might have dissembled. But the friendship between him and the Irishman ran deep. Sebastian drew his mother’s necklace from his pocket. “Lady Guinevere was wearing this when she died.”
“A curious piece.” Gibson’s brows twitched. “But again, what has it to do with you?”
Sebastian held the necklace cradled in his palm. It had always seemed to him that the stones grew faintly warm against his skin. But in his mother’s hand, he’d seen the stones pulse with so much energy as to become almost hot to the touch…. Or at least, so it had seemed to him as a child.
“The necklace belonged to my mother,” he said simply.
Paul Gibson raised his gaze to his friend’s face. “Something strange is going on here, Sebastian. Something that could be dangerous. For anyone involved.”
“If you want to have nothing further to do with it, I’ll understand.”
Gibson made a swift, impatient gesture with one hand. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the one I’m worried about. Who brought you into this?”
“Ostensibly, the Prince. In reality? Jarvis.”
“And you trust him?”
Sebastian gazed down at the still, ravaged body of the woman hidden beneath the sheet. “Not at all. But someone killed Guinevere Anglessey. Someone slipped that dagger into the livid flesh of her bare back and brought her body here to drape it across that couch in a deliberately suggestive posture. Lord Jarvis’s sole intent in all this is to protect the Prince. But mine is different. I’m going to find out who killed this woman, and I’m going to see that he pays for it.”
“Because of the necklace?”
Sebastian shook his head. “Because if I don’t, no one else will.”
“What does it matter to you?”
One of Guinevere’s slim white hands peeked out from beneath the sheet, its fingers curled lightly in death. Seeing it, Sebastian was reminded of another woman, left to die on an altar’s steps, her throat viciously slashed, her body obscenely violated; and another, hunted down like an unwary quarry and subjected to the same hideous end.
He had few illusions about the world in which he lived. He knew the shocking inequality between its privileged and its poor; he recognized the savage injustice of a legal system that could hang an eight-year-old boy for stealing a loaf of bread and yet let a king’s son get away with murder. Once, he’d been so repulsed by the raw barbarism and senseless cruelty of the wars his people fought in the name of liberty and justice that he’d been content simply to let himself drift, aimless and alone. Now that struck him as a reaction that was both self-indulgent and faintly cowardly.
Crouching down beside what was left of the young woman named Guinevere, Sebastian tucked the sheet over that pale, vulnerable hand and said softly, “It matters.”
Chapter 9
Sebastian was crossing the yard toward the Pavilion’s glass-domed, Xanadu-inspired stables when he heard someone calling his name. “Lord Devlin.”
He turned to find the Home Secretary, Lord Portland, coming toward him across the paving. The midday sun was bright on the nobleman’s flaming red hair, but the skin of his face was pale and drawn tight as if with worry.
“Walk with me a ways, my lord,” said Portland, turning their steps down a path that angled off across the Pavilion’s wide expanse of green lawn. “I understand you’ve agreed to help sort out the truth about last night’s peculiar incident.”
Sebastian’s acquaintance with the Earl of Portland was slight, although in the year since Sebastian’s return from the Continent he’d attended several dinner parties and soirees in the man’s company. Like Jarvis and Hendon, Portland was profoundly conservative in his politics, dedicated to continuing the war against France and preserving England’s institutions in the face of a rising tide of demands for reform.
Yet whatever his opinion of the reactionary quality of the man’s beliefs, Sebastian couldn’t help but respect him. The Earl of Portland was one of the few men in the government—or out of it—who refused to play the role of one of Jarvis’s pawns. But there was something distasteful, almost sordid about referring to the death of a vital young woman as a peculiar incident.