Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,44

nightingales and trickling water—the sounds of home. Then an awareness of time and place returned, and Ji lowered the flute.

“I . . .” Ji drew a breath. “It still plays.”

The old man was staring at Ji with a stillness that the child could not read, for the people in this land were too strange, their ways too different.

Then he cleared his throat and reached to close his hand around the watch. “Right then. Two and a half shillings and the flute. It’s a deal.”

Chapter 27

M ajor Hamish McHenry was not an easy man to find.

Sebastian went first to Lower Sloan Street, an area of modest but respectable brick row houses with white-painted double-hung windows and small front gardens filled with colorful splashes of roses and foxgloves and lilies.

He found Mrs. McHenry puttering about her rosebushes with a basket hooked over one arm and a pair of secateurs in hand. She was a small, white-haired woman probably in her late sixties or early seventies, dressed in a black stuff mourning gown and a wide-brimmed straw hat that threw a hatched pattern of light and shade across her plump face. When Sebastian introduced himself and asked after her son, her soft brown eyes crinkled with her smile.

“I’m afraid you’ve just missed him, my lord,” she said with a lilting Scottish burr. “He was here for a bit and then went off again. Said something about meeting his mates for a pint, although he didn’t say where. You might try the Scarlet Man in Cockspur Street. I hear all the officers go there these days, although when my George was alive they were always at the Bedford Arms.”

“Your husband was in the Army as well, Mrs. McHenry?”

“Royal Marines,” she said proudly. “Lieutenant Colonel George McHenry. Served from India to Gibraltar to America, he did. Can’t believe my Hamish will be going back there now to fight another war—to America, I mean. After all these years.”

“When does his regiment set sail?”

“Soon, they say.”

Sebastian watched her snip a spent bloom and place it in her basket. “Did you know Crispin Hayes?”

Her gaze flew to his, then slid away as her smile faltered. “I didn’t, no. My George and I were living in Plymouth in those days. And now they’re saying his brother is dead too.” She turned to snip at another bush. “Shall I tell Hamish you’re looking for him?”

“Yes, please,” said Sebastian with a bow. “Thank you for your time.”

She nodded, her smile once more firmly in place. But he was aware of her watching him as he walked away, the sun hard on her face and her secateurs slack in her hand.

* * *

Sebastian checked the Scarlet Man, the Bedford Arms, and several other pubs and coffeehouses popular with military men, all without any luck. Giving up on the major, he went in search of the Third Earl of Seaforth.

With its classical facade, gleaming black-painted door, and neat rows of silk-swagged windows, Ethan Hayes’s elegant town house in North Audley Street was virtually indistinguishable from the other impressive residences in the street, a monument to its owner’s wealth and status. But Sebastian found himself pausing at the top of the steps as he reached for the knocker.

Once, this house—like the Irish estates and titles that went with it—had belonged to a man whose three sons were now dead. Nicholas Hayes had grown up in this house, played in its nursery as a child, broken into its library as an anguished young man in search of something he considered his. Had his ghost haunted the current Earl all these years, troubling his conscience and dimming his pleasure in the enjoyment of what should never have been his? Somehow, Sebastian doubted it. Men like Seaforth always managed to find excuses for their own worst behavior, even as they loudly condemned the slightest transgressions committed by others.

Pushing the thought away, Sebastian let the knocker fall.

It was close enough to the fashionable dinner hour that Sebastian wouldn’t have been surprised to be told that the Earl was already dressing. But Seaforth simply directed his butler to show Sebastian up to his dressing room.

Attended by a fussy, middle-aged valet, Seaforth stood in the center of the room, clad only in a long, open-necked shirt and drawers. His bare calves were pasty white and skinny despite the small potbelly that showed against the loose folds of his shirt. He dismissed his valet with a nod and said, “This is getting tiresome, you know. I only agreed to see you