Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,5
tempted to leave the weapon in place and send the body as it is to Paul Gibson.”
“Probably a good idea,” said Sebastian. No one in London could read a corpse better than the former Army surgeon.
Lovejoy was silent a moment. “It makes no sense—Hayes coming back here, I mean. Somehow the man must have managed to escape from Botany Bay with everyone thinking he was dead. Why risk everything by returning to England again?”
“I suspect the answer to that might tell us who killed him.”
“I hope you’re right. Because the palace isn’t going to like this. They aren’t going to like this at all.”
Sebastian knew only too well what that meant. The palace had a tendency to see sensational crimes involving the nobility or the royal family—whether as victims or perpetrators—as threats to the established order of society. Their first instinct was to shut down any and all investigations, usually by finding a convenient scapegoat to blame.
Lovejoy pressed his handkerchief to his sweat-dampened face again. The magistrate had always been abnormally sensitive to cold, but lately he’d begun to have trouble tolerating heat as well. “We’ll need to move quickly to inform the current Earl of Seaforth before he hears of this from elsewhere. He’s—what? Nicholas Hayes’s brother?”
“First cousin. I believe Hayes did have brothers, but all died before the previous Earl.”
Lovejoy tucked his handkerchief away. “Only a cousin? How very awkward. So the man has been calling himself the Earl of Seaforth for years when the rightful heir was alive all along.”
“Well, no one could dispute that he’s the rightful Earl now,” said Sebastian, his gaze on the still, pallid face of the dead man at their feet.
Chapter 5
H is Royal Highness George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales and Regent of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, looked out at the bejeweled, highborn crowd overflowing his palace’s stifling-hot reception rooms and smiled. His color was high and his eyes sparkled with pleasure, for the Regent was in fine spirits on this, the third day of the Allied Sovereigns’ visit to London.
At the Regent’s invitation, a glittering assortment of Europe’s hereditary ruling families had descended on London to celebrate the recent defeat of Napoléon: the Tsar of Russia and his sister the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg; King William of Prussia and his sons; Princes Metternich and Leopold and dozens of other, lesser princes and war heroes. The city was lit in a glorious three-day Illuminations of Joy, and the streets were constantly filled with jubilant, cheering crowds. The fact that they were cheering not the Prince of Wales but his royal guests had yet to penetrate the Regent’s overweening sense of amour propre.
“It’s quite the defining event of the Season. Wouldn’t you agree, Jarvis?” said the beaming royal.
“Undoubtedly, sir,” said Charles, Lord Jarvis, the Prince’s most trusted advisor and distant cousin as well as the real power behind Wales’s fragile Regency.
“Everyone is saying it was a stroke of genius, my inviting all the Allied Sovereigns here for a grand visit to commemorate our victory.”
Those who knew their self-absorbed Prince were actually predicting he would quickly tire of sharing the attention he so desperately coveted. But Jarvis wasn’t about to tell him that. “They are indeed, sir.”
The Prince’s smile faded as he watched the Tsar’s beautiful, proud, ostentatious sister Catherine, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, go down the line of a country dance. “Does it look to you as if she dislikes music? You remember when she told me she doesn’t like music and made me stop the orchestra I had playing at my banquet in her honor?”
“Perhaps she only dislikes music when she’s dining,” suggested Jarvis. Privately he suspected the Grand Duchess’s announcement had been made to spite the Regent, who’d been bragging about personally selecting the pieces to be played with each course of the banquet.
“Possible, I suppose. Still, it’s odd, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well, she is Russian.”
“There is that.”
Jarvis let his gaze drift over the gathering of the Kingdom’s wealthiest and most powerful and found his attention settling on his own daughter, Hero. She was exceptionally lovely tonight in a silver silk gown of half-mourning worn in memory of her dead mother. Her looks were not of a type he admired. Jarvis preferred blond, petite women with winning ways, whereas Hero was brown haired, alarmingly tall, and far too masculine in both her features and her interests. But he had to admit that marriage and motherhood had improved her.