Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,50

long grass that lay wilted in the heat of the brutally sunny day. Hat in hand, Sebastian stood beneath the spreading limbs of a nearby ancient elm and tried to understand both this woman’s death and the part it might have played all these years later in the murders of Nicholas Hayes and Irvine Pennington.

What were you like? Sebastian found himself wondering as he stared at that starkly plain tombstone. All he really knew about Chantal de LaRivière was that she was young and beautiful and that she had died violently. What else? He remembered someone saying something about a year-old child. Was the child still alive? A boy or girl? He didn’t know. And it occurred to him that, despite having been relatively young at the time of his wife’s death, the Count de Compans had never remarried. Why? Had he loved her that much?

Lifting his head, Sebastian gazed off across the sea of weathered, thickly clustered tombstones. From here he could see quite clearly the feathery treetops of Pennington’s Tea Gardens. Nicholas Hayes’s life had taken him halfway around the world, from the brutal shores of Botany Bay to the exotic, lotus-scented waterways of Canton. And yet in the end he had come back here to die just a few hundred feet from the grave of the woman he’d been transported for killing. What were the odds?

Sebastian brought his gaze back to the headstone before him. If Hayes had, in truth, been responsible for Chantal de LaRivière’s death, then Sebastian supposed there was a kind of poetic justice to it all. But he couldn’t shake the conviction that the true story of that fatal night eighteen years before had never been told.

“What happened?” he said aloud, as if the long-dead, long-buried woman could somehow hear him. “What really happened that night?”

A hot wind kicked up, rustling the leaves of the elm overhead and dancing patterns of light and shade across the eighteen-year-old tombstone. He could smell the ripening hay from a nearby field, hear the high, clear trill of a wren, feel the warmth of the sun on his face. And he realized that until now, he’d been thinking of this dead woman only in terms of the men in her life: her husband, the Count de Compans; Crispin Hayes, who had admired and desired her; and Nicholas Hayes, who’d been convicted of killing her. But once, he knew, she had been a living, breathing woman with her own hopes, fears, desires, and dreams.

Perhaps the answers he sought lay there, in her past.

Chapter 30

H ero spent the morning in Snow Hill, interviewing street musicians.

She spoke first to a cheerful blind man who imitated farm-animal sounds on a fiddle—everything from bulls and donkeys to dogs, peacocks, and roosters, all reproduced with an accuracy Hero found uncanny. He told her he used to play the violin at parties until he’d gone blind.

“The gentlefolk didn’t like the look of my white, vacant eyes,” he said, and then smiled. “I tried playing Mozart and Haydn on street corners, but that didn’t answer too well. So I taught myself to do this.” His grin widened. “Took me a while to perfect it, but folks do like it.”

Farther up the street she found another blind man who simultaneously played the violin and the bells, a feat he managed by fixing the bells to a board with hammers and rigging up a system of wires and pedals he controlled with his toes. Each man had with him a young orphan he’d taken under his wing to serve as his guide and keep people from stealing the coins dropped in his cup. Hero asked the children if they had seen or heard of a boy who looked as if he might be part Chinese. But first one lad, then the next looked at her blankly and said, “What’s ‘Chinese’?”

Frustrated, she moved to Cock Lane, where she talked to an old Italian barrel-organ grinder with a capuchin monkey. Dressed in a broad-brimmed felt hat with a jaunty red kerchief, the man played his organ while his monkey—clad in a red soldier’s jacket and a Bonaparte hat—beat a drum and danced.

“I teach him with kindness, I do,” said the old man, smiling as the monkey scrambled up onto his shoulder and gave a loud screech. “Only way to do it. I had a dog who dance too, and the monkey, he dance with the dog. Had that dog fifteen years.” His voice broke. “But he die last winter,