Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,71

She stood silent and stony-faced through the short graveside service. And then she left.

Afterward, Sebastian and Hero stood alone beside the raw grave, with the gusting wind flattening the rank grass of the churchyard around them. “I wonder how he would feel about lying here,” Hero said suddenly.

“He knew he was dying when he came back to England. I suspect he didn’t much care where his body ended up.”

She stared off across the jumble of moss-covered tombs and headstones, toward the wind-thrashed treetops of Pennington’s Tea Gardens. “I wish Ji could have been here.”

“I know.” Sebastian was silent for a moment, the wind buffeting his face. Then the wind dropped and the air smelled of dust and lichen-covered stone and old, old death. He said, “I should have realized Kate Brownbeck was with child—that only a baby would have precipitated that disastrous, hasty elopement.”

Hero drew a painful breath. “And then they took her baby away and she never had another. The poor woman.”

The sun was sinking lower in the sky, bathing the world in that strange brassy light. He said, “I must admit I can sympathize with Nicholas Hayes for coming back here with murder in his heart. I think about the lot of them—Brownbeck, Forbes, Seaforth, and LaRivière—and it’s hard not to be consumed with vicarious rage.”

“Of the four, I’d say Forbes and LaRivière are by far the strongest and most dangerous characters—and the most likely to kill.”

“Yes. But weak men can also kill, especially out of fear. And a sickle in the back strikes me as the act of a weak man.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” The church bell began to ring, tolling out the hour, and the mournful peal seemed to press down upon them. The air was heavy with the smell of freshly turned earth, the hard sky crisscrossed with birds coming in to settle for the night. Wordlessly, Hero reached out to take his hand. He laced his fingers with hers, and she said, “Is it wrong that I find myself wishing he’d succeeded in doing what he came here for?”

“I don’t think so. Not at all.”

She looked over at him and smiled.

Chapter 43

Wednesday, 15 June

T he next morning, Hero and Calhoun shifted their search for Ji away from the areas around Pennington’s Tea Gardens and the Red Lion.

Someone had told Calhoun about seeing a boy who might have been part Chinese playing a bamboo flute in Leicester Square. Calhoun had spent hours Tuesday evening combing the area without any luck, but it started him thinking. “Maybe the lad is deliberately staying away from places Hayes’s killer might know about,” said Calhoun. “Maybe that’s why we can’t find anyone who’s seen him.”

“You might be right,” said Hero. And so with that possibility in mind, they decided to try Clerkenwell.

Lying to the north of London’s old city walls, Clerkenwell had once been the site of four rich monastic institutions. After the Dissolution, Henry VIII doled out the land to his noble supporters, and for a time Clerkenwell was an area of fine houses and exclusive spas. But those glory days belonged to the past. The nobility had long since shifted west to Mayfair, leaving Clerkenwell to poor tradesmen, artisans, and prisons.

What was still called Clerkenwell Green no longer bore any resemblance to the idyllic village green it had once been. A narrow space shaped like a squished, elongated triangle, it had the intimidating bulk of the Sessions House taking up the entire wide end and Clerkenwell Churchyard at the point. What wasn’t paved over was reduced to hard-packed earth, and the whole was hemmed in by two converging streets thick with drays, carts, and carriages. The dusty space in between was given over to stalls, pickpockets, stray dogs, and itinerant street performers. It was noisy and crowded and smelled of urine and dung.

While Calhoun walked up Clerkenwell Close to the church and then back down to St. John’s Square, Hero interviewed the only musician on the green—a lame, blind woman who said her name was Alice Jones.

“Been blind all my life,” said Alice, who looked to be somewhere in her seventies but said she was only sixty-two. Her clothes were ragged but clean, her soft gray hair neatly platted and wrapped around her head in two braids. Her eyes were an eerie milky white. “Played the hurdy-gurdy all my life too. That’s what they taught me in the blind school, you see.”

“When did you leave school?” asked Hero, tilting her parasol against the fierce sun.

“They kicked us

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