Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,84
even met.” He glanced over at Sebastian. “That’s an honest question, by the way. I genuinely would like to know.”
“For the same reason I would step in to stop a man from whipping a tired horse, or a cruel child from tormenting a stray dog. Because it’s the right thing to do.” And because I believe we are all connected, every living thing one to the other, so that I owe to each what I would owe to myself. But he didn’t say that.
LaRivière shook his head as Sebastian turned toward the door, obviously finding the concept too alien to comprehend. “What a waste of a life.”
But Sebastian only laughed.
* * *
That night, Sebastian lay awake long after the last gentleman’s carriage had rattled up the street, long after the creatures of the dark settled down into silence with a final furtive rustling and the wind died in the hours before dawn.
“You can’t stop thinking about it all, can you?” said Hero, rolling over to rest her hand on his chest.
He slipped his arm beneath her to gather her close. “No.” He had told her some but not all of what he had learned that day. Jarvis’s role in the events of eighteen years ago he had kept to himself.
She said, “I think Seaforth did it. I think he killed Nicholas but missed Ji, so the next morning he hired someone to find the boy and eliminate him.”
“Seaforth spent the afternoon at White’s. Lovejoy’s men confirmed it.”
“You don’t think he could somehow have left and come back without anyone noticing?”
“Possibly.” Sebastian buried his face in the heavy fall of her warm, soft hair. “I wish we could find that child.”
“We came so close today,” said Hero. “Thank God I was there, even if he did then slip away. Do you believe Seaforth has indeed called off those men?”
“Surely he knew I wasn’t making an idle threat. Although I plan to pay him another visit in the morning, just to impress the point.”
* * *
But by morning, the Third Earl of Seaforth was dead.
Chapter 49
Thursday, 16 June
W ho found him?” said Sebastian, staring down at what was left of the late Earl of Seaforth. His lordship sat slumped against a grimy brick wall just inside the arch to Leen Mews, less than half a block from his North Audley Street house. The early-morning air was cool, the light pale and diffuse, thanks to a cover of high white clouds. Around them, the exclusive streets of Mayfair were only just beginning to come awake.
“A dustman,” said Sir Henry Lovejoy. “Right before dawn. At first glance, he thought his lordship must have imbibed too freely last night and fallen asleep. Then he took a closer look.”
“That must have been a shock.”
“I daresay it was.”
Seaforth sat with his thin legs in their natty yellow nankeen trousers splayed out before him, his arms hanging limply at his sides, his bare head bowed. It wasn’t until Sebastian hunkered down beside the dead man that he could see the Earl’s wide, staring eyes. A trickle of blood had dried beside his lordship’s slack mouth; a larger, dark red rivulet stained the cobbles near the wall.
Lovejoy said, “According to Lady Seaforth, her husband went for a walk late last night and didn’t come back. She says he’s been troubled by something lately and hasn’t been sleeping well.”
“‘Something’ being the reappearance and murder of his cousin Nicholas?” suggested Sebastian, studying the blood pooled on the cobbles.
“Presumably.”
Sebastian rose to his feet. “From the looks of things, I suspect that when we move him, we’ll find he’s been stabbed in the back.”
“Lovely.” Lovejoy pushed out a long, pained breath. “The palace isn’t going to like this. They aren’t going to like it at all. The talk about Nicholas Hayes was finally beginning to die down. Now it’s all going to start up again, only it will be even worse. First an earl’s son, now an earl.”
Sebastian glanced around at a clatter of horses’ hooves. A groom was leading a pair of smart chestnuts out of the stables at the far end of the mews. For a moment the two men’s gazes met; then the groom looked away. “Perhaps we’ll be lucky and find someone who saw something.”
Lovejoy nodded. “I’ll have the lads talk to everyone in the area.” Yet even as he said it, both men knew it was unlikely to turn up anything. Nicholas Hayes’s death might have been messy, but the two killings since then were something else entirely.