Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,99

she said the walking helped ease the stiffness. So she’d walk up to those gardens nearly every afternoon. She’d sit on one of the benches for a time and then walk back. Sometimes I worried about her going up there all alone like that. But she’d just laugh at me and say the earth and green growing things and the birds soothed her soul and gave her energy.”

Miss Bowers paused, as if vaguely embarrassed by what she’d said. “Mama was a bit peculiar in that way.”

“I can understand it.”

“Can you?” Miss Bowers looked at him as if he must be a bit peculiar too, even if he was a real viscount. “I never could. But then, Mama was different from me. I’ve always been good with my needle, but Mama was the one with what she called ‘vision.’ She said she could see her hats in her head before she started making them.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“So where do you get your ideas?”

She nodded to a nearby stack of well-thumbed editions of Ackermann’s Repository and The Ladies’ Monthly. “From fashion plates, of course.”

“Of course,” said Sebastian. “Do you by any chance know if your mother was acquainted with either the Count de Compans or the Earl of Seaforth?”

Miss Bowers stared at him blankly. “I don’t think so, my lord.”

“How about a Major Hamish McHenry?”

“No, your lordship.”

“Sir Lindsey Forbes?”

Miss Bowers shook her head. “Mama used to make hats for her ladyship when she was Miss Katherine Brownbeck and living in Bloomsbury. But I don’t think she ever met Sir Lindsey, no.”

Sebastian knew a quickening in his blood. “So she knew Theodore Brownbeck?”

“Oh, yes, my lord. In fact, she was telling me just the other day that she’d seen him up in the tea gardens. Ran into him in the shrubbery, she said. She mentioned it because he was all red in the face and acting peculiar, and she thought the heat must have got to him.”

“What day was this?” asked Sebastian, his voice sharp enough that Miss Bowers looked momentarily taken aback.

“Must have been Thursday of last week, my lord—the day before she died. I remember because it was so hot that afternoon—the day she was killed, I mean—that she decided not to walk up to the tea gardens and said she’d only go for her evening constitutional after the sun was down. That’s when she told me about having seen Mr. Brownbeck the day before and thinking the heat must have got to him because he was acting so queer.”

Chapter 55

S ebastian reined in near the corner of St. James’s Square, his gaze on the impressive home of Sir Lindsey and Lady Forbes.

He found himself remembering the angry visit from Theo Brownbeck that had followed so hard on the heels of Hero’s first call on Lady Forbes. At the time they had simply assumed Sir Lindsey must have sent word to his father-in-law of Sebastian’s involvement in the investigation of Hayes’s death. But it now appeared more likely that the warning to Brownbeck had come not from Forbes but from her ladyship’s abigail—the same abigail who had accompanied her mistress to Hatchards in Piccadilly and doubtless overheard her arrange to meet Nicholas Hayes in Pennington’s Tea Gardens.

Had the abigail always spied on her mistress for her former employer? Sebastian wondered. Or had Brownbeck’s chance sighting of Hayes that afternoon in Russell Street prompted him to task the abigail with watching his daughter’s every move? However it had come about, that was obviously how Brownbeck had learned of the planned meeting between Hayes and the former Kate Brownbeck. And so he had gone to the gardens that night to— What? Break up the assignation? Warn Hayes to stay away from his daughter?

Kill him?

The latter seemed unlikely, Sebastian decided, given the choice of murder weapon. Far more likely that Brownbeck had gone to the gardens that night planning to confront Hayes. No doubt the two men had exchanged heated words. And then what? What would a man steeped in the teachings of Buddhism do when confronted with the angry father of the woman he still loved?

Walk away, of course.

And so Nicholas had turned his back on Theo Brownbeck. Whereupon that esteemed pillar of society, that pious writer of endless tirades against the lowborn “criminal” classes of society, had grabbed the sickle left by a forgetful gardener and buried the blade deep between Hayes’s shoulder blades. Then he had run away, red in the face and shaking with reaction, and unfortunately encountered an arthritic old widow