"Richard," Jacqueline began. He tried to silence her with a glare: she raised her chin and stepped forward. "It is his wife."
"I'll bet," Eliot said simultaneously, stepping past Jacqueline and striding forward to confront Richard nose to nose. "In loyal service to the Crown."
Garrett heard the scrape of a chair as Henry stood. She didn't look. "That's sedition," Richard said softly.
"It's fact." Eliot turned his head and spat. "Arrest the Prince, Richard. Prove once and for all you care for something other than your Ducal seat. That you care for the colonies, and for New Amsterdam." He turned his head and stared Garrett in the face. "DCI. Do you know who killed my wife?"
Richard moved to put himself between them again. He walked into Sebastien, who had coolly set himself for the block. Garrett pushed forward and laid her hand on the Lord Mayor's arm. She looked over his shoulder, caught a complex expression on the Duchess' face. "When I have conclusive evidence—" You have conclusive evidence, Abigail Irene. "—Lord Peter, you will know what I know."
He stared her in the eye for a long, sharp-edged second before he turned and strode away.
* * *
Garrett wasn't quite certain how Sebastien spirited her away from the dining room. She remembered his hand on her arm, quick footsteps and the eventual pause, breathless, under a rising moon that painted the gravel garden path under their feet in knifelike shadows. "Don Sebastien, I am in your debt again," Garrett said, leaning into the shadows of a towering forsythia, fighting crawling shivers.
"I think we're past the point of friendship where we need to keep accounts," he replied. "Was Richard always such a pig?"
She laughed, winding her arms around her body. "He's jealous. And a patriot: he sets no loyalty before the Crown. I think he sees that you are not jealous, and to him it seems another bit of evidence that you are heartless and cold."
"I learned that it was foolish to try to possess things." Sebastien shrugged and put his arm around her, for all he had no warmth to share. "Or women. What sort of a life could I offer?" A thoughtful pause. "Is it Prince Henry, Abby Irene? I cannot deduce another answer, and I cannot understand why he would do such a thing."
She leaned back against his shoulder and watched the rising moon dye the facade of the Duke's manor the color of skimmed milk. She shook her head, her hair moving against his jacket, the rose in his lapel brushing her ear. "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"
"You realize, if they had listened to the women, Troy would still be standing? Helen tried to warn them, and Cassandra too."
"After she was cursed for spurning Apollo. And yet she and Helen take the blame." The scent of the forsythia hung over them, raw and sweet, less flower than vegetable. The moon rose another finger's width, waning from full, shaped like a sail bellying in the rising wind. "Don't the years grow long alone, Sebastien?"
"Look." He pointed. "You can see the rabbit in the moon."
"Did you bring me a bit of the shirt you wore last night?"
"I did," he answered, and held her strong hand in his cold one as they walked with measured paces back inside. "I'll ask Duchess Jacqueline if I may have the room beside yours, if that suits you. I somehow don't think she'll mind."
* * *
Smoke rose by smoke, two streams plainly divided in the dappled moonlight that made its way through the branches of those ancient elms. Garrett closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall beside the locked door to the library, breathing a sigh. Exactly as it should be.
The wampyr was innocent. She laid the silver spoon in an ashtray and snuffed the candle out with licked fingertips just a moment before a light tap rattled her door. The hall door: she had been prepared to ignore a furtive tap on the other, having little patience for Richard tonight. If he was fool enough to come to her under the same roof as his wife.
Garrett padded to the door barefoot and slid the bolt back, letting the door drift open on well-oiled hinges. She was unsurprised that Henry stood revealed beyond. "I apologize," he said as he brushed by her, pulling the knob from her hand and swinging it silently closed. She noticed with annoyance that he turned the