She knew what he wanted her to say. She touched her throat, felt the torn edges of her dress. "I serve the Crown," she whispered.
She pushed away from the dresser, stepped past Henry, past Richard, toward the door. She stopped. Glanced over her shoulder.
"I have to confess this," Henry said, drawing himself up.
A harsh scent of burned cloth and blood tainted the air, overwhelming the scent of oranges.
"It will mean lives if you do, your Highness." She didn't need to look at Henry to know how his lips pursed in struggle, didn't need to look at Richard to see him drop his eyes to the floor. "Mine, perhaps. The Duke's. Maybe even your own. It will mean war. And it will mean only your honor if you don't."
"I know." His hands flexed helplessly, stretched and clenched. "What would you have me do, Abby Irene? What will you say of all this?"
"I will do as my King bids me do," she said. And then she stood and watched the moonlight move upon the wall, and waited for them to argue. Don Sebastien never moved from his place beside the door.
"Sebastien," she said, some time later. "Sebastien, take me home."
Limerent
(October, 1902)
The dead man sat in a wing-backed chair before a cold fireplace. The butler had shut the gas lamps off from the hall. His rooms were dark and still.
Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett paused in the open doorway, and did not yet enter. First, she set her lantern and her blue velvet carpetbag outside the door and drew white kid gloves onto her hands. Then she slipped the pouches drawstringed with ribbons—her housekeeper Mary had cleverly sewn them from linen handkerchiefs—over her shoes, and bound them tight. She shook out her skirts in the hall, and retrieved her silver-tipped ebony wand.
Taking up the lantern, the white beeswax candle flickering only slightly, she went to the corpse's side.
The smell of death was familiar.
As she approached, she became aware of a soft, organic rumble. She cast around for the source, alert to sorcery. But the sound emanated from a large orange cat curled, kneading, on the dead man's lap. It looked well-kept, sleek and worried, and as Garret watched, it bumped the dead man's hand with its smooth skull, rubbing ears and cheek against his fingers, purring loudly enough to shake its whiskers. Coaxing, hoping.
"He's not for eating," Garrett said to the cat. She preferred terriers. Nevertheless, something about the hand that the cat rubbed so determinedly caught her attention.
She reached out gingerly and stroked the cat between the ears with her gloved hand. It turned mad golden eyes on her, affronted, and she chuckled, tucked her wand under her arm, and set the lantern down on the table beside the chair. She slipped her fingers into the dead man's softly cupped hand.
She drew forth something small and dark, neither a cylinder nor a sphere, and rolled it between her fingers. "Las rosas," said a familiar voice, pitched to carry from the hall.
Garrett did not startle, but the cat did, leaping from the dead man's lap to the floor and vanishing behind a plant stand in one sharp, fluid motion. "Sebastien." She permitted herself a smile as she turned to face the detective. "Roses? It's a rosary bead, yes. How did you know?"
He came forward, even more silent than the cat, and picked the bead from her fingers. "It's one of the old ones," he said, and ran it delicately under his nose. "made of rolled flower petals. It's aromatic. Is there any sign of violence?"
She gave him her shoulder and lifted the cover of the inverted book that the dead man had lain over the arm of the chair with the tip of her wand, meticulously, just enough to read the title page. "Do you smell any blood?"
"He could have been poisoned."
"He could," she said. "Do you smell any of that?"
"Not yet. But he was expecting trouble."
"How do you know?"
Sebastien smiled. "Lift the book a little more."
She lifted an eyebrow as well, but obliged him. And sighed. Under the open pages lay a derringer, unfired, balanced on the broad arm of the chair. "I suppose you smelled that as well?"
"Powder and gun oil. Very distinctive, you know," he said, with an apologetic shrug. "But perhaps he died in a locked room, alone, with a
pistol to hand and a cat on his lap—at peace, with just time to lay down
his novel."
"It's a history." Garrett pointed to the title page. Discours sur les révolutions