de la surface du monde, et sur les changements qu'elles ont produits. "And stranger things have happened."
"So first," Sebastien said, "we find out how he died. Do you suppose his son will want the cat?"
* * *
The dead man was Emmett Goodwood, and Garrett was slightly surprised to discover that he was the mogul behind the Goodwood patent shoe fortune. He had employed over seven hundred young woman in one cramped and steaming stitchery in the Bronx alone, with other factories in Worchester, Hartford, and Philadelphia.
The Lord Mayor of New Amsterdam, Peter Eliot, would just as soon have kept her out of the case entirely. But the corpse of a millionaire, contained in a locked room, was just the sort of reason that Crown Investigators existed. The Colonial Police—who reported to the Lord Mayor—had a murder squad, but it was not equipped to deal with black sorcery.
Still, Eliot had his own ideas as to the proper authority of the Crown in its Western colonies, and interfering in the quotidian administration of his city lay outside that scope. And so Garrett did not herself question the household staff. The role of Crown Investigators, ideally, was to work in tandem with less arcane branches of law enforcement, and she did not expect this to be a terribly difficult case.
She sealed the scene, remanded the body for autopsy, and left the un-sorcerous detective inspectors of the Colonial Police's Murder Investigations Office to remonstrate with Goodwood's next of kin. Finally, at about the fourth hour after midnight, she turned to find Sebastien standing at her shoulder, the marmalade tom ensconced in his arms.
"Would you do me the honor?" he asked.
"Of accepting an armload of tabby?"
The cat, purring, narrowed its eyes. "I had thought you might agree to share my carriage," Sebastien said. "It will be light soon, and—"
Garrett checked over her shoulder. "Sebastien, are you inviting me to come home with you?" She had never been to his house, though they had been friends and occasional lovers since April of 1901.
About time, perhaps.
A tip of his head, self-deprecating. She studied him; he did look drawn, with the waxen countenance she had come to associate with his need. "I'd love to," she said, and cracked her jaw with a yawn. "But I can't promise to be any good to you tonight. Have you a footman we could send to my Mary for a bag?"
"Jack will see to it," he said.
It was not until much later that it occurred to her that she would have been wise to have asked, who is this Jack?
* * *
Sebastien lived in an end-row townhouse fronting Jardinstraat, which was named not for the park it formed the eastern border of, but—along with the park—for the seacaptain Karel Jardinstraat, Dutch hero of the wars of a hundred years before. Jardinstraat, along with New Amsterdam and the rest of the Dutch colonies, had been ceded to the British for the duration of the French occupation of Holland, which stretched until 1815. At the end of the war, the Iron Queen's grandmother Eleanor had been regent for a George who did not live to take the throne; she returned Captain Jardinstraat to the Dutch, but not so the park named for him or the colony it belonged to.
Her grand-daughter, born in 1822, had been named for the end of the last great war with the French: Alexandria Victoria. The Iron Queen.
It was her death that had brought Abigail Irene to the city Queen Alexandria's grandmother claimed as a spoil of war, because it was one thing to be the lover of a dashing, martial younger prince. It was quite another to be the lover of the heir to the throne. Especially when one was scraping by in society on a courtesy title as the elder sister of a wastrel lordling.
Sebastien, however, seemed as if he could not care less for any of that. He'd never asked, and when he'd learned, he'd greeted the news without so much as a shrug. Duke Richard, by contrast, had been tempests of sighs and unconcealed jealousy.
And now, Sebastien let her doze against his shoulder in the rocking carriage, as the orange cat dozed on his lap, only rousing her when they came up to the house. If Garrett fell in love anymore, she'd be tempted. Whatever peculiar dietary habits he professed.
He gave the cat to the footman and handed Garrett down from the carriage. He was a lean man of slightly more than medium height, with strength