He nodded. David could help him with the coffin, anyway.
* * *
Jack had still not returned by sunrise. Phoebe had done her mortal best to stay awake, but sometime after midnight she'd drifted asleep in a parlor chair, and not awakened when Sebastien propped her head with a bundled shawl. He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and stroked the warm skin of her neck, but even the chill of his fingertips did no more than make her stir.
The motion did rouse David, though, who materialized at his shoulder with all the softness of an interested cat. "So frail," he said, which should have sounded ridiculous coming from a creature who might have been made of ribbon-jointed twigs. "How can you bear to give your heart to them?"
Sebastien stepped back from her, bringing his shoulder against David's. David leaned; Sebastien slipped an arm around his waist under his coat, without thinking.
"I can't," Sebastien said, trying not to think of Jack's private business, and all the dangerous places it might have taken him in the night. But Abby Irene was sleeping in her hotel room, or awake and preparing for her interview with the Governor. The rain had broken with sunrise, and burning murder fell from the skies.
And in any case, he hadn't the slightest idea where Jack had gone, other than a suspicion that he was indulging his young man's preoccupation with revolutionaries. For lack of anything better, Sebastien shook his head and said to David, "How can you bear not to?"
For answer, David pressed his lips to Sebastien's throat. "He'll come back to you," David said. "Haven't you noticed we all do?"
* * *
The morning post was delayed, which worried Sebastien further, and a strange hush had fallen over the city by midmorning. Even on the Hill, there should have been a bustle of scullery maids on their way to market, the cries of costermongers in the distance, the clatter of delivery carts. But there was none such, and no children in the street. Gunfire, distant, but unmistakable, wakened Phoebe before noon.
"The French?" David asked.
"We would have heard the canon, if they came by sea." It was not Sebastien's first war.
Phoebe rose up, smoothed her crumpled skirts and hair, and went into the kitchen to make tea. The tension around Sebastien crystallized into a shell of silence that even David hesitated to break.
Eventually, Sebastien set down the novel—one of his hostess's, in fact—that he was flipping at ineffectually, and left David in the parlor. Even the cat wanted nothing to do with him in this mood. Perhaps he'd go upstairs and find his knitting; his concentration might be sufficient unto that.
But his route to the back stair—the front had windows—took him through into the dining room, where he found Phoebe at table, picking crumbs from the crust of an otherwise untouched watercress sandwich. The knitting could wait. He sat down across the table; she looked up and proffered a feeble smile.
He was searching for the right words when the lock on the front door clicked. Both of them started, Phoebe knocking her chair backwards as she rose. She did not pause to right it, just gathered her skirts close and stepped over the legs with all the catlike fastidiousness of a saloon girl stepping over sprawled drunkards.
Whatever dignity she mustered, she clutched Sebastien's elbow as they stepped into the front parlor.
Jack and Abby Irene stood shoulder to shoulder within the door, he with his cap askew and she clutching the handles of her carpet bag in both fists, a cape thrown hastily over her shoulders and her short hair spilling from its pins.
"Riots," she said, with all the ice-knife precision of her exquisite enunciation, and slumped against the door, the carpet bag falling unheeded at her feet, though Sebastien noticed she kept her ebony wand clutched in her left hand, concealed in the fall of lace cuff. He turned to fetch brandies for her and Jack; David was still seated not far from the fire.
While Sebastien poured, Phoebe guided the travelers into chairs. "Riots?"
Jack waved at the door. "I had a little warning," he said. "The outcry was over rumors of Navy press gangs working near the docks, and I think some Home Rule advocates opining we should be siding with the French against the Crown. It started in the taverns."
Sebastien, setting a drink by Jack's elbow, suspected how Jack knew that, and what his business of the previous night might have been. From Abby Irene's