As he approached the stand of oaks near the canal, a familiar middle-aged man, small and bespectacled and wrapped in a great-
coat more suited to the dead of winter than a chilly September morning, broke off his conversation with one of the constables and walked forward to meet him.
“Sir Henry,” said Sebastian. “Thank you for sending me word.”
“Sorry news, I’m afraid,” said Sir Henry Lovejoy. Once of Queen Square’s public office, Sir Henry was the newest of Bow Street’s three stipendiary magistrates, a man who undertook his responsibilities with a seriousness born of his own personal tragedies and a dour religious outlook. He and Sebastian might be unlikely friends, but friends they were.
Sebastian gazed beyond the magistrate, to where the lifeless body of a tall, dark-haired man in his early thirties lay curled on its side next to a rustic bench. “What happened to him?”
“Unfortunately, that’s not readily apparent,” said Lovejoy as they walked toward the body. “There are no discernable signs of violence. He was found lying much as you see him. It’s as if he sat down to rest and then collapsed. I understand he has been ill for some time?”
Sebastian nodded. “Walcheren fever. He fought it as long as he could, but in the end he was invalided out of the service.”
The magistrate tut-tutted softly. “Ah, yes; terrible business, that. Terrible.” The 1809 assault on the Dutch island of Walcheren was the kind of military debacle most Englishmen tried to forget. The largest British expeditionary force ever assembled up to that time had embarked with the ambitious aim of taking first Flushing and then Antwerp, in preparation for a march on Paris. Instead, they’d been forced to withdraw from the island after only a few months, in the grip of a medical disaster. In the end, more than a quarter of the forty thousand men involved succumbed to a mysterious disease from which few ever recovered.
Sebastian hunkered down beside his friend’s body. The two men had met nearly ten years before as subalterns, when Sebastian bought his first commission as a raw cornet and Wilkinson had just won promotion to the same rank. The son of a poor vicar who’d served with the common soldiers as a “gentleman volunteer” for three long years before a vacancy opened up, Wilkinson made no attempt to hide his good-humored scorn for the young Earl’s heir, whose wealth enabled him to step straight into a rank Wilkinson himself had had to fight to earn. Sebastian won the older man’s respect only slowly; friendship between them had taken even longer. But it had come.
Wilkinson still wore the proud swooping mustache of a cavalry officer. But his clothes were those of a gentleman down on his luck, the cuffs of his shirt neatly darned at the edges, his coat showing the effects of one too many brushings. Once, he’d been a strapping officer, tanned dark by the sun and full of life. But years of illness had wasted his once powerful body and left his skin sallow and sunken. Reaching out, Sebastian touched his friend’s cheek, then brought his hand back to rest on his own thigh, fingers curled. “He’s stone-cold. He must have been here all night.”
“So it would seem. Hopefully Paul Gibson will be able to tell us for certain after the postmortem.”
Like Sebastian and Wilkinson, Gibson had once worn the King’s colors. A regimental surgeon, he’d honed his craft on the charnel-house battlefields of Europe. No one was better at ferreting out the secrets a dead body might have to tell—which was why Gibson was the last person Sebastian wanted examining this body.
He swiped one hand across his beard-roughened face. “Is that necessary? I mean, if he died of the fever . . .”
Lovejoy looked vaguely surprised. Normally, Sebastian was a vocal proponent of the still relatively new and highly controversial practice of autopsying the bodies of victims of murder or suspicious death. “Still best to be certain—wouldn’t you say, my lord? Although I don’t doubt you’re right. From the looks of things, he sat down on the bench to rest and suffered a seizure of some sort. Poor man. One wonders what possessed him to push himself by walking so far. And at night, after the park was closed.”
Sebastian was afraid he knew only too well why Wilkinson had chosen to lose himself in the farthest reaches of the park, after hours. But he felt no need to share that fear with Lovejoy.