C S Harris [Sebastian St. Cyr When Gods Die (epub)

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.Sebastian smiled.“As a matter of fact, yes.”Tom took a step back, one hand coming up to anchor his cap to his head as a salt-laden breeze gusted up from the Strand.“If’n anybody seen anythin’, gov’nor, I’ll find ’im, never you fear.”“Oh and, Tom?” Sebastian added as the boy started to dash off.“Don’t lift anyone’s purse, you hear? Not even just for practice.”Tom drew himself up with a show of wounded dignity and sniffed.“As if I would.”Chapter 10Unlike most members of the ton who hired narrow town houses on the streets of Brighton for the summer months, Oliver Godwin Ellsworth, the Fourth Marquis of Anglessey, possessed an estate of his own on the outskirts of town.It was one of his lesser properties, and quite small compared to his main seat in Northumberland, but the house was neat and comfortable, and pleasantly situated on a hillside overlooking the clean sweep of the sea a reasonable distance from the noise and bustle of Brighton’s streets.Leaving the chestnuts in the care of a groom, Sebastian found the Marquis in a garden of mossy brick paths and carefully tended roses that thrived in the lee of the high walls sheltering them from the worst of the salty winds blowing up from the sea.At the sound of Sebastian’s footsteps, Anglessey turned, an old man with once dark hair heavily laced now with strands of gray.Only a few years Hendon’s senior, he seemed older, his body thin, his face drawn with the lines of ill health and visibly weighed down by a heavy burden of recent grief.“Thank you for agreeing to see me at such a time,” said Sebastian, pausing in a bright patch of June sunlight.“I can’t tell you how sorry I am about what has happened.”The Marquis went back to clipping the spent blooms of a pale pink rose that twined around a stout pillar at the edge of the path.“But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”The directness of the question took Sebastian by surprise.“No,” he answered with equal bluntness.“Lord Jarvis has asked me to look into the circumstances surrounding your wife’s death.”The Marquis’s fist tightened around his secateurs.“To protect the Prince, of course.” He said it as a statement, rather than a question.“That’s their motive, yes.”The Marquis looked around, one eyebrow arched.“But not yours?”“No.” Sebastian met the old man’s steady, intelligent gaze.“Do you think he did it?”“The Prince?” Anglessey shook his head and went back to pruning the rose.“Prinny might be a drunken, overindulged, self-coddling idiot, but he’s not violent.Not like his brother Cumberland.” He paused to subject his handiwork to a critical assessment, his jaw hardening in a way that belied both age and infirmity.“But make no mistake about this: if I’m wrong—if I should discover Prinny did have something to do with Guin’s death—I won’t let him get away with it.Prince Regent or not.”Sebastian studied that angry, grief-stricken face.The Marquis might be old, but there was nothing weak or feeble about either his determination or his powers of understanding.“So who do you think killed your wife, sir?”An odd half smile touched the old man’s lips.“Do you realize you’re the first person who’s asked me that? I suppose it’s because everyone who doesn’t think the Prince killed Guinevere naturally assumes I did it.”The Marquis moved on to the next rose.Sebastian waited, the sun warm on his shoulders, and after a moment the Marquis said, “They’ve refused to let me have Guinevere’s body.Did you know that? They say there’s some surgeon coming down from London.Someone they want to take a look at her.”“Paul Gibson.He’s very good at this sort of thing.He’d like your permission to do a complete autopsy.”Anglessey glanced around.“Why?”Sebastian met the old man’s pained, haggard gaze.“Because Lady Anglessey wasn’t killed last night.She was killed sometime yesterday afternoon and her body moved to the Yellow Cabinet in time for the Prince to find her.”An angry light flared in the old man’s eyes.“What is this? Some trick to throw suspicion away from the Prince?”“No.As a matter of fact, the Prince’s physicians have given it as their opinion that Lady Guinevere committed suicide.”“Suicide! With a dagger sticking out of her back?”“Exactly.” Sebastian hesitated, then added, “Except that the dagger isn’t what killed her.According to Gibson, she was probably dead several hours before she was stabbed.”“Good God.What are you suggesting?”Sebastian shook his head.“We don’t know how she died, sir.That’s why Gibson wants your permission to do a postmortem.Without one, it’s going to be difficult to ever understand what happened to your wife.”There was a moment of silence, filled with the click-click of the Marquis’s secateurs and the distant cry of the gulls.Then he said, “Very well.Your Dr.Gibson has my permission.” He cast Sebastian a fierce glance over one shoulder.“But I want to be informed of everything.Do you hear me? No holding back out of consideration for my age or my health or any of that nonsense.”“No holding back.”Anglessey pressed his lips together, his nostrils flaring as he sucked in a quick, deep breath.“I know what people think of my marriage to Guinevere.An old man like me, taking to wife a woman young enough to be his granddaughter.They act like it was something disgraceful, something sordid.As if the forty-five-year difference in our ages made it somehow impossible for me to love her.”He paused, his hands stilling as he stared off toward the end of the garden, his voice becoming hushed.“But I did love her, you know.Not because she was beautiful—although God knows she was.But she was so much more than that.She was…she was like a breath of fresh air that came into my life.So full of energy and passion.So bright, so determined to grasp life with both hands and make of it what she wanted—” He broke off and had to suck in a quick gasp of air before saying more quietly, “I can’t believe she’s dead.”Sebastian waited a moment, then asked again, quietly, “Who do you think killed her, sir?”Anglessey went to sink down on the weathered wooden bench sheltered by a nearby arbor, his hands in his lap.“Guinevere was my third wife,” he said, his voice once again firm, under control.“The first died within hours of presenting me with a stillborn son.The second was barren.”Sebastian nodded.There was no need for the Marquis to explain further.He and Sebastian belonged to the same world, a world in which everyone understood only too clearly the need for a man in their position to produce a legitimate heir.Even at twenty-eight, Sebastian had already felt that pressure brought to bear upon himself, both by his father and by the weight of his own awareness of what he owed his house, his name.“Ever since the death of my brother twenty years ago,” Anglessey was saying, “my heir has been my nephew.Bevan.”The implications were inescapable.Sebastian studied the old man’s closed, angry face [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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