What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

gamekeeper to Lord Broxton, and he taught all us little ones how to read game tracks. Men’s tracks is no different. There was two sets of men’s bloody footprints, comin’ out o’ that chapel. Ain’t no doubt about that.”

Chapter 53
     
     
    S ebastian propped a hip on the edge of Lord Jarvis’s heavily carved Jacobin desk, one leg swinging back and forth as he leveled the Cassaignard flintlock at the fat man’s chest. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”
    “I never do anything stupid,” said Jarvis, his glance flicking from Sebastian to the long windows overlooking the rear garden, then back again. “You’ve tracked mud on my carpet.”
    “So I have. A legacy of my recent conversation with Lord Frederick Fairchild.”
    Jarvis leaned his back against the closed door and crossed his arms at his massive chest. “Really? Is that statement meant to be significant?”
    “Lord Frederick tells me you presented the Prince of Wales with one of a collection of indiscreet letters written by Lord Frederick to a certain young gentleman in the Foreign Office. Now, as I understand it, you led the Prince to believe this letter was found in the possession of a French agent named Monsieur Léon Pierrepont. Which is curious, don’t you think, given that Rachel York stole those letters from M. Pierrepont’s townhouse shortly before she was murdered last Tuesday?”
    Jarvis’s full lips curled up into a smile. “Really?”
    “Don’t,” said Sebastian, pushing away from the desk. “Don’t try my patience. I’ve had a long and very fatiguing day.”
    Jarvis’s gaze passed, derisively, over Sebastian’s rain-soaked and muddied Rosemary Lane clothing. “Obviously.”
    Sebastian plucked a stray wisp of hay from his lapel and let it fall. “How did you find out Rachel York was working for the French?”
    “There is very little happens in this town I don’t know about.”
    “So you—what? Offered her protection from arrest if she agreed to cooperate with your scheme to discredit Lord Frederick?”
    “Traitors’ deaths are such messy, painful affairs. It’s amazing what people will agree to do in order to avoid that kind of unpleasantness.” Jarvis nodded toward a cut-crystal decanter warming on a table beside the hearth. “I trust you won’t shoot me if I should venture to pour myself a glass of brandy?”
    A tapestry bellpull hung just to one side of the carved mantel. Sebastian smiled. “Of course not. As long as you remember what I said about Stupid Things.”
    He watched the big man cross the room. It did much to explain Rachel York’s nervousness in the weeks leading up to her death, if Jarvis had discovered her association with the French and used it to coerce her into working for him.
    Jarvis reached for the brandy decanter and lifted it from its tray with slow, ponderous movements.
    “So Rachel stole the letters from Pierrepont to give them to you,” said Sebastian.
    “Letter,” said Jarvis, correcting him. “Fair Rachel provided me with one letter only.”
    “And the other documents? Did she take those at your directive as well? Or was that her own initiative? Is that why you killed her? Because she’d discovered something she wasn’t meant to know?”
    Jarvis huffed a soft laugh. “You don’t seriously think I would stoop to killing some insignificant little bit of muslin, now do you?”
    “As a matter of fact, yes.”
    “Why would I? She’d delivered the letter I needed. I admit it wasn’t as incriminating as I had hoped, but in the end it served its purpose. Quite nicely.”
    “You see, that’s one of the things that puzzles me. Rachel York stolesome half a dozen of Lord Frederick’s letters from Pierrepont’s townhouse, yet you say she gave you only one. What happened to the others?”
    Jarvis’s florid, self-confident face gave nothing away. But Sebastian saw a hint of surprise flicker in the man’s eyes. “I neither know nor care.”
    “And here I thought little happens in this town that you don’t know about.” Sebastian watched Jarvis splash a generous measure of brandy into a glass. “You did know, of course, that it wasn’t true, what you told the Prince. Lord Frederick might have been foolishly indiscreet, but he wasn’t dealing with the French.”
    Jarvis eased the crystal stopper back into the decanter and set it aside. “Truth is such an overrated commodity. This country could not continue with a mad king on the throne; everyone knew that. We needed