What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

overlooking the terrace below, his hands clasped behind his back, his profile carefully composed, as if in deep thought. It was a moment before he spoke. “You’re a sophisticated man, Sir Henry. Surely I’ve no need to explain to you what it means, to have the son of a prominent peer—a member of the government, for God’s sake—implicated in such a crime. If we are seen to hesitate”—he swept one well-tailored arm in an expansive gesture toward the streets—“if the crowds out there believe that being born to a position of privilege is enough to allow an Englishman to get away with rape and murder, with sacrilege—” Jarvis broke off, his arm falling back to his side, his voice dropping to a deep, solemn hush. “I was in Paris, you know, in 1789. I’ll never forget it. The sight of blood running in the gutters. Of men’s severed heads, stuck on pikes. Of gentlewomen snatched from their carriages and torn limb from limb by the howling mobs.” He paused, his gaze sharpening suddenly on Lovejoy’s face. “Is that what you want to see here, in London?”
    “No. Of course not, my lord,” Lovejoy said hastily. He knew he was being manipulated, knew there were undercurrents to all this that he, a simple magistrate, could never hope to understand. He knew it, yet that didn’t stop the chill that touched his soul, the sick dread that clutched at his vitals. It was every Englishman’s worst fear, that the endless, rampant, mindless carnage of the French Revolution might someday spread across the Channel and destroy everything he held most dear.
    “If Lord Devlin is indeed innocent of this terrible crime,” Jarvis was saying, “he will in due course be exonerated and freed. The important thing is to be seen acting now. These are perilous times in which we live, sir. The news from the war is not good. The masses are discontented and sullen, and easily stirred up by radicals. With His Majesty’s health unlikely to improve and a Regency bill even now before Parliament, the very stability of the realm could be at stake. This is no time to be seen to hesitate, to dither and delay. The Prince of Wales wants Devlin arrested, and he wants it done before nightfall.” Jarvis paused. “I trust I can rely upon you to handle the situation with the tact and discretion required.”
    It was never easy, bringing a member of the aristocracy to justice. Yetit did happen. It wasn’t so many years since the Fourth Earl Ferrers had been arrested for the murder of his steward, tried before the House of Lords, and hanged. As heir to the Earl of Hendon, Sebastian St. Cyr carried the title of Viscount Devlin as a courtesy title only. “Lord” he might be called, but otherwise the title conveyed upon him none of the legal rights of an actual peerage. Until the day he became Earl of Hendon in his father’s stead, Devlin would not, technically, be a peer. And so he would be tried before the King’s Bench, like any other common criminal, rather than in the House of Lords.
    If it came to that, of course.
    Lovejoy bowed sharply. “Yes, my lord. I’ll see to it personally.”
    An unexpectedly winning, almost gentle smile spread across Lord Jarvis’s face. “Good man. I knew I could count on you.”
    His hat gripped tightly before him, Lovejoy bowed himself out of the great man’s presence. But as he turned to walk down that long, ornate corridor, his footsteps echoing hollowly, his heart feeling strangely heavy in his chest, Sir Henry Lovejoy became aware of a growing conviction that he was being used.

Chapter 6
     
     
    S ometimes, dreams of the war still came to him. Dreams haunted by dying children, dark eyes filled with pain and fear and bewilderment, and golden-skinned women, swollen pregnant bellies ripped open by soldiers’ bayonets. Once it had mattered to him which soldiers’ bayonets, French or English? It had mattered desperately. That had been before he’d understood it was irrelevant, that it was only a factor of time and geography, that soldiers of all nations did these things. Once, he’d thought England a nation anointed by God, a favored land blessed and divinely protected, a force of good, battling enemies who must therefore be the forces of evil. Once, he had believed that there were such things as just wars and righteous causes. Once.
    Sebastian opened his eyes, his breath coming short and fast, his clenched hands clammy with sweat. The gloom of his velvet-shrouded bedchamber gave no indication