What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

back. “Known what?”
    “I thought it was Bayard,” he continued, as if she had said nothing. “I was remembering all those nasty little incidents from when he was a boy. The time he set fire to the henhouse at Hendon Hall, just so he could have the fun of watching it burn. All the unmentionable things he used to do to any stray animal unlucky enough to fall into his clutches.”
    He drew up before her, close enough that she could smell the acrid wet of the fog that had seeped into his rough, workingman’s clothes. “I used to wonder where it came from, that utter lack of empathy for the suffering of others, that streak of cruelty bordering on madness. I even wondered if perhaps it ran hidden within me, too. And then one day I saw Wilcox laugh at the sight of a cotter’s child being torn apart by a pack of hounds, and I knew. I knew where it came from.”
    “You’re the one who is mad.”
    “Am I?” He swung away. “You’ve heard the news, I suppose? About Leo Pierrepont?”
    “Pierrepont?” Amanda shook her head. “What has he to do with anything?”
    “Dear Amanda. Can it be that you really don’t know? Hendon told me something a few days ago, something that should have piqued my curiosity, except that I missed it. He said the government has known about Pierrepont’s ties to Napoleon for the better part of a year now, ever since a certain gentleman he called Mr. Smith found himself under pressure from Pierrepont to provide information of value to the French government. It seems Hendon and Lord Jarvis decided between them to simply sit on the revelations about Pierrepont, and use this compromised gentleman as a sort of double agent.”
    “So?” said Amanda.
    “So, the curious thing is that while Father and Jarvis both serve the King, on a personal level the two men can barely tolerate each other. Which tells me that the only reason Jarvis discussed the situation with Hendon is because the compromised gentleman had come to Hendon for help. And the only man I can think of who would do that is your husband. Wilcox.”
    Amanda stood very still, watching her brother prowl restlessly about her dressing room. She hadn’t known this about Wilcox, that he’d been careless enough to allow himself to fall into a French trap. She gripped her hands together, shaken by an onrush of cold rage directed not just at Martin but at this man, her brother, who had come here to taunt her with her husband’s stupidity.
    “What did they have on him, I wonder?” Sebastian said, pausing to fiddle with the quill she’d left lying on the leather-covered writing surface of her desk. “Something more, I suspect, than a mere sexual indiscretion. Whatever it was, Rachel must have found evidence of it when she helped herself to a cache of sensitive documents in Pierrepont’s possession. A fatal mistake, poor girl, since she must then have offered to sell the incriminating evidence to Wilcox. She didn’t know the kind of man she was dealing with.” He swung suddenly to face her. “But you did.”
    “You’re mad,” Amanda said again, her hands gripping together tighter and tighter.
    “Am I? That day I came here to confront Bayard, you knew then. It’s why you were so careful to tell me the exact time Wilcox had encountered Bayard. Only, he didn’t bring the lad straight home, did he?”
    “The girl was a whore,” said Amanda suddenly, the words a harsh, angry tear ripped from a tightly constricted throat. “A whore, and a traitor.”
    A strange light shone in her brother’s uncanny, alien eyes. “So that makes it all right, does it, what Wilcox did to her? What about the maid, Mary Grant? Or is that all right, too, because she was just a common servant and not a very honest one at that?”
    His words fell into a silence Amanda had no intention of breaking. From outside came the fog-muffled clip-clop of hooves, and, nearer at hand, the clatter of a bucket followed by a giggle from one of the housemaids.
    In the end it was Sebastian who broke the silence, the anger in his voice having been replaced by a kind of urgency. “Wilcox has developed a taste for it now, Amanda. You do realize that, don’t you? He’s going to keep doing it. And one day, he will be caught.”
    “Hopefully not until after they’ve hanged you.”
    His face went suddenly, satisfyingly blank. “I’ve always known you disliked me,” he said after a pause. “But I don’t think I realized until now just how much you hate