What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

me.”
    “Of course I hate you,” she said, practically spitting the words at him. “Why wouldn’t I? You, Viscount Devlin, the precious, pampered heir to everything. Everything that should have been mine.” She thumped her fist against her chest. “ Mine . I was my father’s firstborn child. While you—” She cut herself off just in time, clenching her teeth together.
    “I didn’t invent the laws of male primogeniture,” he said, his voice a quiet counterpart to hers, his brows drawing together as if in puzzlement as he searched her face, “even if I have benefited from them.”
    She watched, confused, as a strange smile touched his lips, then faded. “It’s funny, but my first thought when it finally all came together was to rush over here and warn you—warn you about how dangerous the man you were married to has become. It wasn’t until I started thinking about what you’d said, about how Bayard had passed out before nine when the police have everyone thinking the murder took place between five and eight, that I realized you knew the truth.” He drew in a deep breath then let it out in a harsh expulsion of air. “I’m not going to swingfor you, Amanda. And I’m not going to let that sick bastard who is your husband keep butchering women.”
    “You have no proof,” she said, as he turned toward the door.
    He paused to glance back at her over his shoulder. “I’ll find something.” His mouth curved into a tight smile, harder and far meaner than the last. “Even if I have to make it up.”

     
    Outside the churchyard of St. Matthew of the Fields, Sir Henry Lovejoy found the streets of Westminster deserted. Peering hopefully into the murky darkness, he turned up his collar against the creeping, insidious cold and wished he’d had the forethought to tell his hackney driver to wait.
    He thought about that girl, Rachel York, coming here alone on a night such as this. He wondered at the kind of courage that must have taken—courage, or a passionately held conviction, or maybe a large dose of both. Yet there was nothing he had discovered yet in this case that suggested a reason for either.
    The Reverend McDermott had been shocked at the discovery that such a woman had possessed a key to his church and baffled as to how she might have obtained it. Yet she had obtained it, and used it to meet the Earl of Hendon here at ten o’clock, just as Hendon had claimed. It was why Jem Cummings had seen the bloody footprints of two men—the first set belonging to Rachel York’s murderer, the second set left, later, by Hendon.
    It was always dangerous, Lovejoy knew, to assume a fact is true simply because it appears obvious. Yet it was a mistake all too often made—a mistake he had made. And because of it, they’d spent the last week chasing an innocent man.
    The rattle of carriage wheels over rough cobbles brought Lovejoy’s head around as a dark, rawboned job horse and hackney emerged from the gloom. There was a shout, and the jarvey pulled up.
    The carriage’s near door flew open. “Sir Henry. There you are.” Edward Maitland appeared in the open doorway. “I was hoping to catch you before you left the church. We’ve a report that Viscount Devlin has beenstaying at an inn near Tothill Fields. A place called the Rose and Crown. I’ve sent some lads to watch the place, but I thought you’d like to be there when the arrest is made.”
    Lovejoy scrambled up into the carriage’s musty interior. “There’ve been some new developments in the case,” he said as the carriage took off again with a jerk. He gave the constable a quick summary of his meeting with the sexton and the Reverend McDermott. “What it means, of course,” he said, wrapping up, “is that in all likelihood Rachel York wasn’t killed until sometime after eight—probably more like ten o’clock. And since we know Lord Devlin arrived at his club shortly before nine, his lordship couldn’t possibly have had enough time to kill the girl here in Westminster, rush home to Brook Street, change his clothes, and still appear in St. James’s Street when he did.”
    The swinging carriage lamp threw irregular patterns of light and shadow over the set features of the constable’s face. “Just because we don’t see how he could have done it doesn’t mean he didn’t do it,” said Maitland. “Besides, you’re forgetting what he did to Constable Simplot.”
    Lovejoy bit back what he’d been about to say. It was true, he had