What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

watchful. “Get to my father. Goddamn it,” he cried, when the boy simply stood there slack mouthed and frozen. “I said, run!”
    The boy whirled toward the door.
    Something hard and solid slammed into the side of Sebastian’s head. He staggered and tried to turn, but the world began to go black. The last thing he saw was the skinny, flailing arms of the boy, Tom, held fast in the hands of Sir Henry Lovejoy.

Chapter 59
     
     
    S ebastian came awake to a sense of movement, to the clip-clop of horses’ hooves and the clatter of carriage wheels jolting over uneven paving.
    Through a dizzying spiral of pain, his thoughts flew at once to Kat. The horror of what he knew Wilcox would do to her was so powerful he was nearly shaking with the need to control it, with the need to keep himself from lashing out in mindless, useless frustration. He forced himself to keep his eyes closed and lie still, fighting down a wave of nausea that burned sour in his throat as he concentrated all his senses on the task of understanding the situation in which he now found himself.
    He lay on the cracked leather seat of an old carriage. The forward seat. Rough ropes bit into his wrists, binding them together before him. His ankles were bound as well. But he could detect the steady breathing of only one other person in the carriage with him, a man who sat quiet and alert on the opposite seat. One man.
    Which man?
    Sebastian opened his eyes to find Sir Henry Lovejoy regarding him through narrowed, watchful brown eyes. “Well,” said Sebastian in a pleasantly conversational tone, “I wouldn’t have expected the Beau Brummell of Queen Square to willingly miss this.”
    “If you are referring to Senior Constable Maitland, he is currentlyotherwise occupied. Conveying two of his fellow constables to the surgeon, to be precise.”
    Fighting down a fresh wave of nauseous dizziness, Sebastian shifted his weight slightly and discovered that in addition to being tied together, his wrists were also tethered to a ring bolted to the carriage floor. He tightened his jaw against a violent upswelling of rage, but some hint of his feelings must have shown on Sebastian’s face because he noticed the magistrate sink back farther into his corner, his eyes wide and watchful.
    Sebastian showed his teeth in a smile. “You aren’t afraid I’ll murder you between here and the Public Office? Cut off your head and take a bath in your blood and do all manner of other ungodly things to your person?”
    Lovejoy was not amused. “I think not.”
    Sebastian glanced out the window as the carriage swung around a corner. The foggy void of the night swirled about them. “And the boy?” he asked casually.
    “If you mean that appallingly foul-mouthed urchin who was taken up in your company, he slipped out of my grip and darted off as we were leaving the inn.”
    It was a crumb of comfort, pitifully small. There were too many things that could go wrong. Hendon could refuse to see the boy, or simply refuse to believe him. And even if the Earl did believe the boy’s tale, what then? Whether Hendon sent a party of constables to the wharf, or went himself, the result would be disastrous. Martin Wilcox might be a murderer, but he was no fool and he knew what was at stake. The trap he had laid for Sebastian would be cleverly, carefully planned and orchestrated so that, whatever the outcome, Kat would die. Wilcox couldn’t afford to let her live to tell the tale.
    Sebastian fixed Sir Henry Lovejoy with an intense stare. “You must let me go.”
    The little magistrate thrust his hands into his pockets and settled deeper into his overcoat, as if bothered by the cold that seeped up from the straw-strewn floorboards and whistled in with the wind through the cracked windows. “It might be some consolation for you to know that I have reason to believe that you are indeed innocent of the deaths ofthose two women, Rachel York and Mary Grant. However, once the formalities are satisfied—”
    “You don’t understand,” said Sebastian, his voice low and earnest. “You need to let me go now . The man who killed those women has taken another one, Kat Boleyn. If I don’t get to her in time, he’ll kill her, too.”
    The carriage lurched suddenly, slowing to a crawl as a thickening press of bodies engulfed them. At first Sebastian thought it another bread riot. Then he heard a cry, “Huzzah for Florizel,” and saw the laughter and bright expectation in the swell of