What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

When a city’s detectives were paid a forty-pound reward for each conviction, true justice was more often than not a victim of avarice.
    And so at some point during the long night Sebastian had decided that he would not escape abroad, nor would he surrender himself, trustingly, foolishly, to the dubious expedience of British justice. Out there, somewhere, was the man who had killed Rachel York; Sebastian’s only hope lay in discovering precisely who that killer was.
    Five years in army intelligence had taught Sebastian that the firstthing he needed was information. He needed to talk to someone who’d known Rachel; someone who could identify her enemies, someone who might know why she had gone on a cold winter’s night, alone, to meet her death in a small, out-of-the-way Westminster church.
    He’d already decided against making any attempt to contact either his own family or friends; they would undoubtedly be watched, and he would do nothing that might endanger them. But no one would think to set a watch upon the actress who’d been playing Rosalind to Rachel’s Celia in the Covent Garden production of As You Like It . The woman who’d broken Sebastian’s heart six long years ago. . . .
    The sun was rising higher in the sky, but only a faint hint of lightness showed through the inevitable mantle of dirty fog. He could hear the rumble of wagons and market carts on their way to Covent Garden, and the whirl of a knife grinder’s wheel in the yard below.
    And, nearer at hand, the sound of quick footsteps in the corridor outside his room.
    Flattening himself against the wall beside the door, Sebastian stood tense, waiting. Then he heard a furtive scratching and a boy’s whisper. “Oi, gov’nor. ’Tis me, Tom.”
    It was the urchin from last night. “Tom?” said Sebastian with malicious amusement. “I don’t believe I’m acquainted with a Tom.”
    From the far side of the panel came an impatient oath. “The figger what tried to prig your purse last night.”
    “Ah. And you expect me to open the door to you, do you, my larcenous friend?”
    “Lord love you, gov’nor. Now’s no time to be funnin’. There’s Bow Street men downstairs right this weery minute. Asking for you, they are—leastways, if’n you’re the cove what knifed a constable over Mayfair way and—”
    Sebastian opened the door so fast that Tom, who’d been leaning against it, half fell into the room. In the pale light, the boy looked thinner, and dirtier, than Sebastian remembered him. He fixed Sebastian with dark, assessing eyes. “They also say you cut up some mort in a church off Great Peter Street.” There was a pause. “Did you?”
    Sebastian met the boy’s hard gaze. “No.”
    Tom nodded his head in quick, silent affirmation. “Thought I smelled a rum ’un. But there’s two beaks in the common room right this weery minute, askin’ about you, and another forty-pounder out the front.”
    Perching on the edge of the bench, Sebastian pulled on first one boot, then the other. “I take it you’re suggesting I might find it advisable to depart through the window?”
    “Aye, gov’nor. And pretty soon, too, if’n you’re not anxious to dance the Newgate hornpipe.”
    Sweeping up his greatcoat, Sebastian crossed to the open window and surveyed the yard below. The casement opened above a low, lean-to roof of what he thought might be the kitchen. But the only exit from the yard was through the front arch. He would have to make his way along the slant of the lean-to roof to where it abutted a jutting brick extension of the inn’s second story, and somehow climb from there up onto the main roof.
    “Why, precisely, did you come to warn me?” Sebastian asked, pausing with one leg over the windowsill to look back at the boy.
    “Gor. If ever a cove needed help, it’s you, gov’nor.”
    “Huh. Your altruism, while inspiring, is somehow less than convincing,” Sebastian said, and dropped to the sloping roof below.
    Light and agile as a cat, Tom landed beside him. “I don’t know what you means by that, exactly. But my offer still stands: for a shilling a day, I’m your man. I know these parts weery well, I do. If’n you’re set on ’idin’ out around ’ere, you couldn’t find a better snapper.”
    “I thought the price was ten pence?” Sebastian said, running along the lean-to roof in a low crouch.
    “It was. Only, now that I know the China Street pigs is after you, the price ’as gone up.”
    Sebastian