What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

hadn’t been there before. “You don’t ask why I’m here.”
    Once, he’d been her heart, her soul, her reason for living. Once,she’d have given up anything for him. Anything. But that was six years ago, and she was as different from that love-obsessed young girl as she was from the laughing child who’d once climbed an oak tree on the edge of a sun-filled Irish green.
    He stopped before her, close enough that she could see the shadow of his day’s growth of beard and the exhaustion that pulled his features taut. Close, but not too close. Still it seemed there was to be a distance kept between them.
    “Do you need money?” she asked. “Or simply an introduction to a trustworthy band of smugglers who aren’t particular about the identity of the passengers they carry across the Channel?”
    He shook his head. “Do you really think I would run?”
    No, he wouldn’t run. She might not know all that had happened to this man during those brutal years he was away. But she still knew this about him.
    He appeared to have slept in his clothes. His cravat was gone, and what looked like dried blood stained the white cuffs of his shirt. “You look terrible,” she said.
    The Sebastian she’d known, once, would have laughed at that. He didn’t. His gaze sought hers, captured it. “Tell me about Rachel York.”
    His eyes were as frighteningly animalistic as she had remembered. She swung away to settle down beside the cold hearth and set to work lighting a fire. She told herself it was natural that he had come here, to ask about Rachel. She and Rachel had been starring together in the Covent Garden production of As You Like It . He would know that. There was no reason to worry that he knew anything else.
    “According to word on the streets, Rachel’s maid is saying she went to St. Matthew’s last night to meet you.” Kat glanced back at him. “Did she?”
    He shook his head.
    “They say they found your pistol on her body.”
    “Really?” His eyes opened a fraction wider, but that was the only reaction he betrayed. “How curious.”
    When had he become so adept, she wondered, at hiding his feelings? “They also say the constable you stabbed still lives, although he won’t for long. Did you know?”
    “I didn’t stab him.”
    “Just like you didn’t kill Rachel?”
    A corner of his mouth twitched. “If you really believed I’d killed Rachel York, you’d be swinging that poker at my head.”
    Kat sat back on her heels, the poker idle in her hands, her gaze on the man beside the window. “Why do you want to know about Rachel?”
    “Because it seems to me that the only hope I have of working my way out of this wretched tangle is to discover who the hell did kill her.” He went to the table where she kept a brandy decanter, poured himself a drink, and knocked it back in one long pull. “Any ideas as to who might have wanted to see Rachel York dead?”
    She’d thought about it, of course. Thought about who, besides Leo and his associates, could have been responsible. Rachel hadn’t been particularly well liked amongst the theatrical community; she’d been too focused and driven—and too successful—not to stir up petty resentments and rivalries. But Kat could think of only one man angry enough, and violent-tempered enough, to attack a woman so brutally, so passionately.
    “There is someone. . . .” Kat paused, then said the name in a rush. “Hugh Gordon.”
    Devlin looked around in surprise. “Hugh Gordon?” A tall, darkly handsome man with a deep voice and the ability to move an audience to tears with a simple gesture, Hugh Gordon was London’s most popular male actor since John Kemble.
    “Rachel caught his eye her first day at the theater. She was flattered, of course. He helped her career enormously when she was starting out. She may even have fallen in love with him, for all I know. There was talk at one point of marriage. But then he became more possessive. Controlling. More . . . violent.”
    “You mean, he hit her.”
    Kat nodded. “She left him after about a year.”
    Devlin reached for the decanter. “I don’t imagine a man with Hugh Gordon’s amour propre would take kindly to that.”
    “He threatened to kill her.”
    “You think he could do a thing like this?”
    “I honestly don’t know.”
    He poured another drink, then simply stood there, regarding it thoughtfully. “What about the men in her life since Gordon?”
    Beside her, the coals glowed red hot with