What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

thumping the stair door back against the wall as she momentarily lost her balance and wavered.
    “What was that?”
    Kat’s head jerked around as the urgent, high-pitched words echoed through the empty rooms.
    “What? I didn’t hear anything.”
    The first voice was moving. “There’s someone here. In the back. Quick.”
    Kat didn’t wait to hear more. Her half-boots clattering on the bare steps, her reticule clutched in her hand, she fled.

Chapter 19
     
     
    T he ruse of simple Mr. Simon Taylor from Worcestershire wasn’t going to work with a man such as Leo Pierrepont. Sebastian and Pierrepont didn’t exactly move in the same circles, but the émigré knew Lord Devlin on sight, and a poorly cut coat and a few streaks of gray at the temples would be unlikely to prove an adequate disguise. Pierrepont had a reputation amongst the ton for shrewdness.
    So Sebastian visited a discreet shop on the Strand, where he provided himself with a neat little French Cassaignard flintlock pistol with a cannon muzzle and stepped breech, which fit snugly into the front pocket of his greatcoat. Then, as an early dusk fell over the city and the lamplighters struggled against a steady rain and sharp January wind, he set off for Half Moon Street.

     
    Leo Pierrepont hurried down his front steps, his coat collar turned up and hat brim pulled low against the wind-driven rain. “Cavendish Square,” he told the hackney driver, shutting the door behind him with a snap.
    “There are more reasons than one might suppose,” said Sebastian, lounging at his ease in the far corner, “for the Beau’s assertion that gentlemen should avoid riding in hackney carriages.”
    The Frenchman’s start of surprise was almost instantly controlled. “Ibeg your pardon,” he said, his glance darting, betrayingly, to the door. “I didn’t realize the jarvey already had a customer.”
    He had quite a reputation as a swordsman, this Frenchman, his slim body still energetic and agile despite his forty or fifty years. Sebastian slipped his hand from his pocket and calmly aimed the flintlock at the Frenchman’s chest. “I think you understand.”
    Leo Pierrepont stretched out his legs, settled deeper into the seat, and smiled. “Then I fear you overestimate my powers of imagination.”
    “Yet you know who I am.”
    “Of course.” His eyebrows rose in a very Gallic expression of disdain. “Wherever did you find that appalling coat?”
    Sebastian smiled. “The Rag Fair in Rosemary Lane.”
    “It looks like it. An effective disguise, I suppose, in its way. But only so long as the authorities fail to realize they should be seeking their missing viscount amongst the ill-dressed, hmm?”
    “I’m not worried. I suspect you have your own reasons for avoiding the authorities. At least when the topic of conversation is Rachel York.”
    “And if your suspicions are incorrect?”
    “There is that, of course. Still, it’s interesting, don’t you think, that you were the man paying the rent on her rooms?”
    A carriage rattled past, the glow from the torches carried by its linkboys slanting in through the hackney window to highlight the Frenchman’s sharp, hawkish features. “Who told you that?”
    Sebastian lifted one shoulder in a careless shrug. “Information is easy enough to come by . . . when one uses the right means of persuasion.”
    The Frenchman regarded him dispassionately for a moment. “Am I to guess why you’ve chosen to approach me on this matter?”
    “I should think the reason obvious.”
    Pierrepont opened his eyes wide. “Good God. What are you suggesting? That I killed Rachel? What do you imagine to be my motive, 4I wonder? Not lust, surely. Given the details you’ve discovered about our arrangement, it’s obvious I could have had the girl anytime I chose. Why rape her in a church?”
    Sebastian studied the other man’s carefully composed features. Had Rachel been raped? “Yet you seem to have shared her with others,” saidSebastian, keeping his voice deliberately bland. “Was that generosity willing, I wonder? Or not?”
    “What do you think? That I killed Rachel in a fit of jealous passion?” Pierrepont waved one long, delicate hand through the air in a dismissive gesture. “Such a fatiguing emotion, jealousy—apart from being rather primitive and plebian. You see, I am not a possessive man, my lord. The arrangement Rachel and I had suited us both—however strange some might find it.”
    “There are