What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

mainly contained notations for meetings with the likes of hairdressers and seamstresses. But one name appeared on virtually every day. “Who’s Giorgio?”
    “I think it might be Giorgio Donatelli. He helped design and paint the scenery when we did The School for Scandal last year. But he’s become increasingly popular as a portrait painter since then. He’s had commissions from the Lord Mayor and several members of the Prince of Wales’s inner circle. I don’t know why Rachel would be seeing him.”
    “What do you know of him?”
    “Not much, except that he’s young, and rather romantic-looking. He’s Italian.”
    “Our young man with the key?”
    “I don’t know. It’s not like Rachel to give any man the key to her rooms.”
    Sebastian started to put the book in his pocket, but she reached out and touched his arm, stopping him.
    “You didn’t look to see if she’d written down her Tuesday night appointment at St. Matthew of the Fields.”
    Somewhere in the night, a tomcat howled, a deep throaty caterwaul of primal beastiality. Sebastian met the gaze of the woman beside him. “Did she?”
    “Yes.”
    There was a ribbon, stitched into the binding for use as a place marker. The book opened easily to its last entry.
    At the top of the left-hand page, in a neat, well-schooledcopperplate, Rachel York had written Tuesday, 29 January 1811 . Sebastian scanned that day’s entries. She’d had a lesson with a dancing master at eleven that morning, another appointment near the theater at three. Then he saw the words St. Matthew’s and, beside that, a name.
    St. Cyr.

Chapter 22
     
     
    L ater that night, alone in his small chamber at the Rose and Crown, Sebastian lit a candle, slipped the leather-bound book from his pocket, and settled down in the room’s single, straight-backed wooden chair to read.
    All the pages containing Rachel’s entries prior to the afternoon of Friday, January 18, had been cut from the book. Sebastian stared at the date at the top of the first surviving page. It had been bitterly cold that week, he remembered, as he followed Rachel York’s fine copperplate through the mundane passage of the last days of her life, through the rehearsals and performances, the lessons and appointments with tradesmen. He leafed through each successive day, scanning the entries, not realizing until he reached the morning of Thursday the twenty-fourth that another page was missing, the page for Thursday evening—along with the following morning, which must have been on the overleaf of the same page.
    Thoughtful, Sebastian thumbed back to the beginning. Was there a significance, he wondered, in the pattern of missing pages? What had happened in her life on those two successive Friday mornings or Thursday nights that Rachel hadn’t wanted anyone to know about?
    Or that someone else hadn’t wanted Sebastian to know?
    Sebastian returned to the afternoon of Friday, the twenty-fifth. Afterthat, the pages continued without interruption up to Tuesday, the twenty-ninth, the evening Rachel died. The evening she had planned to meet someone named St. Cyr in St. Matthew of the Fields.
    He went back again to that first page, paying more attention this time to each individual entry and to the notations Kat had made beside them, in pencil. There was little out of the ordinary: singing lessons and meetings with wardrobe; a reminder to pick up a pair of dancing slippers from the shoe repair man. Each appointment with each individual would need to be checked out, of course. But Sebastian found his attention focusing on two names.
    The painter, Giorgio Donatelli, appeared frequently, each time with only the brief notation, Giorgio , and a time. But even more intriguing was an individual referred to simply as “F.” Kat had circled each appearance of the initial, along with a question mark.
    Once more, Sebastian went back to the beginning and ran through the entries. Whoever “F” was, he—or she—appeared in the twelve days covered by the book’s surviving pages twice: on the evening of Wednesday, the twenty-third, and again on Monday, the twenty-eighth. In other words, Rachel had met with “F” the evening before the missing Thursday, and again the night before she died. A coincidence, Sebastian wondered, or not?
    “F” could be a lover, of course—someone so familiar, so dear, that a simple initial sufficed. But he could also be a person whose involvement in her life Rachel had wanted to keep secret.