What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

Haymarket. The air was cold, the kind of damp, penetrating cold that sank bone deep. Wisps of dirty mist drifted across the cobblestones, wrapped around the half-dead plane trees in a small, nearby square. By nightfall, the yellow fog would be back, thick and pungent and bitter.
    “Twenty. Maybe twenty-one,” said Sebastian. “His mother is my elder sister.”
    Tom glanced up at him. “You don’t like ’im much, do you?”
    “He was the kind of little boy who got a kick out of tearing the heads off live turtles.” That, and worse. Sebastian shrugged. “I may be prejudiced. He could have grown out of it.”
    “They’d don’t, usually,” said Tom, his jaw set tight and hard, as if to ward off memories too savage to be recalled. And Sebastian wondered again at the life the boy must have led, before he’d tried to lift Sebastian’s purse in the common room of the Black Hart.
    A bath, a change of clothes, a few good nights’ sleep, and a consistently full belly had wrought a startling transformation in the boy. From what Sebastian had been able to gather, Tom had been alone on the streets for at least two years. Of his life before that, the boy seldom spoke.
    “Why?” Sebastian asked suddenly, his gaze on the boy’s sharp-featured, freckled face. “Why in God’s name have you decided to throw in your lot with a man in my situation? I can’t believe it’s for a shilling a day, when you could earn many times that by simply lodging information against me at Bow Street.”
    “I would never do that!”
    “Why not? Many would. Perhaps most.”
    The boy looked troubled. “There’s lots o’ bad things ’appen in this world. Lots o’ bad things what ’appen, and lots o’ folks what do bad things. But there’s good, too. Lots o’ good. Me mum, before they put her on that ship for Botany Bay, she told me never to forget that. She said that things like ’onor, and justice, and love are the most important things in the world and that it’s up to each and every one of us to always try to be the best person we can possibly be.” Tom looked up, his nearly lashless eyes wide and earnest. “I don’t think there’s many what really believes in that. But you do.”
    “I don’t believe in any of that,” Sebastian said, his voice harsh, his soul filled with terror by the admiration he saw shining in the young boy’s eyes.
    “Yes, you do. Only, you thinks you shouldn’t. That’s all.”
    “You’re wrong,” said Sebastian, but the boy simply smiled and walked on.
    They turned onto Grange Street, each lost in his own thoughts. Sebastian kept turning over and over in his mind all that he had learned about the woman he stood accused of killing. It seemed to Sebastian that the essence of the woman who had been Rachel York continued to elude him. It was as if each of the men he’d spoken to so far—Gordon, Pierrepont, Donatelli—had shed light on a facet of her life only. Sebastian had caught glimpses of Rachel as a new young actress, full of passionate rhetoric about revolution and the rights of man; of Rachel as a mistress, seductive, compliant; of Rachel as an artist’s model, beautiful and yet, ultimately, two-dimensional, an image onto which the viewer could project his own fantasies and illusions.
    Only from Kat had Sebastian picked up a sense of anything beyond that famous face and sensuous body—the Rachel York who’d once beena young child, alone and afraid and abused by a society that had no care for its weaker or less fortunate members. And yet Kat’s rendering, too, had been blurred, incomplete, an image of Rachel as seen from a distance. He needed to see Rachel through the dispassionate eyes of someone who had known, intimately, all the various aspects of her life, the pattern of her days.
    What he needed, Sebastian decided, was to talk to that maid, Mary Grant.
    Stopping abruptly, he swung to face Tom. “I want you to find someone for me, a woman named Mary Grant. She used to be Rachel York’s maid. But she cleaned the place out right after her mistress died, so she’s probably living pretty high at the moment.”
    Tom nodded. “What’s she look like, this Mary Grant?”
    “I haven’t the slightest idea.”
    The boy laughed, his eyes gleaming with anticipation. He wasn’t just good at this sort of thing, Sebastian was beginning to realize; Tom enjoyed it.
    “Right then,” he said, one hand coming up to anchor his hat to his head. “I’m off. But you watch yer back,”