What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

sweat and tobacco and spilled gin filled the air.
    “Now,” said Sebastian, smiling, “you need to try very, very hard not to forget that I have a gun pointed at your crotch.”
    Bayard nodded, his eyes widening as he got a good look at Sebastian for the first time. “Good God. It’s you. Whatever are you doing in that rig? You look like a bloody bridle cull.”
    Sebastian smiled. “An appropriate getup, don’t you think, for one in danger of cutting a caper upon nothing?”
    Sebastian watched, bemused, as Bayard’s fear slowly dissipated beneath the onslaught of a deep and powerful fury. “I heard it was you,” he said, enunciating the words through clenched teeth, “ you who killed her.”
    “You’re forgetting the pistol, Bayard,” said Sebastian as his nephew half rose from the table.
    Bayard sank back into his chair, his gaze locked on his uncle’s face. “Did you do it? Did you? Did you kill Rachel?”
    “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
    “ Me ? But I love her.” The present tense of the verb wasn’t lost on Sebastian. “Besides, it’s your flintlock they’re saying was found on her body.”
    “And yet it’s you who’s been preying on the poor woman since before Christmas.”
    Bayard’s eyes widened, that brief flash of anger sliding away as the fear surged again. “ Preying on her? What are you saying? I never touched her! Why, I never even managed to summon up the courage to approach her. The one time I found myself face-to-face with her, I was so overcome I couldn’t open my mouth.”
    “You never actually spoke to her?”
    “No! Never.”
    Sebastian leaned back in his seat. “When was the last time you saw her?”
    Bayard worried his lower lip between his teeth. “Monday night, I think. I went to her performance. But that was all! I swear.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    Sebastian stared across the table at his nephew. As a child, Bayard had been not only spoiled and cruel, but also dangerously, almost pathologically untruthful. He wondered how much, if any, the boy had changed. “Where were you Tuesday night?”
    Bayard might be self-indulgent and weak, but he wasn’t stupid. His eyes widened. “You mean, the night Rachel was killed?”
    “That’s right.”
    “We planned to spend the evening in Cribb’s Parlor.” He jerked his head toward the two men still leaning on the bar, their attention focusedon the mammoth breasts of the woman slinging gin behind the counter. “Robert and Gil and I. We’d been here—at the Leather Bottle—most of the afternoon, so we were pretty well lit by the time we got there.”
    “You were there all night?”
    “Well, actually, no.” He scrubbed one hand across his face, as if to wipe away an unpleasant memory. “I started feeling unwell.”
    “You mean you shot the cat.”
    A deep stain of mortification and resentment colored the younger man’s cheeks. “All right. Yes. Robert and Gil were hauling me out of there when what should we do but run smack up against my father. It was damned embarrassing, I can tell you that. He insisted on taking me home. I must have passed out in the carriage because the next thing I know, I’m in my own bed and he’s hauling off my boots and prosing on about how lucky I am that my mother didn’t see me.”
    “What time was that?”
    Bayard looked confused. “What time was what?”
    “At about what time did you pass out?”
    Bayard shrugged one shoulder. “I couldn’t say for certain. Early. Around nine, I suppose.”
    Sebastian studied his nephew’s red, sulky face. It would take time, but it should be easy enough to trace Bayard’s movements through the course of Rachel York’s final day. If he were telling the truth.
    “Wait a minute,” Bayard said suddenly, sitting forward. “I did see Rachel on Tuesday. It must have been about midway through the afternoon, when I swung by the theater on my way here. I was hoping I might get a glimpse of her, and there she was.”
    “At the theater?” Sebastian frowned, trying to remember Rachel’s schedule for the afternoon before her death. “They were rehearsing?”
    “No, no. She wasn’t actually at the theater, you see. She was in the goldsmith’s across the street. I wouldn’t even have noticed her except for the way he was shouting—”
    “He?”
    “That actor. You know the one? He was doing Richard III at Covent Garden when it burned down.”
    “You mean Hugh Gordon?”
    “Yes, that’s