What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

Rachel?”
    Sebastian watched her walk over to straighten one of the drapes at the front windows. It was a fussy thing to do, not at all like her. “Whynot? He was involved with her. For some men, that’s all the reason they need, if the woman decides to try to walk away from them. Or if she should suddenly become infatuated with a beautiful Italian painter.”
    Kat turned to face him again. “When I was at Rachel’s lodging house, the Scotswoman who lives upstairs told me she thought Rachel was planning to leave London.”
    “You think it’s true?”
    “I don’t know. Rachel certainly never said anything about it. But this woman seems to have the impression Rachel was about to get her hands on a lot of money.”
    “Money?” Sebastian set aside his empty cup. “I wonder if she was blackmailing someone.”
    Hardly had the words left his mouth when a thought occurred to him, a thought at once inevitable and so terrible as to take his breath. And he knew by the way Kat’s eyes flared wide that the possibility had come to her at almost exactly the same time. “No,” he said, before she could give voice to it.
    “But—”
    “No,” he said again, walking up to her. “You’re wrong. I know my father. He might be able to kill, given the right provocation, but not like that. He could never kill like that.”
    Her head fell back, her wide, beautiful eyes dark and troubled as she looked up into his face.
    It wasn’t simply something Sebastian was saying; he truly believed Hendon could never have raped Rachel York on those altar steps, or left her dying in a sea of her own blood. And yet . . .
    And yet the name St. Cyr had been there, in the dead woman’s small red leather book. And the gentleman who’d been stalking her for so many months wasn’t only Sebastian’s nephew.
    Bayard Wilcox was also the Earl of Hendon’s grandson.

Chapter 28
     
     
    S ebastian met Jumpin’ Jack Cochran and his two-man crew in a dark byway just off Highfield Lane. A cold wind had come up, tossing the bare branches of the elm trees and silhouetting against a storm-swirled sky the church’s spire just visible above the slate roofs of the nearby row of houses.
    “Don’t kin why yer so feverish to tag along,” said Jumpin’ Jack, hawking up a mouthful of spittle that he shot downwind. “ ’Tain’t as if the good doctor’s affeared we cain’t be relied on t’ deliver the goods.”
    The grave robber was an incredibly tall, lean man somewhere between forty and sixty, with deep-set, narrowed eyes and rawboned features and a good two weeks’ of graying beard grizzling his cheeks and chin. But he was a natty dresser, with a bright red kerchief tied around his neck and striped trousers that showed only a hint of mud around the cuffs. The resurrection business was a lucrative one.
    Sebastian simply returned the man’s quizzical stare and made no attempt to put his reasons into words. This man made his living stealing dead bodies from churchyards. He would never be able to understand the compulsion that had brought Sebastian here, the belief that his responsibility for the desecration of Rachel York’s grave somehow obligated him to be there to witness it.
    They left the resurrection men’s cart and horse in the care of one ofthe lads and set off down a narrowed, darkened alley. They walked softly, their long-handled tools wrapped in sacking to prevent them from clanking together. In a nearby yard, a dog began to bark, deep, throaty howls that blew away with the wind. They kept walking.
    Rachel York had been laid to rest in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s, an ancient sandstone pile that rose up suddenly before them. Hundreds of years of internments had raised the level of its graveyard so far above the street that the swelling soil had to be contained by a stone wall some three feet high. And still it bulged out, pestilent and seemingly filled to bursting.
    Along the top of the wall ran a high iron fence topped with a menacing row of spikes. But at the end of the alley lay a narrow side gate, half-overgrown with ivy, which someone had been paid to leave unlocked. The same person had obviously been compensated for oiling the gate’s hinges. No telltale squeak shrieked out into the stillness of the night as they slipped quietly inside.
    A foul stench hung in the air, dank and vaguely, sickeningly sweet. The other men moved as if blind, only risking an occasional flash of their shuttered lantern as they crept