What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

night?”
    “I can’t tell you that.”
    Sebastian twisted around, one knee pressing into the hearth rug. “You what ?”
    Wordless, his father stared back at him, that strange mingling of emotions shading his brilliant blue eyes.
    “Was she blackmailing you? Is that it?”
    “No.”
    Sebastian thrust aside the coal scuttle and stood up. “What else am I to believe?”
    Hendon scrubbed a hand across his face, his jaw working soundlessly back and forth in that way he had when he was thinking, obviously deciding what he was going to tell Sebastian and what he was going to keep to himself. “She contacted me early Tuesday,” he said at last. “She had something she thought I might be interested in purchasing.”
    “So she was blackmailing you.”
    “No. I told you, she had something to sell. Something I wanted to buy. We agreed upon a price, and she said she’d meet me at St. Matthew’s, in the Lady Chapel, at ten o’clock.”
    “Why St. Matthew’s?”
    “She said it was quiet. There’d be less chance of our being disturbed or discovered.” A round table with a gleaming, well-polished inlaid top stood at the foot of the massive bed, and Hendon went to seat himself in one of the nearby lyre-backed chairs. “That little cross-biting cully of a magistrate, that Lovejoy, he claims the church was locked at eight that night, but it wasn’t. The north transept door was open when I arrived there, just as she’d said it would be.”
    “Did you see anyone else about?”
    “No.” Hendon’s laced fingers tightened until the knuckles showed white. “No one. I thought we were alone. She’d lit all the candles on the chapel’s altar. I could see the flames flaring up together, like a warm golden glow as I walked toward the back of the church. Then I saw her.”
    He rubbed one splayed hand across his eyes as if to wipe away the memory of what he’d seen. “It was ghastly, the way she’d been left lyingthere, on the altar steps with her legs spread. . . .” His voice trailed away to a whisper. The effort it took him to push the words out was an almost palpable thing. “You could actually see the bloody imprints of his hands on the bare flesh of her thighs. So much blood, everywhere.”
    Sebastian gazed across the room at his father’s ashen, troubled face. No one would ever describe the Earl of Hendon as a sensitive man. He was hard, irascible, phlegmatic; he could be brutal. But he’d never been to war, never seen the blackened, bloated bodies of children lying in the burned ruins of their home. Never seen what artillery—or even a couple of drunken soldiers—could do to the once soft, smooth flesh of a woman.
    Sebastian kept his voice steady, dispassionate. “And this—this whatever it was you went there to buy. Did she have it on her?”
    Hendon sucked in a deep breath that lifted his chest, then blew it out again through pursed lips and shook his head. “I looked for it.” He pressed a clenched fist against his lips, and Sebastian thought he knew what it must have cost his father to approach that bloodied, ravished body and systematically, ruthlessly search it. “That must have been when I dropped the pistol. I had hoped I’d left it in the pocket of my greatcoat. I threw it away, you know—the greatcoat, I mean. Stuffed it down one of the drains in Great Peter Street. There was so much blood on it I could never have explained it to Copeland. I washed off my boots as best I could, but I still had to invent some faradiddle about stopping to help the victims of a carriage accident.” His gaze seemed to come unfocused, as if he were seeing into the past. “So much blood.”
    Sebastian walked over to stand on the far side of the table, his gaze studying his father’s face. “You must tell me what you went there to buy.”
    Hendon leaned back in his chair, his jaw set hard. “I can’t.”
    Sebastian slammed the open palm of one hand down on the table between them. “Whatever you went to St. Matthew’s to buy is very likely the reason Rachel York died. How the bloody hell am I to discover who killed her when you won’t even tell me what this is all about?”
    “You’re wrong. My business with that woman has nothing to do with her murder.”
    “You can’t know that.”
    “Yes, I can.”
    Sebastian leaned his weight into the tabletop, then shoved himself away. “ Bloody hell. Don’t you understand what’s at stake here?”
    Hendon pushed to his feet, his face darkening. “You