What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

aching now from lack of sleep. After he’d left his father’s house in Grosvenor Square, he’d spent what was left of the night walking the slowly lightening alleys and byways of the city. He kept turning what his father had told him over and over again in his mind, trying to figure out what Rachel York could have been selling that his father would be so desperate to buy that he agreed to meet her in a deserted church in the dark of the night.
    He’d sworn it wasn’t blackmail, but Sebastian had to acknowledge that that could be mere quibbling, a question of semantics only.Whatever it was, Hendon wanted it badly enough that he’d forced himself to overcome his horror and search Rachel York’s bloody, mutilated body in hopes of finding it.
    Yet he hadn’t found it. Which could mean either that her killer now had it, or that Rachel York had never brought it to St. Matthew’s in the first place.
    Then again, Sebastian couldn’t discount the possibility that his father was lying, that Hendon had found it and taken it, after all.
    An unexpected chill shook him. Sebastian turned up his collar against the cold. Hendon’s refusal to talk baffled him. After all these hours of walking the streets, of turning over one possibility after another in his mind, Sebastian was still no closer to understanding. It was only now, as he watched the snowflakes falling thick and fast from a lowering sky, that he was able to admit to himself that beneath the confusion and rage coursing through him every time he thought about his interview with his father, what he felt most powerfully was a deep and abiding sense of hurt. For try as he might, he found it impossible to imagine a secret so important that a father would place its preservation above the life and freedom of his only surviving son.

     
    That afternoon, Sebastian paid an interesting visit to the small goldsmith’s shop across the street from Covent Garden Theater. He was just turning away when he spotted Tom, whittling on a block of wood with a small pocketknife as he waited in the protective lee of the theater’s wide porch.
    “What are you doing here?” said Sebastian, walking up to him.
    “Waitin’ for Miss Kat. She knows someone she reckons might be able to put me onto this Mary Grant’s whereabouts, but she figures it’d be better if’n she were to introduce me to the cove ’erself.”
    “Ah,” said Sebastian, who knew something of the kind of “friends” Kat had from her early days in London. Leaning forward, he peered at the quadruped taking shape beneath the boy’s nimble fingers. “What is it?”
    “A ’orse,” said the boy, proudly holding it aloft.
    “Like horses, do you?”
    Tom nodded. “I always thought it’d be just grand to be one o’ them tigers, sittin’ up behind some sportin’ gentleman in ’is curricle, watchin’ ’im tool a pair of prime ’igh steppers.”
    Sebastian personally had little use for the current vogue for employing children as grooms. But as he looked down into the boy’s shining eyes, he found himself saying, “Once I fight my way clear of this wretched mess I’m in, I could take you on as a tiger. If you’re interested.”
    Tom’s eyes narrowed. His face was wary and guarded against disappointment, but his breathing had quickened, his jaw going slack with awe. “You got a curricle?”
    Sebastian laughed and stepped out into the street. “That I do.”
    “Got a tiger?”
    “Not yet.”
    The boy nodded, struggling to contain a grin. “Where you off to, then?”
    Sebastian turned up his collar against the snow. “To have another talk with Hamlet.”

Chapter 31
     
     
    D arkness came early that day, settling over the city with a heavy fall of snow.
    Across the street from the lodging house where Hugh Gordon had rooms, Sebastian stomped his numb feet and watched the stocky, gray-haired woman who came in daily to “do” for the actor close the street door behind her and set off toward the Strand, the snow blanketing her head and shoulders with white as she hurried through the gathering gloom.
    Sebastian waited while a coal cart trundled by, followed by a brewer’s wagon. Then he crossed the street, with each step easing himself into the persona of Cousin Simon Taylor from Worcestershire. By the time he stood outside Gordon’s door, his shoulders had slumped and he was twisting his hat anxiously in his hands as he waited for Gordon to answer his knock.
    “Oh, it’s you, is it?” said the