What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

quiet in the gently falling snow.
    He entered the inn’s public room, warm with the piney scent of fire and the murmur of sleepy voices, and made his way to the back of the inn and up the stairs to his chamber. What he needed, he decided, was to come to a better understanding of Rachel York’s life. In the morning, he would visit the foundling hospital where she’d volunteered once a week. And if Tom could find that maid, Mary Grant . . .
    Sebastian paused in the dim, drafty hall outside his door. He couldn’t say what had warned him. Some faint, lingering scent, perhaps. Or perhaps it was simply a vestige of the primitive instinct that alerts an animal returning to its lair that all is not entirely as he left it. Whatever it was, something told Sebastian even before he fit the key into the lock of his door that she was there.
    He hesitated for the briefest instant. Then he pushed open the door and walked into his past.

Chapter 35
     
     
    S he sat in the battered old chair beside the hearth, her head tipped back so that the firelight played over the elegant curve of her long, graceful neck and brought out the hint of auburn in her dark hair. She had worn a cherry red velvet opera cloak that now lay discarded on a nearby table, but she had come to him still dressed in the costume of her character, Rosalind.
    “You picked the lock, I suppose.” Sebastian closed the door behind him and leaned back against it.
    “It’s a very old lock,” said Kat Boleyn, the barest hint of a smile touching the edges of her lips.
    He pushed away from the door and walked toward her. “Why did you come?”
    “You left your clothes at the theater. I brought them.”
    He didn’t bother to ask how she had found him here, at the Rose and Crown. She would have her ways, as he had his. It was a danger he had both acknowledged and accepted when he first decided to approach her.
    “You’re hurt,” she said when he came to stand before her, close enough that his legs almost touched hers, but not quite.
    “I went through a window.”
    “Leo found you, did he?”
    “What makes you think I went to see Pierrepont?”
    “There weren’t that many masquerades in Mayfair tonight.” She shifted subtly in her seat, so that her thigh just brushed his. “What sent you there?”
    “According to Hugh Gordon, Pierrepont is a French spy master.”
    She sat very still and quiet for a moment, then said, “And do you believe him?”
    Sebastian shrugged. “Gordon had no proof, of course. But I found a code cipher in Pierrepont’s library.” What Hendon had told Sebastian, he would keep to himself.
    “What has any of this to do with Rachel?”
    Sebastian turned away to swing off his cloak and hang it on a hook beside the bed. “I think she might have been passing Pierrepont information. She seems to have shared her favors with an interesting collection of men. Men in positions to know tidbits they might easily let slip, things like troop movements and shifting alliances and the thinking of those close to the King.”
    “They say someone stole Rachel’s body from the churchyard,” she said. “Was it you?”
    “Yes.”
    Any other woman would have felt the need to affect a feminine display of shock and horror. Not Kat. She watched him strip off his doublet and shirt, then go splash cold water from the basin over his blood-encrusted face and neck. “What do you expect to learn from it?”
    The room’s towel was coarse and stiff, and he dabbed gently around his cuts. “I don’t know. But I’ve already learned one interesting little fact: whoever killed Rachel York slit her throat first. Then he sexually assaulted her.”
    “That’s a nasty little perversion.”
    Sebastian tossed aside the towel. “What kind of man likes to have sex with a dead woman?”
    “A man who hates women, I should think.”
    Sebastian looked down at the bloodstains he’d left on the old towel. He hadn’t thought of it that way, that Rachel’s rape was an act of hate rather than lust, but he suspected Kat was right. Whoever killed Rachel York had taken joy in her destruction, had been sexually aroused by theact of slitting her pale throat and watching the life ebb slowly from her pretty brown eyes. Most men felt the need for at least some measure of response in the women with whom they copulated—it was, after all, the reason behind a prostitute’s little moans and gasps of simulated pleasure. But Rachel York’s killer was the kind of man who could