What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

Sebastian’s shoulder caught him in the gut and brought him down.
    “What are you doing? What do you want from me?” the Italian managed to gasp, before Sebastian shoved his forearm up beneath the man’s chin, cutting off his air.
    “I understand you’ve been buying yourself some half-longs,” said Sebastian through gritted teeth. “Is that the way you like your women, hmm? You like it when they don’t move, don’t talk back, don’t even breathe ?”
    Donatelli’s angelic brown eyes went wide. He tried to speak, but all he could get out was a gurgle.
    Sebastian eased the pressure on the man’s throat just enough to let him gasp, “No! It’s nothing like that. I do medical illustrations.”
    Sebastian made as if to increase his pressure on the man’s throat again. “Gammon.”
    “No! I swear it’s true. My last commission was for the female torso.” He made as if to push up from the floor, then went limp again, his features twitching with fear, when Sebastian brought up the small flintlock and laid the muzzle against the man’s temple.
    Donatelli licked his lips, his eyes rolling sideways in an effort to watch Sebastian’s finger on that trigger. “If you let me go, I’ll show you. They’re in the back room.”
    Sebastian hesitated, then let the man up.
    Donatelli’s hand crept to his throat. “Mother of God, you could have killed me.”
    Sebastian leveled the flintlock at the artist’s chest. “The illustrations.”
    Donatelli nodded. “They’re back here.” He staggered toward the other room. “See?” They were a series of perhaps a dozen, rendering in meticulous detail the torso of a woman in various stages of dismemberment, from a variety of angles.
    “I work with a medical student from St. Thomas’s,” said Donatelli, his voice still hoarse, strained. “He does the dissections while I sketch.”
    “Now why would a painter who’s suddenly become Society’s newest discovery need to be hawking anatomy sketches to medical journals?”
    Donatelli twitched one shoulder in a very Mediterranean shrug. “I began doing it for extra money when I was painting scenes at the theater. I keep it up because it improves my ability to realistically render the human form. I’m not the only painter who studies cadavers. Look at Fragonard.”
    Sebastian turned away from the bloody renderings. “Where were you the night Rachel York was killed?” The illustrations might provide the artist with a plausible excuse for buying female human cadavers, but that was all.
    The Italian’s eyes went wide. “ Me ? But . . . Surely you don’t believe that I killed Rachel?”
    Sebastian kept his gaze steady on the other man’s face. “Where were you?”
    “Why, here, of course. Painting.”
    “Anyone with you?”
    The Italian tightened his jaw. “No.”
    Sebastian paused, his attention caught by a nearby small canvas. It looked like a study for a larger painting, a family portrait. The grouping was of a man and three women, each at a different stage in her life. The matriarch of the family sat in the center. She was thin andwrinkled and stooped with age, but her eyes still shone with such determination and pride that she completely overshadowed the woman to her left, a pale, vacant-faced lady of middle years who was undoubtedly the man’s wife. On the other side, the family’s brown-haired, plain-faced daughter, who looked to be in her early twenties, stared at something just out of sight, as if to disassociate herself from the others. And towering above them all, his arms spread as if both to protect the women and to dominate them, stood a large, jowly man with a florid complexion and fiercely staring eyes that Sebastian recognized as Charles, Lord Jarvis.
    Sebastian glanced up to find the artist watching him nervously. “You’re doing a portrait of Lord Jarvis’s family?”
    “That’s the study. The portrait itself was finished last spring.”
    “When you were still painting theatrical scenery?”
    A muscle ticked along the side of Donatelli’s jaw. “Lord Jarvis is known for his generous encouragement of new artists. He’s the man responsible for bringing me to the attention of the ton .”
    Sebastian looked back at the family grouping. He was aware of a shadow of a thought flitting about the edges of his consciousness. But when he tried to reach for it, it simply floated away, a pale, mocking chimera that was there, and then gone.
    The small flintlock still in hand, Sebastian