What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

and gossip about it, but no one would ever think to look beyond it to the real secret that would destroy him, if it were to become known.
    The problem with those kinds of arrangements, however, was that they left one vulnerable to blackmail. And blackmail was often a motive for murder. Except . . . Except that it was hard to imagine a man whose tastes ran to young male lovers being so physically aroused by the act of killing as to rape the dead bodies of his female victims.
    Sebastian’s gaze fell on another of Donatelli’s paintings, the one ofRachel as an odalisque, preparing for her bath. For the first time he noticed that the painting also contained the figure of a man, peering out at her from behind a nearby planting of pleached orange trees.
    “Tell me again about Bayard Wilcox,” said Sebastian suddenly. “You said he used to watch Rachel, follow her around. But he never actually approached her?”
    “Not until last Saturday.”
    Sebastian looked up in surprise. “Saturday?”
    “At Steven’s in Bond Street. We went there after the play—a group of mainly theater people. At about half past eleven, Bayard arrived with some of his fellow aristos .” Donatelli’s angelic features quivered with remembered revulsion and disgust. “They were falling down drunk. Propping each other up. Laughing like idiots. Then Bayard, he saw Rachel. He went quiet all of a sudden and left the others to come lean against a nearby column and stare at her in that way he had. His friends tried to pry him away, but he wouldn’t budge. So they started teasing him. Said he must be some kind of a eunuch, to stand around simply looking at a woman the way he did. They said that if he had any balls, he’d walk up to her and tell her how he felt about her.”
    “So he did?”
    Donatelli nodded. “Walked right up and told her he wanted to fuck her. In those exact words. She threw her punch in his face.”
    “What did Bayard do?”
    “I’ve never seen anything like it. One minute he was blubbering all over himself, saying she was like a goddess to him, and how he couldn’t think of anything but what it would be like to have her naked and beneath him. Then she threw the punch in his face and it was as if he turned into someone else. I mean, his face actually changed—his eyes scrunched together and his lips curled back and his skin grew dark. It was as if he were possessed by someone else. Someone evil.”
    Sebastian nodded. He knew what Donatelli was talking about. He’d seen that kind of a change come over Bayard, even when he was a boy.
    “If we hadn’t been there,” Donatelli was saying, “I think he’d have killed her on the spot with his bare hands. We had to physically hold him back until his friends finally dragged him away. You could still hear himscreaming when he was outside, spewing the most vile obscenities. Saying he was going to kill her.”
    “He said that? That he wanted to kill her?”
    Donatelli nodded, his face ashen and strained. “He said he’d rip her head off.”

Chapter 40
     
     
    N ormally, Sunday was the only day of the week when Charles, Lord Jarvis, spent any time at home. He would shepherd his mother, wife, and daughter to church in the morning, and then he’d sit down with them for a traditional English Sunday dinner before retreating to one of his clubs, or to the chambers set aside for his use in Carlton House or St. James’s Palace.
    But a condition his doctors called inflammation of the heart—but which Jarvis himself considered little more than heartburn—had kept him in bed that Monday under the care of his caustic, sharp-tongued mother, who ran his household while his wife retreated farther and farther into her own misty dream worlds and his daughter was off tilting at windmills and meddling in things she refused to believe were none of her affair.
    It was one of the ironies of Jarvis’s existence, that his life was filled with women. In addition to his mother, wife, and daughter, who lived with him, Jarvis was far more involved than he would have liked in the lives of his two sisters: weepy, harebrained Agnes, forever needing his help to tow her useless husband and son out of dun territory; and Phyllis, who, while no more intelligent than her sister, had at least had the wit to marry well.
    Women, in Jarvis’s opinion, were generally even more profoundlybrainless and foolish than most men. True, there were some exceptions—females with astonishingly rational, quick