What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

’e’s a clerk. At the Foreign Office.”

     
    It was the hour of the fashionable promenade in Hyde Park, the hour when everyone with pretensions to being anyone was careful to be seen there, walking, trotting sedately along the Row on a showy hack, or bowling up the avenue in a suitably stylish curricle, phaeton, or barouche. The weather hadn’t been particularly favorable lately, but that morning’s bleak sunshine had melted what was left of the snow, helped along by a stiff wind that was still blowing hard enough to keep away the stinking, yellow London fog. Society’s finest were out in droves, bundled up to their stiff upper lips against the cold.
    Sebastian kept his hat pulled low and his scarf wrapped about his lower face, but his scruffy appearance still attracted more attention than he would have liked as he waited patiently beside the footpath, some twenty yards away from where Lord Frederick had paused to speak to a fawning matron and her blushing young daughter.
    He might be nearly fifty and a younger son, but Lord Frederick was still considered quite a catch, for all that. His first wife had, unfortunately, left most of her considerable fortune tied up in trust for their daughter, but everyone knew that the chances were more than even that the man would be made prime minister in just a few days’ time. True, he’d shown no disposition to remarry in all the years since his wife’s tragic death, but the recent marriage of his dearly loved only daughter had raised hopes in the bosoms of the Metropolis’s mamas—as well as among more than a few of Society’s more attractive widows. Surely, they reasoned, the need for female companionship would at long last inspireLord Frederick to look about him for a wife—especially when one considered the pressing need for someone to play the part of his political hostess.
    Of course, they didn’t know about the existence of one Mr. Wesley Davis of Stratton Street.
    Smiling smoothly, Lord Frederick extricated himself from the clutches of the two ambitious ladies, tipped his hat, bowed, and continued up the footpath. He wore buff-colored doeskin breeches and a many-caped Garrick, and carried an ivory-handled ebony walking stick that swung idly in one hand as he headed toward Park Lane.
    Sebastian fell into step beside him. “I’ve a flintlock in me pocket big enough to blow a hole in yer gut the size o’ a dinner plate, so don’t ye be getting any fancy ideas about hollerin’ out, or tryin’ to skewer me with the fancy little sword ye got hidden in that cane o’ yers,” Sebastian added when the man’s fist tightened around his walking stick.
    Fairchild relaxed his hold on the stick’s ivory handle, but his expression remained calm and defiant. “Surely you don’t expect to get away with armed robbery in broad daylight in the middle of Hyde Park?”
    “I don’t want yer boung and geegaws. All’s I wants is for us to have us a little chat. Over there.” Sebastian nodded toward a wooden bench set back amongst the shrubbery. “Beneath that chestnut tree.”
    Lord Frederick hesitated a moment, then stepped off the footpath into the long wet grass.
    “Sit down real easy-like,” said Sebastian, when Fairchild reached the bench and turned to look back expectantly. “And drop that walking stick. That’s right. Now kick it over here.”
    Keeping a watchful eye on the man on the bench, Sebastian reached for the cane at his feet. The mechanism that released the ivory handle from the ebony shaft was easy enough to find. The shaft fell away with a well-oiled hiss, revealing a gleaming, two-edged blade. “Nasty little piece of work, this,” he said, in his own voice and diction.
    Lord Frederick set his handsome, square jaw. “The streets are dangerous places these days.”
    Sebastian laughed and loosed the scarf from about his lower face. “You’ve no idea how dangerous.”
    A mingling of recognition and shock sagged the other man’s face. “Oh, God. You’re Devlin, aren’t you?” He swallowed, a new kind of wariness narrowing his eyes, replacing the initial slackness of surprise. “What do you want from me?”
    “The truth would be nice. For a change.” Sebastian played with the sword stick in his hand, learning the weight of it, testing the balance. “I’ll save us some time, shall I, by telling you what I already know? For instance, I know that whatever else you were doing with Rachel York, you weren’t tupping her.”
    Lord Frederick