What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

men, one of whom might have decided to kill rather than pay for the secrets she had to offer.
    He studied the man who sat slumped on the bench, lost in his own thoughts. “Do you think she’s the one who took the letters from Davis’s rooms in the first place?”
    “Rachel?” Lord Frederick considered this a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. Although the last few weeks, she seemed afraid of something. I don’t know what. She talked about going away, starting over someplace else.”
    It fit with what the others had told him, Hugh Gordon and the Reverend Finley at St. Jude’s. “When were you supposed to meet her? Tuesday?”
    Fairchild’s chest lifted with a weighty sigh. “I only wish I had. It’s what she wanted, but it wasn’t easy for me to raise that kind of money. I asked her to give me until Wednesday.” He scrubbed one hand across his face, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “I was still getting the money together when I heard she’d been killed.”
    “So who has the letters now?”
    His hand fell back to his side. He looked haggard. Frightened. “I wish I knew. As soon as I heard what had happened to Rachel, I went past the lodging house where she kept her rooms. I had some notion of going up and looking for them, but the constables were there. I didn’t dare stop.”
    Sebastian nodded. So Fairchild had gone to Dorset Court that day. But if he hadn’t gone up to search Rachel’s rooms, then who had?
    Fairchild jerked up from the bench and took an agitated step away before whirling back around. “If those letters are made public, I’ll be ruined. Absolutely ruined.”
    Sebastian studied him dispassionately. “Did Rachel tell you who had the letters?”
    A faint flush touched the man’s high, aristocratic cheekbones. “Yes. Leo Pierrepont.”
    “Of course,” said Sebastian. “I should have known.”
    At the far end of the Row, a young blade on a showy, white-marked chestnut sent his mount cavorting. Sebastian lifted his head and watched the chestnut’s four white stockings flash in the thin winter sunlight. And he knew it again, that tantalizing sensation of a thought hovering somewhere on the edges of consciousness, just beyond his grasp.
    “Exactly who had she found to steal the letters from Pierrepont? Did she say?”
    The other man shook his head. “All I knew was that it had to be done while Pierrepont was out of town for the week, at Lord Edgeworth’s country house down in Hampshire. She was hoping to be gone by Thursday, before Pierrepont had a chance to come back and find the letters missing. I could be wrong, but had the impression . . .”
    “Yes?”
    “He’s the one she was afraid of. The one she was running away from.”
    Sebastian glanced down at the gleaming blade in his hands. The sword stick was a common enough weapon amongst London’s noblemen. Sebastian’s own father carried one, while Leo Pierrepont was known to have an extensive collection.
    Sebastian slid the blade back into its sheath with a quiet hiss. Lord Edgeworth had hosted a party at his Hampshire estate the week before, Sebastian knew; as a part of that set, Pierrepont had undoubtedly been invited. But if he’d been planning to spend the week, something must have changed his mind, for he’d come back in time to host a dinner party on Tuesday night.
    The night Rachel York was killed.

Chapter 43
     
     
    S ir Henry Lovejoy sat in the empty pit of the Stein and watched Hugh Gordon, decked out as Hamlet, rehearse his climatic sword fight with a significantly overweight Laertes.
    The discovery of Mary Grant’s ravaged body should have removed whatever lingering doubts the magistrate might have had about Lord Devlin’s guilt. Lovejoy himself had interviewed their witness, Mrs. Charles Lavery, and he’d found her a solid, no-nonsense woman. If Mrs. Lavery said she’d seen Lord Devlin leaving the lodging house, then Lovejoy was inclined to believe the man had been there. And yet. . .
    And yet, the doctor who examined Mary Grant’s body had given it as his opinion that she’d been killed earlier in the day, perhaps before noon. And while most people didn’t put much stock in such things, Lovejoy had too much respect for the scientific method to ignore the doctor’s report. Except that if Devlin hadn’t killed Mary Grant, then what was he doing there at her rooms? Why was he still in London at all?
    Lovejoy shifted uncomfortably in his seat, remembering his