When Gods Die

“Because he forced her into marriage with Anglessey?”

“No one forced her. Anglessey was her own choice.” Lady Quinlan gave the black skirt of her mantua walking dress a little shake. “She always claimed she couldn’t forgive Papa for refusing to allow her to marry where she wished. But if truth were told, I think what she really couldn’t forgive him for was favoring Gerard over her.”

“Gerard?”

“Our young brother.”

Sebastian studied the woman’s closed, hard face. “It didn’t trouble you?”

A confused frown creased her forehead. “Of course not. Why would it? All men favor their sons. It’s the way of the world. But Guinevere could never accept that. She was so naive, so idealistic.” Her lips quivered with disdain. “A fool.”

Sebastian glanced away again, across the crowded, sun-scorched clearing to where the cooling shimmer of a canal could just be seen in the distance. What had happened, he wondered, to produce such animosity, to make Morgana hate her sister so much that even now, in the aftermath of Guinevere’s violent death, there was no softening, no flicker of either affection or regret?

The balloon was nearly full, the silk stretched taut, lifting the wicker cage from the ground and straining at the moorings. The little Frenchwoman, Madame Blanchard, was in the basket, making last-minute adjustments to the flap that would allow some of the gas to be let off and help her control the balloon’s ascent.

Sebastian kept his gaze on the balloon. “This man your father refused to allow your sister to marry…who was he?”

Sebastian half expected Lady Quinlan to be reticent, but she answered him readily enough. “Alain, the Chevalier de Varden. He’s the son of Lady Audley from her first marriage. To a Frenchman.”

Sebastian had heard of the Chevalier, a dashing young man with a quick temper and a ready laugh who was well liked about Town. He turned to look at Morgana in surprise. “Varden was considered unsuitable?”

“Of course. The family’s good enough, to be sure. Better, actually, than that of Guinevere’s mother. But Varden himself is penniless. Everything he would have inherited was lost in the Revolution.”

There was something about the sneering tone of her reference to Guinevere’s mother that piqued Sebastian’s interest. “Tell me about Lady Anglessey’s mother.”

Again, that condescending little laugh. “Guinevere herself was quite proud of her mother’s family.”

“Why shouldn’t she be?”

Morgana sucked in her cheeks in a way that made her look older—and more disagreeable—than before. “Her mother, Katherine, was not from the best of families. They say her great-grandmother was burned at the stake as a witch.”

It was one of the dirty little secrets of Western Christendom, the witch-burning craze—an outpouring of hatred and suspicion that had twisted itself around until it found a safe target in society’s weakest members—women. He’d heard it said that before the witch-hunting frenzy died down, some five million women had been burned at the stake across Europe. There were some villages where the hysteria ran so high that when it was over, not a woman was left alive.

“If it’s true,” he said, staring out over the perspiring, sun-dappled crowd, hushed now with a mutual breathless anticipation as Madame Blanchard secured the door of her little wicker boat and snuggled into a warm coat, “then it’s an indictment of those responsible for her death, rather than of the poor woman herself.”

Someone shouted, “Let ’er go!” The balloon’s moorings were cut loose and a great cheer arose from the crowd as the silken ball lifted straight up, soaring high above the treetops.

“Perhaps,” said Morgana, her gaze, like his, on the rising sphere. “Although her grandmother was said to have been a witch, as well. They say she bewitched no less a person than the King’s son and contrived to have a child by him.”

Some six or seven hundred feet overhead, the balloon caught a current and began to drift rapidly away to the west, the sun bright on its taut silken skin, the basket with its little Frenchwoman growing so small as to become nearly indistinct. Watching it, Sebastian knew a strange sense of dislocation. There was a roaring in his ears and his cheeks suddenly felt flushed, as if he were hot. “Which prince?” he asked, although he knew the truth even before she answered him. Knew it, deep in his gut where all certainty lies.

“James Stuart. The one who later became James the Second.”

Chapter 18

“It must be a coincidence,” said Paul Gibson some half an hour later. “What can James the Second possibly have to do with that poor young woman’s murder?”

They were in the weed-choked yard that stretched between Gibson’s house and surgery to the front, and the small stone building at the rear he used for dissections and autopsies. Sebastian sat on a nearby stone bench, a pint of ale in hand, while the surgeon busied himself with something boiling in a large pot of water over an open fire pit.