When Gods Die

Paul Gibson made a face. “I’m not sure which I find the most gruesome. Is it possible that poor woman was killed simply to provide her murderer with a body to be used to embarrass the Regent?”

Sebastian hesitated. “I must admit I find it difficult to credit. Yet I suppose it is possible.”

“But…why? Why kill the wife of a Marquis? Why not simply take some common woman off the streets?”

“Which do you think would cause the greater scandal?”

“There is that, of course.”

Sebastian slid the fine satin of the dress between his gloved fingers. “What I don’t understand is how the devil did our killer manage to get the body into the Pavilion that night?”

“Aye. That’s the rub, isn’t it?”

From the narrow street outside came the lilting cry of a costermonger, Ripe cher-ries! Buy my ripe cher-ries. Sebastian folded the green satin gown into a small package to take away with him. “What have you done with the dagger that was in her back?” he asked.

Gibson went to crouch beside his iron pot. “I don’t have it.”

Sebastian swung around. “What?”

The surgeon looked up, his eyes narrowing against the smoke. “By the time I had made arrangements for the transportation of the body and came back to collect it, the dagger was gone.”

Chapter 19

Upon consideration, it seemed to Sebastian that there were only two likely explanations for the disappearance of the dagger: either Guinevere’s murderer had contrived in some inexplicable way and for some unknown purpose to return to the Yellow Cabinet and retrieve a weapon he had deliberately left behind, or else—which seemed far more likely—Lord Jarvis himself had removed the dagger. Sebastian could come up with several reasons why the Regent’s unofficial minder might have done so; none reflected well on the man in whose arms Guinevere’s body had been found.

Determined to confront Lord Jarvis, Sebastian drove to Carlton House, where Jarvis’s frightened, pale-skinned clerk insisted his lordship was at home. But when Sebastian arrived at Grosvenor Square, it was to be told by the fey, half-mad Lady Jarvis that she rather thought her lord might be at Watiers. Watiers was still under the impression his lordship was out of town.

Temporarily balked of his quarry, Sebastian decided to pay a visit to the Chevalier de Varden.

ALAIN, THE CHEVALIER DE VARDEN, was a young man of twenty-two not long down from Oxford. He was well liked about Town, although his dashing good looks and tragic history were enough to cause considerable trepidation in the breasts of the mothers of young ladies of a marriageable age. A foreign title was all well and good, but only if there were extensive lands to go with it. The vast estates the young Chevalier was to have inherited from his dead father had all been lost in the Revolution.

Lacking an appreciable income of his own, the Chevalier lived with his mother, Isolde, Lady Audley, in Lady Audley’s town house on Curzon Street. A widow now for the second time, she spent most of the year in London rather than at the isolated Welsh castle that had passed upon the death of her second husband to their son, the new Lord Audley.

Asking for the Chevalier, Sebastian was shown into a small but elegantly furnished withdrawing room filled with afternoon light. There, a slim, fine-boned woman with fiery auburn hair barely touched with gray knelt on the carpet in a secluded corner. Beside her lay a panting, very pregnant collie bitch that looked to be in the final stages of labor.

“I beg your pardon,” Sebastian began, “there must be some mistake—”

“No mistake,” said Lady Audley, looking up. Sebastian supposed she must be somewhere in her midforties, although she appeared younger, with clear, translucent skin and the kind of bone structure that ages well. “I asked that you be brought here. You must forgive me for receiving you like this, but poor Cloe is very near her time and I didn’t want to leave her. Please, have a seat.”

Declining the offer, Sebastian went to stand beside the open windows, his back to the sun.

“I know why you have come,” said Lady Audley, her attention all for the laboring collie. “You think my son had something to do with Guinevere’s death. But you are wrong.”

He watched her slender hands move with gentle compassion over the collie’s sweat-darkened shoulders and quivering flanks. “Let me guess,” he said, remembering how Guinevere’s sister, Morgana, had also known of his interest in the Marchioness’s death. “You, too, are an intimate of Lady Portland.”

“Lady Portland is my daughter, Claire.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Are you familiar, I wonder, with Wales?”

“Not especially, no.”