When Gods Die

Sebastian watched her slim throat work as she swallowed. It was a familiar enough story, a tragedy enacted a thousand times or more a year in London, Paris—in every city across Europe. Women barely eking out a subsistence wage, caught by illness or a downturn in the fashion industry and thrown onto the streets. Most turned to prostitution or theft, or both. They had no choice, but that didn’t stop the moralists from condemning them as sinful women and railing against them as the source of all corruption and decadence. As if any woman in her right mind would willingly embark upon a path certain to lead to disease and death and an unmarked grave in some noisome churchyard’s poor hole.

“I was desperate,” Tess Bishop said in little more than a whisper, a flush of remembered shame coloring her cheeks. “I finally took to begging in the streets. Lady Anglessey…she took pity on me. Brought us in and gave us something to eat. Even had in a doctor for my little one.”

Sebastian looked at the woman’s thin shoulders, at the starched white cap that covered her bowed head. “But it was too late,” she said after a moment. “My Sarah died that very night.”

Out in the garden, the rain had eased up, although the clouds still hung gray and heavy over the city. From here Sebastian could see the outlines of a large glass-and-frame conservatory, its panes steamy with moisture.

This was a side of Guinevere that no one had showed him before, and one he suspected wasn’t exactly typical. He wondered what had moved her to extend the hand of salvation to this woman. A chance meeting of the eyes, perhaps? Some intuitive recognition by the young, heartsick Earl’s daughter that this other woman, this widowed mother of a dying baby, knew a despair far, far greater than her own?

“I wanted to die, too,” said Tess Bishop, her voice little more than a whisper. “But Lady Guinevere, she said I mustn’t. She said if we’re given a hard road to walk in life, we just have to fight to find some way to make what we want out of what life has given us.”

“And she hired you as her lady’s maid? Even though you’d no experience?”

Tess Bishop’s head came up, her lips crimped together in stubborn pride. “I worked hard to learn, and I’m quick. I haven’t let her ladyship down. I’d do anything for her.”

“You’re letting her down right now,” said Sebastian, pressing his advantage. “If you were really willing to do anything for her, you’d help me figure out who murdered her.”

She leaned forward, her small gray eyes flashing with unexpected fire. “I can tell you who killed her. His name is Bevan Ellsworth. He’s Lord Anglessey’s nephew and he’s wanted her dead ever since the day she married his uncle four years ago.”

“Wanting someone dead and actually going so far as to kill them are two very different things.”

Tess Bishop shook her head, her nostrils flaring on a hastily indrawn breath. “You didn’t hear him. You didn’t hear him when he came here—”

“When was this?”

“Just last week. Monday, I think it was. He came storming into the house while her ladyship was at breakfast. Shouting so loud we all heard him, about how his creditors had learned she was with child and that he might not be the next Marquis of Anglessey after all. He said they were threatening him—threatening his life, even. And then he threatened her.”

“Threatened her? How was that?”

“He said he’d see her dead before he’d let her foist her bastard in his place.”

Chapter 22

A

sampler hung on the wall just behind the abigail’s head, a sampler worked in silk thread against a linen background. Sebastian stared at it, at the neatly stitched flowers intricately entwined around the letters of the alphabet. But he wasn’t really seeing it. He was remembering the glitter of hatred in Bevan Ellsworth’s eyes, and the sound made by a boy’s arm breaking on the playing fields of Eton.

“What did her ladyship do?” Sebastian asked.

“She told him to get out. And when he said he’d go all right and tell everyone who’d listen that she’d been playing the whore, she…” The abigail’s voice trailed off.

“She what?”

Tess Bishop’s color was high. She hesitated, then said in a rush, “She laughed. She said he’d only show himself to be the fool he was, because her son would be the next marquis even if he’d been begotten by a hunchback in the gutters.”

It was a legal principle that had come down to them from the Romans, a doctrine known as Pater est quem nupitae demonstrant. As far as the law was concerned, a woman’s husband was the father of her child, whether the man actually sired the child or not. Guinevere’s statement didn’t necessarily mean anything, of course. Scornful words flung in anger. But still…

“You’ll have to excuse me now, sir,” said the abigail, pushing to her feet. “His lordship has asked me to help with organizing the staff’s mourning clothes.”