When Gods Die

He expected her to argue with him. She was always arguing with him. Instead, she followed his gaze across the street. For one oddly intense moment, Hero’s frank gray eyes met Devlin’s feral stare. Then she deliberately turned her back on him to shepherd her mindlessly babbling mother and frowning grandmother toward the carriage.

Stepping wide to avoid the filthy rushing gutter, Jarvis crossed the street to the waiting Viscount.

Chapter 24

Devlin leaned against the low iron railing that fronted the street, his hands in his pockets. “You made a mistake. Two, actually.”

Jarvis paused a prudent distance before him. “I rarely make mistakes.”

The younger man gazed down at the toes of his boots, a strange smile playing about his lips before his head came up again, his eyes narrowing against the rain. “The trinket Prinny sent to the Marchioness of Anglessey. What was it?”

At Jarvis’s continuing silence, the Viscount pushed away from the fence to take a significant step forward. “What was it, damn it? And don’t even think of pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“A brooch of rubies,” said Jarvis in a calm, unhurried tone, “pierced by a diamond arrow.”

The Viscount’s reaction was difficult to decipher, even for a man skilled in reading the thoughts and emotions of others. “An expensive trifle, surely,” said the Viscount, “for a woman His Highness claims he barely knew?”

It had begun to rain harder. Jarvis opened his umbrella and held it aloft. “There are times when His Highness has difficulty with the truth. Particularly when the repercussions from the truth might prove…unpleasant.”

“So what’s your excuse?”

Jarvis maintained a studied silence.

“That’s why you had the note destroyed, isn’t it? Because whoever wrote it referred to her previous rejections of his advances. Suggested in some way that she’d changed her mind.”

Again, Jarvis kept his own counsel.

With a violent oath, the Viscount took a hasty step away, only to swing back again. “He was making advances on her. Rude, unwelcome advances. And he wasn’t taking no for an answer.”

“Are you so certain they were unwelcome?”

Devlin brought up a warning hand to slash the air between them. “Don’t. That woman was poisoned, stabbed, and robbed of her life and the life of her unborn child. Don’t you even think of trying to take away her honor with your lies.”

“Poisoned? Really? How interesting.”

Devlin stared across the street to where the soot-darkened redbrick gatehouse of St. James’s Palace thrust up against the cloud-laden skies. And it came to Jarvis, watching him, that for Devlin, this investigation into the circumstances of Guinevere Anglessey’s death was more than an intellectual puzzle, more than just an escape from boredom. The Viscount actually cared

about what had happened to that young woman. It was an unexpected element of emotion that made him both easier to manipulate and yet, at the same time, unpredictable and dangerous.

“Where was Prinny early Wednesday afternoon?” the Viscount asked suddenly.

“In Brighton, of course.” Jarvis let out a low, deliberate laugh. “Good God. You surely aren’t entertaining the notion that His Highness actually had something to do with this death, are you?”

“It seems less improbable now than it did.”

“Why? Because the woman repulsed his advances? Don’t be ridiculous. England is full of women panting for the opportunity to copulate with a future king. He need only look at one and smile.”

“Yet what would happen, I wonder, should such a vain, sensitive prince encounter a woman with the courage to rebuff his advances?”

“No woman has ever accused His Highness of forcing himself upon her.” The words were crisp, carefully enunciated, just bordering on anger. “Ever.”

“Perhaps. Yet his father—a model of domestic fidelity if ever there was one—dropped his breeches and attacked his own daughter-in-law just last year.”

Jarvis’s hand tightened around the handle of his umbrella, although he managed to keep his voice calm, his face serene. “The Prince Regent is not going mad.”

Devlin’s lean face remained impassive. Unreadable. “Tell me about the dagger. The one you took from Guinevere Anglessey’s body.”

Jarvis gave the Viscount a warm, reassuring smile. “Now, why would I do that?”

Devlin’s smile was just as calculated and decidedly chilling. “I keep asking myself that same question. You might not like it when I come up with the answer.”

SEBASTIAN ARRIVED BACK AT HIS HOUSE on Brook Street to discover Sir Henry Lovejoy there before him.

“Sir Henry,” said Sebastian, opening the door to the library, where the chief magistrate of Queen Square was reading the Morning Gazette in one of the caned chairs beside the front bow window. “I trust you’ve not been waiting long?”