When Gods Die

SEBASTIAN SPENT THE NEXT SEVERAL HOURS asking some discreet questions about Bevan Ellsworth’s boon companion, Fabian Fitzfrederick, illegitimate son to Prince Frederick, the Duke of York. But Fitzfrederick’s movements on that fatal Wednesday proved to be as innocuous as Bevan’s. After a day spent at Tattersall’s, Fitzfrederick had whiled away the evening at the same Pickering Place gaming hell frequented by his friend Ellsworth.

Thoughtful, Sebastian sent Tom off to canvass the shops of Giltspur Street in Smithfield, then turned his own steps toward the Marquis of Anglessey’s Mount Street town house.

He found the Marquis in the tile-floored conservatory built onto the back of the house. Pausing beneath a gently drooping tree fern, Sebastian looked at Guinevere’s husband and saw an old man, his once-sturdy frame now gaunt, his gray head bowed as he tended a yellow blooming jasmine. Then the Marquis looked up and the impression of age and infirmity was dispelled by the power of the intelligence and sheer force of personality shining in his eyes.

“I was wondering if you would come today,” said the Marquis, jerking off his gardening gloves and laying them aside.

Sebastian glanced around the humid room, crowded with ferns and orchids and tender, leafy tropicals. The warm air smelled of moist earth and green growing things and the sweet perfume of the cape gardenia blooming over by the door. He had something of a reputation as a connoisseur of exotic plants, the Marquis. They said that when he was young, he’d sailed on a naval expedition to the South Pacific, collecting botanic specimens.

“Paul Gibson tells me he gave you the results of your wife’s autopsy,” said Sebastian.

Anglessey nodded. “He thinks Guin was poisoned.” He brought one hand to his face and rubbed his closed eyes with a spread thumb and forefinger. “The dagger would have been a far kinder death. Quick. Relatively painless. But cyanide? God help me, how she must have suffered. She’d have had time to know she was dying. I can’t imagine what her last thoughts must have been.” His hand fell to his side, his eyes open wide and hurting. “Who did this? Who could have done such a thing to her?”

Sebastian held the old man’s tortured gaze. “Bevan Ellsworth claims the child Lady Anglessey carried was not yours.”

The words were blunt and brutal, but necessary. The Marquis’s head snapped back, his jaw going slack with shock and anger. He tried to take a quick step forward, only to stumble over an uneven tile so that he had to fling out one hand and catch the edge of a nearby iron table for balance. “You dare? You dare say such a thing to me? I’ve called men out for less.”

Sebastian kept his own voice calm. “He’s not the only one saying it. The assumption on the streets is that she was the Regent’s mistress.”

The Marquis’s face had gone white, his thin chest jerking so hard with each breath that for a moment Sebastian was afraid he might have pushed too far. “It’s not true.”

Sebastian met the old man’s furious gaze and held it. “Then help me. I can’t find out what really happened to your wife if I don’t know the truth.”

Anglessey swung away. He suddenly seemed older, shrunken. Picking up a long-spouted watering can, he went to fill it at the pump. Then he simply stood there, his head bowed.

When he finally spoke, his voice sounded tired. Resigned. “It’s no easy thing, facing the final years of your life with the knowledge that everything you’ve dedicated yourself to preserving will be destroyed after your death by another man’s dissipation.”

Sebastian was silent, waiting. After a moment, Anglessey took a deep breath and continued. “Guinevere and I both went into marriage with our eyes wide open. She knew I wanted a young wife to give me an heir, and I knew that her heart already belonged to another.”

“She told you that?”

“Yes. She thought I deserved to know. I respected her for it. It was my hope that we would at least become friends. And in that, I think we succeeded.”

Friends. A lukewarm enough ambition for husband and wife. Yet it was a status achieved by very few married couples of their society.

“My second wife, Charlotte, was never well,” said Anglessey, tightening his grip on the watering can. “For the last fifteen years of her life, I essentially lived the life of a monk. Other men in my position would have taken a mistress, but I never did. Perhaps that was a mistake.”

It was a common maxim that a man lost his ability to bed a woman when he quit bedding women. An old maxim that probably had a fair amount of truth in it, Sebastian decided.

Anglessey went to tip a careful stream of water along the roots of a line of ferns. “I was never able to consummate my marriage with Guinevere.” A faint line of color touched his sharp, high cheekbones and stayed there. “She tried. We both tried very hard. She knew how much it meant to me to have a son. But it eventually became obvious that it wasn’t going to happen.”