When Gods Die

As incredible as it seemed, he’d found no one who’d known Guinevere Anglessey who would admit to ever having seen the triskelion. Not only that, but according to her abigail, Tess Bishop, the gown chosen by the Marchioness on the afternoon of her death had sported a neckline that would have made the wearing of the ancient piece impossible. Obviously, like the satin gown, the necklace had been clasped around Guinevere’s neck after her death. But why? And by whom?

Although Sebastian doubted it, he supposed it possible that Charles, Lord Jarvis, had dangled the necklace before Sebastian simply to entice him into the investigation. Yet even if that were so, it still begged the question: how had a necklace that should have been at the bottom of the English Channel suddenly reappeared?

The explanation suggested by Hendon, that the necklace had been sold by some peasant who’d found the Countess’s body washed up on a distant beach, remained plausible. But Sebastian could not avoid confronting the more likely explanation, that Sophie Hendon had not died in that long-ago boating accident, but had simply sailed away, leaving a husband, a married daughter, and an eleven-year-old son to mourn her.

Sebastian stared off across a mist-filled meadow to the line of elms that could be seen edging a stream in the distance. Even as a child, he had nourished few illusions about his parents’ marriage. It was the way of their world, husbands busy with Parliament and their clubs while their wives were left to amuse themselves with other things. In Sebastian’s memories, Sophie Hendon was a golden presence, her touch soft and loving, her gay laughter still echoing to him down through the years. Yet his school days had been punctuated with fisticuffs, fought to defend his mother’s honor. For in a society where infidelity was commonplace, the Countess of Hendon had been known to be particularly promiscuous.

A crow rose from a nearby field, its voice raucous, its wings dark against the cloudy sky. Sebastian paused, then turned his steps toward the New Road. He had never thought of his mother as unhappy, yet he realized now, looking back, that it might well have been unhappiness that drove her restlessness, that brought that brittle edge to her smile. Had she been unhappy enough to simply sail away and leave them all? To leave him?

He remembered the aching loss of that summer. He hadn’t believed it when they’d told him of the tragic end to the Countess’s pleasure outing. He thought about the endless hot hours he’d spent on the cliffs overlooking the sea. Day after day he had stood there, his eyes dry and hurting as he determinedly scanned the sunsparkled horizon for sails that would never come. He thought about the possibility that it had all been a lie, and he knew a surge of bitter rage and a deep, abiding hurt.

Chapter 32

Of the four children born to the Earl of Hendon and his Countess, Sophia, only two still lived: Hendon’s youngest and only surviving son and heir, Sebastian, and the couple’s eldest child and only daughter, Amanda.

By the time Sebastian was born, Amanda had already been in her twelfth year. In the memories of his childhood she was a distant, sullen presence, disapproving and vaguely hostile. She had grown into a tall, haughty woman, fiercely proud of her noble lineage and forever embittered by the harsh realities of an ancient tradition that handed everything—titles, estates, wealth—to her youngest, most despised brother.

At the age of eighteen, she had married Martin, Lord Wilcox, a man of staid respectability from a suitably ancient and wealthy family. She was now a widow, left financially comfortable by the terms of her marriage settlement as well as being in full control of her children’s fortunes. But the circumstances of her husband’s death that previous February were cloudy, and served only to deepen the animosity between brother and sister.

He found her that afternoon walking the boxwood-trimmed paths of the iron-railed square before her house. She still wore the heavy black trappings of deep mourning, a state of forced idleness and isolation he knew she must find trying, although she would never show it. She turned at his approach. In her early forties now, Amanda had inherited their mother’s fairness and slim, elegant carriage and combined it with Hendon’s more blunt, heavy facial features. At the sight of Sebastian, her blue St. Cyr eyes narrowed.

“Well. Dear brother. To what do I owe this unexpected…” She paused just long enough to make the word a lie. “Pleasure?”

Sebastian smiled. “Dear Amanda. Walk with me a ways, won’t you?”

She hesitated, then inclined her head. “Very well. What is it?”

They turned their steps together toward the statue that stood at the center of the square. “I wanted to ask you a question. Is it possible, do you think, that Mother didn’t die in a boating accident that summer? That the accident was simply a hoax, a ruse?”