When Gods Die

Faced with such determined opposition from her family, another woman might simply have succumbed to the wishes of her keepers and lived a pale, unhappy life of resignation and acceptance. But not Guinevere. Given no real choice, she had come to London. But she had come determined to find some way to make her life on her own terms.

And so she had taken to husband the Marquis of Anglessey, a man who was not only wealthy and kindly, but also old enough to be nearing the end of his life. As a wealthy widow, Guinevere would have been free to marry to please herself. Had that been her objective? Only, in the end it had been the Marquis of Anglessey who buried his beautiful young wife.

If the murder had been staged in such a way as to implicate Bevan Ellsworth or Lady Anglessey’s unknown lover, Sebastian might have believed the Marquis guilty. It wouldn’t have been the first time an old, impotent husband had been driven to murder by the discovery that his beautiful young wife was giving her love to a younger man. But Guinevere Anglessey’s killer hadn’t implicated Bevan Ellsworth. He had targeted the Prince Regent. Why?

Leaving the square, Sebastian closed his fist around the bluestone necklace, a necklace given as a talisman by a Welsh witch to her lover, a fugitive Stuart prince who in turn had presented it to his illegitimate daughter on her wedding day. From there its history was obscure until that day some thirty years ago now when a withered old crone in the wilds of northern Wales had pressed it upon the young Countess of Hendon.

Whatever link existed between the two women must lay there, Sebastian decided, somewhere in the green, misty mountains of northern Wales.

Chapter 33

They were referred to as morning calls, that endless round of formal visits that took place daily amongst the members of Society in residence in London. But the truth was that no gentleman or lady with any pretensions to breeding would dream of appearing on the doorstep of any but his or her most intimate of friends before three o’clock.

And so Sebastian spent the next several hours in Jackson’s saloon, working the soreness out of his muscles. It wasn’t until half past three that he arrived at the home of Guinevere’s sister, Morgana, Lady Quinlan. After the thinly veiled hostility of their encounter at the balloon ascension, he half expected to be told she was not at home. Instead, he was shown upstairs to the drawing room, where he found Lady Quinlan in conversation with another caller, a young woman introduced to him as Lady Portland, wife to the Home Secretary and half sister to Guinevere’s childhood love, the Chevalier de Varden.

She had much the look of her mother, Isolde, being incredibly small and fine-boned. Only her hair was different, an ashen blond rather than a fiery auburn. She was also very young, no more than twenty at the most. As a child of Lady Audley’s second marriage, she was younger than Varden, younger even than Guinevere.

“Lord Devlin,” said Claire Portland, offering her hand and looking up at him with that intense interest used to flirtatious effect by so many of her sex. “I’ve been hearing a great deal to your credit.”

The hand in his was a dainty, frail thing, and he found himself thinking that Claire Portland, like her mother, was far too tiny to have been the owner of the green satin gown that had been used as Guinevere’s death shroud.

“Portland tells me you’ve agreed to help discover the truth about what happened to poor Guinevere,” Claire was saying. “How gallant of you.”

Sebastian adjusted the tails of his coat and sat on a nearby sofa. “I don’t recall,” he said to Lady Portland. “Were you present at the Prince’s musical evening last Wednesday?”

She gave a little shudder. “Thank goodness, no. I had the headache and decided to stay in my room.”

“But you were in Brighton.”

“Oh yes.” She leaned forward as if confiding a secret. “Personally, I find the place rather tedious. But now that Prinny has been named Regent, I fear we shall all be doomed to follow him down there every summer.”

Leaning back again, she fixed him with an intense gaze and said, “Is it true what Portland says, that the people on the streets actually believe the Prince killed poor Guin?”

Sebastian glanced at Morgana, who sat quietly beside the empty hearth. “It’s been my experience that most people tend to believe what they are led to believe,” he said.