"He's in his study," the lady said. She handed Fam a heavy leather purse. He peered inside at the layers upon layers of gold guineas. Without bothering to count the coins he dropped the bag into one of the deep pockets of his greatcoat.
"Last door on the left," the lady instructed.
"The pistols?" he asked the gentleman, obviously the viscount's son and husband to the lady who was very much in charge.
"In the case on his desk, loaded and primed as Miss Stubbs instructed." The gentleman sweated profusely. His hands shook and his face held the chalky color of someone about to cast up his accounts all over his expensive boots. "The gun cleaning supplies are right next to the pistols."
"Is there a servants' entrance into the study?" Fam asked even as he glanced about the kitchen looking for inset doors. The lady strode to a corner of the room and touched the wall. A door immediately appeared in the wood paneling.
"Go upstairs," Fam ordered. "Don't come down until you hear the shot." The gentleman flinched. His eyes went wide. "The time to back out is now. I keep the blunt for my trouble, but I can walk out into the mews, disappear, and never speak of this again."
"No," the lady said even as her husband opened his mouth to speak. "He breathes his last tonight."
Fam nearly smiled. He ducked into the servants' passage and moved past the various doors without making a sound.
Once he reached the last one, he pressed the release mechanism and peered through the narrow slit he'd opened in the recessed door.
Seated at the desk, Viscount de Winter poured a generous portion of amber liquid into a glass.
The desk was lit by a large ornate oil lamp.
He downed half the glass and immediately refilled it to the top.
Brandy . Fam's nose seldom failed him regarding food or expensive spirits.
He drew his dagger from his boot and glided slowly through the darkness, across the deep, expensive carpet.
The viscount didn't look up. Not even when Fam lifted the lid on the ornately carved box that held two pristine Mantons.
"Viscount de Winter?" Fam adopted his most steady emotionless tone.
The viscount snapped his head up and stared at Fam through bleary, bloodshot eyes. "Who the devil are you? What are you doing in my house?"
"I'm your own personal angel of death, my lord. The devil's had about enough of your buggering children and beating women. He sent me to fetch you back to hell where you belong."
"Get out of my house. How dare you talk such filthy nonsense to me." He tried to stand. Fam whipped his dagger up so that the tip dipped just inside the viscount's right nostril.
"Sit down you fucking whoreson."
Once the viscount dropped back into his chair Fam withdrew his dagger and tucked the blade into the waist of his buckskins.
"My sources tell me you've been buying children from every harpy abbess and guttersnipe cock-bawd in London for years.
How many did you kill besides the one who died last night birthing your bastard?
You really shouldn't have gone after your own grandchildren, my lord.
Bad form and all that." Fam forced himself to go cold, to shut off the feelings of fury and despair at the fates of those whose pain he knew all too well.
"I don't know what you're talking about, you wretched shite. My son will--"
Fam picked up one of the pistols and thumbed back the hammer.
He leaned across the desk and pressed the barrel between the viscount's eyes.
"Your son is the one paying me to do this," he said as he allowed a mirthless grin to crease his lips.
"Now you can do this yourself or I'll do it for you, but rest assured, you vomit from your mother's cunny, tonight you will be dining with Old Scratch.
" He pulled the gun away from the viscount's forehead a few inches. The man's eyes lit with impotent fury.
"Fuck--"
Boom!
Fam placed the pistol onto the desk, still smoking.
He dropped the cleaning cloth into the already spreading pool of blood from under the viscount's white-haired head.
In a few swift movements he tipped over the glass of brandy and the container of gun oil.
He studied his handiwork like an artist eying a canvas.
The rush of booted footsteps echoed outside the double doors that undoubtedly opened into the townhouse foyer.
With one final perusal of the room, Fam strolled out the doors to find the new Viscount de Winter standing at the bottom of the stairs that led from a balustraded landing down to the marble floor of the entrance hall. His expression of fear and horror was almost laughable, at least to Fam it was.
The smell of smoke and gunpowder lingered like a whore's perfume in the still, cold air of one of London's most elegant townhouses.
"You knew. You knew and you let him continue to debauch children in brothels and have them delivered here to be raped and defiled.
" He glanced up to the first-floor landing and for a moment he met the gaze of the eerily silent lady staring down at him.
She finally gave him a nearly imperceptible nod.
The man who now, thanks to Fam's having just put a bullet through the previous viscount's brain, was Viscount de Winter, dropped to sit on the bottom step of the grand staircase that rose from the gilt and marble foyer of the London townhouse.
His face was white as milk and his body as limp as a Covent Garden puppeteer's string-cut doll.
"I recommend you leave him for the servants to find in the morning," Fam suggested, already weary and ready to make his way home.
The night air had smelled of a storm when he'd been let into the house from the mews by the now trembling viscount.
He did not look forward to walking in a downpour back to where he'd left his carriage.
"They will assume it was a suicide, but with the proper inducements.
..to them and the magistrate, I have made everything appear as an accident whilst cleaning his pistols. "
"I shall beg God's forgiveness every day for the rest of my life," the viscount rasped, holding his head in his hands. The front door rattled in the frame. The wind had picked up and began to howl against the windows.
"For what?" Fam asked as he used a silk serviette to wipe the blood and brains from his face and gloved hands.
"For hiring me to do what you could not?
Or for the children whose souls your father destroyed with his depraved desires?
For the eleven-year-old girl lying in the Rose Street dispensary who died giving birth to his child last night?
You have a bastard sister, by the way. What could you possibly want God's forgiveness for, Lord de Winter? "
The pitiful creature sitting on the stairs began to sob like an old woman. Fam laughed and shook his head as he turned to go down the corridor that led to the back of the house.
"What of you, sir?" the new viscountess asked as she descended the stairs and stepped around her weeping husband. "Will you beg God's forgiveness for what's been done this night?"
"For what I've done this night? No, milady, I will not. I never beg for something I know will never be given."
"And you are content with that?"
He glanced at the closed doors to the study where the lady's father-in-law lay bleeding onto his desk from the bullet hole Fam had put in the man's head.
The slightest scent of piss and shit began to seep into the foyer.
Even the most neatly executed death had its drawbacks.
"I make no apologies for my actions to God or anyone else.
Bloody waste of time, and I have no time to waste.
Good night, Viscountess de Winter." He tossed the stained serviette at her feet and left the house.
Once he reached his carriage and climbed inside, he pulled the purse from his greatcoat and tossed the heavy leather bag to Sullivan, who immediately emptied the contents onto the seat next to him and began to count as Bull turned the carriage onto Charles Street.
"Guv'," Pigeon started. "Are you--"
"Tell me about this Earl of Elbridge and his brother. What exactly does the earl want us to do?"