Page 1 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)

London: Monday, 19 August 1816

T he boy stood with his thin shoulders hunched against the cold, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his ragged coat. Narrowing his eyes against the slanting rain, he studied the silent windows of a certain elegant town house on the far side of Brook Street, then shivered.

It was only midafternoon and yet already the sky was dark and gloomy, the wind icy enough to make it feel more like February or March than high summer. But then, they hadn’t had anything like a summer that year. The crops in the fields were dying—or dead. People were already going hungry, and Father said he didn’t know what the poor would do when winter came. Lots of folks were scared, saying the weather wasn’t ever gonna get better, that the end of the world must be upon them and Jesus would be coming back soon to save the righteous and smite the wicked.

At the thought, the boy shivered again, for he sure enough knew which category he belonged to—he and Father both. Then a flicker of movement jerked his attention back across the street, and he watched as a wavering light appeared in the room that lay to one side of that shiny black front door, as if someone there was lighting a brace of candles. A tall, lean man with dark hair and a slight limp crossed in front of the room’s windows. It was the nobleman the boy was here to see: Viscount Devlin, he was called.

A trickle of rain ran down the boy’s cheek to tickle his bare neck, and he swiped at his wet face with the back of one hand. He was afraid that what he was about to do was a mistake. But something needed to be done.

Sucking in a deep breath of the foul, coal smoke–scented air, the boy leapt the rushing gutter at his feet and crossed the street’s wet granite paving. But at the base of the house’s steps, he faltered. He had to force himself to march up the steps and grasp the door’s shiny brass knocker. He brought it down so hard that he jumped back in surprise.

The door was opened almost at once by a grim-looking majordomo with a military air and a forbidding frown that darkened as he took in the ragged, undersized lad shifting nervously from one bare foot to the other. “The service entrance is—”

“Sure then, but ’tis his lordship I’m here to see—Lord Devlin, I mean,” said the boy in a rush before the man could shut the door on him. “About a body, it is: a dead man. His face is all purple, ye see, and he’s hanging—hangin’ upside down.”

“Ah,” said the majordomo, some emotion Jamie couldn’t quite decipher twitching the man’s thin lips as he took a step back and opened the door wider. “Then, in that case, I suppose you’d better come in.”