Page 24 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)
T hat night, long after the house had grown quiet around him, Sebastian stood in the doorway of the darkened drawing room, a glass of brandy in one hand, his gaze on the eighteenth-century portrait of a young woman that hung above the hearth.
A thick band of clouds had obscured the waning moon, so that the only light came from the banked, dying fire. Taking a sip of his drink, Sebastian went to stand with one hand braced against the mantel; he did not light the candles. But then, he didn’t need them.
He’d been perhaps eight or nine when he realized that most people’s perception of the world differed subtly from his. That most people couldn’t see well enough to move at ease through a darkened landscape, couldn’t see clearly over great distances, couldn’t hear whispered conversations from another room. He remembered the time his mother found him absorbed in a book in the summerhouse long after sunset. “Oh, Sebastian,” she’d said with a laugh. “You can’t possibly see well enough to read anymore.” He’d looked up in surprise and said, “Of course I can.”
He still remembered the strange, faraway expression that leapt into her eyes, the catch in her voice when she said, “Ah. Then it’s a gift.” It wasn’t until much, much later that he’d realized she knew . She knew his strangely acute eyesight and hearing had come to him from his father—from his real father, who wasn’t the Earl of Hendon at all.
It was something Sebastian wouldn’t discover himself for another twenty years. Instead he’d grown up wondering—wondering so many things. Why his eyes were yellow instead of the famously intense St. Cyr blue. Why his relationship with the man he called Father was so strained and troubled. Why he was tall and lean rather than large and heavy boned like his father and brothers. Why the acute eyesight and quick reflexes that helped Hendon’s third son excel at things like shooting and fencing seemed to trouble the Earl as much as they made him proud.
It wasn’t until both of Sebastian’s older brothers were dead and he had been Hendon’s heir for many years that Sebastian finally discovered the truth: that the beautiful, wild, wayward Countess of Hendon had played her lord false, presenting him with a bastard who had no legitimate claim to the titles and estates that the deaths of his two elder brothers meant he would someday inherit.
Draining his glass, Sebastian let his head fall back, his gaze once more on the portrait hanging above him. She’d been so young when Gainsborough painted her, her face flushed with laughter, her unpowdered golden hair cascading loose around her shoulders. And he felt choked by such a swirl of fierce, conflicting emotions—love and fury, longing and resentment, all tangled up with a piercing, breath-catching grief so intense that he shuddered.
For years he had thought her dead, only to learn she’d actually run off with one of her lovers, leaving the eleven-year-old child Sebastian had been then behind. As a father now himself, he couldn’t begin to understand how she could have done such a thing. Hendon had told him once that she’d thought it for the best, for all of them. An easy excuse? Or a painful reality?
He set his glass aside, his gaze still on his mother’s hauntingly beautiful face. She had died over a year ago, in Paris, on a cold, dark night on an island in the middle of the Seine. It had been a painful, violent death, and he still ached when he thought of what her last moments must have been like. She had died without telling him the name of his father, and because some things didn’t quite line up or make sense, Sebastian still wasn’t entirely certain of the man’s identity. But Sebastian’s resemblance to the Napoleonic general Alexandre McClellan was impossible to deny.
Descended from a family of Scottish Jacobites who’d fled to France in the bloody aftermath of the Forty-Five, Maréchal McClellan was a man famous for his brilliance on the battlefield. A man known for his unnaturally acute hearing and his ability to see great distances and in the dark. A man with strange yellow eyes.
A man the Bourbons were trying to kill.
“Where is he now?” Sebastian said aloud to the silent woman who stared at him from out of the past. Was the Bourbons’ assassin right? Had McClellan fled France for England?
It was a thought that brought with it a rush of exhilarating hope and anticipation mingled with something else. Something it took Sebastian a moment to realize was fear.
Thursday, 22 August
“You’re doing it again, aren’t you?” said Alistair St. Cyr, the Fifth Earl of Hendon, as he and Sebastian trotted their horses along the Row in Hyde Park. It was just past seven in the morning and the two men had met for an early-morning ride, as they often did when both were in London. Sebastian’s relationship with the gruff, demanding man who’d raised him as a son had never been easy and it never would be. But they’d gradually found a way to move past the painful revelations of the last few years to a new understanding.
“Doing what again?” asked Sebastian, glancing over at him.
Hendon grunted in disgust. “You’ve involved yourself in this damned murder inquiry.” His heir’s commitment to investigating murders had long been a source of aggravation for Hendon.
Sebastian kept his voice light. “I didn’t exactly involve myself in this one; the boy who found the body came to me.”
“God help us,” muttered the Earl.
In his early seventies now, Hendon was a large, barrel-chested man with a plain, slablike face, heavy brows, and the characteristically intense blue eyes of the St. Cyrs. Once his hair had been almost as dark as Sebastian’s, but it had long ago turned completely white and was now beginning to thin. In addition to the careful management of his estates, the Earl had dedicated his life to statesmanship, serving under a succession of prime ministers in various capacities. For some years now he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer and was known as one of the few people in Britain with the courage to stand up to the King’s powerful cousin Lord Jarvis.
“I was under the impression you’ve been focusing on improving your estate,” said Hendon. There’d been a time when Sebastian’s possession of a small estate in Hampshire—a legacy from a maiden great-aunt—had been a source of endless irritation to Hendon. But at some point he’d become reconciled to his heir’s economic independence. “I hear you’ve been expanding it.”
“We have, yes.”
“And experimenting with some of these damned newfangled farming techniques.”
Sebastian smiled. He and Hero had taken to spending more and more of their time in Hampshire, expanding their holdings, coordinating the draining of boggy fields, mixing soils, experimenting with new breeds of cattle, sheep, and pigs, and in general exploring various innovations—most of which Hendon had long disapproved. “Yes.” He looked over at the Earl. “What would you have me do instead?”
“Go into government.”
At that Sebastian laughed out loud. “So I can agitate for Catholic emancipation and universal suffrage? I don’t think you’d like that.”
“God help us,” Hendon muttered again.
“Never mind all that,” said Sebastian, his gaze on the wisps of mist drifting through the treetops. The day had dawned cool and cloudy but blessedly dry—at least, so far. “Tell me what you’re hearing from the Continent. Is the French harvest as bad as ours?”
“If anything, it’s worse. They’ve had the same damnable late freezes and even more rains. And the problem is, the weather’s been crazy all over—Spain, Italy, the United States and Canada, even Russia and Turkey. With harvests bad everywhere, no one can import grain.” Hendon sighed. “Bringing a twenty-five-year war to an end would have been difficult enough without a bloody famine to go along with it. The only way King Louis has been able to keep the peace in Paris is by stripping the grain from the provinces and shipping it to the capital. But while that might stop the people of Paris from revolting, it’s causing widespread discontent in the parts of the country that have traditionally stayed loyal to the monarchy.”
Sebastian looked over at him. “Any danger of France disintegrating into civil war?”
“Honestly? It’s a very real possibility. The only thing that will probably stop it is the fact that so many of their young men are already dead. That and our massive army of occupation—although that causes its own problems, since the French have to feed and billet them. Things aren’t as ugly as they were at first, when there were royalist bands roaming the countryside, looting and burning and killing at will. But Louis has basically given his brother Artois and his damned heir, Angoulême, free rein do their worst, and they’ve realized they can do whatever they want because they have our army of occupation backing them up. So they’re doing it.”
Hendon was silent for a moment, his jaw working back and forth in that way he had when he was thoughtful or quietly agitated. “The fools think they’re making their hold on the throne more secure. But they’re not. They’re not.”
His words both surprised and troubled Sebastian, for Hendon’s fears of revolution and republicanism had long made him an uncompromising champion of the Bourbons. “I thought they were finally starting to move away from the widespread arbitrary arrests and executions we’ve been hearing about.”
“They are, but only because they’ve now shifted to what is basically a legal terror. They’ve set up these new provost courts they’re using to try anyone deemed an enemy of the state. No jury, no appeal; just summary judgments. They’ve executed thousands and deported God knows how many more to their wretched penal colonies in the tropics.”
“In other words,” said Sebastian, “they’ve brought back the revolutionary tribunals.”
“Basically, although they don’t like the comparison. It’s being called the White Terror to distinguish it from the Red Terror of revolutionary days. Hopefully, it won’t end up being as bloody—although it won’t be for lack of trying.”
Sebastian kept his gaze on the track ahead and chose his words carefully. “I’m told they’re killing some prominent officers who fought under Napoléon—even when their names aren’t on the proscribed list. Is that true?”
Hendon let out a low growl. “It is. Mouton-Duvernet is the latest; I heard just yesterday that they’ve shot him. And there’ve been at least two attempts to quietly assassinate McClellan.”
Sebastian had to work to keep his voice level. Calm. “He’s dead?”
“No one knows exactly what’s happened to him, but he’s disappeared. Rumor has it he may have gone to America.”
“Any chance he could have come here, to Britain?”
Hendon looked over at him, his brows drawn together in a frown. “Not if he’s smart.”
?Later that morning, Sebastian and Hero were sitting down to breakfast when someone rang a peal at the front door.
“Expecting anyone?” said Hero, looking up from pouring the tea.
“No.”
They heard the booming voice of one of Lovejoy’s constables in the entry hall; then the man himself appeared at the doorway to the breakfast parlor, hat in hand.
“Beggin’ your pardon for intruding on you like this, ma’am,” he said to Hero with a bow. “But Sir Henry thought his lordship would like to know they’ve just found Half-Hanged Harry McGregor dead. In Swallow Street, my lord.”
Sebastian stared at him. “Not in the same chapel?”
The constable nodded, his nostrils flaring as he sucked in a quick breath. “Same exact place, my lord.”