Page 5 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)
S ebastian returned to Brook Street to find his baby daughter asleep under the watchful eye of their French-born nurse, Claire, and Hero out walking with the two boys. He changed into dry clothes, poured himself a glass of brandy, and went to stand for a time at the library window, his gaze on the gray sky pressing low on the city, his thoughts drifting painfully to the past, to a time before Hugh Chandler had run off with Lord Preston’s wife, when Hugh had still been a captain and Sebastian only a lieutenant, and they’d both endured a grueling winter retreat that no one who’d survived it would ever forget…
Pushing aside the memories, Sebastian turned abruptly from the window. Opening the bottom drawer of his desk, he withdrew the deck of tarot cards he’d acquired the previous summer—back when England had actually had a summer—when he’d encountered a mysterious, deadly woman who called herself Sibil Wilde.
Removing the deck from its case, he began turning the cards over one by one, beginning with an image of a man dressed in the multicolored habiliments of a medieval court jester. The card bore no number but was entitled Le Mat : the Vagabond, the Fool. Then came the numbered cards: Le Bateleur , the Magician or Mountebank, with the tools of his trade spread across a table before him, followed by Junon , L’Imperatrice , L’Empereur , and Jupiter . He laid the six cards in a neat row, then started a second row and kept going until he came to XII: Le Pendu , the Hanged Man.
In this deck’s interpretation of the card, the man wore a green coat with a red collar and yellow braiding down the front. His pantaloons were red, his one visible boot brown and tied by a rope to a wooden beam resting between two trees. The trees were leafless and looked dead, their branches broken off in a way that reminded Sebastian of a forest shattered by intense artillery fire. Or was that simply because the man’s clothing looked vaguely like a military uniform and because Sebastian had once, after a particularly brutal engagement in Spain, come across some two dozen French soldiers hanging like this, upside down—except by both feet and with their bodies hideously mutilated by the Spanish peasants into whose hands they had fallen?
He pushed the memory aside and forced himself to focus on the image depicted on the card. The man’s eyes were closed, his forehead furrowed as if with age or a frown, although his features were not otherwise distorted. Despite those two shattered dead trees, a stretch of bright green grass grew beneath him. The man was hanging so low that his head touched the grass, tilting it slightly to one side.
What did it all mean? And for what possible reason had Farnsworth’s killer posed his victim’s body like this? Was it simply, as Lovejoy had suggested, a coincidence? Or was the killer sending them a message?
What message?
The sound of a young child’s voice, followed by laughter, drew Sebastian’s attention to the street outside. He heard the quick patter of little boys’ feet on the front steps as Morey moved to open the front door.
“I see Papa’s hat!” shouted Simon. “He’s home?”
“He is, but—Master Simon! Master Patrick—”
Two small boys came hurtling through the open doorway to the library, one after the other, the straw hats in their hands streaming grimy wet ribbons and their nankeens liberally splashed with mud. “Papa!” cried Simon. “We’ve been for a walk along the Serpentine, and you wouldn’t believe how full it is! Everything is wet !”
“And so are you, from the looks of things,” said Sebastian, laughing as he caught the grubby three-year-old boy around the waist to hold him at arm’s length.
“Simon fell,” said Patrick, coming to stand beside his brother. “Not in the Serpentine, but almost.” There’d been a time when the older boy’s accent had been that of a Bishopsgate barmaid, but no longer. The two boys looked enough alike that, except for the slight difference in their heights, they might have been twins. But only the younger, Simon, was Sebastian’s own son; Patrick was an orphan, the son of a man who’d looked enough like Sebastian to have been his brother, although the connection between the two men had never been explained. His name had been Jamie Knox, and it was because of Knox’s resemblance to Sebastian that Knox had died and Sebastian lived….
“It’s slippery!” said Simon.
“One of the park-keepers told Mama they think it’s gonna flood,” said Patrick.
Simon nodded solemnly. “Betsy says it’s ’cause the sun is dying and the world is gonna end!”
“Who is Betsy?” asked Sebastian, his gaze meeting Hero’s as she followed the boys into the library.
“The new nursery maid,” she said, taking off her own sodden hat and going to work on the buttons of her wet pelisse. She was an extraordinarily tall woman, nearly as tall as Sebastian himself, with a Junoesque build, dark hair, and an aquiline nose she had inherited from her father, Lord Jarvis, the formidable, ruthless man known as the real power behind the Prince of Wales’s fragile regency. “From the sound of things, she and I need to have a little talk.”
“Alors,” said the children’s nurse, hurrying down the stairs toward them. “Look how wet you two are!”
“Claire!” said Simon, running toward her. “I fell!”
“I see you did,” said the Frenchwoman, scooping him up and holding out her hand to Patrick. “Venez, mes enfants.”
“I thought you had an interview scheduled for this afternoon,” Sebastian said to Hero as Claire and the two boys disappeared up the stairs.
“I did,” said Hero, easing off her wet pelisse. For several years now she had been writing a series of articles on the poor of London for the Morning Chronicle. It was a project that enraged her father, but Hero was one of the few people in the Kingdom whom Jarvis had never been able to intimidate. Her current article was on the hundreds of thousands of destitute ex-soldiers and sailors who had been discharged since the ending of the decades-long wars with France, and Sebastian knew she was finding the research for this article particularly troubling.
“The man I was supposed to talk to died during the night. I knew he wasn’t well, but…”
“I’m sorry.”
She tossed her pelisse aside. “Was it all a hum, then, your hanging man? No dead body?”
“Oh, there was a body, all right: Lord Preston Farnsworth’s.” Sebastian reached for the card labeled Le Pendu and held it up. “He was hanging upside down, posed exactly like this.”
“Good heavens.” Hero came to take the card from him and study it. “Why would someone do that?”
“Revenge, perhaps?”
She set the card back in its place on the desktop but continued to stare at it, her features pinched with worry that mirrored his own. “Farnsworth is well known for his work with Wilberforce and Clarkson to end the slave trade. And while it’s been eight or nine years since the bill successfully made it through Parliament, slave traders and plantation owners are dangerous enemies to make, and some people can hold a gr—” She broke off as if suddenly realizing her reasoning was leading her exactly where she didn’t want to go.
“A grudge? They can indeed. And who is more likely to hold a grudge than a man forced by a vindictive husband to pay twenty thousand pounds for the sin of falling in love with another man’s wife?”
Hero looked up, her features strained. “You can’t think Hugh did this. Not Hugh.”
Sebastian drained his brandy, then set the glass aside and went to stand again at the library’s front window, his gaze on the wet, rain-lashed street. It was a long moment before he said, “Honestly? I’m afraid he might have.”