Page 59 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)

T he fog was thicker closer to the Thames, a ghostly white swirl that hovered low over the water and clung to the ancient brick chimney tops of the tumbledown houses of Southwark.

Leaving his horses with Tom near St. Saviour’s, Sebastian slipped quietly into the mist-shrouded, burned-out ruins of the once-grand palace of the Bishops of Winchester. The palace—and the remnants of the mean tenements and warehouses that had been built in and around it over the centuries—sprawled along the river on both sides of Clink Street and stretched far back toward Borough Market. He had assumed at first that Barr and Lady Hester meant to kill Angélique the same way they had killed so many of the city’s young, impoverished women: by holding her head underwater in that small, grim courtyard and then throwing her body in the Thames. But the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that Barr, or Lady Hester, or whoever’s idea this was wouldn’t want the French nun’s death to echo those earlier killings. Although the fact they’d chosen to kill Angélique here, in the palace ruins, showed a distinct lack of imagination.

Desperately hoping he wasn’t too late, Sebastian had to force himself to work his way slowly and cautiously through the piles of debris, the broken walls, the scattered stones, bricks, and charred lengths of ancient wood, lest a careless footfall betray his presence. With each step he listened intently, cursing the fog and the way it deadened all sound and obscured everything more than five feet before him. Then, for a brief moment, the mist eddied and he caught the dim glow of lantern light through the broken tracery of the Great Hall’s ancient rose window.

Shifting closer, he heard a woman’s voice, her words still carrying the inflections of her native France. “I don’t understand,” she said with admirable calm. “Why would you wish to kill me?”

“It would have been better if you’d brought the little redheaded harlot with you,” said Sir Windle Barr, sounding almost bored. “But I don’t suppose she’ll be too hard to find with you out of the way.”

Wishing like hell that he’d had time to swing by Brook Street for a pistol, Sebastian eased his knife from the sheath in his boot and crept along the hall’s broken wall to where he could see three long, narrow shadows cast across the surrounding rubble by the light from the horn lantern someone had set atop a flat stone.

Dressed in a plain black gown with a high white collar that echoed the age-old habit of her order, Angélique stood with her head held high, her hands clasped before her as she stared at the round-shouldered, rather dumpy man some ten feet before her, the muzzle of his single-barreled flintlock pistol pointed unwaveringly at her. Lady Hester hovered off to one side, her palms cupping her elbows to draw them close to her sides, her face a tense mask.

“Ironically,” Barr was saying as Sebastian eased closer, “the Frenchman who told me about the girl didn’t even realize my interest in her. I considered simply letting him take care of you, but I trusted Hester here to induce you to bring the girl, too.”

“I tell you, the girl wasn’t there,” hissed Lady Hester, her voice unnaturally high and tight.

“It’s a pity,” said Barr, pulling back the hammer of his flintlock.

“No!” shouted Sebastian, pushing to his feet and breaking into a run just as Barr swung the pistol toward Lady Hester and fired.

She let out a sharp cry, crumpling slowly. But the magistrate was already moving, his jaw tight with determination as he yanked a braided leather garrote from his pocket and leapt to loop the cord around the Frenchwoman’s neck.

“We appear to be at a bit of an impasse,” said Barr, drawing the garrote tight as he swung Angélique around, her hands coming up helplessly to her throat as he held her before him like a shield.

Sebastian drew up. “Let her go,” he said.

“I think not.” A hard smile curled the magistrate’s lips. “If I let her go, that knife of yours will end up in my belly.”

Sebastian shook his head. “No. But I can promise you this: If you kill her, I will kill you. Without hesitation.”

The magistrate made a tsk ing sound. “What to do, what to do? Ah, I know. She can come with me—very slowly and carefully, do you hear, my dear?” He stooped to place his lips inches from the French nun’s ear. “We shall back cautiously away from the decidedly lethal Lord Devlin here, to where my carriage awaits me at the end of Clink Street. Understand?”

The Frenchwoman’s eyes met Sebastian’s. He was reminded that this was a woman who had lived through some of the worst horrors of the French Revolution; who had tended a princess brutalized by her captors and then watched her own brother die beneath the blade of the guillotine before escaping over the Pyrenees to exile. For one telling moment, she held Sebastian’s gaze. Then, letting her hands fall, she reached down and back, grabbed Barr by his testicles, and squeezed as hard as she could.

Sir Windle’s eyes widened, his mouth sagging open and his breath leaving his chest in a pained oof as Angélique wrenched away from his hold and Sebastian stepped forward to drive his knife deep under the man’s ribs with an expert upward thrust.

The garrote fluttering from his fingers, Sir Windle took one step, two, then collapsed. Sebastian watched him fall, watched his hands grope feebly toward the handle of the knife still embedded in his chest, then spasm and slide away.

Carefully crouching down beside the dying man, Sebastian slid an arm beneath Barr’s shoulders and lifted his head.

“Stupid bitch,” said Barr, looking up at him with pain-filled, stricken eyes. “How bad is it?”

Sebastian glanced down at the dark red blood pulsing out from around the knife still buried in the man’s chest. “Bad.”

Barr nodded and coughed up blood. “Thought so.” His voice was broken, breathy; his tongue crept out to lick his dry lips. “Made a tactical error, didn’t I? Telling you the Frenchman had found Angélique, I mean. Didn’t think you knew who…who she was.”

Sebastian shook his head. “Why shoot Lady Hester?”

“She was becoming…a threat. Too…frightened. Saying and doing stupid things. Telling you about Lamont. I thought…thought the nun would be easy enough to strangle. But Hester, she’s a big woman…. Knew I had to…shoot her, kill her first. Was going to make it look like…” His face spasmed, his eyes beginning to roll back in his head.

Sebastian had to fight the urge to shake the man. “Why the bloody hell did you try to kill my wife?”

Barr drew a painful gasp. “Didn’t. Guess you have another enemy…someone you don’t know about, hmm?” The ghost of a smile touched his bloody lips. Then he sucked in a rattling breath, and another. And as Sebastian watched, the light went out of his eyes and his chest stilled.

Sebastian lowered the man to the ground, surprised to see that his hands were smeared with the dead man’s blood. He tried to feel something, but he was dead inside. And he found himself wondering if this was what the war had done to him and to so many others like him—made him dead inside at the time of a kill, so that he didn’t feel whatever it was a person was supposed to feel when they took a life. So that the haunting shadows of endless torment came only afterward, in the darkest hours of the night. He was suddenly, almost painfully aware of the mist cool and damp against his face, of the stench of burnt black powder still hanging in the air and the distant slosh of the river against its bank. But inside, he was dead.

Wiping his hands on his breeches, he pushed to his feet and went to where Angélique now knelt beside Lady Hester, one of the woman’s limp hands in her own.

“She’s dead,” said the Frenchwoman without looking up at him.

“Good.”

Angélique—or Sister Anne Marie, he supposed he should think to call her—carefully lowered Lady Hester’s hand and then settled back on her heels, her palms pressed flat against her thighs. “It would have been better if she could have had time to confess her sins and make her peace with God.”

Sebastian hunkered down beside the dead woman. Barr’s bullet had caught her square in the chest; she must have died almost instantly. “She wouldn’t have,” he said. “Confessed her sins, I mean.”

“You can’t know that.”

Sebastian looked over at Sister Anne Marie. It was the first time he had taken a really good look at this woman who had for so long been only a name. She was built small and fine boned, with clear blue eyes, delicate, aristocratic features, and smooth skin. To see her, one might think her as young as thirty, except that having heard something of her history he knew she must be at least forty-five, if not more. “Perhaps not,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” She touched one hand to her crushed high collar, then let it fall. “I am sorry you had to kill that man. For his sake, and for yours.”

“It isn’t—” Sebastian started to say, then broke off, his head turning as he caught the soft whisper of shoe leather rubbing against stone and the click of a hammer being carefully eased back.

“Get down!” he shouted, throwing himself at the Frenchwoman, knocking her flat. He felt the rush of a bullet passing his cheek, heard the rifle shot echo around the burned-out shell of the old medieval hall.

“Are you hit?” he said hoarsely.

“No, but—”

“Stay down!” he shouted, and pushed to his feet to take off at a run.

With no way of knowing if the shooter was alone, had a second weapon, or was standing his ground and calmly reloading, Sebastian ran in a zigzag, cursing the drifting fog as he raced down the length of the ruined hall.

He could hear the sound of running feet as the shooter fled. For a moment, the French assassin’s lean, familiar figure appeared silhouetted against the mist as he darted through a jagged opening in one of the long, broken walls, his rifle still gripped in one hand. Then he was swallowed by the fog.

Sebastian tore after him. He could hear Cartier’s stumbling progress across a rubble-strewn courtyard; saw him trip and catch himself as they raced, one after the other, through the ruins of a warehouse. Sebastian’s leg was already howling with pain; under normal conditions the Frenchman would have been able to outpace him. But the night was dark and the ancient palace grounds dangerously littered with debris, forcing him to slow, while Sebastian had the night vision of a wolf.

He narrowed the distance between them to fifteen feet. Ten. Then the Frenchman caught his foot on something lurking unseen in the rank weeds and went sprawling, the rifle flying from his hands as he fell.

He came up fast, a dagger held in his fist as he crouched low and smiled. “Pity you left your knife in Barr’s gut.”

“Think that gives you an advantage, do you?” said Sebastian, snatching up a charred length of wood from the rubble at his feet.

Both breathing heavily, the two men circled each other warily, sizing each other up. Then the Frenchman lunged, his blade aimed at Sebastian’s chest. Sebastian sidestepped nimbly, putting all his weight behind the blow as he swung his makeshift club at the assassin’s head. He felt the impact reverberate up his arms to shudder his body, heard the thwunk of wood striking flesh and bone.

And the snap of something vital as the man’s neck broke.

His head bowed, Sebastian was sitting on his rump in the rank weeds beside the man he had just killed, his arms propped on his bent knees as he waited for his heart to quit pounding and his breath to quiet, when he became aware of the woman who had once been known as Angélique walking toward him through the swirling mist.

“You are unhurt?” she said, her hands fisting in the black cloth of her gown as she drew up some feet away.

He looked up at her. “Yes.”

She stared down at the dead man beside him. “I don’t understand. Who is he?”

“You know Marie-Thérèse wants you dead?”

She met his gaze and said quietly, “I know.”

He nodded to the Frenchman’s motionless, blood-streaked face. “Since he’s been operating in England, Monsieur Cartier here has been careful to make his killings look more natural—or at least easily explainable. But he’s been finding it difficult to catch you alone, so I suppose he decided that, under the circumstances, one more body with a bullet in it wouldn’t make a great deal of a difference.” Sebastian paused, then said more gently, “They will send someone else, you know.”

“Yes.”

“You could leave. Emigrate to New Orleans, perhaps. They speak French there.”

“No. My work is here.” She hesitated a moment. Then she knelt in the rubble beside him, crossed herself, and bowed her head to pray for the man who had died trying to kill her.

And for the soul of the man who had killed him.