“It began at Carlton House sometime last spring. She and Anglessey were attending a state dinner, and the Regent pressed her to allow him to show her his conservatory.”
“Where he became overly familiar? Is that what you’re saying?”
Varden’s lip curled. “He put his hand down the front of her dress.”
Sebastian stared off across the rain-drenched churchyard. It wasn’t the first time the Regent had done such a thing, Sebastian knew. A spoiled prince, handsome when young and accustomed to a lifetime of flattery and sycophancy, the Regent frequently overestimated his appeal to women.
Yet he’d claimed, when asked, that he’d barely known the young Marchioness.
Sebastian brought his gaze back to the Chevalier’s pale, grief-stricken face. “What did she do?”
“She tried to pull away from him. He laughed. Said he enjoyed a spirited woman. So she took more drastic measures.”
“Such as?”
“She slapped his fat, self-satisfied face.”
“Was he in his cups?”
“No more than usual. You’d think that sort of reaction would have quenched his desires, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. He wouldn’t leave her alone. Kept soliciting her hand at balls, arranging to sit next to her at dinners. And then just last week he sent her a trinket. A small token of his affection, he called it. From Rundell and Bridge on Ludgate Hill.”
They were the Prince’s favorite goldsmiths and jewelers, Rundell and Bridge. It was grumbled in some quarters that he spent enough every year on jewelry to feed and clothe the entire British army. He was always buying trinkets, as he called them, to shower upon his favorites and lady friends: ivory snuffboxes and jeweled butterflies, amethyst and diamond bracelets…and rare, unusual necklaces.
Sebastian squinted up at the rain. Silhouetted against the dark gray sky, the leafy branches of the oaks and chestnuts overhead looked black. “What kind of trinket?”
“I didn’t see it. She sent it back to him—along with a note stating in no uncertain terms that his advances were unwelcome.”
“And Anglessey? Did he know any of this?”
A strange flush darkened the other man’s pale, gaunt cheeks. “It’s hardly the sort of thing a woman would tell her husband, now, is it?”
“Yet she told you,” said Sebastian, and watched the color drain slowly from the Chevalier’s face.
CHARLES, LORD JARVIS, maintained a fervent respect for the institution of the Church of England.
The Church, like the monarchy, was a valuable bastion of defense against the dangerous alliance of atheistical philosophy with political radicalism. The Bible taught the poorer orders that their lowly path had been allotted to them by the hand of God, and the Church was there to make quite certain they understood that. And so Jarvis took pains to be seen at church every week.
That Sunday, his head bowed in due respect for his Maker, Jarvis attended services at the Chapel Royal in the company of his aged mother, his half-mad wife, Annabelle, and his tiresome daughter, Hero, whom he believed to be in serious need of remembering what the Bible and St. Paul had to say about a number of things, particularly the role of women in society.
During the second reading, when the clergyman loudly proclaimed, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law,” Jarvis emphasized the point by quietly elbowing Hero in the side.
Her gaze fixed oh-so-properly on the pulpit, she leaned toward him to whisper maliciously, “Careful, Papa. You’re setting a bad example for the ignorant masses.”
She was always saying that sort of thing, as if the canker of social discontent spreading across the country were a subject for jest. Yet he knew she took what she referred to as “the dreadful situation of the nation’s poor” very seriously indeed. There were times when he almost suspected his daughter of harboring radical principles herself. But it was an idea too disconcerting to be entertained for long, and he quickly dismissed it.
After the service, they walked out of the palace into a gray day still dripping rain. A man stood across the street; a tall young man whose rough greatcoat and round hat did nothing to disguise his aristocratic bearing or the dangerous glitter in his strange yellow eyes.
Jarvis rested one hand on his daughter’s arm. “See your mother and grandmother home in the carriage,” he said, keeping his voice low.
He expected her to argue with him. She was always arguing with him. Instead, she followed his gaze across the street. For one oddly intense moment, Hero’s frank gray eyes met Devlin’s feral stare. Then she deliberately turned her back on him to shepherd her mindlessly babbling mother and frowning grandmother toward the carriage.
Stepping wide to avoid the filthy rushing gutter, Jarvis crossed the street to the waiting Viscount.
Chapter 24
Devlin leaned against the low iron railing that fronted the street, his hands in his pockets. “You made a mistake. Two, actually.”
Jarvis paused a prudent distance before him. “I rarely make mistakes.”
The younger man gazed down at the toes of his boots, a strange smile playing about his lips before his head came up again, his eyes narrowing against the rain. “The trinket Prinny sent to the Marchioness of Anglessey. What was it?”
At Jarvis’s continuing silence, the Viscount pushed away from the fence to take a significant step forward. “What was it, damn it? And don’t even think of pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“A brooch of rubies,” said Jarvis in a calm, unhurried tone, “pierced by a diamond arrow.”
The Viscount’s reaction was difficult to decipher, even for a man skilled in reading the thoughts and emotions of others. “An expensive trifle, surely,” said the Viscount, “for a woman His Highness claims he barely knew?”
It had begun to rain harder. Jarvis opened his umbrella and held it aloft. “There are times when His Highness has difficulty with the truth. Particularly when the repercussions from the truth might prove…unpleasant.”
“So what’s your excuse?”
Jarvis maintained a studied silence.
“That’s why you had the note destroyed, isn’t it? Because whoever wrote it referred to her previous rejections of his advances. Suggested in some way that she’d changed her mind.”
Again, Jarvis kept his own counsel.
With a violent oath, the Viscount took a hasty step away, only to swing back again. “He was making advances on her. Rude, unwelcome advances. And he wasn’t taking no for an answer.”
“Are you so certain they were unwelcome?”
Devlin brought up a warning hand to slash the air between them. “Don’t. That woman was poisoned, stabbed, and robbed of her life and the life of her unborn child. Don’t you even think of trying to take away her honor with your lies.”
“Poisoned? Really? How interesting.”
Devlin stared across the street to where the soot-darkened redbrick gatehouse of St. James’s Palace thrust up against the cloud-laden skies. And it came to Jarvis, watching him, that for Devlin, this investigation into the circumstances of Guinevere Anglessey’s death was more than an intellectual puzzle, more than just an escape from boredom. The Viscount actually cared about what had happened to that young woman. It was an unexpected element of emotion that made him both easier to manipulate and yet, at the same time, unpredictable and dangerous.
“Where was Prinny early Wednesday afternoon?” the Viscount asked suddenly.
“In Brighton, of course.” Jarvis let out a low, deliberate laugh. “Good God. You surely aren’t entertaining the notion that His Highness actually had something to do with this death, are you?”