“Did he ever come back to England?”
Henrietta frowned. “Only once, if I remember correctly. I believe he brought the child and his nurse back to Sir Maxwell, after Beau Knightly’s death.” She fixed him with a hard glare. “And now, not another word do you get out of me until you tell me what this is all about.”
But Sebastian simply gave her a resounding kiss on one powdered and rouged cheek and said, “Thank you, Aunt. Enjoy your visit with Lady Jersey.”
Chapter 54
The bell towers of the city were striking four when Sebastian watched Sir Galen Knightly tuck a silver-headed walking stick up under one arm and pause to purchase a paper from one of the newsboys on St. James’s Street. A dark, angry storm was sweeping in on the city, the air heavy with the scent of coming rain.
“Walk with me a ways, if you will, Sir Galen?” said Sebastian, stepping forward as the Baronet turned toward the entrance to White’s.
The laugh lines beside the Baronet’s eyes creased as he seemed almost to wince at the suggestion he depart from his comfortable daily routine. “Well. . I was just on my way to the reading room,” he said, his gaze drifting longingly toward his club’s stately facade.
“I know; I’m sorry. But I’d like your opinion on a tale I’ve just been told, and to be frank, I’d rather not repeat it where we might be overheard.”
Knightly hesitated, then shrugged. “As you wish.”
They walked down the hill toward the high, soot-stained brick walls of St. James’s Palace and the Mall beyond it. Lightning flickered across the roiling underbelly of the clouds, and the air filled with dark, swirling flocks of birds coming in to roost.
Sebastian said, “I had an interesting conversation this afternoon with the owner of a coffee shop frequented by Dr. Douglas Sterling. He tells me Sterling spent all of last year in Jamaica and returned only a few weeks ago.”
“Oh?” said Knightly. “I had no notion it was so recently.”
Sebastian studied the older man’s hard-boned profile. “I think I know why both he and Stanley Preston were killed.”
Knightly glanced sideways at him. “Do you? Why is that?”
“It all goes back to a deception carried out some forty years ago.”
“Forty years?” Knightly gave a brittle, forced laugh. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m afraid I am. You see, forty-odd years ago, a certain Hertfordshire baronet shipped his young, excessively profligate heir off to a maternal uncle in Jamaica. The idea was to remove the heir from the influences of his boon companions, who by all accounts were a rather unsavory lot. Only, things didn’t go quite according to plan.”
“They rarely do,” observed Knightly, swinging his walking stick back and forth.
“True,” said Sebastian. “It seems that shortly after his arrival in Jamaica, our young heir impregnated and was forced to marry the daughter of a prominent local landowner. Unfortunately, the young man barely lived long enough to see his son take his first steps before succumbing with his bride to a yellow fever epidemic.”
“Yes, I’m afraid yellow jack has long been a terrible scourge in the warmer American colonies. But. . is there a point to this tale?”
“There is. You see, the father’s death meant the orphaned babe was now the Baronet’s new heir. The grandfather wanted the child raised in England, and the uncle finally agreed to bring him.”
Knightly kept his gaze on the wind-tossed trees in the park beyond the palace, his jaw set hard, and said nothing.
“The child had lost his wet nurse along with his parents,” said Sebastian, weaving together what he’d learned from Juba with what he’d been told by the Duchess of Claiborne, “and was being nursed by one of the uncle’s own slaves-a pale-skinned quadroon named Cally whose babe had died in the same epidemic. Cally was by all accounts a beautiful woman, so beautiful the uncle was rumored to have made her his mistress. When the uncle and the child set sail for England, Cally came with them.”
Knightly pursed his lips in a way that sucked in his cheeks, his gaze fixed relentlessly straight ahead.
“Now, here’s where it gets interesting,” said Sebastian. “Before he died, Douglas Sterling told Stanley Preston that he believed the real heir to the baronetcy had actually died in the epidemic along with his mother and father. That the child brought to England was in fact the child of the slave woman, Cally, and the uncle-”
“It’s a lie!” Nostrils flaring with the agitation of his breathing and both fists tightening on the handle of his walking stick, Knightly drew up abruptly and swung to face Sebastian. “You hear me? It’s all a lie.”
Thunder rumbled long and ominously close as Sebastian studied the older man’s rigid, angry face. “It may well be. But Dr. Douglas Sterling was a physician, which meant he was in a position to know if something irregular had occurred. I can’t explain why he kept silent all these years-perhaps he only suspected a switch had been made and was unable to prove it. But when he arrived back in London after a lengthy visit to his daughter to find Stanley Preston anxious to marry his daughter to that very child-long since grown to manhood and now in possession of a baronetcy to which he might actually have no real claim-I think Sterling decided to share his suspicions with Preston. Preston, of course, reacted to the tale with all the horror to be expected of a man obsessed with wealth and birth-not to mention a biblically inspired conviction in the superiority of the European race. It was you, after all, who told me of Preston’s aversion to miscegenation. Remember?”
Knightly fingered the catch on his walking stick-a walking stick that in all likelihood concealed a long, thin sword.
Watching him carefully, Sebastian said, “That morning, shortly after the doctor left, Preston called a hackney and went to Fish Street Hill. That’s where the old woman who’d once served as the child’s nurse now lives, you see; in Bucket Lane. When the child’s uncle returned to Jamaica, he left Cally behind to care for the boy. Only, when the lad was just three years old, Sir Maxwell dismissed her.” Sebastian paused. “If the child truly was hers, the separation must have caused her unimaginable agony. Although perhaps she consoled herself with the thought her son was growing up the heir to a baronet.”
“It’s not true,” said Knightly, his features dark and twisted with rage. “You hear me? None of it is true.”
“I hope not,” said Sebastian. “Because if it is true, then when you killed the old woman, Cally, you killed your own mother.”
The twin rows of Pall Mall’s lampposts lent a golden cast to the strengthening rain. Knightly stared straight ahead, his jaw clenched tight.
Sebastian said, “She denied it, you know. When Preston came to see her that day, Cally swore you were Beau Knightly’s son. That it was her own child who’d died in the yellow fever epidemic. And after Preston left, when the daughter she’d had by a London costermonger questioned her, she still denied it. So perhaps it is nothing more than an old doctor’s muddled suspicions. But three people are still dead because of it-four if you count the virger, Toop, who simply had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The rain was falling harder now, large drops that pinged on the iron handrail beside them and ran down the Baronet’s hard, sun-darkened cheeks. “You’re mad. Do you hear me? Utterly mad.”
Sebastian shook his head. “When he left Bucket Lane, Stanley Preston went to confront you, didn’t he? I’ve no doubt you denied it all to him, just as you’re denying it to me now. Why didn’t you kill him then, I wonder? Did the conversation take place somewhere too public? Is that why you decided to wait and kill him later that night when he went to meet Rowan Toop at Bloody Bridge? You did know of that meeting, didn’t you?”