Sebastian returned to Brook Street to find Hero seated in one of the cane chairs at the drawing room’s front bow window, a lighted candle on the table beside her, her head tipped to one side as she studied a sheet crowded with names and qualifications. The big, long-haired black cat who had adopted them some months before slept curled up on the hearth.
He paused in the doorway for a moment, just for the pleasure of looking at her. She was an unusually tall woman with large, clear gray eyes, an aquiline nose, and the kind of strong facial structure that was generally described as “handsome” rather than pretty. He had disliked her intensely the first time he met her. Now he wondered how he could ever live without her.
She looked up, caught him watching her, and smiled.
“What’s this?” he asked, going to peer over her shoulder.
“A list of nursery maids suggested by the agency.” She frowned and set the page aside. “I don’t like the idea of entrusting my child to some young, ignorant country girl who’s barely more than a child herself.”
He went to warm his hands at the fire. The cat glanced up at him through slitted eyes, then settled back to sleep. “So tell them you want someone older. And educated.”
“I intend to.”
He turned to face her. “I’m planning to drive out to Buckinghamshire in the morning. If I change teams twice on the way out and three times on the return journey, I should be back in London by midafternoon at the latest. But if you feel uncomfortable about me going out of town, I won’t.”
She looked at him in confusion. “Why would I-” Enlightenment dawned, and she gave a startled trill of laughter. “Good heavens, Devlin, I hope you don’t mean because of the babe?”
“I don’t want you to be-”
“Left alone? I have a house full of servants and the best accoucheur in London ready to rush to my side at a moment’s notice. I will not be alone. Apart from which, this babe is not coming anytime soon.”
“So certain?”
“I have it on the authority of Richard Croft himself. And if you insist on hovering about me until it does come, you’re liable to drive me mad.”
He gave a rueful smile. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to do that.”
She pushed to her feet, the swelling weight of the child making the movement awkward, and went to draw the drapes against the coming night. “Where in Buckinghamshire?”
“Hartwell House.”
She paused to look at him over one shoulder. “Good heavens; you think the Bourbons could somehow be involved in Damion Pelletan’s death?”
“They might be.”
He told her of his visit to the Gifford Arms Hotel, and the conversation Madame Bisette had overheard the night of Pelletan’s murder, and his own less-than-productive confrontation with Jarvis.
“Do you know anything about a peace delegation from Paris?” he asked, watching her closely.
“No. But I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Jarvis won’t tell you anything. Not now.”
She gave him a smile that curled the edges of her lips and brought a secretive gleam to the shadowy depths of her intense gray eyes. “I don’t intend to ask Jarvis.”
• • •
That evening, as he was preparing to make an early start the following morning, Sebastian sent for his valet.
Jules Calhoun was a slim, elegant gentleman’s gentleman in his early thirties, with straight flaxen hair and twinkling eyes. Affable and extraordinarily clever, he was a genius at repairing the ravages the pursuit of murderers could sometimes wreak on Sebastian’s wardrobe. But for all his skill with boot blacking and starch, Calhoun was no ordinary valet. Born in one of the worst flash houses in London, he was familiar with parts of the city-and segments of its population-that would cause most valets to shudder with horror.
“Ever hear of a man named Bullock?” Sebastian asked. “I’m told he’s a big, scar-faced tradesman with a shop somewhere in the vicinity of Golden Square.”
Calhoun shook his head. “I don’t believe so, my lord. I can look into him, if you wish.”
Sebastian nodded. “But cautiously. I understand he has a nasty disposition.”
Chapter 11
Saturday, 23 January
Sebastian left London before dawn, driving O’Malley’s team of fast creamy whites and with his own young groom, or tiger, Tom, clinging to the perch at the rear of the curricle. The boy had been with Sebastian for two years now, ever since he’d tried to pick Sebastian’s pocket in a low St. Giles tavern. Sebastian had been on the run at the time, charged with a murder he didn’t commit. The young street urchin had saved Sebastian’s life, although Tom always contended they were more than even.
They drove through misty flat meadows filled with frost-whitened grass, and sleepy villages with stone-walled, thatched-roof cottages and wind-ruffled millponds where ducks foraged amongst the freeze-nipped reeds that grew in the shallows. The sun rose in a muted pink haze above winter-bared stands of elm and birch, and still they pressed on, the team’s galloping hooves eating up the miles, their heaving sides dark with sweat by the time Tom blew up for the change.
“We ain’t never gonna make ’Artwell ’Ouse in three hours,” said Tom, critically eyeing the new team as it was put to.
Sebastian snapped shut his watch and smiled. “Yes, we will.”
They made it in just under two hours and fifty minutes.
An elegant small manor dating to the time of the Tudors, Hartwell House had been hired by the exiled Bourbons some four years before. Sebastian had heard that Sir George Lee, the owner, was not happy with the treatment his estate was receiving at the hands of the royals. As Sebastian drew up his curricle on the ragged gravel sweep before the manor’s small porch, he thought he could understand why.
Crude new windows had been punched through the venerable old stone walls, while tattered laundry hung out to dry on the roof flapped in the cold wind. What was once a grand sweep of turf had been torn up here and there and planted with vegetables; the bleat of goats and the cluck-clucking of chickens filled the air.
“Looks worse’n a bleedin’ back court in St. Giles,” said Tom, scrambling forward to take the reins.
“Not exactly Versailles, is it?”
Tom scrunched up his sharp-boned face in puzzlement. “Ver-what?”
“Versailles. It’s the grand palace that was home to the kings of France until the revolutionaries dragged the royal family into Paris in 1789.”
“Oh.” The tiger didn’t look impressed. But then, Tom had no use for foreigners in general and the French in particular.
Sebastian dropped lightly to the ground. “Do keep your ears open around the stables, will you?”
Tom broke into a gap-toothed grin. “Of course, gov’nor!”
Still smiling faintly to himself, Sebastian turned toward the manor’s small, somewhat shabby portico. Virtually anyone else driving out from London uninvited to see the daughter of the last crowned King of France would most likely have been curtly rebuffed. But not Sebastian St. Cyr, heir to the powerful Earl of Hendon, Chancellor of the Exchequer. The estrangement between the Earl and his heir might be well-known, but few understood its reasons, and no impoverished European royal was going to risk alienating the member of the cabinet responsible for all economic and financial matters.
As a result, Sebastian waited in the dingy vestibule for only a few minutes before a powdered footman in threadbare livery appeared to escort him back outside and around the far wing of the house to where Marie-Therese Charlotte, Daughter of France, waited to receive him at the entrance to a long topiary arcade that stretched toward a silver shimmer of water in the distance. She had been standing with one of her ladies, her gaze on the canal. But at his approach she turned and nodded her dismissal of the footman.
Sebastian had met her before, at various London balls and dinners. On those occasions she had always been every inch the King’s daughter, dressed in velvets and silks and dripping the diamonds and pearls that her mother, Marie Antoinette, had managed to smuggle out of France with friends in the early days of the Revolution. Today she wore a somewhat shabby gown of dark green wool, made high at the neck with only a modest touch of lace at the collar and cuffs; an unfashionable, heavy wool shawl draped her shoulders. But her carriage was eminently regal, her head held high as she moved to greet him.