Bondurant pursed his large mouth into a terse expression. “What has any of this to do with me?”
“You know of no one who would want to kill Pelletan?”
“I believe I already answered that question.” He tightened his scarf around his neck. “Now you must excuse me. You have interrupted my constitutional.”
And he strode off, arms swinging, head down, as if battling a strong wind or reading a book that was no longer there.
• • •
Sebastian’s next stop was the Sultan’s Rest, a coffeehouse on Dartmouth Street popular with the military men of the area.
He found the comfortable, oak-paneled room thick with tobacco smoke and filled with red-coated officers all talking and laughing at once.
The French colonel, Foucher, sat by himself in one corner, inconspicuous in his dark coat and modest cravat. His head was bent over a newspaper opened on the table before him; a cup of coffee rested at his elbow. But Sebastian knew by a certain subtle alertness about his person that the Frenchman’s attention was focused more on the conversations swirling around him than on the page before him.
Working his way across the crowded room, Sebastian pulled out the chair opposite the colonel. “Mind if I have a seat?”
The colonel looked up, his hazel eyes blinking several times. “Would it stop you if I did?” he asked, leaning back in his own chair as Sebastian sat down.
The Frenchman was tall and well built, although illness and injury had left him thin and his face sallow. Sebastian could see scattered strands of white in his sandy hair and thick mustache; lines dug deep by weather and endured pain fanned the skin beside his eyes.
Sebastian cast a significant glance around the crowded room. “Popular place.”
“It is, is it not?”
“I assume that’s why you come here?”
A slow gleam of amusement warmed the other man’s gaze. “I find I enjoy the company of military men, whatever their uniform.”
“I hear you were in Russia.”
“Yes.”
“There aren’t many who staggered out of that fiasco alive. With the exception of Napoleon himself, of course.”
“No.”
Sebastian rested his forearms on the tabletop and leaned into them. “Let’s get over rough ground as quickly as possible, shall we? I know why Vaundreuil is here. What I don’t know is why someone would stab Damion Pelletan in the back and cut out his heart. The most obvious reason would be to disrupt your mission. The mutilation of the corpse seems rather macabre, but it could be a subtle warning directed at Monsieur Vaundreuil, who I understand suffers from a heart condition.”
The colonel took a slow sip of his coffee and said nothing.
“Then again,” said Sebastian, “Pelletan could have been killed because he had in some way become a threat to the success of your mission.”
“Is that why you are here? Because you consider me a reasonable suspect?”
“You don’t think you should be?”
Foucher eased one thumb and forefinger down over his flaring mustache. “If he had simply been killed, I could see that, yes. But the very flamboyance of his murder tends to work against such an argument, does it not?”
“It does. Unless the killer were fueled by anger or the kind of bloodlust one sometimes sees on the battlefield.” Sebastian let his gaze drift around the noisy room. “We’ve both known men who enjoy mutilating the bodies of their fallen enemies.”
Again the colonel sipped his coffee and remained silent.
Sebastian said, “There is of course a third possibility: that Pelletan was killed for personal reasons. It’s unlikely, given that he was only in London for three weeks. But it is still an option.”
The French colonel reached for his cup again with a care that suggested his lingering injury might be to his right arm or shoulder. “You know about the woman, I assume?”
Sebastian watched the other man’s face, but Foucher was very good at giving nothing away. “What woman?”
“The wife of some duke-or perhaps it is the son of a duke.”
“You mean Lord Peter Radcliff?”
“Yes, that is it; his wife is very beautiful. So you do know her?”
“Yes.”
The Frenchman drained his coffee and set it aside. “The husbands of beautiful women are frequently subject to passionate fits of jealousy; jealousy and possessiveness. If you seek a personal motive, that might be a good place to start, yes? Particularly given the removal of Pelletan’s heart.”
“Did you know that Pelletan was killed on the twentieth anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI?”
“No, I did not. You believe that to be significant?”
“Rather a coincidence if it is not, wouldn’t you agree?”
The colonel wiped his mustache again and rose to his feet. “Life is full of coincidences.”
He started to turn.
Sebastian stopped him by saying, “Why do you think Ambrose LaChapelle attended Pelletan’s funeral mass?”
“Perhaps you should ask him,” said the colonel.
Then he pushed his way through the laughing, jostling crowd, a tall, erect man with the bearing of a military officer surrounded by his nation’s enemies.
Chapter 20
By the time Sebastian reached the Half Moon Street town house of Lord and Lady Peter Radcliff, thick white clouds were pressing down on the city, and he could smell a hint of snow in the frosty air.
He didn’t expect to find Radcliff at home, and in that he was not disappointed. Lady Peter, also, was out. But a friendly conversation with a young kitchen maid scrubbing the area steps, her hands red with cold, elicited the information that the mistress had taken her small brother and a friend to Green Park. Sebastian thanked the girl and turned his steps toward the park.
He knew something of Lady Peter’s story. She’d been born Julia Durant, in the dying days of the Ancien Regime. Her father, the younger son of a minor Rhone Valley nobleman, had trained as an artillery officer at the prestigious Ecole Militaire in Paris. When the people of Paris rose up and overthrew the Bourbons, Georges Durant did not flee France. Rather than join the forces of the counterrevolutionaries, he remained loyal to the land of his birth, eventually becoming a trusted general, first under the National Convention, then under the Directory.
But General Durant never had much use for a certain cocky young Corsican named Napoleon Bonaparte. When Napoleon declared himself emperor in 1804, Georges Durant tried to stop him-and only narrowly escaped with his life.
Fortunately, he’d had the forethought to send his wife and children out of the country first. And before he died, the old French general managed to marry his beautiful daughter, Julia, to the younger son of an English duke.
When Sebastian walked up to her, Lady Peter was seated on an iron bench near the Lodge. She wore a thick dusky pink pelisse and a close bonnet trimmed with a delicate bunch of velvet and silk flowers and was smiling faintly as she watched her orphaned eight-year-old brother toss a ball to his friend. Then she saw Sebastian, and her smile faded.
“No, don’t run away,” he said as she surged to her feet, eyes wide, one hand clenching in the fine velvet cloth of her pelisse. “I take it you know why I wish to speak with you?”
She was nearly a decade younger than her husband, in her mid-twenties now, with luminous green eyes and rich brown hair that curled softly around a heart-shaped face. Her nose was small and delicately molded, her lips full, her bone structure as flawless as one of Fra Filippo Lippi’s madonnas. But her eyes were red rimmed and swollen, and Sebastian had no doubt that she’d been crying. For Damion Pelletan? he wondered. Or for some other reason entirely?
He watched as a succession of conflicting emotions flitted across her lovely face, a lifetime of carefully inculcated good manners at war with an instinctive urge to snatch up her little brother and run.