What Darkness Brings

Chapter 31



B

y the time Sebastian reached the parish of St. Giles, the darkness of the night was complete, the sickle moon and few dim stars that had been visible earlier at dusk hidden now by a haze of coal smoke and scattered clouds. The smell of cook fires and a pervasive dampness left from the day’s rain hung heavily in the air, underlain by the inevitable stench of effluvia and decay. As he paid off his hackney driver, a tousle-haired woman in a tawdry, low-cut red gown emerged from the shadows of a nearby doorway to smile archly. “Lookin’ fer some fun, gov’nor?”

Sebastian shook his head and turned to push his way through the raucous, drunken crowds of costermongers and day laborers, thieves and pickpockets, doxies and beggars, his gaze carefully scanning the sea of rough, dirty faces.

The East End of London was choked with men like Collot: raised in want and desperation, uneducated, angry, and long ago cut loose from the moral underpinnings that typically anchored those who looked askance at them. Most were English or Irish, but in their midst one also found many French, Danes, Spaniards, even Africans. Living precariously from day to day, subsisting largely on potatoes and bread and crammed as many as five or ten to a room, they wreaked their own kind of vengeance on a system that viewed them as a permanent “criminal class,” impervious to improvement and suitable only for containment. Those who didn’t die young or violently could generally look forward to being either hanged or transported to the nasty new penal colony at Botany Bay that had replaced the earlier hellholes in Georgia and Jamaica.

With each step he took, Sebastian allowed himself to sink deeper and deeper into a persona he had affected often during the war, when he’d served as an exploring officer in the hills of Iberia. It was Kat who’d first taught him, long ago, that there was more to carrying off an effective disguise than a dirtied face and old clothes; successful deception lay in recognizing and altering the subtle differences in movement and posture, mannerisms and attitude that distinguish us all. Gone were the upright carriage, the easy confidence and demeanor of the Earl’s son. Instead, he moved from one public house and gin shop to the next with the stooped shoulders, ducked head, and furtive sideways glances of a man who had never known command, who had been forced to claw and bluff his way through life, who could rarely be certain where his next meal would come from, and who always knew that the heavy hand of vengeful authority could fall upon him at any moment.

It was in a public house just off Great Earl Street that Sebastian finally spotted his quarry in earnest conversation with three cohorts huddled around a battered table. Ordering a pint of ale from a barmaid who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, Sebastian stood with his back to the counter, one knee bent so that the sole of his boot rested against the rough planking behind him. The close atmosphere smelled of spilled ale and tobacco and unwashed men. Narrowing his eyes against the smoke, he watched Collot nod to his cohorts and rise from the table to walk toward him.

Sebastian held himself very still.

But the Frenchman brushed past Sebastian without a flicker of either recognition or suspicion and pushed open the door. His companions remained at their table.

Setting aside his tankard, Sebastian followed Collot out into the dark coolness of the night.

He trailed the Frenchman down a crooked lane lit only by a rare torch flaring in a rusted sconce fastened high to the side of a crumbling wall, or by whatever dim light filtered through the thick, grimy panes of old glass in the windows of the occasional coffeehouse or gin shop. Quickening his pace, he caught up with Collot just as the Frenchman was passing a narrow alley between a pawnshop and a tallow-candle maker.

As if sensing the danger behind him, Collot half turned as Sebastian plowed into him.

“Mon Dieu!” he cried as the force of Sebastian’s momentum carried the two men deep into the fetid darkness of the alleyway.

Sebastian slammed the Frenchman face-first against a rough brick wall, one hand tightening around Collot’s right wrist to yank his arm behind his back and lever it up, effectively holding him pinned in place.

“Bête! Bâtard!” swore Collot, his gray-whiskered face twisted sideways, his hat askew, his one visible eye opened so wide Sebastian could clearly see the white rimming his dark, dilated iris as he struggled against Sebastian’s hold. “Put a hand on my purse, you whore’s son, and I’ll—”

“Shut up and listen to me very carefully,” hissed Sebastian, every affectation gone from his manner.

Collot stilled. “You?”

Sebastian drew his lips back into a smile. “Yes, me.”

“What is this? What do you want?”

“Two rules,” said Sebastian softly. “Rule number one: Don’t even think about lying to me again. Lies have a tendency to make me cranky, and I’m already not in the best of moods at the moment.”

“But I did not lie—”

“Rule number two,” said Sebastian, increasing the pressure on the Frenchman’s arm in a way that made him grimace. “Don’t waste my time. There’s an innocent man in Newgate who’s liable to hang for a murder he did not commit. Which means that when you waste my time, you’re helping to kill him.”

“Are you so certain, monsieur, that he is indeed innocent of what he is accused? Perhaps you—”

“You’re forgetting rule number two,” said Sebastian evenly.

Collot fell silent.

Sebastian said, “I learned something interesting today. It seems that, far from coming from a family of Parisian lapidaries, you are actually descended from a long line of Parisian thieves.”

Collot huffed a nervous laugh. “Jewel thieves, jewelers—is there such a difference?”

Sebastian was not amused. “Tell me about the theft of the French Crown Jewels from the Garde-Meuble in Paris.”

“But I never—”

Sebastian tightened his grip. “Now you’re forgetting both rule number one and rule number two. You told me you sold jewels to Daniel Eisler in Amsterdam in 1792. What I want to know is, was one of them the French Blue?”

Collot gave a snort of derision. “You think they would allow us to keep something as valuable as the Emblem of the Golden Fleece?”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“Danton.” Collot spit the word out as if it were a bite of tainted old mutton.

The name caught Sebastian by surprise. A coarse, physically ugly mountain of a man, Georges Danton had initially fled the Revolution, only to return and rise to prominence as one of the architects of the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Reign of Terror. “Danton? Not the Minister of the Interior, Roland?”

“They were both in on it—the two of them, Danton and Roland, working together.”

Sebastian said, “It was Danton who eventually sent Roland to the guillotine.”

“Eventually, yes. But in September of 1792, Danton and Roland were allies. Danton and Robespierre were also allies at one time; remember? Only, that didn’t save Danton’s head when Robespierre eventually decided to move against him, now, did it?”

Sebastian shifted his grip to swing Collot around to face him. In the flickering light thrown by a distant torch, the Frenchman looked pale and slack-jawed, his wayward eye more noticeable than ever. “Why should I believe you?”

Collot turned his head and spat. “Why should I care whether you believe me or not? I am telling you, Danton and Roland wanted to sell the Crown Jewels because the government needed the money. Only, the other members of the government would not agree. So Danton arranged to have the jewels ‘stolen’ instead.”

“And the French Blue? What happened to it?”

A distant burst of laughter jerked Collot’s attention, for a moment, to the lane at the end of the alley. Then he brought his gaze back to Sebastian and smiled.

“You don’t know anything, do you? That was September of 1792, when the combined armies of Austria and Prussia were camped at Valmy, just a hundred miles from Paris. Together, they outnumbered the French troops facing them nearly two to one. If they had advanced on the city then—in the middle of September—they could have taken Paris. The Revolution would have been over. Finished. That’s what Danton was afraid of. He knew what his life would be worth if Louis were restored to the throne.”

“What are you suggesting? That Danton used the French Crown Jewels to bribe the Prussian and Austrian armies not to attack Paris?”

Collot gave a harsh, ringing laugh. “Not the Prussians and the Austrians; their commander.”

Sebastian’s eyes widened, for Collot’s words opened up an entirely new angle on Eisler’s murder. He took a step back and released Collot so suddenly the Frenchman sagged and almost fell.

For the man commanding the Prussian and Austrian armies at Valmy was none other than Carl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, husband to George III’s sister, the English Princess Augusta, and father to Princess Caroline. . . .

The estranged wife of George, the Prince Regent.