What Darkness Brings

Chapter 51



T

hat night, as Kat prepared to leave for the theater, a heavy fog rolled up from the river, swallowing the city in a thick white mist.

She was in the hall, easing the hood of her cloak up over her hair, when Yates appeared in the doorway from the library, a glass of brandy held in one hand. He’d been drinking steadily since his release from Newgate, although Kat couldn’t say she blamed him.

“I think perhaps it would be best if I were to ride with you in the carriage tonight,” he said.

“Good heavens, why?”

He met her gaze and held it. “You know why.”

She gave a soft laugh that sounded forced even to her own ears. “I’ve never heard of anyone holding up a carriage on the streets of London, if that’s what concerns you.”

“There’s always a first time.”

“If it comes to that, I’ve a footman and a coachman to protect me.”

He drained his glass and set it aside. “Humor me?”

She smiled, a genuine smile this time. “All right.”

They drove through streets shrouded in white and unusually light in traffic. Yates said, “Devlin tells me he intends to continue his pursuit of Eisler’s killer.”

“Does that surprise you?”

“In a way it does, yes. Eisler was a vile excuse for a human being. What does it matter who killed him? The world is well rid of him.”

“Perhaps. Yet more people are now dying.”

“An aging Parisian jewel thief and a half-mad ex-soldier?”

“Do you consider the world well rid of them too? I suspect there are many who would say the same of a Covent Garden actress—or an ex-pirate with a tendency to frequent the city’s most notorious molly houses.”

His lips quirked into a crooked smile. “I suppose you do have a point. Still—” He broke off, sitting forward suddenly.

They were rounding the long, sweeping curve from Oxford Street to Broad. The fog was thicker here nearer the river, the dark trees and squat bell tower of St. Giles looming ghostlike out of the mist.

“What is it?” she asked, just as a team of black horses erupted from a narrow lane to their left, eyes wild, hooves flashing, nostrils flaring wide in the cold night. In the horses’ wake, a heavy, old-fashioned traveling coach careened from side to side, its coachman driving straight toward Kat’s delicate town carriage.

“What the hell?” swore Yates as their own coachman shouted in alarm. Horses squealed, the carriage lurching sharply as their driver hauled his team hard to the right. Kat had a tilted vision of tumbled gray tombstones and the rusty spikes topping the churchyard wall.

The carriage shuddered to a standstill.

“Are you all right?” asked Yates.

“Yes. But—”

The coachman’s startled cry cut through the night, followed by an ugly thump.

She said in a low, urgent voice, “Yates,” just as a man dressed in footmen’s livery and a powdered wig jerked open the carriage door, a blunderbuss pistol in one hand.

“What the devil?” thundered Yates.

The man grabbed Kat’s wrist and hauled her forward. “If you’re smart, you’ll stay out of this,” he warned Yates in an unexpectedly cultured voice.

“This is madness,” said Kat, falling heavily against him as he dragged her through the doorway to the pavement. The air was cold and damp against her face, the churchyard’s earthy scent of decay thick in her nostrils. “We have nothing of value for you to steal!”

He pressed the cold steel of his pistol’s muzzle against her temple and gave her a tight smile. “There’s only one thing I need from you.”

Panic thundered her heart, caught her breath in her tight throat as she heard the soft snick of the pistol’s hammer being pulled back. She lunged wildly against the hand on her arm, but his grip tightened cruelly, holding her fast.

She saw Yates rear up in the open carriage doorway, a small pistol in one hand. The night filled with the roar of flames and the acrid stench of burnt powder, and the chest of the man holding her dissolved in a warm, wet spray of blood.

He went down, hard.

“Mason!” shouted a second assailant, who’d been holding a gun to the head of Kat’s own wide-eyed footman.

“Yates! Look out!” cried Kat as the second assailant turned, leveled his double-barreled pistol on Yates, and fired.

“Yates!” she screamed.

Yates tumbled face-first to the pavement.

Arm outstretched, the assailant calmly cocked his pistol’s second barrel and turned the muzzle toward Kat.

Kat froze.

“No! Leave her,” shouted the heavy coach’s tall, dark-caped driver. “That’s Russell Yates you’ve just killed, you fool. You know our orders. Grab Mason and let’s get out of here.”

“Yates?” Kat went to crouch beside him. She was only dimly aware of the dark coachman whipping his horses, the old coach pulling away.

“Oh, Yates,” she whispered, and gathered his bloody, broken body into her trembling arms.



An hour later, Kat was crossing the entry hall of her Cavendish Square house when a preemptory peal sounded at the front door.

She was expecting Paul Gibson, for she’d asked the surgeon to come examine her injured coachman. Instead, her butler opened the door to Charles, Lord Jarvis.

She froze, one hand on the newel post, her husband’s blood still soaking the bodice and skirt of her silk evening gown.

Jarvis carefully removed his mist-dampened hat, a faint smile touching his lips as he met her furious gaze. “I believe we need to talk. Don’t you agree?”