What Darkness Brings

Chapter 6



S

ebastian lived in a bow-fronted town house on Brook Street, near the corner of Davies. The house was elegant but small. Once, it had suited him just fine. But since his marriage six weeks before to Miss Hero Jarvis, he’d been thinking he ought perhaps to consider moving to something larger, grander. Only, when he’d mentioned it to Hero, she’d simply looked at him steadily in that way she had and said, “I like our house.”

He found her now seated sideways at the bench before her dressing table. She wore a very fetching emerald green walking dress trimmed with navy braid and had her head bowed as she worked at closing the fastenings of a smart pair of navy half boots. He paused for a moment, one shoulder propped against the doorframe, and watched her. Just for the pleasure of it.

She was a woman in her twenty-sixth year, generally described as more handsome than pretty and taller than most people thought a woman ought to be. She had inherited her aquiline profile, fierce intelligence, and a certain chilling ruthlessness from her powerful father, Charles, Lord Jarvis. But her Enlightenment-inspired beliefs—and her conviction that with affluence and privilege came an obligation to fight for the rights of society’s underdogs—were unique to her.

Sebastian hadn’t liked Hero much when they first met. Since he’d been holding a gun to her head at the time, he suspected the antipathy had been mutual. Respect had come gradually, even grudgingly; the intense physical attraction that accompanied it had surprised—and dismayed—them both.

Their marriage was as complicated as the reasons that had brought it about, and they were still working their way toward understanding and something else, something deep and powerful that both beckoned and scared the hell out of him. Passion came easily; trust and openness took time and effort and a leap of faith he wasn’t certain either of them was yet ready to make. There was still so much she didn’t know about him, or he about her. And it occurred to him now that he was about to jeopardize all that they had so far managed to build between them by what he was about to do.

Just as he knew he had no real choice.

She looked up, caught him watching her, and smiled.

“It’s a nasty habit you have,” she said, “sneaking around, spying on people.”

“I wasn’t sneaking. I made quite a bit of noise, actually.”

She let out a genteel huff. “We don’t all have the eyes and ears of a bird of prey.” Still smiling, she rose to her feet and came to rest her hands on his shoulders, her gaze on his face. Her smile faded, and it occurred to him that perhaps she knew him better than he thought she did, because she said, “Your friend is dead, isn’t he?”

“A keeper found the body this morning in Hyde Park.”

“Oh, Devlin; I’m so sorry.”

He bracketed her face with his palms and kissed her once, long and hard. Then he rested his forehead against hers and took a deep breath before letting her go. “More interviews today?” he asked lightly.

She nodded, turning away to tuck a small clothbound notebook into her reticule. “I’ve found another crossing sweep who’s agreed to talk to me.”

“I should think they’d all be eager to talk, given that you pay them handsomely for nothing more than the privilege of listening to them natter on about themselves.”

“You’d be surprised how many of these children are afraid to open up,” she said, hunting for something amidst the litter of hair clips and books on her dressing table. “And I don’t blame them. From what I’m hearing, their distrust of authority figures is more than justified.”

Sebastian found himself smiling. After working on everything from Catholic emancipation and the slave trade to labor laws and the economic causes of the current proliferation in the number of prostitutes in London, Hero was now writing an article on the poor children who eked out a meager living by sweeping London’s street crossings. She was so taken with the project that she was thinking about doing a collection of such articles to be gathered into a book entitled London’s Working Poor.

“Ah, here it is,” she said, coming up with a pencil. She straightened, caught him smiling, and said, “You’re laughing at me.”

“Yes. But that doesn’t mean I don’t admire what you do.”

She poked the pencil into her reticule and reached for her gloves. “My father, needless to say, is scandalized. I’m not certain which concerns him more: the possibility that I might contract some dread disease from one of the wretches or the lowering suspicion that I’m turning into a maudlin lady bountiful.”

“Surely he knows you better than that.”

She gave a soft chuckle. “He should by now. I’m far too much his daughter to ever take to ladling out soup or teaching Sunday school.” She looked up from pulling on her gloves, and whatever she saw on his face stilled her amusement. She said, “There’s something more, isn’t there? Something besides Rhys Wilkinson’s death.”

He nodded. “Have you seen this morning’s papers?”

“Not yet. Why? What has happened?”

“Russell Yates has been arrested for the murder of an Aldgate diamond merchant.”

She kept her features carefully composed. She was very good at hiding what she was thinking. “And did he do it?”

“He says he didn’t. I believe him.”

“Can you prove it?”

“I don’t know. All I know is, if I don’t, he’ll hang.”

She reached for her hat and turned away, her attention all for her reflection in the mirror as she settled the velvet-trimmed confection on her head. Like most of London society, Hero knew only too well that the woman who was now Yates’s wife had once been Sebastian’s mistress. She knew, too, that something had happened between them the previous autumn, something that ended in Kat Boleyn’s marriage to Yates and sent Sebastian into a brandy-soaked downward spiral from which he had with difficulty only recently emerged. But that was all she knew, and he wasn’t sure he was ready to tell her the rest.

He said, “This is something I must do.”

He watched while she positioned her hat just so, then pivoted slowly to face him again. “Are you concerned that I might object? Pitch a fit and take to sulking in my room in a jealous pique?”

He gave a rueful laugh. “No. But—”

“You told me just now that you admire my work. Do you think I don’t admire what you do? Do you imagine I’m the kind of woman who would begrudge your efforts to save a man’s life simply because you share a past with that man’s wife?”

He shook his head. Reaching out, he cupped his hand beneath her chin, tipped his head to brush her lips with his. “You’re a wonder to me, Lady Devlin,” he said, his breath mingling with hers.

She smiled. But he saw the shadow in her fine gray eyes, and he knew that while she could never begrudge him what he was about to do, that didn’t mean the situation didn’t worry her.

Just as it worried him.