With deliberate, provocative slowness, Sebastian let his gaze slide over the man before him, from his mottled, sweat-streaked face to his clumsily tied cravat and the egg stain on the garish waistcoat that pulled too snuggly across his protuberant belly. He watched the magistrate’s complexion darken and his jaw harden until the man was virtually shaking with fury. Then Sebastian nodded to the old butler and said, “Thank you for your time.”
He turned toward the door, quietly tucking the blue satin slipper out of sight. He’d already made up his mind to return to the house later that night under the cover of darkness, when Campbell and his wife were asleep in their attic rooms.
“You’re not to come back here,” Leigh-Jones shouted after him. “You come back here, and I swear to God, I’ll have you up before me on charges of trespass—viscount or no viscount. You hear me? You hear me?”
Sebastian kept walking.
Chapter 10
S
ebastian had first learned of the existence of another dark, lean young man with yellow eyes from a Chelsea doctor who’d lost his watch and pocketbook to such a man at the point of a gun one stormy night on Hounslow Heath. And then, just that August, Sebastian and the man had come face-to-face.
His name was Jamie Knox, and he’d once served as a rifleman with the 145th. A crack shot with an almost mythical reputation for accuracy over long distances and in the dark, he was discharged when his unit was reduced after the disastrous defeat of the English forces under Wellington at Corunna. What he’d done after that was a matter of dispute. Sebastian was inclined to believe the tales that said he’d taken to the high toby and become a highwayman, a legendary figure in black who preyed on the coaches of those foolish enough to venture unescorted across the wasteland of Hounslow Heath after dusk.
Aided by what was reputed to be an animal-like sense of hearing and a preternatural ability to see in the dark, Knox had quickly accumulated the resources to purchase a Bishopsgate public house known as the Black Devil. Although there were others who said Knox had in fact stolen the pub—and murdered its previous owner.
Sebastian had never discovered which version of the tale was true. But he had it on reliable authority that the French wine and brandy in Knox’s cellars found its way across the Channel in the holds of darkened ships that plied their dangerous trade on moonless nights. . . .
And that one of Knox’s associates in that shadowy world was a certain aristocratic ex-privateer named Russell Yates.
The Black Devil was a half-timbered relic from an earlier age, built against one of the few remaining stretches of London’s old Roman walls. Popular with Bishopsgate’s shopkeepers, clockmakers, and tailors, it was marked by a faded wooden sign depicting a black devil dancing against a background of flames. Like its exterior, the inside of the house had changed little over the centuries. The heavily beamed ceiling hung low; the flagged floor was uneven and covered with sawdust to catch spills; a heavy, smoke-blackened stone hearth took up a significant portion of one wall. When Sebastian pushed open the taproom door, he found the public room crowded with a typical noontime assortment of journeymen and apprentices from the surrounding streets.
A few of the nearest men glanced up, curious, then went back to their beer. Caught in the midst of drawing a tankard of ale, the young woman behind the counter froze as Sebastian walked toward her.
“Bleedin’ hell,” she said, tossing her head to shake back a heavy lock of dark hair that had fallen into her face. “Not you again.”
Sebastian gave her a smile that showed his teeth. “Where is he?”
Setting aside the tankard, she rested one hand on her hip and hardened her jaw. Her mouth was wide and full, her cheekbones high, her dark eyes almond shaped and exotically tilted. She was beautiful and voluptuous, and she knew it. “Think I’d tell ye?”
A low laugh came from behind him. “Pippa has a tendency to hold grudges, I’m afraid,” said Knox. “She somewhat resents your threat to see me hanged.”
“Only if I discover that you’re guilty,” said Sebastian, turning.
The tavern owner stood with one hand propped against the frame of a doorway that opened off the end of the taproom. He might have left the high toby behind, but he still dressed all in black, like the devil that danced before the flames of hell on the sign hanging outside his tavern. Black coat and waistcoat, black trousers and boots, black cravat. Only his shirt was white.
He was older than Sebastian by a few years, darker, and perhaps a shade taller. But he had the same leanly muscled frame, the same fine-boned face, the same feral yellow eyes. As far as Sebastian knew, the two men were not related; yet Knox looked enough like Sebastian to be his brother.
Or at least a half brother.
“I didn’t kill your damned Frenchman,” said Knox. The smile on the man’s face remained, but his eyes had hardened. Just six weeks before, Sebastian had accused Knox of killing a paroled French officer named Philippe Arceneaux. Knox denied it. But Sebastian was never completely convinced of the man’s innocence.