Sebastian drove his curricle to the Home Office, where he learned from a helpful clerk that Lord Sidmouth was in Downing Street and would surely be closeted with the Prime Minister for the rest of the day on a matter of supreme urgency that the clerk refused to particularize.
“Think ’e’s avoiding ye?” asked Tom when Sebastian took the reins again, then paused to stare thoughtfully toward the river.
“Perhaps. But perhaps not.”
The discovery that an undetermined number of royal relics—including the head of King Charles I—were missing from the chapel at Windsor Castle had added a bizarre new twist to the murder of Stanley Preston. It seemed probable that whoever stole the relics did so with the intent of selling them to Preston, either directly or—more likely—through some unknown middleman. Could that explain Preston’s presence at the bridge on such a cold, wet night? Was he there to take possession of the stolen relics?
The problem with that theory was that such items were typically delivered to their wealthy purchasers’ doorsteps, discreetly hidden inside straw-filled tea chests. Not handed over under cloak of darkness at the end of a deserted lane. Yet the presence of Charles I’s coffin strap at the murder scene suggested an undeniable link. Had the relics been dangled before Preston as clever bait to lure him to some out-of-the-way spot where he could be murdered? Why was the engraved strap left at the scene? Deliberately? Or by accident?
And where was the King’s purloined head?
Still pondering these questions and more, Sebastian turned his horses toward Knightsbridge and a ramshackle hostelry called the Shepherd’s Rest.
Chapter 18
C aptain Hugh Wyeth was playing solitaire at a table in the crowded taproom, a half-empty tankard of ale at his elbow, a deck of cards held in his left hand, his right arm resting in a sling. He looked up when Sebastian approached his table, his gaze assessing, guarded.
“You’re Devlin?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Wyeth set his deck of cards upside down amidst the ruins of his game. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Six years of war coupled with the pain of a severe injury and long recovery had etched lines in the captain’s once boyish face. But he was still, as Jane Austen had noted, devastatingly handsome in his regimentals, with black hair and blue eyes and lean, sun-darkened features. He gaze never left Sebastian’s. “I didn’t kill Stanley Preston.”
“I imagine it would be rather difficult to cut off a man’s head with your arm incapacitated,” said Sebastian, nodding to the sling.
“So it would—if I were right-handed. As it happens, I am not.”
“Ah.”
A group of laughing officers, some on crutches, others looking more hale, crowded into the taproom. Sebastian said, “Are you capable of walking?”
The captain rose to his feet. “Of course. It’s mainly my arm that’s still not working right. But I hope to be able to rejoin my regiment soon.”
“Where were you wounded?” Sebastian asked as they left the inn and cut across Knightsbridge toward the Life Guards barracks and the park beyond.
Wyeth stumbled as he stepped off the kerb, his lips tightening in a fleeting grimace as he regained his balance. “San Mu?oz, last fall.”
“You’re certain you’re up to walking?” asked Sebastian, watching him.
“My leg gets stiff if I sit for too long, that’s all.”
They cut between the officers’ stables and the riding school, the tall brick buildings casting cold, dark shadows across the ground.
Sebastian said, “I take it Miss Preston warned you to expect me?”
“She did, yes. She’s terrified I’m going to be blamed for her father’s death.”
“Because Preston objected to your friendship?”
A gleam of self-deprecating amusement showed in the captain’s pain-shadowed face. “Oh, I don’t think he’d have had too much difficulty with our friendship. It was the prospect of something more serious that he found intolerable.” He watched a troop of new recruits leading their horses from the stables to the riding school, his smile fading as the clatter of shod hooves over cobbles echoed between the crowded buildings. “Look—I understand now just how presumptuous it was of me all those years ago to ask someone as young as Anne was then to share my life; to expect her to follow the drum and face all the hardships and dangers that come with being an Army wife. But at the time . . .” He hesitated, then shrugged. “We were both so young, and I was so very proud of my new colors—proud and utterly blind to how foolish it would have been for a woman with her prospects to throw herself away on a poor vicar’s son from the fens of East Anglia.”
The words were right: contrite, respectful of conventions, resigned. And yet . . .