When Gods Die

“Exactly.” Sebastian hesitated, then added, “Except that the dagger isn’t what killed her. According to Gibson, she was probably dead several hours before she was stabbed.”

“Good God. What are you suggesting?”

Sebastian shook his head. “We don’t know how she died, sir. That’s why Gibson wants your permission to do a postmortem. Without one, it’s going to be difficult to ever understand what happened to your wife.”

There was a moment of silence, filled with the click-click of the Marquis’s secateurs and the distant cry of the gulls. Then he said, “Very well. Your Dr. Gibson has my permission.” He cast Sebastian a fierce glance over one shoulder. “But I want to be informed of everything. Do you hear me? No holding back out of consideration for my age or my health or any of that nonsense.”

“No holding back.”

Anglessey pressed his lips together, his nostrils flaring as he sucked in a quick, deep breath. “I know what people think of my marriage to Guinevere. An old man like me, taking to wife a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. They act like it was something disgraceful, something sordid. As if the forty-five-year difference in our ages made it somehow impossible for me to love her.”

He paused, his hands stilling as he stared off toward the end of the garden, his voice becoming hushed. “But I did love her, you know. Not because she was beautiful—although God knows she was. But she was so much more than that. She was…she was like a breath of fresh air that came into my life. So full of energy and passion. So bright, so determined to grasp life with both hands and make of it what she wanted—” He broke off and had to suck in a quick gasp of air before saying more quietly, “I can’t believe she’s dead.”

Sebastian waited a moment, then asked again, quietly, “Who do you think killed her, sir?”

Anglessey went to sink down on the weathered wooden bench sheltered by a nearby arbor, his hands in his lap. “Guinevere was my third wife,” he said, his voice once again firm, under control. “The first died within hours of presenting me with a stillborn son. The second was barren.”

Sebastian nodded. There was no need for the Marquis to explain further. He and Sebastian belonged to the same world, a world in which everyone understood only too clearly the need for a man in their position to produce a legitimate heir. Even at twenty-eight, Sebastian had already felt that pressure brought to bear upon himself, both by his father and by the weight of his own awareness of what he owed his house, his name.

“Ever since the death of my brother twenty years ago,” Anglessey was saying, “my heir has been my nephew. Bevan.”

The implications were inescapable. Sebastian studied the old man’s closed, angry face. “You think him capable of murder?”

“I think Bevan Ellsworth could kill someone who stood between him and what he considered his, yes. And as far as Bevan is concerned, my estates are essentially his. He took my marriage to Guinevere as a personal affront. He actually threatened to try to have the marriage set aside—as if he could.”

“Yet it’s been several years since your marriage. Why kill Lady Anglessey now?”

Anglessey let out a pained sigh. “Bevan’s expenses have always exceeded his income. Of course, as far as Bevan is concerned, the fault lies entirely with the inadequacy of his income rather than with the extravagance of his habits. He’s a very natty dresser, my nephew. He’s also sadly addicted to games of chance. As long as he was my heir, his creditors were willing to give him pretty much a free rein. I suspect things must have become rather uncomfortable when it became known that my wife was with child.”

“Yet the child might have been a girl,” Sebastian felt compelled to note, “in which case Bevan Ellsworth’s position as your heir would have remained secure.”

“The child might have been a girl,” Anglessey agreed. “But, frankly, I don’t think Bevan could afford to take that chance.”

Sebastian stood with the sun behind him, his own features thrown deliberately into shadow as he studied the older man’s face, set now in quiet thoughtfulness. The new lines scoured there by recent grief were easy to read, as was the vacant glaze of pain in the Marquis’s pale gray eyes and the heavy burden of sorrow that weighed down his slim, aged shoulders.

There was anger there, too, in the hard set of the jaw and the tight line of the thin lips. Rage at the sudden, unexpected loss of one so loved, at the selfish greed of the nephew he believed had stolen from him one held so dear. And yet…and yet Sebastian couldn’t shake the conviction that something else was going on here, too; something he was missing.

“When was the last time you saw your wife alive?” he asked suddenly.

Anglessey looked up, his eyes squinting as he stared into the sun. “Nearly ten days ago now.”

Sebastian drew a quick, sharp breath. “I don’t understand.”