When Gods Die

“The dagger?” He looked around again, his eyes opening wide as if in surprise. “Of course. It’s part of the collection of Stuart memorabilia that was in the possession of Henry Stuart when he died. I believe it belonged to his grandfather, James the Second.”

The bell on the shop’s door jangled as two soldiers came in, bringing with them the smell of morning air and sun-warmed brick and a whiff of fresh manure. Sebastian kept his gaze on the Scotsman’s freckled face. “What happened to it?”

“You mean after Henry’s death? Don’t you know? He willed the entire collection to the Prince of Wales—the Regent.”

Chapter 38

Kat spent a restless night. Her dreams were troubled by marching rows of dead soldiers and a bloodstained guillotine that creaked ominously in the wind.

Rising early, she went to stand at the window overlooking the street below. In the clear dawn light she could see the milkmaids making their rounds, the buckets of fresh milk dangling from the yokes across their shoulders.

She had no regrets for the things she had done. The tyranny the French soldiers had brought to the continent of Europe was nothing compared to the horrors Ireland had suffered under the English for hundreds of years now. She would still do whatever she could to hasten the day of Ireland’s liberation. But she could not, in all honesty, accept Sebastian’s love and continue to give aid to the enemy he had risked his life to fight.

She had been torn for a while, but by now she had decided to keep tomorrow’s rendezvous in the Chelsea Physic Gardens with Napoléon’s new spymaster. She intended to tell him the French could no longer rely upon her as a source of information. Whether they would allow her to withdraw her services so easily remained to be seen.

Too nervous to go back to sleep, she decided to get an early start in her search for the maker of Guinevere Anglessey’s death shroud. But in the end, the task was even easier then she expected. Setting out that morning shortly after breakfast, Kat found she had to visit only three fashionable modistes before hitting upon the establishment responsible for the creation of the green satin gown.

“Mais oui, I remember it quite well, thees one,” said Madame de Blois, proprietor of an expensive little shop on Bond Street. “Lady Addison Peebles ordered it from me just thees last season.”

Kat had to bite her lip to keep from saying, Are you certain? The young lady in question was a beautiful but excessively dim-witted heiress who had married Lord Addison Peebles, youngest son of the Duke of Farnham, some two years before. Lord Addison was every bit as vacuous as his bride, to the extent that some members of the ton had taken to calling the couple Lord and Lady Addled and Feeble. It was difficult to imagine either of them having anything to do with what had happened to Guinevere Anglessey.

“Lovely, is it not?” Madame de Blois was saying. “Although hardly the shade of green for a young woman with Lady Addison’s coloring, hmm? I tried to discourage, but she would hear none of it.” The modiste shook her head and made a little tsking sound. “For you, I think, we shall do something in sapphire, yes? And a more daring décolleté, of course.”

Kat gave the woman a wide smile. “Of course.”

SEBASTIAN HAD NEVER UNDERSTOOD the Prince Regent’s fascination with the Stuarts.

He was a prince who longed to be popular, who was genuinely troubled by the boos and hisses that greeted him everywhere. Yet despite mounting public fury over his never-ending debts and monstrous extravagance, he made no effort to reform his indulgent ways. While women and children starved in the streets, the Prince gave lavish banquets at which privileged guests had their choice of more than a hundred different hot dishes. England’s soldiers on the Continent shivered in their ragged uniforms, but the Regent continued to order breeches and waistcoats by the score in sizes so small he would never be able to wear them. The poor of England might be groaning under an ever-increasing, onerous weight of taxes, but that didn’t stop the Prince from petitioning Parliament to pay his gambling debts.

Some believed the Prince was driven by an evil genius, but Sebastian thought the truth was probably far less flattering. Prinny longed to be loved, but he wanted to be loved as he was, without the need to reform the odious ways that made him hated. Given a choice between popularity and continuing his hedonistic, self-obsessed lifestyle, George the hedonist beat out George the prince every time.

Yet with each passing year, his love affair with the Stuarts seemed only to grow. It was as if he both envied and identified with the Stuarts. Once so despised that they had lost the throne of England forever, the Stuarts had nevertheless managed to acquire a patina of romance. Figures of pathos and tragedy, they had become something Prinny himself would never be: the stuff of legends.