When Gods Die

The abigail shook her head. “But she was so upset when his lordship first suggested it, I couldn’t help but overhear things.”

“Do you know what happened to change her mind?”

A faint tinge of color touched the abigail’s pale cheeks. “There was this young gentleman come to town. A gentleman she’d known before, from when she was a girl in Wales.”

“What was his name?” Sebastian asked again, knowing already what the answer would be.

Tess Bishop’s hands shook so badly her teacup rattled against the saucer and she set it aside. “It couldn’t have been him what killed her,” she said, hunching forward, her hands clenched together, her head bowed. “It couldn’t.”

Sebastian looked down at her bowed head, at the bones of her neck showing prominently against the pale flesh. “When her ladyship didn’t come home that Wednesday night, did you think she might have run away with this man?”

“No! Of course not.” The abigail’s head came up, her gray eyes flashing with indignation. “Her ladyship would never have done such a thing to the Marquis.”

But then Sebastian saw her eyes slide away, and he knew that at some point in those long, anxious hours as the abigail waited for a mistress who would never return, the thought had occurred to her, however briefly.

“You don’t understand,” she said, leaning forward. “No one understands. They look at a beautiful young woman married to an old man and they see a marriage of convenience.” She pushed her thin, colorless hair off her forehead in a distracted gesture. “Oh, it began that way, to be sure. But they were well suited to one another—truly they were. They could spend hours together, just talking and laughing. You don’t see many couples like that amongst the nobs.”

She hadn’t used the word love, but it hung there unacknowledged in the air between them.

“Yet even after she conceived the child, she continued to see her young gentleman,” said Sebastian softly.

Tess Bishop bit her lip and looked away.

“Is it possible she tried to break off with the young man?” Sebastian suggested. It would hardly be the first time a passionate, rejected young lover had killed the object of his affection.

The abigail shook her head. “No. But they did quarrel.”

“When was this?”

“The Saturday before she died.”

“Do you know what the quarrel was about?”

“No. But it was…it was as if she’d found out something about him. Something that…” She hesitated, searching for the right word.

“Something that disappointed her?”

Tess Bishop shook her head. “It was worse than that. She and the Marquis, they were good friends. But that young gentleman, he was like a god to her.”

Sebastian turned to stare out the window. Only, he wasn’t seeing the sun-warmed bricks of the houses across the street, or the baker’s mule trotting past with a slow clip-clop below. He was remembering a time when he had loved like that. When he had known the bitter, soul-destroying shock of disillusionment.

For Sebastian, the disillusionment had been false, a carefully crafted charade played by a woman who loved him enough to want to drive him away from her for his own good—although he hadn’t known that at the time.

He was like a god to her. What happens when your god dies? Sebastian wondered. When someone is your sun and moon and stars, and then you discover something, something that reveals a hitherto unknown weakness so fundamental, so shattering that it destroys not only your trust in the other person, but your respect, too.

Some people never recover from that kind of disillusionment. Sebastian had taken up a commission and gone off to war. What would Guinevere Anglessey have done?

Sebastian glanced over to where Tess Bishop sat watching him with a pale, almost frightened face. “His name,” Sebastian asked again, pressing her. He needed to have her say it, needed to have every suspicion confirmed. “What was his name?”

For a moment he thought she meant to keep the man’s identity to herself in some final act of loyalty to the mistress who had once loved him. Then she hung her head and said in a torn whisper, “Varden. It was the Chevalier de Varden.”

Chapter 43

The screams were starting to get to him. The screams and the never-ending drip, drip, drip of water.

Tom drew his knees up against his chest and hugged them close, his teeth gritted against the shivers that ripped through his body. Outside, the sun might shine warm and golden from a clear June sky, but here within the dank, filth-encrusted walls of Newgate, all was darkness and damp and the bone-chilling cold of perpetual winter.

“You there. Boy.”

The seductive whisper was close. Tom turned his face away and pretended not to hear.

“The offer’s still open. Tonight. Five shillings.”

The man had never exactly said what he wanted Tom to do for those five shillings, but Tom was no flat. He knew. His empty stomach heaved.