When Gods Die

And so they had stayed, until the morning in mid-July when Sebastian’s brother Cecil awoke flushed and feverish. By nightfall he had become delirious. The best doctors were called in all the way from London. They shook their heads and prescribed bloodletting and calomel, but Cecil’s fever continued to climb. Two days later he was dead, and Sebastian found himself the new Viscount Devlin, his father’s only surviving son and heir.

There followed tense weeks filled with loud voices and angry accusations. But whenever he was around Sebastian, Hendon kept a strange, tight silence. It was as if he couldn’t comprehend why Fate had taken his first- and second-born sons and left him only the youngest, the one least like their father.

For Sebastian, those days remained a painful blur. But he could remember quite clearly the sunny morning Sophie Hendon sailed away on what was supposed to have been a simple day’s outing with friends.

And never came back.

THE PAIN OF THAT SUMMER fueled Sebastian’s anger now as he took the steps to his father’s house on Grosvenor Square.

He found Hendon in the entrance hall, headed for the stairs. The Earl was dressed in breeches and top boots, his crop in one hand, and it was obvious he’d only just come in from his morning ride. “What is it?” he asked, his gaze on Sebastian’s face.

Sebastian crossed the hall to throw open the door to the library. “This is a conversation we need to have in private.”

Hendon hesitated, then came away from the stairs. “Very well.” He walked into the room and tossed his crop on the desk as Sebastian closed the door. “Now, what is it?”

“When were you planning to tell me the truth about my mother?”

Hendon swung around, his expression guarded and wary. “Which truth is that?”

“Bloody hell.” Sebastian let out his breath in a sharp, humorless laugh. “Are there so many lies? I mean the truth about what happened seventeen years ago in Brighton. Or should I say, what didn’t happen. Is she still alive today? Or do you even know?”

Hendon held himself very still, as if carefully considering his answer. “Who told you?”

“Does it matter? You should have told me yourself—long before I asked you about the necklace.”

Hendon blew out a long, slow breath. “I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

The Earl drew his pipe from a drawer, his movements slow and deliberate as he filled the bowl with tobacco and tamped it down with his thumb. “She’s still alive,” he said after a moment. “Or at least she was as of last August. Every year she delivers to my banker a letter briefly detailing the major political and military events of the previous twelve months. Once we have proof she still lives, I send her annual stipend.”

Sebastian was aware of a fine trembling going on inside him. He couldn’t have said if the discovery Sophie still lived, after seventeen years of his thinking her dead, brought him relief or only fueled his rage. “You pay her? Why? To stay away?”

“It’s not such an unusual arrangement. Couples who can no longer live together frequently agree to live apart. Look at the Duke and Duchess of York.”

“The Duchess of York didn’t fake her own death.”

Hendon went to kindle a taper and hold it to his pipe. “Your mother…she was involved with another man. For her to have lived with him openly here in England would have ruined my standing in the government. She agreed to go abroad in return for my granting her an annual stipend.”

Sebastian was silent for a moment. Had there been a man that summer—a special man? Impossible to remember. There were always men around Sophie Hendon. “Why didn’t you simply divorce her?” he said aloud, searching his father’s heavily featured face. “What does she have on you?”

Hendon met his gaze and held it. “Nothing I intend to tell you.”

“My God. And the necklace?”

“I honestly don’t know how Guinevere Anglessey came to be wearing that necklace. I suppose it’s possible your mother gave it to someone over the years.”

Sebastian doubted it. Sophie Hendon had never been a particularly superstitious woman, but she had believed in that necklace and in its power. “Where is she now?”

Hendon sucked on his pipe, kindling the tobacco. “Venice. Or at any rate, that’s where I send the money. The acquaintances she went out with that day—the ones who helped coordinate the accident—they were Venetians.”

The air filled with the sweet smell of burning tobacco. Sebastian stood at one of the long windows overlooking the square. “All those years,” he said, half to himself, “all those years of missing her, of mourning her…and it was all a lie.” He was aware of his father coming to stand behind him, although he didn’t turn his head.

“If she could have taken you with her,” said Hendon, his voice gruff, “I think she would have. Of all her children, I always thought her love for you was the most intense.”