When Gods Die

“I never—” Tom began as they turned onto Brook Street, only to break off and say, “Gor! Look there. Ain’t that Miss Kat?”

She stood on the footpath before Sebastian’s house, the embroidered skirt of her poult-de-soie walking dress clutched in one hand as she prepared to mount his steps. Kat never came to his house. She said it wasn’t appropriate, that the time they shared together should be kept separate from the life he lived in Mayfair as the Earl of Hendon’s son and Lady Wilcox’s brother. She knew it infuriated him, but she wasn’t the kind of woman to be intimidated by a man’s anger. No matter how much he told her he didn’t give a damn about the conventions, that he had only one life and she was a vitally important part of it, she stubbornly stayed away. Only once before had she come here, and then she’d been both unconscious and bleeding.

At the sound of the curricle, her head turned, the brim of her chip hat casting the features of her face into shadow.

“Stable them,” he told Tom, handing the boy the reins and jumping lightly from the curricle’s high seat. “What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked, his hands clasping Kat’s shoulders as she came up to him.

She shook her head. “Nothing’s wrong. I located the secondhand dealer who sold Lady Addison’s green satin evening gown.”

He knew better than to ask how out of all the secondhand clothing dealers in London she’d known which one to go to. “And?”

“She says she sold it to an African and a tall young girl with pale gray eyes.”

THE GIRL WAS EASY ENOUGH TO FIND.

According to one of the men Sebastian came upon sifting through the still-smoking rubble of the Norfolk Arms on Giltspur Street, her name was Amelia Brennan. The eldest of eight children, she lived with her mother and father in a ramshackle whitewashed cottage built into what had once been the garden of a bigger house facing Cock Lane. The larger houses themselves had long since been broken up into lodgings, their gardens disappearing beneath a warren of shanties and hovels threaded by a narrow byway half-filled with heaps of ashes and steaming rubbish piles.

As Sebastian’s carriage turned down the lane, ragged children stared from open doorways, their hair tangled and matted, their faces and arms as caked with dirt as newly dug potatoes. Most had probably never seen a lord’s carriage, with its well-fed, glossy-coated horses, its liveried and powdered footmen standing up behind. They had certainly never seen such a sight here in Ha’penny Court.

Sebastian waited in the carriage while one of the footmen hopped down and went to rap on the Brennans’ warped door. The show of ostentatious power and wealth was deliberate, and Sebastian meant to use it to his advantage.

The Brennans’ cottage was better tended than its neighbors, he noticed, its missing windows covered with oiled parchment rather than simply stuffed with rags, the front step freshly swept. But signs of encroaching decay were evident in the rotting eave at one corner, in the shutter that hung drunkenly from a broken hinge.

A woman answered the door, a boy of about two balanced on one hip. She had the worn face and graying hair of an old woman, although considering the age of her children, Sebastian suspected she was only in her midthirties. He watched her gaze travel from the powdered footman to the grand carriage filling the lane outside her cottage, and saw the terrible fear that flooded into her eyes. Her lips parted, her arm tightening around the child so that he let out a whimper of protest.

Sebastian swung open the carriage door and stepped down with an affected, languid pace, a scented handkerchief held to his nostrils. “Your daughter Amelia has been implicated in the murder of the Marchioness of Anglessey,” he said, his voice at its most patrician and condescending. “If she cooperates, I can help her. But only if she cooperates. If she doesn’t, it will go hard on her.” He let his gaze drift with unmistakable meaning over the humble cottage. “On her, and on you and your other children.”

“Oh, my lord,” gushed the woman, sinking to her knees. “Our Amelia’s a good girl—truly she is. She only did what she was told, like a proper servant, when—”

Sebastian cut her off. “Is she here now?”

“No, my lord. She’s—”

“Get her.”

A crowd of stair-stepped children filled the open doorway behind the woman. She twisted around, her gaze singling out a thin boy of perhaps eleven or twelve. Normally, a lad of that age would be off earning money to help his family. That he was here now suggested that the boy, like his sister, must have worked at the Norfolk Arms. Last night’s fire would be hard on this family.

“Nathan,” said the woman. “Go. And be quick.”

Sebastian watched the boy dash off, then turned back to the woman. “I would like to come in and sit down.”

Mrs. Brennan stumbled to her feet, her thin chest jerking with each rapid breath. “Yes. Of course, my lord. Please, come in.”