Why Kill the Innocent (Sebastian St. Cyr #13)
C.S. Harris
So shalt thou put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you, when thou shalt do that which is right in the sight of the Lord.
—DEUTERONOMY 21:9
Chapter 1
Clerkenwell, London: Thursday, 27 January 1814
A howling wind flung icy snow crystals into Hero Devlin’s face, stinging her cold cheeks and stealing her breath. She kept her head bowed, her fists clenched in the fine cloth of her merino carriage gown as she struggled to drag its sodden weight through the knee-deep drifts clogging the ancient winding lane. A footman with a lantern staggered ahead of her to light the darkness, for Clerkenwell was a wretched, dangerous area on the outskirts of the City, and night had fallen long ago.
She was here, alone except for the footman and a petite French midwife who floundered through the snow in her wake, because of an article she was writing on the hardships faced by the families of men snatched off the streets by the Royal Navy’s infamous press gangs. The midwife, Alexi Sauvage, had offered to introduce Hero to the desperate eight-months-pregnant wife of a recently impressed cooper. No one had expected the woman to go into labor just as a fierce snowstorm swept in to render the narrow lanes of the district impassable to a gentlewoman’s carriage. Thanks to their presence, mother and child both survived the long, hard birth. But the snow just kept getting deeper.
“Do you see it yet?” Alexi called, peering through the whirl of white toward where Hero’s carriage awaited them at the base of Shepherds’ Lane.
Hero brought up a cold-numbed hand to shield her eyes. “It should be j—”
She broke off as her foot caught on something half-buried in the snow and she pitched forward to land in a deep drift on quickly outflung hands. She started to push up again, then froze as she realized she was staring at the tousled dark hair of a body that lay facedown beside her.
The footman swung about in alarm, the light from his lantern swaying wildly. “My lady!”
“Mon Dieu,” whispered Alexi, coming to crouch next to her. “It’s a woman. Help me turn her, quickly.”
Together they heaved the stiffening woman onto her back. The winter had been so wretchedly cold, with endless weeks of freezing temperatures and soaring food and coal prices, that more and more of the city’s poor were being found dead in the streets. But this was no ragged pauper woman. Her fine black pelisse was lined with fur, and the dusky curls framing her pale face were fashionably cut. Hero stared into those open sightless eyes and had no need to see the bloody gash on the side of the woman’s head to know that she was dead.
“She must have slipped and hit something,” said Hero.
“I don’t think so.” Alexi Sauvage studied the ugly wound with professional interest. As a female, she could be licensed in England to practice only as a midwife. But Alexi had trained as a physician in Italy, where such things were allowed. “She couldn’t have died here. A wound like this bleeds profusely—look at all the blood in her hair and on her pelisse. Yet there’s hardly any blood in the snow around her.” With tender hands, she brushed away the rapidly falling flakes that half obscured the dead woman’s face. “I wonder who she is.”
Hero watched the snow fall away from those still features and felt her chest give an odd lurch. “I know her. She’s a musician named Jane Ambrose. She teaches piano to”—she paused as Alexi swung her head to stare at her—“to Princess Charlotte. The Regent’s daughter.”
Chapter 2
Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, stood at the river steps below Westminster Bridge, his worried gaze on the turgid ice-filled expanse of the Thames before him.
Never in anyone’s memory had London seen a winter such as this. Beginning in December and lasting for more than a week, a great killing fog had smothered the city with a darkness so heavy it could be felt. After that came days of endless snow that buried the entire Kingdom beneath vast drifts said in some places to run as much as twenty-three feet deep. And then, yesterday, a brief, sudden thaw sent massive blocks of ice from up the Thames spinning downriver to be carried back and forth by the tide, catching in eddies and against the arches of the bridges, where they crashed into one another with a series of echoing booms that reminded Sebastian of artillery fire. Now, with this evening’s plunging temperatures and new snowfall, the city had turned into a strange black-and-white world of bleak windblown drifts cut by a ribbon of darkly dangerous ice-filled waters. And still the snow fell thick and fast around him.
He was aware of a strange silence that seemed to press down on the city, unnatural enough to be troubling. Twenty years of war combined with falling wages, soaring prices, and widespread starvation had already brought England to her knees. There was a very real worry that this vicious, killing winter might be more than the country could—or would—bear.
He glanced back at the ancient stone walls of the Houses of Parliament, which rose just beyond the bridge. They seemed so strong and invincibly enduring. Yet he knew they were not.
“Gov’nor.” A familiar shrill cockney voice cut through the icy silence. “Gov’nor!”
Sebastian turned to see his sharp-faced young groom, or tiger, slip and almost fall as he took the icy footpath curling down from the bridge. “Tom? What the devil are you doing here?”