Why Kill the Innocent (Sebastian St. Cyr #13)(57)

“Unless she threatened to leave you.”

Ambrose froze with his elbows still spread wide, his gaze on Sebastian’s face.

Sebastian said, “I can see a certain kind of man who owed his success—his very livelihood—to a woman becoming enraged if she threatened to leave him.”

“Jane would never have left me.”

“She would never leave you when walking out on her marriage meant losing her sons. But now? If she found out you were drowning in debt and spending the money she’d actually earned on a mistress? I can imagine her at least threatening to leave you. And I can see you flying into a rage and hitting her, the way you’d hit her so many times in the past. Only this time she struck her head on something when she fell and she didn’t get up again. And when you saw what you’d done, you wrapped her body in—what? A carpet? A blanket? An old greatcoat?—and carried her out into the snowy night to leave her in Shepherds’ Lane.”

Ambrose stared at him, jaw slack, nostrils flaring with alarm. “No.”

“The only thing I don’t understand is, why Shepherds’ Lane? Did you mistakenly think her lessons with Mary Godwin were on Thursdays rather than Fridays?”

“I didn’t kill her, damn you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Ambrose might be drunk, but he wasn’t too drunk to know that men had swung on flimsy conjectures such as this. His tongue flicked out to wet his lips. “You . . . you were asking me the other day about the Rothschild girl Jane was teaching.”

“Yes.” Sebastian frowned. “Why?”

Ambrose leaned forward. “Jane had an aunt who was married to Sheridan—Richard Sheridan. Sheridan and I never exactly got along, but he came to see me last night. Spun some crazy tale about Rothschild and gold shipments to France, and wanted to know if Jane had ever talked to me about it.”

“Had she?”

“No. I’d never heard any of it before. But Sheridan was damnably upset about it all. I can tell you that. Went away muttering under his breath. I couldn’t catch most of it, but he was saying something like ‘I blame myself.’”

“‘I blame myself’?”

Ambrose nodded. “I did tell you I thought her strangely frightened by her last meeting with Rothschild. Didn’t I tell you?”

“You did.”

“So you’ll look into it?”

“I will.” Sebastian pushed up from the table. “Why would Jane tell her late aunt’s husband what was frightening her but not her own husband?”

Ambrose’s head fell back as he stared up at Sebastian. “What do I know of the government’s gold policy? Sheridan spent decades in Parliament.”

“That he did,” said Sebastian, reaching for his hat.

But Edward Ambrose only tipped his head and frowned, as if the larger implications of his statement eluded him.



Richard Sheridan was feeding scraps to a colony of stray cats in the noisome alley behind his house when Sebastian came to stand with one shoulder propped against a nearby corner.

“How’d you find me?” asked the old man without looking up. He was wearing a tattered greatcoat, scuffed boots, and the same nightcap Sebastian had seen on him before. Gray stubble shadowed his unshaven face.

“Your housemaid.”

“Ah, Lizzy. She’s a treasure. Poor girl hasn’t been paid in months, but she won’t give up on us. Don’t know what we’d do without her.”

Sebastian said, “Why didn’t you tell me your niece tangled with Rothschild over a shipment of smuggled gold?”

“Been talking to Ambrose, have you?”

“Yes.”

Sheridan reached down to pet a gray tabby rubbing against his legs. “It all happened so many weeks ago, I frankly wasn’t even thinking about it when you were here before. I was focused on the last time I’d seen her. It wasn’t until after you’d gone I started wondering if Rothschild might have had a hand in what happened to the poor girl.”

“I take it she overheard something in his house she wasn’t meant to hear?”

The old man nodded. “It’s frightening, isn’t it? The simple, seemingly inconsequential decisions we make that can shift the entire course of our lives. She went to use the water closet after her lesson with the child and was coming down the stairs when she heard Rothschild consulting with one of his men. I suppose he thought she had gone. There was little in Jane’s world beyond music—and her boys, of course, when they were alive—so she didn’t know the background of what she was hearing. I suspect if Rothschild had simply smiled at her and let her go on her way, she probably wouldn’t have given it another thought.”

“What did he do instead?”

“He came the ugly—threatened her with all sorts of dire repercussions if she told anyone and then ordered her never to come near his house again.” Sheridan shook his head. “The man might be a wonder when it comes to manipulating markets and turning this nasty war to his advantage, but he’s a poor judge of people. He thought he was frightening her—and he did frighten her. But he also put up her back. She went home, thought about it all for a while, then came to ask me to explain it to her.”

“So Rothschild knew about the gold guineas hidden aboard the Viking?”