Why Kill the Innocent (Sebastian St. Cyr #13)(76)

What would happen, he wondered, if a woman who’d recently buried both her children were to discover that her husband was about to have a child by his young mistress—a mistress he maintained in grand style on money earned from the operas she herself had secretly written?

What would she do?

Sebastian found himself coming back to what Jane had told Liam Maxwell the afternoon before she died: Our society asks women to give up too much, but nothing is going to change as long as we keep meekly doing what is expected of us. When Sebastian first heard those words, they struck him as oddly out of character for the woman he thought he was coming to know. But that was before he’d learned all that had happened to Jane Ambrose in the twenty-four hours before that strange conversation, from van der Pals’s brutal rape in a Savile Row alley to her discovery of her husband’s pregnant mistress. When considered in that context, Jane’s statement to Liam Maxwell sounded like the dawning resolution of a woman who’d had enough. Who’d had enough of hiding her talent from the world because of her sex. Who was weary of denying a love that had been slowly deepening over ten long years. Who no longer believed she should endure a loveless marriage to an abusive husband simply because that’s what her religion and society expected of a wife.

So what had she done? Sebastian wondered. Confronted Ambrose? Threatened to leave him?

It wasn’t difficult to imagine how a man such as Edward Ambrose, deeply in debt and known for hitting his wife, would react. And if he hit her hard enough that she fell and fatally struck her head?

A man like Ambrose would never admit what he had done.



The housemaid who answered the door of Ambrose’s Soho Square town house looked less sorrowful than the last time Sebastian had seen her, but more anxious.

“My lord,” she said, bobbing a quick curtsy. “If’n yer here t’ see Mr. Ambrose, he’s in his library. He’s been in there forever, but he don’t take kindly to us interruptin’ him when he’s working like this, and I don’t dare disturb him.”

“That’s quite all right,” Sebastian said pleasantly as he simply walked past her toward the library door. “I’ll interrupt him myself.”

“But, my lord—”

She broke off in a gasp and threw her apron up over her face as Sebastian thrust open the door without knocking.

It was the unexpected chill that hit him first—the chill and the ripe smell of blood. Edward Ambrose lay sprawled on his back beside the library’s cold hearth, one knee bent awkwardly beneath him, his arms flung out at his sides. His mouth was slightly agape, his eyes wide, as if he were startled by something. But the eyes were already filmed and flattening, and a dark sea of blood stiffened the front of the torn white silk waistcoat from which protruded the handle of an elegant dagger.

The housemaid, who had crept up to peek around Sebastian’s side, dropped her apron and began to scream.





Chapter 44

“How long do you think he’s been dead?” asked Lovejoy sometime later as he crouched beside the dead man.

Sebastian stood with one hand braced against the nearby mantelpiece. “Quite a while, from the looks of things. Much of the blood has dried, and the fire has burnt itself down to ashes. According to the housemaid, he shut himself in here shortly after breakfast, and no one in the household had seen him since.”

“Not even to bring him a cup of tea?”

“She said he didn’t like to be disturbed.”

“Someone obviously disturbed him.” Lovejoy pushed to his feet with a stifled grunt as his knees creaked. He turned in a slow circle, taking in the room’s gently worn furnishings and scattered musical instruments. Jane Ambrose’s basket of mending still rested beside her chair. “There doesn’t appear to be any sign of either an altercation or a search.”

“No.”

Lovejoy sighed. “I’ll set some of the lads to going over the house. We might find something.”

“Perhaps,” agreed Sebastian, although he doubted it.

Lovejoy brought his gaze back to the dagger protruding from the dead man’s chest. It was an exotic weapon, the nephrite handle gently curved to fit comfortably in the palm and set with pearls and semiprecious stones. “An unusual piece.”

“It looks Indian to me—probably Mughal,” said Sebastian, and left it at that.



Dusk was falling by the time Sebastian made it back to St. Anne’s, Soho.

Liam Maxwell was not there.

He checked the journalist’s printing shop, then his booth at the Frost Fair, and drew a blank both places. Frustrated, he turned his steps toward Tower Hill. As he crossed Gibson’s snowy yard, he could see the glow of a lantern shining through the high windows of the surgeon’s stone outbuilding to cast a warm pool of golden light into the night. But when Sebastian pushed open the door, the Irishman was just tugging off Ambrose’s boots.

“Bloody hell,” said Gibson, looking up. “I hope you aren’t already expecting me to know anything about this latest corpse you’ve sent. Lovejoy’s men just delivered him.”

Sebastian grunted. “Let me see the dagger, at least.”

Gibson shifted to carefully ease the weapon from the dead man’s chest, his eyes narrowing as he studied the inlaid handle. “Looks Mughal.”