Why Kill the Innocent (Sebastian St. Cyr #13)(93)

Somerset nodded to one of the apprentices to take his place. “Of course.”

“I know what happened to your sister,” said Sebastian as the two men turned to push their way down the crowded promenade.

Something shifted behind the printer’s eyes, something swift and calculating and quickly hidden by half-lowered lids. “You do? Well, that’s encouraging. Was it her husband, then?”

“Actually, no.”

“Oh?”

“It was you.”

Somerset drew up and swung to face him, the light from the torches flanking a nearby dance tent falling golden across his features. A burst of shouts and laughter and the high-pitched, urgent screech of a fiddle filled the night. “Is this some sort of sick jest?”

“Hot pies!” shouted a passing boy selling mutton pies from a tray slung by a strap around his neck. “Pies, fresh and hot!”

Sebastian kept his gaze on the printer. “The day she died, Jane discovered by chance that you’d been in Hampshire at the time the Hesse letters were stolen. She went to your print shop, presumably intending to confront you with what she suspected. Only you weren’t there. And so she searched your office, looking for the letters. She must have known you well, because she found them, didn’t she? Then she lit a fire in your stove so she could burn them. That’s when—”

“This is madness! Whatever makes you think—”

“That’s when you came in. You realized what she was doing and you struck her, knocking her aside so you could pull the letters from the flames. The way I figure it, she must have picked up the burning letters with her bare hands—singeing her fingers—and thrust them back into the fire. So you pushed her away again. Only, this time when she fell, she hit her head on the side of the stove. And it killed her.”

The torches beside them hissed and smoked as a clutch of drunken soldiers reeled past, voices warbling, “O’er the hills and o’er the main—”

Somerset swallowed hard. “No. You’re wrong. Do you hear me? You’re wrong.”

“The ironic thing,” said Sebastian, watching him carefully, “is that what happened to Jane that day wasn’t murder. It was manslaughter. If you hadn’t panicked, you could even have passed it off as a simple accident by saying she’d slipped on the wet floor and hit her head. No one would have suspected anything. Except because of those bloody letters, you did panic. You were so desperate to get rid of her body that you hauled her through the snowstorm up to Clerkenwell and dumped her in the middle of Shepherds’ Lane. And it might have worked—except you had the wrong day for her lessons there, and one of the women who found her had the medical training to realize that the lack of blood meant she must have died someplace else.”

“You’re wrong,” said Somerset again, breathing so hard and fast his chest was jerking. “It was Ambrose. I can’t prove it, but it had to be him. He was a lying, cheating, foul-tempered bastard who beat her for years. Years! Of course it was he.”

Sebastian shook his head. “Ambrose was all that and more. But he wasn’t a murderer. Unlike you.”

“Apples! Hot apples!” shouted an aged, stoop-shouldered woman with a steaming basket she thrust toward them. “Buy me hot apples, gentlemen?”

Somerset’s gaze darted sideways. Jaw tightening, he yanked the basket from the woman’s arms, threw its contents in Sebastian’s face, and ran.

The apples rested on a grate above a pan of coals, and Sebastian squeezed his eyes shut and flung up one crooked elbow to protect his face. He felt the shower of hot embers sting his skin, smelled the pungent reek of burning wool as the glowing coals and hot grate tumbled down the front of his greatcoat. A horde of laughing urchins descended on him to scramble after the fruit rolling at his feet.

“Me apples!”

“Bloody hell,” swore Sebastian as one of the children knocked into the old woman and sent her staggering against him.

Steadying her, Sebastian paused long enough to thrust a couple of shillings into the woman’s hand, then turned and half tripped over a joyfully barking dog. “Bloody hell,” he said again.

Christian Somerset was already seventy-five to a hundred yards ahead, plowing up the crowded promenade like the prow of a ship through debris-thick waters. Shaking off the old woman, the children, and the dog, Sebastian took off after him just as a stout butcher stepped backward out of a nearby mulled wine tent and slammed into Sebastian hard enough to make him grunt.

“Oye! Why don’t ye watch where yer goin’ there?” the man shouted after Sebastian as he ran on. “Bloody nobs!”

Sebastian kept going, past cook stalls and trinket booths and tents of tattered canvas that flapped in the wet wind. The snow was turning to rain now, and he nearly collided with a pretty woman in a fur-trimmed hat who’d stopped suddenly to look up at the sky and laugh, her face wet in the torchlight. Swerving, his feet slipping and sliding in the slush, he pelted past the Punch and Judy show. The children turned to laugh and point, the puppet master pivoting Judy to call after him in a high-pitched voice, “Tsk-tsk. Young gentlemen! Always in a hurry!”

With Sebastian now gaining on him, Jane’s brother ducked through a beer tent, pausing just long enough to snatch up a tankard of ale and lob it at Sebastian before streaming out the far end.