What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

next day, his face tight with grief, to hold the pale, lifeless body of his eldest son and heir clutched in his arms.
    With Richard dead, the title of Viscount Devlin, like the position of heir apparent, had passed to the second son, Cecil. Only Cecil had died, too, just four years later. Then all of Alistair St. Cyr’s hopes, all his ambitions and dreams had fallen on the boy who’d never been meant to be the heir, the youngest and least like his father of them all.
    With a shrug, Sebastian let the curtain drop and turned toward the stairs.
    He’d made it almost to his bedroom when his majordomo camehurrying down the hall. “My lord, I must speak with you. We’ve had the constables here this morn—”
    “Not now, Morey.”
    “But my lord—”
    “Later,” said Sebastian, and firmly shut the door.

Chapter 5
     
     
    H is hat clutched in his cold hands, Sir Henry Lovejoy followed a liveried and powdered footman through the echoing, labyrinth-like corridors of Carlton House. A few months ago, Lord Jarvis would have held such an audience at St. James’s Palace, where the poor mad old King George III kept his offices. That Jarvis had now shifted his base here, to the palace of the Prince of Wales, struck Lovejoy as the clearest sign imaginable that a Regency was indeed imminent.
    The great man was at his desk, writing, when Lovejoy was ushered into his presence. He acknowledged Lovejoy’s existence with a curt motion of one plump, ringed hand, but he did not glance up or even invite Henry to sit. Henry hesitated just inside the threshold, then went to stand before the hearth. The fire was a small one, the room cavernously large and frigid. Henry held his numb hands out to the flames. From somewhere in the distance came the rhythmic rat-a-tat of a hammer and the clanging of what might be scaffolding. The Prince of Wales was always renovating, whether here at Carlton House or at his Pavilion in Brighton.
    “Well?” said Jarvis at last, laying aside his pen and shifting in his chair so that he might regard his visitor. “What have you to report about this sorry business?”
    Retracting his cold hands and turning, Lovejoy executed a neat bow,then launched into a precise description of the crime scene, the victim, and the evidence they’d collected so far.
    “Yes, yes,” said Jarvis, thrusting up from his chair with an impatient gesture that cut Henry short. “I’ve heard all this from your constable. It’s obvious Lord Devlin must be arrested immediately. Indeed, I can’t conceive why a warrant hasn’t been issued already.”
    Lovejoy watched his lordship fumble in his pocket for a delicate ivory snuffbox. He was an unusually large man, standing well over six feet in height and weighing some twenty to twenty-five stone. In his youth, he had been handsome. Beneath the ravages of indulgence and dissipation and the passing of the years, traces of those good looks could still be seen, in the fiercely intelligent gray eyes, the strong, aquiline thrust of the nose, the sensual curve of the mouth.
    Lovejoy cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, my lord, I am not convinced the evidence is sufficient to justify such an action at this time.”
    Jarvis’s head came up, his eyes narrowing, his fleshy face deepening in hue as he fixed Lovejoy with a hard stare. “ Not sufficient ? Good God, man. What do you want? An eyewitness?”
    Lovejoy drew a steadying breath. “I admit the evidence implicating the Viscount appears on the surface quite damning, my lord. But we really know very little as yet about this woman. We don’t even have a clear idea as to what the killer’s motive might have been.”
    Deftly flicking open his snuffbox with one fat finger, Lord Jarvis lifted a pinch to his nostrils, and sniffed. “She was raped, was she not?”
    “Yes, my lord.”
    “So there’s your motive.”
    “Perhaps, my lord. Although the violence of the attack suggests a level of anger, of instability even, which goes beyond simple sexual hunger.”
    Jarvis closed the box with a snap and sighed. “Unfortunately, such outbursts of violence are not unknown amongst young gentlemen who have served King and country in war. As I understand it, Devlin has killed on at least two other occasions since his return from the Continent.”
    “Affairs of honor, my lord. And his opponents were wounded. Not killed.”
    “Nevertheless, the tendency is obviously there.”
    His lordship walked away to stand for a moment at a window