“I sincerely hope so.”
The surgeon grinned and limped over to stand beside him. Gibson’s gaze rested, like Sebastian’s, on the woman now working the rich black soil near the house. “I’ve asked Alexi to marry me a dozen times,” he said with a sigh, “but she won’t hear of it.”
“Does she say why not?”
“She says all of her husbands have died.”
So have her lovers, thought Sebastian, although he didn’t say it.
He shifted to study his friend’s lean, pain-lined face. “She said she could do something to help with the phantom pains from your missing leg.” His pain—and his opium addiction. “Has she tried?”
“She keeps wanting to, but it sounds daft to me. How can a box with mirrors possibly do any good?”
“It’s worth making the attempt, isn’t it?”
The Irishman simply shook his head and turned back to his work. “I’ll let you know if I find anything else.”
Sebastian nodded and pushed away from the doorframe.
But as he followed the narrow path to the gate, he was aware of Alexi Sauvage’s gaze on him, silent and watchful.
It often seemed to Sebastian that trying to solve a murder was somewhat akin to approaching a figure in the mist. At first an indistinct, insubstantial blur, the murdered man or woman began to take form and emerge in detail only as Sebastian came to see the victim through the eyes of the various people who had known, loved, or hated him.
At the moment, virtually all Sebastian knew about Stanley Preston was that the man was cousin to the Home Secretary, a widower and father of two who owned plantations in Jamaica and was not in the habit of trying to fondle the pretty young barmaid at the local pub. Before he approached the dead man’s grief-stricken daughter, Sebastian felt the need to learn more. And so his next stop was the home of Henrietta, the Dowager Duchess of Claiborne.
One of the grandes dames of Society, the Duchess had long maintained a relentless interest in the personal lives and antecedents of everyone who was anyone. Since she also possessed an awe-inspiring memory that deemed few details too trivial not to be retained forever, he couldn’t think of anyone in London better able to tell him what he needed to know about Mr. Stanley Preston.
Born Lady Henrietta St. Cyr, elder sister of the current Earl of Hendon, she was known to the world as Sebastian’s aunt, although she was one of the few people aware of the fact that the relationship between them was in name only. She lived alone with an army of servants in a vast town house on Park Lane, in Mayfair. Technically, the house belonged to her son, the current Duke of Claiborne, who resided at a far more modest address in Half Moon Street. An amiable, somewhat weak-willed gentleman now of middle age, he was no match for the Dowager Duchess, who had every intention of dying in the house to which she had come as a bride some fifty-five years before. She was proud, nosy, perceptive, arrogant, judgmental, opinionated, and wise, and one of Sebastian’s favorite people.
He found her ensconced in a comfortable chair beside her drawing room fire, an exquisite cashmere shawl draped about her stout shoulders and a slim, blue-bound book in her hands.
“Good heavens, Aunt Henrietta,” he said, stooping to kiss one subtly rouged and powdered cheek. “Have I caught you reading a novel?”
Rather than put the book aside, she thrust one plump finger between the pages to mark her place. “I bought it to see what all the fuss is about—it has quite taken the ton by storm, you know. But I must confess to finding it unexpectedly diverting.”
Sebastian went to stand before the fire. “Who wrote it?”
“No one knows. That’s partly what makes it so delicious. It’s simply ascribed to ‘the author of Sense and Sensibility.’ And no one has yet to discover who she is.”
He reached to pick up one of the other two volumes resting on the table beside her and read the title. “Pride and Prejudice. Whoever it is obviously likes alliteration.”
“And she has the most devastatingly wicked wit. Listen to this.” She opened the book again. “‘They were in fact very fine ladies . . . had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people of rank; and were therefore in every respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others. They were of a respectable family in the north of England, a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than that their brother’s fortune and their own had been acquired by trade.’”
“Devastating, indeed. I wonder, could you tear yourself away from this delightful tale long enough to tell me what you know of Mr. Stanley Preston?”
“Stanley Preston?” she repeated, looking up at him. “Whatever for?”
“You haven’t seen the morning papers?”
“No; I’ve been reading this book. Why? What’s happened to him?”
“Someone cut off his head.”