“Humor me.”
“Well, let’s see. He was a younger son, of course. The family sent him off to Jamaica after he half killed some constable with his bare hands. He did quite well for himself there, in the end. But he’s been dead twenty or thirty years now. Never did have any children of his own—leastways none he could acknowledge. His wife was barren, which is how he ended up making Sir Galen his heir.”
“Did he ever come back to England?”
Henrietta frowned. “Only once, if I remember correctly. I believe he brought the child and his nurse back to Sir Maxwell, after Beau Knightly’s death.” She fixed him with a hard glare. “And now, not another word do you get out of me until you tell me what this is all about.”
But Sebastian simply gave her a resounding kiss on one powdered and rouged cheek and said, “Thank you, Aunt. Enjoy your visit with Lady Jersey.”
Chapter 54
T he bell towers of the city were striking four when Sebastian watched Sir Galen Knightly tuck a silver-headed walking stick up under one arm and pause to purchase a paper from one of the newsboys on St. James’s Street. A dark, angry storm was sweeping in on the city, the air heavy with the scent of coming rain.
“Walk with me a ways, if you will, Sir Galen?” said Sebastian, stepping forward as the Baronet turned toward the entrance to White’s.
The laugh lines beside the Baronet’s eyes creased as he seemed almost to wince at the suggestion he depart from his comfortable daily routine. “Well . . . I was just on my way to the reading room,” he said, his gaze drifting longingly toward his club’s stately facade.
“I know; I’m sorry. But I’d like your opinion on a tale I’ve just been told, and to be frank, I’d rather not repeat it where we might be overheard.”
Knightly hesitated, then shrugged. “As you wish.”
They walked down the hill toward the high, soot-stained brick walls of St. James’s Palace and the Mall beyond it. Lightning flickered across the roiling underbelly of the clouds, and the air filled with dark, swirling flocks of birds coming in to roost.
Sebastian said, “I had an interesting conversation this afternoon with the owner of a coffee shop frequented by Dr. Douglas Sterling. He tells me Sterling spent all of last year in Jamaica and returned only a few weeks ago.”
“Oh?” said Knightly. “I had no notion it was so recently.”
Sebastian studied the older man’s hard-boned profile. “I think I know why both he and Stanley Preston were killed.”
Knightly glanced sideways at him. “Do you? Why is that?”
“It all goes back to a deception carried out some forty years ago.”
“Forty years?” Knightly gave a brittle, forced laugh. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m afraid I am. You see, forty-odd years ago, a certain Hertfordshire baronet shipped his young, excessively profligate heir off to a maternal uncle in Jamaica. The idea was to remove the heir from the influences of his boon companions, who by all accounts were a rather unsavory lot. Only, things didn’t go quite according to plan.”
“They rarely do,” observed Knightly, swinging his walking stick back and forth.
“True,” said Sebastian. “It seems that shortly after his arrival in Jamaica, our young heir impregnated and was forced to marry the daughter of a prominent local landowner. Unfortunately, the young man barely lived long enough to see his son take his first steps before succumbing with his bride to a yellow fever epidemic.”
“Yes, I’m afraid yellow jack has long been a terrible scourge in the warmer American colonies. But . . . is there a point to this tale?”
“There is. You see, the father’s death meant the orphaned babe was now the Baronet’s new heir. The grandfather wanted the child raised in England, and the uncle finally agreed to bring him.”
Knightly kept his gaze on the wind-tossed trees in the park beyond the palace, his jaw set hard, and said nothing.
“The child had lost his wet nurse along with his parents,” said Sebastian, weaving together what he’d learned from Juba with what he’d been told by the Duchess of Claiborne, “and was being nursed by one of the uncle’s own slaves—a pale-skinned quadroon named Cally whose babe had died in the same epidemic. Cally was by all accounts a beautiful woman, so beautiful the uncle was rumored to have made her his mistress. When the uncle and the child set sail for England, Cally came with them.”
Knightly pursed his lips in a way that sucked in his cheeks, his gaze fixed relentlessly straight ahead.