“She was, yes. Captain Miles Sauvage. Met him in Spain, she did.”
“And where is Captain Sauvage now?”
“He died, not more than six weeks after we came here.”
“You were with her in Spain?”
“I was, yes.” Her tone was once again guarded, her jaw set hard.
Rather than press her on the point, Sebastian shifted to a different tack. “Tell me more about this man you say has been threatening her.”
“Bullock?” Her heavy brows drew together in a thoughtful frown. “He’s a tradesman—has a shop somewhere hereabouts. Big bear of a man, he is, with curly black hair and a nasty scar running across his cheek, like this—” She brought up her left hand to slash diagonally from the outer edge of her eye to the corner of her mouth.
“And apart from Bullock, can you think of anyone else who might have wished her harm?”
“No, no one. Why would anyone want to hurt her?”
“And did you know Dr. Damion Pelletan?”
She hesitated a moment, then shook her head. “Non.”
“You’re certain?”
“How would I know him?” she demanded, staring belligerently back at Sebastian.
“Do you know if Madame Sauvage had any contact with the exiled Bourbons?”
A slow tide of angry red crept up the woman’s neck. “Those puces? What would the doctoresse want with them? She hates them.”
“Really?” It was an unusual attitude for a French émigré.
“Well,” said the woman hastily, as if regretting her harsh words, “I suppose the Comte de Provence is not so bad, when all is said and done. But Artois?” Her face contorted with the violence of her loathing. “And that Marie-Thérèse! She is not right in the head, that one. She lives still in the eighteenth century, and she wishes to drag France back to the past with her. You know what the doctoresse calls her?”
Sebastian shook his head.
“Madame Rancune. That’s what the doctoresse calls her. Madame Rancune.”
Rancune. It was a French word meaning grudge or rancor, and it carried with it more than a hint of vindictiveness and spite. He’d heard Marie-Thérèse called it before.
Madam Resentment.
Chapter 10
By the time Sebastian left Golden Square, the weak winter sun was disappearing fast behind a thick bank of clouds that bunched low over the city, stealing the light from the afternoon and sending the temperature plummeting.
He walked up Swallow Street, trying to make sense of a murder investigation that seemed to be going in three different directions at once. The next logical step would be to speak to Marie-Thérèse, the Duchesse d’Angoulême, herself. But the daughter of the last crowned King of France was currently living at Hartwell House, in Buckinghamshire, nearly forty miles to the northwest of London. Under normal circumstances, he would have driven out there without a second thought. But a journey of that length presented logistical problems for a man whose wife was heavily pregnant with their first child.
After careful calculations, he decided that if he left London at dawn, driving his own curricle but with hired teams changed at twelve-to fourteen-mile intervals, he could make it there and back by early afternoon.
He altered his direction and turned toward the livery stables in Boyle Street.
“Six teams?” said the livery stable’s owner, a gnarled little Irishman named O’Malley who’d made quite a name for himself as a jockey some decades before. “To go less than eighty miles? Ye don’t think that might be a wee bit excessive, my lord?”
“I plan to make it there and back in six hours,” said Sebastian.
O’Malley grinned. “Well, if anyone can do it, you can, my lord.” He scratched the back of his neck. “I reckon I’ve just the team fer your first stage—real sweet goers they are, all four as creamy white and well matched as two twins’ breasts. And, if ye’ve a mind to it, I could send one of me lads on ahead tonight to make sure ye get the best cattle at every change, there and back.”
“I would appreciate that,” said Sebastian, his gaze scanning the slice of street visible through the stable’s open doorway.
He’d been aware of a vague, niggling sensation of unease ever since he left Golden Square. Now, as he studied the steady stream of wagons, carriages, and carts that filled the street, whips cracking, iron-rimmed wheels rattling over paving stones, he identified the source of that unease: He was being watched. He could not have said by whom, but he had no doubt that he was the object of someone’s intense scrutiny.
“Them clouds might look nasty,” said O’Malley, misunderstanding his concern, “but me bones say we won’t be gettin’ no snow fer a day or so yet.”
“I hope your bones are right.”