Who Will Remember

Chapter 1

London: Monday, 19 August 1816

T
he boy stood with his thin shoulders hunched against the cold, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his ragged coat. Narrowing his eyes against the slanting rain, he studied the silent windows of a certain elegant town house on the far side of Brook Street, then shivered.

It was only midafternoon and yet already the sky was dark and gloomy, the wind icy enough to make it feel more like February or March than high summer. But then, they hadn't had anything like a summer that year. The crops in the fields were dying-or dead. People were already going hungry, and Father said he didn't know what the poor would do when winter came. Lots of folks were scared, saying the weather wasn't ever gonna get better, that the end of the world must be upon them and Jesus would be coming back soon to save the righteous and smite the wicked.

At the thought, the boy shivered again, for he sure enough knew which category he belonged to-he and Father both. Then a flicker of movement jerked his attention back across the street, and he watched as a wavering light appeared in the room that lay to one side of that shiny black front door, as if someone there was lighting a brace of candles. A tall, lean man with dark hair and a slight limp crossed in front of the room's windows. It was the nobleman the boy was here to see: Viscount Devlin, he was called.

A trickle of rain ran down the boy's cheek to tickle his bare neck, and he swiped at his wet face with the back of one hand. He was afraid that what he was about to do was a mistake. But something needed to be done.

Sucking in a deep breath of the foul, coal smoke-scented air, the boy leapt the rushing gutter at his feet and crossed the street's wet granite paving. But at the base of the house's steps, he faltered. He had to force himself to march up the steps and grasp the door's shiny brass knocker. He brought it down so hard that he jumped back in surprise.

The door was opened almost at once by a grim-looking majordomo with a military air and a forbidding frown that darkened as he took in the ragged, undersized lad shifting nervously from one bare foot to the other. "The service entrance is-"

"Sure then, but 'tis his lordship I'm here to see-Lord Devlin, I mean," said the boy in a rush before the man could shut the door on him. "About a body, it is: a dead man. His face is all purple, ye see, and he's hanging-hangin' upside down."

"Ah," said the majordomo, some emotion Jamie couldn't quite decipher twitching the man's thin lips as he took a step back and opened the door wider. "Then, in that case, I suppose you'd better come in."

Chapter 2

S
ebastian Alistair St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, rested his hips against the edge of his desk and leaned back, taking the weight off a leg that still gave him more trouble than he liked to admit. He was a former cavalry captain, in his thirties, tall and lean, with dark hair and strange, wolflike yellow eyes. He was known to the world as the only surviving son and heir of the Earl of Hendon, although he was not, in truth, Hendon's son.

The black-haired boy who stood before him, blue eyes wide with fear as he nervously twisted his wet, ragged hat between his hands, looked to be perhaps fourteen or fifteen, although seriously underfed and scrawny. His features were even and surprisingly clean, but then, that might be the work of the rain.

"What's your name, lad?"

The boy had to swallow hard before he could answer, and even then his voice came out hushed and scratchy. "Gallagher, sir. Jamie Gallagher."

Jamie. It was a name that still had the power to twist at something deep inside Sebastian, even after three years, so that it was a moment before he trusted himself to speak. "Tell me about this dead man, Jamie. Where is he?"

"He's in the ruins of that old chapel, sir," said the boy in a soft Irish lilt. "Ye know the one? In the courtyard off Swallow Street where they're tearin' down everything to make way for the Regent's grand new avenue?"

"I've seen it. You say he's hanging upside down?"

Jamie nodded. "Hangin' by one foot, he is, sir. And someone done tied his hands behind his back, too-like this." The boy bent his arms, elbows spreading wide as he thrust both hands behind him.

So obviously not a suicide, thought Sebastian. Aloud he said, "Why come to me? Why not find a local bailiff or constable, or go to the nearest public office?"

The boy dug one mud-streaked bare big toe into the rug at his feet. "Faith, ye think they'd listen to the likes of me? Toss me in the watchhouse for making a disturbance, that's what they'd do-if they didn't go decidin' it musta been me who done for the nob and hang me."

The nob. This was a new detail. "The dead man is a gentleman?"

The boy sniffed. "Sure then, but he must be, wearin' clothes that fine."

Pushing away from the desk, Sebastian walked to the library door. He spoke for a moment with his majordomo, then glanced over at the boy. "Morey here will take you down to the kitchens for a bite to eat while the horses are put to."

At the mention of food, something leapt in the boy's eyes, something painful to see. But he wasn't about to be distracted from his original purpose. "So you'll be comin', then? You'll be lookin' into it?"

"I'll come," said Sebastian.


“It might be a trap,” said Hero some minutes later as she watched Sebastian move about his dressing room. She stood in the doorway from the bedroom, the Honorable Miss Guinevere Annabelle Sophia St. Cyr, their nine-month-old daughter, balanced on one fashionably gowned hip. The baby was chewing on a chubby fist, her brilliant blue eyes narrowed with the seriousness of her task, and Sebastian paused for a moment to tousle with a gentle hand the child’s silken fair hair before turning away again.

"It might be," he acknowledged, reaching for his greatcoat. "But I doubt it."

"You will be careful."

"I'm always careful."

His wife made a scoffing sound deep in her throat and shifted the baby to her other hip. "No, you're not."

"Well, more careful than I used to be," he acknowledged, looking up with a smile as he slipped a small double-barreled pistol into the pocket of his coat.

Chapter 3

T
he rain had eased off by the time they left, although the air was still cool and damp against their faces, the sky above heavy gray, the city's cobblestones and granite setts glistening with wet. Sebastian had decided to take his curricle, both because the chestnuts needed exercising and because after months and months of endless rain he was sick and tired of riding in a closed carriage.

The boy, Jamie, sat hunched on the high seat beside him, his shoulders rounded and his hands clasped between his knees so tightly the knuckles showed white. He was obviously frightened. But then, reasoned Sebastian, what lad wouldn't be after stumbling upon such a gruesome corpse?

"What made you think to come to me with what you'd found?" asked Sebastian as he turned the chestnuts down Bond Street toward Piccadilly.

Jamie cast him a quick sideways glance, then looked away again. "Heard about ye from Father, ye see. He told me about how ye solve murders, sometimes even when the other nobs don't want ye to be solvin' 'em."

"And where is your father now?"

A quiver passed over the boy's features, then was gone. "Dead. These past two years and more."

"And your mother?"

"I don't even remember her."

I'm sorry, thought Sebastian. But he didn't say it, because the rigid set of the boy's shoulders told him any expression of sympathy would not be welcome.

He was aware of the boy tensing up tighter and tighter as they threaded their way through the sodden traffic on Piccadilly and then turned in to the deserted remnants of Swallow Street. Once, this had been a thriving if somewhat aged neighborhood of small shops, workshops, modest houses, livery stables, blacksmiths, and pubs. Most were now reduced to rubble, with only rain-soaked stacks of salvaged timbers or piles of old bricks and stones standing here and there. The Regent had an ambitious scheme to push a broad, architecturally consistent avenue through the western end of London, all the way from Carlton House in Pall Mall to what they were now calling Regent's Park, and the longest stretch of it was slated to run right through here. Little had as yet actually been built, largely because of the economic woes that had beset the country since the ending of the French wars. But the wholesale destruction of everything in the project's path was well underway.

"In there, he is," said Jamie, nodding to a crumbling stone archway that still stood midway up the street. As Sebastian turned in to the ancient courtyard, he could see what had once been a private chapel tucked into one corner. Built of the same golden sandstone as the ancient archway, the chapel-like the arch-was the relic of a decrepit, now half-demolished Tudor-era mansion. The chapel's door was already gone, part of the roof appeared to have caved in, and the facade's single lancet window gaped blankly, its delicate stone tracery empty and broken. Sebastian had been here once before, although for an entirely different reason.

"Do you live around here?" asked Sebastian, reining in before the ruin.

The boy kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. "I do not."

Sebastian waited for him to say more, but he didn't. "So what were you doing here, in the chapel?"

"Ducked in there to get out of the rain, I did. If I had the doin' of it again, I reckon I'd just get wet." A quiver passed over the boy's features as he glanced at the chapel's dark, ominously yawning doorway. "I don't need t' be goin' in there again, do I?"

"Yes."

The boy's nostrils flared on a quickly indrawn breath. Then he gave a jerky nod, braced one hand on the edge of the seat, and jumped down.

For a moment, Sebastian thought he might run, but he didn't.

"Walk them out on Swallow Street," Sebastian told his young groom, Tom, as the tiger scrambled forward to take the reins. "And be ready to get out of here fast and head for Bow Street if this is a trap."

Tom glanced over to where Jamie now stood, his hands tucked up under his armpits, his solemn gaze on the doorway before him. "Ye reckon it might be, gov'nor?"

"No." Sebastian leapt lightly down to the broken cobbles of the ancient, shattered courtyard. "But I could be wrong."


Sebastian saw the hanging body’s menacing, swaying shadow first, its arms akimbo and one leg bent up so that it appeared to be dancing a bizarre pirouette over the crumbling, rain-streaked altar.

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He glanced at the boy beside him. "You all right?"

Jamie nodded, his face pale and grim. Sebastian had expected him to try to hang back, but he didn't.

Due to the orientation of the old Tudor house, the door from the courtyard entered the chapel's southern wall, up near the altar, with the columned nave stretching away into shadow to their left. Debris from the partially collapsed groin-vaulted ceiling filled the dark, musty interior, so that they had to pick their way carefully over rain-soaked segments of broken, age-darkened timbers and shattered stones. Whatever pews might once have been here were long gone, doubtless carried off by the area's impoverished residents for firewood. But through the scattered rain puddles and bird droppings at his feet, Sebastian could catch glimpses of half-obliterated inscriptions on the worn paving stones. Beloved daughter of . . . Here lyeth the body . . . buried this day . . .

"You'll be findin' him just there, sir. At the back," said the boy softly.

"I see him," said Sebastian as they came abreast of one of the chapel's slender columns and the dead man himself came into full view. "Damn."

The man had been hung by one ankle from an old wooden beam exposed by the collapsed stone vaulting above. Blood from the gory mess someone had made of his head had dripped down to pool on the worn paving stones beneath him and congealed there. A piece of white cloth Sebastian suspected was the dead man's own cravat lashed the foot of his bent right leg to his straight left knee. His elbows were also bent, his hands hidden behind his back. As the body swayed again in a gust of wind that whistled through a gaping hole in the chapel's rear wall, Sebastian could see that the same white cloth had been used to bind together the dead man's wrists.

"Ye know who he is?" whispered Jamie, taking a step back.

Sebastian studied the hanging man's blood-streaked, distorted features, now a ghastly reddish purple thanks to what was known as the "darkening of death." He'd been in his late forties, big and stocky, with a full face and dark hair. His clothing was that of a prosperous gentleman who patronized London's best tailors without falling victim to the lures of extreme dandyism; his only jewelry was a macabre and highly distinctive gold watch that dangled from the pocket of his pantaloons, with a single fob attached to the end of its chain.

His heart beating heavily in his chest, Sebastian hunkered down to take a closer look at that watch. Exquisitely rendered in the shape of a skull decorated all around with reliefs of Adam and Eve and the Grim Reaper, the watch was hinged at the back of the cranium so that the lower jaw dropped down to reveal its elaborate dial. It was a kind of memento mori, carried by its somber-minded owner as a reminder of human mortality and the brevity of life. And even if he hadn't recognized the dead man's discolored features, Sebastian would have recognized that watch.

"I know him," said Sebastian, his voice flat.

He was aware of the rain starting up again, pounding on what was left of the roof and slanting in through the holes in the walls and ceiling. "When exactly did you find him?" Sebastian asked-or rather started to ask. Except he knew even before he twisted around to be certain that he was now alone in the chapel.