Beauty Like the Night by Joanna Bourne

Author:Joanna Bourne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2017-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Twenty-three

AT the Sleeping Hound, Raoul cradled his cup between his hands. The food smelled good, but he wasn’t here to eat or drink. Ten ounces of ale was enough to establish his right to a table in this crowded tavern.

Across from him Charles Tweed, surgeon for the Coroner’s Inquiry of Central London, spooned a carrot from his stew. He was a plump little man with sharp eyes and a bulbous nose. His scalp gleamed even in the dimness of the public house. Tweed was a noted surgeon when he wasn’t looking at dead people for the magistrate. Séverine said a questionable corpse couldn’t do better than Mr. Tweed when it came to investigating the circumstances of its demise.

Tweed was Sévie’s old friend, obviously, and ready to be frank about the inquest as a favor to her. He said, between bites, “. . . hyperinflated to fill the entire thoracic cavity . . . petechia beneath the visceral pleura . . . other signs indicative of advanced asthma.”

Sévie’s eyes slid away from Tweed, toward him. “Did you know she had asthma?”

“We were not well acquainted.”

“You weren’t well acquainted with your wife?” Tweed narrowed eyes at him.

“It was an arranged match.” The grim humor of that struck him. He remembered the poke of a pistol in his back. The cold of the chapel. He’d been swaying on his feet, half conscious at that point, thanks to an imaginative beating. One of the Gavarres grabbed his hair and made him nod a proper response.

“The aristocracy continues to amaze me,” Tweed said dryly.

He brought the conversation back to the inquest. “You’re saying she died of asthma?”

“Long-established and severe asthma was the proximal cause of death. I eliminated involvement of the . . .” Tweed lapsed into technicalities.

At the end, Séverine tapped her pencil on the notebook that lay flat on the table beside her. “I don’t understand half of that.”

“Then don’t ask me complicated questions. If it’s a skull bashed in, I say that. Stab wound in the belly, I call it that.” Tweed chased a vegetable around his stew. “With this one there’s no simple answer.”

The barmaid came to refill mugs and look disapproving that no one but Tweed was eating. She was more pleased with the table across the room, where Séverine’s Scots manservant was working on his second bowl of stew.

Only one question was important. He said to Tweed, “Are you telling me it was a natural death?”

Sévie looked up from her notes. “You saw that she’d been tied up?”

Tweed chewed for a while. “It wasn’t murder,” he said. “Or I would have called it that.”

Damn this juggling words. “She chose that moment to fall over dead? Pure coincidence?”

“Pretty much.” Tweed crumbled bread into his bowl. “This is why I never talk to families. It’s pointless.”

“Do it as a favor to me,” Séverine said.

“For you, then,” Tweed said, “and your father, who’s one of the few sensible men I meet in the way of doing business.” He scraped his spoon around the bowl.

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