St. Cyr 02 - When Gods Die by C. S. Harris

Author:C. S. Harris
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery & Detective, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781741753646
Publisher: Signet
Published: 2006-11-06T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 33

They were referred to as morning calls, that endless round of formal visits that took place daily amongst the members of Society in residence in London. But the truth was that no gentleman or lady with any pretensions to breeding would dream of appearing on the doorstep of any but his or her most intimate of friends before three o’clock.

And so Sebastian spent the next several hours in Jackson’s saloon, working the soreness out of his muscles. It wasn’t until half past three that he arrived at the home of Guinevere’s sister, Morgana, Lady Quinlan. After the thinly veiled hostility of their encounter at the balloon ascension, he half expected to be told she was not at home. Instead, he was shown upstairs to the drawing room, where he found Lady Quinlan in conversation with another caller, a young woman introduced to him as Lady Portland, wife to the Home Secretary and half sister to Guinevere’s childhood love, the Chevalier de Varden.

She had much the look of her mother, Isolde, being incredibly small and fine-boned. Only her hair was different, an ashen blond rather than a fiery auburn. She was also very young, no more than twenty at the most. As a child of Lady Audley’s second marriage, she was younger than Varden, younger even than Guinevere.

“Lord Devlin,” said Claire Portland, offering her hand and looking up at him with that intense interest used to flirtatious effect by so many of her sex. “I’ve been hearing a great deal to your credit.”

The hand in his was a dainty, frail thing, and he found himself thinking that Claire Portland, like her mother, was far too tiny to have been the owner of the green satin gown that had been used as Guinevere’s death shroud.

“Portland tells me you’ve agreed to help discover the truth about what happened to poor Guinevere,” Claire was saying. “How gallant of you.”

Sebastian adjusted the tails of his coat and sat on a nearby sofa. “I don’t recall,” he said to Lady Portland. “Were you present at the Prince’s musical evening last Wednesday?”

She gave a little shudder. “Thank goodness, no. I had the headache and decided to stay in my room.”

“But you were in Brighton.”

“Oh yes.” She leaned forward as if confiding a secret. “Personally, I find the place rather tedious. But now that Prinny has been named Regent, I fear we shall all be doomed to follow him down there every summer.”

Leaning back again, she fixed him with an intense gaze and said, “Is it true what Portland says, that the people on the streets actually believe the Prince killed poor Guin?”

Sebastian glanced at Morgana, who sat quietly beside the empty hearth. “It’s been my experience that most people tend to believe what they are led to believe,” he said.

Lady Quinlan’s features remained inscrutable, while Claire Portland tipped her head sideways, her expression quizzical, as if she were not quite sure how to take that. Looking into her clear, cornflower blue eyes, Sebastian found himself wondering just how much Lord Portland confided in his pretty young wife.

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