Chapter 9
Hero waited until later that afternoon, when the hour for paying formal social calls had finally arrived, before ordering her carriage brought round again and setting out for the Half Moon Street home of Gil Keebles’s widowed mother.
As the carriage rolled through the gloomy wet streets, Hero found her thoughts, inevitably, drifting to her own mother.
She could remember one time, when Hero was perhaps ten years old, that her mother had taken Hero along on one of Lady Jarvis’s regular visits to her childhood friend.
Afterward, as they sat side by side in the carriage on the way home, Hero said to her mother, “If you don’t like Lady Keebles, why do you visit her? ”
For a moment, Lady Jarvis looked startled. Then she choked on a bubble of laughter she tried—but failed—to suppress. “Oh, Hero, I never said I don’t like her. She was my dearest friend growing up.”
“But you don’t really like her much anymore, do you?”
Lady Jarvis’s laughter died. She’d always tried very hard to be honest with her daughter, and she now said, “I’ll admit I liked her better when we were younger. She was…different then—adventuresome, strong, and fun; not bitter and, well, waspish the way she is now.”
“So what changed her?”
Lady Jarvis thought about it. “Her marriage, I suppose.”
It took Hero a moment to digest this. “Does marriage always change a woman?”
“Not always, but it can. Which is why a wise woman chooses her husband very, very carefully.”
Hero could remember thinking at the time that her mother had not chosen her husband carefully.
As much as Hero loved her father, she knew her mother was deeply unhappy in her marriage and had been for as long as Hero could remember.
She’d never become bitter or waspish, but that was obviously a danger.
“I don’t think I want to marry at all,” she’d said.
“Oh, Hero.” Lady Jarvis had glanced over at her and smiled. “I suspect you’ll change your mind someday.”
Lady Jarvis had been dead now for three years, but Hero still found her breath catching at the memory. Still felt the heavy inner ache of yearning for her mother that she’d realized long ago was never going to go away.
Lady Keebles had been in her late thirties when her only son, Gilbert, was born, which Hero figured meant she was now somewhere in her sixties.
In Hero’s memories she had always been a wispy type of woman, never exactly ill but also somehow not quite well.
For years she had worn her fine, silver-threaded fair hair coiled around her head like a faded halo.
Hero found the General’s widow dressed in deep mourning and half sitting, half lying on a cream silk–covered sofa before the fire in her drawing room.
The room was small but tastefully furnished, with a white marble fireplace above which hung an enormous portrait of the late General Sir Peyton Keebles.
At the sight of Hero, the widow let the newspaper she’d been reading fall onto the pile of other papers at her feet and made as if to rise.
“Oh, please don’t disturb yourself, Lady Keebles,” said Hero, going quickly to take the older woman’s outstretched hands in hers. “Just sit there and be comfortable. And please accept my apologies for intruding on you like this on a Sunday.”
“Dearest Hero.” The widow squeezed Hero’s hands and compromised by sitting up straighter. “Do have a seat. I think I can guess why you’ve come. If I remember correctly, Bayard Wilcox is Devlin’s nephew, is he not?”
“He is, yes; his sister Amanda’s son.”
“I remember their mother, Lady Hendon. She was so very beautiful. Beautiful and vibrant and—” She broke off, as if reluctant to put whatever she was about to say into words.
Hero suspected the word she’d been on the verge of using was “scandalous.” But she smiled and said, “Yes, she was very beautiful.”
“And she died so young.”
She hadn’t, of course; after staging her own death when Sebastian was a child of eleven, Lady Hendon had run off to Venice with a lover. But once again Hero simply nodded and said, “Yes.”
Lady Keebles heaved a sad sigh. “What a horror this all is. Marcus dead now, too, and Bayard lucky to have escaped with his life.” She fluttered one hand toward the papers at her feet.
“I can’t believe the rubbish I’ve been reading, all this nonsense about Druids and human sacrifice and goodness only knows what else.
But hopefully Bow Street will now quit treating me like a foolish old woman and admit I was right in insisting that Gilbert was not the victim of common thieves. ”
“You don’t think Gil was attacked by footpads?”
“No, I do not. It’s what they always do when there’s a strange, troublesome murder; have you noticed? Blame it on footpads! Much easier to accuse some common thief and hang him in front of the roaring crowds at Newgate than to actually set about unmasking the true killer.”
Much easier, thought Hero.
“Not that I would object to them clearing the city of those detestable reprobates,” Lady Keebles was saying.
“But it should have been obvious to everyone from the very beginning that my son was deliberately murdered, and why. And yet, for reasons I’ll never understand, Bow Street has refused even to consider holding the man responsible accountable. ”
“Who do you think was responsible?”
“That German!”
Hero gave a faint shake of her head. “What German?”
“Accum, of course.”
Hero stared at her. “You can’t mean Herr Friedrich Accum?”
“Of course I mean Friedrich Accum!”
Hero sat back abruptly in her chair. Friedrich Accum was a German chemist who’d made England his home for over twenty years.
It was thanks largely to Accum that more and more of London’s streets were now being lit by gas.
But Accum was more than a simple inventor; the chemist had made it one of his missions in life to bring the knowledge of science to the general public, writing his books in a way that made them accessible to more people and delivering public lectures on chemistry, minerology, and pharmaceuticals.
He also manufactured and sold a range of portable and affordable scientific instruments and laboratory equipment.
Devlin regularly used Accum’s kits for the analysis of the soils and stones of his fields in Hampshire.
“Why in the world would Herr Accum have wanted to kill Gil?”
“He tried to sue them, you know,” said Lady Keebles, her mouth prissing with scornful contempt. “Can you image? He actually tried to sue Gil and the others!”
“ ‘The others’ being Gil’s friends?”
“Yes. He didn’t get anywhere, of course. So he killed Gil, and now he’s killed young Toole as well.”
“But…why would Accum want to sue Gil and his friends?”
“Because of the explosion.”
“What explosion?”
Lady Keebles sank back against her sofa’s cushions.
“He gives lessons, you know—Accum, I mean—in his house in Compton Street. Chemistry lessons or some such thing, where he shows people how to conduct experiments. Gil and Marcus and the others thought it would be great fun, except there was an explosion, and Accum tried to hold them accountable.” She pushed out her breath between her front teeth in a derisive, contemptuous sound that wasn’t a laugh. “What on earth did he expect?”
“Obviously not that,” said Hero. “When did this happen?”
“Last October.”
“I can understand Accum feeling…aggrieved that he lost his suit,” said Hero, choosing her words carefully. “But what makes you think he would then feel moved to commit murder?”
“He’s a nasty, choleric man. Have you met him?”
“I have, actually.”
Lady Keebles nodded, as if that settled everything.
Hero studied the older woman’s pinched, grief-ravaged face and felt a wave of empathy mixed with what she knew was quiet horror, for she did not want to even try to imagine what it would be like to be in this woman’s place, to have lost her only son.
“Can you think of anyone else who might have wanted to kill Gil?”
“No. He was the sweetest boy. Your mother always used to say so; you remember? She was always saying to me, ‘Harriet, that little boy is the sweetest child I’ve ever seen.’ ”
Hero could remember her mother calling Gilbert Keebles an overindulged, sulky, entitled brat, but never “sweet.” She was still trying to think of a tactful reply when Lady Keebles sighed again and said, “I can only be grateful that Sir Peyton didn’t live to see this day.
When I think of all the years we tried so hard to have a son.
Eight girls the good Lord sent to us before he finally blessed us with Gilbert.
And now he’s taken our sweet boy away again. ”
“I’m so sorry,” said Hero.
“Of course,” Lady Keebles was saying, “your mother went through the same thing with her only son.”
“Yes,” said Hero, her throat suddenly, painfully tight. Her brother David’s death was still raw and always would be.
“But now your father’s new wife has given him another son. Such a blessing, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Hero.
“And you have children of your own now, I believe?”
“I do, yes. A son, Simon, and a little girl, Guinevere.”
“Only the one son? I thought I saw you the other day with two little boys.”
“Patrick is an orphan Devlin and I are raising.”
“Oh? He looks very much like your own son, doesn’t he?” She paused, then added archly, “And so like Devlin.”
Hero realized her fingers were curling into claws and had to force herself to relax them.
The inescapable resemblance between Patrick and Simon—and between Devlin and Patrick—had given rise to much speculation and tittering amongst the ton.
But Lady Keebles was the first person to have teased Hero about it openly.
“Patrick’s father and Devlin were distantly related,” said Hero, keeping her voice even.