Chapter 21
“Thought you’d be interested to hear that I finally managed to speak to m’ mother about Sid Diamond,” said Calhoun the next morning as Sebastian was shaving.
Sebastian looked over at him. “And?”
“Seems he’s been on the high toby for a little over a year, since a few months after he was shipped back from France.
Hasn’t killed anyone that she knows of—well, apart from when he was off at war, of course.
Seems he’s acquired something of a reputation for what I suppose you might call ‘gallantry.’ Says she’s never heard anything to his discredit. ”
Sebastian reached for the towel Calhoun was holding out and dried his face. “Apart from the fact that he robs people at gunpoint.”
Calhoun smiled. “Well, yes; except for that.”
Half an hour later, Sebastian met Hendon for an early-morning ride in Hyde Park, as had become their habit when both men were in London.
At this time of year the sun was still hovering below the horizon, coloring the sky a bright yellow and orange.
It was cold enough that the exhalation of their breath hung around them like a mist as their horses cantered down the Row.
“Have you discovered anything? Anything at all?” Hendon asked when they reined in to a walk.
Choosing his words carefully, Sebastian looked over at the man who had raised him. “How much do you know about the activities of Bayard and his friends?”
Hendon was silent for a moment, his gaze fixed between his horse’s ears, his jaw working back and forth in that way he had when he was thoughtful or troubled. “I’ve heard…murmurs. A few cryptic hints from old friends.” He paused. “It’s bad, is it?”
“If he and his friends were eighteen or nineteen, I know there are some who would be tempted to make excuses for them. But they’re not eighteen, they’re creeping up on thirty, and my concern is that what I’ve learned so far isn’t the worst of it.
I can see a group of spoiled, wealthy men with such a sense of entitlement and superiority crossing the line into the sort of behavior that is worse than ugly. ”
Hendon looked over at him. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Sebastian shook his head. “If you’ve heard the rumors and hints, then you probably know as much as I do. Wanton destruction. Harassment that strays into the realm of cruelty and abuse. Beyond that I can only guess.”
Hendon tightened his jaw. “I’d hoped marriage to Fanny would finally settle the lad.”
“It might if he would stay home with his bride. I don’t think he does.”
“Damn,” said Hendon softly. “I assume you know Sir Samuel Toole was in White’s yesterday telling anyone who’d listen that the Radicals are behind his son’s murder?”
“Did he say what this was based on?”
“Something to the effect that the Radicals know he and Lord Bridgewood are their enemies.”
“And yet no one has gone after Bridgewood’s son.
And to my knowledge, Phineas Upcott’s father has rarely left his estate in thirty years, while Gil Keebles’s father is long dead.
” Sebastian paused, then said, “I could be wrong, but I suspect Toole’s accusation comes from an article that recently appeared in one of the Radical journals, attacking the young men for their behavior. ”
“God help us. It’s that bad? That a segment of the press has gone after them?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Do you think any of this is likely to come out at Toole’s inquest?”
“No.”
“When is it?”
“This afternoon. There’s little doubt the jury will return a verdict of murder by party or parties unknown, and that will be it.”
“The Palace will not be happy.”
“No.”
They rode on in silence for a time. Then Hendon said, “Did it strike you that there was something not quite right about the tale Bayard told us Saturday night?”
Sebastian hesitated, then said, “Perhaps.”
Hendon swallowed, then said in a rush, “Is it possible Bayard is the killer?”
The question took Sebastian by surprise; he’d no idea Hendon shared his own fears.
He chose his words carefully. “To be honest, I thought at first that he might be. I thought it was even possible he’d killed his friend, then passed out and not remembered doing it when he woke up.
But now…” Sebastian shook his head. “I’m less inclined to think so.
When I saw him yesterday, he struck me as genuinely frightened. ”
“You think he’s truly in danger?”
Sebastian met Hendon’s worried gaze. “I think he very well may be.”
With several hours still before he needed to leave for the inquest, Sebastian went, again, in search of Erasmus Inkberry. This time he had more luck.
“Ah, Lord Devlin!” said the scholar, his craggy face breaking into a wide smile when his housekeeper showed Sebastian into the warm, overstuffed parlor.
“Come in; come in and have a seat, please. I was hoping you’d return so that we might have a more extensive discussion on the question of human sacrifice in the ancient world.
I fear I was not as frank as I might have been earlier.
” He cleared his throat. “As much as I admire Lady Devlin’s formidable intellect, I still can’t help but feel uncomfortable discussing such things as human sacrifice in front of the fair sex. ”
Diplomatically keeping his opinions on that subject to himself, Sebastian took one of the chairs offered and stretched his cold hands out to the fire. “You know there’s been another murder? This one by hanging?”
Inkberry sank into the opposite chair and nodded gravely. “I saw it in the papers, yes. It’s troubling.”
“It’s been pointed out to me that the three deaths—one by fire, one by drowning, and one by hanging—echo a certain passage in the surviving poem of the first-century Roman writer Lucan.”
Inkberry leaned forward. “Someone else noticed that, too, did they? The thing about Lucan is that he’s more believable than the others because he names three specific Celtic gods to whom human sacrifices were made: Esus, Teutates, and Taranis.
Although most of the details actually come from later commentators on his work—one from the fourth century and another from the ninth. ”
“Details such as that the sacrifices to Taranis were burned in a wooden structure that sounds very similar to Caesar’s wicker man?” said Sebastian.
“Like that, yes.”
Sebastian studied the glowing red coals of the fire on the hearth before him.
“When I was in the Peninsula, I remember hearing about a traditional festival in northern Portugal—the Caretos festival—that ends with the burning of a wooden or wicker human effigy. And I’ve been told something similar occurs in Catalonia during a festival held in May. ”
Inkberry nodded. “I’m not surprised. Wicker giants are also still burned in various parts of France on Midsummer’s Eve. And before the Revolution, even Paris would burn a wickerwork warrior at a festival they held in July. The participants would sing ‘Salve Regina’ to the Virgin Mary.”
“It’s all very suggestive, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, very. It’s quite common to substitute effigies for what were once living sacrifices.
We don’t like to think that our ancestors did something so barbaric, but I fear the uncomfortable truth is that the Celts very likely did at one time practice human sacrifice.
After all, is there an ancient society that did not?
The Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Israelites—they all did it in the past. The vestiges of the practice in the Old Testament are almost too numerous to mention.
Apart from the obvious example of the story of Abraham and Issac, there are several very specific passages in Leviticus prohibiting the sacrifice of children, which surely wouldn’t be there unless it had once been the society’s practice.
Deuteronomy, Kings, Chronicles, Jeremiah, Ezekiel…
a critical reading can be very eye-opening.
Religious practices do tend to be conservative, so I suspect something like that was difficult to stamp out. ”
“ ‘Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ ” Sebastian quoted softly.
Inkberry nodded. “Micah. That’s also a good example of the ancient idea of the ‘sin offering.’ A person—or sometimes even an entire community—guilty of a sin would lay their hands on a victim selected to be sacrificed, thus making him their representative; then the victim would be cursed and spat at before being killed.
The idea was that when the victim died, the sin would be forgiven and the holy bond with the god reestablished.
In later years a goat was substituted for the human victim, which is of course where we get the term ‘scapegoat.’ But the idea that something—or someone—could die for our sins lingered. ”
He leaned back in his chair, his hands steepled before him.
“I fear even the ancient Greeks had the dark practice of human sacrifice hiding in their past. We tend to associate them with the finest flowerings of civilization—art, philosophy, poetry, statesmanship—but then we read the myth of Lycaon.”
“Or Polyxena,” said Sebastian thoughtfully. “And Iphigenia.”
“Ah, yes; poor Iphigenia. Deceived into believing she was about to be wed to Achilles, only to be sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon, so that the Greek fleet could sail to Troy. In the later mythical version of the tale, the girl is rescued at the last instant by Artemis, who magically whisks her off to safety—much as in the story of Abraham, God stops the father’s hand just as he is about to sacrifice his son.
But did you know there are earlier versions of that tale where Isaac does not survive?
The thing is, if you see human life as the most valuable of all lives, that inevitably makes human sacrifice the greatest gift one can give to the gods, doesn’t it?
” He paused. “Or at least, so it seems to our eyes. But that might not have been true two thousand years ago. One can imagine a society in which the life of a prized horse, for instance, would be valued far above that of a slave.”
“Or a prisoner of war,” said Sebastian.
Inkberry nodded. “Remember how Achilles sacrificed twelve Trojan prisoners on the funeral pyre of his friend Patroclus?”
Sebastian leaned forward. “So revenge could play a part in the selection of a victim for sacrifice?”
“Oh, yes. There were many different reasons for making a sacrifice to the gods. After a military victory, prisoners would be sacrificed as a way to give thanks to a war god such as Mars. Other sacrifices were made to appease the gods—as in the case of Iphigeneia. Various societies even used to practice what I suppose we could call ‘foundational’ sacrifices. Someone, often a child or a baby, would be sacrificed for the well-being of whatever was being built and then buried beneath it—things like ramparts, bridges, houses, even sanctuaries. That practice seems to have continued in Britain into Roman times and beyond.”
“That late?”
“I’m afraid so. That’s the thing that aggravates me about the Roman accounts of Celtic human sacrifice.
In reading them, it’s easy to come away with the impression that it was only the ‘barbarians’ who engaged in human sacrifice, but the ugly truth is that human sacrifice wasn’t officially outlawed in Rome until 97 BC, and even then the Romans still allowed what they called ‘ritual killings,’ like the triumphal processions held for successful generals like Caesar upon their return to Rome. ”
“And the gladiatorial games,” said Sebastian. “So tell me this: Why the different forms of sacrifice? Burning, drowning, hanging?”
“Well, think about this: If you’re worshipping an earth deity, you would bury your offering, right?
And if your god is a water god, you would want to drown your sacrifice.
The Norse especially liked to throw their human and animal sacrifices off cliffs and into wells.
But if your god is a sky god, how else are you going to get your gift to him besides burning it? ”
“I’m glad Lucan only mentioned three gods,” said Sebastian.
Inkberry scrubbed one big, blunt-fingered hand across his mouth and chin. “You think this killer is deliberately following what we know of the ancient Celtic customs?”
“It seems likely, wouldn’t you say?”
The scholar nodded solemnly. “Unfortunately, the Celts were also very fond of cutting off heads. They believed the soul resided in a man’s head, you see.
So they’d hang the heads of those they killed in war from their saddles, and then nail them to the walls of their houses and display them on the ramparts of their hill forts until they rotted and fell into the ditch. ”
“Good God,” whispered Sebastian, his throat feeling suddenly tight. “Hopefully this killer doesn’t know about that.”
“What do you think are the odds?”
Sebastian met the scholar’s worried gaze. “Frankly? Not good.”