Free What Remains of Heaven by C. S. Harris Page B

brightened. “Aye, gov’nor. Any idea what part o’ the area ’e ’ails from?”
    Sebastian gathered the gray’s reins. “No.”
    Tom gave a cheery laugh and hopped down from his perch at the rear of the curricle. “I’ll find ’im, gov’nor. Ne’er you fear!”

Chapter 12
     
    Hero spent what was left of the day prowling the big Jarvis townhouse on Berkeley Square and awaiting the arrival of Bishop Prescott’s appointment schedule from London House.
    The discovery that the Archbishop of Canterbury had asked Viscount Devlin to investigate Prescott’s death filled her with a driving sense of urgency. She knew Devlin, which meant she knew it was only a matter of time before he discovered the truth behind her recent visits to the Bishop. And once he knew that, she had no doubt he would be relentless in his determination to “do the honorable thing” and marry her. Wild and unorthodox Devlin might be, but he was still an officer and a gentleman. And in affairs of this nature, the gentleman’s code was inflexible.
    Of course, he could not compel her to marry him. Normally, Hero would have laughed at the suggestion that she might find it difficult to resist him. But she was discovering that pregnancy had the disconcerting effect of making even the strongest of females weak and—God help her—weepy. There were times, particularly in the dark, sleepless hours just before dawn, when she found herself actually considering such a solution. Which made it vitally important that the Bishop’s murder be solved. Quickly. Before it was too late.
    That evening, when the papers from London House had still not arrived, she pleaded a headache (which was real enough) and stayed home from a dinner at the Austrian ambassador’s. She was convinced the schedule from the Bishop’s chaplain would arrive at any moment.
    But it never did.
     
     
    That night, Sebastian dressed in a white silk waistcoat, black tails and knee breeches, and silk stockings, and directed his carriage toward Covent Garden.
    He arrived late, after the fashionable crush of chattering society members had settled in their private boxes, and after the less-than-fashionable stampede of those taking advantage of the theater’s practice of selling off all empty gallery seats at half price after the second interval.
    For the better part of a year, Sebastian had carefully avoided the theater. Now, as he walked through the dim corridors and up the candlelit staircase, he breathed in the familiar scent of oranges and imagined for one painful moment that he caught the distant echo of a woman’s sweet laughter, like a ghost from the past.
    There’d been a time when Kat Boleyn, the most famous actress of the London stage, had been Sebastian’s mistress and the love of his life. Then came the devastating revelations of the previous autumn, when Hendon rediscovered a previously unknown illegitimate daughter, and Sebastian . . . Sebastian lost forever the woman he’d hoped to make his wife.
    He knew that painful truth should change the way he felt about Kat, and in many respects, it had. But over the last months he’d been forced to acknowledge that a part of his heart would forever be hers, no matter how damned that might make him in the eyes of God and man.
    The boxes, although private, were as brilliantly lit as the stage, for one attended the theater to see and be seen as much as to actually watch the production below. He was aware of heads turning, of whispers behind raised fans as he slipped, alone, into his box. His many months’ absence from the theater had naturally been marked and speculated upon—coinciding as it did with the precipitous marriage of his longtime mistress to a gentleman of dubious reputation and questionable sexuality.
    Sebastian kept his gaze on the stage below.
    Resplendent in the red velvet robes of Portia in The Merchant of Venice , Kat was as beautiful as ever, her cheekbones exquisitely high and flaring, her dark hair touched with