Free Who Buries the Dead by C. S. Harris

quarrelsome tendency as one of his less admirable traits. “What is the name of this unsuitable young man?”
    “Wyeth. Captain Hugh Wyeth.”
    “And where might I find Captain Wyeth?”
    “I believe he has taken a room in the vicinity of the Life Guards barracks. But I’m afraid I can’t give you his precise direction.”
    “Do you know his regiment?”
    “No; I’m sorry.”
    “Thank you,” said Sebastian, pushing to his feet. “You’ve been very helpful.”
    “Perhaps my brother will be able to tell you more when he returns to town,” she said, rising with him, her expression one of earnest concern.
    “Hopefully,” said Sebastian. Although when he looked into those dark, intelligent eyes, he couldn’t shake the conviction that this self-contained, quietly watchful woman actually knew considerably more than she’d been willing to divulge.

    Sebastian spent the better part of the next hour making inquiries about Captain Hugh Wyeth at the various inns and taverns in the lanes and courts around the Life Guards barracks in Knightsbridge. But when the bells of the city’s church towers began to chime six, he abandoned the search and turned his horses toward home.
    “Ye thinkin’ this hussar cap’n might be the one done for the cove at Bloody Bridge?” asked Tom as they rounded the corner onto Brook Street.
    “I’d say he’s certainly a likely suspect.” The heavy cloud cover had already robbed most of the light from the day, so that the reflected glow of the newly lit streetlamps spilled like liquid gold across the dark, wet pavement. Sebastian guided his horses around a dowager’s cabriole drawn up at the front steps of a nearby town house. And then, for reasons he could not have explained, he was suddenly, intensely aware of the solid length of the leather reins running through his hands, of the throbbing of the sparrows coming in to roost on the housetops above, and of the scattered drops of cold rain blown by a gust of wind against his face as he lifted his head to study the jagged line of roofs looming above.
    “What?” asked Tom, watching him.
    “Something doesn’t feel right,” he said, reining in hard just as an unseen force knocked the top hat from his head, and a rifle shot cracked from somewhere in the gathering gloom.

Chapter 12
    “G
et down,”
Sebastian shouted at Tom.
    “’Oly ’ell,” yelped the tiger, tumbling from his perch as Sebastian fought to bring the squealing, plunging pair under control. Then, rather than duck for cover down the nearest area steps, the boy leapt to the frantic horses’ heads.
    “God damn it!” swore Sebastian. “Are you trying to get yourself shot? Get out of here!”
    “Easy lads, easy,” crooned the tiger.
    The whirl of a watchman’s rattle sounded over the horses’ frightened snorts and pounding hooves. “I say, I say,” blustered an aging, fleshy man in a bulky greatcoat as he trotted up, his lantern swaying wildly, one arm thrust straight above his head as he spun his wooden rattle furiously round and round. “Was that a shot? That was a shot, yes?”
    “That was a shot,” said Sebastian.
    More people were spilling into the street—slack-faced butlers and elegant gentlemen in tails and one grimly determined footman brandishing a blunderbuss.
    “Merciful heavens,” said the watchman, swallowing hard. “Whoever heard of such a thing? In Brook Street, of all places! Where did it come from?” He turned in a slow circle with his lantern held high, as if its feeble light might somehow illuminate the would-be assassin.
    Sebastian finally brought his frightened horses to a stand. “It came from the roof of that row of houses. But I suspect the shooter is long gone by now.”
    “Look at this!” said a skinny youth in silken breeches as he held up Sebastian’s beaver hat with one white-gloved finger thrust through a neat hole in the crown. “That was close!”
    “’Oly ’ell,” whispered Tom again, his hand sliding slowly down