Where Shadows Dance by C.S. Harris

streets.”
    Jarvis drew up abruptly and swung to face him.
    Sebastian reined in and nodded to his middle-aged groom, Giles, who hopped off his rear perch and took a step back to await Sebastian on the footpath.
    “My lord?” said Sebastian to Jarvis.
    With unexpected agility, the big man leapt up into the curricle to take the seat beside Sebastian. “Very well. You may drop me at the Admiralty. Now, what the devil is it?”
    Sebastian gave his horses the office to start, his attention all for the task of guiding the grays back out into traffic. “Miss Hero Jarvis has consented to become my wife.”
    Jarvis remained silent. Then he said, his voice calm, “I take it this is some sort of a jest. A vulgar wager, perhaps, or—”
    “You know it is not,” said Sebastian, turning onto Whitehall.
    “You would have me believe that Hero has agreed to this? Hero?”
    “Yes.”
    “Preposterous.”
    “Ask her.”
    Jarvis’s large fist tightened around the seat’s iron railing. “And if I refuse my consent?”
    Glancing sideways, Sebastian studied the older man’s florid, closed face. The thought of having Lord Jarvis as his father-in-law alarmed him almost as much as the concept of taking Hero Jarvis to wife. He said, “I assume you know your daughter better than that. She is determined to wed, with or without your approval.”
    Jarvis let out a sound somewhere between a grunt and a snort. “Why are you doing this?”
    Sebastian met Jarvis’s fierce stare. He tried to remind himself the man was a father, with a father’s concerns. “Believe me when I say that my motives are nothing except honorable.”
    Jarvis turned his head away. “Pull up here.”
    Sebastian reined in his horses and waited while the Baron clambered down from the high seat. “The Archbishop’s chapel in Lambeth. Thursday. Eleven o’clock. Be there or not, as you choose,” he said, and drove off to retrieve his groom.

Chapter 15
    P aul Gibson limped up Tower Hill, increasingly conscious of a faint but unmistakable stench of putrefying flesh that intensified as he drew closer to his small stone house and the adjoining surgery.
    He was met at the entrance by his housekeeper, a squarefaced, foul-tempered matron named Mrs. Federico. “I’m a housekeeper, I am,” she squawked, flapping her stained apron at him. “A housekeeper! Not some bleedin’ sexton.”
    “And a wonderful housekeeper you are, too, Mrs. Federico,” lied Gibson, turning on the Irish and giving her a cajoling smile. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”
    ʺHmph ,ʺ she said, stomping after him down the narrow hall. “I told them, ‘I want nothin’ to do with that thing.’ But did they listen? No. ‘Do you have a key to the buildin’ out the back?’ they ask me. ‘Not bloody likely,ʹ says I. ‘Why, just keepin’ his house and cookin’ his meals is more than a Christian ought to be asked to do,’ says I. ‘Have you seen what he keeps in those jars of his?’ says I.”
    Gibson poured a tankard of ale from the pitcher in the kitchen and headed out the back door. The jars—or, more properly, their contents—were the excuse Mrs. Federico used to avoid cleaning most of the rooms in the house. He said, “I take it someone’s brought me a body, have they?”
    “If you want to call it that. ‘Then we’ll just have to wait for him,’ they says, like the thing ain’t smellin’ bad enough to put the whole neighborhood off its dinner.”
    Gibson grunted.
    She followed him out onto the back stoop. “I’ve already had Mel Jacobs here complainin’. And Mrs. Cummings too. Worse than a bloody charnel house, it is.” She stopped at the top of the steps. “You don’t pay me enough for this,” she shouted after him as he cut across the unkempt yard. “You hear? You don’t pay me enough!”
    He found the constables waiting for him in the narrow strip of shade cast by the small outbuilding’s stone walls. One was a gnarled, grizzled old codger who