Where Serpents Sleep by C. S. Harris Read Free Book Online

married a widow who owned a grog shop on Newgate. Now he owns at least a dozen different establishments—everything from grog shops to pubs to places like the Orchard Street Academy. He’s smart, and he’s ruthless.”
     
     
    “Ruthless enough to kill a woman who fled his house?”
     
     
    Calhoun raised his spoon to test the consistency of his mixture. “His wife died a year after the marriage. Fell down the stairs and broke her neck. There are those who claim Kane pushed her. But then, it could just be rumor.”
     
     
    Sebastian studied the valet’s half-averted face. “What do you think?”
     
     
    Calhoun moved the pot of boot polish off the fire. “I think people Ian Kane finds a danger or even just a nuisance seem to have a higher-than-average chance of ending up dead.” He glanced around, his blue eyes somber. “You’d do well to remember that, my lord.”
     

 
    Chapter 9
     
     
    Hero Jarvis considered herself a sensible woman not given to willfulness or foolish stubbornness. She came from an ancient, powerful family and understood well the obligations such a heritage entailed. Nevertheless, she did not subscribe to the oft-expressed belief that a woman’s virtues were limited to chastity, humility, and obedience. She did strive for humility, although it was at times difficult. She was also a chaste woman and, at the age twenty-five, had resigned herself to a virginal old age. But that state of affairs came more from an unwillingness to submit herself to a husband’s power than from anything else. And as for mindless obedience—well, in Hero’s opinion, that was for children, servants, and dogs.
     
     
    Her father tended to lump her in his mind with either the sentimentalists or the radicals, but in that, he erred. She was neither. She considered fervent democrats dangerously delusional, and while she supported charity work, she had no personal inclination to ladle porridge at a soup kitchen or volunteer in an orphanage. Her dedication to change and reform was more intellectual than emotional, and more legal than personal. She simply subscribed to a vastly different moral code from the one that governed her father—which did much to explain why he couldn’t understand her.
     
     
    Her decision to take it upon herself not to allow the Magdalene House murders to be forgotten had not been reached lightly. But once she had resolved not to fail the woman who had died in her arms, Hero pursued her goal with the same single-minded drive that characterized her father. Because she knew herself deficient in the experience and skills necessary to deal adequately with the task at hand, it was a logical step to solicit the assistance of someone such as Viscount Devlin. But Hero knew it would be both disingenuous and cowardly for her to convince herself that her obligation ended there. And Hero Jarvis was neither disingenuous nor cowardly.
     
     
    Returning to the Jarvis townhouse on Berkeley Square, she exchanged her gown and matching pelisse of moss green for a more somber gray walking dress of fine alpaca and a small veiled hat. Then, accompanied reluctantly by her maid, she set forth in her carriage for Covent Garden.
     
     
    Hero’s research into the causes of the recent proliferation in the number of prostitutes in the metropolis had given her a familiarity with people and places unknown to most women of her station. She thought it made sense to use those contacts now, in an attempt to find the woman who had originally arrived at the Magdalene House with Rose Jones. Lord Devlin might be skilled in the arts of detection, but the fact remained that he was a man, and Hero knew well the attitudes toward men that characterized the fallen women of the demirep. They would be far more likely to open up to Hero, a woman, than to a member of a sex they both hated and scorned.
     
     
    At this hour of the afternoon, the main square of Covent Garden was still given over to its market, the surrounding streets