Who Will Remember? (Sebastian St. Cyr, #20)

by C.S. Harris

the Honorable Miss Guinevere Annabelle Sophia St. Cyr, their nine-month-old daughter,

“In the version of the tarot that’s popular in southern France, there’s a card called Le Pendu, the Hanged Man.

To Sebastian, Lovejoy said quietly, “This card…what is it supposed to mean?” Sebastian shook his head. “I have no idea. But I doubt it’s anything good.”

How do you accuse a friend of murder?

“Farnsworth’s death makes Tess a widow. She’s now free to marry you.” Hugh was silent for a moment. “I realize it’s probably an odd thing to say, but after all these years it feels almost…irrelevant. There was a time I was desperate to be able to marry Tess, to give her the protection of my name and ‘make an honest woman of her’ in the eyes of the world, as they say. But now…” He shrugged. “At this point we’ve been ‘living in sin’ for six years. I suppose if we’d had children it might be different, but that hasn’t happened. And after a while you begin to realize what’s important—that the real strength of your relationship comes from what’s inside you and from the promises you make to each other. Not from whatever laws God or your society have decided to impose on you.”

Guinevere chose that moment to dump out her blocks all at once, then babbled a string of nonsense at her father and handed him the empty bucket. “My turn, is it?” He reached for one of the blocks. “Shall we start with the yellow one?”

A gleam of understanding showed in those nasty eyes.

“It’s strange—is it not?—how as a species we like to think that, however messy human affairs may be, the earth itself will always be there, always the same: orderly, stable, eternal, reliable. But it’s not, is it? Something has gone terribly wrong with our world. And simply because we don’t understand what it is doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

“Because people need to know about the hardships our veterans are facing,” she said, looking up from writing Sgt. Alexander Watson on a new page in her notebook. “You think they don’t know already? All they need do is look around.” “Some people find it easy to close their eyes.”

The way they act, you’d think they wish the lot of us had just died over there rather than coming home to be a burden on the government. They say they can’t help us any more than what they do because the country’s so deeply in debt. Except why are we in debt? Because they spent hundreds of millions of pounds they didn’t have just to put old King Louis back on his throne!”