A Regimental Murder (27 page)

Grenville descended shakily from the carriage
and came to rest on a little stone bench beside the walkway to the
front door. He breathed in the clean, warm air, and color slowly
returned to his face.

Brandon and I proceeded to the door. No one
answered my knock. Above in the brick walls, casement windows stood
open, but I spied no movement, heard no noise from within.

I knocked again, letting the sound ring
through the house. Again, I received no answer. On impulse, I put
my hand on the door latch. The door swung easily open.

Brandon peered over my shoulder. We looked
into a tiny entranceway, not more than five feet square, with open
doors on either side. I stepped in and through the door to the
left.

The large square room beyond was part sitting
room and part staircase hall. A ponderous wooden stair wrapped
around the outer walls and led to a dark wooden gallery on the
first floor. An unlit iron wheel chandelier hung from the ceiling
at least twenty feet above us. Dust motes danced in sunlight from
windows high above.

"Eggleston!" I shouted.

My cry echoed from the beams and rang faintly
in the chandelier. No footsteps or voice responded. No servants, no
paramour, no Eggleston.

Brandon whispered behind me, "Breckenridge
truly murdered Spinnet to gain his promotion? Dear God, I was ready
to defend him and his honor."

"Doubtless they had him cowed." I put my foot
on the first stair, holding my walking stick ready.

"Lacey!"

It was Grenville, shouting from outside. His
voice held a note of horror. Brandon and I turned as one and sped
out again to the brick path.

Grenville was no longer on the bench. He had
followed the path around the house to the garden. Roses climbed
everywhere, twining through trellises, rambling across a wall,
tangling in the grass. On the other side of the wall, which was
about five feet high, the earth had been overturned into rich, dark
heaps. Brambles of roses sat in pots, ready to be planted.

As we approached, Grenville moved his stick
through the soil and brought up a white hand in a mud-grimed
sleeve.

"Good God," Brandon whispered.

The hand and arm belonged to a body lying
facedown and shallowly buried in the dirt. Grenville brushed earth
from the man's back, studying him in somber curiosity. In the back
of my mind, I marveled that a man who grew nauseous traveling ten
miles in a carriage could observe a dead body without a twinge.

He leaned down and without regard for his
elegant gloves, turned the body over.

I drew a sharp breath. Brandon gave no hint
of recognition. Grenville got to his feet. "It's Kenneth Spencer,"
he said.

* * * * *

Chapter Twenty

He had been dead perhaps a day. His face was
drawn and gray, his eyes open and staring at nothing.

"His neck is broken," Grenville said slowly.
"Just like Breckenridge's."

Brandon stared at him. "But Breckenridge fell
from his horse."

"Did you see him fall?" I asked him.

"No. I told you, I found him on the ground. I
thought . . . " He stopped. Grenville and I both watched him. He
reddened. "Very well. I followed you when you rode out that
morning. But I lost you in the dark and there was a mist. Later I
walked the same route I thought I had seen you take. And I found
Breckenridge. I thought it was you, fallen from your horse." His
brow furrowed. "Good God. So you were right after all? Someone
killed him?"

"But who?" Grenville asked, studying Spencer.
"Eggleston?"

"No, I do not-- "

A sharp crack sounded in the summer air and
shards of brick from the top of the wall suddenly stung my
face.

"Good lord," Grenville said.

Brandon and I were already on the ground. I
reached up, grabbed Grenville's coattails, and dragged him down to
the mud.

Brandon sat up, his back flat to the wall.
"Where did the shot come from?" he whispered. "The house or the
woods?"

"Devil if I know," I hissed back. "Too
quick."

"The house, I think," Grenville said. We
looked at him. "The direction of the gouge the bullet made in the
wall," he explained.

Another crack, and another pistol ball winged
off the wall and whizzed over our heads. "Definitely from the
house," Brandon muttered.

"My coachman and Bartholomew are still in
front," Grenville said. "They could sneak into the house while he's
firing at us."

"And be shot for their pains," I said
sharply. "Both of them are in there."

Laughter sounded over our heads, from the
open casement windows that overlooked the garden.

"Do we lie here the rest of the day?"
Grenville asked. His usually pristine cravat was caked with black
mud. "Or try to get in there and disarm them?"

"If there are two of them," Brandon said,
"both shooting, or one reloads while the other fires, we could be
here a long time."

"At least until dark," I said. I leveraged
myself up to sit next to him, keeping my head well below the lip of
the wall. Kenneth Spencer's outstretched arm nearly touched my
boot. "We can slip away then. They won't be able to see well enough
to aim."

Grenville gave me a sour look. "They could
always hit us by chance."

"Or . . ." Brandon looked at me. "Do you
remember the ridge near Rolica?"

I knew what he was thinking. Eight years ago,
at the beginning of the Peninsular campaign, he and I had been
trapped together on a path we had been reconnoitering. Our horses
had been frightened away and we were cut off from our troop by a
gunman who kept us pinned in a small niche in the rocks. We had
lain there together, tense and certain we would not live the day,
while bullet after bullet struck the rocks inches from where we
huddled. Shards of rock had stung my face; Brandon's cheeks had run
with blood.

We had escaped by sheer daring and not a
little foolhardiness. I knew what he had in mind. It would still be
foolhardy.

Running footsteps sounded suddenly on the
brick path. "Sir? Are you all right?"

I sat up in alarm. It was Bartholomew,
running to see if his master needed assistance.

"Go back!" Grenville shouted.

We heard the explosion of the pistol, heard
Bartholomew cry out, heard the sickening crash of his large body
falling to the brick path.

"Damn it!" Grenville sprang from his hiding
place, his face and suit black with mold. He took three steps
toward his fallen footman before another shot sent him scrambling
back to the safety of the wall.

I risked a look. Bartholomew lolled on the
dusty bricks between us and the house. He held his shoulder with
his large hand, his glove crimson with blood. Grenville cursed in
fury.

Brandon glanced at me. "We will have to risk
it," he said in a low voice. "If the lad is hit again . . ."

"It was a stupid idea the first time," I
said. "And I cannot run as fast as I used to."

"Neither can I," he shot back.

"What idea?" Grenville panted.

"He can only shoot one of us," Brandon said.
"If we go in three different directions at once, we may get away.
He cannot watch all sides."

I was perfectly certain that he could. When
Brandon and I had agreed, on that ridge, to split and run, so that
one of us at least would have a chance, we had each been willing to
sacrifice our life so that the other could live. The ruse had
succeeded, and we'd both survived. But Brandon had missed being
shot in the head by a fraction of an inch.

He was asking for that same kind of sacrifice
now. I saw in his light blue eyes that he was willing to take the
chance that the gunman would hit him.
It does not matter what
happens to me
, his expression seemed to say,
as long as we
get the bastard
.

I remembered, dimly, why I had once admired
him.

"All right," Grenville said. "Better than
lying here."

Brandon nodded once. "Best to wait until he
fires again. He'll need a moment to take up the next weapon."

"Unless he's got a double-barreled pistol,"
Grenville said.

"He does not," Brandon replied. "The sound is
wrong."

I nodded agreement.

We whispered our plan. Grenville hissed a
protest, but Brandon replied, "I am stronger. I can carry your
footman, you cannot."

Grenville looked back and forth between us,
then nodded glumly. "How do we draw his fire? Stick our heads over
the wall?"

Brandon gave him a brief smile. "That is one
way."

As it turned out, we needed to do nothing.
Laughter sounded once more, then a pistol shot, then Bartholomew
cried out in renewed agony.

We stared at one another in stunned horror,
then Brandon hissed, "Now!"

We dove from hiding. Brandon ran toward
Bartholomew, I around to the right of the house, Grenville toward
the woods.

The gunman decided to shoot at me. I slammed
myself around the corner of the house, pressing myself against the
climbing roses. Thorns pierced my coat and skin.

Breathing hard, I risked a look back. Brandon
had seized Bartholomew under the arms and was dragging him toward
the front of the house. I hurried around the other side to help
him.

My shoulder blades prickled as Brandon and I
carried the footman between us past the front windows and through
the gate. Bartholomew was still alive, though his face was white,
his breathing shallow, and blood stained his scarlet livery still
darker red.

The coach had moved a little way down the
road. The coachman had halted there, holding the frightened horses,
not daring to leave them. Grenville came panting up, reaching the
carriage the same time we did.

I wrenched open the door of the coach, and we
slid Bartholomew in. Grenville climbed in beside him. When Brandon
and I hung back, he stared down at us incredulously. "Come along,
gentlemen. We will go for the magistrate."

I shook my head. "They might run, and we
might never find them again."

Brandon said nothing. Grenville looked at
Bartholomew, who lay groaning and bleeding on the luxurious
cushions, then at us, waiting on the ground.

With a grunt, he swung down again. "Three
against two is better odds. But at least, let us go armed."

He opened a cabinet under the seat and pulled
out two boxes that each held two pistols and bullets and powder
horns. He took two pistols himself and handed the other two to me
and Brandon. We loaded and primed them, and then filled our pockets
with extra balls and powder.

Grenville sent the carriage off with a curt
directive to his coachman to find a constable and a surgeon. He
joined us, his anger palpable.

Brandon led the way back to the house. It
felt natural to follow him as I had for many years, across India,
Portugal and Spain, and into France. At one time, I would have
followed him to hell itself. Too much had passed between us since
then, but somehow, as I kept my gaze on his broad back while we
moved stealthily against the blank wall of the house, I felt a
glimmer of the old bond the two of us had so thoroughly pulled
apart.

We abandoned the idea of entry through the
front door. We could go only single-file through the tiny hall, and
anyone on the gallery could pick us off one at a time. Brandon
forced open one of the downstairs windows and entered that way.
While he made plenty of noise doing so, Grenville and I crept in
through the cellar door we found on the left side of the house,
then up through a cool deserted kitchen and back stairs to the
ground floor.

Silence met us. I peered into the staircase
room and spied Brandon on the other side, waiting in the shadows.
We had agreed to try to disarm the two upstairs or, barring that,
to at least pin them down here until the constable arrived.

One of them stepped out onto the gallery, a
pistol in either thick hand, an affable smile on his face, just as
I remembered from the boxing match at Lady Mary's.

"Evening, Captain," Jack Sharp said
cheerfully. He peered into the gathering shadows in the hall, then
upended his pistols against his shoulders. "Thought I'd frightened
you off."

I said nothing. When I'd read his name on the
paper James Denis had handed me, many things had fallen into place.
In Kent, I had reasoned that only a very strong man could have
broken Breckenridge's neck. A very strong man had been on hand, the
pugilist Jack Sharp. I had dismissed him at the time because he had
been laid out by the farm lad, as Bartholomew had told us, but that
entire scene had likely been a farce. Jack Sharp, probably
instructed by Eggleston, had simply taken a fall, making certain to
show a great deal of blood on the way down.

"I won't shoot you, sirs," Jack Sharp called
down. "Not my manner, not at all."

We remained in place, and silent. I believed
Sharp--he probably preferred hand-to-hand combat, a bout in which
the strongest and most skilled would win. But Eggleston waited up
there, and I imagined
he
would shoot anything that
moved.

"Stalemate, then, gentlemen?" Jack said. He
spoke no differently than he had in the garden at Astley Close,
cheerful, friendly. He was a mate you would join at the local
tavern. "Well, well, if you will not come up, I will come
down."

"No!" Eggleston's voice rang out.

Jack kept grinning at us. "Now, now. I'll
leave my shooters here." He leaned down and dropped both pistols to
the floor. They clanked heavily against the boards. "They are
honorable gentlemen. We'll just have us a chat, me dears, won't
we?"

He was spoiling for a fight. He wanted to
fight the three of us at once, to see what he could do. It was a
challenge to him, a game. I saw no remorse in him for Kenneth
Spencer's death, nor for Breckenridge's.