A Regimental Murder (3 page)

But I wondered. Something seemed very out of
place.

"Who is she?" I asked.

Brandon's look turned outraged. "You do not
even know?"

My temper frayed. "For God's sake, what do
you take me for?"

"I take you for a man who does as he pleases,
with whomever's wife he pleases."

My heart beat hard. "One more insult, and we
meet. Even if Louisa guts me for it."

At the mention of his wife's name, the fight
suddenly went out of him. His eyes filled with contrite anguish,
and he walked blindly past me to the middle of the room. He stopped
and stared down at the cloak.

He must have been very certain of finding
Louisa here. He had worked himself into a rage, ready to kill me
and drag her home. He had wanted his fears proven, wanted to stand
over Louisa and me, letting the role of the wronged man give him
power. That opportunity had been snatched from him, and now he was
at a loss.

"I do not know where she is, Gabriel," he
said, his voice hushed. "I believe she has left me."

"Good God. Why do you think so?"

"You do not know. You . . ." He broke off and
swung around, his manner as stiff as ever. "This is none of your
affair, Lacey."

All night, I had been told that things were
none of my affair. "You charged in here looking for her, certain
she was with me. You have made it my affair."

He looked down his nose. "It is a private
matter."

"Then do not air it in public. If Louisa were
to part from you, she would find some way to do so discreetly. She
would not simply vanish."

A faint hope flickered in his eyes. "That is
true."

"Doubtless she is somewhere sensible, with
Lady Aline, perhaps."

"She is not. I have called on Lady Aline, and
Louisa is not there."

Alarm touched me. "How long has she been
gone?"

"A week Monday."

"A week?" Alarm bit me. "Did not it occur to
you that she might have met with an accident? Or been taken
ill?"

He shook his head again. "She sent a
note."

I relaxed. A little. "Which said?"

"None of your damned business what it
said."

I clenched my fists. "I am ready to tell you
to go to the devil. I did not ask you to read it out to me, I asked
for the gist of it. If I am to help you find her-- "

Brandon reddened. "She said she wanted to go
off and think. And I did not ask for your help."

"So you immediately thought she'd come to
me."

His mouth tightened. "The last time my wife
decided to go off and think, she ran straight to you, did she
not?"

His voice was dangerously calm, with just a
hint of tremor. We--Louisa, myself, and her husband--had given our
words never to speak of the matter again.

"That was in another life," I said.

He looked at me as though he thought of the
incident every night before he went to bed and first thing each
morning. "It was not so very long ago."

I had wondered when he would reopen the
wound. Louisa had made us promise not to. We had kept to our word
so far, though that had not prevented Brandon from attempting, in a
roundabout way, to kill me.

Where the discussion would have taken us, to
words we could not withdraw or to a meeting with pistols on the
green of Hyde Park the next morning, I do not know, because
Marianne Simmons chose that moment to open my door and walk in
unannounced.

"I am out of candles, Lacey. Borrow
some?"

She was reaching toward the pile of candles
on my shelf even as she spoke, never noticing Brandon or our
expressions of suppressed fury.

She had obviously been out enticing
gentlemen. Her cheeks were rouged, her lips artificially reddened,
her golden hair pinned into childlike curls. Her gown was white
muslin, very plain, a costume a bit out of date, but the thin
fabric clung to her limbs, and her breasts, unfettered by stays,
moved easily beneath it.

Colonel Brandon's color rose. "Who is that,
Gabriel? What does she mean by bursting in here?"

Marianne turned, her hand still closing on a
fistful of candles. She looked Brandon up and down. His suit
betrayed that he certainly had a good income--with an inheritance
of over ten thousand a year, the colonel could afford to frequent
some of the best Bond Street tailors. But for all his wealth of
dress, I saw Marianne sense that here was a gentleman who would not
give an actress tuppence to buy her supper. This put him in a
different category from Lucius Grenville, who had once handed
Marianne twenty guineas in exchange for nothing.

I had wondered over the last months what had
become of that twenty guineas. Marianne had purchased several new
gowns and a bonnet, but the garments would never have cost her that
much. She continued to gnaw bread from downstairs for her meals and
to filch my candles and coal.

I cleared my throat. "This is Marianne
Simmons. My upstairs neighbor."

Brandon's gaze flicked involuntarily to
Marianne's bosom, where her dusky tips pressed the gown's fabric.
"Good God. What kind of a house is this?"

Marianne snatched up the candles. "Well, I
like that. I don't think much of your friends, Lacey. Good
night."

She swung away, bathing us in a waft of
French perfume. She left the door open behind her as she, in high
dudgeon, mounted the stairs to the next floor. Her door banged.

I was left alone with Brandon and fewer
candles.

He regarded me in complete disgust. "When I
allowed my wife to visit you, against my better judgment, I
imagined you at least had taken respectable lodgings. Louisa shall
not visit you here again."

He stopped, remembering that Louisa had
removed herself, at least for now, from his sphere of influence.
His eyes chilled. "I will leave you to it."

He marched out, back stiff, with the air of a
man who has said all there is to say. I ground my teeth as I
watched him descend the stairs, wishing I were more able-bodied so
I could fling him out myself. Unscathed, he opened the outer door,
strode out, and slammed it behind him.

I withdrew into my rooms and seethed for a
moment, then I let out a frustrated growl. I had let Brandon get
away without telling me the name of the woman in my bed.

*** *** ***

She emerged from my chamber at ten the next
morning. I sat at my writing table trying to answer letters, but my
thoughts were too full and the pen had long since dropped from my
fingers.

She had smoothed her hair with the brush I
had placed on the washstand and had washed her face with the warmed
water I had fetched from Mrs. Beltan. Her gown was stained and torn
from her adventures, but her eyes were clear, the frenzy of the
night before gone.

She hesitated in the doorway, regarding me in
some embarrassment. The laudanum had done its work and she looked
rested, though her face was still too colorless.

I nodded a greeting, keeping my expression
neutral. "I have fetched breakfast for you." I gestured to the
small table that held a plate of brown-crusted rolls and a fat pot
of coffee. I paused. "Mrs. Westin."

At the name, her face went dead white. Her
fingers tightened on the door handle, and she stared at me with
darkened eyes. "How did you know?"

I lifted a small card from the writing table
and held it up between my fingers. I had found, in a pocket sewn
into her cloak, her reticule, which contained a card case. The
small ivory-colored rectangles within had proclaimed her as Mrs.
Colonel Roehampton Westin.

She looked angry, but whether at me for
taking such a liberty, or herself for not thinking to remove her
card case, I could not tell.

When I'd read the name early that morning, I
had understood better why she'd not wanted to tell me who she was.
She was Lydia Westin, the widow of the unhappy Colonel Westin, late
of the Forty-Third Light Dragoons. Rumor put it that he had
committed a murder during the Peninsular campaign, a murder that
had only recently come to light.

From what I had learned from gossip in the
coffeehouses that summer, and from my former sergeant, Pomeroy, now
a Bow Street Runner, a young man called John Spencer and his
brother were seeking to discover who had murdered their father
during the rioting after the battle of Badajoz in Spain in
1812.

At first it had been assumed that Captain
Algernon Spencer had simply been killed in the frenzy. But now it
seemed that his true killer had a name, and that name might well
have been Colonel Roehampton Westin.

The happenings after the victory at Badajoz
were, in my opinion, a blot on the reputation of the King's army.
After the French had fled the town, the English soldiers had gone
mad, beginning a drunken revelry that had lasted days. They had
stormed houses, dragged families into the streets and shot them for
sport, and looted all within. They had bayoneted those too feeble
to get out of their way, and forced themselves onto women right on
the muddy cobbles, ripping jewelry from their ears and breasts.

Not until a gallows had been set up in the
middle of the square did the violence cease. I had been among those
sent in to try to restore order. One of my own sergeants had
threatened to shoot me if I did not help him plunder a house of a
woman and her sister. I had lost my temper and let him know with my
fists what I thought of his threats. The sergeant had been carried
back to camp.

The death of Captain Spencer had been
originally attributed to the rioting--Spencer had simply gotten in
the way of soldiers too drunk to tolerate an officer trying to stop
their entertainment. His son, John Spencer, wanting to determine
"the actual man who pulled the trigger on my father," had searched
letters and papers of those who had been at Badajoz, and had
questioned many eyewitnesses in search of the answer.

What he had discovered was that a group of
officers from the Forty-Third Light Dragoons, Westin included, had
gone in, like me, to help restore order. They had apparently gotten
caught up in the madness themselves and had turned on Captain
Spencer, who had tried to stop them. During the fiasco, Spencer and
another officer of their party, one Colonel David Spinnet, had
died.

Colonel Brandon, I'd learned, had been asked
to lend his testimony; he had supped with Westin the evening before
Westin had gone out and committed the deed, and Brandon was
prepared to swear that Westin was already drunk before he even
reached the town.

But now none of that would come to pass. I
had recently read in the newspapers of Westin's death not a week
before from a fall down a staircase.

Westin's wife stood now in my front room,
head lifted, eyes glittering. Brandon had supposed her my
lover.

"You have the advantage of me, sir," she
said. "You know who I am and doubtless all that my name means. I
still do not know who you are."

I opened the writing table drawer and
extracted one of my own cards from my careful hoard. I held it out
to her, which forced her to leave the doorway and venture to
me.

She took it from my outstretched fingers,
turned it around, and read aloud: "Captain Gabriel Lacey." She
lowered it, her eyes quiet. "I thought you might be he."

* * * * *

Chapter Three

I hired a hackney coach to take us through
the hot and damp bustle of London to Mayfair. Haze shimmered in the
air, rendering the classical lines of the Admiralty a distant white
bulk as we passed through Charing Cross.

We followed Cockspur Street, then commenced
up Haymarket to Piccadilly, and thence into Mayfair through
Berkeley Street and Berkeley Square. Even at the early hour, young
ladies and gentlemen in their carriages, properly chaperoned, of
course, were eating ices from Gunter's in the shade of trees in the
oval park. These ladies were not the most fashionable--the grande
dames would still be abed from their evenings out, not rising until
perhaps three in the afternoon.

The hackney turned out of Berkeley Square
into Davies Street, and so on to Grosvenor Street. We stopped
before a plain brown brick house adorned with Doric columns that
flanked a red painted front door. The door was missing its knocker,
which would usually indicate that the family had left London. I
knew the house’s simple façade was deceiving--the houses on this
street held sons of lords, wealthy members of Commons, and
gentlemen of high standing. My acquaintance Lucius Grenville lived
but ten doors down in large and elegant splendor.

A footman in maroon livery hastened from his
post and pulled open the door of the hackney as soon as it halted.
He stared at me in surprise, then his footman's demeanor slammed
back into place and he reached in to help his lady. I guided her
out to him. Her perfume, diminished with the night, mingled with
the scent of summer rain.

I descended after her and bade the driver to
wait.

The footman looked a bit bewildered. He was
young and tall and strong, as a good footman ought to be, and I was
relieved to see devotion in his eyes when he looked at his
mistress. He took his cue from me and led her to the door with as
much tenderness as he might his own mother.

Before we reached it, a man halted on the
pavement beside us. It was none other than the irritating
journalist, Billings.

"Good morning, Captain." He tipped his hat.
"Madam."

Mrs. Westin turned her face away. I gave her
to the care of her footman, and approached Billings, walking stick
firmly in my hand. "Leave now," I advised.

"Good morning, Captain Lacey," the man said.
"Returning home with Mrs. Colonel Westin at such an interesting
hour of the morning. Good gracious heavens. What will everyone
think?"

"Now," I repeated, "before I call a constable
to clear you out."