Hanover Square Affair, The (2 page)

I accompanied them. My purpose in Mayfair that afternoon had been an appointment with the wife of my former commander, at their Brook Street house, but I was just as happy to climb into the cart and let it take me in the opposite direction.

Louisa would be annoyed when I sent my regrets, but I welcomed the chance to avoid the meeting. I had a feeling I knew what she wanted to speak to me about, and I wanted nothing to do with it. Also, her husband might be home, the man who had once been my mentor and closer to me than a brother. That same man had ended my career and very nearly my life.

The drover made his slow way through the traffic, still bottled, to Swallow Street, a narrow artery south. Plans were underway to widen this street into an elegant thoroughfare so that the Prince Regent would be able to travel a more or less direct route from a park that would be built north of Oxford Street to his opulent Carleton House just below Pall Mall. There the Prince, who’d been Regent for five years now, dwelled in splendor, while his father, King George, slowly lived through his madness in his padded rooms in Windsor. The rest of us used Swallow Street simply to leave graceful Mayfair for the darker regions of London.

The fog lowered. By the time we reached Haymarket, the rain had ceased, but the blanket of mist enveloped us. I held the man steadily against the bumps of the cobbles and the sway of the wagon. His wife sat, staring at nothing. Farther south, in Charing Cross, a street puppet theater had attracted a fair number of watchers, who, despite the darkening, chill weather, cheered or booed with enthusiasm.

The drover turned his cart into a small lane that opened from the Strand. The lane was narrow and dark, rather like the one in which I had lodgings, but the tall houses crowded here were painfully neat and respectable. The drover found the house and stopped his wagon before it.

I had to pry the woman’s hand from her husband’s and lift her to the pavement. The drover watched me, pity in his eyes. “Poor sods. ’Ow’d they get all the way to ’Anover Square?”

The same question had occurred to me.

The door of the house burst open, and a thin woman in maid’s garb dashed out. “Madam? What has happened?”

“Help me with her,” I said.

The maid’s eyes flicked from the woman to the old man in the cart, and her already white face paled. “God above. Where did you find them?”

“Hanover Square,” I said.

The dismay in her eyes told me that my words did not surprise her, that she’d been expecting something like this. The gray-haired woman turned instantly from me and flung her arms about the maid’s waist, as though sensing she’d found someone stronger to pass her burden to.

“Did Mr. Horne shoot him?” the maid asked.

The question surprised me, but the drover interrupted before I could ask what she meant.

“What about ‘im, guv?” The drover jerked his thumb at the wagon. The maid turned away without waiting for me to answer and led the clinging old woman into the house.

“Can you lift him?” I asked the drover.

“Aye, I’ve carried ’eavier loads than ’im, man and boy.”

The house opened right onto the street. I followed the drover, who carried the old man, through the open door into the dim hall of a small, but respectable house. The faded wallpaper was clean and uncreased, and competent, if unimaginative, landscape paintings dotted it. At the end of the narrow hall, a staircase rose to the upper floors. The banisters were free of dust, the runner straight and clean. The sconces on the landing held unlit candles, half-burned.

The maid reappeared as we stepped onto the first floor, and led us to a small front bedroom. The drover deposited his burden on the bed there and returned to me in the hall.

“’E’s not long for this world, poor sod,” he said. “Now, then, guv, I’m off to ’Ampstead.”

He didn’t exactly hold out his hand, but I took a crown from my pocket and dropped it into his calloused palm. I could ill spare it, but he had gone out of his way when he had no reason to.

The drover touched his forelock and departed, finished with the business.

I returned to the small, neat bedroom. The old man, barely alive, lay face up on the bed. The maid, her hands visibly shaking, was peeling his ruined waistcoat from him.

The ball had torn a heavy gash through his middle. Bone, white and obscene, poked through the hole, and his chest rose and fell with his shallow, rasping breaths. But I knew enough about gunshot wounds to know that this one was clean. The bullet had passed clear through him.

“He needs a surgeon,” I said.

The maid answered without looking up. “We can’t afford the likes of that.”

I removed my coat. “Get a basin of water and plenty of cloths. Are you willing to help?”

“Help what, sir?”

“Patch him up if nothing else. That’s all a surgeon could do. He may live if the wound doesn’t sicken.”

She stared at me. “Are you a doctor?”

I shook my head. “I’ve bandaged plenty of wounds. Including my own.”

The maid was brave. She brought the basin and a pile of towels and stayed for the whole messy business. Alice, she said her name was, and she’d been doing for the master and mistress—Mr. and Mrs. Thornton—for twenty years. She steadied the basin and handed me towels and held Mr. Thornton to the bed when I came to the tricky business of cleaning the wound.

In the heat of Spain and Portugal, during the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, which had ended only the year before, surgeons had used water to clean wounds when they could no longer obtain healing concoctions. They continued to use water when they discovered that wounds cleansed with it tended to heal more swiftly than those smeared with ointment. I put that theory to the test now, sensing that these people could not afford ointment from an apothecary in any case.

I wrapped his torso in bandages, and Alice bathed him. The room had gone dark, and I lit a lone candle. Mr. Thornton had fallen into a stupor and lay still, but his breathing continued—smooth, clean breathing, with no bubbles of blood.

“Do you have laudanum?” I asked.

She nodded. “A little. I’ve given the mistress a few drops.”

“Give him some when he wakes. He should stay utterly still for some days.”

“I’ll look after him, sir. I always do.”

I wiped my hands and lowered myself to a hard chair, sighing in relief as I removed the weight from my injured leg. “Who is Mr. Horne?” I asked.

Alice spun around, cloths dripping watery crimson onto the bed cover. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“The first thing you asked when you saw your master was whether Mr. Horne had shot him. Does he live in number 22, Hanover Square?”

She swallowed and looked away, and I thought she was not going to answer me. Finally she lifted her head and met my gaze, her intelligent eyes keen and clear.

“He has committed an unspeakable crime, sir,” she said. “A horrible thing, worse than murder. And I’d give anything, anything in the world, to watch him swing for it.”

Chapter Three

At eight that evening, I reached Hanover Square again and made for number 22.

I’d retraced my route via a hired hackney from the Strand, and as I’d neared the elite environs of Mayfair, carriages, horses, and dwellings had become more and more elegant. Sturdy cart horses gave way to elegant, well-matched, fine-blooded teams pulling closed carriages painted anything from modest dark brown to bright yellow. A gentleman passed in his cabriolet, his white-swathed neck stiff with pride at his two-wheeled rig and the high-stepping horse pulling it. A small boy in livery, known as a tiger, clung to the perch in the back.

I’d sent a message to Louisa Brandon earlier, giving her my apologies for missing my appointment that afternoon. She’d demand an explanation when I saw her again, and I’d give her one in due time.

Someone had nailed boards over the ground floor windows of number 22, and the door still sported scars from rocks the mob had flung. Otherwise, the house was still, as calm as if the rioting had never taken place. The railings flanking the stairs to the kitchens remained whole and upright, the columns to either side of the front door were unblemished. The cobbles onto which Mr. Thornton had fallen had been trampled by horses and carriages and foot traffic, his blood already erased.

Despite the afternoon’s excitement, number 22 was an ordinary house, no different from its neighbors to either side. But I had come to pry out its secrets.

I stepped up to the scarred door and plied the knocker. In a few moments, an elderly retainer with a hook nose opened the door and peered out.

“I would like to see Mr. Horne, if he’s in,” I said.

The door closed to a sliver. “We are much indisposed at present, sir.”

“I know. I saw what happened to your windows.” I thrust my card through the crack. “Give him this. I’ll wait.”

The retainer lifted the card to his rheumy eyes, studied it carefully, and opened the door a little wider.

“I will inquire, sir. Please follow me.”

He let me inside, ushered me to a high-ceilinged reception room at the back of the house, and left me there.

I looked about after he’d departed and decided it a pity that the windows hadn’t been smashed in this room as well—it would have made an improvement. The chamber was decorated in garish crimson, gold, and green in the faux Egyptian style, with divans, chairs, and ottomans upholstered with cheap fabric meant to look like brocade. The gilded frieze that marched around the top of the walls had been sloppily done, and depicted nude Egyptian maidens adoring fortunate, and well-endowed, Egyptian males. Under these scenes of debauchery hung incongruous landscapes painted by someone attempting—and failing—to imitate Turner.

I paced beneath these bad paintings trying to decide what I would say to Horne if he agreed to see me. He didn’t know me, I had no appointment, and we’d never been introduced. He could very well have the butler toss me out again, and my errand would be for naught.

But I’d been driven here as sure as January wind drives the snow, because the maid Alice had told me about Jane Thornton.

Jane was the Thorntons’ daughter, an ordinary girl of seventeen: pretty, quiet-spoken, dreaming of a husband and family of her own. Sometimes Jane would visit a young lady in Mayfair, daughter of a family called Carstairs. The young lady would frequently send her father’s carriage for her poorer friend so that the two could enjoy a visit or an outing. One day Jane and her maid, Aimee, had set off to meet the young lady for an afternoon of shopping. They’d never arrived. When the carriage reached the young lady’s home, Jane and her maid had not been in it.

The coachman had professed shock and astonishment and appeared as baffled as anyone else. Traffic in London streets often slowed to a crawl or halted completely; the two girls could have descended at any time without the coachman’s knowledge. But for what reason? It made no sense for a girl to leap from a carriage into the perilous streets of London instead of allowing herself to be safely taken to the home of her friend. A search was made, but Jane and Aimee had never been found.

And then, weeks later, Alice had been walking with Mr. Thornton along the Strand, nearing St. Martin in the Fields church. A carriage had passed them, and its window had framed the face of Jane Thornton.

She had not called out, she had not waved, she’d only gazed at them sadly before another hand had pulled the curtain closed, hiding her from view. Alice and Mr. Thornton had pursued the carriage, with difficulty, all the way to Hanover Square, where it had stopped before number 22.

But when Mr. Thornton had thumped on the door and demanded admittance, the household had denied that Jane was there. Mr. Horne, the widower who occupied the house, even offered to let Thornton search the house for his daughter. Mr. Thornton had looked, but Jane was not to be found. He’d grown confused, his grief overcoming him, and Alice had taken him home.

Alice still believed Jane was at number 22. This morning, Mr. Thornton had persuaded Alice that he would take Mrs. Thornton shopping. Mrs. Thornton had convinced herself that Jane was away buying clothes, and she took refuge in shopping for her return. Mr. Thornton must have left her in Oxford Street and made his way to Hanover Square. He’d returned there a few times before, the Watch dragging him home again. He’d promised Alice after the last incident that he would not go again.

And so, here I was.

The story had awakened in me a dangerous anger, one that had led me to trouble countless times in my past. I had served as a light dragoon for the entire Peninsular campaign, from the time we’d landed in Portugal in 1808 to France’s retreat in 1814. I’d felt no anger against the French in general; they were soldiers performing their duties, much as I was. Their infantry did their best to shoot me, their artillery did their best to destroy my men, and their cavalry charged us, sabers drawn, but that was all part of the great game of war.

No, what commonly enraged me beyond reason were the things others might consider small: the subaltern who’d beaten a prostitute nearly to death; my own soldiers committing horrific acts after the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo; and a toad-like colonel who’d made improper and unwelcome advances to Louisa Brandon, my commander’s wife. I’d relieved my temper in the first two incidents by ordering floggings, the last, by calling out the colonel in question.