A Regimental Murder (2 page)

After the third glass, her shaking at last
began to cease. She leaned against the worn wing chair, her eyes
closing. I fetched a cloth, dampened it with water at my wash
basin, and began to wipe the blood and grime from her hands.

Sitting this near to her let me study her
closely. Her eyes were dark blue, wide, and handsome, and her hair,
now tangled and loose, was darkest brown, bearing only a few
strands of gray. Her mouth was regal and straight, the mouth of a
woman not much given to laughter.

She was a lady, highborn and wealthy, who had
been to a ball or soiree or opera. Who had managed to get herself
away from her carriage and servants to walk alone to the unfinished
bridge at the Strand for her secret errand.

I still did not know who she was.

Grenville would know. Lucius Grenville knew
everyone who was anyone in London. Every would-be dandy from the
Prince of Wales to lads just down from Eton copied his dress, his
manners, and his tastes in everything from food to horses to women.
This famous man had befriended me, he'd said because he found me
interesting, a relief from the ennui of London society. Most
Londoners envied me my favored position, but I had not yet decided
whether I should be flattered or insulted.

"Will you tell me who you are?" I asked as I
worked.

"No." The voice was matter-of-fact, the
timbre rich and warm.

"Or why you went to the bridge?"

Her closed eyes tightened. "No."

"Who was the man who accosted you? Did you
have an appointment to meet him?"

She opened her eyes in sudden alarm. Then she
focused her gaze on my left shoulder, holding it there as if it
steadied her. "He was a beggar, I told you. I thought to give him a
coin, because he was pitiable. Then I saw he had a knife and tried
to flee him."

"Happy chance I was there to stop him." My
palm still throbbed from the cut he'd given me, but it was shallow,
my glove having taken the brunt of it. "That still does not answer
the question of why you went to the bridge in the first place."

She lifted her head and bathed me in a
haughty stare. "That is my own affair."

Of course she would not tell me the truth,
and I had not thought she would. I wondered if the women at the
bridge had been right, that she'd gone there to end her life.
Suicide was a common enough means of ending one's troubles in these
times--a gentleman ruined by debt, a soldier afraid to face battle,
a woman raped and abandoned.

I was no stranger myself to melancholia. When
I'd first returned to London from Spain, the black despair had
settled on me more times than I cared to think about. The fits had
lessened since the turn of the year, because my sense of purpose
was slowly returning to me. I had made new friends and was
beginning to find interest in even the most wretched corners of
London.

She offered nothing more, and I carefully
touched my cloth to the scrapes on her cheek. She flinched, but did
not pull away.

"You may rest here until you feel better," I
said. "My bed is uncomfortable, but better than nothing. The brandy
will help you sleep."

She studied me a moment, her eyes unfocussed.
Then, with a suddenness that took my breath away, she lifted her
slim arms and twined them about my neck. The light silk of her
sleeves caressed my skin, and her breath was warm on my lips.

I swallowed. "Madam."

She did not let me go. She pulled me into her
embrace and pushed her soft mouth against mine.

Primal blood beat through my body, and I
balled my fists. I tasted her lips for one heady moment before I
reached up and gently pushed her from me. "Madam," I repeated.

She gazed at me with hungry intensity. "Why
not? Does it matter so much?" Her eyes filled and she whispered
again, "Why not?"

I could easily have accepted what she
offered. She was beautiful, and her lips were warm, and she had
quite entranced me. It was devilish difficult to tell her no.

But I did it.

She sat back and regarded me limply. I picked
up the cloth I had dropped and resumed dabbing the blood from her
face. My hands trembled.

Silence grew. The fire hissed in the grate,
coal at last warming the air. My lips still tingled, still tasting
her, and my body absolutely hated me. None would blame me, it said.
She had come here, alone, deliberately forsaking protection, and
had offered herself freely. The censure would go to her, not to
me.

Except the censure from myself, I finished
silently. I had already tallied too many regrets in my life to add
another.

After a time, her eyes drifted closed. Her
breathing grew steady, and I thought she slept. I returned the
cloth to my washbasin, but when I came back to her, she was
watching me.

"They killed my husband," she announced.

* * * * *

Chapter Two

I stared at her in astonishment. "I beg your
pardon?"

Her voice trembled. "They made him bow his
head and take the blame for their crime, and then they murdered him
to make certain of it." Her eyes flashed. "May they rot in
hell."

I could only gape. A spatter of rain struck
the glass of the open window, and the casement creaked softly.

"Madam, who are you talking about?"

"The three of them. The triumvirate, I call
them. They did everything."

"Who?" I went to her. "Who has killed your
husband? You must tell me."

She blinked, as though just waking.
"What?"

"You have just said your husband has been
murdered."

Tears filled her eyes. "Has he?"

"You have said so."

She shook her head. "I am mistaken. I have
made so many mistakes. Do not heed me."

My alarm grew. "You must tell me."

She blinked again, and then a sane light
entered her eyes. She pulled away. "You gave me too much brandy. I
do not know what I mean." Her gaze darted to me and away, color
blooming on her cheeks.

I stared at her. Had she witnessed her
husband's murder, that very night, perhaps? Was that what had
driven her out to the bridge alone? Or did she fear for her own
life because she knew the murderers' identities? And why the devil
hadn't she simply run to Bow Street?

"Madam, you really must tell me what has
happened."

She shook her head again. "No. I am tired. I
must sleep." She closed her eyes.

I tried for a time to make her speak to me,
to explain her fantastic declaration. She remained stubbornly
silent. When I told her I would go out and fetch back a Bow Street
Runner, her manner changed. Her haughty demeanor fell away and she
regarded me with the alarm of a child. She begged me to say
nothing, that she had dreamed it, that she had invented it in her
stupor. I did not believe her, but I could see that something, at
least, had frightened her badly.

I at last gave up. She was exhausted and
incoherent and needed sleep. I would put her to bed and question
her again in the morning.

She agreed to take my bed, but nearly
collapsed when I helped her from the chair. I lifted her into my
arms. She was light, her frame thin, as though she had been
starving herself of late.

I took her to my room and laid her on the
solid, square tester bed that had been here since I'd let the rooms
from Mrs. Beltan. The thick mahogany bedposts and boards were worn
and scarred from a century of use; births, deaths, and lovemaking
had occurred in this bed time and again. Now my lady would use it
for simple sleep, a healing sleep I hoped.

I had one more weapon in my arsenal and that
was laudanum. A few drops of the opiate would let her sleep in
sweet oblivion. I dropped the drug into a glass of water and
stoppered the bottle again. She drank readily enough, as though
relieved to have it, and lay down. I settled the blankets over her,
then left her to let the laudanum do its work.

I took the bottle away with me. I did not
trust her not to decide a large dose of it a pleasant way to keep
from facing her troubles.

When I closed the door, her eyes had already
slid closed, and her breathing was even.

I spent the rest of the night sitting in the
wing chair she had vacated, my elbows on my knees, staring into the
tiny flames of the fire.

I had laid her cloak and slippers before the
fire to dry. The cloak was heavy velvet, the slippers mere wisps of
cloth decorated with beads. They told me nothing about her except
that she came from wealth and had fine taste in dress.

I still felt her kiss. She had flung herself
at me scarcely knowing what she did. Her strange tale of murder
could have been all invention, as she claimed, but her anguish had
been real. Something had happened to her, something that had made
her leave the safety of family and friends and venture to the
unfinished bridge.

Her behavior reminded me of my own nearly
fifteen years before when I had faced the worst night of my life.
That night I had lost my wife and two-year-old daughter, not to
battle or disease, but because of my own folly and blindness. I had
not been able to see what I had done to the wisp of a young woman
who had married me. She had hated life following the drum, and she
had hated me. And so, one night, she had left me.

It amazed me even now that she had dredged up
the courage to go. She had been like a little songbird, tiny and
easily frightened. She must have truly loathed me to find the means
to slip away from our rooms in Paris, where we had journeyed with
the Brandons during the Peace of Amiens, alone and with a child.
She had gone to her lover, a French officer of all people, and he
had taken her away.

When I'd found her gone, truly gone, a
madness had come upon me that I scarcely recalled. My wife had left
a letter for Louisa Brandon, and Louisa had been forced to break
the news to me. A young woman of twenty-five then, Louisa had
already possessed a strength of will greater than that of any
battalion commander. She'd taken the pistol from my hands herself,
never mind that I must have tried to kill her with it. She'd
ordered a subaltern to sit on me, and then had dosed me with
coffee, brandy, and laudanum until I'd calmed enough to see
reason.

I'd been hurt that day more than any in my
young life, but Louisa had made me live through it and go on. The
least I could do was help this woman live through whatever troubles
drove her.

I looked in on her once or twice during the
night, but she slept quietly, her breathing even and deep. She did
not stir when I entered the room or adjusted the blankets. I left a
candle burning so that she would not be in the dark if she awoke,
but did not light the fire in the already warm room.

As I returned to my chair a third time, the
double rectangles of windows lightened to gray. In the street below
I heard the cries of the milkmaid who trudged through every morning
offering her wares to the cooks and housewives of Grimpen Lane.
"Milk," she cried. "Milk below!"

Her second cry trailed off, and at the same
time, I heard someone clattering up the stairs. The tread was too
heavy to be Marianne's, too heavy even to belong to Grenville's
footman, Bartholomew, who was a spry lad with the strength of
youth.

After a moment, I recognized, to my surprise
and dismay, footsteps I'd not heard before in this house. I rose
and opened the door.

Colonel Aloysius Brandon stood on my
threshold, breathing hard from his climb. He was a large man in his
forties with crisp black hair just graying at the temples, a hard,
handsome face, and eyes as chill as winter skies. At one time he'd
been my mentor, my commander, and my greatest friend. Since our
return to London after Napoleon's first capture in 1814, Brandon
had never visited my rooms. I had not thought he even knew where
they were.

Now he stood on my doorstep, his eyes filled
with cold fury. "Gabriel," he said. "Where is my wife?"

I regarded him in surprise and not a little
annoyance. "Not here," I answered coolly.

Louisa readily visited my rooms whenever she
needed to. Brandon knew that she did. He had never said a word, and
I'd thought he'd learned since our falling out not to doubt her.
But his ice-blue glare now told me that for this past year and a
half he had only been letting doubt fester in his soul, nurturing
it. After everything we'd been through, he hadn't learned a
thing.

He followed me inside and slammed the door. A
few shards of ceiling plaster settled like snow in his dark hair.
"Where is she, then?"

"I have no idea. I have not spoken to Louisa
in days."

He was not listening. He was staring at the
woman's cloak that lay spread across the chair before my hearth,
and at the slippers discarded there. His neck and face turned
slowly purple and he raised his eyes to the closed bedchamber
door.

The last thing the poor woman inside needed
was Aloysius Brandon. I made for him, but he moved more quickly. He
reached the door a second before I did, and flung it open.

He stopped. The woman slept on under my
blanket, undisturbed. A dark strand of hair had snaked across the
white pillow, and one soft hand had curled under her cheek.

Brandon studied her for a long time, then he
slowly turned and looked at me. I reached around him and pulled the
door closed.

He continued to stare at me, his breathing
deep and slow. "You have damned cheek, Gabriel."

"You draw a hasty conclusion, sir," I said.
"She needed help, and I helped her. Any other assumption insults
her."

"Her husband was disgraced. There is no help
you can offer her."

Her husband. The one who she'd said, in her
inebriation, had been murdered. But a husband in disgrace might
explain her words, and despair. In the world of the haut ton,
dishonor could be a living death. She may have meant murder in the
sense that Iago might have expressed it, murder to his good name.
Disgrace to her husband would be great disgrace to her as well.