A Regimental Murder

by Ashley Gardner

  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.

  But I wondered. Something seemed very out of place.

  "Who is she?" I asked.
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  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 i
n 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.