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
