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.
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
