The room Brandon obtained was not elegant by any means. A tall tester bed stood in one corner, with a heavy mahogany cupboard on another wall and a table and chairs in the middle of the room. A small fireplace, cold, lay opposite the door.
The turnkey barked at a lackey to build a fire. Gloom-faced, the servant looked neither at me nor Brandon while he worked, then he shuffled out. Pomeroy, with a cheerful 'Good day, sirs,' left us alone.
Brandon looked out of a barred window to the courtyard three floors below. He remained silent, his back in his soiled coat still and sullen.
'Sir,' I said. Even after all the years I'd known him and all we'd been through, I still could not bring myself to address him in a way other than as an officer who outranked me.
'I suppose,' Brandon said coldly, addressing his words to the window, 'that as soon as you heard what had happened, you went immediately to my wife.'
'Of course I did. I knew Louisa would be distressed once I learned what a pig's breakfast you'd made of everything.'
'How fortunate that she has a friend as kind as you,' he said, biting off every word. 'A friend who will stay with her in times of trouble.'
'Lady Aline Carrington stays with her.'
Brandon swung around. His face was carefully neutral, but his eyes glittered. 'You must be delighted, Gabriel. Watching me be arrested and tried for murder. My wife will need much comfort during this ordeal, and there you will be. Perhaps the turnkey will allow me to hang a pair of horns above my door, so that all who pass will know that herein lies a cuckold.'
I was tempted to march out of the room and leave the idiot to his fate, but I knew that Louisa would never forgive me if I did. 'You are a fool and a bloody hypocrite. Your wife has never betrayed you. Yet you claimed, with Louisa standing next to you, that this Mrs. Harper was your mistress. If Louisa leaves you, it will be as much as you deserve.'
'Ah, yes. I can learn from you how to be an abandoned husband.'
I stared at him in astonishment. In all our quarrels, he had never cast up to me that my wife had deserted me, as though the topic were impermissible. Now he glared at me, defiance in his very breathing.
Through my anger, I had a hint of understanding. 'Why are you deliberately provoking me?' I asked. 'You know you need my help. Why are you tempting me to tell you to go to the devil and stay there?'
'Because this is none of your affair!'
'It hurts Louisa. And is therefore my affair.'
'Affair,' he sneered. 'A fine choice of words.'
'Your word, sir.' I stepped close to him. 'Do you want to die in ignominy? Hanging is a nasty death, and you know it. Louisa will have to live her life as the wife of a condemned murderer.'
'Lacey, for God's sake, stay out of this.'
'Why?' I asked him. 'Never tell me you really did kill Turner.'
He avoided my gaze. 'I do not wish to speak of it.'
'Did Imogene Harper kill him? Why are you protecting her?'
'I will not answer.'
'I will ask her,' I said.
'You will leave her alone,' he snapped in reply.
'You are no longer my commanding officer. Your own actions made that so. I no longer must obey you.'
I expected him to argue, to rage, to bluster. But Brandon said nothing. After a time, he turned away, his shoulders slumped in defeat.
'You are a fool, sir,' I repeated.
He turned back to me, a strange light in his eyes. 'No, Gabriel. You are the fool.'
I knew I would gain nothing more from him, so I turned away and left him alone.
I visited Brandon's man of business before leaving the City to explain Brandon's situation and tell him to send money to the prison. The man of business was distressed, with good reason. A respectable solicitor wants a respectable clientele, and a client held in Newgate to await trial for murder was a most distressing thing indeed. However, he put in motion the errands needed to ensure that Brandon spent his time in prison in the most comfortable accommodations possible.
I returned to my lodgings and ate a hasty meal of bread at Mrs. Beltan's bakery below my rooms. I bathed and changed my clothes, giving them over to Bartholomew to clean, but I could not shake the stench of Newgate from me.
I took a hackney back to Mayfair and to Brook Street. Lady Aline met me at the door to Brandon's house. Grenville had been and gone, she said, and had broken the bad news.
Louisa was up, pacing her sitting room in agitation. Her face was white, her eyes sunken into hollows. She held herself rigid when I went to take her hands and kiss her cheek.
I explained that I'd seen Brandon settled and that he could have a servant or two to look after him. Lady Aline said she'd dispatch Brandon's valet at once and bustled off to do so. As soon as the door closed, Louisa's hands clamped down on mine.
'What will happen now, Gabriel?'
'Pomeroy and his patrollers will try to gather evidence against Brandon. If they find nothing that firmly points to his guilt, then he will be acquitted.'
'His knife in the man's chest is not firm evidence?'
'Anyone may steal another's knife and use it. Were I to murder someone, I would use a weapon easily identified as belonging to another man. Why bring suspicion to myself?'
'If you were angry, you would not think of that,' Louisa said. 'You would snatch up the first thing you saw and stab.'
'Perhaps.'
Her observation gave me an idea. What if Brandon had left the knife in the anteroom when he was in there earlier with Turner? Why he should, I didn't know, but he might have done. The murderer could have quarreled with Turner, noticed the knife, and in a fit of pique, snatched it up and driven it into Turner's chest.
'Louisa, your husband is being stubbornly cryptic, but I will discover the truth,' I said. 'I will bring him back to you. I promise you that.'
Louisa released my hands and walked away from me, her eyes bleak. 'Gabriel, have I been deceived all my life? I stuck by him through thick and thin. Through everything he did. Even after… When he came looking for me in your tent that night, I went back to him. He tried his best to harm you over that incident, and even then I stood by him.'
I remembered. Colonel Brandon had decided one day soon after Vitoria that he no longer wanted a wife who could not give him children. He'd told Louisa he would find some way to annul the marriage so that they could be parted without scandal. Then he'd left camp for who knew where.
Louisa, her world crumbling around her, had fled to my tent and told me the entire tale. I'd been furious at Brandon and tried to comfort Louisa the best I could. Brandon had returned the next morning to find Louisa sitting on my lap in a camp chair, her head on my shoulder.
He'd assumed the worst.
Not long later, Brandon had sent me out with false orders into a pocket of French soldiers, who had caught and tortured me. I'd managed to escape and survive with the help of a Spanish farmer's widow, who'd dragged me the long way back to camp.
I remembered lying on the bunk of the surgeon's tent, hideous pain leaking through the haze of laudanum, my body sweating with fever and infection. When Louisa had come and discovered what Brandon had done, she'd shouted at him long and hard. I had lain in my stupor and laughed.
'I recall that you told him quite firmly what you thought of him when you found out what he'd done to me,' I said.
