I knew full well that Grenville's interest in me was entirely selfish. He sought to entertain himself, and paid me back by smoothing my way into a society that would normally have ignored me. I supposed I should be grateful, but what I mostly felt was irritation.
Colonel Brandon had been another man who'd smoothed my way for me, in this case, into an army commission when I'd had no money to purchase it. He'd convinced me to volunteer as an officer, which I could do as the son of a gentleman, and his influence slid me into the rank of cornet when one came open. I'd clawed my own way up the next few ranks to captain, moving more slowly than others because of my lack of wealth, but Brandon's influence, and money, certainly had helped me.
And then, in the end, he had completely and utterly betrayed me. The look on his face when I'd returned from the mission in which I was to have died had forever shattered any remnant of love and respect between us. Poor Louisa, blaming herself, had tried to sow the seeds of forgiveness, but neither of us had let her.
Small wonder that I never wanted to depend upon anyone again. I barely knew Grenville, despite the interesting circumstances of our first meeting. He must have the acquaintance of scores of officers from the Peninsular campaign, not to mention Waterloo, but he'd fixed his interest upon me.
Grenville confirmed my thoughts even as I had them. "I admit that I collect people," he said, "much as I collect art. I am interested in people like you, people who have lived. I've only played at living."
"You have explored Africa and much of the Amazon," I reminded him.
"A rich man relieving his ennui. You, on the other hand, have lived your life."
I warmed the goblet in my palm. "Yet, I would gladly trade with you."
Grenville shook his head. "You would not, in truth. I have done things that I regret."
"As have all of us."
Grenville fixed an intense gaze on me, but I could see that he saw something beyond me. "Have you?"
I simply drank my brandy. Grenville did not know the half of what I regretted, and I was not going to tell him.
* * * * *
The afternoon had clouded over, and by the time I reached Hanover Square for my appointment with Horne, the sky was dark, rain spattering in little droplets. I descended from the hackney and knocked on the door, hoping the butler would hasten to answer.
I'd decided after speaking with Grenville to ask Horne point blank about Jane Thornton and her maid. If he were innocent, then he would have nothing to fear from me--I'd apologize and leave him alone. If he were not innocent, I'd put him to the question until I knew Jane's whereabouts. If she were in his house, I'd get her out of it, using violence if necessary. If she were elsewhere, I'd damn well make the man take me to her.
I was tired of polite evasiveness and roundabout methods. It was my nature to act. If I offended the man and he called me out, then he did. I'd borrow a pistol from Grenville and let Horne shoot at me while I fired into the air. If he were innocent, I'd deserve it.
The butler took his time. I plied the knocker again.
Instead of the butler, a young footman yanked open the door and peered out at me. I handed him my card. He looked me up and down, inspected my drab suit, then ushered me inside to the dim hall.
The hooknose butler entered from the back of the house as the footman took my hat and gloves. "Captain. Welcome, sir. My master is expecting you. I will inform him of your arrival."
He limped away and mounted the stairs. The footman led me to the same reception room with the same annoying Egyptian drawings and the same clumsy paintings. I did not sit down.
The footman moved to stir the fire. He shot me a few eager looks over his shoulder before he wet his lips and spoke. "Were you in the war, sir? At Waterloo?"
I was asked that often, but no. Brandon and I had chosen semiretirement before Napoleon's escape and return to power in 1815. While the last, glorious battle had been waging in Belgium, we'd remained in London, learning of the outcome only when the guns in St. James's Park had fired to celebrate the victory. "Not Waterloo," I answered. "The Peninsular campaign."
The footman grinned in delight. Already, the horrors of the war were fading, the brutal battles of Vitoria, Salamanca, and Albuera had becoming distant and romantic tales.
"What regiment, sir?"
"Thirty-Fifth Light."
"Aye, sir? My brother was in the Seventh Hussars. He was batman to a colonel. The colonel died. Shot out of the saddle. My brother was that broken up. Narrowly missed ending up a Frog prisoner."
"My condolences for his loss," I said.
"I wanted to go. But I was only fifteen, and me ma wouldn't hear of it. What was to happen to her if both her sons died over in foreign parts? she wanted to know. So I stayed. My brother came back all right, so she worried for nothing."
My own father had forbidden me to go into the army; the fact that he could not afford a commission for me had been moot. We'd had day-and-night screaming rows about it, which included him cuffing me or beating me with a stick when I couldn't elude him. I'd no money of my own for a commission either, and I'd assumed I had no hope. Then, just after my twentieth birthday, I'd met Aloysius Brandon, who convinced me to come with him to India and volunteer.
Brandon had been a compelling man in those days and our friendship had deepened quickly. So I'd turned my back on my father and gone with Brandon to the King's army. I heard of my father's death the very day I'd followed Arthur Wellesley, the brilliant general who was to become the Duke of Wellington, into Talavera, in Spain. The next morning, I'd been promoted from lieutenant to captain.
We heard the butler returning, but he was running, clattering down the stairs. Somewhere upstairs, a woman began screaming.
The footman with his young exuberance gained the hall before I could. The butler swayed on the stairs above us, clutching the rail, his face gray. His gaze fixed on me and clung for a moment, then he doubled over and vomited onto the polished floor.
The screaming went on, winding down to wails of despair. Footsteps sounded on the lower stairs--the rest of the staff emerging from the kitchens to see what was the matter.
The footman charged past me and up the stairs. I came behind, my injured leg slowing me. On the first floor, in the doorway of the study in which I'd met Horne the day before, huddled the maid called Grace. Her cap had fallen from her brown hair, and her face was blotched with weeping.
The footman looked past her into the room, and his face drained of color.
The pretty yellow carpet had been ruined. A huge brown stain marred it, spreading from under the body of Josiah Horne. He lay face up, his eyes wide, his mouth frozen in a grimace of horror. The hilt of a knife protruded from the center of his chest, and a small circle of blood stained his ivory waistcoat.
But that wound had not made the dull brown wave that encompassed most of the carpet. Horne's trousers had been wrenched opened and his testicles sheared from his body.
* * * * *
Chapter Seven
The stink of blood and death coated the stuffy room. I pushed past the footman and made for the window, taking care to step only where the carpet was still yellow. I unlatched and opened the window onto the garden letting in the chill wind and rain. I gulped the cold air in relief.
When I turned back, Grace was clinging to the doorframe, sobbing wretchedly.
"Take her out," I told the footman.
The footman tried to coax Grace to her feet, but she remained in a heap, weeping. The footman grasped her under the arms and hauled her bodily up and away.
I made my way back across the room, barely feeling my stiff knee, my thoughts tumbling. In these moments of shock, when the world blurred for others, it became crystal clear for me. I saw the room with sharp edges, every piece of furniture, every shadow from the tiny fire, every fiber of carpet soaked with blood.
Horne's face was a mask of surprise. His mouth was wide open, his brown eyes round. He'd died without struggle, I could see from the way his hands
lay open at his side. His fingers were curled slightly, not raised in defense. His testicles, bloody and disgusting, rested on the carpet between his spraddled legs. The knife in his chest must not have killed him instantly, but the mutilation of his body had spilled his life onto the bright yellow carpet.
I turned away, like a man caught in a dream, and found the butler in the hall. He leaned against a wall, his handkerchief to his mouth, his breathing shallow.
Here was one whose world blurred with shock; he'd be useless to me. My long habit of command seeped through me, and I straightened my shoulders. "Send someone for a constable. And a doctor. Keep the others from coming in."
The footman trotted back to us from the stair, his young eyes wide and excited. "A doctor's not going to do him any good. He's dead, ain't he?"
"A doctor can tell us how long he's been dead," I said.
"Can he, sir? Must have been a long time. Would have to be for all that blood to dry, wouldn't it?"
The butler whimpered, and I snapped my attention back to him. "When was the last time you saw Mr. Horne?"
He moved his handkerchief a fraction. "This morning, sir. In this very room."
"This morning? It is five o'clock. You did not speak to him all day?"
"He told me he did not want to be disturbed, sir."
"Was that usual?"
The footman nodded. "Aye, on account of his ladies. We were never to come nigh him when he was with his ladies. No matter what."
"Shut up," the butler wheezed.
"We weren't supposed to know. He kept it quiet like. But we knew."
I kept my gaze on the butler. "So you thought nothing of it when you never saw him from that moment to this?"
Both servants shook their heads.
I scanned the room again. An odd place for Horne to have a liaison. The desk was littered with books and papers and the chaise was too narrow to be comfortable. Odd places could be exciting, but Horne was older than I was, his body thickset. A man of his stature would long for a deep featherbed for anything more than a playful kiss.
I looked again at the wardrobe. It was of cheap mahogany, like the rest of the furniture, but its presence bothered me.
I went to it, again keeping to the edges of the carpet. It sported two keyholes, double locks like misshapen eyes. I ran my hand down the seam between the doors. Near the locks, the crack between the doors was nicked and chipped, small gouges in the finish.
I pulled on the handles. The doors did not move.
"Do you have a key for this?"
In the hall, the butler said, "I have keys for all the locks."
"Bring it to me."
Keys jingled as the butler sorted them in his shaking fingers. The footman carried one across the room and laid it in my outstretched hand.
I inserted the small key into one of the locks and pulled open the door. It swung on its hinges, noiseless as mist, and I stopped in shock when I saw what was inside.
Inside the wardrobe lay a young woman, her knees pulled against her chest, her hands twisted behind her back and tied. She lay motionlessly, her eyes closed, her pale lids waxen. A fall of yellow hair half hid her bruised face, and the brown tips of her breasts pressed the opaque fabric of a chemise.
I felt the footman's breath on my shoulder. "My God, sir."
I knelt and touched the girl's bare neck. Her skin was cool, but her pulse beat under my fingers.
"Who is she?" I demanded.
The footman stammered. "That's Aimee. I thought she'd gone."
Aimee. My heart beat thick and fast. Jane Thornton's maid. "Where is the other girl? Where is Jane?"
"Don't know any Jane."
"Damn you, the young woman she came here with."
The footman took a step back, dark eyes bewildered. "The girl she came with weren't Jane. She was Lily."
"Where is she?"
"Don't know, sir. She's gone."
I drew a short knife from my pocket. The footman looked at me in alarm, but I turned away and gently cut the cords that bound the girl's hands.
I rose to my feet. "Lift her."
"Sir?"
"I cannot carry her. You must. Is there a chamber we can take her to?"
"I suppose a guest chamber, sir, but Mr. Bremer's got the keys."
I assumed that Mr. Bremer was the butler. I glanced at the hall, but he'd crept away while we stared at Aimee.
"I'll find Bremer him. When did this girl named Lily leave?"
The footman's brow wrinkled under his white wig. "Oh, weeks ago it was now."
"Where did she go?"
He looked close to tears. "I don't know, sir."
I let it go. "Take her to a guest chamber. I'll fetch Bremer."
I left him lifting the girl in his beefy arms, looking down at her in undisguised awe. I found Bremer in the kitchen. He sat at a table, his head in his hands, the other staff gathered around him. They looked up at me, white-faced and anxious, while Grace's wails echoed from the dark doorway beyond.
A tall and bony woman, with an alert, almost handsome face, her apron dusted with flour, stepped in front of me. "Who are you?"
I ignored her and went to Bremer. "I need your keys."
He unhooked them from his belt and handed them to me in silence, the keys jangling as his fingers shook.
I pointed at a boy who leaned against a wall. "You. Run and get a constable. Then go to Bow Street and ask for Pomeroy. Tell him Captain Lacey sent you."
They all stared at me, and I clapped my hand around the keys. "Now."
The boy turned and banged his way out the scullery door into the rain. His thin legs flashed by the high window as he ran up the outside stairs.
The servants continued to stare at me as I turned my back and tramped away. Behind me, Bremer began to weep.
I found the footman waiting before a door in the upper hall. The young woman lay insensibly in his arms, her hair tangled on his chest. His wig had been knocked askew, which made him look still younger than his thick arms suggested--a child's frightened face on a man's body. The footman seemed unsurprised that I'd assumed command, and waited patiently for his next order.
The room I unlocked was neat and cheerful, the first one with those qualities I'd seen in this house. I told the footman to lay the girl on the bed's embroidered white counterpane and to start the fire.
I shook out the quilt that lay at the bottom of the bed and draped it over the girl. She lay in a swoon, but her breathing was better, her chest rising and falling evenly, as though she were simply asleep. The footman watched her, a mixture of pity and fascination in his eyes.
"Stoke the fire well," I told him. "And tell the other maid to come up and sit here with her. Not Grace."
The footman dragged his gaze from Aimee. "You want Hetty, sir? I'll fetch her."
"In a moment."
I limped out of the room and back to the study. I closed the door on the grisly scene and locked it with Bremer's keys. When I returned to the bedroom, the footman was tossing heaping shovelfuls of coal onto the grate one-handed. He'd built the fire to roaring, and heat seeped into the room.
For a moment, I wanted to sink to my knees and, like Bremer, press my hands to my head. I had come here to get the truth from Horne, by violence if necessary, but someone had beaten me to it. Someone had stabbed him through the heart, cheerfully perhaps. And then, not satisfied with that, the killer had mutilated him.
I could almost understand the murder. Horne was disgusting and self-satisfied, and by all evidence, he'd beaten this young woman and kept her tied and locked in a wardrobe. But what the murderer had done afterward lodged bile in my throat. That had been an act of anger, of vengeance, an act as disgusting as Horne had been himself.
Behind my disgust, my clear thoughts kept working to piece together what had happened. I felt a sudden need to order everything in my mind before Pomeroy arrived, though I couldn't have told myself why. It was Pomeroy's job to discover the culprit and arrest him, not mine.
I looked at the footman. "What is your name?"
He turned from the fireplace, still on his knees. "John, sir. I was christened Daniel, but gents mostly want a John or a Henry on their doors."
"If your master told Bremer he was not to be disturbed, why was Grace there?"
John thought a moment. "Sometimes he had Grace wait on him. When he wouldn't have us."
I remembered Grace kneeling in the doorway, staring in anguish at Horne's body in the stain of brown blood. "Was she there before or after Bremer opened the door?"
He looked confused. "I don't know, sir. I was with you."
I let that drop. "What is your job here? To stand by the front door?"
"Aye, sir. From the morning until I locks it last thing of the day. If a gent comes to the door what has business with the master, I put him in the reception room and give his card to Mr. Bremer. If it's someone as has no right to be here, I chuck him out."
"But you are not on the door all the time, are you?"
He looked confused. "Yes, I am."
"When I arrived yesterday, Mr. Bremer let me in. Not you."
"Oh. Well, I'm really the only man here, ain't I? Except Mr. Bremer, and he's too old. I help Hetty and Gracie carry the coal buckets up and down the stairs. Or a load of wood, or a tub of water to the scullery. No one else is big enough."
"So all day you or Mr. Bremer opens the door to visitors. No one comes in without you knowing it."
"No, sir."
"Who came today?"
His eyes widened. "Do you mean someone who came today might have stuck the master?"
"It is possible. Think back. Who came to visit?"
John's face screwed up with effort. "Well, there was one gent, thin, dark haired. You'll have to ask Mr. Bremer who he was. I was helping cook lug in the potatoes for dinner. I let the gent out."
"When was that?"
John wiped his sweating forehead on his arm, dislodging his footman's white wig and revealing cropped dark hair beneath. "Oh, maybe half past two."
"Was he the only visitor the entire day?"
"Excepting yourself, sir."
"What about the girl, Aimee? You said you'd thought she'd gone."