A Regimental Murder

Chapter Twenty

He had been dead perhaps a day. His face was drawn and gray, his eyes open and staring at nothing.

"His neck is broken," Grenville said slowly. "Just like Breckenridge's."

Brandon stared at him. "But Breckenridge fell from his horse."

"Did you see him fall?" I asked him.

"No. I told you, I found him on the ground. I thought… " He stopped. Grenville and I both watched him. He reddened. "Very well. I followed you when you rode out that morning. But I lost you in the dark and there was a mist. Later I walked the same route I thought I had seen you take. And I found Breckenridge. I thought it was you, fallen from your horse." His brow furrowed. "Good God. So you were right after all? Someone killed him?"

"But who?" Grenville asked, studying Spencer. "Eggleston?"

"No, I do not- "

A sharp crack sounded in the summer air and shards of brick from the top of the wall suddenly stung my face.

"Good lord," Grenville said.

Brandon and I were already on the ground. I reached up, grabbed Grenville's coattails, and dragged him down to the mud.

Brandon sat up, his back flat to the wall. "Where did the shot come from?" he whispered. "The house or the woods?"

"Devil if I know," I hissed back. "Too quick."

"The house, I think," Grenville said. We looked at him. "The direction of the gouge the bullet made in the wall," he explained.

Another crack, and another pistol ball winged off the wall and whizzed over our heads. "Definitely from the house," Brandon muttered.

"My coachman and Bartholomew are still in front," Grenville said. "They could sneak into the house while he's firing at us."

"And be shot for their pains," I said sharply. "Both of them are in there."

Laughter sounded over our heads, from the open casement windows that overlooked the garden.

"Do we lie here the rest of the day?" Grenville asked. His usually pristine cravat was caked with black mud. "Or try to get in there and disarm them?"

"If there are two of them," Brandon said, "both shooting, or one reloads while the other fires, we could be here a long time."

"At least until dark," I said. I leveraged myself up to sit next to him, keeping my head well below the lip of the wall. Kenneth Spencer's outstretched arm nearly touched my boot. "We can slip away then. They won't be able to see well enough to aim."

Grenville gave me a sour look. "They could always hit us by chance."

"Or…" Brandon looked at me. "Do you remember the ridge near Rolica?"

I knew what he was thinking. Eight years ago, at the beginning of the Peninsular campaign, he and I had been trapped together on a path we had been reconnoitering. Our horses had been frightened away and we were cut off from our troop by a gunman who kept us pinned in a small niche in the rocks. We had lain there together, tense and certain we would not live the day, while bullet after bullet struck the rocks inches from where we huddled. Shards of rock had stung my face; Brandon's cheeks had run with blood.

We had escaped by sheer daring and not a little foolhardiness. I knew what he had in mind. It would still be foolhardy.

Running footsteps sounded suddenly on the brick path. "Sir? Are you all right?"

I sat up in alarm. It was Bartholomew, running to see if his master needed assistance.

"Go back!" Grenville shouted.

We heard the explosion of the pistol, heard Bartholomew cry out, heard the sickening crash of his large body falling to the brick path.

"Damn it!" Grenville sprang from his hiding place, his face and suit black with mold. He took three steps toward his fallen footman before another shot sent him scrambling back to the safety of the wall.

I risked a look. Bartholomew lolled on the dusty bricks between us and the house. He held his shoulder with his large hand, his glove crimson with blood. Grenville cursed in fury.

Brandon glanced at me. "We will have to risk it," he said in a low voice. "If the lad is hit again…"

"It was a stupid idea the first time," I said. "And I cannot run as fast as I used to."

"Neither can I," he shot back.

"What idea?" Grenville panted.

"He can only shoot one of us," Brandon said. "If we go in three different directions at once, we may get away. He cannot watch all sides."

I was perfectly certain that he could. When Brandon and I had agreed, on that ridge, to split and run, so that one of us at least would have a chance, we had each been willing to sacrifice our life so that the other could live. The ruse had succeeded, and we'd both survived. But Brandon had missed being shot in the head by a fraction of an inch.

He was asking for that same kind of sacrifice now. I saw in his light blue eyes that he was willing to take the chance that the gunman would hit him. It does not matter what happens to me, his expression seemed to say, as long as we get the bastard.

I remembered, dimly, why I had once admired him.

"All right," Grenville said. "Better than lying here."

Brandon nodded once. "Best to wait until he fires again. He'll need a moment to take up the next weapon."

"Unless he's got a double-barreled pistol," Grenville said.

"He does not," Brandon replied. "The sound is wrong."

I nodded agreement.

We whispered our plan. Grenville hissed a protest, but Brandon replied, "I am stronger. I can carry your footman, you cannot."

Grenville looked back and forth between us, then nodded glumly. "How do we draw his fire? Stick our heads over the wall?"

Brandon gave him a brief smile. "That is one way."

As it turned out, we needed to do nothing. Laughter sounded once more, then a pistol shot, then Bartholomew cried out in renewed agony.

We stared at one another in stunned horror, then Brandon hissed, "Now!"

We dove from hiding. Brandon ran toward Bartholomew, I around to the right of the house, Grenville toward the woods.

The gunman decided to shoot at me. I slammed myself around the corner of the house, pressing myself against the climbing roses. Thorns pierced my coat and skin.

Breathing hard, I risked a look back. Brandon had seized Bartholomew under the arms and was dragging him toward the front of the house. I hurried around the other side to help him.

My shoulder blades prickled as Brandon and I carried the footman between us past the front windows and through the gate. Bartholomew was still alive, though his face was white, his breathing shallow, and blood stained his scarlet livery still darker red.

The coach had moved a little way down the road. The coachman had halted there, holding the frightened horses, not daring to leave them. Grenville came panting up, reaching the carriage the same time we did.

I wrenched open the door of the coach, and we slid Bartholomew in. Grenville climbed in beside him. When Brandon and I hung back, he stared down at us incredulously. "Come along, gentlemen. We will go for the magistrate."

I shook my head. "They might run, and we might never find them again."

Brandon said nothing. Grenville looked at Bartholomew, who lay groaning and bleeding on the luxurious cushions, then at us, waiting on the ground.

With a grunt, he swung down again. "Three against two is better odds. But at least, let us go armed."

He opened a cabinet under the seat and pulled out two boxes that each held two pistols and bullets and powder horns. He took two pistols himself and handed the other two to me and Brandon. We loaded and primed them, and then filled our pockets with extra balls and powder.

Grenville sent the carriage off with a curt directive to his coachman to find a constable and a surgeon. He joined us, his anger palpable.

Brandon led the way back to the house. It felt natural to follow him as I had for many years, across India, Portugal and Spain, and into France. At one time, I would have followed him to hell itself. Too much had passed between us since then, but somehow, as I kept my gaze on his broad back while we moved stealthily against the blank wall of the house, I felt a glimmer of the old bond the two of us had so thoroughly pulled apart.

We abandoned the idea of entry through the front door. We could go only single-file through the tiny hall, and anyone on the gallery could pick us off one at a time. Brandon forced open one of the downstairs windows and entered that way. While he made plenty of noise doing so, Grenville and I crept in through the cellar door we found on the left side of the house, then up through a cool deserted kitchen and back stairs to the ground floor.

Silence met us. I peered into the staircase room and spied Brandon on the other side, waiting in the shadows. We had agreed to try to disarm the two upstairs or, barring that, to at least pin them down here until the constable arrived.

One of them stepped out onto the gallery, a pistol in either thick hand, an affable smile on his face, just as I remembered from the boxing match at Lady Mary's.

"Evening, Captain," Jack Sharp said cheerfully. He peered into the gathering shadows in the hall, then upended his pistols against his shoulders. "Thought I'd frightened you off."

I said nothing. When I'd read his name on the paper James Denis had handed me, many things had fallen into place. In Kent, I had reasoned that only a very strong man could have broken Breckenridge's neck. A very strong man had been on hand, the pugilist Jack Sharp. I had dismissed him at the time because he had been laid out by the farm lad, as Bartholomew had told us, but that entire scene had likely been a farce. Jack Sharp, probably instructed by Eggleston, had simply taken a fall, making certain to show a great deal of blood on the way down.

"I won't shoot you, sirs," Jack Sharp called down. "Not my manner, not at all."

We remained in place, and silent. I believed Sharp-he probably preferred hand-to-hand combat, a bout in which the strongest and most skilled would win. But Eggleston waited up there, and I imagined he would shoot anything that moved.

"Stalemate, then, gentlemen?" Jack said. He spoke no differently than he had in the garden at Astley Close, cheerful, friendly. He was a mate you would join at the local tavern. "Well, well, if you will not come up, I will come down."

"No!" Eggleston's voice rang out.

Jack kept grinning at us. "Now, now. I'll leave my shooters here." He leaned down and dropped both pistols to the floor. They clanked heavily against the boards. "They are honorable gentlemen. We'll just have us a chat, me dears, won't we?"

He was spoiling for a fight. He wanted to fight the three of us at once, to see what he could do. It was a challenge to him, a game. I saw no remorse in him for Kenneth Spencer's death, nor for Breckenridge's.

He was wrong if he thought I would not shoot an unarmed man. I would shoot him even if Grenville and Brandon were too punctilious to; I'd shoot to bring him down until the constable came to put him in chains.

Eggleston stepped into the light. His face was white, his blue child's eyes protruding. "Lacey, you interfering bastard, go away!"

Jack grinned. He turned and pattered along the gallery to his lover and kissed him on the mouth. Then, his manner still oozing friendliness, he turned back and started down the stairs.

"Go away, all of you!" Eggleston shouted desperately.

Jack kept plodding toward us. Brandon came forward to meet him, pistol ready, despite my signaling for him to stay back. If he got in my way, I could not fire at Sharp.

Behind me Grenville quivered with rage. "If we rush the bastard-

"

"Eggleston will shoot us," I said. "And Sharp probably has a knife up his sleeve."

Brandon reached him. "I am arresting you, sir," he said to Sharp in stentorian tones. "For the deaths of Colonel Roehampton Westin, Lord Breckenridge, and Mr. Kenneth Spencer."

Brandon carried power in his voice. So he had sounded in the days when he'd commanded an unruly band of cavalry troops and kept them all alive. For a moment Jack Sharp gazed at him in astonished apprehension, the face of a clever pickpocket who'd at last been nicked. Then he moved.

Everything happened very fast. Ringing footsteps sounded without, and a man burst through the door. John Spencer.

Before I could be startled at his sudden appearance, or wonder that he'd followed us here, he ran at Jack Sharp, howling murder, his face a mask of rage and grief.

A blade flashed in Sharp's hand. Brandon grabbed Spencer, stopping him just before he reached Sharp. Eggleston aimed his pistol at the both of them.

I saw this in a split second before I was racing up the stairs to Eggleston. Sharp pain flashed through my leg, then went numb. I hurled myself at Eggleston, even as he fired.

The shot went wide. The ball struck the chain of the heavy iron chandelier, shattering the links. Below, Brandon hurled Spencer out of the way, just as the iron wheel of the chandelier crashed down.

Eggleston screamed. Grenville, swearing hard, ran forward. John Spencer, panting, turned back in horror.

Brandon lay facedown beneath the chandelier, the arc of iron pinning him. The legs of Jack Sharp protruded from the other side of the massive thing, and he lay still beneath it, his face a mass of blood.

Eggleston screamed again. He came at me, fists waving. I ducked a blow and punched him full in the face. He went down, crying and cursing. I hit him again, and he collapsed to his hands and knees to the smooth floorboards.

I wrested the pistol from him, searched his pockets for any other weapon, then seized him by the collar and marched him down the stairs. The numbness in my leg wore off on a sudden, and the pain returned with head-spinning fervor.

"Lacey," Grenville said. He was crouching by the fallen chandelier, his hand on Brandon's shoulder.

I dropped Eggleston to the floor. He folded up into a ball and wept.

"Sharp is dead," Grenville told me.

"Brandon," I said hoarsely.

"Still alive. But this damn thing is heavy. I fear that…"

He did not finish the thought, and I did not want him to. The iron wheel lay across Brandon's lower back. The chandelier could have crushed his legs, or the organs in his body. I might be facing Louisa tonight, explaining why I had killed her husband.

John Spencer, still breathing hard, took hold of one side of the chandelier. I, too, locked my grip around the cold iron wheel, my hands shaking. Brandon lay utterly still.

Spencer and I strained to lift the thing. While we held the chandelier raised, faces reddening, Grenville grabbed Brandon under the arms and dragged him from beneath.

We rolled the chandelier away, exposing Jack Sharp's crushed and dead body. Eggleston cried out and crawled to him.

Grenville had turned Brandon over onto his back. I sat down on the floor and gently lifted Brandon's head to my lap.

His breathing was ragged and shallow. I gently slapped his face, his beard stubble scraping my fingers. "Brandon, old man," I said. "Wake up, damn you."

He did not move. His face was pasty white, and gray lined his mouth.

"Do not dare to die on me. Louisa will never forgive me." I patted his face again. "You know what she will say. 'Could you not take care of my husband any better than that, Gabriel?' And then she will look at me. You know how she does."

I kept babbling. Stupid, stupid- It had been just like him, to try to save Spencer at the expense of himself. Never risk yourself unnecessarily, he had once told me. But when it is necessary-by God, go out fighting, and make every blow count. Make your sacrifice mean something.

He had brought down a killer and saved Spencer's life and mine and Grenville's.

Grenville's muddy buff boots, buckles coated with grime, stopped next to me. His leg bent, and his knee in fine lawn breeches touched the board floor. He held a pewter cup of strong-smelling spirits. "Help me make him drink."

I raised Brandon's limp head. His hair was graying more than I'd noticed before, white strands mixing with the black. He'd be completely gray in another few years.

Grenville guided the goblet to Brandon's lips and poured a few drops of liquid inside. For a moment, Brandon lay unmoving, then his body spasmed weakly, and he coughed. Ruthlessly, Grenville poured more brandy into his mouth. Brandon coughed again, harder, then his eyelids moved and he groaned.

His light blue eyes remained blank for a moment, then his gaze fixed on me, and his pupils widened.

"Oh hell," he said. His voice was little more than a croak. "It's you."