The Hanover Square Affair

Chapter Two

I'd heard such a cry of despair once before, in Portugal during the Peninsular campaign, when a corporal had watched his best friend-some said his lover-be gunned down by a French soldier. He'd hurled himself, with that same cry, at the Frenchman, and had fallen onto his friend's body with the Frenchman's bayonet piercing him. I'd shot the Frenchman who'd killed them both.

The battlefield receded and Hanover Square came back into focus. The young cavalryman next to me stepped back, brought up his pistol, and fired it straight into the gray-haired man's back.

The man jerked as the ball penetrated him, and blood blackened his coat. With another cry of anger and misery, he fell slowly to his knees.

I caught him as he collapsed. Blood coated his rain-soaked worsted suit, and his eyes were wide, bewildered. I lowered him gently to the cobbles then glared up at the cavalryman. "What the devil did you do that for?"

The officer was young. His face was round and babyish, his eyes as gray as the clouded sky. His insignia told me he held the rank of cornet, the cavalry's version of ensign, and his eyes told me he'd never seen battle, or a French soldier, or death.

His fine nose pinched. "He is a madman. Railing at his betters."

The old man still breathed. The stones beneath him were slick with that afternoon's rain and filthy with mud and horse droppings, ground in by the wheels of carts and carriages. I pulled my coat from my shoulders, wadded it, and slid it under the man's head.

His coat, now ruined, had been well made, if it was a bit out of date, and a tear on his sleeve had been carefully mended. Beneath blood and mud, his gloves were whole and finer than mine. The dark gold rim of a watch peeped from his waistcoat pocket.

"He's not working class," I said. "A clerk or a Cit, possibly a solicitor's or banker's assistant. A man used to soft work."

Leather creaked as Gale dismounted. He moved to stand next to his cornet, and studied me in dislike. "Weddington, this is Captain Lacey. Of the Thirty-Fifth Light. Self-appointed expert on all mankind."

"Indeed, sir?"

"Indeed. He is ever fascinated by who a man is and why he does what he does."

I ignored him. Gale had never forgiven me, a mere nobody, for saving his life.

"Who lives here?" I asked, gesturing at number 22.

The house was no different from the others in the square-fine, modern, elegant, large. Two large multi-paned windows, now broken, sat to the right of the door, and two more rows of windows marched across the first and top stories. Doric columns flanked the door, and arches above the windows relieved the plain facade. The number "22" hung on one of the columns. The door, painted black, sported a shining brass knocker, an indication that the family within was in residence. If they'd chosen to spend this spring elsewhere, the door would have been bare.

A curtain moved in the upper floor of the house next door, but number 22's windows remained tightly muffled.

"Damned if I know," Gale growled. "My commander told me he'd had a personal complaint about a disturbance in Hanover Square, and would I see to it? 'Yes, sir' was all I thought to say. I obey orders."

I hid my wince by straightening the dying man's coat, but old pain rose, fast and bitter. I wondered briefly if Gale were taunting me, but dismissed it. He could not know. We'd said nothing. That had been the agreement.

The gray-haired man began to shiver, and his eyes shifted back and forth beneath his waxen eyelids. "He'll die if we do not help him," I said.

"He'll die in Newgate then," Gale offered.

I looked at number 22. "We can take him in there."

"To the house he's been chucking bricks at? Find a cart and drag him out of here if you must."

My white-hot temper began to rise, and I briefly regretted not shoving Lieutenant Lord Arthur Gale back under that horse in Portugal. The dying man meant less to these fine gentlemen of the Twenty-Fourth than a trampled insect.

I got to my feet. I would take the man home. As an officer on half-pay, with no private income, I struggled to make ends meet, and this perhaps gave me more affinity with my poorer neighbors. Let Gale return home to receive his evening port on a silver tray. This man had no one to help him.

Another cry filled the air as a woman pushed through the edges of the now curious crowd and stumbled toward us. She was as old as he, with long gray hair escaping from her cap, her eyes as wide and wild as the dying man's. "Charles," she cried. "Husband."

Her basket fell from her arm, and fruit and paper parcels skittered across the wet cobbles.

The cornet started for her. I put a heavy hand on his arm, and he swung around, eyes lit with anger.

"Let it go," Gale ordered. "Mount up."

The cornet and I shared another glance of hostility before I finally released him. He turned from me, rubbing his wrist.

He caught his horse and climbed into the saddle, his movements angry. At a signal from Gale, the cavalrymen wheeled as one and trotted out of the square, leaving me alone with the dying man and his wife.

I persuaded a good-natured drover to take them home. He didn't want to, having a load to meet near Hampstead, but I promised him a crown for his trouble. We made our unknown gentleman as comfortable as possible in the bed of the wagon, and his wife crawled in beside him. She neither looked at us nor thanked us, but merely crouched beside her husband, holding his hand as if she could pour her own life into his waning body. I had a devil of a time getting a direction from her, but finally she mumbled the name of a lane, which the drover recognized as one near the Strand.

I gathered up her basket. The fruit in it was rotten, as if she'd carried it with her for days. I threw away the fruit and unwrapped the parcels. Each contained lace, a fine skein of it, each identical to the others. I put them back into the basket and tucked it beside her. She scarce seemed to notice.

I accompanied them. My purpose in Mayfair that afternoon had been an appointment with the wife of my former commander, at their Brook Street house, but I was just as happy to climb into the cart and let it take me in the opposite direction.

Louisa would be annoyed when I sent my regrets, but I welcomed the chance to avoid the meeting. I had a feeling I knew what she wanted to speak to me about, and I wanted nothing to do with it. Also, her husband might be home, the man who had once been my mentor and closer to me than a brother. That same man had ended my career and very nearly my life.

The drover made his slow way through the traffic, still bottled, to Swallow Street, a narrow artery south. Plans were underway to widen this street into an elegant thoroughfare so that the Prince Regent would be able to travel a more or less direct route from a park that would be built north of Oxford Street to his opulent Carleton House just below Pall Mall. There the Prince, who'd been Regent for five years now, dwelled in splendor, while his father, King George, slowly lived through his madness in his padded rooms in Windsor. The rest of us used Swallow Street simply to leave graceful Mayfair for the darker regions of London.

The fog lowered. By the time we reached Haymarket, the rain had ceased, but the blanket of mist enveloped us. I held the man steadily against the bumps of the cobbles and the sway of the wagon. His wife simply sat, staring at nothing. Farther south, in Charing Cross, a street puppet theater had attracted a fair number of watchers, who, despite the darkening, chill weather, cheered or booed with enthusiasm.

The drover turned his cart into a small lane that opened from the Strand. The lane was narrow and dark, rather like the one in which I had lodgings, but the tall houses crowded here were painfully neat and respectable. The drover found the house and stopped his wagon before it.

I had to pry the woman's hand from her husband's and lift her to the pavement. The drover watched me, pity in his eyes. "Poor sods. 'Ow'd they get all the way to 'Anover Square?"

The same question had occurred to me.

The door of the house burst open, and a thin woman in maid's garb dashed out. "Madam? What has happened?"

"Help me with her," I said.

The maid's eyes flicked from the woman to the old man in the cart, and her already white face paled. "God above. Where did you find them?"

"Hanover Square," I said.

The dismay in her eyes told me that my words did not surprise her, that she'd been expecting something like this. The gray-haired woman turned instantly from me and flung her arms about the maid's waist, as though sensing she'd found someone stronger to pass her burden to.

"Did Mr. Horne shoot him?" the maid asked.

The question surprised me, but the drover interrupted before I could ask what she meant.

"What about 'im, guv?" The drover jerked his thumb at the wagon. The maid turned away without waiting for me to answer and led the clinging old woman into the house.

"Can you lift him?" I asked the drover.

"Aye, I've carried 'eavier loads than 'im, man and boy."

The house opened right onto the street. I followed the drover, who carried the old man through the open door into the dim hall of a small, but respectable house. The faded wallpaper was clean and uncreased, and competent, if unimaginative, landscape paintings dotted it. At the end of the narrow hall, a staircase rose to the upper floors. The banisters were free of dust, the runner straight and clean. The sconces on the landing held unlit candles, half-burned.

The maid reappeared as we stepped onto the first floor, and led us to a small front bedroom. The drover deposited his burden on the bed there and returned to me in the hall.

"'E's not long for this world, poor sod," he said. "Now, then, guv, I'm off to 'Ampstead."

He didn't exactly hold out his hand, but I took a crown from my pocket and dropped it into his calloused palm. I could ill spare it, but he had gone out of his way when he had no reason to.

The drover touched his forelock and departed, finished with the business.

I returned to the small, neat bedroom. The old man, barely alive, lay face up on the bed. The maid, her hands visibly shaking, was peeling his ruined waistcoat from him.

The ball had torn a heavy gash through his middle. Bone, white and obscene, poked through the hole, and his chest rose and fell with his shallow, rasping breaths. But I knew enough about gunshot wounds to know that this one was clean. The bullet had passed clear through him.

"He needs a surgeon," I said.

The maid answered without looking up. "We can't afford the likes of that."

I removed my coat. "Get a basin of water and plenty of cloths. Are you willing to help?"

"Help what, sir?"

"Patch him up if nothing else. That's all a surgeon could do. He may live if the wound doesn't sicken."

She stared at me. "Are you a doctor?"

I shook my head. "I've bandaged plenty of wounds. Including my own."

The maid was brave. She brought the basin and a pile of towels and stayed for the whole messy business. Alice, she said her name was, and she'd been doing for the master and mistress-Mr. and Mrs. Thornton-for twenty years. She steadied the basin and handed me towels and held Mr. Thornton to the bed when I came to the tricky business of cleaning the wound.

In the heat of Spain and Portugal, during the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, which had ended only the year before, surgeons had used water to clean wounds when they could no longer obtain healing concoctions. They continued to use water when they discovered that wounds cleansed with it tended to heal more swiftly than those smeared with ointment. I put that theory to the test now, sensing that these people could not afford ointment from an apothecary in any case.

I wrapped his torso in bandages, and Alice bathed him. The room had gone dark, and I lit a lone candle. Mr. Thornton had fallen into a stupor and lay still, but his breathing continued-smooth, clean breathing, with no bubbles of blood.

"Do you have laudanum?" I asked.

She nodded. "A little. I've given the mistress a few drops."

"Give him some when he wakes. He should stay utterly still for some days."

"I'll look after him, sir. I always do."

I wiped my hands and lowered myself to a hard chair, sighing in relief as I removed the weight from my injured leg. "Who is Mr. Horne?" I asked.

Alice spun around, cloths dripping watery crimson onto the bed cover. "I beg your pardon, sir?"

"The first thing you asked when you saw your master was whether Mr. Horne had shot him. Does he live in number 22, Hanover Square?"

She swallowed and looked away, and I thought she was not going to answer me. Finally she lifted her head and met my gaze, her intelligent eyes keen and clear.

"He has committed an unspeakable crime, sir," she said. "A horrible thing, worse than murder. And I'd give anything, anything in the world, to watch him swing for it."