The Hanover Square Affair

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."

His gaze strayed to the bed. "Aye, sir. Weeks ago now. Her and Lily, they went."

"You saw them go?"

He thought. "No. The master said they were gone. Gracie was that glad. She had to wait on them. She didn't like them."

"The girl, Lily. Are you certain that was her name?"

"The master said it was."

"What did she say it was?"

He looked worried. "She never said. I never went nigh her. Wasn't allowed, was I?"

"Did he tell you why they went away?"

John shook his head. "They just went."

I leaned on my walking stick. John watched me with an anxious expression on his shiny face. I didn't know if his worry meant that he was lying or whether he simply waited for another difficult question.

"Go fetch Hetty. If you remember anything else, please tell me."

"Yes, sir."

John rose to his towering height and lumbered from the room.

The air had warmed, and the cold tension eased from my muscles a bit. I pulled a chair close to the bed and sat down. I itched to rouse the girl to ask her questions, but she was breathing evenly, sleeping well. Had Horne tied her and put her in the wardrobe before the murderer came, or had the murderer done that? Either way, Aimee might have seen something, heard something, enough to tell us who had killed the man in the library.

Pity moved me to let her rest. I had found at least one of the girls, and she still lived. Bruises, dark and angry, threaded the translucent skin on her face, throat, and chest. Fury beat through me at the sight of them, fury at Horne and the murderer both. Dead, Horne could made no recompense for what he'd done, and I had a deep and aching need to make him pay. The murder had robbed me of that satisfaction.

The door opened and a maid I had seen in the servants' hall came in. Dark hair showed through the white cotton of her cap, but her face was not young. It was an intelligent face, with a sharp nose and rather narrow eyes.

She looked at the pale, sleeping girl on the bed, and her nostrils pinched.

"You sent for me, sir."

"Yes. Hetty, is it?"

"Yes, sir. I'm downstairs maid. And I help cook."

I gestured to the bed and kept my voice low. "Did you know that this young lady was in the house?"

"She's not a young lady, sir. And I didn't know until John told me a moment ago. I thought she'd gone."

I clamped down on my anger at her self-righteousness. "Do you remember when she first came here? She came with another girl, the girl Mr. Horne called Lily."

"Oh, yes, I remember."

"Was Lily the girl's real name?"

"How should I know, sir? They give themselves names, don't they?"

My fingers curled around the head of my walking stick. "How did they arrive here in the first place, Hetty? In a carriage?"

"I don't know, sir, I never saw. I was out shopping for cook the day they came. When I came home, cook was in a foul temper and said we had to make up for more people. She sent me right out again for more vegetables. She was that glad when they left again. What do you want to know, for?"

I held on to my patience. "Did you see them go?"

"I never did. But the master said they'd gone. Both of them."

"You knew why they'd come in the first place."

Hetty flushed. "Of course I did, sir. But it's not my place to say anything, is it? If the master wants to keep young ladies about, it's not my business."

"But you didn't like it," I prodded.

"No, sir. John laughs and says the master has lively appetites. But it's wrong, isn't it? John says I read too many pamphlets."

"Yet you stay," I pointed out.

Her eyes flickered. "It's a good place, sir. Hard to get another place with wages so good. And Lily spoke kind, for what she was."

"Would it surprise you to learn that Lily was in truth a respectable gentleman's daughter, brought here against her will?"

Hetty looked doubtful. "Indeed, sir, it would surprise me very much. I thought she was an actress or dancer or some such. Are you sure? She never tried to run away."

No, I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure of anything.

"Would you have stayed if you had known she was really a respectable young lady?"

Her voice dropped a notch. "I'm ashamed to say I don't know, sir. The wages is high."

I tapped my fingers on my walking stick. "If Mr. Horne was so generous, and this is such a large house, why aren't there more of you? You said you have to double as the cook's assistant."

Hetty shrugged. "Sometimes there's more. They come and go. Cook and Mr. Bremer, they've been here forever. I've been here the longest after that, then John, then Grace, then Mr. Horne's valet, Marcel. He's French. Henry-he's the boot boy-has only been here a sixmonth. He'll not last long, though. He doesn't like it." Her face grew mournful. "But we're all out of a place, aren't we, sir? Now that the master is gone. He's truly dead?"

I gave a short nod. "He is most definitely dead. Did anyone go upstairs to the master's chambers today, Hetty? After he gave orders not to be disturbed?"

She thought a moment. "Mr. Bremer and Grace. They're the only ones he lets in. No one else. But most of the afternoon I was in the kitchens with cook and Henry, so I don't know who all went up and down in the front."

So Bremer had already lied. He'd told me he hadn't seen Horne since Horne gave orders not to be disturbed.

I said, "But there was a visitor earlier in the day. A thin gentleman. Bremer let him in."

Hetty nodded. "Oh yes, sir. I served him port in the downstairs sitting room. Mr. Bremer took him upstairs."

"Do you know who this gentleman was?"

"Yes, Mr. Bremer told me. He was a gentleman called Mr. Denis. A friend of the master's, Mr. Bremer said."