Rage and grief and burning coldness swam through me. Louisa watched, powerless to help, Louisa who had stood by me throughout every hardship in my life.
"I wanted…" My throat hurt. "I was going to ask Lydia to marry me. I had taken steps to look for…" I took a shaking breath. "To make certain I could marry."
Louisa only looked at me. I wanted to storm and swear, I wanted to swarm upstairs and shake Lydia until she told me why she had done it, I wanted to break down and weep until I was sick.
I opened and closed my fists. "I do not…" I stopped. "Damn it."
She placed cool hands over my agitated ones. "Go home, Gabriel." She squeezed my fingers when I started to protest. "You cannot see her yet. She needs time to heal. As do you."
I drew a breath. "I do not want to see her." If I saw her now, I might hurt her. Anger was overtaking grief, and I did not want to let it have full rein.
"Then go home," Louisa repeated. "I will stay with her. I promise." She smiled faintly. "It is either that or face my husband, and I am certainly not ready to do that yet."
I put my hands on her shoulders, held her hard. I wanted to say things, but words lodged in my throat. But she knew. She knew everything I wanted to say, and everything I felt. She could read me like no other. It had ever been so, even to the day that Aloysius Brandon had introduced me to her when she had been twenty-two years old and I had been twenty.
I left her. I went home, but I did not sleep.
I lay awake long into the afternoon. The events of the previous day jumbled themselves in my head-verbally fencing with Lady Breckenridge, the tedious chore of sorting through Breckenridge's papers, my excitement at what I had found, then Lydia's illness.
Questions beat at me like the wings of a terrified bird. She had lied to me, lied from the very start. She had gone to the bridge that night because, as the vulgar women there had put it, she'd been belly-full. I'd saved her life that night. She had looked at me and seen what I'd told her she'd seen, a fool who would fall on his knees and be her willing servant.
I had known even then I was being a bloody fool, and I had taken great pains to prove myself right.
What had Lady Breckenridge said? Gentlemen have dashed themselves to pieces on those rocks before. She had smiled at me with her world-wise eyes, knowing my fate better than I had.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Lydia's husband had only once been capable of copulation with her, no matter how many times he'd visited his doctor, no matter how many aphrodisiacs he'd tried. The chance that Colonel Westin had been the father of this child was remote. I remembered her declaring that she had gone to her husband's chamber the morning she discovered him dead, because, she'd said, I wanted to tell him everything, the entire truth.
I did not want to examine the truth.
The truth was that Breckenridge or Eggleston had murdered Colonel Spinnet that night at Badajoz. Westin had known the truth as well. And he'd died. They'd both died.
Another truth was that John Spencer had made an appointment with Westin the day of his death.
Kenneth Spencer did not like his brother trying to uncover the truth.
I did not blame him. Truth was a terrible thing.
I sensed the viscid fingers of my melancholia reaching through the hot, bright room to me. I had not been encased in my malady in months, and had even begun to believe myself free of it. Now it beckoned to me, dark and seductive.
Lie still, it said. If you do not rise, do not move, nothing can hurt you. Simply do nothing, say nothing, be nowhere.
I began to close my eyes to embrace it.
No. I slammed my eyes open. I would not. I forced myself from my bed, though it was like moving my limbs through heavy mud. Through great effort, I bathed, shaved, and dressed myself, then limped my way to Bow Street and the magistrate's house.
I found Pomeroy explaining to his patrollers that they were to go to Islington and wait for him. He looked up, annoyed, when I entered and asked to have a few words with him.
He dismissed his men with a sergeant-like bellow, and took me into the corridor. "What is it, Captain? Thought you'd have dragged in Lord Breckenridge's murderer under your arm by now. What is keeping you?"
"The last link in the chain," I replied tersely. "What have the Spencers been up to these last few days?"
Pomeroy shook his head. "Not much, sir. Living very quiet-like. Excepting Mr. Kenneth Spencer left London a few days ago."
I came alert, and the melancholia slid away. "Did he? Good lord, why did you not tell me at once? Did he go to Sussex?"
Pomeroy's brows climbed. "Sussex? No- "
"Oxfordshire then?"
"No, sir."
My heart pumped. "Where then?"
"I would tell you if you'll give me half a minute, Captain. He went to Hertfordshire."
I stopped. "Hertfordshire? Why?"
"Now I don't know, Captain. I'm only watching him to find out where he goes. Not why. That's your lookout."
"Well, what is he doing there?"
"I don't know." Pomeroy frowned. "I pulled my men off him, soon as he went somewhere harmless. None of your lordships live in Hertfordshire. And I need my men in Islington. Someone's gent killed his wife-at least so his wife's sister says, but no one's found the wife's body. Not the first time the gent's murdered his wife, so this sister says. Not the same wife twice, you understand, but wife one and wife two. Either he is very clever, or the sister's for Bedlam."
I could get nothing more helpful from him. I left Bow Street and returned to my rooms.
The cure for melancholia, or at least a method of staving it off awhile, was action. I acted. I wrote to John Spencer, asking to meet with him. I wrote to Eggleston in Oxfordshire, also requesting a meeting.
I then wrote Grenville to apprise him of what I had discovered. I had not spoken to him in some days, and he had not sent for me in his imperious way. I wondered what the devil he was doing, and at the same time was a bit relieved that I had not seen him and would not have to explain my current agitation.
I heard nothing from Louisa, and I sent no inquiry to her. If Lydia had wanted to see me, or if she had grown worse, Louisa would have informed me. Likewise I heard nothing from Brandon, from which I concluded Louisa had not yet returned to him or even sent word.
John Spencer replied by the next post that he'd see me. We met the next day in the same tavern we had before. He confirmed that his brother had gone to Hertfordshire to visit an old school friend, then I discussed Colonel Spinnet and my speculations with him.
He admitted that when he'd read Colonel Spinnet's diaries, he'd found references to Breckenridge wanting promotion, but he'd drawn no conclusion but that Breckenridge had been incompetent and annoying.
I asked Spencer if he would show me what he had found, and after regarding me sourly for a time, he took me to the rooms in Piccadilly he shared with his brother and fished out Spinnet's diaries.
I flipped through them eagerly. Breckenridge, Spinnet had written early in 1812, that ass, yearns to be a major. He is the sort who likes to strut about in braid and lace, and knows nothing of commanding or warfare. Old Nappy will not go away because Breckenridge waves his balls about. I have told Westin to not, for God's sake-for all our sake's-give him major. Such a thing would make a mockery of all other majors in the Army.
No doubt Breckenridge had not been pleased to hear this news.
It all fit now. Breckenridge and Eggleston had contrived between them to murder Colonel Spinnet and remove him from Breckenridge's road to promotion. Lydia's husband had known, and they had somehow persuaded him to take the blame when the deed came to light.