The Thief-Taker : Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner (18 page)

Arabella could see her shoulders shudder.

“Perhaps I hoped Mr. Morton would discover a murderer so that I might blame someone other than myself.” It was almost a sob.

“But Halbert wasn't killed in the duel,” Arabella reminded her quietly. “He was killed later. The two matters might have no connection.”

After a long moment Louisa turned, her cheeks glistening. “What has Mr. Morton's enquiry uncovered?” she asked faintly.

“He has been to the Otter House in Spitalfields.”

“This is the ‘flash house’ he spoke of?”

“Yes. It seems that Halbert was there that evening, just as the jarvey claimed.”

Louisa shook her head. “And what does that mean, pray?”

“Only that he was there, but we know not why.”

Miss Hamilton did not respond for a moment.

“Did he go out that morning seeking death?” she asked suddenly, “because he despaired of ever winning my favour? Is that why he went?”

It was not a question Arabella Malibrant could answer.

“But what of Rokeby?” pressed on Louisa. “Was I not perhaps too harsh with him, earning his enmity? And look where that led.”

“You take too much on yourself. Colonel Rokeby and Mr. Glendinning were men, making decisions such as men do. If Henry Morton went out tomorrow and were killed in a duel defending my good name I should mourn
him, and think him a fool, but I should not take the blame. Mr. Morton makes his own way in the world, as did Halbert Glendinning. And you were likely not so cruel to him as you think. I hardly think you capable of real cruelty.”

Louisa glanced at her, birdlike. “More capable than you think,” she muttered.

Arabella decided to change her approach. “Besides, I always say that if a woman hasn't had at least one duel fought over her she should begin to question her charms. I've had three fought in my name.”

Miss Hamilton smiled bleakly at this attempt to cheer her.

“I suppose one of them,” went on Arabella, “was more about my husband's debts than about me, strictly speaking. But that's another story.” She looked directly at the other woman. “No one died in your duel, Louisa. If Halbert was murdered it was in a less honourable way, and you can hardly take blame for that. Indeed, as I said, it might have nothing at all to do with you. It could have been a case of mistaken identity.”

Louisa's eyebrows raised at this. “You are being very kind,” she murmured, but there was appreciation in her voice.

An uneasy silence settled around them, punctuated by the street sounds echoing up from below.

“May I ask you a question, Louisa?”

Arabella received the smallest shrug in answer.

“Who is Richard?”

Very casually, Louisa put out a hand to the window casing. “Why do you ask?”

“On the stair, that evening at Lord Arthur's …you called out the name Richard.”

Louisa shook her head as though in disbelief. Then
she turned and went to one of the military portraits. “Richard Davenant,” she said, her voice warming noticeably. “We were engaged to be married, but he gave up his life at Albuera in 1811.”

“And he is the man to whom Halbert was always compared… ?”

Louisa nodded.

“You must have taken his death very hard.”

For a moment Louisa only stared at the portrait, and then managed a nod.

“It is a fine portrait,” Arabella said, unable to bear the woman's distress any longer. “You have a significant talent.”

“It is my brother Peter's work,” Louisa said, drawing herself up a little. “Richard was his dearest friend, and brother-in-arms. You see, we have both lost terribly….” But she did not go on. Instead, she turned to Arabella. “One can be overwhelmed by grief,” she said firmly, “and not be mad.”

S
urgeon Bromley's waiting-room was rather a
dismal place, dark, lined with hard wooden benches, but empty of patients. Military surgeons frequently set up in private practice upon their discharge from active duty, and in fact many of them did not wait for that formality. Stories were told of doctors who blithely informed their commanders that their other patients left them no time to go on campaign. Morton wondered if Robert Bromley had really succeeded to this degree. The address was good, but the premises seemed a trifle shabby for a physician who'd made any serious inroads on fashionable society.

It was rather a well-dressed gentleman, however, who presently emerged from the inner sanctum, picked up his hat and cane, and departed. A few moments later Bromley's sallow apprentice ushered the Runner in and pulled the door closed behind him, leaving the visitor with his master.

Across a polished table the two men stared at each other in surprise.

“Well, Dr. Bromley; I have the pleasure of meeting you again.”

The other nodded curtly, and scowled.

It was the same small bald man, the same surgeon, who had been in attendance at Portman House when Morton had examined the body of Halbert Glendinning.

“You're one of those bloody Bow Street people. I've forgotten your name.”

Morton grinned mirthlessly, and introduced himself. Bromley made a curt gesture toward a chair and they both sat.

“I've not changed my view,” immediately announced the surgeon. “The man died of choking, on his own vomitus, brought on by intemperate use of alcohol, and other dissipations, doubtless.”

“Doubtless,” softly echoed Morton.

“I can tell you nothing more. Miss Hamilton is better out of it, I daresay. The man was clearly another low-born blackguard, pretending to be a gentleman.”

Morton wondered if this odd statement was an accident or if it was aimed at Morton. But now Bromley fell silent and merely glared at him, folding his arms defiantly over his small chest.

“Was Mr. Glendinning your patient?”

“He was not. My clients tend to be better bred…and not shirkers,” he said, keeping his eye fixed on Morton.

“We do not all serve in the same way,” Morton said evenly. “If he was not your patient, then how do you know of his ‘dissipations’?”

Bromley tossed his hands up briefly in impatience. “No, I know nothing, just as you say. Like everyone else, I've heard it murmured, I cannot recollect when or by
whom. But there were the appearances, on the night you and I saw him, after all.”

“Are you intimate with the Hamiltons?”

“What is this in aid of, sir? I am a casual acquaintance of both families, no more. I was at Lord Arthur's entirely by chance. I made my diagnosis as a courtesy to my host. And I stand by it. There is an end to it—unless of course you have found some way to make some silver out of this poltroon's death.”

Morton ignored this, letting his eye run casually around the room. The place was decorated with a series of sentimental oils depicting fallen British heroes, inevitably mourned by their comrades against darkening sunsets. Odd fancy for a former military surgeon, he thought.

Morton turned back to the little doctor. He let a certain threat slip into his voice. “It certainly is a curious chance, sir, that you seem to have attended at the deaths of both gentlemen to whom Miss Louisa Hamilton has been engaged.”

The surgeon looked startled, but Morton did not quite know how to read his expression. “I had not thought of that. But I suppose, as you say, it is true. I had quite forgotten about the other. Or rather, had forgotten her misguided preference for him. That milk-livered soldier.”

“Richard Davenant.”

“Yes. I believe that was him.”

“You were, in fact, there at his end?”

“At Albuera, during the peninsular campaign. Yes. I was regimental surgeon to the Thirty-fifth at the time. But he was dead when he got to me. Just like this other one.”

“Why do you say he was milk-livered?”

“He ran from the enemy.”

“How do you know this, Mr. Bromley?” A growing dislike had put a certain coldness into Morton's tone, of which the other man, in his apparently habitual illhumour, seemed oblivious.

“He had a bullet squarely in the back of his head. He was supposed to be advancing. What conclusions would you draw, sir?”

“In a battle, surely many things are possible.”

“They who brought him in confirmed it.”

“You did not examine Davenant where he fell?”

“Nay, sir,” snapped Robert Bromley. “It was not my role to go where the shot fell. Would you have me amputating limbs under cannon fire?”

Morton looked steadily back at him without answering.

“Sometimes,” the surgeon went irritably on, “the men would wrap a fellow up in a blanket or some such matter and carry him back to me. The army discouraged it, as the folk who did this were often shirkers. They carried some ‘beloved’ comrade back, and then, strangely enough, never quite returned to their rightful places in the firing line.”

“Was Richard Davenant carried back to you this way? You just said he was dead already.”

“It was a battle—if you had ever been in one you would know that much is lost in the confusion. Perhaps he still had a faint pulse when he reached me. But it didn't last long.”

“Could he speak?”

“No, sir, of course he could not, any more than you could under the same circumstances.” The little man put his fingertips together and stared up at the ceiling.
“Some of his fellows were blubbering and making a great show of their grief about him, but it was clearly a ploy. The truth soon came out: The man had blanched at the sight of the French, and bolted, shamefully, at the moment of greatest peril. I've told others this, sir, and I'm weary of telling it. He was far from the only one. Some of these puffed-up tin soldiers, with their fine uniforms and their lies of glory, they weary me. I've seen them when they've not been so proud, sir. I've heard them scream and beg when I've had them on my table and taken a leg from them, or an arm. And I've seen many a wound that no one ever got from charging the enemy direct. No, sir, anyone who has been where I have been and seen what I have seen knows how rare true bravery is. And I will tell you something about the men who possess it, sir. They tend also to be the men with the best blood and purest pedigrees. The old, true stock of England. Not ill-bred bastards or the sons and grandsons of tradesmen and grasping, time-serving Scottish interlopers!”

Morton found himself wondering, not in a cool impersonal way, how a swiftly delivered uppercut would affect this vicious little doctor's opinions. He had already intimated Morton was a shirker—though apparently aiming this insult elsewhere—and passed judgement on sham gentlemen.

What were the real sources of Bromley's resentment? Could he have imagined himself a rival for a woman like Louisa Hamilton? But there were so many other possible reasons. A more plausible sweetheart stolen by one of these same tin soldiers. Or the fact that he could never have been a soldier himself. The Duke of York's height requirement, though hardly stringent, would certainly have eliminated this near-dwarf.

The man, at any rate, was cramped, bent, fairly curdled within by his hatreds, his jealousies. They reeked from him, like an offensive odour. Morton could barely stand to be in the little man's presence, and found his own anger welling up.

“In so great a battle I'm surprised that you remember the death of Richard Davenant. There must have been so many.”

“I knew Davenant somewhat,” Bromley admitted grudgingly.

“And did not like him.”

“I didn't know him well enough to like or dislike him. But he was known to me by reputation.”

“Who was it told you that Richard Davenant had run?”

Bromley threw up his hands. “I was hardly on a social footing with the whole Thirty-fifth Regiment of Foot!” he snapped back with what seemed unnecessary vehemence. But then, “It was some captain or other. I'd only recently been posted to the Thirty-fifth, and did not stay long. I went to the First Guards after that, which is a much better regiment in every respect.”

A more fashionable one, at least, Morton reflected. And coincidentally enough, Rokeby's regiment. “Colonel Fitzwilliam Rokeby was not also in the Thirty-fifth Foot at that time, by chance?”

“To my knowledge, the Colonel has always been a member of the First Guards. Now, sir, if you please. I have much better ways of using my time than in idle discussions.”

Morton made no move to leave.

“You disapproved of Miss Hamilton's impending marriage to Mr. Glendinning?” he asked.

“I disapprove of any comely woman throwing herself away on a coward.”

“How do you know Glendinning was a coward?”

“It was all around town that he went out to meet Colonel Rokeby and near swooned from his fear.”

“Unlike you, sir, who would go out to meet a man like Rokeby as though it were a ride in the country?”

The surgeon's face suddenly turned red. “What are you saying, sir?”

“That if you ever found the dark eye of a firearm peering at you, Mr. Bromley, I daresay you would be as frightened as young Glendinning. And if you don't think so, send a friend to call on me and I will aim a pistol at you and prove my point. Good day to you.”