Chapter 1
July 1819
Iwoke, or seemed to. I was on my feet, fully dressed in my evening clothes. My head ached, blood pounding in my temples, my eyes hot. Every limb was on fire but stiff, the old injury in my knee throbbing in quiet agony.
I rubbed finger and thumb into my eyes, trying to clear them, and moved my tongue in my dry mouth. The taste I met was foul, sticky and sweet, and at the same time rancid.
I had no idea where the devil I was. A cautious glance showed I stood in a massive but unfinished room, dim and silent. Cloths draped a bare wood floor, and a ceiling soared overhead, gray light leaking through tiny windows at the top.
Something caught my attention at my feet, and I rubbed my eyes again as I bent to peer blearily at the object.
It was a man, sprawled on a dust sheet, limbs askew. I stared at him in a daze, barely able to comprehend what I was seeing.
He was dead—I knew that immediately. His face was gray, open eyes unseeing, chest still. A blue uniform coat gaped to show a white shirt now stained with dark blood. The sword that had killed him, also coated with blood, was clenched in my hand.
It was a cavalry saber, well-balanced with a thick hilt and a curved blade. It wasn’t the sword from my walking stick—that one was straight, and the stick lay on the floor at my side.
I had no idea how I’d come to be here, or why I stood over the body of a dead man with a bloody sword in my cramped grip.
My heart beat thick and fast, senses returning slowly, but no memories. The chamber was utterly silent, no running footsteps of someone hurrying to investigate a fight, no shouts of horror or dismay. Only quiet, until a breeze outside carried to me the lone, shrill cry of a seagull.
I realized as awareness trickled into me that I stood in the Prince Regent’s house in Brighton. Half of what the prince called his Pavilion was unfinished, the other half already a confusion of styles, much like Carlton House, but on a more whimsical scale.
I’d dined here tonight with Grenville, my wife, and several other guests, including the man on the floor, hours ago it must be. Dawn’s light above confirmed that it was likely four or five on this summer morning.
I passed my tongue over paper-dry lips, panic a dim thing shouting inside me. My head hurt like fury, my stomach burned, and renewed pain flowed through my blood as bits and pieces of the night swooped at me like visions from a nightmare.
The man on the floor was Colonel Hamilton Isherwood of the Forty-Seventh Light Dragoons. I’d encountered him on the Peninsula, at Salamanca, seven years ago, where he’d despised me, and I him. Those memories were sharp and clear, as bright as the Spanish sky and the dusty, hard hills around it. Far clearer than the hours between supper and now.
Tonight, Isherwood had behaved, at the meal at least, as though we’d been briefly acquainted during the war, nothing more.
I had absolutely no memory of killing him.
Or of trudging back to the Pavilion after I’d left it last night. I should be at home in the bow-windowed house we’d hired, asleep next to my wife. Not in an unfinished room with a bloody sword in my hands, an old enemy dead at my feet.
I shook, my palms sweating in my gloves. I wanted to heave up the Regent’s excellent supper and fine port, but my throat remained closed.
Lay down the sword and depart,my common sense told me.Walk back home. Do not be found here.
Wise advice. I began to place the sword on the floor when I heard a gasp, loud in the silence.
I jerked around to see a young man in the wide doorway, a flickering candle in his hand. He wore a dressing gown, but he was not a guest. I’d seen his face earlier this evening, but it had been blank with deference as he’d served me port in the prince’s drawing room.
He was a footman, slim and tall, his skin black. He’d worn a turban while he carried trays about, as it was the fashion to have one or two “Moorish” servants in attendance, but the lad was no more Moorish than I was.
He stared at me as I slowly straightened, the candlelight showing his dark eyes wide with shock. He opened his mouth, drawing breath to shout.
“No!” I cried in a fierce whisper as I moved a shaky step toward him.
His face took on a look of abject terror, and I realized I still had the sword in my hand. I dropped it, but the lad turned and fled from the madman with the bloody weapon. He dashed through a doorway and was gone.
“Damnation.”
I snatched up my walking stick, having to brace myself on it to regain my feet. I could barely move as I turned to search for a another way out of the room, one that would take me in the opposite direction the footman had gone.
The door through which he’d disappeared was open—in fact, the door had not been hung yet and leaned against the wall. I must be in one of the chambers the builders were overhauling in their frenzy to redesign and expand the Prince Regent’s Pavilion.
Drapes covered the soaring walls to protect them, the plasterwork on the arches still wet. The scent of paint, plaster, and dust hung heavily in the silent air.
