Ashley Gardner - A Regimental Murder

I felt sweet relief. If she told the truth, then Grenville had been wrong. She had not taken a lover to give herself Chloe. She was innocent of that at least.

We sat in silence for a time, listening to the crack of the flames and the wind in the trees outside the window.

I still did not have one piece of information. "I could have wished that you had told me from the start what Eggleston's hold over your husband was."

She glanced at me uneasily. "Hold?"

"The reason your husband promised to go to the gallows for what Eggleston and Breckenridge had done."

Color filled her cheeks. "I did tell you. For honor."

"That is true, in part. Colonel Westin, from all I have learned, held honor in high regard. But what was the other side of it? A gentleman might die for another when the cause is just, and worthy. Even Brandon is willing to chance death to save his fellows from harm, but I doubt he'd have crossed the street for Eggleston. What was your husband's reason?"

She gave me an anguished look. "Gabriel, must you?"

"Damn it, Lydia, might we at least have perfect clarity between us? If we can have nothing else?"

She hesitated a long time, then she sighed. "You are right, Gabriel. I can at least give you the courtesy of my trust. There was something. It happened ten years ago, but Eggleston could not leave it lie." She looked at me limply. "Roe had an affair with a young subaltern. Eggleston, the toad, brought it about, helped them meet in secret, and kept it quiet for them both."

I stared at her. "An affair? But I thought- "

She toyed with a button on her cuff. "I believe it surprised Roe most of all. Eggleston instigated it, of course. He suggested that where Roe could not succeed with a woman, he might with a man. I suppose Roe was desperate. So he let Eggleston lead him, and discovered that, indeed…" She faltered.

"Good God."

Lydia nodded. "Roe was so ashamed. And yet, for a long time, he could not stop."

But he had at the last. He had returned to the good Dr. Barton, trying desperately to learn how to go to his wife.

"How did you discover the truth?" I asked.

She lifted her head. Rage sparkled in her fine eyes. "Eggleston told me. He sat down with me one evening and told me all, giggling in that horrible way of his. He hoped, you see, that I would destroy my marriage with Roe, that I would shame him, perhaps go so far as to have him arrested. Eggleston kept suggesting ways I might go about proving a case of sodomy against my husband, which would have taken Roe to the gallows. I do not know why Eggleston wished that; he might have been jealous, or he might have been angry that Roe would not put through a promotion for his dear friend Lord Breckenridge." She fixed me with a steely gaze. "But Lord Richard Eggleston read me wrong. Perhaps I could not have a real marriage with my husband, and perhaps I had not loved him for a long time, but I was still his friend."

I could imagine her rising before the astonished Eggleston, rage and scorn radiating from her. I hoped she'd made Eggleston crawl away on his belly.

"Colonel Westin was lucky to have you," I said.

"Roe was a good man. I wish you could have known him. He did not deserve to be in thrall to someone like Richard Eggleston." Her expression softened. "I also recognize that you are a good man. And you did not deserve what I did."

"I did it to myself," I said, knowing the truth. "You beckoned to me, and I was willing to oblige. I would have done anything for you, even lived a lie."

She held up her hand. "Do not, please, Gabriel, I do not think I can endure gallantry just now."

"I did fall in love with you," I admitted. "But do not worry, the madness has passed."

She pressed her shaking fingers together. "I am so sorry. I had realized that day-the day you found me ill-that I could not go on deceiving you. But you had made me feel…" She broke off, smiling faintly. "I had never had a lover before. I had not known I could feel what you made me feel." She made a helpless gesture. "I so did not want to give that up."

"Few people do."

"But I realized how unfair it was to you. I was ready to lay my burden upon you, to let you ruin yourself to take it up. When I lay ill, Mrs. Brandon explained to me about your first marriage. You ought to have told me you were already married, Gabriel. I certainly would never have tried to trap you."

"My life was already in ruins. Taking up your burden could only have improved it."

She flushed and did not answer. We sat in silence again. "You are lying about one thing," I said after a time.

She looked startled. "Am I?"

My anger, nearly forgotten, began to simmer again. "You have just told me you'd never had a lover before. That is a lie. Someone fathered the child you destroyed. Who was he?"

Her face whitened, and she looked swiftly away.

Behind my stillness, the anger reached out and clawed the last of the fog away. "I believe I have guessed it," I said. "But name him."

She shook her head. "Please do not make me. He is gone. I have sent him away."

Outside, a sparrow began singing a belated summer song in the flowerless lilac tree. A soft September breeze whistled in the chimney.

I said, "I thought he was to marry your daughter."

Her eyes glittered. "I would never have let that happen. I persuaded her to cry off. Do you think I wanted him married to her?"

"Why did you go to him?" I asked in a hard voice.

When she looked up at me, her eyes held the imperious defiance I remembered from our first meeting. The great lady had returned. "Know this, Gabriel. I never went to him, never. He looked upon me, and he wanted me." She shook her head. "Other gentlemen have done so in the past. I do not know why they should-when I look into a mirror, I see only Lydia the silly schoolgirl who has grown into a woman with wrinkles about her eyes."

If she did, she saw so little. Those eyes held a dark fire, a passion burning beneath her cool and aristocratic gaze. The elegant way she carried herself only made a gentleman wish to smooth that delicate skin, to feel her blood pulsing beneath his fingertips.

"But he wanted me," she went on woodenly. "He wanted my daughter as well, but he knew he must hold himself from her. Mr. Allandale always obeys the rules! He must keep pure the young maiden he was to marry, because to do otherwise would be wrong. Scandal must never touch their pristine marriage. But a married woman, she may take a lover if she is discreet."

Even if that lover was his fiancee's mother. The fury within me danced and snarled.

"And so he proposed it. I was shocked and showed him the door. The next day he had the audacity to return and ask if I'd changed my mind. Of course I had not. I threatened to tell my husband. And then… Oh, Gabriel it was horrible. He changed. He had always been polite and soft-spoken to all of us, so friendly, such a help. And then all that vanished in an instant. His face… He was like a beast. He terrified me. He said he would hurt Chloe if I did not oblige him. He said he had ways of hurting my husband. Still I defied him-I thought that I could go to my husband and we could defeat Mr. Allandale between us. And so…" She closed her eyes. "He took it from me. I tried so hard to stop him. I tried and tried, but he was too strong. I have never before not been strong enough to stop anything."

She trailed off. The room went silent.

Within me I was anything but silent. She had described a beast in Allandale's eyes, which I too had seen, but one also lurked inside of me, its red-hot rage holding me in its grip.

I did not think she lied. Her anguish was real. When she spoke his name, her voice filled with loathing. During the wars I'd served in, I'd known women who had been raped, by enemy soldiers, by our own soldiers. They had all shown what Lydia did now-fear, anger, remembered terror, the shrinking inside themselves when something startled them. Their trust had been ripped away, their comfortableness with themselves gone.