Read Hanover Square Affair, The for Free Online Page B

Cockspur Street near Charing Cross, on foot, in my regimentals.
    My coat was a deep blue, with white facings and silver loops and braid. This uniform—which had cost me almost a year’s pay—I had kept fine for social occasions, but on the Peninsula, I had worn another like it to ruin with sweat and mud and blood. With a carbine on my saddle and a saber at my side, I and the light and heavy dragoons had charged at everything: French cavalry, squares of French infantry we wanted to scatter, and even artillery. We’d been trained to draw our sabers at the last instant before our lines merged and met—the sound of ringing steel and the sight of a glittering forest of sabers were meant to strike fear into the enemy. But I never discovered if the enemy even noticed this spectacle because, at that very moment, they had been busy trying to shoot us, bayonet us, or slice us to pieces in return.
    Now I fought a different battle, one for social acceptance and good public opinion. Both Louisa and the loathsome Horne had been right when they’d told me that recognition by Grenville was an advantage to me. Those who might not have spoken to me or even noticed the existence of an obscure gentleman from a remote corner of East Anglia—a captain who’d made no famous name for himself on the Peninsula—now sent me invitations to some of the most sought-after events in the social season.
    I had been correct too, when I’d told Louisa that they invited me only to speculate why Grenville had taken up with me.
    I’d met Grenville earlier that year, at a New Year’s rout at his own house. Lady Aline Carrington, a spinster who loved gossip and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Women , in that order, had persuaded Grenville to allow her to bring me along. I had escorted her and Mrs. Brandon to the rout, and there met the famous Mr. Grenville.
    Admittedly, I had not thought much of him on first glance, dismissing him as a dandy too full of his own opinion. I believe he sensed that, because he was cool to me, though he did not actually turn me out of his house.
    Things changed when I discovered, quite by accident, that several of the extra staff he, or rather his butler, had hired for the evening, had planned to rob him. Grenville kept rare artwork and antiquities in his private upstairs sitting rooms; only a privileged few were ever allowed to view them. The gang of thieves, led, as it turned out, by the butler, had arranged an elaborate scheme to carry off these artworks.
    I had made so bold as to approach the disdainful Grenville and tell him my suspicions. To his credit, he dropped his pose, listened to me, then asked me why the devil I thought so. I told him, because the footman’s livery did not fit him.
    The staff hired for the night had not been allowed anywhere but the kitchens and the grand reception rooms on the ground floor. It turned out that several had laid out Grenville’s large footman, Bartholomew, and one had stolen his livery in order to access the upper floors. They supposed that great gentlemen never noticed what their own footmen looked like—they were hired by butlers, housekeepers, or stewards. True, very few people at the rout looked into the faces of the servants circulating with champagne and macaroons.
    But Grenville had hand-picked his servants—though, he confided later, he had made a grave mistake with the butler. When we found Bartholomew, trussed up, sore, and most angry, in a retiring room upstairs, Grenville had been furious. We had rushed to the sitting room and caught the thieves in the act. Bartholomew had returned the blows laid on him in a fine show of pugilism, and I of course had the sword in my walking stick.
    The next morning, Grenville had sent his carriage for me, inviting me to breakfast with him and to discuss the incident. Thus had begun our interesting acquaintanceship.
    This acquaintanceship with Grenville gave me another advantage—he knew nearly everything about everyone in London,