you? He was a rifleman with your regiment. Not only that, but he’s the sergeant who testified in your defense at your court-martial. If it hadn’t been for him, you’d have hanged.”
“I remember him.”
“I must admit,” said Sebastian, “his appearance has changed so radically that I didn’t recognize him.”
Tyson shook the water from his hands and reached for the towel offered by an attendant. “I’m not surprised. He got kicked in the head by one of the supply wagon’s mules. He’s never been right since then, which is a polite way of saying the man belongs in a madhouse.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where I might find him?”
“Did you try Bedlam?”
Sebastian shook his head. “He’s very much a free man. And he seems to be laboring under the opinion that he’s suffered some sort of injustice. Do you know anything about that?”
Tyson tossed the towel aside. “As I recall, after the accident he had difficulty distinguishing between his own property and that of others. Why? What does any of this have to do with me?”
“I don’t know that it does.”
Tyson reached for his coat and shrugged into it. “I told you, the man is mad.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“He may well be.” Tyson adjusted his cuffs. “Do you think him involved in Eisler’s murder in some way?”
“Was Foy acquainted with Eisler?”
“Now, how would I know? The man was a sergeant—not exactly one of my intimates.”
“Unlike Beresford?”
Tyson looked over at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Did you know Eisler was in the habit of acquiring information about people and then using it against them?”
Tyson turned to walk toward the entrance. “I can’t say I’m surprised. Are you?”
Sebastian fell into step beside him. “It occurs to me that Eisler could have been playing his tricks on Blair Beresford—threatening to tell Hope about his gambling losses.”
Tyson looked over at him. “What makes you think Beresford has gambling debts?”
“He told me himself.”
“Beresford isn’t exactly what you’d consider a ripe target for blackmail. He has no money—as Eisler himself obviously knew all too well.”
“To my knowledge, Eisler’s form of blackmail was more subtle than your normal variety of extortion.”
Something flickered across Tyson’s face, then was gone. “Perhaps. But I can’t imagine what Beresford has that might have interested Eisler. He’s the younger son of a small Irish landowner, in London for a few months.”
“Seems an unusual friend for someone who spent ten years fighting from India to Spain.”
Tyson drew up on the flagway before the shooting gallery. The golden September sunlight fell hard across his face, accentuating the harsh lines and deep grooves dug there by a decade of forced marches and indifferent rations and overexposure to a fierce tropical sun. “What are you suggesting? That I ought to be spending my days at the Fox and Hound, knocking back tankards of stout and reminiscing with my fellow officers about the good old days? I’m twenty-six, not seventy-six. Blair Beresford is quick-witted and endlessly amusing. He’s also a brilliant poet. He took the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for one of his poems. Did you know?”
“No.”
“There is much that you do not know.” Tyson squinted up at the sun. “And now you really must excuse me. I’ve an appointment with my tailor.”
Sebastian watched the lieutenant turn to saunter toward Bond Street, but stopped him by saying, “How did you happen to meet Beresford, anyway?”
Tyson pivoted slowly to face him again, his dark eyes narrowing with a tight smile that could have meant anything. “We met through Yates.”
Then he touched his hand to his hat and walked on.
Since her marriage to Russell Yates, Kat Boleyn had lived in a sprawling town house on Cavendish Square. It was a fashionable address favored by the nobility and wealthy merchants and bankers, all of whom no doubt looked upon their notorious new neighbors with scandalized horror. Kat might have been the most acclaimed actress on the London stage, but she was still an actress. And although it was not well-known, she’d once survived as a homeless, abused child on the streets of London by selling the only the thing of value she possessed: herself.
It was a time she rarely spoke of. But Sebastian had seen the way she looked at the young, ragged girls who haunted the back alleys of Covent Garden. He knew only too well the mark those days had left upon her. He’d tried to ease the damage done to her by that desperate time, by the English soldiers who’d raped and killed her mother, by her aunt’s lecherous