I lifted a small card from the writing table and held it up between my fingers. I had found, in a pocket sewn into her cloak, her reticule, which contained a card case. The small ivory-colored rectangles within had proclaimed her as Mrs. Colonel Roehampton Westin.

She looked angry, but whether at me for taking such a liberty, or herself for not thinking to remove her card case, I could not tell.

When I'd read the name early that morning, I had understood better why she'd not wanted to tell me who she was. She was Lydia Westin, the widow of the unhappy Colonel Westin, late of the Forty-Third Light Dragoons. Rumor put it that he had committed a murder during the Peninsular campaign, a murder that had only recently come to light.

From what I had learned from gossip in the coffeehouses that summer, and from my former sergeant, Pomeroy, now a Bow Street Runner, a young man called John Spencer and his brother were seeking to discover who had murdered their father during the rioting after the battle of Badajoz in Spain in 1812.

At first it had been assumed that Captain Algernon Spencer had simply been killed in the frenzy. But now it seemed that his true killer had a name, and that name might well have been Colonel Roehampton Westin.

The happenings after the victory at Badajoz were, in my opinion, a blot on the reputation of the King's army. After the French had fled the town, the English soldiers had gone mad, beginning a drunken revelry that had lasted days. They had stormed houses, dragged families into the streets and shot them for sport, and looted all within. They had bayoneted those too feeble to get out of their way, and forced themselves onto women right on the muddy cobbles, ripping jewelry from their ears and breasts.

Not until a gallows had been set up in the middle of the square did the violence cease. I had been among those sent in to try to restore order. One of my own sergeants had threatened to shoot me if I did not help him plunder a house of a woman and her sister. I had lost my temper and let him know with my fists what I thought of his threats. The sergeant had been carried back to camp.