In Bed with the Duke

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More Than a Lover

by Ann Lethbridge

Chapter One

March 30th, 1820

Bladen Read, erstwhile captain of the Twenty-Fifth Hussars, stretched his legs beneath the scarred trestle table in the corner of the commons of the Sleeping Tiger. Nearby, a miserable fire struggled against the wind whistling down the chimney while the smell of smoke battled with the stink of old beer and unwashed men oozing from the ancient panelling. He might have stayed somewhere better these past five days, but it would have been a waste of limited coin he preferred to spend on decent stabling for his horses and a room for his groom. After all, it wasn’t their fault he’d been forced to tender his resignation from his regiment.

That was his fault, fair and square, for not blindly following orders. And not for the first time. It was why he’d never advanced beyond captain and never would now.

Hopefully, his letter to his good friend Charlie, the Marquess of Tonbridge, would result in an offer of employment or he’d be going cap in hand to his father. The thought made his stomach curdle.

He nodded at the elderly tapman to bring him another ale to wash down the half-cooked eggs, burned bacon and day-old bread that served for breakfast in this establishment. Not that his rations while fighting for king and country on the Iberian Peninsula had been any better, but they also hadn’t been that much worse.

He opened The Times and placed it beside his plate. The tapman wandered over with a fresh tankard. He slapped it down on the table, the foam running down the sides and pooling in a ring around its base. His lip curled as he pointed a grimy finger at the headline—the words were stark: ‘Hunt. Guilty of Sedition’.

‘Sedition?’ the old man growled. ‘It was a massacre. There was women there. Families. It’s the damned soldiers what ought to be up on a charge.’

‘You are right.’ Blade knew, because he’d been at St Peter’s Field. Hunt had been invited to Manchester to speak to a populace suffering from the loss of work or low wages and high prices for bread. He advocated change. What the powers that be had not expected were the vast numbers who would come to hear the man speak.

People had come from miles away, the women in their Sunday best, many of them wearing white, holding their children by the hand and carrying the banners they’d stitched. They’d come to hear Hunt, a radical who was famous for his opinions and wearing a white top hat. Scared to the point of panic, the government had sent the army to break up the gathering because they had learned of the careful organisation behind the event. Curse their eyes. The crowd had been peaceful, not starting a revolution as the government claimed. Hunt had barely begun addressing the crowd from a wagon bed when the militia had charged.

The potman snorted derisively. ‘You were there, then, were ye, Captain? Got a few licks in?’

Not this soldier. He had tried to turn the militia aside. As a result, he’d been deemed unfit to serve his king. His years of service had counted for nothing. Not that in hindsight he would have done anything different. Waking and asleep, he heard the screams of women and children and the shouts of men, as the soldiers, his soldiers, charged into the crowd, laying about them with sabres as if they were on the battlefield at Waterloo. Eighteen citizens dead and over seven hundred injured, some by the sword, others trampled by horses. Just thinking about it made him feel ill.

No wonder the press had labelled it Peterloo. Britain’s greatest shame and a tarnish on the victory over the French at Waterloo a mere four years before.

The potman spat into the fire. ‘The people won’t stand for it. You wait and see. They might have put Hunt in prison, but it won’t be the end of it.’

Blade’s blood ran cold. ‘I’d keep that sort of talk to yourself, man, if you know what’s good for you.’

The government had spies and agents provocateurs roaming the countryside looking for a way to justify their actions of last August and the laws they had changed to reduce the risk of revolution. The Six Acts, they were called. The radicals called it an infringement of their rights.

He swallowed his rage. At the government. At the army. At his stubborn dull-witted colonel. And most of all at himself for remaining in the service beyond the end of the war. He had wanted to fight an enemy, not British citizens.

The man gave him a narrow-eyed stare as if remembering to whom he was talking. ‘Will there be anything else, Captain?’

‘Mr and, no, thank you. Nothing else.’