Henry Gerrard had a life, and friends and family. How could she have forgotten, even for a single moment, Jeremy wasn’t the only victim of this crime? She knew better than anyone a tragic loss, especially a violent one, couldn’t be kept inside a clenched fist. It couldn’t be contained. It was like a contagion, infecting everyone it touched.
“My mother was murdered,” Sophia whispered, then froze, shocked she’d said the words aloud. She never spoke of her mother, not to anyone, and she was choosing to startwith Lord Gray?
It seemed so.
“I saw it happen. I was hiding in a cupboard, and saw it through the keyhole.” It hadn’t been the first time she’d been in that cupboard, or even the first time a man had knocked her mother down.
But this had been different. This time, her mother hadn’t gotten up again.
“There was…a great deal of blood.” Sophia didn’t look at Lord Gray as she spoke, but she was aware he’d gone still beside her. “I was very young at the time, but I remember trying to staunch the blood.” Even at seven years old, Sophia knew what to do when there was blood.
Bits of wadded linen for blood, and kisses for bruising…
It hadn’t worked, of course, but she’d stayed there for hours, crooning to her mother and stroking the matted dark hair until the light in the window faded, then lightened—once, then again, and again a third time. Three days. By the time Lady Clifford and Daniel came, her mother’s body hadbegun to decay.
Sophia had fled back into the cupboard when she heard their steps on the splintered boards in the hallway. Years later, Lady Clifford told her they’d known she was there because she’d left a trail of bloody footprints from her mother’s body to thecupboard door.
Sophia risked a glance at Lord Gray. His stern face had softened, and his gray eyes had gone dark with shared grief. “Will you…will you tell me a little about Mr. Gerrard?”
His throat worked, and without thinking, Sophia reached across the seat and took his hand. He jerked in surprise at the touch of her fingers, but he didn’t pull away. “He was…alive. I know that sounds foolish, but no other word fits quite as well as that one. He loved to laugh.” He made a helpless gesture with his hand. “It’s been weeks, and even now, I still can’t believe he’s gone. It seems incredible a life like his could end so quickly, with so little fanfare, like…snuffingout a candle.”
Sophia gave the long fingers in her hand a hesitant squeeze. “How didyou know him?”
“The three of us—myself, Lord Lyndon, and Henry—were at Eton together, and later Oxford.” A sad smile lifted one corner of his lips. “His high spirits got us into no end of trouble, but he always managed to talk his way out of being sent down. He had a good heart. No one could stay angry athim for long.”
Sophianodded, waited.
“His son, Samuel, is just two years old. His widow, Abigail…all she and Henry wanted was to be together, to watch their son grow into a man.” Lord Gray trailed off with a shake of his head that said more than words could have. “They should have had that chance. None of themdeserved this.”
“No, they didn’t.” How wrong it was, that a man like Henry Gerrard should suffer such a tragic fate, while men like Peter Sharpe went about their lives unscathed.
Lord Gray met her gaze. “Jeremy Ives doesn’t deserve it, either.”
Sophia’s heart twisted at his words. Until he said them aloud, she didn’t realize she’d ached to hear them. Not from Lord Gray, exactly, but ever since this nightmare began, she’d been waiting for someone, anyone from outside the Clifford School to listen to her, and believe her.
Believe Jeremy.
The tears she’d been holding back stung her eyes. They didn’t fall, but Lord Gray saw them. He brushed his fingers under her eyes and caught the moisture on his fingertip. It was the last thing Sophia expected him to do, and from the stunned look on his face, the last thing he expected of himself.
They stared at each other, tension crackling between them, until Lord Gray broke their gaze. He cleared his throat. “I intend to speak to Sampson Willis about Jeremy. He may be able to do something to help him.”
Sophia nodded, but she already knew it wouldn’t do any good. The courts had pronounced Jeremy guilty. Sampson Willis wouldn’t challenge the verdict, and even if he did, it would come too lateto save Jeremy.
But she didn’t say so. There was no point.
Yesterday she’d accused Lord Gray of not caring if an innocent man were sent to the gibbet, but she’d been wrong. Hedidcare. Perhaps he even cared as much as she did, but he was still the Ghost of Bow Street. He still had faith in men like Sampson Willis. He still believed in justice, in courts and witnesses, in magistratesand scaffolds.
Perhaps she’d believed in those things once, too, but if she ever had, it was so long ago it was a mere echo in her memory. But perhaps once, before her mother’s death, there’d been a time when she believed in justice. She’d been too young to call it that then, of course, but when her mother had promised her good little girls were rewarded for their behavior, Sophia had believed her.
She’d been a good little girl, once upon a time, but it hadn’t made any difference. She’d still been that little girl who’d torn strips of linen from the hem of her mother’s petticoat to try and bandage her head. She’d still ended up in a dismal, empty room, her pinafore soaked with her deadmother’s blood.
Somehow, it was this image of her childhood self, still young and naïve enough to believe a bandage could heal every wound, that haunted Sophia. A child, crooning broken fragments of lullabies to her murdered mother, waiting forher to wake up.
Good little girls didn’t get rewards. Justice didn’t have anything to do with goodness, any more than it did with evil. So, there was really no point in being good atall, was there?
That was the lesson Sophia took with her on the day of her mother’s death, when she left the only life she’d ever known behind. A small, hard kernel of knowledge, buried deep inside the layers of her heart.
It was a lesson she never forgot.
