Page 16 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

“Devil seems rather strong.”

“There was a scandal some years ago. A young woman compromised—or so the story goes. He took the blame and went into the army afterward. Served in the Crimea and was wounded.” She picked up her needle again with studied calm. “He came back to England after his brother died, and he inherited the title. Society has not entirely forgiven him for the sin he supposedly committed. But seeing how he is now a marquis, I suspect society will suffer from a sudden lapse of memory.”

“And now he is burying Lydia Gray.”

“Which means he’s either a man of conscience,” Miriam said, “or a man with something to hide. In my experience, the two are not always distinguishable at first glance.”

I stared into the fire and turned the notebook’s weight over in my mind. Lydia had served in the Everthorne household. She had witnessed something terrible there. And now the Marquis of Everthorne was paying for her grave. Was it payment for her silence through the years? She did not mention him to me.

But he was certain to be at her funeral. I would go to Highgate and see what I made of him.

Tuesday dawned gray and cold, the sky low with the threat of rain as though London itself had dressed for mourning. Our carriage climbed the long hill to Highgate beneath a canopy of bare elms, their branches black and intricate against the pale sky.

Miriam sat beside me, buttoned into her darkest bombazine, her expression set in the careful neutrality she reserved for occasions she privately considered reckless. She knew I intended to talk to Everthorne. And she disapproved.

Highgate Cemetery received us in silence. The iron gates stood open. Beyond them, the paths wound between monuments and headstones like the corridors of a vast stone library. Angels presided from their plinths, wings spread in frozen benediction. Ivy crept over older tombs, softening their edges, drawing them slowly back into the earth. The air smelled of damp stone, turned soil, and the faintly sweet decay of leaves.

The plot chosen to receive Lydia Gray’s remains was modest but well chosen—set upon a gentle rise beneath a young oak, with a view down the hill toward the city. Whoever had selected it had done so with care, which surprised me. It felt personal, not perfunctory.

A small knot of mourners had already gathered. Mrs. Fitzwilliam stood near the path in a black mantle trimmed in crape, her sharp face softened by genuine grief. She clasped my hands when I reached her.

“I did not think there would be many,” she said quietly. “Lydia had admirers but few who would risk being seen at her grave. Her writings made her inconvenient.”

“Inconvenient women deserve witnesses at their burial,” I said.

“Then we shall be her witnesses,” Mrs. Fitzwilliam said. “And let them whisper if they like.”

Beyond her, I counted fewer than a dozen people—a handful of women I recognized from the salon, a young clergyman clutching his prayer book as though the wind might steal it, and two men in dark coats who stood apart with the careful blankness of those who did not wish to be noticed.

And then there was the man standing alone beside the grave.

The man from the inquest—the one who had stood at the back of that wretched room above the King’s Arms, half-hidden by the pillar, watching everything with the still intensity of a hawk. I had felt his gaze across the crowded room. For one strange, suspended moment, our eyes had met, and I had seen something in his expression that I recognized—a fury held on a tight leash, an understanding of injustice that went deeper than outrage.

He had slipped out before I could reach him. I had spent the days since wondering who he was.

Now I knew.

Julian Ashcombe, Marquis of Everthorne. The Devil himself.

He was tall, lean, and angular, with the kind of stillness that suggested coiled energy rather than calm. His dark hair was uncovered despite the cold, and his face—sharp-boned, weathered by sun and wind in a way that spoke of years spent far from English drawing rooms—bore the guarded expression of a man who had learned not to let the world see too much. A scar, thin and pale, traced the line of his jaw from ear to chin. The Crimea's mark, I supposed.

He leaned, very slightly, on a walking stick of dark wood—his weight shifted off the left leg in a way I doubted he was aware of, but which told its own story. The war had cost him more than the scar.

There was something compelling in the way he held himself—a quality of absolute self-possession that made the space around him feel charged, as though the air itself had drawn a breath and not yet released it.

He stood at the head of the grave with his hat in his hands, looking down at the coffin as though he owed the woman inside something he could not name.

The clergyman began the service. His voice was thin in the open air, the familiar words carried sideways by the wind. I heard them without listening—earth to earth, ashes to ashes—the same words spoken over every grave, as though all deaths were equal, all losses the same weight.

They were not. Lydia Gray’s death was not an accident, and no amount of prayer would make it one.

I kept my eyes forward, but my attention pulled toward Everthorne like a compass needle finding north. He did not weep. He did not bow his head. He watched the coffin with an expression I could only describe as resolve—the look of a man making a promise to the dead.

When the clergyman finished, the mourners stirred. A few stepped forward to drop earth upon the coffin. Mrs. Fitzwilliam squeezed my arm and murmured her farewell.

Miriam lingered at my side, vigilant as ever. I could feel her attention sharpening as she followed the direction of my gaze. “That is Everthorne,” she said under her breath.

“I know. He arranged all of this, Miriam. The plot, the service, the clergyman. A man does not bury a former servant with this kind of care unless he feels an obligation beyond the ordinary.”