Page 22 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

"Some young women what?" I pressed. "Should know their place? Should remain silent? Should disappear conveniently, as Emily did?"

"I didn’t say that." His voice had gone hoarse. For a moment, Mainwaring stood frozen in the doorway. Then, without a word, he was gone.

The silence he left behind was louder than anything he had said.

Chapter

Ten

The Devil's Arithmetic

The fire had burned low in my study, but I had not bothered to ring for more coal. Pain was easier to think through in the cold.

My leg ached—the deep, grinding ache that came with damp weather and hours spent standing on ground that was never meant to hold a coffin. The surgeon in Scutari had saved the limb but not the ease of it. He had also saved the rest of me, though not without omissions. There were days when a name I ought to know arrived blank, when a face surfaced without context, when the past rearranged itself like furniture in a room I could no longer fully enter. Shrapnel. A near thing. I had walked into the Crimea on two good legs and a memory I could trust, and been carried out lacking the full use of either.

I shifted in my chair and stared at the letter on the desk before me. My third attempt. The first two lay crumpled in the grate, their inadequacies consumed by the dying embers.

Lady Larkspur.

I had promised to send word.

That much was simple. The difficulty lay in everything that followed.

At Highgate, standing over Lydia Gray's grave, I had acted on instinct. An alliance had seemed not merely logical but necessary—two people who believed a woman had been murdered, pooling what they knew. The calculus of it was clean. She had information I lacked. I had resources she could not access. Together, we might uncover what had been so carefully buried.

But instinct, I had learned, was a poor strategist.

I reached for my pen, then set it down again. The nib left a small blot of ink on the paper, spreading like a bruise.

If I drew Lady Larkspur into this—into the world of men who silenced women with carriages and buried evidence behind respectable names—I would be placing her in danger. Real danger, not the polite social peril of a reputation damaged by association with the Devil of Everthorne. The kind that ended with a body on a street and a verdict of misadventure.

I could attend to the business I had come here to conduct and return to Everthorne to deal with the mundane machinery of an inheritance I had never sought. I could let Lydia Gray rest in her Highgate grave and let the truth rest with her.

I picked up the crumpled draft from the grate's edge and smoothed it flat. The words stared back at me, stiff and inadequate:

I believe it would be prudent for us to meet at your earliest convenience to discuss matters of mutual concern.

Prudent. As though prudence had ever governed a single decision I had made.

I crushed the paper again and let it fall.

The trouble was, Lady Larkspur would not walk away. I had seen it in her face at the inquest when she challenged the coroner. I had heard it in her voice at Highgate when she spoke of Lydia's poem. She was already investigating—already asking questions, already drawing connections. She would continue whether I helped her or not. And a woman asking dangerous questions alone, without knowing the full shape of the danger, was far more vulnerable than one who had an ally watching her back.

Which meant that keeping my distance was not the safer course. It was the more cowardly one.

I crossed to the window, my left leg protesting each step with its familiar sullen complaint. The London night pressed against the glass—fog and gaslight, the distant rattle of a late hansom. Everthorne House sat in Mayfair like a monument to a family that had perfected the art of looking admirable from the outside.

I had not wanted this house. I had not wanted the title, the estate, the weight of a name that tasted like ash in my mouth. My brother William had inherited it from our father, and then he himself had been taken by typhoid fever within the year—a cruel efficiency. Providence had worked through the family Bible with a pen, striking out names until only I remained.

The least suitable.

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and closed my eyes. For a moment I was twenty-three again, standing in my father's study at Everthorne Manor while the old Marquis explained, with the patient logic of a man accustomed to arranging other people's lives, exactly what was required of me.

Emily Driscoll had been found in the conservatory, weeping, her dress torn, bloodied. The house party had dissolved into whispered chaos within the hour. Her father, Sir Richard Driscoll, was demanding an explanation. Someone would have to answer for it.

Not William. William was the heir—steady, respectable William, whose political career was already being mapped out in the clubs and drawing rooms of Westminster. William could not be touched by this. The family would not survive it.

But Julian—reckless, restless Julian, who had already earned a reputation for wildness, who had been seen drinking and flirting with half the young women in the county—Julian could absorb the blow. The mud would stick to a man already muddied.