Page 23 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

My father had not raised his voice. He never did. He simply laid out the facts as though they were tiles in a mosaic. And when the picture was complete, he waited for me to see it.

"You will leave for London tomorrow," he had said. "A commission will be arranged for you. In time, the matter will be forgotten."

Was it William? I had wanted to ask. The question had risen in my throat like bile. My father's expression—calm, immovable, utterly certain—told me that the answer did not matter. What mattered was the outcome. The Ashcombe name. The succession.

I had looked at my father and seen, for the first time, the machinery behind the man—the cold, precise logic that could sacrifice a son as readily as a pawn.

And I had done what he asked. God help me, I had done it.

I opened my eyes. The window showed me my own reflection—older, thinner, the scar a pale line from ear to chin, the face of a man who had spent twelve years carrying a weight he might not deserve.

Might not. That was the cruelty of it. I did not know. I had been drinking that night—heavily, stupidly, as I drank in those days. My memories of the evening were fractured, unreliable. And what the drink had not taken, the war had finished. The surgeons had warned me that older memories might suffer—might blur, might lose their edges, might simply vanish like ink left in the rain.

I had not mourned the loss of most of them. But the memories I needed most—the hours of that night, the faces in the corridors, who had been where and when—those were precisely the ones I could not trust. I knew I had not touched Emily Driscoll. But I could not prove what I had not done, and I could not say with certainty who had. William had been in the conservatory that evening. So had other friends of his. There had been others, too—guests, servants, a clergyman attached to the household whose name I ought to remember and did not. The war had taken it, along with so much else.

The not-knowing was its own punishment. It left no room for righteous anger, only the slow corrosion of doubt.

I turned from the window and limped back to the desk. Enough. The past was a locked room, and I had spent too many years pressing my ear to the door.

What mattered now was Lydia Gray. She had served my grandmother. She had seen things—patterns, as Lady Larkspur had called them. She had written them down, shaped them into verse, and prepared to publish them. And someone had driven a carriage over her body to prevent it.

If that truth was connected to Everthorne—to whatever had happened to Emily Driscoll and to whoever had escaped blame—then I owed it to Lydia to find out. Not for redemption. I had stopped believing in redemption somewhere on the road to the Crimea. But for the simple, stubborn principle that the dead deserved better than silence.

I drew a fresh sheet of paper toward me and dipped the pen.

The meeting place mattered. Not her home—I would not compromise her reputation by calling at a single woman's residence. Not a park—too exposed, too easily observed by the sort of people who made a profession of noticing things.

The British Museum. Public enough to be unremarkable. Quiet enough, in the right gallery at the right hour, for a conversation that would not be overheard. Two people of education and standing, happening upon each other before the Elgin Marbles. Who could object to that?

I began to write. No preamble. No pleasantries. She would not want them, and I was not capable of producing them convincingly.

Lady Larkspur,

I should be grateful for the opportunity to continue our conversation earlier this week. The Townley Gallery at the British Museum is little frequented on Tuesday mornings. I understand the Roman portrait busts repay close study. Hopefully, eleven o’clock would do.

I remain, etc.

Everthorne

I read it once, set down the pen, and sealed the letter before I could change my mind.

Then I rang for Dawson and instructed him to have it delivered first thing in the morning.

The fire had gone out entirely. I sat in the dark for a long time, listening to the silence of a house full of ghosts, and wondered whether I was doing the right thing or merely the inevitable one.

In my experience, they were rarely the same.

Chapter

Eleven

A Discussion Among the Romans

The morning was absurdly bright—one of those rare London days when the sun seemed to have mistaken March for May. I arrived, with my maid in tow, at the British Museum at half past ten, having told Miriam I intended to study the Roman antiquities—which was not, strictly speaking, a lie.

One could study a great many things in the Townley Gallery. Roman portrait busts. The behavior of gentlemen who signed their letters with one name and introduced themselves with another. The limits of one's own judgement.

Inside, the museum swallowed the sunshine whole. The gallery was cool and dim, nearly deserted as Lord Everthorne's note had promised. A pair of elderly scholars murmured over a catalogue. Otherwise, the Roman dead had the room to themselves.