Page 24 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

I found the portrait busts and pretended to examine them. A row of marble senators stared back with expressions of varying severity, each convinced of his own importance. They reminded me, uncharitably, of Lord Pemberton.

I was contemplating a particularly supercilious Caesar when a voice spoke from behind me.

"The expression on that one suggests he has just been told the wine has run out."

I turned. Julian Ashcombe stood a few paces away, carrying a walking stick with the easy manner of a gentleman for whom it was simply part of his dress. Tall, dark coat, plain cravat—but there was nothing simple about the way he occupied a room. Containment. A man holding a great deal in check.

"Lady Larkspur." He inclined his head. "Thank you for coming."

"Your note was persuasive. Shall we walk? Two people standing in conversation attract more notice than two people strolling past antiquities."

He fell into step beside me. My maid followed far enough behind she could not hear our conversation. As we moved deeper into the gallery, I noticed the slight unevenness in his gait—a faint favoring of the left leg, the kind of thing one might miss if not paying close attention.

"You wished to discuss how we might proceed," I prompted. "Regarding Miss Gray."

"I have been thinking of little else." He paused before a bust of Marcus Aurelius, though I doubted he saw it. "Lydia was companion to my grandmother for twenty years. She was intelligent, discreet, and quietly courageous."

"You knew her well, then."

"Well enough to respect her. My grandmother was not a woman given to trust." There was a dryness in his tone that suggested considerable understatement. "But Lydia earned it. She was not merely a companion but a confidante."

We moved past a case of Roman glass.

“You think your grandmother shared things with her?”

"I cannot say with certainty. My grandmother died while I was in the army." He glanced at me. "But Lydia kept a notebook. I saw it, in those early years—a small leather-bound thing she carried everywhere. She might have written down what Grandmother shared with her.”

My pulse quickened, but I kept my expression steady. The notebook was locked in my writing desk drawer at Everly House, its pages half verse, half cipher. I had deciphered barely a page in three evenings. "Do you believe it still exists?"

"That is what troubles me. The landlady testified at the inquest that Lydia's rooms had been ransacked. If whoever killed her went to the trouble of searching her lodgings, the notebook is precisely the sort of thing they would have been looking for."

"And if they found it?"

"Then we have lost our best evidence of what Lydia knew and whom she intended to expose. But there is a chance they did not. Lydia was careful—more careful than anyone gave her credit for. The rooms should be searched properly."

I let the silence fill with the soft echo of our footsteps. The notebook was not in Lydia's rooms. It was in mine. But I was not ready to trust him—not yet. His family's name appeared in its pages. Until I understood what Lydia had written about the Ashcombes, sharing it with him would be unwise.

"The landlady was fond of Lydia," I said. "Lydia spoke of me to her once as the lady who hosted a literary salon. I think she would let me in."

"You. But not me."

"A woman calling on a dead friend's landlady to collect a keepsake is unremarkable. The Marquis of Everthorne arriving to search a murdered woman's rooms would be rather more conspicuous."

The ghost of a smile crossed his face. "You have a talent for strategy, Lark—" He stopped, as though the name had slipped out ahead of permission. "Forgive me. Lady Larkspur."

I let the moment pass.

"There is something else," he said, stopping before a marble Roman matron whose serene expression suggested she had never been troubled by anything so vulgar as doubt. "The poem Lydia read at your salon. It spoke of men who used power to escape scrutiny. Of silence purchased."

"It did."

"Was she writing about Everthorne Manor?"

The question was direct, and I respected him for asking it. A guilty man—or a cautious one—would have circled the subject.

"The poem was not specific. She described a figure—unnamed—who built a public image upon charity while privately sanctioning cruelties that would never survive daylight. Lydia came to see me privately before she died. She told me a young woman in your grandmother's household had been dismissed very suddenly with no explanation. By the end of the week, the girl was spoken of as unstable, unsuitable. Lydia said the man responsible dined at the table the following evening as though nothing had occurred."

Julian went very still.