Page 27 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

Lydia Gray’s lodgings were in a narrow house on a quiet street in Bloomsbury, the sort of respectable-but-unfashionable address favored by women who valued privacy more than prestige.

I had brought Miriam. We had debated the point over breakfast—whether I should go alone, whether the errand warranted a chaperone—but in the end, practicality won. A woman visiting a dead friend’s rooms alone might appear eccentric. Two women paying their respects and collecting keepsakes was simply decent.

The landlady, Mrs. Hobson, answered the door with the guarded expression of a woman who had already been troubled more than she liked. She was slender, sharp-eyed, and practical in the way of people who could not afford to be otherwise.

“Mrs. Hobson? My name is Lady Larkspur. I was a friend of Miss Gray’s.”

Recognition stirred in her face. “You’re the one with the literary salon. She spoke highly of you.”

“She was very dear to me,” I meant it more than I had expected to. “I wondered whether I might see her rooms. I should like to collect any personal writings she may have left—her poetry, her letters. They ought to be with someone who valued them.”

Mrs. Hobson studied me with the frank appraisal of a woman who made her living judging character at the doorstep. Then her expression softened.

“She’d have wanted that, I think. Always scribbling away, she was. Sometimes I’d hear her pacing at night, muttering verses to herself.” She sighed. “Poor soul. Paid through the end of the month, so the rooms are as they were. I thought the police might want another look, but they haven’t troubled themselves.”

“The inquest mentioned that her rooms had been disturbed,” I said carefully.

Mrs. Hobson’s face darkened. “Disturbed. That’s a kind word for it. Someone went through her things proper while I was out to market. Drawers pulled out, papers everywhere. I found it that way the day after she died.” She shook her head. “Told the coroner’s men, for all the good it did. They said it was probably Miss Gray herself, searching for something in a distracted state before she went out. Distracted state.” She repeated the words with the contempt they deserved. “That woman was the least distracted person I ever met.”

“I quite agree,” I said.

She pulled a key from her pocket. “Top floor, last door on the left. Take what you need. She’d not want her work going to strangers or the dustbin.”

The house smelled of boiled cabbage and beeswax, the mingled scent of economy and care. Miriam and I climbed the narrow stairs in silence. At the top, I turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door.

Lydia’s room was small but dignified. A narrow bed, neatly made. A writing desk beneath the window. A bookshelf crammed with volumes that spoke of a restless and voracious mind—poetry, philosophy, political treatises, histories. A washstand with a chipped basin. A single framed print on the wall: a reproduction of Millais’s Ophelia, that drowned girl with flowers in her hair. The choice unsettled me more than I wished to admit.

The afternoon light fell through the window in a pale slant, illuminating the fine layer of dust that had settled over everything. The room had the stillness of a place that had been waiting for someone who would never return.

“We should be efficient but move quickly,” Miriam said, closing the door behind us.

“Right.” Otherwise, the landlady might start to wonder what was taking us so long.

The room confirmed what Mrs. Hobson had described, and the inquest had recorded. Someone had searched it with more urgency than care. Drawers stood half-open, papers were scattered across the surface, and the careful order Lydia had surely maintained was destroyed. Ink bottles had been overturned, their dark stains had spread across the wood like bruises. A pen nib lay snapped in two.

"Whoever did this was not concerned with being discovered," Miriam said, surveying the damage. "They expected her to be dead."

The thought settled over me like cold water. The ransacking and the murder had been planned together— the one to silence Lydia, the other to find whatever she had left behind.

I rifled through what remained. Bills and receipts. Correspondence from publishers—rejection letters mostly, a few cautious acceptances for poems published under her pseudonym. The ordinary detritus of a writer's life, left behind like shed skin.

Nothing that would have warranted murder.

"They were looking for the poem," I said. "Her drafts, her notes—anything that could be used to expose the man she was writing about." I sat back on my heels, thinking. "The question is whether they found it. Lydia was on her way to her publisher the day she was killed. She was carrying the manuscript with her, so it would not have been here for them to find."

“Or she was on her way back after having delivered it,” Miriam said.

The thought had already occurred to me, and I did not like where it led. If Lydia had already delivered the poem, the publisher would have it—and the killer would have searched for nothing. But if she had been intercepted before she arrived, the manuscript might have been taken from her body. Then, the poem could be anywhere—in the hands of her killer or lost in the street.

“Either way, the poem would not be here. But her drafts would be. The question was: where would she have hidden them?”

Two dozen or so volumes, well-worn and clearly beloved, rested on the shelves. A woman who valued ideas above all else would trust other books to guard her secrets.

“Check every one,” I said. “Loose pages, anything tucked inside.”

We worked quickly and methodically, pulling volumes from the shelves, fanning the pages, checking for anything hidden between the leaves. Most yielded nothing. A pressed flower fell from a volume of Keats. A shopping list slipped from between the pages of a French grammar. Small, ordinary fragments of a life.

Then Miriam opened a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and a folded paper fluttered to the floor.