Page 28 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

“Lark.”

I crossed to her side, my hands unsteady as I picked up the paper. It was foolscap, torn raggedly along one edge as if ripped from a larger sheet. And written on it, in Lydia’s small, careful hand, were four stanzas of verse.

The garden kept its secret well that night,

While lanterns burned in rooms above the stair.

A lamb was led where no one saw her plight⁠—

The revelers too glad, the hour too fair.

The stone house holds what living tongues deny.

Ask who was absent when the music played.

Ask what was purchased with a father’s lie,

And who was ruined, and who was repaid.

The son went East. The daughter disappeared.

The name was scrubbed as one might scrub a floor.

But ink endures what shame and power have feared⁠—

I kept the record. I will keep the score.

Let those who lit the fire now face the flame.

The wolf still walks among the pious fold.

I know his face. I will not speak his name⁠—

Not yet. Not here. But soon, the truth be told.

I read it twice, then a third time, my mind working through each line like a locksmith testing tumblers.

The garden. A house party. A young woman harmed while the rest of the company was occupied. A son sent away—that could mean Thorne, banished to the army. A daughter who disappeared—Emily Driscoll, perhaps, married off and removed from society. A father’s lie. But whose father? Emily’s? Thorne’s? Both?

And then the final stanza. The wolf still walks among the pious fold. Not the old Marquis—he was dead. Not William, also dead. Someone else. Someone still living, still powerful, still walking freely among respectable society. Lydia knew his face. But she had not written his name.

“It’s about the house party,” Miriam said, reading over my shoulder. “The one at Everthorne Manor.”

“It would fit,” I said. “She’s written it to suggest without confirming. But it could point in more than one direction.”

“The wolf,” Miriam pressed. “She knew his face.”

“But she would not speak his name at the salon. And now. Not ever.” I traced the line with my finger. The wolf still walks among the pious fold. “Pious. That word is deliberate. She’s describing someone who presents himself as morally upright. But who? Without Lydia to tell us, the poem alone isn’t enough.”

“That narrows it to half the men in London,” Miriam said dryly.

"But not half the men at that house party." I folded the paper carefully and slipped it into my reticule. "We need the guest list. Thorne is talking to Mainwaring and sending for his grandmother's papers. We can then begin to narrow down who this wolf might be."

“Thorne?” Miriam raised an eyebrow. “Not Everthorne?”

"He prefers it. Everthorne is the title. Thorne is the man."

Miriam's expression suggested she had thoughts about that distinction, but she kept them to herself.