Page 29 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

We continued searching. Two more scraps of verse turned up. Both were in Lydia’s hand, both fragmentary, and both maddeningly oblique. Pieces of a pattern whose full shape I could not yet see.

I was replacing the last of the books when Miriam touched my arm. "We should go," she said quietly. "We've been here long enough. If we linger, Mrs. Hobson will wonder what we're really looking for."

On our way down, we encountered the landlady. “Mrs. Hobson, did Miss Gray have many visitors?”

She considered this. “Not many. She kept to herself mostly. A few ladies from time to time—I expect from your salon. The odd delivery of books.” She paused, frowning. “But there was one gentleman, a few weeks ago. Came to the door asking for her. I sent him up, but she turned him away after only a few minutes. I heard raised voices, though I couldn’t make out the words.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Older fellow. Well-dressed. Silver hair, very neat. Had a sort of—” She searched for the word. “A respectable look about him. The kind of man you’d see at the front of a church.”

That could mean anyone. The powerful sat in the front pews. I kept my expression pleasant and neutral, though my heart had begun to beat very fast. “Did he give his name?”

“No.” She sniffed. “When he came down, he looked angry. Face all red, jaw set. Asked me whether Miss Gray had family. I told him nothing. Wasn’t his affair.”

“You are a good judge of character, Mrs. Hobson.”

“I’m a good judge of men who think they’re owed answers,” she corrected. “Same thing, in my experience.”

I thanked her, promised to return if any further effects needed collecting, and we stepped out into the Bloomsbury afternoon.

The reticule at my wrist felt heavier than its contents could possibly account for. Three scraps of verse. A wolf with no name. A respectable man with silver hair who had come asking questions Lydia had refused to answer.

Somewhere in London, he was walking through his day—calling on friends, perhaps, or sitting in his pew, or signing his name to some new act of public virtue. Confident that the woman who knew his face was buried in Highgate, and that whatever she had written had died with her.

He was wrong on both counts. And before this was finished, I intended for him to know it.

Chapter

Thirteen

The Ledger & the Lie

There is a circle of purgatory reserved for gentlemen who must sit in solicitors’ offices while other men explain their own finances to them. I had been occupying it since half past nine.

Harkness & Poole kept chambers on Throgmorton Street, in one of those narrow, soot-darkened buildings where fortunes were made, lost, and occasionally discovered to have been imaginary all along. The senior partner, Mr. Harkness, had served my father for twenty years and my brother for the months of William’s tenure as marquis. He had the dry, patient manner of a man accustomed to delivering bad news in measured doses.

“The position,” he said, adjusting his spectacles and turning another page of the ledger before him, “is not catastrophic.”

“That is reassuring.”

“It is not, however, comfortable.” He looked at me over the rims. “Your father’s expenditures in his final years were—considerable. Your brother inherited debts he had neither the time nor, if I may speak frankly, the temperament to address. The typhoid remediation you undertook cost upward of three thousand pounds, and the drainage works are not yet complete.”

I knew this. I had walked the estate myself, counting the cost in cracked pipes and boarded cottages and the too-quiet churchyard where the fever’s victims lay. Eight tenants dead. Fourteen more who survived but would not forget. The old drainage had been a disgrace—open channels running behind the workers’ cottages, contaminated wells that my father had known about and chosen to ignore because the expense of repair would have inconvenienced his London season.

I had ordered the works the week I claimed my inheritance. It was the first decision I made as Marquis of Everthorne, and it remained the only one I did not regret.

“The mill leases,” I said. “Where do we stand?”

Harkness turned to a different section of the ledger with the careful deliberation of a man who alphabetized his anxieties. “The Clough Beck parcel is under negotiation with Messrs. Broadbent and Son. They wish to build a wool scouring operation along the river. The terms are favorable—a sixty-year lease with annual reviews—but they are insisting on a railway spur to connect the site to the main line at Mirfield.”

“And the railway company?”

“Willing in principle. Reluctant in practice. Your father promised the spur three years ago and never delivered. The Midland Railway has learned to treat Everthorne promises with a degree of skepticism.”

I could not blame them. My father had been a man of magnificent promises and negligible follow-through—a trait William had inherited along with the title, the debts, and the conviction that the name alone should be sufficient currency. I, who had earned nothing but a commission and a limp, was now expected to make good on their failures with a reputation that preceded me into every room like a foul smell.

“Then we must demonstrate that the current marquis keeps his word,” I said. “Draw up a formal proposal for the spur. I will meet with the railway directors myself.”