Page 30 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

Harkness made a note, his pen scratching across the paper with the steady industry of a man billing by the hour. “There is also the matter of the Thornecliffe site. Two mill owners have expressed interest—a spinning operation and a finishing works. The land is suitable, but the access road requires improvement, and the local magistrate has raised objections about the water table.”

“The magistrate being?”

“Sir William Hartley. He owns the adjacent land and, I suspect, prefers it to remain pastoral.”

“Everyone prefers their neighbor’s land to remain pastoral.” I shifted in my chair, easing the weight on my left leg. The damp of the City crept through stone walls and found every old wound with unerring accuracy. “Arrange a meeting with Hartley. If he has legitimate concerns about the water table, I will hear them. If he is merely protecting his view, he can be persuaded.”

We continued in this fashion for another hour. Rents, tenancies, repairs, obligations. The machinery of an estate that had been running on reputation and credit for a generation and was now being asked, for the first time, to run on competence. It was tedious, necessary work—the sort of work my father and brother had considered beneath them and which I found, to my own surprise, suited me rather well. Perhaps because it was honest. Numbers did not lie, did not perform, did not require you to be charming. They simply were.

I had learned the value of honest reckoning in the army, where the difference between accurate intelligence and wishful thinking was measured in men’s lives. The Everthorne accounts were not so dramatic in their consequences, but the principle was the same: see the ground as it is, not as you wish it to be.

It was as we neared the end of the ledger that Harkness paused.

“There is one item I wish to bring to your attention.” He turned several pages and ran his finger down a column. “A charitable endowment established by your father in 1847. An annual payment of one hundred and fifty pounds to a private institution in Kent, administered by a clergyman. The terms of the trust require the payment to continue for the lifetime of the establishment.”

“What sort of institution?”

“The trust instrument describes it as—” He consulted the document. “‘A private establishment for the moral rehabilitation and residential care of vulnerable women.’”

I looked at him. “An asylum.”

“The word is not used in the document. But the description would be consistent with a private asylum, yes.” Harkness removed his spectacles and polished them—a gesture I had come to recognize as his equivalent of clearing his throat before saying something uncomfortable. “The payments have continued without interruption since the endowment was established. Your brother did not question them. I confess I did not question them either, as they appeared to be a straightforward charitable obligation.”

“And now?”

“And now you are reviewing every line of the accounts, my lord, and I would be failing in my duty if I did not bring to your attention an annual expenditure of one hundred and fifty pounds whose purpose is not entirely clear to me.”

One hundred and fifty pounds a year. For twelve years. Nearly eighteen hundred pounds paid to a clergyman in Kent for the upkeep of an institution my father had never, to my knowledge, mentioned. My father, who spoke at length about every charitable subscription he made because generosity, in his view, was only valuable if it was observed and admired. Yet this endowment was buried in the accounts like a stone dropped into deep water.

“Who is the clergyman?” I asked.

Harkness consulted the trust instrument again. “The Reverend Mr. Grimshaw. The payments are made to his account at Coutts.”

The name meant nothing to me. Or—not nothing. It sat at the edge of memory like a face glimpsed in a crowd, familiar but unplaceable. I had the sense that I had heard it before, perhaps in childhood, perhaps in the murmur of household business that drifted through the corridors of Everthorne Manor when I was too young to attend to it.

“Was Grimshaw known to my father?”

“I could not say with certainty. The trust was established through this office, but the instructions came by letter from your father.” Harkness paused. “Shall I make enquiries?”

“Yes. Quietly. I should like to know what this institution is, who resides there, and on what basis my father considered it worthy of sustained and apparently secret patronage.”

Harkness wrote this down with the impassive thoroughness of a man who had long ago learned that the most dangerous word in the English language was “quietly.”

“One other matter,” I said. “Have a notice placed in the principal London newspapers. State that I seek anyone who witnessed a woman being struck by a carriage on Gower Street on the morning of the fourteenth of March. Any person possessing information is to communicate with this office.”

Harkness looked up. “You believe there may have been witnesses who have not yet come forward?”

“I believe there almost certainly were. Whether they understood the importance of what they saw is another matter entirely.”

I gathered my hat and stick and rose. My leg had stiffened during the hours of sitting, and the first few steps required more concentration than I cared to show. Harkness, to his credit, looked away.

Everthorne House greeted me with the silence of a residence whose master lived largely in three rooms and whose staff had learned to move like ghosts. Dawson, my man, met me in the hall with a letter tray.

“Two items, my lord. The first from your steward at Everthorne.”

I broke the seal. Croft’s handwriting was as methodical as the man himself—a former sergeant who had served under me in the Crimea and whom I had installed at the estate for the simple reason that he was honest, tireless, and incapable of being intimidated by tenants, tradesmen, or traditions.

My Lord,