Page 31 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

The dowager’s papers have been located in the east wing study, in three locked cases. I have not opened them, as you instructed. They will be dispatched to London by the Thursday carrier and should reach Everthorne House by Saturday at the latest.

The drainage works at Thornecliffe proceed on schedule. The new well at Prior’s Farm has been sunk and tested clean.

Your obedient servant, etc.

Croft

I read the letter twice. The papers would arrive by Saturday—good.

“The second item, my lord.” Dawson held out a plain envelope, unsealed, without postmark. “Delivered by hand this morning. The boy who brought it could not describe the sender.”

I opened it. A single sheet, unsigned, in a hand I did not recognize.

The poet is buried. Let the poem die with her. There are men in London whose generosity has limits, and whose patience has none.

I stood in the hall for a long time, the paper in my hand, the house silent around me.

The threat was not subtle. It was not meant to be. Whoever had written it knew about Lydia’s poem, knew I was investigating her death, and wanted me to understand that further enquiry would carry consequences.

I felt a machinery engaging—the instinct that had kept me alive through years of war. Assess the ground. Identify the threat. Determine whether to advance or withdraw.

In the Crimea, the answer had always been the same: you advanced, because withdrawal meant leaving your men exposed.

I folded the note carefully and placed it in the breast pocket of my coat. Then I sat down at my desk and wrote a letter.

Lady Larkspur:

The dowager’s papers arrive Saturday. I plan to visit Mainwaring tomorrow. We will need to meet again to discuss what I find as well as what you have discovered. Please name the place and time we may do so.

I am at your disposal,

Thorne

Having signed it with the name she had chosen for me, I sealed it before the ink was dry.

I didn’t mention the charitable endowment my father had funded in my letter, mainly because it may not have anything to do with our investigation. Once I had more information, I would decide whether it was something to pursue. But it was rather suspect on its own. My father had paid a clergyman one hundred and fifty pounds a year for years. For what? The question would not rest. Charity did not require concealment. Obligation, on the other hand, often did.

I did not yet know what this meant. But I had learned, in the army and in life, to recognize the shape of something hidden—the way the ground dips where a grave has been dug, even after the grass has grown back.

Outside, the March light was fading, the sky above Mayfair thickening to the color of pewter. I sat in the growing dark and thought about charitable endowments and the kind of man who kept his generosity a secret.

And then I rang for Dawson and told him to have Lady Larkspur’s letter delivered before the evening post.

Chapter

Fourteen

The Notebook and the Warning

Since our return from Lydia Gray’s lodgings, I had been racking my brain trying to decipher the notebook. This evening was no different.

Miriam and I spread what we had found on the drawing room table. The four stanzas from the Wollstonecraft. The two additional fragments. And beside them, open to the page I had been struggling with since we returned, the notebook itself.

I had not told Thorne about it, mainly because his family name appeared in its pages. Until I understood what Lydia had written about them, I would not share that information with him. It was not that I distrusted him—not precisely. But trust, once given, cannot be retrieved, and I preferred to know what I was offering before I did.

I laid the poem fragments beside the notebook’s cramped, coded entries and tried to see the pattern.

The verse was Lydia’s public voice—her accusations shaped into art, careful enough to suggest without naming, dangerous enough to terrify whoever recognized himself in its lines. The notebook was her private record—dates, initials, observations set down in a hand that grew smaller and more cautious as the entries progressed.