Page 33 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

That landed. It was meant to. Miriam did not deal in idle warnings; she dealt in consequences, and she had an unerring instinct for the ones I most wished to ignore.

I set the letter aside and reached for the second envelope.

I recognized it at once. The stationery was expensive, the handwriting elegant and faintly theatrical—loops and flourishes that suggested a man who enjoyed the act of writing as a minor performance. The seal bore a crest I knew well.

Peregrine’s.

I opened it with a smile that faded, slowly, as I read.

My dearest Lark,

A word to the wise, from one who is seldom accused of wisdom.

You were observed in close conversation with a certain dark-haired gentleman among the Roman busts at the British Museum. The source was Lady Fenton, who could not have been more delighted if she had witnessed an elopement in the reading room.

I make no judgement. The gentleman in question is, I confess, uncommonly well-formed, and possessed of the sort of brooding intensity that sends ladies reaching for their smelling salts. One can hardly blame you for lingering among the antiquities in such company.

However. You are unmarried. He is notorious. And London has the collective discretion of a parrot in a parlor. If you intend to continue your study of the Roman busts—and I suspect the busts are not, in fact, what hold your interest—I would counsel a change of venue where you may be more private.

Take care, dear girl. Society forgives a great deal in a man and almost nothing in a woman, which is among its many injustices, but not one we are in a position to reform.

Your devoted and perpetually concerned admirer of your judgement, if not always your prudence,

P.

I lowered the letter.

Miriam was watching me with the expression of a woman who did not need to ask what the letter contained because my face had already told her everything.

“Peregrine,” I said.

“And?”

“Lady Fenton saw Thorne and me at the museum.”

Miriam closed her eyes briefly—the nearest she ever came to profanity. Lady Fenton was among the most industrious gossips in London, a woman who treated other people’s business as a vocation and pursued it with the devotion of a saint. If Lady Fenton had seen us, half of Mayfair would know before long.

“You cannot receive him here. You cannot meet him in public—not after this. Lady Fenton will be watching for a second sighting the way a terrier watches a rabbit hole.”

“Then what do you suggest? We have information to exchange. We cannot conduct an investigation by post—letters can be intercepted, and I need to see his face when we speak.”

“Then you must find a way to meet that does not give society—or your brother—a weapon.”

I stared at Peregrine’s letter, at the elegance of his handwriting, at the warning wrapped so carefully in wit that it almost disguised the genuine concern beneath. He was right. Miriam was right. The museum had been a mistake—not in substance but in visibility. Two people of standing, seen together in conversation, became a story. And a story, once told, could not be untold.

The solution, when it came to me, was so improper that it circled back around to practical.

“Midnight, here,” I said.

Miriam stared at me. “I beg your pardon?”

“No one will see him arrive at midnight. No one will see him leave. The servants will be abed. You will be here as chaperone, which satisfies propriety, if not convention. And we will have the privacy to speak freely without Lady Fenton or anyone else cataloguing the encounter for public consumption.”

“You are proposing to receive a gentleman—an unmarried gentleman—at midnight. In your home.” Miriam’s tone could have etched glass. “Do you hear yourself?”

“I hear a woman with no good options choosing the least bad one.” I met her eyes. “A midnight meeting is irregular, I grant you. But it is also invisible. And right now, invisible is what we need.”

Miriam regarded me for a long, measured moment. I could see the argument forming behind her eyes—the marshaling of objections, the weighing of alternatives, the slow and reluctant acknowledgement that I was not wrong.