Page 34 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

"I will remain in the house," she said. "In this very room, within earshot. And should I judge the situation to be in any way compromising⁠—"

"You will intervene with the full force of your disapproval. Which, as we both know, is considerable."

"It is my finest quality." She removed her spectacles and polished them—her version of a concession. "Write your note. Make it brief. And for heaven's sake, Lark, sign it with nothing warmer than your initial." She rose. "It has been a long day, and I am for bed. Goodnight, my dear."

"Goodnight."

"Don't stay up too late." And with that, she swept from the room.

I pulled a sheet of paper toward me, dipped my pen, and wrote.

T,

After careful consideration, I propose that you come to Everly House on Monday at midnight. Enter by the garden gate on the north side; it will be unlocked. You will be met at the back door.

I trust your discretion, as I hope you will trust mine.

L.

I read it over. It was brief, businesslike, and gave away nothing that could not be explained were the note intercepted. Except for the fact I was inviting a man to my house at midnight.

Before I could wonder about the wisdom of it, I sealed the note and handed it to Bexley to be dispatched by messenger first thing in the morning. The sooner Thorne read it, the sooner he could make his arrangements.

Then I sat for a time in the quiet drawing room, the notebook and the poem fragments spread before me like a map of a country I had not yet learned to read.

Somewhere in London, a man with silver hair and a respectable bearing was walking freely among the pious fold, confident that the women he had silenced would stay silent.

He was wrong about that.

Lydia Gray had made sure of it. She had written it down, hidden it in verse, tucked it inside the pages of a book by a woman who had argued, two generations ago, that female minds deserved the same rights as male ones. The evidence was not buried with her. It was here, on my table, waiting to be understood.

I picked up the notebook again and turned to the next page.

The cipher would not defeat me.

I owed Lydia that much. And I suspected I owed it to a great many other women as well.

Chapter

Fifteen

The Reluctant Telling

Ihad not sent word.

Mainwaring had walked out of Lady Larkspur’s drawing room never intending to discuss the weekend at Everthorne Manor again. I was disinclined to give him the courtesy of preparation.

His chambers were on Bedford Row, in a tall, narrow house whose brass plate read Mainwaring, Cole & Abbott and whose stairs smelled of beeswax and old paper. A clerk in his thirties looked up from a ledger as I entered and made the brief calculation, visible behind his eyes, that his caller was not a tradesman and was unlikely to be a debtor.

“Lord Everthorne, to see Mr. Mainwaring.”

The clerk’s pen paused. “Have you an appointment, my lord?”

“I have not.”

He rose from his desk with the slow care of a man who had already decided the answer would be no but was reluctant to deliver it to a titled gentleman. “Mr. Mainwaring is in chambers, my lord, but I do not believe he is at liberty⁠—”

“Tell him I am here. Tell him I shall wait in his outer office—displeased with my shabby treatment—in full view of his clients, and that I shall do so until he is at liberty.”