Page 36 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

“We left the billiards room together. We had agreed to find a housemaid who could be…persuaded. I cannot tell you who suggested we look in the conservatory. I did not arrive at the same time as them. I had drunk too much, and I had a need that the brandy had made urgent. I told the others I would catch them up. And then I went out to the garden to relieve myself.” He looked at me with something like appeal. “I am not proud of this. I am telling it as it occurred.”

“Get to the point.”

“I had been there perhaps two minutes when I heard her scream. The conservatory, as you know, has a glass roof. The sound reached out of the building as if it were screaming. I came round the hedge, and I—” He shut his eyes again. “I ran, Everthorne. I shall tell you the truth and not embellish it. I ran toward the screaming because I was three-and-twenty years old and I was drunk and I did not yet understand what I had been a party to. I thought, in the moment, that we had begun something which one of us must now stop.”

“You arrived at the conservatory.”

“I arrived at the same moment as three other men. Coming from the other side. From the direction of the smoking room, I believe.”

“Who?”

“Your father.”

I had expected this. I made my face show nothing.

“And the others?”

“An older gentleman whose name I never learned. Forties or fifties. Sober dress. Heavy build. He had the manner of a guest of standing—not a tradesman, not a servant—but I could not place him in the company. I do not know that I had been introduced to him. I had not, certainly, drunk with him.”

“Could you describe him further?”

“Thick across the shoulders. He spoke once, that I heard, and his accent was northern—perhaps Yorkshire, perhaps further. I am sorry. It is what I recall.”

“And the third man.”

Mainwaring hesitated. “The third was—peculiar. He was dressed in black, sober as a judge in chapel. White at the collar, I thought at first he was a clergyman, but I could not later remember any clergyman among the guests. He was younger than the other two—perhaps forty. Pale. Composed. He did not exclaim when he saw what was in the conservatory. He stepped past your father and went directly to the girl. I remember thinking that he must be a physician, but he carried no bag, and he did not—he did not behave as a physician would have done.”

“How did he behave?”

“He was efficient.” Mainwaring’s voice had dropped. “He took her by the shoulders. He spoke to her. I could not hear the words. He did not console her. He instructed her. The hysterics quieted within a minute. He looked, my lord, like a man who had done this work before.”

I held very still. The ache in my leg, which I had been ignoring since I crossed the threshold, reasserted itself with a sharp, small cruelty.

“Do you remember anything further of him?”

“Only that he and your father exchanged a look, a look of two men who knew each other well.”

“And Emily Driscoll.”

“She was on the floor when I came in. Her dress was torn from the shoulder. There was blood—on her, on the tiles—more blood than I had thought a—than I had thought possible.” His voice cracked. “She was crying out a name. I could not make it out. The sober man got to her before I could hear it.”

“Did she say my name?”

“No, my lord. She did not say your name. Of that, I am certain.”

I had not known I was holding my breath until I let it out.

“Where was William?”

“Not in the conservatory. I do not know where he had gone. He was found—by your father, I believe—somewhere in the upper part of the house, not long after. I did not see him again that night.”

“And me.”

“My lord?”

“Was I in the conservatory?”

He looked at me for a long moment. The question, he understood at last, was not rhetorical.