Page 37 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

“You arrived,” he said carefully, “at some point after the rest of us. I cannot tell you how long after. It may have been five minutes. It may have been twenty. You came in through the garden door. You were—” He stopped.

“Drunk.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Conscious.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“In what condition was my coat?”

He looked at his hands. “I did not look at your coat, Everthorne. I am sorry. I was looking at the girl. I have spent twelve years wishing I had looked elsewhere, and I cannot tell you a single useful thing about you when you came in. I can tell you that your father saw you and that his face changed. That is all.”

We stood in the kind of silence that follows a confession in a Catholic church. I had not expected to receive this much. I had not expected it to be so little.

“What became of Emily?”

“Her father was sent for. Apparently, he’d gone to bed early. He was not a well man. By breakfast, he’d taken a weeping Emily home. By the end of that day, you’d been sent off in disgrace, and the rest of us had gone our separate ways. I have not spoken her name aloud, my lord, since the day I left Everthorne. I have not, in all candor, spoken yours either, until last week.”

“Mainwaring.”

“My lord?”

“The sober man. If you ever recall his name, or a place where you might have seen him since—if anything reaches you that even resembles his face—you will write to me. You will not seek to verify it. You will not approach him. You will write to me, at Everthorne House in Mayfair, the same evening.”

He looked up. “Why?” He had aged five years in twenty minutes.

“Because he would not have arrived at that conservatory by accident.”

I left him there, behind his desk, in the pale light from the window. I did not shake his hand. I did not look back from the door.

I sat in the carriage for some minutes.

A clergyman who was not a clergyman. A man who had done such work before. A man who exchanged with my father the look of two men who knew each other well.

The Reverend Mr. Grimshaw, of Kent. One hundred and fifty pounds a year, paid quietly into Coutts.

It was a leap. It was the leap of a man who had spent years in a war reading terrain from too little evidence. I had been right more often than wrong. And I knew the shape of a thing being hidden when I saw it.

I would tell Lark on Monday. I would tell her all of it.

I gave the driver the direction home.

Chapter

Sixteen

Revelations at Midnight

The gate yielded without a sound as I stepped into the dark garden of Everly House.

A single lamp burned in a ground-floor window, casting a pale oblong across the flagstones of the terrace. I followed it as a mariner might follow a harbor light—warily, and with the knowledge that what lay beyond might prove more dangerous than the open sea.

A door opened before I reached it. Not Lady Larkspur, as I had half expected, but a middle-aged woman carrying a lantern. Its light caught the set of her jaw before it found mine.

"Good evening, Lord Everthorne." She did not appear happy to see me. "I am Mrs. Selwyn. Lark's cousin."

And resident dragon, by the look of her. She held the lantern high enough to examine my face with the unhurried thoroughness of a woman deciding whether to admit me or set me alight. Whatever she found there did not improve her mood.