Page 41 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

Something eased in his expression. Not quite a smile—the evening was too heavy for smiles—but an acknowledgement. A recognition of equals.

“And now?” he said. “What manner of man have you decided I am?”

“An honorable man who can be trusted.”

He looked at me for a long moment, then nodded—a small, grave gesture that carried more weight than any words.

I held out the notebook.

He took it carefully, as though it were something living, and opened it to the first page to study Lydia's cramped hand. I watched his long fingers spread across the page, the slight downward turn of his mouth as his eyes moved across the lines. He read with a stillness that was not calm, but one held precisely in check. The firelight found the scar along his jaw and followed it, and I wondered what that scar had cost him.

"She was thorough," he said.

"She was a poet. Poets notice everything. They simply have the good manners to disguise it as metaphor."

He almost smiled at that.

"These RG initials." He turned several pages, pausing at the entries I had marked with small slips of paper, and indicated a passage near the center of the notebook. To see it I had to lean in, near enough that his sleeve brushed mine. “I think it’s Grimshaw.”

"Grimshaw? Who is he?"

He told me of the charitable donations his father had made for twelve years to a Reverend Grimshaw, for the upkeep of an institution in Kent. He spoke evenly as though distance from his father were a thing he might impose by tone alone.

"I have asked my solicitors to inquire as to the nature of the institution. I hope to hear from them within a few days."

Edgar had mentioned an institution in Kent when he proposed that Linnet be sent there. The memory drew a cold thread through the warmth of the room. "Were you acquainted with him?"

"No. I rarely visited Everthorne Manor during my time at Oxford. And afterward, even fewer times.” He did not explain the reason. I already knew.

"Do you know what Grimshaw looked like?"

"There is little I remember from that weekend. A vicar would not have been something I noticed."

"Lydia's landlady mentioned a gentleman who visited her. An older man, well-dressed, silver haired. She said he looked like someone you'd see at the front of a church. I took that to mean a member of the congregation." I paused. "But she may have meant a vicar."

“Maybe so, but it could mean someone else entirely. Did you find anything in her rooms?"

"I did." I retrieved the poem and the two scraps from Mary Wollstonecraft's book and handed them across. Our hands met for the briefest moment in the passing—his fingers cool, mine not entirely steady, though I told myself it was only the lateness of the hour.

"The first part concerns the weekend at Everthorne Manor," he said.

"So it seems," I agreed.

He read on. "And the wolf still walks among the pious fold. That has to be Grimshaw."

"Perhaps," I said. "What did Mainwaring have to say?"

He shared what Mainwaring had told him. There was very little new in it, beyond what we had already deduced. But now we had a witness's account from someone who had been there. Most importantly, it proved Thorne innocent of the charge leveled against him. He had paid the price for his brother's sin.

I had not realized how tightly I had been holding that question until it loosened its grip. Innocent. Whatever else he was—and I did not know the whole of him—he had not done the thing his name had been made to carry. I had braced myself against the possibility that he was a man I could not afford to trust. To learn otherwise felt like vindication.

He closed Lydia's notebook. "So where do we go from here?" he asked.

"We need to decipher Lydia's notebook. You would be the better person to do that since it covers what happened at Everthorne Manor. You may be more familiar than I with the initials and the places she mentions. Why don't you take it and see what you can learn?”

“Very well. And you can do the same with my grandmother's journal. Her handwriting grew spidery as she grew older, but it is legible." He placed it on the table between us and slid it toward me—slowly, deliberately, the way a man sets down a thing he is not entirely certain he can bear to part with. "Take as long as you need."

I picked up the journal. The leather was warm where his hand had rested. “Thank you for trusting me with the truth.”