Page 43 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

I sat. “Go on.”

“Twelve days ago,” Croft said, “a woman by the name of Sarah Hodge died of a fever in the village of Beckwith, three miles from the estate. She had a son, ten years old. The boy’s aunt—Mrs. Beadle, sister to the deceased—came to me four days ago. She has six children of her own and a husband on a laborer’s wage. She cannot keep the boy.”

I waited. There was more. Croft would deliver it in his own time.

“Sarah Hodge was a housemaid at Everthorne Manor in the spring of 1848. She left service that summer. The boy was born in November of the same year.” Croft’s eyes met mine. They held nothing beyond the steady regard of a man who had been asked to carry an unpleasant thing and had carried it. “Mrs. Beadle says her sister never named the father to anyone but her, and made her swear never to speak the name aloud. On her deathbed, she released her from the promise. The name was William Ashcombe.”

The room did not change. The fire crackled on; the clock marked the seconds with its small, indifferent precision. But something had shifted and would not shift back.

Sarah Hodge. Her initials lay in my grandmother’s journal, in a passage I had read three nights before. S.H., dismissed June, with six months’ wages. The girl is no fool. She knows the use of silence. I had read the line and turned the page, because there had been so many such lines, and one cannot weep at every one.

“Thank you, Croft.” My voice was even. I was distantly proud of it. “You have done what was right.”

“I took the liberty of bringing him myself, my lord. I did not want him sent on the carrier with a label round his neck.”

“No. Quite right.”

“He knows his mother is dead. He knows he is being brought to a gentleman who is brother to his father.” Croft paused. “He does not know his father’s name. His mother kept it from him to the end, and I have not told him.”

“Good.”

“He is—” Croft hesitated for the second time in our long acquaintance, and I understood I was being given a warning of some kind. “He is a fine boy. He is also angry, and frightened, and grieving, and ten years old, and he has been on a train an entire day with a stranger. I would ask you to remember that when you meet him.”

I looked at Croft for a long moment. He had never spoken to me in such terms, not in the years we had served together. He had buried friends with me in the Crimea and never once offered an opinion that had not been asked for.

“I shall remember it,” I said. “Bring him in.”

The boy walked into the library three paces ahead of Croft, stopped in the center of the carpet, and looked at me as I came to my feet.

He was small for ten—narrow-shouldered, thin in the wrist, with the hollow-eyed leanness of a country child whose meals had been counted. His hair was dark, almost black, and curled at the ends in a way I recognized before I was ready to. His face was my brother’s face, fined down by hunger and grief into something at once younger and older than itself. The Ashcombe stamp was on him as plain as a seal in wax.

But the eyes were not my brother’s. William’s had been pale and restless; this boy’s were dark and steady. They met mine without flinching and did not like what they found.

“Good evening,” I said.

He did not answer.

Dawson came in with the coffee things and a plate of sandwiches, set them on a small table, and withdrew.

I gestured to the tray. “Croft, help yourself.”

“Thank you, my lord.” He took nothing and remained standing.

I turned to the boy. “Now then. My name is Julian Ashcombe. You have been told, I think, that I am to look after you for a time.”

“For a time,” he repeated. His voice came higher than I expected, roughened by the catarrh of a long day’s travel. The accent was Yorkshire, broad and unforced. “How long is a time?”

I had not expected to be interrogated within thirty seconds of the boy’s arrival; I had not expected, either, how immediately I should respect him for it.

“I do not yet know,” I said. “That is an honest answer. I had rather give you an honest one than a comfortable one. Is that acceptable?”

He considered this. “Aye.”

“May I know your name?”

“You know my name.”

“I know what your mother named you. I do not know what you are called.”