Page 54 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

Smoke and Fury

Dawson brought the morning papers into the morning room with my coffee. There was a certain stiffness in the way he crossed the breakfast room that suggested he had read enough of the headlines to wish he had not.

I didn’t bother to pick up the cup. “What is it?”

“There has been a fire in Bloomsbury, my lord.”

Every thought in my head went still. “Where?”

He placed the topmost newspaper beside my plate and turned it so I could read the column. FIRE IN HARTWELL LANE. PRINTING OFFICES DESTROYED.

For one moment I did not move. Then I snatched up the paper.

The account was brief. A fire had broken out sometime before dawn in the offices of The Quill and Crown, a small literary journal with premises in Hartwell Lane. No lives had been lost. Several adjacent buildings had suffered smoke and water damage. The cause of the fire was unknown.

Unknown. The word struck me as obscene. I read the paragraph again. Then a third time. The Quill and Crown. Hartwell Lane. Lydia’s poem.

Lark.

By the time I reached the end of the article, I was already on my feet.

“Have the carriage brought round.”

Dawson looked as if he had expected no less. “At once, my lord.”

“Quickly.” The coat Dawson pressed on me I took only to stop him trailing after me with it.

The next ten minutes passed in a state of cold, controlled impatience. Or so I told myself. The truth was uglier.

I was afraid.

Not in the manner of battle, where fear arrived with noise and blood and smoke and the certainty that a man might die where he stood. This was worse, because there was nothing to strike, no order to give, no line to hold. There were only a newspaper report and the image of Lark walking straight toward danger because she believed truth had a right to be unearthed even when men wished it buried.

The carriage seemed to take an hour to arrive at Bloomsbury. I looked out the window and saw none of London properly. Only flashes. A flower seller setting out her baskets. A boy sweeping a crossing. Omnibuses lumbering through the traffic, women with parcels, men reading their newspapers as they walked—the whole ordinary machinery of a city that had no notion anything was wrong and would not have cared if it were. None of it had any business being so calm, and yet, all of it was.

Then Bloomsbury began to declare itself. The air changed first—a low, bitter taint of wet ash. The streets I knew went wrong by degrees. A scorch of soot along a wall. A knot of idlers at a corner with their faces turned the same way, come to look at someone else’s ruin. And under all of it the single thought I could not silence: that a fire a few streets from her door told me nothing of whether she was behind it, safe, or not behind it at all. I pressed my stick to the floor of the carriage as though I might drive it faster by will alone.

When the carriage finally reached her townhouse, curtains shifted in at least three neighboring windows. The Everthorne crest gleamed plainly on the door. Damnation—too late to do anything about it now.

The door opened almost as soon as I knocked. A wide-eyed maid took one look at my expression and stepped back.

I walked into the hall—and stopped.

Lark stood near the staircase fastening the buttons of her gloves as though this were an ordinary morning and not one that had begun with smoke and fire.

She looked up in surprise. “Thorne?”

Relief struck first. Sharp enough to make me briefly unsteady. “Thank God, you’re safe,” I muttered.

A younger version of Lark stood halfway down the staircase.

For one disorienting moment, I thought fear had unsettled my senses. The resemblance was unmistakable. The same dark hair. The same eyes. The same fine-boned face. But where Lark appeared startled by my arrival, the young woman on the stairs looked merely curious.

“Linnet,” Lark said, her fingers moving as she spoke in some quick, deliberate pattern. “This is Lord Everthorne.”

Ah. The sister.

“Lady Linnet.” I inclined my head, though I had not fully turned from Lark.