Page 59 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

"I published her for six years under three different names, none of them her own. I knew her better than anyone else, I should think." He set the glass down at last. "She was the bravest person I ever printed and very nearly the bravest I ever met."

"Mr. Quennell,” I said. “Did she bring the poem to you?"

"She did."

"Where is it?”

"Burned along with everything else I have ever loved that was made of paper, which is the great bulk of what I have ever loved." Quennell's chin came up. "And before you ask in that admirably direct fashion—yes, I read it, and I remember it."

Thorne took the lead. “What did the poem say?” It came across more harshly than I would have liked.

“It said,” Quennell began, his voice climbing as if he’d grown suddenly fearful.

“Take your time, Mr. Quennell,” I said, “we’re in no rush.” I speared Thorne with a glance that said he was to say nothing more. “You’ll have to forgive Lord Everthorne. He came across London this morning, expecting to find me dead beneath your burning roof, and he has not yet got his manners back. It makes him abrupt. It does not make him your enemy."

There was a silence in which I felt rather than saw Thorne decide. And then he simply reclined against the chair.

Quennell looked between us, and an awareness came into his ruined face. "Ah," he said. "It's like that, is it?" Before either of us could disabuse him of the notion there was something between Thorne and me, he continued, "The poem named no one. You must understand that first. Lydia was no fool—to print a name was to hand the gentlemen in question a libel writ and a noose for my journal. So she named no one. She did something far worse. She described them."

"Described them how?” I asked.

"Exquisitely." For an instant the editor surfaced through the wreck, and I saw the man who had spent twenty-two years in love with sentences. "Three portraits. Drawn so fine that anyone who moves in society would know the faces at a glance, and anyone who does not would read only very accomplished verse. That was her genius, you see. Deniable to a magistrate. Damning to a drawing room."

He held up one ink-stained finger.

"The first. A physician. She wrote of a healer whose windows look upon the lamps of learning, which is a great deal of poetry to mean Gower Street. A fashionable doctor who mends the rich and breaks the poor. She wrote that more than one young woman had gone to him with a difficulty and come away permanently without it. You take my meaning, Lady Larkspur. I shall not embarrass you by enlarging upon it."

I took his meaning.

A second finger.

"The second. A clergyman—and here she fairly bared her teeth, for she dressed him in his own sermons. A shepherd, she called him, renowned for his Christian tenderness toward fallen women, who maintains a quiet house in the country where ladies of a delicate condition may be received away from unkind eyes." Quennell's voice had lost every trace of babble. "It is an asylum, Lady Larkspur. A private madhouse. And the women shut up in it are neither mad nor fallen. They are inconvenient. Wives who talk too much, daughters who love the wrong man, widows whose money another relative has grown fond of. The family pays the good Reverend, and the woman is buried alive with a chaplain's blessing and a view of the garden." He passed a hand over his eyes. "Lydia wrote that he interred the living and called it mercy. I have not been able to stop hearing the line."

Somewhere below in Piccadilly, a costermonger was crying flowers, the sound floating up absurd and bright through the window.

"And the third," I said.

Quennell did not raise a finger for the third. He folded his hands instead, very carefully, as a man does when he has come to the part that frightens him.

"The third is a solicitor—the one who makes the interment possible." He wet his lips. "She placed him among the old courts—a man who argues justice in the great halls and sells it in the passages behind them. He is the cleverest of them and the most careful. He leaves no trace, because leaving no trace is his entire profession. The doctor and the parson are the hands of the thing." He looked up, and for the first time the fear in him had hardened into something colder and steadier. "He is the head. And it was to him, I should think, that someone reported a journal in Bloomsbury had got hold of Lydia’s poem."

"You believe he ordered the fire," Thorne said, more softly this time.

"I believe, my lord, that three men who make their living burying women would not lose a great deal of sleep over burying a building." Quennell's hands were trembling again, but his voice held. "They burned my offices to bury that poem. Which means they knew it existed. Which means they knew I had it. Which means—" He could not finish.

"Which means they know your name," I said gently.

"Which is why," Peregrine put in from the mantel, "Horace is presently residing in my spare room and shall continue to do so until London becomes less interesting. I have a great many faults, Lark, but turning out a friend in a high wind has never been among them."

Something passed between the two men then—brief, without a word, and not for me to read. I looked away from it because I had understood its shape the instant Quennell came through the door. He had not run to a magistrate, or to his own lodgings, or to any of the ordinary harbors a frightened man might choose. He had run here. To the one place in London where someone understood the danger he was facing and would offer a safe harbor.

"I have told you everything I know," Quennell said. "I ask only one thing in exchange." He looked at me, the babbling, brittle creature wholly gone. "When you find them—and God help you both, I begin to think you might—you will leave my name out of it entirely. I am not Lydia. I never was. I printed brave things written by braver people and told myself that was courage enough. Look where it has brought me."

"Your name stays with us," I said. "You have my word."

Thorne rose. I watched him gather himself, hesitate, and then do the thing that came hardest to a man like him.

"Mr. Quennell. I was discourteous when I addressed you. You have lost more than most men own, and you risked the little that remained by speaking to us at all. I repaid it with harshness.” He inclined his head. "I beg your pardon."