Page 65 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

"Good morning to you as well, Edgar." I did not rise. It was a small rebellion, an old one that never failed to put a tighter line around his mouth. "We are at breakfast, as you see. Will you sit? Bexley can bring another cup."

"I will not sit." He set his hat upon the sideboard. "And I should prefer to do this privately."

"Then you ought not to have done it at half past nine, when the household is breaking their fast.” I gestured at the empty chair. “So say your piece and let us finish our toast in peace."

His jaw worked. My brother had inherited our father's rigid bearing and imperious manner, but none of the cold cleverness that had made our father genuinely formidable. Edgar was merely cold. It made him easier to provoke and far more tiresome to endure.

"Very well." He braced his hands behind his back. "I will be plain. You were seen yesterday—in the open street, in the full light of day—in the company of Everthorne. Half of Mayfair has been speaking of nothing else since."

"Has it?” I buttered a corner of toast. "How industrious of half of Mayfair. I should have thought the fire might occupy them at least a day or two."

"This is not a matter for levity." His voice rose, then caught itself—Edgar was always conscious of servants. "Do you know what is said of that man? Do you know what he is?”

"I know what is said of him. The two are not the same thing, as you of all people ought to appreciate, given what is said of me."

That landed. His color deepened. "What is said of you is that you keep a salon full of bluestockings and radicals. What is said of him is that he ruined a young woman under his own father's roof and was sent into the army to escape the consequences. A girl, Larkspur. Twelve years ago. The thing is not gossip. It is known."

And there it was—the wall I could not climb, set squarely in the middle of the room.

Because I knew, now, what Edgar did not. The girl had never named Julian Ashcombe. The man who had done it was dead, and Julian had carried the blame for it across twelve years, an ocean, and a war, because the alternative was to drag his family's name through the courts with no witness willing to speak. Thorne was innocent of the single crime the whole world had agreed to lay at his feet.

But I could say no word in his defense. To explain how I knew would be to unravel everything—the notebook, the poem, Lydia, the enquiry that had already cost one woman her life and one printing house its roof. The truth was not mine to spend. It was Thorne's, and it was Lydia's, and it would buy me nothing but a brother who knew far too much.

So I did the only thing left to me. The thing that was public knowledge.

"The girl never accused him," I said. "She was married off and never spoke his name once. He went to the Crimea and came back with the Victoria Cross, which the Crown does not hand to men for ruining respectable young women. I am disinclined to convict a man on the strength of a story no one will sign their name to."

Edgar stared at me as though I had begun speaking in Linnet's silent language. "Listen to yourself. You are defending him."

"I am declining to condemn him. There is a difference, though I grant it is a fine one, and you have never had much patience for fine ones."

"He is the Devil of Everthorne," Edgar said, slow and deliberate, as if to a child. "And you are a woman alone, of marriageable age, with a fortune and a household and a deaf sister to think of. Have you any notion what your defending him does to this family's standing? To Linnet's prospects?” His lip curled. “Such as they are.”

At her name, Linnet went still. She had not heard it, but she had read it from his lips, the way she read everything.

Miriam set down her paper. She did not speak. She merely shifted her chair a few inches—a small movement that placed her squarely between Edgar and my sister.

"Leave Linnet out of your sermons," I said. The warmth had gone out of my voice entirely.

"I cannot. She is precisely the point." He drew breath, and I felt the shape of what was coming before it arrived. "I have not been idle on her account, whatever you may think. Anne and I dined again with the clergyman I mentioned to you. The one acquainted with the establishment in Kent."

The room seemed to recede slightly, as though I were hearing him from the bottom of a well.

"He speaks of it most highly," Edgar went on, mistaking my silence for attention rather than dread. "A private retreat. Discreet. Well-appointed. The sort of place where a young woman with—afflictions—might be cared for properly, among others of her kind, without the strain of a world she was never made to manage. He assures me the families who place their relations there are most grateful for the discretion."

I had to set down my knife. My hand was not entirely steady, and I did not want him to see it.

It was the same place. Of course it was the same place. There could not be two such institutions in Kent, both administered by a clergyman, both trading in the quiet disposal of inconvenient women, both spoken of in the same hushed, congratulatory murmur. The wolf among the pious fold. The place where women went and from which they did not return. My brother had dined at the same table as the man who ran it and come away charmed.

And he meant to send Linnet there.

I have been frightened perhaps a dozen times in my life with real, marrow-deep fear. This was one of them. But fear has a useful cousin in cold calculation. I reached for it now the way a drowning woman reaches for a rope.

"This clergyman," I said, and I was proud of how level it came out. "What is his name?"

Edgar blinked, thrown by the question. He had braced for fury and got curiosity instead. "Grimshaw. The Reverend Mr. Grimshaw. Why?"

"Because if you are seriously proposing to put our sister in the keeping of strangers, Edgar, I should think I am entitled to know the names of those strangers." I folded my hands to keep them from betraying me. "Who is he? Where did you meet him? On whose recommendation does this paragon come to you?"