Page 66 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

"Anne's cousin's husband—Sefton—introduced us. Grimshaw has handled a number of such arrangements for families of standing." Edgar's chest expanded slightly. He had taken my interrogation for the dawning of sense. "You see, it is all perfectly respectable. There are doctors who attend. Papers signed. Proper certificates, all in order, lodged with the house itself. It is not a thing done in a corner, Larkspur, whatever your imagination has conjured. It is legal. It is correct. All handled by a solicitor. Carmody.”

Grimshaw. Carmody. Doctors who attend. Certificates lodged with the house.

I committed each word to memory as he said it, the way I had once memorized lines of verse. It cost me a great deal to let him believe he was winning.

"I see," I said. "And these certificates. Two doctors, I suppose? I have read that the law requires two."

"You have read a great deal too much," Edgar said, but he answered anyway, because he could never resist demonstrating that he knew a thing I did not. "Two, yes. It is all attended to. The family need scarcely lift a finger."

"How convenient for the family," I said.

Something in my tone reached him at last. His eyes narrowed. "You are being strange, Larkspur. First you defend a known libertine, and now you cross-examine me on a kindness I am attempting to do this family. I begin to think Everthorne is not the worst of your influences. I begin to think you require⁠—"

"Choose your next word with care, Edgar."

To his credit, or his cowardice, he did not say it. But it hung there between us all the same, unspoken and unmistakable. I understood with perfect clarity that my brother had just, for the first time, considered whether the establishment in Kent might one day have a use beyond Linnet.

Across the table, Linnet had taken up her pencil again. She was not drawing the breakfast things. She was drawing Edgar. As I watched, she lifted the sketchbook a fraction, the way a child shows a parent a treasure, and turned it so that only I could see.

She had given him jowls. A heavy, slavering muzzle. Ears flattened in fury, paws planted on a doorstep. It was the mastiff again, the same one she had drawn the morning he came here breathing threats.

Beneath it, in her quick, certain hand, she had written two words. Still barks.

I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to hurt, which was the only thing that saved me from laughing in my brother's face.

"Was there anything further?" I asked him sweetly.

“No. But this conversation is not finished."

"It never is with you." I rose at last, since he was leaving, and there was no longer any rebellion to be had in sitting. "But do give my regards to Anne. I hope to see her soon."

He paused at that, just perceptibly, as though wondering whether there was a barb in it. There was not—or not the one he feared. He decided to let it go and swept out, trailing offended dignity like smoke from the fire two streets over.

For a moment none of us spoke. Then Miriam folded her newspaper with great deliberation and said, "Well. That was bracing. Anyone care for more tea?"

"He means it this time.” I was looking at Linnet, who had returned to her sketchbook. "About Kent. He has gone past wishing it."

"Then we shall ensure that doesn’t happen,” Miriam said briskly. But her hand, when she reached for the pot, was not quite as steady as her voice.

I crossed to Linnet and crouched beside her chair so that she could see my hands and my face together.

"You are safe here," I signed. "Always. I promised you that once, and it’s still true.”

“I’m not worried,” she signed. “You always win.”

I had not won, in fact. I had merely gathered intelligence under fire and retreated in good order, which is not the same thing. I smiled and squeezed her hand. But I did not tell her that the place her brother wished to send her was the same place a woman had been murdered to keep hidden.

Chapter

Twenty-Six

Further Revelations

By three o'clock the drawing room had filled with the usual company for the literary salon. The smell of smoke had given way to the scent of tea, hothouse lilies, and Lord Pemberton's regrettable cologne.

My salon was not, whatever Edgar believed, a den of sedition. It was merely a room in which women were permitted to finish their own sentences, which to a certain kind of man amounts to the same thing. We read. We argued. We passed pamphlets with the furtive pleasure of children sharing contraband. And we gossiped—because gossip, properly understood, is simply the historiography of people denied access to the official record. No one knew that better than the women in my drawing room.

Mrs. Fitzwilliam held court near the fire, sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued, demolishing a gentleman's essay on female education with the patient cruelty of a cat. Lord Pemberton, who attended chiefly for the cakes and the proximity to ladies who tolerated him, had wedged himself into a chair too small for his ambitions. And Lord Peregrine lounged by the window waiting to hear what fresh absurdity Lord Pemberton would say next.