Page 67 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

Anne arrived last, as she so often did, slipping through the door pink-cheeked and breathless with the exhilaration of a woman who has lied to her husband about her afternoon and gotten away with it.

"Forgive me," she whispered, sinking into the chair beside Miriam. "I was delayed at the modiste."

“It is a wonder you have any gowns left to be fitted,” Miriam observed firmly tongue in cheek.

Anne smiled. “Ah, but there are so many new ones to order.” Her gowns were beautiful and numerous, and every one of them was an alibi for her attendance at the salon.

I waited until the reading was done and the conversation had loosened into its usual eddies before I steered it where I wanted it to go. It was not difficult. I had only to mention, with a great show of distress, that I had lately heard the most troubling things about the ease with which families might confine their inconvenient women—a topic on which my salon held views as firm as they were loud.

"It is a scandal," Mrs. Fitzwilliam declared at once. "A woman may be declared mad for reading the wrong books or refusing the wrong husband. Two physicians, a signature, and she is gone."

"Surely there are protections," ventured a younger woman whose name I could never keep.

"There are protections in the way there are locks on a hen house," Mrs. Fitzwilliam said. "Adequate against the honest. Useless against the fox."

And then Lady Havers, who could no more resist a confidence than water can resist running downhill, leaned toward the younger woman with the bright, terrible eagerness I had been counting on.

"You speak as if it were rare," she said. "It is not rare. Why, only consider Honoria Sefton. A lovely creature, rather too lively for her husband's taste, and then there was that unpleasantness about money. And the next any of us heard, she had been sent to a retreat in the country for her nerves. Kent, I believe. All of it arranged by Carmody. Two years now, and no one has had so much as a card from her." She sat back, immensely satisfied. "Her sister tells everyone she is resting."

The name Carmody went through me like cold water.

Anne's cousin's husband was named Sefton. Carmody, the solicitor, had arranged the whole thing.

The same names Edgar had given me this morning, dropped now at my own tea table by a woman who imagined she was merely being interesting. The solicitor who arranged matters for Grimshaw. The husband who had sent a too-lively wife to a retreat in Kent and told society she was resting.

I kept my face precisely as bland as Lady Havers deserved.

"How very sad," I said. "And no one thought to call on her?"

"One does not call," Lady Havers said, scandalized by the very idea, "on a person who is resting."

It was Anne who undid her. Anne, who had gone quite still beside Miriam, her teacup halted halfway to her lips, the color drained clean out of her pretty face.

"Honoria Sefton is my cousin," she said.

The room turned toward her. Lady Havers had the grace to look briefly disconcerted, which on her was the equivalent of mortification in anyone else.

"I had not—forgive me, Lady Westmere, I had quite forgotten the connection⁠—"

"She is my cousin," Anne said again. There was something new in her voice, something I had not heard when she slipped into my drawing room under cover of fictional fittings. "And she was not mad. She was unhappy and vocal about it. Her husband found both intolerable. I was told she was resting.” She set her cup down with a small, precise click. “To my shame, I never pressed the point.”

No one answered her. Mrs. Fitzwilliam, who missed nothing, was watching Anne with frank reassessment, as though a piece of furniture had suddenly stood up and revealed itself to be a person.

The talk moved on, in time, the way talk does. But when the room had thinned, and the last carriage had been called, Anne did not leave with the others. She lingered beside the cold hearth, twisting the ribbon of her reticule between nervous fingers. When I approached, she spoke low and fast, as though afraid her courage might fail if she did not spend it quickly.

“You were asking those questions for a reason, Lark. I am not clever like you.” She lifted her chin. “But I am not a fool either, whatever Edgar may think. You wanted to know how it is done. The confining.”

“I do.”

“He invited a Reverend Grimshaw to dinner twice. He manages an institution in Kent for troubled women. Edgar has never said so directly, but I believe he means to send Linnet there.”

“I believe so too. He visited us this morning and made his intentions plain.”

Anne stared at me, clearly distressed. “I cannot believe he would do such a thing to his own sister.”

“I can. More than that, I believe he has already set it in motion.”

Her fingers tightened around the ribbon. “Then we must stop him.”