Page 68 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

“Oh, I intend to.” My voice sounded steadier than I felt. “But first I need information. I need to know precisely how such arrangements are made.”

She clutched my arm. “I can find out about Honoria. Her sister will see me. I am family, after all. And I have a standing invitation I have been too cowardly to use. I can ask where she was sent. The name of the place. The doctors. Whatever you need." Her eyes shone—not with tears, but with something I recognized with a small shock, because I had felt it myself, the day I first opened Lydia's notebook. It was purpose. "I have spent my whole marriage being decorative. Let me be useful. Just once. Let me be useful."

I ought to have said no.

I knew, even as she spoke, exactly what I was looking at. A woman with no notion of how deep the water ran, offering to wade in on my behalf. If Edgar learned that his wife had been making inquiries into the very establishment he meant to use, there would be a reckoning, and Anne would bear the brunt of it. I would be pouring fresh oil on a fire that already had quite enough to burn.

And then I thought of the woman resting in Kent who had not sent so much as a card in two years. I thought of Linnet and the place my brother had begun to arrange.

"All right," I said. "But you will be careful, Anne. You will go only as a loving cousin paying a call. You will ask nothing that a loving cousin would not ask. And the moment it grows the least bit strange, you will leave, and you will come and tell me everything, and leave the rest to me. Do you understand?"

"I understand." She was already glowing, already halfway out the door in her mind, already useful. "I shall call on her sister tomorrow."

"Anne." I caught her hand. "I mean it. This is not a game."

"I know," she said. The worst of it was that she believed she did. "I know it isn't. That is rather the point."

Then she was gone, in a rustle of expensive silk and borrowed courage, and I stood alone in my emptied drawing room with dusk gathering at the windows.

I had wanted a thread to pull. I had been handed two in a single day—Carmody from my brother's mouth, and now Honoria Sefton from my own tea table—and a willing pair of hands to help me pull them.

I should have felt triumphant. Instead, I felt the unease of a person who has just set something in motion that she is no longer certain she can stop.

I rang for Bexley, asked for paper and ink, and sat down to think about how one called upon an asylum without announcing oneself—and how soon I might do it before anyone thought to tell me I could not.

Chapter

Twenty-Seven

The Witness in the North

My solicitor’s people finally ran Brookes to ground with the thoroughness I paid them for. With no time to waste, I took the next train to Edinburgh—the night mail from King's Cross. It put me there a little after eight in the morning, stiff in every joint and worst of all in the leg, which had spent the dark hours informing me, mile by mile, exactly how it felt about being folded into a railway carriage for the better part of the night.

The address they had given me was a narrow house in a close off the Canongate, the sort of respectable poverty that announces a man come down in the world and anxious that it not be remarked upon.

I had not sent word. I had learned the value of that with Mainwaring. But Mainwaring, it transpired, had sent word for me.

I knew it the moment the door opened. The man who stood in the gap was in his late thirties, though he wore his years badly and his fear worse. He had been handsome once. But now the flesh had gone loose at the jaw, and the eyes were the eyes of a man who slept with a lamp burning.

He looked at me, my stick, and my scar, and something in his face simply gave way—not to surprise, but to a dreadful confirmation.

"You're Everthorne," he said. "Mainwaring wrote me you'd come."

"Then I am spared the trouble of explaining myself."

"He wrote me—" Brookes's hand went to the doorframe. "He wrote me that you'd been asking about that night. And that Lydia Gray was dead. That she was killed for it. For knowing who was in the house." His voice climbed. "I want you to understand, before you say another word, that it was not me. Whatever you have come to lay at my door, it was not me. I never touched the girl. I swear it before God."

"May I come in, Brookes? Or shall we conduct this on your step, for the benefit of your neighbors?"

He stepped back and let me in.

The room was cold and close and smelled of damp wool and the herring he had evidently had for breakfast. He did not offer me a chair, which suited me. Standing kept my leg from seizing. Behind him, I could see a trunk, half-packed, its lid thrown back.

"You are leaving Edinburgh," I said.

"I have people in the north." He said it the way a hunted thing says the name of its burrow. "I should have gone years ago. I stayed because—" He stopped. "It does not matter why I stayed. I am going now. Today, if I can manage the trunk."

"Then I have come at an opportune moment."