Page 69 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

"You have come," he said, with a flash of something that was almost spirit, "at the worst moment of my life, my lord, which I gather is a thing that follows you about." He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. "Forgive me. I am not—I have not been well."

I let the silence work. It was the most reliable instrument I owned. Most men cannot bear the weight of an unfilled pause. They will rush to fill it, and in the rushing, they say more than they intended. Brookes lasted perhaps ten seconds.

"What do you want from me?" he burst out. "I'll tell you it wasn't me a hundred times over, but you've not come four hundred miles to hear that. So say it. Say what you want and let me be gone."

"I want that night," I said. "All of it."

He sat down on the edge of the trunk, heavily, as though his legs had given way. “How much did Mainwaring tell you?”

“A great many things. He was careful to make none of them his fault. I should like to hear it from a man who was there. In the conservatory.”

That reached him. I had not been certain it would. But guilt had a curious vanity to it. A man who had spent twelve years hating himself will sometimes resent being thought a mere bystander to his own damnation. Brookes had not been in the garden relieving himself. Brookes had been there. And some buried, ruined part of him would want that acknowledged now.

"It was a bet," he said, low. "You'll think us monsters. But we were only four young men drunk past sense. That is its own kind of monster, I suppose. But it did not feel so at the time. It felt like sport." He stared at the floorboards. "William said—your brother said—there was a housemaid, a pretty one, who'd not say no to any of us. He said it would be a kindness to her because we would pay for her time. And then it became a wager, the way everything became a wager with William. Who could—" He swallowed. "Who could have her first. There was money on it. Five pounds. I remember the figure. I have tried for twelve years to forget the figure, and I cannot. Five pounds."

“But it was not a housemaid. It was Emily Driscoll,” I said. “How did you bring her to the conservatory?"

“We didn’t. She was already there smelling the night-blooming flowers. Something that only opened after dark.” He swallowed hard. “When we saw Emily, the wager changed. The housemaid would not prove a challenge, but young, innocent Emily would.” His voice had gone to gravel.

I kept my face as I have learned to keep it. But inside I was sickened by it. “Who suggested the change?”

“I can’t remember. On my life, I don’t.”

I didn’t believe him. “Go on.”

"She understood what we were about the moment the conservatory door was shut. She tried to leave. One of us put himself between her and the door, and then—" He shut his eyes. "And then it was not sport any longer. She fought. I had not expected her to fight. God help me, I do not know what I had expected. She screamed, and the glass roof took the sound and threw it up into the whole house, and I⁠—"

He stopped.

“I threw up on some plant as she screamed, as her screams were muffled, as they turned to whimpers and sobs. I never lifted a finger to stop it.” He opened his eyes. They were wet. "I'll not dress it as something better than it was. You may judge me. You cannot judge me more harshly than I have judged myself, and I have had twelve years of it."

"Who assaulted her?"

The change in him was immediate. The confession had been pouring out of him like water from a breached cask. But now, all at once, the cask sealed itself. His hands, which had been moving, went still in his lap.

"No," he said.

"Brookes—"

"No." He looked up at me, and beneath the fear, there was something harder, the bedrock a frightened man strikes when he has finally found the one thing he will not give up. "She cried out a name. I heard it. I will carry it north and into the ground when the world is done with me, but I will not say it aloud. Lydia Gray is dead, my lord. A clever, careful woman who never did a wrong thing in her life is dead in the street because she knew. I have a wife. I'll not be the next notice in The Times."

“You did not kill Lydia Gray."

"No," Brookes agreed. "But you are asking the question that killed her. I don’t want the next to be me."

It was, I conceded privately, not an unreasonable position. I let it stand. I knew the difference between a man who was concealing and a man who had reached the floor of himself. Brookes had reached his floor. I would get no name from him. Pressing for it would cost me what else he had—which was, in the event, the thing I had truly come for.

"Then we will leave the young men where they lie," I said. "Tell me about the others. The ones who came after the screams. The older men."

Something eased in him, and curdled at the same time—relief at the change of ground, and a fresh dread at where the new ground lay. "You know about them."

"I know what Mainwaring saw. Three men who arrived together after the screams. My father. A man in black he took for a clergyman. And a third. Immaculately dressed. Not as old as my father. Mainwaring could not name them. Can you?"

For a long moment, Brookes said nothing. Then he laughed, once, without any humor in it at all.

"You don't know," he said softly. "After all this time, you don't know who they were.”

"That is why I am asking."