Page 73 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

Grimshaw appeared beside us. "I do apologize," he said gently. "One of our more troubled ladies. Poor creature. She imagines the most fantastical things.”

“How very sad for her,” I managed to say even though I wanted to scream.

“They always insist they are sane, you understand. They claim they are imprisoned. Wronged. That someone must rescue them." The benevolent smile never left his face. "It is the nature of the disorder, you see.”

And suddenly I understood the perfection of the machine.

The woman at the window could speak nothing but truth, and it would still be used as evidence against her. The saner she sounded, the madder she would be judged. There was no argument she could make that the institution had not already prepared to dismiss.

I wanted to challenge him. To demand her name. To demand her release. But I had no authority. No proof. No protection. Only a false identity and the knowledge that someone inside those walls was begging for help.

So I did the hardest thing I have ever done. I thanked Reverend Grimshaw, climbed into the carriage, and left.

As we rolled down the drive, I glanced back. A figure stood by a ground-floor window. Tall. Perfectly still. Dr. Strode. He had witnessed the entire scene. And he was watching me leave.

Miriam and I did not speak until the gates were well behind us.

"That woman," I said.

"I know."

"She was no madder than you or I."

"I know." Miriam had gone pale. "I have spent my whole life being told what women are," she said quietly. "I know the sound of a sane woman."

I thought of Linnet. Of that barred window. Of Edgar waiting on a convenient day.

I had gone searching for evidence. Instead, I had found a person. A living woman trapped behind bars who had looked into my eyes and chosen me to carry word that she existed. I would carry it.

Whatever it cost.

Chapter

Twenty-Nine

No Line to Hold

The night before, I’d made it upstairs through sheer force of will. My hands had fumbled badly at the buttons of my coat. I’d discarded my boots somewhere between the dressing room and the bed. And then I’d collapsed on the mattress, the pain in my leg throbbing in time with my pulse.

I’d dreamed of Sevastopol, as I do when pain drives. The dream was the old one until it was not.

The old one ran the same course every time, the way a river finds the same channel. The forward trench in the grey before dawn. The cold that had found its way into the iron of the rifles and the marrow of the men. The order I was about to give to advance that I could never call back. And then the noise—the obscene music of it, shot and shell and the high animal sounds men made when the body discovered what the mind refused to believe. I was moving up the line. My leg was whole in the dream; it was always whole, which was its own cruelty. I was looking for someone in the smoke. And I never found him.

But last night the dream did something it had never done. Somewhere in the smoke, threaded through the guns, a woman was screaming.

She did not belong there. There were no women at Sevastopol, not in the trenches, not in the grey dawn with the iron and the cold. And yet the scream went up and up, and it had a shape to it I half-recognized, the shape of a sound forced out of a body that has just understood it will not be helped. Over my head, where there should have been only the low Crimean sky, there was glass. A glass roof. The scream struck it and came back down doubled, the way Mainwaring had explained, the way Brookes had stood in a cold room in Edinburgh and told me it had. I was running toward it through the smoke and the guns. But I could not reach it; I could not reach her. There was a body between us in the dark.

I came awake, my breath loud and ragged, with my hand fisted in something warm and coarse.

Ajax had his head on the mattress beside me. He had got up onto the bed, which he is not permitted to do. But which he does on the nights he judges the rule to be the lesser of the evening’s concerns. He did not whine. He did not fuss. He simply lay his great head down within reach of my hand and let his weight settle against my side and waited—as he had waited a hundred times in a hundred grey mornings—for the thing in me to pass.

So I’d lain still and allowed it to flow through me. There was no quick way through it. There was only the breathing, and the count, and the warm coarse fact of the dog, who asked nothing and told no one and had never once looked at me as though I were less for needing him.

I had never spoken of it to a living soul. Dawson knew, because Dawson knew everything and said nothing, and the dog knew, because the dog was the only creature I had ever permitted close enough to know. That was the whole of my garrison against it—a silent man and a silent beast, and the rule about the bed, which Ajax broke when he decided I required it broken.

I had intended to wake early so I could go to Lark and tell her what I’d learned. But my exhaustion, and the pain, and the dream betrayed me. And I didn’t come awake until past noon.

Dawson, when I rang, brought coffee and the news that no message had been received from Everly House, when I asked, but one had from my solicitors. He brought the letter along with the coffee.