Page 74 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

I tore open the envelope to find a witness had come forward about the incident that had killed Lydia Gray. They’d interviewed her and found her statement believable. And then they’d included her name and address because she was willing to speak to me.

“You will want to eat something, my lord,” Dawson observed.

My first inclination was to decline the suggestion, but Dawson was right, as he often was. I hadn’t eaten anything since that questionable meal at Waverley Station.

“Eggs, toast, and anything else that can be made in a hurry. I have something I must do.”

“Yes, my lord.”

While he was gone, I bathed and dressed. A soldier learns to fend for himself even when he has a manservant.

My leg had told me in no uncertain terms, during my bath, that I was not to put it through the rigors of yesterday. I was to ease my way through the day or else I would pay the price. So, once the food was consumed, I asked for my carriage.

The address of the witness was close to Gower Street, the place where Lydia had been trampled by a carriage. Too late I realized I should have written ahead and asked for permission. But it was too late for regret. I would have to beg for forgiveness.

The house was one of a narrow terrace, respectable and worn, the brass on the door polished until the maker’s name had nearly rubbed away. I knocked and composed myself to be turned from the step.

The woman who answered was of middling size and somewhere in her fifties, white-haired, with bright black eyes shiny as boot-buttons. They went over me in a single unhurried sweep—coat, stick, the favoring of my left leg, the scar—and made some private accounting of which she gave no sign.

“Yes?”

“I beg your pardon, ma’am. I am Everthorne. I am looking for Martha Preston. My solicitors tell me she witnessed the incident on Gower Street, where a woman was run down by a carriage.”

The black eyes widened by a fraction. “Oh. You’re the gentleman whose solicitors came to see me.”

“I am.”

“Then you’d best come in.”

She stepped aside without ceremony, and I followed her into a front room no larger than my dressing closet. A fire burned in the grate despite the mildness of the day—the small, careful fire of a household that counted its coals. A sewing basket sat open beside the chair nearest the hearth, a half-darned stocking laid across its rim. Everything in the room had its place, and everything in it had been put there by hands that did not waste motion. This was not a woman given to fancy, nor to telling tales for the pleasure of being listened to.

“Please sit down, Lord Everthorne.”

I obeyed, lowering myself into the chair she indicated with more gratitude than I let her see. She took the seat by the fire and folded her hands in her lap.

“My sister tells me I ought to begin by apologizing.”

“For what?”

“For not coming forward sooner.”

“I confess the delay has puzzled me.”

“It would puzzle me as well, my lord, had I not spent the last three weeks in York.”

I retrieved a notebook and pencil from my coat. “Why York?”

“My sister took ill. A chest infection. For several days the doctor feared the worst of it.” She smoothed the stocking across her knee with one thumb, a small steadying gesture. “The very afternoon of the accident I’d had a telegram bidding me come at once. I gave my statement to a constable and was on a train out of King’s Cross within the hour.”

“You spoke to the police.”

“I did.”

A familiar heat moved through me, low and old. Three weeks. A witness had stood on a London pavement and told a constable what she had seen, and in three weeks no man in the whole of the Metropolitan Police had thought it worth a letter to anyone who cared.

“And what, precisely, did you tell them?”

Miss Preston blinked at the sharpness I had not quite managed to keep from the question.