Page 75 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

“The truth.”

“Which was?”

She studied me for a long moment, and something in her face shifted. “You truly do not know?”

“No.”

“It was no accident, my lord.”

I felt myself go very still. “What did you see, Miss Preston?”

She drew a slow breath, and her gaze drifted from my face to some point above the fire, to the afternoon three weeks gone. “I was on the far side of Gower Street. There was a flower seller at the corner, and I had stopped to look over the roses. I had half a mind to carry some up to York.” Her hands settled. “The woman stepped down off the pavement. She seemed distracted, as though her mind were elsewhere entirely.”

Lydia. Carrying her poem, or the memory of it, into the last street she would ever cross.

“Then a man came up to her.”

“A stranger?”

“I believe so. She looked startled when he spoke to her—the way you do at a face you don’t know.”

“What happened then?”

“They had a few words between them. I was too far off to hear, and the cart traffic was loud.” Her mouth thinned. “And then he pushed her.”

For the space of a breath, I thought I had misheard her over the snap of the fire. “Pushed her?”

“Directly into the road.”

The little room seemed to draw in around the two of us.

“You are certain of it.”

“I watched it happen, my lord. With these eyes. I have turned it over a hundred times since, looking for the innocent shape of it, and there is none.”

I leaned forward, both hands on the head of my stick. “Tell me exactly what you saw. As you would tell it to a man who must act upon it.”

She inclined her head, as if she approved of being asked so. “The carriage was already coming on—a closed carriage, moving faster than it had any business moving on that street. The woman turned, as though she meant to walk away from the man. He put both his hands flat against her shoulders.” Miss Preston raised her own hands a little from her lap to show me, palms out. “And he shoved her into its path.”

My grip tightened until the brass of the stick bit into my palm.

“And then?”

“The horse took her. She went down. There was shouting—a man near me, and then half the street at once.” She swallowed, and for the first time her steadiness wavered. “And then the carriage was gone. The driver never stopped. And the man who pushed her, he was gone as well. Almost before she struck the stones.”

“Did he run?”

“No.” She looked at me directly. “That was the thing that struck me hardest and has struck me every night since. He did not run. He walked.”

As a man walks who has finished an errand and has another waiting.

“What did he look like?”

She answered without a moment’s hunting for it, the way an honest witness does when the picture is burned in. “Medium height. Strongly built through the shoulders. Rough-looking.”

“Anything more particular?”

“Ginger hair. Bright with it. And a scar. Here.” She touched her own cheek, drawing a fingertip down toward the jaw. “Running down to about there.”