Page 81 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

Then the rest: bright sitting rooms, a chapel, a walled garden. Everything arranged to persuade. Everything respectable. Very nearly convincing—right up to the moment they were leaving, when a window was forced open above the forecourt, and a woman appeared at the bars, clawing at the iron, screaming for help.

“That is the worst of it, Thorne." Her cup had gone still in her hands. "Grimshaw stood there and called the poor creature deranged. He said she always insisted she was sane. That she was wrongly imprisoned. That someone must come for her, and that this was the nature of the disorder."

She turned the cup in her hands but did not drink. "Don't you see what it means? Every sane thing she did would be turned and used to prove her mad. Her reason. Her desperation. There is no argument she can make that they have not already prepared to dismiss." Her gaze met mine. "And they will do precisely the same to Linnet. How are we to manage that?"

“We don't fight them on their ground. We don't try to prove Linnet sane. We prove the place corrupt." I let that settle. "The report from my solicitors reached me the day I left for Edinburgh."

Her face blazed with emotion. “And you said nothing to me?”

"There was no time. I had a train to catch, and I'd not put a thing like that in a letter. I meant to lay it before you the moment I returned."

Her shoulders eased. “So what did your solicitors have to say?”

"It confirms everything you've just described. And a good deal worse." I set my cup aside. "The arrangement has run more than fifteen years. Women go in. Almost none come out. They are not meant to."

She said nothing, waiting.

"And yet every form is observed, every certificate in order. Carmody, the solicitor, sees to that. Annual reports filed. Fees collected at admission and again each year, without fail." I held her gaze. "Grimshaw. Strode. Carmody. Three respectable men grown rich on the trade."

"So that is all it is?” Her voice flattened with contempt. "Money."

"At bottom, yes. But here is the thing of it—no one has ever challenged them. Not once in fifteen years has a single committal been questioned."

"Because the family who paid to lock the woman away is hardly going to petition for her release."

"Just so." I held her gaze. "But Linnet is not like the others. Edgar may have the law on his side to commit her. What he does not reckon on is that a committal can be contested. And that is precisely what we shall do." She needed reassuring. So, I set my hands on her shoulders. "We will get her back, Lark."

"How?"

"To begin with, we stop panicking."

She shrugged off my hands. "I am not panicking, Thorne.” The look she leveled at me could have stripped varnish from a door.

Good. Her fighting spirit was coming back. "If you say so."

"I do. And even if I were, I should have every right to panic.”

"You would, I agree.” Unfortunately, I could not quite keep my mouth from twitching.

She caught it, of course. "Stop smirking and explain yourself."

I surrendered the smirk. “Here’s the thing. We must be clever, and we must be loud.”

Her brow creased.

"Your brother wants this done quietly. A respectable arrangement, soberly conducted, attracting no notice whatever. So we deny him the pleasure, and we turn it against him."

A dangerous light came into her eyes as she caught my meaning. “We give it a voice. We make a very great deal of noise."

“Yes, but not yet.”

“Not yet? Why not?”

“If we make the noise too soon—before she is committed—we gain nothing but to warn him. Westmere has every reason to move her somewhere we cannot follow, and every excuse to call you precisely what he would like to call you. Hysterical. Unwell. Unfit to have charge of anyone, least of all yourself." I held her gaze. "Noise is a fine weapon, Lark. But you fire it once, and you fire it when it cannot miss." I learned that lesson in the Crimea.

"Then when?"

"When the thing is done. When Edgar has signed his order, when two doctors have signed their certificates, and Linnet has been received at Elmwood under the seal of the law."