Page 82 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

The color drained from her face. "You are asking me to let him take her."

"I am asking you to let him reach for her. Not to leave her there." I softened my voice. "A thing that has not happened cannot be undone, Lark. But the moment he commits her, the order exists. The certificates exist. And we know whose names will be upon them before the ink is dry."

"How can you know that?"

"Because of my solicitors’ report, and what you yourself have learned. Strode will sign as one of the examining physicians. Carmody will have brokered the arrangement, as he brokered so many others. And the whole of it runs through Grimshaw's very respectable house in Kent. We are not guessing at our enemies, Lark. At that point, we will have their names, their fees, their signatures on Linnet’s committal.”

“But how will we fight this once it’s done?” she asked.

“They will claim the same they have of other women. That she is hysterical. Of unsound mind. Not mistress of her own senses." I held her gaze. "And there sits the flaw at the center of the thing. Linnet is deaf, but not one of those men signs. So how does Strode examine a woman he cannot speak to and cannot understand? How does he take down her answers when he has no means to put the questions? He will write her silence into derangement and her hands into the ravings of a disordered mind, because he has no other way to read her. He will call deafness madness, for it is the only verdict the room permits him."

Understanding came into her face. "And the moment we say so⁠—"

"—his certificate is worthless. It is proof he certified a woman he never once comprehended." I let that settle between us. “But we do not stop at tearing up his paper. We answer it. You will set before the commissioners a young woman whose conduct half of literary London has witnessed with its own eyes. Respectable men and women who have sat in your drawing room and watched Linnet hold the whole company without speaking a word. We will show them her drawings, her paintings.”

“Along with Lord Charles Merriton’s testimony,” Lark said.

The name meant nothing to me. Another poet, perhaps? “Who’s he?”

“A gentleman who belongs to a family no board in England would care to offend. He’s troubled himself to learn sign language and is, unless I am a great fool, halfway to losing his heart to Linnet.”

"He would make a fine witness, then. A man from a family that can't be ignored, vouching she's as sane as he is." I paused. "And that a gentleman thinks her worthy of being loved."

"Of course she is worthy of being loved." The words came out clipped. "You speak as though Linnet requires a gentleman's endorsement before society will acknowledge what she has always been."

I instantly became contrite. “That was not my intention. I apologize.”

She shook her head. "Now I'm the one apologizing. You're helping, and I snap at you for it.”

“No need to apologize, Lark.”

She breathed out a long sigh. “How long will this take?”

“Days at the very least.”

She sprang from her chair. “Linnet is to stay inside those walls. Behind barred windows. Have her suffer for days⁠—”

"Lark."

"—and to trust a Lunacy Board and witnesses and the good opinion of Charles Merriton, while she sits in the dark not knowing whether anyone is coming for her at all and⁠—"

"Lark. No panicking. Remember?”

It stopped her, as I had known it would. Her mouth closed. The look she turned on me this time held no fight in it, only fear, naked and terrible, and that was far harder to stand against than her temper had been.

"You ask too much of me," she said, very low, retaking her seat.

"I know it." I took her hands. They were once again cold. I turned one palm upward and brushed my thumb across it. Her eyes met mine briefly, but she did not pull away.

"Days," she said quietly.

"I would not ask it if there were another road. But there isn’t. Every other road ends with Linnet lost to you forever. This one ends with her home. I will not pretend the cost is small. But I will not lie to you about the prize either."

She drew a breath that shook on the way in.

"Your sister is not the woman at that window. Linnet is not friendless, she is not forgotten, and she is a great deal stronger than her brother has ever troubled to notice. She will know what has been done to her. She will know, the whole of the time, that you are moving heaven and earth on her behalf—because she knows you, and she has never once had cause to doubt that you would come. She will hold. She will walk out of that place on her own feet. And whatever it costs her, she will not come out broken. She will come out knowing precisely what she survived, and what she is made of." I pressed her hands. "That is not nothing to give a young woman, either."

For a long moment she only looked at me. Then something in her shoulders gave way—not collapse but surrender of a different kind. The setting down of a weight she had been carrying alone.