Page 9 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

“I believe words can name what others pretend not to see.” A faint, fierce light touched her expression. “Once named, it becomes harder to bury.”

“And you believe this notebook proves…?”

“It proves that virtue, loudly proclaimed, often conceals rot.” She met my gaze without blinking. “I wrote what I saw. What I heard. What was dismissed as ‘unfortunate circumstance’ or ‘female hysteria.’”

The room seemed smaller suddenly, the morning light too bright.

“Why bring it to me?” I asked quietly.

Her answer came without pause. “Because you listen when others prefer comfort. Because your salon gathers minds that still believe words matter. And because if the poem is stopped—delayed, altered, quietly buried—this remains as evidence of wrongdoing.”

She slid the notebook closer to me. “Should I be prevented from speaking further, you will decide what becomes of it.”

The implication lay between us, heavy as iron. “You think someone might try to stop you.”

A corner of her mouth lifted, not in humor but recognition. “Influence has already been attempted. Questions about my past. A gentleman who has taken a sudden interest in my movements. Concern for my ‘well-being.’”

Her fingers rested lightly on the notebook’s cover. “I am not naïve, Lady Larkspur. I know the cost of saying certain things aloud.”

“Then why proceed?” I asked before I could stop myself.

She held my gaze. “Because silence is how they win.”

The words did not ring like rhetoric. They settled, final and unadorned.

I felt, absurdly, as though I were being examined in turn. Judged for whether I would carry what she offered.

“I will deliver the poem today,” she went on. “It will be printed. But if it is not—if some hand intervenes—you will know why.”

She pressed the notebook into my hands. “Keep it safe.”

Its weight surprised me. As though years had substance.

She rose then, smoothing her skirts, movements precise. “Your salon matters, Lady Larkspur. Do not let them teach you fear. That is their first victory.”

“I won’t,” I said, though I was not certain it was yet true.

She inclined her head and left with measured steps, neither hurried nor hesitant. A woman going to an appointment. A woman stepping, knowingly, into consequence.

The room felt altered after she had gone, as though the air itself had shifted.

I stood for several minutes in the quiet, the faint scent of damp earth and early crocuses drifting from the garden. The clock on the mantel ticking like a heartbeat. I opened the notebook. Within were worn pages dense with revisions, lines struck through, margins crowded with symbols and half-hidden meaning. This was no poem.

It was testimony that Lydia Gray had shaped into verse.

And I knew, with a clarity that made my throat tighten, that London would never forgive her for it.

Chapter

Six

Death Comes Calling

The following morning, I came down late to breakfast, the night’s thoughts still pressing on me. Lydia Gray’s words had followed me into sleep and back again, circling the same questions. What had she seen that others had not? What would happen once her verse was published? And the more troubling one, What price would she pay?

The household hummed with its usual morning life. Crockery touched china. A maid laughed somewhere beyond the door. The world, it seemed, had chosen normalcy.

Miriam was already at the table, spectacles perched low upon her nose as she scanned a letter. She looked up at once. “You look as though sleep and you quarreled.”