Page 93 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

He had not chosen a dog. He had chosen himself.

“So I did,” I said.

The grin broke across his face like sunrise.

“He will be bathed,” I said, “before he sets one paw above stairs. He will not bite the staff. And he will not”—I looked at the thing, which looked back at me with frank contempt—“he will not, under any circumstances, be permitted upon the furniture.”

“Right,” said Will, in the tone of a boy agreeing to terms he has no intention whatever of honoring.

“Dawson.”

“My lord.”

“Have a bath drawn for the—” I considered the word. “For the dog.”

“At once, my lord.” Dawson inclined his head. But I caught, beneath the gravity, the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth.

“Might I ask what we are to call him?”

Will answered with the instant certainty of a decision long since made. “Rocket.”

Of course it was Rocket. The boy loved locomotives, and here was a small fierce thing that went off without warning and could not be stopped once it started. The name was, I was forced to admit, very nearly perfect.

“Rocket,” I agreed.

“Thank you, Uncle Julian.”

Uncle Julian. He had said it without ceremony, in the same breath as the thanks, already half turned back to the small warm riot in his arms. He could not know what he had done.

No one had spoken my Christian name in years—not my father, who had unmade me with it; not William, who was past calling anyone anything at all; not my grandmother, years in the ground. But here was a boy thrust upon me by nothing better than chance, who had looked at the whole bankrupt inheritance of the name and found in it, of all the things he might have wanted, an uncle.

When I had command of myself again, I said only that Rocket would want feeding, and that a gentleman saw to his animals before himself.

Will bore his prize from the room in triumph, Dawson following.

No doubt the household’s evening would be disrupted by the urgent business of one disreputable dog. I could only imagine his reception.

Left alone again in the failing light, with Ajax pressing warm against my good leg, and the affidavit on the desk, I pondered the name I had wanted all day.

Murphy.

We not only had a name, but a face, a trade, and a witness who would put him on the street the afternoon Lydia died. But we had something else now too, and it was less welcome. A man with a knife and no conscience, standing between us and the truth, who had killed once to keep it buried and would not scruple to do so again.

Lark did not know the half of what I now knew. I would have to tell her—tonight.

From somewhere in the house, a small dog barked at the indignity of soap with a violence wholly disproportionate to its size.

I glanced down at Ajax. “Do not trouble yourself. You still rule this house." Ajax thumped his tail once against the floor, supremely unbothered, while somewhere above us the new claimant to the throne shrieked on. "All evidence to the contrary."

And then I ordered the carriage brought round.

Chapter

Thirty-Six

A Man on Fire

Thorne arrived as the lamps were being lit. I knew from his face that he carried good news.