Page 95 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

"For as long as it profits the men who put her there." It was Miriam who answered, from her chair by the window. "Women go into these places, Lord Charles. They are not, as a rule, seen to come out. There is money in the keeping of them. There is none at all in their cure."

Lord Charles looked from her to me to Thorne, as the whole smooth, lawful, paper-thin horror of it settled on him at last. Linnet’s confinement required no villainy any man could point to, no broken law, no locked-room crime. Only a brother's signature, two complaisant doctors, and a quiet house in the country. That’s all it took for a woman to be erased from the world.

He jumped up from the chair as though it had caught fire beneath him. “Tell me where she is, and I will go to her, and I⁠—"

"You will do nothing of the kind," Thorne said.

It was not unkind, but it landed like a door closing. Lord Charles checked himself. "I beg your pardon, sir, but I do not see by what right⁠—"

"By the right of a man who has spent quite some time building the only road that ends with her free and would prefer you did not put your boot through it."

I watched it go into Lord Charles like cold water—the same dousing Miriam had given me just yesterday. We must be clever, we must be loud, and we must not mistake the one for the other.

"Then what am I to do?" he said. "I cannot do nothing. I shall go mad myself."

"You are to be useful," I told him, “Which is a great deal harder than being brave, and worth more." I leaned toward him. "Lord Charles, you know her language. You sat next to my sister and held an entire conversation with her that only Miriam and I could follow. Half of literary London has watched you do it. Do you understand what that makes you?"

He shook his head.

"A witness to her sanity,” Thorne said. "When the time comes to challenge the committal, the whole of their case rests on one rotten plank: that a deaf woman who cannot be spoken to must therefore be deranged. We mean to set before the commissioners a person of standing who knows her mind directly. And a gentleman who comes from a family held in society’s highest esteem, who took the trouble to learn her language when her own brother never troubled to learn a single sign—" He nodded as if he understood. "That is not a small witness, Lord Charles. That is the witness that ends the matter."

Something changed in Lord Charles's face then. The wild color did not leave it, but it had found a direction. A man on fire is only dangerous until you give the fire somewhere to go.

"Then I shall testify," he said. "I shall stand up before anyone you please and say what I know to be true—that Lady Linnet Everly has the clearest mind and the kindest heart of any woman I have had the honor to know, and that the only madness in this case belongs to the men who would call her mad to be rid of her." He drew breath. "And I shall say it under my own name and my family’s name.”

"You understand what you are offering?” I said gently. “Your name beside hers, publicly, in a matter of lunacy. It will be talked of."

"Let it be talked of." For the first time since he had come through the door, Lord Charles Merriton looked entirely steady. "I have spent a great many evenings being talked of for nothing whatever. I should be glad, for once, to deserve it."

I liked him very much in that moment. So, I think, did Thorne.

"Then we are agreed," I said. "You go nowhere near Edgar. You hold yourself ready, and when we send for you⁠—"

A knock at the street door cut me off, followed by Bexley's measured tread answering it. And then, a voice in the hall I knew, pitched higher than I had ever heard it.

I was on my feet before I had decided to rise.

Anne swept in without being announced, her traveling cloak still on, the hem of it dark with damp, one glove gone. She had been weeping, going by the track of tears on her face. She glanced at me and then at Thorne, who she did not know, and Lord Charles, who she did.

And then her words spilled out.

"It is done, Lark. The physicians came today—Strode, and another I never had the name of—with a document for Edgar to sign." Her voice did not break. It had gone somewhere past breaking. “They’ve taken her to Elmwood House. Linnet is committed.” Her breath hitched. “I am so sorry. I came the moment I could get away."

Behind me, Lord Charles made a sound as though he had been struck.

And I—God forgive me—felt the cold, clear thing rise in me that Thorne had promised would come. Because the worst had happened, exactly as he had said it would. And the worst happening was the very thing we had been waiting for.

The order existed now. The certificates existed. The names were on them.

We could begin.

Chapter

Thirty-Seven

The Mask Removed

The poem went off like a charge laid in a coal seam—slow to catch, and then everywhere at once.