Page 96 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

Quennell published “The Mask of Virtue” the morning Harkness laid our challenge before the commissioners, exactly as we had agreed: Lydia's verses set within a black border, her pen name beneath the title, and beneath that the date of her death. By noon the first copies were passing hand to hand in the coffee houses along Fleet Street. By evening I was told there was not a clean copy of The Quill and Crown to be had in the whole of the West End, and the printer was setting a second run by lamplight.

I had thought I understood what we were doing. I had not. I had imagined a stone dropped in a pond. This was a fire in a high wind.

It was the timing that did it—that, and the date beneath the title. Half of literary London already knew that Lydia Gray had died under the wheels of a carriage in Bloomsbury, and now half of literary London held in its hands a poem she had written before her death, naming in unmistakable terms the precise machinery by which troublesome women were declared mad and buried alive in respectable houses in the country. And while the ink of that was still wet, the same drawing rooms learned that the deaf sister of Lord Westmere had been carried off and shut away in exactly such a house.

The poem ceased to be a poem. It became a key, and every reader in London turned it in the same lock at once.

"You will want to sit down for the morning's intelligence," Miriam said, three days after the challenge had been made, laying the cards and notes she’d received from her extensive gossip network beside my chocolate. "Edgar was cut at his club."

I set down my cup. "Cut. Really?”

"By name, in the smoking room, by old Lord Brearley, who is too deaf himself to have managed it quietly and too grand to be corrected." Her mouth twitched. "He enquired of the room at large whether a man who would put his own sister behind bars might not be more comfortable taking his brandy elsewhere. I am told Edgar left within the quarter hour and has not been back since."

“He must be furious,” I sipped my chocolate. “Anything else?”

“The invitation to the Hartleys’ ball was rescinded as well as the Marchmains' supper and Lady Provost's musical evening." She folded her hands. "He is finding, Lark, that the pristine name he prized above his own sister is a good deal less pristine this week than last. And the beauty of it is that he cannot say a word in his own defense without naming the thing he most wishes unnamed. To protest is to confess he has a deaf sister at all."

I should not have smiled. But I did.

My joy was fleeting. Every coffee house in London might be ablaze with Linnet's name. But Linnet sat behind a barred window in Kent, unaware of how hard we were fighting for her release. We had not been allowed to write to her, and, even if we did, I very much doubted the letter would ever get to her. Yes, Edgar was that vindictive.

Then, on the fourth morning, Harkness's note came. The Commissioners in Lunacy would receive the matter of Miss Linnet Everly. Not in the ordinary course which would take weeks. At once.

"They cannot afford to be slow," Thorne said when I put the note into his hand. He had come the moment I sent for him. "A body that exists to prevent wrongful confinement, sitting on its hands while the whole town reads a murdered woman's poem about wrongful confinement? They would be the next thing in every column. We did not give them a choice, Lark. We took it from them."

"You took it from them,” I clarified.

"We," he affirmed, and did not let me argue.

The commissioners kept their offices at Whitehall Place, in a set of rooms a great deal plainer than the power they held within them. I expected something grander, and found instead a long table, a quantity of foolscap, a coal fire that smoked, and seven men who between them could open the door of any madhouse in England or nail it shut for good.

I knew them only by Harkness's murmured catalogue as we entered—three medical men, three of the law, and the chairman, a spare grey gentleman named Mr. Ellison who had the dry, unhurried manner of a man who had heard every lie the human animal could devise and was no longer impressed by any of them. They were the audience our whole strategy had been built to reach. I found my hands were not as steady as I wished. I folded them so it would not show.

Edgar was already there.

A part of me had hoped he would not, so that I might never again be in a room with the man who had done this. But, of course, he had come. A man does not let a thing be decided about his property without attending to it. He sat very upright, very correct, in a coat brushed to perfection. When his eyes found mine across the room, there was nothing in them at all. That was the worst of him. There never had been.

Beside him sat the solicitor, Carmody, who had brokered the whole filthy arrangement. In a seat behind, looking as though he wished the floor would oblige him by opening, sat Dr. Aubrey Strode.

And then a side door opened, and they brought in Linnet.

I was on my feet before I knew it. Thorne's hand closed briefly over my wrist—not yet, not here. I made myself stand still and not run to her. She was pale, thinner, and there were shadows under her eyes that had not been there before. But she was still Linnet. They had not broken her.

The instant she saw me her whole face changed, and her hands moved. “I knew you would come.”

I had to look at the smoking fire very hard for a moment to keep my composure in front of the men who would weigh it.

At the far side of the room, Lord Charles had risen as well.

When Linnet saw him, a fierce emotion crossed her face. But it was not for me to read. So I looked away.

Mr. Ellison rapped the table once. "We are not a court," he said, to the room at large. "I will thank everyone present to remember it. We are here to satisfy ourselves upon a single question: whether this young woman is detained with sufficient cause, or without it. Mr. Harkness. You act for the petitioner against the order. You may begin."

Harkness rose, unhurried. He did not raise his voice once in the whole of what followed, which made it carry all the further.

"The order committing Miss Everly rests upon two medical certificates," he said. "By law, they must. Remove either, and the order falls. I shall trouble the commissioners with only one." He turned a single sheet face up upon the table. "The certificate of Dr. Aubrey Strode."

He let it sit.