Page 98 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

For a moment, no one in the room moved at all.

And then Linnet offered, without being asked, more on her own.

"She says,” Charles went on, and here his voice did break, just once, before he mastered it, “’If the commissioners require more proof of my sanity, I would be more than glad to provide it. All you need to do is ask.’”

I did not look at Edgar. I did not have to. The small sound he made was the first human thing I had ever known to come out of him. Made of pure fury, it came far too late to be of the slightest use to anyone.

Mr. Ellison set down his pen.

He conferred with the men to either side of him—a matter of minutes only, heads bent, a low murmur I could not catch and did not need to. When he straightened, he spoke not to Harkness, nor to Edgar, but directly to my sister, slowly, while Charles's hands moved to carry his words.

“Lady Linnet. This commission finds no sufficient cause for your detention, and a great deal of cause for our displeasure with those who arranged it. The order is discharged. You are free to leave this place, and to go wherever, and with whomever, you please."

I did not clearly remember crossing the room. What I did remember were Linnet's arms and the warm, shaking reality of her. Her hands were against my back saying something over and over that I could not see to read and did not need to. Lord Charles stood a careful, aching half step away, granting us the moment, his whole heart in his face, while Miriam wept openly into a handkerchief.

I turned at the last to Thorne—who had not said a word in the whole proceeding, who had stood at my shoulder the entire time like a wall I could lean on without seeming to—watching me with an expression I had never seen him wear, and would spend some time afterward trying to name.

"You fired it once," I said, when I could speak. "And it did not miss."

"No." He looked at my sister, at the young man hovering at her side, and finally at the wreckage of three ‘respectable’ men at the long table. And something eased in him that I had not known was being held. “No. It did not."

Edgar left before we did. He went without a word to anyone, upright still, correct still, his pristine name in cinders behind him and the whole of London waiting outside to watch him carry it home. No one rose. No one saw him to the door.

It was, I thought, exactly the silence he had meant for Linnet. I found I could not be sorry he had been made a present of it instead.

Chapter

Thirty-Eight

What Found Me

Ihad not, in a decade, gone willingly to a dinner party. I had attended a few since I’d inherited the marquisate, but willingly was another matter. I went to them as a man goes to be appraised, as I felt it had been my duty.

This was the first I went to because I wished to be there. That alone should have warned me something had shifted under my feet.

The second warning was that I brought Will.

I had told myself, in the carriage, a number of sensible things about why. That the boy could not be left to dine alone with the servants on such an evening. That Lark had asked that he come, and a marquis does not refuse a lady. That it was, in some vague and unexamined way, good for him. All of these were true. But not one of them was the real reason.

The reason was that I wanted her to meet him. I wanted the boy I had let through my guard to stand in the same room as the woman who had got past it without my noticing the breach until it was made. What I expected to come of the wanting, I could not have said. I was not a man much practiced in wanting things for himself. I had spent much of my life learning not to.

Will, for his part, suffered no such complications. He had spent the drive informing me of the locomotive he intended to describe to anyone who would hold still. He came up the steps of Everly House at a pace that obliged me to take the collar of his new coat.

"You will remember," I said, "that you are a guest."

"I know how to be a guest."

"You will remember it in the house, and not only on the steps."

"Rocket's the one with no manners," Will said, with the serene injustice of a boy displacing his sins onto an absent dog. "Not me."

Bexley admitted us before I could frame a reply, and then there was no need of one, because Lark was crossing the hall toward us, and Will fell silent of his own accord—which, I had learned, the boy did for almost no one.

She did not stoop to him, nor pitch her voice up into that register adults reserve for children, which I had found he despised. She put out her hand as she would to any guest, and said, "You must be Will. I have heard you know more about locomotives than anyone in London. I have a great many questions about the subject.”

Will took the hand. He looked her over with the frank, weighing stare he turned on everyone, the one that had taken the measure of half of those he’d met in London. And found them wanting. Then, with enormous gravity, he said, “I can answer them.”

Something in my chest performed a movement it had no business performing in a front hall.