Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
The Devil's Arithmetic
The fire had burned low in my study, but I had not bothered to ring for more coal. Pain was easier to think through in the cold.
My leg ached—the deep, grinding ache that came with damp weather and hours spent standing on ground that was never meant to hold a coffin.
The surgeon in Scutari had saved the limb but not the ease of it.
He had also saved the rest of me, though not without omissions.
There were days when a name I ought to know arrived blank, when a face surfaced without context, when the past rearranged itself like furniture in a room I could no longer fully enter.
Shrapnel. A near thing. I had walked into the Crimea on two good legs and a memory I could trust, and been carried out lacking the full use of either.
I shifted in my chair and stared at the letter on the desk before me. My third attempt. The first two lay crumpled in the grate, their inadequacies consumed by the dying embers.
Lady Larkspur.
I had promised to send word.
That much was simple. The difficulty lay in everything that followed.
At Highgate, standing over Lydia Gray's grave, I had acted on instinct.
An alliance had seemed not merely logical but necessary—two people who believed a woman had been murdered, pooling what they knew.
The calculus of it was clean. She had information I lacked.
I had resources she could not access. Together, we might uncover what had been so carefully buried.
But instinct, I had learned, was a poor strategist.
I reached for my pen, then set it down again. The nib left a small blot of ink on the paper, spreading like a bruise.
If I drew Lady Larkspur into this—into the world of men who silenced women with carriages and buried evidence behind respectable names—I would be placing her in danger.
Real danger, not the polite social peril of a reputation damaged by association with the Devil of Everthorne.
The kind that ended with a body on a street and a verdict of misadventure.
I could attend to the business I had come here to conduct and return to Everthorne to deal with the mundane machinery of an inheritance I had never sought. I could let Lydia Gray rest in her Highgate grave and let the truth rest with her.
I picked up the crumpled draft from the grate's edge and smoothed it flat. The words stared back at me, stiff and inadequate:
I believe it would be prudent for us to meet at your earliest convenience to discuss matters of mutual concern.
Prudent. As though prudence had ever governed a single decision I had made.
I crushed the paper again and let it fall.
The trouble was, Lady Larkspur would not walk away.
I had seen it in her face at the inquest when she challenged the coroner.
I had heard it in her voice at Highgate when she spoke of Lydia's poem.
She was already investigating—already asking questions, already drawing connections.
She would continue whether I helped her or not.
And a woman asking dangerous questions alone, without knowing the full shape of the danger, was far more vulnerable than one who had an ally watching her back.
Which meant that keeping my distance was not the safer course. It was the more cowardly one.
I crossed to the window, my left leg protesting each step with its familiar sullen complaint.
The London night pressed against the glass—fog and gaslight, the distant rattle of a late hansom.
Everthorne House sat in Mayfair like a monument to a family that had perfected the art of looking admirable from the outside.
I had not wanted this house. I had not wanted the title, the estate, the weight of a name that tasted like ash in my mouth.
My brother William had inherited it from our father, and then he himself had been taken by typhoid fever within the year—a cruel efficiency.
Providence had worked through the family Bible with a pen, striking out names until only I remained.
The least suitable.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and closed my eyes. For a moment I was twenty-three again, standing in my father's study at Everthorne Manor while the old Marquis explained, with the patient logic of a man accustomed to arranging other people's lives, exactly what was required of me.
Emily Driscoll had been found in the conservatory, weeping, her dress torn, bloodied. The house party had dissolved into whispered chaos within the hour. Her father, Sir Richard Driscoll, was demanding an explanation. Someone would have to answer for it.
Not William. William was the heir—steady, respectable William, whose political career was already being mapped out in the clubs and drawing rooms of Westminster. William could not be touched by this. The family would not survive it.
But Julian—reckless, restless Julian, who had already earned a reputation for wildness, who had been seen drinking and flirting with half the young women in the county—Julian could absorb the blow. The mud would stick to a man already muddied.
My father had not raised his voice. He never did. He simply laid out the facts as though they were tiles in a mosaic. And when the picture was complete, he waited for me to see it.
"You will leave for London tomorrow," he had said. "A commission will be arranged for you. In time, the matter will be forgotten."
Was it William? I had wanted to ask. The question had risen in my throat like bile. My father's expression—calm, immovable, utterly certain—told me that the answer did not matter. What mattered was the outcome. The Ashcombe name. The succession.
I had looked at my father and seen, for the first time, the machinery behind the man—the cold, precise logic that could sacrifice a son as readily as a pawn.
And I had done what he asked. God help me, I had done it.
I opened my eyes. The window showed me my own reflection—older, thinner, the scar a pale line from ear to chin, the face of a man who had spent twelve years carrying a weight he might not deserve.
Might not. That was the cruelty of it. I did not know.
I had been drinking that night—heavily, stupidly, as I drank in those days.
My memories of the evening were fractured, unreliable.
And what the drink had not taken, the war had finished.
The surgeons had warned me that older memories might suffer—might blur, might lose their edges, might simply vanish like ink left in the rain.
I had not mourned the loss of most of them.
But the memories I needed most—the hours of that night, the faces in the corridors, who had been where and when—those were precisely the ones I could not trust. I knew I had not touched Emily Driscoll.
But I could not prove what I had not done, and I could not say with certainty who had.
William had been in the conservatory that evening.
So had other friends of his. There had been others, too—guests, servants, a clergyman attached to the household whose name I ought to remember and did not.
The war had taken it, along with so much else.
The not-knowing was its own punishment. It left no room for righteous anger, only the slow corrosion of doubt.
I turned from the window and limped back to the desk. Enough. The past was a locked room, and I had spent too many years pressing my ear to the door.
What mattered now was Lydia Gray. She had served my grandmother. She had seen things—patterns, as Lady Larkspur had called them. She had written them down, shaped them into verse, and prepared to publish them. And someone had driven a carriage over her body to prevent it.
If that truth was connected to Everthorne—to whatever had happened to Emily Driscoll and to whoever had escaped blame—then I owed it to Lydia to find out.
Not for redemption. I had stopped believing in redemption somewhere on the road to the Crimea.
But for the simple, stubborn principle that the dead deserved better than silence.
I drew a fresh sheet of paper toward me and dipped the pen.
The meeting place mattered. Not her home—I would not compromise her reputation by calling at a single woman's residence. Not a park—too exposed, too easily observed by the sort of people who made a profession of noticing things.
The British Museum. Public enough to be unremarkable. Quiet enough, in the right gallery at the right hour, for a conversation that would not be overheard. Two people of education and standing, happening upon each other before the Elgin Marbles. Who could object to that?
I began to write. No preamble. No pleasantries. She would not want them, and I was not capable of producing them convincingly.
Lady Larkspur,
I should be grateful for the opportunity to continue our conversation earlier this week. The Townley Gallery at the British Museum is little frequented on Tuesday mornings. I understand the Roman portrait busts repay close study. Hopefully, eleven o’clock would do.
I remain, etc.
Everthorne
I read it once, set down the pen, and sealed the letter before I could change my mind.
Then I rang for Dawson and instructed him to have it delivered first thing in the morning.
The fire had gone out entirely. I sat in the dark for a long time, listening to the silence of a house full of ghosts, and wondered whether I was doing the right thing or merely the inevitable one.
In my experience, they were rarely the same.