Chapter 17
“Iapologize,” I said. “I should not have expressed myself as less than a lady.”
It was not the sort of language a lady used in her own drawing room at midnight, with a gentleman seated opposite her. But the words had escaped me before propriety could intervene.
“Ladies swear, Lady Larkspur,” Thorne said. “I can attest to that.”
For some reason, the remark offended me. “Have much experience, do you?”
He bit back a grin. “Some.”
And that told me much about Thorne. Of course he would have women fawning over him. Not merely women—ladies.
But that was neither here nor there. We were not discussing Thorne’s liaisons. We were discussing what we had come across in our investigations. And what I possessed was a key component.
“I have something to confess.” I knew what I had to do. I had known, I think, from the moment he walked through my door. But knowing and doing are different countries, and the border is not easily crossed. “Wait here.”
He raised a brow as he came politely to his feet but did not ask. I appreciated that. I had spent too many years among men who required an explanation for everything a woman did, as though we could not be trusted to cross a room without rendering an account of our intentions.
I nodded to Miriam on my way out of the drawing room.
“Is everything—?”
“Everything’s fine.”
In my bedchamber, I took what I needed from the desk drawer, along with everything else the night would require.
I returned to find Thorne stirring the fire—a mercy, for the March night had turned bitterly cold. As his eyes found the notebook in my hands, understanding gathered behind them.
I sat but did not yet offer him the notebook.
“You asked me to trust you,” I said. “Not in those words, but that is what you did tonight. You shared your family’s worst secret.”
He said nothing. He waited, as I had waited for him.
“This belonged to Lydia Gray.”
Something shifted in his expression—not surprise, exactly, but a sharpening of attention.
“As you know, she kept a notebook,” I continued. “Her entries are written in a mixture of abbreviations, initials, and what I believe to be a simple substitution cipher for the most sensitive passages. She was protecting herself.” I paused. “Or someone else.”
“How did you come to have it?” he asked, taking his seat once more.
“She left it with me for safekeeping. The last time I saw her, she pressed it into my hands and bade me keep it hidden. She said that if anything happened to her, I would know what to do with it.” My throat tightened. I had spoken of that afternoon to no one but Miriam.
“I did not understand, then, what she meant by if anything happened. I thought her dramatic. Lydia could be dramatic.”
The fire crackled in the silence.
“But something did happen,” he said quietly.
“Yes.”
I looked down at the notebook. Lydia’s hand was minuscule—a reflection of the woman, crowding as much meaning as possible into the smallest space.
The black ink had faded to brown in places, and the pages were soft with handling.
She had returned to these entries again and again, adding, revising, questioning herself in the margins.
“There is something I must tell you before I show you this,” I said. “And I need you to understand why I did not share it sooner.”
Thorne’s expression did not change, but his hands went still on the arms of the chair.
“The notebook mentions your family name.”
“In what capacity?”
“I can’t tell. It is written in a code I have not been able to break.”
A silence. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. The fire settled.
“When you and I first spoke, I did not know you. I did not know what part your family had played, or whether you were aware of it, or whether you might be—”
“Complicit.”
The word lay between us like a blade.
“Yes,” I said. I would not soften it. He deserved better. “I could not risk showing this to a man who might be entangled in the very thing Lydia died investigating. Not until I knew what manner of man you were.”
I watched him absorb it—watched him understand that while he had been deciding whether to trust me, I had been making the same calculation about him.
That we had been circling one another like two people holding lanterns in the dark, each trying to determine whether the other’s light was a signal or a trap.
Something eased in his expression. Not quite a smile—the evening was too heavy for smiles—but an acknowledgement. A recognition of equals.
“And now?” he said. “What manner of man have you decided I am?”
“An honorable man who can be trusted.”
He looked at me for a long moment, then nodded—a small, grave gesture that carried more weight than any words.
I held out the notebook.
He took it carefully, as though it were something living, and opened it to the first page to study Lydia's cramped hand.
I watched his long fingers spread across the page, the slight downward turn of his mouth as his eyes moved across the lines.
He read with a stillness that was not calm, but one held precisely in check.
The firelight found the scar along his jaw and followed it, and I wondered what that scar had cost him.
"She was thorough," he said.
"She was a poet. Poets notice everything. They simply have the good manners to disguise it as metaphor."
He almost smiled at that.
"These RG initials." He turned several pages, pausing at the entries I had marked with small slips of paper, and indicated a passage near the center of the notebook. To see it I had to lean in, near enough that his sleeve brushed mine. “I think it’s Grimshaw.”
"Grimshaw? Who is he?"
He told me of the charitable donations his father had made for twelve years to a Reverend Grimshaw, for the upkeep of an institution in Kent. He spoke evenly as though distance from his father were a thing he might impose by tone alone.
"I have asked my solicitors to inquire as to the nature of the institution. I hope to hear from them within a few days."
Edgar had mentioned an institution in Kent when he proposed that Linnet be sent there. The memory drew a cold thread through the warmth of the room. "Were you acquainted with him?"
"No. I rarely visited Everthorne Manor during my time at Oxford. And afterward, even fewer times.” He did not explain the reason. I already knew.
"Do you know what Grimshaw looked like?"
"There is little I remember from that weekend. A vicar would not have been something I noticed."
"Lydia's landlady mentioned a gentleman who visited her. An older man, well-dressed, silver haired. She said he looked like someone you'd see at the front of a church. I took that to mean a member of the congregation." I paused. "But she may have meant a vicar."
“Maybe so, but it could mean someone else entirely. Did you find anything in her rooms?"
"I did." I retrieved the poem and the two scraps from Mary Wollstonecraft's book and handed them across. Our hands met for the briefest moment in the passing—his fingers cool, mine not entirely steady, though I told myself it was only the lateness of the hour.
"The first part concerns the weekend at Everthorne Manor," he said.
"So it seems," I agreed.
He read on. "And the wolf still walks among the pious fold. That has to be Grimshaw."
"Perhaps," I said. "What did Mainwaring have to say?"
He shared what Mainwaring had told him. There was very little new in it, beyond what we had already deduced.
But now we had a witness's account from someone who had been there.
Most importantly, it proved Thorne innocent of the charge leveled against him.
He had paid the price for his brother's sin.
I had not realized how tightly I had been holding that question until it loosened its grip.
Innocent. Whatever else he was—and I did not know the whole of him—he had not done the thing his name had been made to carry.
I had braced myself against the possibility that he was a man I could not afford to trust. To learn otherwise felt like vindication.
He closed Lydia's notebook. "So where do we go from here?" he asked.
"We need to decipher Lydia's notebook. You would be the better person to do that since it covers what happened at Everthorne Manor. You may be more familiar than I with the initials and the places she mentions. Why don't you take it and see what you can learn?”
“Very well. And you can do the same with my grandmother's journal.
Her handwriting grew spidery as she grew older, but it is legible.
" He placed it on the table between us and slid it toward me—slowly, deliberately, the way a man sets down a thing he is not entirely certain he can bear to part with. "Take as long as you need."
I picked up the journal. The leather was warm where his hand had rested. “Thank you for trusting me with the truth.”
“Thank you for believing in me,” he answered.
We were so close I could smell the wool of his coat and his cologne—something clean and faintly bitter, cedar and a darker note I could not name.
The clock on the mantel ticked on, indifferent, and I was aware—acutely, foolishly—of every inch of the small distance between us, and of how little it would take to make it smaller. He was watching me with that stillness of his, one I could not read for what it held in check.
But whatever this was, it was not the thing we’d wanted to discuss.
“I best go,” Thorne said as he came to his feet. “You’ll let me know what you find, if anything.”
I came to my feet and nodded. “And you’ll do the same?”
A faint smile touched his mouth. “I will.”
For one suspended moment, neither of us moved.
Then he bowed his head and walked out.
I stood very still after the door closed behind him, his grandmother’s journal clasped tightly in my hands.
This was dangerous territory. I had expected many complications when I began looking into Lydia Gray’s death.
Scandal. Resistance. Powerful men with secrets to protect.
But I had never anticipated this unsettling awareness of the man now entangled in the investigation beside me.
My life did not allow for such distractions. Such complications.
I would need to remember that.
Because Lydia was dead. And somewhere within the pages of his grandmother’s journal and Lydia’s notebook was the reason why.