Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
North of the River
My next literary salon proved a subdued affair. Heavy rain kept many of my usual guests away, including Peregrine, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, and several others whose absence left the afternoon quieter than usual. And throughout it all, Lydia Gray’s empty chair seemed impossible not to notice.
Then, as though London had abruptly wearied of gloom, the weather turned. The rain vanished. Pale spring sunlight broke through the clouds and spilled warmth across Bloomsbury.
A note from Thorne arrived later that same afternoon.
I declined to examine too closely whether my improved spirits owed more to the sunshine or to his handwriting.
Four lines, in the now-familiar hand:
There are several matters I would like to discuss with you. The notebook for one, as well as two others.
I have arranged a private parlor at the Anchor & Crown, Wapping, kept by a man I would trust with my life, as I have done.
Would two o’clock tomorrow suit?
Thorne
I dashed off a note agreeing to the time and place and asked Bexley to have it delivered tonight.
By noon Wednesday, I had chosen my disguise, for I couldn’t very well be seen with him in public as myself. A mourning gown, a bonnet with a dark veil. Black boots. At half past one, I boarded a hansom cab, alone. Miriam remained behind. She was not pleased.
The drive took the better part of an hour—east past the Tower, the streets narrowing and roughening the further we went, until Bloomsbury felt like a place I had invented rather than left that morning.
Warehouse walls rose on either side, blank and soot-blackened, and above the chimney pots the masts of moored ships stood improbably tall, a forest grown out of the wrong soil.
Gulls wheeled and shrieked over the rooftops.
The smell of tar and brine reached the cab before the river itself came into view.
The Anchor & Crown sat in a narrow street running back from the riverside, the sort of street that in Mayfair would have been an alley and here was a thoroughfare thick with dockhands and lightermen going about their business without a glance at a mourning-veiled woman descending from a hansom—a small mercy, and one I noted with relief.
The building was older than its neighbors: a two-story affair of dark brick with a painted sign showing an anchor crossed by a small gold crown, swinging faintly on its bracket in the river wind.
The windows were clean. A boy of ten or so swept the step with the bored competence of a child who had been sweeping steps for years and would sweep them for years yet.
The driver pulled up at the door. I gathered my skirts and descended the steps. The door of the pub opened before I reached it.
The man who filled the doorway was perhaps fifty, perhaps fifty-five, broad in the shoulder and shorter than Thorne.
His left sleeve was pinned up empty at the elbow.
His face was weathered to the color of old leather.
One side of it carried the pale pucker of a wound that had healed badly.
His eyes, deep-set and grey, moved over me with the brisk assessment of a man who had stood sentry.
"Ma'am." His voice was low, roughened by weather and tobacco and perhaps by shouting across battlefields. "I'm Burch. The captain, pardon, His Lordship, is expecting you. If you'll step inside." As I passed him, I caught the faint smell of boot-polish and pipe smoke.
The taproom was low-ceilinged, dim, and at this hour nearly empty.
Two dockhands nursed pints at a corner table, their forearms bare and corded with the strength of men who moved cargo for a living.
A thin cat slept on the hearth. The sawdust on the floor was fresh, and the brass on the bar had been polished that morning.
It was not a fashionable house. But it was a respectable one.
“Up the stairs, if you please, ma’am,” Burch said. “Second door on the right. Fire’s lit. I’ve put tea and a cold plate out. I’ll be below if you want anything.”
“Thank you, Mr. Burch,” I said.
“Just Burch, ma’am. Never held with the other.”
He did not watch me climb the stairs. I was as safe here as I had been in my own drawing room.
The small, plain parlor had a window that looked over a dockside yard stacked with coiled rope and empty barrels awaiting tomorrow's tide, a coal fire burning briskly in a clean grate, a scrubbed table set with tea things and bread and butter.
A single oil lamp burned on the mantel against the grey of the afternoon.
The room smelled of coal smoke and beeswax and the faint resinous tang of new firewood, though beneath it, faintly, came the tar-and-brine smell that never quite left this stretch of the river.
Thorne stood by the fire, the walking stick propped against the hearth.
He appeared more preoccupied than he had been at midnight, two nights ago.
Something had happened to him since. His weight had settled onto his good leg, and one hand rested on the mantel with more pressure than the pose required, as though he needed the stone to hold him upright rather than merely to lean against it.
"Thorne," I said, putting back my veil.
He looked at me for a moment. Something in his gaze seemed to catalogue me—the veil, the set of my shoulders, whatever he read there—before he let it go.
Then he said, very quietly, "Lark, thank you for coming.
" He'd addressed me not as Lady Larkspur but the name only my family and close friends used.
Warmth moved through me before I could stop it, an entirely unhelpful thing to feel in a tavern parlor while discussing murder.
"Your note was—" I searched for the word. "Intriguing."
Something eased in his face. "Then it achieved its purpose."
"Which was to get me here, I suppose."
"I apologize. Please let us take a seat."
We sat at the table. Between us lay the teapot, the bread and butter, and whatever he had come to say. He did not pour. His hands stayed folded before him, still, in the way a soldier learns to still his hands—not resting so much as restrained.
"Tell me about the notebook," I said.
Thorne reached into the inner pocket of his coat and withdrew several folded sheets of paper.
He handled them carefully, as though he had spent many hours with them already, the creases gone soft with handling.
"I spent most of yesterday attempting to make sense of Lydia's shorthand.
" One corner of his mouth lifted faintly. "The woman had a talent for obscurity."
"She feared someone reading it."
"With good reason, I think." He unfolded one of the sheets and slid it across the table toward me, his fingers lingering a moment on the edge before he released it, as if reluctant to hand over even that much. Several initials had been copied there in his precise hand.
I leaned closer. "You deciphered them?"
"Some of them. Not enough." He rested his forearms against the edge of the table.
The small movement pulled at his leg. He did not mention it, and I knew better than to.
"Most of the entries remain too fragmentary to draw firm conclusions.
But several names—or parts of names—appear repeatedly in the section concerning the weekend at Everthorne Manor.
Croome. Brookes. The initials correspond to the names Mainwaring gave me, as well as Mainwaring himself. "
"And R.G.?"
"Grimshaw." His expression hardened almost imperceptibly—a tightening at the jaw, nothing more. "Lydia observed him entering my father's study several times with another man she could not identify. She believed those meetings significant enough to record."
The room seemed quieter suddenly. Beyond the window came the distant rattle of cartwheels over wet stone.
"Did she say why?"
"No. Only that the atmosphere in the house changed afterward."
I looked again at the copied initials, though in truth I was watching him from beneath my lashes—the careful stillness he wore like armor, the way his thumb pressed once, hard, against the edge of the table before releasing. "Were you able to discover anything about Croome and Brookes?"
Thorne nodded once. "Croome was the second son of a baronet. He died in India in '51."
"Just as Mainwaring claimed."
"Yes." He paused, and something crossed his face. "Brookes is living in Edinburgh. I have not yet learned more than that, but my solicitors are making enquiries."
"Then Mainwaring was telling the truth. At least in part."
The coal shifted softly in the grate.
Thorne's expression altered then. Only slightly. A shift around the eyes, a stillness that had not been there a moment before. "There is more.”
A small knot tightened beneath my ribs.
"I received a reply this morning from my solicitor regarding the institution in Kent."
My fingers tightened around my teacup as Edgar's voice returned to me with dreadful clarity.
A clergyman who spoke very highly of an institution in Kent.
An institution where he wanted to put Linnet.
My pulse rose so quickly I felt it in my throat, and I had to concentrate on keeping my hand steady around the porcelain.
Thorne must have noticed because his expression gentled immediately, some of that careful stillness breaking into open concern. "Lark—"
"What sort of institution?" My voice came out flatter than I intended, the tone I used when I did not trust myself to sound otherwise.
"A private asylum. Though it presents itself as a charitable retreat for nervous ladies and women of delicate constitution."
Revulsion moved through me so swiftly I had to set the cup back into its saucer before I dropped it. The china rattled once against the wood. "It is revolting that women may simply be hidden away because they are troublesome to someone else."
For a few moments, he studied me, his gaze steady and unhurried in a way that made me feel entirely seen and slightly exposed both at once. "I sense this is personal for you."
I looked down at my hands while I considered denying it.
My gloved fingers had curled into the fabric of my skirt without my noticing.
But then I answered truthfully. "I have a sister.
Linnet. She is eighteen years old. Deaf since birth.
Loves to paint." My throat tightened unexpectedly, the words catching.
"I had to fight my brother Edgar for custody of her.
And now he wants to put her into an institution in Kent.
Grimshaw's place, I think. She would never see the light of day again. "
He placed his hand over mine and kept it there for a time before he slowly withdrew it—reluctantly, I thought, though I told myself I imagined the reluctance because it suited me to believe it. The warmth of his palm lingered after he had gone.
Down below, somewhere in the taproom, came the muted sound of laughter and the dull scrape of tankards against wood. Ordinary sounds. Comfortingly ordinary after the conversation we had just had.
"There is one additional matter I'd like to discuss with you," he said. "It's personal."