Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
A Brother's Fury
The day after the fire, the smell of it still clung to Bloomsbury—a faint, bitter ghost in the morning air that no amount of open windows could quite dispel.
I was at breakfast, pretending to read a letter from Mrs. Wilmot regarding the lending library, when in truth I was thinking of Thorne.
I had not seen him since he handed me down from the hansom cab the day before, in full view of half the square. We had parted with the understanding that we would wait until he received the report from his solicitors. We would take no further action until then.
Across the table, Linnet bent over her sketchbook, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth in concentration. Miriam read the Times, searching for further news about the conflagration that destroyed The Quill and Crown.
"There is nothing in here," she announced, “about the fire. The only things they note are three deaths from influenza and a deeply tedious debate on the drainage of the Thames. I begin to wonder why I bother."
It was the last easy moment of the morning. Bexley appeared in the doorway, his face arranged in the blank civility he reserved for guests he wished he could turn away at the door.
"The Earl of Westmere, my lady."
I had time only to set down my cup before Edgar swept past him into the room.
"Larkspur." He did not look at Miriam. He did not look at Linnet. "I must speak with you."
"Good morning to you as well, Edgar." I did not rise. It was a small rebellion, an old one that never failed to put a tighter line around his mouth. "We are at breakfast, as you see. Will you sit? Bexley can bring another cup."
"I will not sit." He set his hat upon the sideboard. "And I should prefer to do this privately."
"Then you ought not to have done it at half past nine, when the household is breaking their fast.” I gestured at the empty chair. “So say your piece and let us finish our toast in peace."
His jaw worked. My brother had inherited our father's rigid bearing and imperious manner, but none of the cold cleverness that had made our father genuinely formidable. Edgar was merely cold. It made him easier to provoke and far more tiresome to endure.
"Very well." He braced his hands behind his back. "I will be plain. You were seen yesterday—in the open street, in the full light of day—in the company of Everthorne. Half of Mayfair has been speaking of nothing else since."
"Has it?” I buttered a corner of toast. "How industrious of half of Mayfair. I should have thought the fire might occupy them at least a day or two."
"This is not a matter for levity." His voice rose, then caught itself—Edgar was always conscious of servants. "Do you know what is said of that man? Do you know what he is?”
"I know what is said of him. The two are not the same thing, as you of all people ought to appreciate, given what is said of me."
That landed. His color deepened. "What is said of you is that you keep a salon full of bluestockings and radicals.
What is said of him is that he ruined a young woman under his own father's roof and was sent into the army to escape the consequences.
A girl, Larkspur. Twelve years ago. The thing is not gossip. It is known."
And there it was—the wall I could not climb, set squarely in the middle of the room.
Because I knew, now, what Edgar did not.
The girl had never named Julian Ashcombe.
The man who had done it was dead, and Julian had carried the blame for it across twelve years, an ocean, and a war, because the alternative was to drag his family's name through the courts with no witness willing to speak.
Thorne was innocent of the single crime the whole world had agreed to lay at his feet.
But I could say no word in his defense. To explain how I knew would be to unravel everything—the notebook, the poem, Lydia, the enquiry that had already cost one woman her life and one printing house its roof.
The truth was not mine to spend. It was Thorne's, and it was Lydia's, and it would buy me nothing but a brother who knew far too much.
So I did the only thing left to me. The thing that was public knowledge.
"The girl never accused him," I said. "She was married off and never spoke his name once.
He went to the Crimea and came back with the Victoria Cross, which the Crown does not hand to men for ruining respectable young women.
I am disinclined to convict a man on the strength of a story no one will sign their name to. "
Edgar stared at me as though I had begun speaking in Linnet's silent language. "Listen to yourself. You are defending him."
"I am declining to condemn him. There is a difference, though I grant it is a fine one, and you have never had much patience for fine ones."
"He is the Devil of Everthorne," Edgar said, slow and deliberate, as if to a child.
"And you are a woman alone, of marriageable age, with a fortune and a household and a deaf sister to think of.
Have you any notion what your defending him does to this family's standing?
To Linnet's prospects?” His lip curled. “Such as they are.”
At her name, Linnet went still. She had not heard it, but she had read it from his lips, the way she read everything.
Miriam set down her paper. She did not speak. She merely shifted her chair a few inches—a small movement that placed her squarely between Edgar and my sister.
"Leave Linnet out of your sermons," I said. The warmth had gone out of my voice entirely.
"I cannot. She is precisely the point." He drew breath, and I felt the shape of what was coming before it arrived. "I have not been idle on her account, whatever you may think. Anne and I dined again with the clergyman I mentioned to you. The one acquainted with the establishment in Kent."
The room seemed to recede slightly, as though I were hearing him from the bottom of a well.
"He speaks of it most highly," Edgar went on, mistaking my silence for attention rather than dread.
"A private retreat. Discreet. Well-appointed.
The sort of place where a young woman with—afflictions—might be cared for properly, among others of her kind, without the strain of a world she was never made to manage.
He assures me the families who place their relations there are most grateful for the discretion. "
I had to set down my knife. My hand was not entirely steady, and I did not want him to see it.
It was the same place. Of course it was the same place.
There could not be two such institutions in Kent, both administered by a clergyman, both trading in the quiet disposal of inconvenient women, both spoken of in the same hushed, congratulatory murmur.
The wolf among the pious fold. The place where women went and from which they did not return.
My brother had dined at the same table as the man who ran it and come away charmed.
And he meant to send Linnet there.
I have been frightened perhaps a dozen times in my life with real, marrow-deep fear. This was one of them. But fear has a useful cousin in cold calculation. I reached for it now the way a drowning woman reaches for a rope.
"This clergyman," I said, and I was proud of how level it came out. "What is his name?"
Edgar blinked, thrown by the question. He had braced for fury and got curiosity instead. "Grimshaw. The Reverend Mr. Grimshaw. Why?"
"Because if you are seriously proposing to put our sister in the keeping of strangers, Edgar, I should think I am entitled to know the names of those strangers.
" I folded my hands to keep them from betraying me.
"Who is he? Where did you meet him? On whose recommendation does this paragon come to you? "
"Anne's cousin's husband—Sefton—introduced us.
Grimshaw has handled a number of such arrangements for families of standing.
" Edgar's chest expanded slightly. He had taken my interrogation for the dawning of sense.
"You see, it is all perfectly respectable. There are doctors who attend. Papers signed. Proper certificates, all in order, lodged with the house itself. It is not a thing done in a corner, Larkspur, whatever your imagination has conjured. It is legal. It is correct. All handled by a solicitor. Carmody.”
Grimshaw. Carmody. Doctors who attend. Certificates lodged with the house.
I committed each word to memory as he said it, the way I had once memorized lines of verse. It cost me a great deal to let him believe he was winning.
"I see," I said. "And these certificates. Two doctors, I suppose? I have read that the law requires two."
"You have read a great deal too much," Edgar said, but he answered anyway, because he could never resist demonstrating that he knew a thing I did not. "Two, yes. It is all attended to. The family need scarcely lift a finger."
"How convenient for the family," I said.
Something in my tone reached him at last. His eyes narrowed.
"You are being strange, Larkspur. First you defend a known libertine, and now you cross-examine me on a kindness I am attempting to do this family.
I begin to think Everthorne is not the worst of your influences. I begin to think you require—"
"Choose your next word with care, Edgar."
To his credit, or his cowardice, he did not say it. But it hung there between us all the same, unspoken and unmistakable. I understood with perfect clarity that my brother had just, for the first time, considered whether the establishment in Kent might one day have a use beyond Linnet.
Across the table, Linnet had taken up her pencil again. She was not drawing the breakfast things. She was drawing Edgar. As I watched, she lifted the sketchbook a fraction, the way a child shows a parent a treasure, and turned it so that only I could see.
She had given him jowls. A heavy, slavering muzzle. Ears flattened in fury, paws planted on a doorstep. It was the mastiff again, the same one she had drawn the morning he came here breathing threats.
Beneath it, in her quick, certain hand, she had written two words. Still barks.
I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to hurt, which was the only thing that saved me from laughing in my brother's face.
"Was there anything further?" I asked him sweetly.
“No. But this conversation is not finished."
"It never is with you." I rose at last, since he was leaving, and there was no longer any rebellion to be had in sitting. "But do give my regards to Anne. I hope to see her soon."
He paused at that, just perceptibly, as though wondering whether there was a barb in it. There was not—or not the one he feared. He decided to let it go and swept out, trailing offended dignity like smoke from the fire two streets over.
For a moment none of us spoke. Then Miriam folded her newspaper with great deliberation and said, "Well. That was bracing. Anyone care for more tea?"
"He means it this time.” I was looking at Linnet, who had returned to her sketchbook. "About Kent. He has gone past wishing it."
"Then we shall ensure that doesn’t happen,” Miriam said briskly. But her hand, when she reached for the pot, was not quite as steady as her voice.
I crossed to Linnet and crouched beside her chair so that she could see my hands and my face together.
"You are safe here," I signed. "Always. I promised you that once, and it’s still true.”
“I’m not worried,” she signed. “You always win.”
I had not won, in fact. I had merely gathered intelligence under fire and retreated in good order, which is not the same thing. I smiled and squeezed her hand. But I did not tell her that the place her brother wished to send her was the same place a woman had been murdered to keep hidden.