“How do you know?”
“Has his initials carved into it.” He flipped open his notebook, turning back a few pages. “S.J.C.”
He seemed to realize he had given away more than he should have, color rising into his cheeks.
“Ought to get back to it. You’re free to go.” He added a quick bob of his head, then ducked back into the hall.
Lily didn’t move, shocked to stillness by what the young constable had said.
The man who brought her home . . . had a terrible row . . . his initials carved into the murder weapon . . .
She remembered Annalise Boyden’s bright, bell-clear laugh, and the dashing figure on her arm as she flitted around the gallery the evening before.
She recalled the image of the same figure standing in the moonlit intimacy of the bedroom, turning from the sharp blow of a woman’s hand across his cheek.
S.J.C.
Simon James Carne, Viscount Deveral.
Her brother.
EIGHT
LILY SAT IN THE vast, dark interior of the carriage on a seat worn to little more than board wrapped in tattered leather.
It was a four-seater, likely grand when it was made seventy years ago but since reduced to squeaking hinges and shreds of silk lining. An old crest on the door had largely peeled away, only flakes of color remaining, stained gray with soot.
Lily knew every eye of the crowd gathered on the street at the front of the house was waiting to see who would emerge from inside. The gossip of it would pass like wildfire across the city.
She had led Lord Strangford to the back of the house, knowing there would be a service entrance in a place this grand. Lily found it in the kitchen and took him out into the narrow mews that ran behind the buildings.
There were still gawkers there, but they were fewer in number. For a sixpence one of them agreed to fetch her a hackney.
The conveyance he brought could not have been the nobleman’s typical class of vehicle, but he seemed oblivious to it as he sat across from her, gazing distantly out the filthy window.
Lily tried to suggest the entirely sensible notion that they drop him in Bayswater first before driving on to Bloomsbury, but when she started to give the address to the driver, Lord Strangford broke his silence to firmly insist he would see her home.
The morning traffic had emerged, clogging London’s streets and slowing them to a crawl.
Silence blanketed the interior of the carriage. It was not comfortable.
Lily knew she had to break it, though she doubted her words would make things any less tense.
“It wasn’t Lord Deveral.”
“Did you see who it was?”
“No,” Lily admitted.
“Then how can you be sure?”
“Deveral was there. They fought, like the inspector said, but then he left. It was someone else who killed her. There was someone else in the room.”
“Do you know who it was?”
She thought of Dr. Joseph Hartwell—of the moment in the gallery when Evangeline Ash’s dark, sad eyes had gazed at her over the physician’s shoulder while the banner in her hands spelled out a warning.
Dr. Hartwell had a particular interest in blood, the substance the killer had drained from his victims. But by the same logic, every hematologist in England must be a suspect.
Lily admitted it was not hematology that made her think of him, but the experience of seemingly receiving a warning from an artist thirty years dead. It was an uncanny coincidence. She knew it could be nothing more. To believe otherwise stretched Lily’s credulity to a point that felt akin to madness, even for a woman of her own unusual experience.
Any suspicion she had of Hartwell must be founded upon the fact that she disliked the man. That was hardly grounds to go running back to Inspector Gregg.
“I do not,” she admitted. “But I know he has done it before.” She forced the next words out past a block in her throat. “And I know that he will do it again.”
They crept past the broad expanse of Hyde Park, the carriage rocking to a halt in the river of vehicles. Pedestrians wove past, slipping between the close-packed traffic. Their voices mingled with the snorting of nearby horses and the occasional beep of a motorcar horn.
“Why?”
Lord Strangford’s question was simple, just a single word, but it was raw with feeling, a desperate and unanswerable need for a reason for the horror they had both been confronted by in that bloodstained bedroom.
Her reply felt wholly inadequate.
“I don’t know.”
The carriage inched forward. The giggles of a row of girls in pinafores, slipping past them on their way into the park, penetrated into the dark interior, along with the shout of a paperboy. There would be a different headline by evening when it came out that the heir to one of the most powerful peers in the realm was suspected of murder.
She was certain Lord Deveral was innocent. He was spoiled, cruel and forthright in his hate of her . . . but he had not been the one to kill Annalise Boyden.
It wouldn’t matter. The case the constable had described looked very bad for him, even given that he was a nobleman and as such would not be tried in the common court but by his peers in the House of Lords. It was a body unlikely to convict one of its own for a capital crime, a body over which her father exerted a great deal of influence.
Enough influence to bury a murder charge?
Certainly not without losing his own role and standing in the nation. No matter how one approached it, the case would be an immense blow against the family, one from which they might never recover.
Not that she cared. They weren’t her family.
Still, she was left with the nagging matter of knowing that a despicable but innocent man might hang for this.
What could she possibly do about it?
And yet to do nothing . . .
A horn blared beside her, shouts breaking out as a motorist raged against a cart that would not remove itself from his desired path.
In that moment, Lily wanted nothing more than to get out of this coach—to open the door, step down, and simply walk back to Bloomsbury. It couldn’t possibly be any slower.
Then Lord Strangford spoke.
“I was engaged to marry her.”
His gaze was directed safely out the window at the jumble of slow-moving vehicles. He had taken off his hat and set it on the seat beside him. The shadow of day’s beard darkened his jaw, his eyes tired.
“Her people were the other family of means in our village in Northumberland. Our parents were quite close. The arrangement suggested itself.”
Northumberland. That was the source of the slight burr she heard in his accent, that bit of warmth underlying the aristocratic polish.
Though his voice was steady, Lily could sense the tension beneath his words. This story was not easy for him to tell, but something was driving him to get it out. Right now she was the only one available to listen.
The silence lingering after his words begged for her to push the conversation forward.
“Were you amenable to it?”
“You met her in the gallery. You saw what she was like.”
“Captivating.”
“Captivating,” he agreed tonelessly. “She had always been captivating.”
He closed his eyes. She could see the old pain in him rising to mingle with the new.
“You loved her.”
“It would have been impossible not to.”
“What happened?”
Silence lingered in place of an answer. He looked down at his fingers, wrapped in black leather, spread over his knees.
“My hands.” He swallowed thickly. “You might have noticed . . .”
His voice faltered.
“The gloves.” Her heart quickened, pulse pounding in her ears. “You’re always wearing them.”
Steeling himself, he tugged the fine well-worn kidskin free.
The skin beneath was beautiful, unmarked by any scar or disfigure
ment.
The atmosphere of the carriage felt charged like the moment before a lightning storm. The clatter of the world outside receded, becoming nothing more than a tense hum in the background. All of Lily’s attention sharpened, focused on the man sitting across from her holding his two perfect hands up like weapons he was prepared to brandish.
“I wear them because I’m like you, Miss Albright,” he said quietly. “I can’t see the future. But I can touch the past.”
The tension exploded as Lily’s world was shattered.
You are not alone. You have never been alone.
Years flashed past, years in which there had never been any hint or sign that Lily was not unique her power. Years of holding the secret close against her chest lest she be taken for a lunatic or a liar.
She had carried this burden in isolation and silence all of her life.
“How?” Her throat felt like sandpaper.
“I touch something. It . . . opens to me. I can feel everywhere it’s ever been. All that it ever experienced.”
“When you say ‘all’ . . .”
“I mean everything.”
Lily tried to comprehend that and found she could not.
“How far back can you go?”
“As far as there is. To the beginning. There was a Greek vase . . . Three thousand years old. I could smell the straw on the floor of the potter’s studio. Feel the texture of the wet clay.” He ran a finger along the leather of the gloves where they sat on the seat beside him. “I can’t just buy these off a rack at Harrods. I picked the tailor—very dull fellow but kind. Doesn’t shout at his wife or beat his apprentices. The tanner plays in a fife-and-drum band. He drinks but he’s a jolly drunk. I have him source the kidskin specially from a Muslim butcher out of Brick Lane. Do you know they are required by their faith to kill an animal in a manner that imposes the least possible suffering?”
Her gaze flickered to the exposed skin at his wrist, the pale triangle at his collarbone.
“Is it just your hands?”
“No.”
Her head spun as it unfolded the implications. She looked at the black lapel of his evening dress where it emerged from beneath the wool of his overcoat.
“Your suit . . .” she began, the words drying up.
“I can’t wear cotton. Most of it is American and there’s too much pain in it. Wool is best. It feels like open skies, dogs barking, heather. I can usually manage linen. With silk it depends on where it comes from.”
There was no doubt. She dismissed the notion of trying to convince herself that perhaps it was all a twisted joke. Every atom of her knew that this stranger was speaking the truth, that the man sharing the shadowed interior of this once-grand carriage was exactly what he said he was.
Someone like her.
Another charismatic.
The next words spilled out of her before she could think better of them.
“Would you show me?”
He stiffened. She could feel him withdraw, as though the bench a few inches across from her own had pushed back a yard.
“I apologize. I shouldn’t have asked that.”
“It’s reasonable for you to be skeptical.”
“It isn’t that. Please don’t think it’s that. I just . . .” She struggled for the words to frame her motivation. It wasn’t doubt that drove her, or curiosity, but something else—something that needed what this man had said to be made entirely and irrevocably real. “I wasn’t thinking,” she finished at last.
He was quiet for a moment. One hand rested against the gloves on the seat. He held the other close to his lap. She could see how carefully he moved, avoiding any accidental brush of his fingers against the leather of the carriage seat or the threadbare silk on the walls.
He had always been like that, she realized. The caution had been there in the moment he came across her in the road on Hampstead Heath. She knew now why there had been a hesitation before he offered her his hand to get up or helped her from the horse and into that farmer’s kitchen. Avoiding contact with any unfamiliar object must be ground into him, a habit drilled so deep he carried it like a constant shield.
“Give me something,” he said, surprising Lily out of her reverie. “Nothing too personal. I can’t filter what I see. It comes whether I want it or not, no matter how . . .”
“Unpleasant?” Lily offered into the silence hanging at the end of his words.
“Intimate.” He met her gaze, making the import of his words unimpeachably clear.
Lily had dashed out of the house with nothing more than her staff and whatever happened to be in her coat. The staff was out. It was too close to her, something with far too much history.
She put her hand into her pocket, brushed her fingers over the few things that had been forgotten there. She stopped on a small, round tin, its surface smooth and cool.
She pulled it out.
It was a powder compact.
She hardly ever used powder. The tin had been purchased back in her theatre days, but she had dropped it into her coat the evening before in case she needed to touch up at the gallery.
It was a cheap little thing, simple and impersonal.
She offered it to him.
He hesitated.
“Are you sure you’re willing to share this?”
She could hear the warning in his tone.
“It’s nothing.”
He extended his hand. Lily set the compact against his palm and his fingers curled around the tin.
He breathed in deeply, sharply, and his gaze shifted, the focus leaving his eyes, turning them strange and distant.
“Sawdust,” he said. His voice was clear, steady. “I can smell it. Something else—grease. Machine oil. Not unpleasant. Familiar. Small spaces, cluttered. Bright lights set around a mirror. Lots of little spaces like that, but they all feel the same. You’re in the glass, powdering your face, and it’s cold. Legs are bare. Won’t let you wear anything else. It’s . . . sequins and feathers, too small, makes you feel like . . . alone. So alone, even as the other girls move through the glass. Even in the other places, where the men are drinking and it stinks of their cigars. They put their hands on your—”
Lily’s hand flashed out, snatching the compact from his grasp.
She’d spent a year as a chorus girl. She had resisted it for as long as she could, but she was near to starving and facing a hike in her rent that would put her on the street. The pay was so much more than she could make on odd jobs backstage.
She hated it. The tight, glittering costume felt like a cage around her guts. The spotlights glared. There was never enough heat, and the men—the way they looked at her. How they whistled, tossed coins at her. Then the producer informed her that her presence was required at certain off-stage events, where in the same paint and sequins she fetched glasses of brandy and lit cigars for his friends and patrons.
They treated her body like an amenity, patting or grabbing it with an air of propriety as though they had a right to it. She saw how the other girls let themselves be drawn off to the rooms that lined the hall, knew full well they were supplementing their pay with another sort of work. Lily managed to dance around those expectations, but it was noticed. She was near to a rather desperate choice when her mother’s solicitor arrived with her salvation.
It made for a tawdry picture—her powdered cheeks, pale skin on display, the men with their coarse laughter and their entitled hands.
She thrust the compact into the deepest corner of her pocket.
The silence of the coach was uncomfortable, dancing with tension.
He was the first to break it.
“I’m sorry. I told you that I—”
“It’s fine,” Lily interrupted sharply.
He picked up his gloves, tugging them back on.
“How long have you been able to do it?” she asked. The words came out steady, a bit of her mother’s acting talent exerting itself.
“As long as I can remember.”
; “Who else knows?”
“Ash. The others at The Refuge.”
“Your family?”
“No.”
His answer surprised her—yet why should it? She had never had a family. How could she presume to know what secrets were shared within the bounds of those relationships?
“That wasn’t what you expected to hear.” He rubbed at the stubble darkening his cheek. Lily was conscious that it must have been nearly twenty-four hours since the man had last slept. He gathered some reserve of strength in himself, though she could hear the effort in it.
“Ash believes that we . . .” He stumbled, challenged by the words. “That we are something like saints.”
“Yes. He mentioned that. When I spoke to him.”
She could almost see the fit of it with the pale light of dawn filtering in through the soot-grimed glass, illuminating the weary lines of his face, the worn edges of his collar. He reminded her of one of those portraits hanging in the museum, baroque depictions of black-robed ascetics finding ecstasy among the rocks.
“It did not go very well for them,” he noted quietly.
“But we aren’t claiming to speak for God.”
“Neither were witches. They still burned for it. We aren’t lighting up the countryside with pyres or pinning people to crosses in 1914, but what you and I do is still dangerous. People are as likely to fear it now as they were then. They just have different weapons at their disposal.”
The words resonated. Lily knew that fear. It had lingered at the back of her mind for as long as she could remember. Humanity was not kind to difference.
“But surely you wouldn’t expect that from your family.” The notion shouldn’t shock her, but it did.
“No. Not like that. But it would . . . complicate things.”
Yes, she thought. It was complicated to know more than one ought to in a way that couldn’t possibly be explained. It risked being cast as a madwoman or a manipulator. Even if you were believed, it raised expectations that couldn’t or shouldn’t be met.
Secrets also grew exponentially more difficult to keep each time they were shared.
The Fire in the Glass Page 12
