That night Sir Henry Lovejoy sat alone beside his open parlor window, his gaze fixed unseeingly on the shadowy street below, the room in darkness around him.
He was a simple man and he lived simply, in a modest row house in Bloomsbury. Once, he had been a relatively successful merchant, obsessed with worldly things. But the cruel, senseless deaths of Julia and Madeline had changed all that. Withdrawing from commerce, he’d dedicated the remainder of his life to public service, becoming a magistrate first at Queen’s Square in Westminster, then at Bow Street. The loss of his family had also had a profound effect on his religious beliefs, shifting what had been a largely unthinking adherence to the Church of England into something more closely akin to the stern teachings of sixteenth-century Calvinism. There were times when he could find a measure of comfort in those austere religious beliefs.
This was not one of those times.
His hands tightening around the arms of his chair, he drew a deep breath, his senses filling with all the scents of the city on a warm summer’s evening, the smell of roasting meat and the streetlamps’ hot oil mingling with the more rural odors of horse droppings and hay drifting from the livery stables at the end of the street.
“Ah, Julia,” he whispered aloud to the darkness. “Did I make a mistake all those years ago? Did I in my mindless grief and hubris help kill an innocent man, leaving the one who did take your life still walking this earth to kill again?”
There’d been a time, not so long ago, when he used to talk to Julia like this often. When had he stopped? he wondered. Had he simply moved on with his life? Some might say that after fourteen years it was right that the burden of his grief should have begun to ease, even if only by a little.
And yet not a day went by when he didn’t think of both Julia and Madeline at some point, and usually more than once. Sometimes the memories would come with a fleeting, bittersweet smile, as when he’d hear a child’s joyous laughter or catch sight of a little girl with long dark curls playing in the square. But such moments always carried with them, inevitably, a pang of grief and useless guilt that tore at his insides. It never goes away, the pain of missing those we loved and lost; he knew that. In time the pain of grief might become less onerous, less overwhelming. But it never goes away. And neither does the guilt.
Julia and Madeline had both asked him to go with them that sunny spring day, to join their picnic to Richmond Park. He could have gone. But it had struck him as a frivolous waste of time, somehow not quite proper for a man of business. And so he’d kissed them goodbye, wished them a good time, waved them off, and then turned back to the important letter he’d been writing.
He had never seen them alive again.
Would they have died, he often wondered, if he’d gone with them? Could he have saved them if he’d been there? Or would he have died with them? Impossible to know. There’d been a time when he’d told himself he’d been spared for a reason, so that he might avenge their deaths and make life safer for others. There’d been a time when he’d comforted himself with the belief that he had done so, that the man who’d taken their lives had forfeited his own, justly and righteously.
But what if . . . what if he’d been wrong? What if he’d helped kill an innocent man? What if the real killer was still out there, living and laughing, while Julia and Madeline turned to dust in their graves?
Pushing to his feet, Lovejoy felt so overwhelmed by doubt and rage that for a moment he staggered, one hand flinging out as he steadied himself against the windowsill.
“Who did this, Julia?” he said, almost shouting it this time, so that the words seemed to echo in the room’s empty silence. “Who did it to you, and who is doing this now, again? Who?”
He paused, then said more quietly as he turned away from the window, “If only you could tell me.”