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dear unwilling to bide under a roof where murder had been done. “Was there something else you wanted to discuss, Mr. Belmont?”
    “I have more questions for you, though we should sit, because this might take a while.”
    “My private parlor is warmer,” Abigail said, turning to go.
    Mr. Belmont’s hand on her arm stopped her. “You’re not eating and probably not sleeping.” His blues eye held the concern of a man who had explained to a seven-year-old that death was not the same as oversleeping.
    “I’m managing, Mr. Belmont. You need not be anxious.” Because if he continued looking at Abby like that, she might… lose her wits, run barefoot across the snow, drink every drop of spirits in the house. As she’d lain awake night after night, she’d concocted a long list of things she must not do.
    Startle at every sound the house made as it creaked its way through the interminable hours of darkness, for example.
    Abby shrugged out of Mr. Belmont’s grasp and led the way to the smaller, cozier room closer to the back of the house. A wood fire—extravagant, that—burned in the hearth, while Shreve added water to a vase of roses.
    “Gervaise sent them,” she said, when Mr. Belmont—the botanist—leaned in for a whiff. “He knows they are my favorite, and I will never again enjoy the scent of lilies.”
    The scent of funeral casseroles was equally disagreeable, along with Gregory’s infernal pipes. In recent months, the pipe smoke had been enough to put Abby off her feed entirely.
    The sight of Shreve hovering by the door didn’t agree with her lately either. Ambers, she’d been able to mostly avoid, and she kept the door open when she met with Mrs. Jensen these days too.
    “Funeral lilies aren’t my favorite,” Mr. Belmont said. “Trim up the stems on the roses daily. Change the water, don’t simply add more, and they’ll be happier by the window, where the temperature is lower and the light stronger. Shreve, would you be so good as to bring Mrs. Stoneleigh the tea tray and some sustenance, and for myself, pencil and paper?”
    “Of course, Mr. Belmont. Madam, anything else?”
    “Thank you, no,” Abby replied, not wanting to delay Mr. Belmont’s interrogation one moment more than necessary. She moved the roses to the table near the window, lest the professor do that himself, and took the rocking chair she’d had brought down from the nursery years ago.
    Mr. Belmont took the nearest corner of the settee. Behind him hung a painting of hydrangeas arranged in a purple crock—one of only four paintings in the entire house Abby had chosen—the flowers the same lustrous blue as Mr. Belmont’s eyes.
    “We might as well begin with the handsome, charmless barrister,” Mr. Belmont said, crossing his legs at the knee. “Gervaise benefited greatly from his father’s death, so he had motive to commit murder. How well do you know him?” The magistrate’s pose was relaxed and Continental, a neighbor paying a call, not an inquisitor starting on a martyr.
    And yet, Abby knew his pose was likely the only thing relaxed about him. She earned a few moments’ reprieve from answering when Shreve returned with the tea, sandwiches, sliced apples, and a small offering of tea cakes.
    Abby poured Mr. Belmont a cup of tea, recalling when he’d brought her a mug to savor in private.
    “You will have it that we don’t stand on manners, Mr. Belmont, but talk murder over our tea and crumpets?”
    “You are refreshingly direct, Mrs. Stoneleigh.”
    He wanted this over with too. The realization brought Abby a drop of comfort in an ocean of heartache and anxiety. Who had killed Gregory?
Why?
When, if ever, would she be able to eat and sleep normally again?
    She passed over his tea. “Would it surprise you to know you have also been called refreshingly direct, Mr. Belmont?” Blunt as an andiron, according to Mrs. Weekes, unless he was discussing his blooms.
    “I would be astonished,” he replied gravely.
    They had