Home by Nightfall (20 page)

They discussed the dog for some time then, sipping the claret Waller had opened for them to follow the Tokay, the disappearance of the last evening light in the windows making the candlelit family dining room of Lenox's youth close, intimate, friendly. He asked if Edmund could get hold of a decent scenting dog, and he said he could, down at the Allenby farm, their excellent brindle pointer. Lenox suggested they put his skills to the test the next morning.

When McConnell left at a quarter to eight in the dogcart, both Edmund and Charles stood in the doorway, waving good-bye to him and asking him to pass their love to Toto and Georgianna.

After he was out of sight, they turned back inside and immediately started discussing the case again, even before they had reached the brandy.

It was good to see Edmund animated; and for that reason, Lenox said, when perhaps he might have kept it to himself, for it was a slender thought, “Gray beard, you know. Well dressed. Does it sound like anyone to you?”

“The Duke of Epping.”

Lenox shook his head. “No, I'm being serious.”

“Well, who?”

“To me it sounds rather like Arthur Hadley.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Lenox had a favorite piece of public wit from his many years of life in London. It had appeared at the north end of Westminster Abbey, which had one of the only walls in the entire city that was not covered in handbills—those familiar bright papers pasted up all over, advertisements for steamships, patent medicines, exhibitions, notices of public auction, whole magazines laid out to read page by page.

The men who posted these handbills were a familiar sight. All of them wore similar fantastically garish fustian jackets, with cavernous pockets to hold their bills, their pots of paste, their long collapsible sticks with rollers at the end.

The abbey was exempt from their energies only because of a large, forbidding placard that read
BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
in bold lettering. One day, passing nearby, Lenox had noticed an acquaintance—a usually somber fellow, a naval officer named Wilson—standing at the wall, grinning. Lenox had greeted him and asked what was so entertaining, and Wilson had pointed at the wall, where, underneath the placard, some anonymous genius had written
Bill Stickers is innocent!
Lenox had stared at this for a moment and then burst into laughter, and every time he saw Wilson now they smiled before they spoke, remembering the joke.

The next morning, Lenox woke up smiling, with this joke in his mind. He had been trying to remember all of his favorite ones for Edmund—most of which would elicit a groan from his brother, but a smile, too.

This one was good, and Lenox went downstairs thinking about how he would phrase it for maximum effect. But when he came into the breakfast room, he found that his brother was gone.

“Out on a walk again?” he said to Waller, who was carefully laying strips of kippered herring on a tray.

“Yes, sir, out on a walk.”

Lenox cursed. He didn't know why this sudden uncontrollable passion for morning walks had arisen in his brother, and they had agreed the night before that they would make an early start to interview Miss Harville, Stevens's secretary, before visiting Clavering to check on his progress. As soon as the morning frost burned off, he also wanted to take the pointer out and look for Sandy, Mickelson's dog.

For twenty minutes he felt modestly irritated, as he ate and read the newspaper, and then in the next twenty minutes he began to grow more seriously vexed. This was a murder investigation, not a boys' adventure. By the time he had waited an hour and ten minutes, he was full of utterly righteous indignation.

Edmund came in with red cheeks. “Hullo,” he said.

“Did you leave the dog in the stables?” asked Lenox.

Edmund was reading a letter and looked up from it only after a beat, distracted. “The dog?”

“The Allenby pointer—the one I asked you to borrow.”

“Oh, dash it, I forgot. I'll have Rutherford send someone.”

“Just a leisurely walk, then?” asked Lenox.

“Why, what's wrong?” said Edmund.

He was pouring himself a cup of tea, as if they had all the time in the world, and Lenox said coldly, “It's nearly half past nine.”

Edmund glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was actually about ten past the hour, but he didn't mention it—a piece of discretion that only annoyed Lenox further, in his current mood. “I'm sorry,” Edmund said. “Give me a few minutes, and I'll be with you.”

“Where in creation do you keep going every morning?”

Edmund frowned and was silent for a moment, as if contemplating how to answer. Then he said, “Do you recall that one of my tenants, Martha Coxe, came to the house on the evening you arrived?”

“Vaguely.”

“Apparently Molly was teaching three of the women in the Coxe household to read, the mother and the two daughters. I have undertaken to continue the lessons.”

In a different mood, Lenox would have answered differently—but he was put out, and he made a scoffing noise. “Is that right?”

“Yes,” said Edmund.

“And you imagine that to be a good use of the time of a person engaged upon a piece of detective work—not to mention a Member of the Parliament of Great Britain.”

“I do. Why should it not be?”

“Teaching a parcel of women how to read? Your time is more valuable than that, Edmund, and if yours is not, mine certainly is.”

Edmund reddened. “And what was Molly's time, may I ask you, valueless?”

“Of course not, don't twist—”

“Valueless, simply because she did not sit in the greatest assemblage of fools in the history of the British Empire? Am I to consider yet another blue book on coal mining in preference to teaching these women, and leave them halfway through the alphabet? Do you call that honorable? Parliament!”

“Then there's the case.”

“The case! It can wait half an hour.”

“That is not an assessment you are qualified to make. But more than that, how can you be so obtuse? You have a dozen duties more pressing than—you have the estate, that on its own, you know, is enough!”

“The estate,” said Edmund flatly.

“Your time—”

Suddenly Lenox saw that Edmund was close to vibrating with fury. He realized, a moment too late, that he wasn't even angry at his brother anymore. He tried to go on, but Edmund said, in a very distant voice, “I shall conduct my personal affairs as I see fit, Charles. I do not recall telling you that it was unwise to go into
trade,
though neither of us has to stretch far to imagine how our mother would have felt to learn that you had.”

“Edmund—”

“I shall teach the horses to read if it pleases me. I invite you to disengage yourself from any interest in how I choose to spend my time immediately.”

“Edmund, I—”

“Please feel free to carry on the investigation without me. Good morning.”

He left. When he had gone, Lenox sat back in his chair, thoroughly dissatisfied with his behavior, Edmund's too, and conscious as well of that word, “trade,” still alive in the room. For another ten minutes he sat and picked at the toast on his plate, dipping it in jam and eating it absentmindedly.

When he got up, he thought he might go and apologize. He stood there, indecisively. He noticed the letter Edmund had been reading when he had come in, the one that had distracted him. It was on the piano, atop its torn envelope. Lenox read it.

12 Sept. 76

Midshipman's berth
, The Lucy

Gibraltar

36.1° N, 5.3° W

Father and mother,

Writing in absolute haste, as did not expect to put into Gibraltar, but weather muddy and ugly and woke to find leeshore rather closer than comfortable—so cut against the wind and pulled into harbor, and now just time to dash this off before we lie to and tack out of harbor again. The good news is that we ought to be in Plymouth in a month, perhaps even less. That means my birthday at home! Hopes they will give us a week. If I can I mean to bring Cresswell with me—so hide the gin. (Am only joking, do not hide it please.) Mother, if you fancy you could draw Cresswell, he's a great peacock. I do long to be on a horse again. Life aboard ship is splendid however. We passed old McEwan in Gib and he said to say hello to Uncle Charles and would he be so kind as to give him a character, because he is contemplating entering Parliament in Uncle Charles's old spot (which was a joke). Will James come home at Christmas? What odds the four of us can spend it together? Love to all of you and mind you bring the dogs in on cold nights, that stable is fearfully drafty, whatever Rutherford says.

Your loving son,

Teddy

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Lenox went to the town hall alone. He could see from the activity in the corridors that business had resumed, albeit uneasily. In the small room opposite Stevens's larger office, where his clerks sat, he found Miss Harville, the mayor's secretary.

She was a quiet young woman with dark hair and narrow dark eyes, aged fifteen or sixteen, very, very young for the job. When Lenox mentioned this, she merely nodded.

He had expected her to be highly emotional, but in fact she was quite poised, and had spent the morning helping Stringfellow, the deputy mayor, catch up on the duties that would fall to him, at least for the time being. Perhaps forever. Lenox asked if there was much to do. A great deal, she said—particularly with the budget meeting approaching. It was the village's most significant public debate of the year.

“Do you know who attacked Mr. Stevens, Miss Harville?” he asked.

Her eyes widened. “No, sir,” she said.

“It wasn't you.”

“Of course not, sir.”

“In that case, it must have been disturbing to find the body.”

She nodded solemnly. “Yes. It was.”

He asked how she had come to work for Stevens, and she replied that she had been a student at the grammar, where she had shown a flair for mathematics. When she had left school—not intending to work, for her father was an assistant foreman at the factory, and fairly comfortably off—Stevens, searching for an assistant, had found her through the recommendation of her schoolmaster. He had first tested her skill, and then offered her the job.

“Have you enjoyed it?”

“Yes,” she said, but dutifully.

Lenox pressed her. “Are you sure?”

“It's a pleasure to have my own money. I do feel quite ready to be married, and in a home of my own. But there are … there are not many young men in Markethouse, I suppose, and then, after a fashion, I am married to my work.”

Lenox frowned. As with Elizabeth Watson and Claire Adams, there was something reserved in her reaction to the attack upon Stevens.

“Stevens was not married?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” she said, as if the idea were outlandish, but added nothing else.

“Tell me about discovering the body.”

“I arrived here early yesterday morning, just past seven o'clock, because Mr. Stevens asked me to come in early and run over figures for the budget. We both checked them for safety, though his own calculations were never wrong. I knocked on the door of his office, and there was no answer.”

“Were you surprised?”

“Yes. He normally had his office door open.”

“What did you do?”

“I knocked again and waited for a response. When there wasn't any, I assumed he had been detained at home. I went and fixed him a glass of sherry with an egg in it, which he always liked to take when he arrived at work and just when he left.”

Again that sherry. Lenox remembered Stevens ordering the same concoction at the Horns on Market Day. But could
Stevens,
of all people, have been the one to have broken into Hadley's house? To have stolen the sherry?

It seemed impossible both because of the mayor's character and because he had been the one so eager to put a stop to the thefts. It was Stevens, after all, who had told him that books from the library had gone missing—the titles that matched the books in the gamekeeper's cottage.

“And then?” asked Lenox.

“I went into his office without knocking, thinking I would leave the glass on his desk. It was then that I found him.”

“Had you seen anyone in the corridors of the building? Anyone leaving as you came in?”

“No, sir,” she said.

“As far as you knew, you were the only person in the building.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lenox paused. “Did you disturb anything in the room?”

“No, sir.”

“What did you do?”

“I called for help straightaway.”

Lenox shook his head. “No, you didn't.”

The secretary flushed. “Excuse me?”

Lenox nodded toward her shoes. “There were faint footprints in the carpeting that match the size of your shoe—in blood, you understand. They lead to the window. One set is much deeper there. I think you must have stood at the window for a while, more than a few moments. Perhaps you even drank the sherry! I shouldn't blame you. At any rate, I know that nobody was admitted to the room again after you went for help.”

“Well, perhaps I did stand at the window. I was very shocked.”

Lenox inclined his head. “Did you drink the sherry?”

She was still red. “A sip, to steady my nerves.”

Very calmly, Lenox said, “What sort of man was Stevens?”

“A man much like any other.”

He noticed the word “sir” had dropped out of her answers. “You liked him?”

“He was not a warm person. But he did … he selected me,” she said.

“And who do you think attacked him?”

There was a long pause, and then, at last, she said, “I haven't the slightest idea. And I really must pick up my work again.”