Home by Nightfall (4 page)

They'd been walking toward the dining room, gaslights along the hallways low and flickering, the house quiet. She put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Charles, have you forgotten?”

“What?” he said.

“Our luncheon. Wednesday week.”

He widened his eyes and ran a hand through his hair. “Oh, hell.”

“There's nothing on earth I wouldn't do for your brother, you know, but—”

“No, of course,” he said. “If I weren't so busy I would have thought of it.”

Lady Jane occupied a more rarefied sphere of London society than Lenox himself did, a late-morning intimate of the most illustrious households, which would scarcely have acknowledged him if it weren't for her. She and her friend Violet Clipton were giving a luncheon at Claridge's, on behalf of the Indigent Children's Fund. Three members of the royal family were to be there—and a whisper, a very faint whisper, said that the Queen herself might even have plans to appear, though modestly and, maddeningly, without announcement.

She had been planning it for months. “
You
must go, of course,” she said. “I hope you will. But I cannot.”

Even this was selfless of her. There would be a tremendous amount for her to do between now and then, none of it easier with a husband away from town. “Is Sophia awake?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Asleep.”

He felt exhausted, and now disappointed. He'd only had a few minutes' sight of the small, round-faced, sweet-tempered girl that morning over breakfast, and she had spent those calmly tearing the stuffing out of her doll's feet, until Jane had intervened, cross with Lenox for laughing.

Well; he would eat something; and he would go to Lenox House with his brother alone, if he had to. Nothing could be more important than that. His daughter would survive a fortnight without his presence. Even the visitor—the visitor Polly had mentioned—wasn't enough to keep him from making sure that Edmund endured these horrible days.

Though what a visitor!

“It was a German fellow,” Polly had said. “A friend of Muller's. He told us he had an idea about the disappearance. Left no name. Refused to speak to anybody but you.”

 

CHAPTER FIVE

Early that Wednesday afternoon, Charles and Edmund arrived at Markethouse by train. Edmund's groom was waiting for them there in the dogcart, but it was such a beautiful autumn day—the sky bright and clear, the trees, reddish in their upper reaches, still green in the lower, swaying in the light breeze—that the two brothers decided they would rather walk. They sent their luggage on the cart and set out.

“And he didn't return yesterday?” said Edmund as they walked.

They had been talking about Muller. “No,” said Lenox. “I waited for him all day.”

“I wonder who he might have been.”

“Yes, so do I. I daresay he's a crank. But if he's not! It would be a very great glory to find Muller—not for me,” he added, when his brother gave him a knowing look, “but for the agency.”

The train station was a half mile from the village, alongside a softly rippling millstream. They had to climb stiles to cross the countryside. As they reached the top of a ridge, the spire of St. James's came into view, the village church.

About three and a half thousand souls lived in Markethouse; Edmund was their representative in Parliament, and they knew it, and all felt free to call him to task when they saw him coming. Even before the Lenox brothers reached the village, they met a young boy driving cows, who touched his cap carelessly and called out “Fine day, Sredmund!” before passing across the stream on a narrow footbridge.

The Lenox family and Markethouse had arisen from the misty depths of time at the same moment, roughly, the better part of the current millennium ago; the family was not Scottish (that would be the Lennox family, with another
n
), though people often made that mistake. In 1144, an esquire named Alfred Lance, always presumed because of his surname to have descended from some kind of knight, within the family, had settled in this part of Sussex, and subsequent generations had spelled their name Lanse, Lanx, Lencks, and, finally, some time around the 1400s, Lenox. Since then there had been two royal ships named after members of the family—both sunk for breakwaters now, rather ignominiously—and they had won a baronetcy, too, which gave Edmund the right to be called “Sredmund” by boys driving cows. As for Markethouse, it had been the site of the central Saturday market for eight local towns for seven centuries or so now—the same stalls of turnips and chickens and onions and trinkets, that whole while, every seven days. Rather remarkable to consider.

They reached the edge of the town, where wildflowers were still growing along the stone houses, and parted ways with the millstream. Within a few moments they saw someone they knew—the costermonger, Smith, pushing a barrow of apples. He and Charles were roughly of an age and had played cricket side by side in village games all throughout the summers of their youth, and they exchanged a friendly greeting. Not twenty steps later, as they came to the edge of the bustling, cobblestoned town square, they came upon Pringle, the local veterinarian. He was an old, white-haired, stone-deaf personage; he stopped upon seeing them, beaming.

“CHARLES LENOX!” he shouted, arms crossed, face very complacent. “KNEW YOU'D MOVE BACK ONE DAY! TOLD YOUR BROTHER SO FOR YEARS!”

“I'm only here for a visit,” Lenox said.

“TOLD MRS. PRINGLE AS MUCH, TOO, JUST ASK HER!”

“I'm only here for a visit!”

Pringle, who still hadn't heard, nodded happily to himself at the contemplation of his prescience. Then he shook his head. “WELL, THERE'S WORK TO BE DONE, MOVE ALONG, MOVE ALONG, YOUNG LENOX. GOOD DAY.”

“Good day,” said Lenox, giving up.

Pringle was, at least, an excellent veterinarian, called over much of the county for his skill with horses particularly. The only time he dropped the pretense that he could hear was when there was an urgent case, and then he would ask to have the complete facts of the matter written down. If the farmer who had called him couldn't write, as was often the case, he had to do his best. Fortunately he was very knowledgeable.

By contrast the next person they saw, the chemist, Allerton, was an unrepentant inebriate, considered trustworthy to make up only the most wholly basic medicines and salves. His sideline in homemade brandy kept him in business. For any complicated matter of chemistry, the whole village fled one town west, to a reliable, bespectacled young fellow named Wickham.

Allerton was delighted to see Charles. “Knew you'd be back!” he said.

“Hullo, Allerton,” said Edmund.

“Sir Edmund.”

“Is someone minding the shop?”

“I'd be surprised if they were!” He chortled and then carried on past them but managed to add, sotto voce, “Knew it!”

They passed the baker, Wells, who touched his hat to them, and then Mad Calloway came ranging by, pipe clenched in his teeth, hair flying out from under his hat—an old man with an age-cracked face, who lived out just at the end of the last street of the village in a small overgrown cottage with a dense garden by it. He survived selling the medicinal herbs he grew. He hadn't spoken, to anyone's certain knowledge, in at least a decade.

“Hello, Mr. Calloway!” said Edmund in a pointedly loud voice.

Mad Calloway didn't bother looking at them as he passed. Just behind him was Mrs. Lyons, a very nice woman who sang loudly in church. She looked worriedly after the hermit, then shook her head, as if to say what-can-one-do, and greeted them with a smile. “Mr. Charles Lenox,” she said, “and not at Christmas, nor summer neither! Well, I always did tell your brother you'd move back, was I right?”

“No,” said Lenox.

She didn't hear, and went on, chattily, “Nobody could stand London for a minute longer than you have, either, the whole place smells exactly like brimstone—which I consider a very strong sign that it's the devil's own, though I
will
admit that my cousin Prudence had a fine time at the exhibition, in that great crystal palace, even if twenty-five years does seem a long time to be talking about it, and of course, as I told her, the—”

And so on, the social round of Markethouse for a Lenox, half exasperating, half humorous, half enjoyable, half exhausting, all of it home. They walked on a little ways through the square, and then Edmund, hands in pockets, said, shaking his head, “I knew you'd move back to Markethouse.”

“Oh, shut up.”

It was Edmund's fault. In other towns the squire was a figure of terror, scarcely to be approached, from whom a nod after church was considered an unsurpassably graceful social generosity. But Edmund, like their father, felt a strong sense of duty to the village and its inhabitants, a strong sense of love, too.

Still, it was with some relief that they passed through to the opposite side of town and found themselves on a familiar old dirt road. Soon they came to the wide stone gate of Lenox House, and as they passed it the house itself came into view.

It was a lovely Georgian building, white stone, with three long sides around a courtyard, and a vast black wrought-iron gate on the fourth side, standing open as it usually did. Lenox felt a skip in his heart. This was where he had grown up. Its flower beds, along the avenue as they walked, were as familiar to him as the faces of his friends, and off to the left he could see the pond where he and Edmund had fished and swum as boys, and rising on a gentle upslope of grass beyond that, the steps that led up to the small circular family chapel. To the right of the house as they faced it were the gardens, and framing them a great deal of lovely green springy Sussex turf.

The dogcart stood by the gate, and after a moment there was a commotion at the door, and four dogs came tearing out, falling over each other, barking with happiness. Three of them were little black-and-tan terriers, the fourth (much slower) an old retriever that dated to Edmund's children's childhood. Edmund and Charles stooped to greet them, and as they walked the last hundred yards to the house the dogs milled around their feet, urging them to go faster.

In Edmund's tired smile as he greeted the dogs, Lenox felt the whole sorrow of the past five weeks. It was so difficult! Lenox dealt in death—it was his stock-in-trade, as surely as tin was a tin peddler's. And yet, strangely, when someone died that he had known personally, this familiarity didn't decrease the surprise of it. If anything, the surprise was greater. It was as if he had annexed death strictly to the professional region of his mind, over the years; when it crossed back into his own life it seemed a bizarre thing, terribly sad and wrong. How was it that Molly was dead? A few months before, they had played piquet all through one evening in Hampden Lane, chattering about what it was like to have children. Where could that person have gone?

Heaven, perhaps. He dearly hoped so; there were people he would like to see again. For all his faith, though, it was hard not to experience a feeling of loneliness when he thought of his sister-in-law.

And given that, what must his brother, trying not to trip over the dogs, hands in his pockets, be feeling?

At the door to the house, they met Leonardson, a stout middle-aged man who came each week to do the blacking in the kitchen. He touched his hat to Sir Edmund, congratulated Lenox on moving back to the countryside from London (“a terrible place, v'always said so”), and then waved good-bye as the brothers went inside.

 

CHAPTER SIX

The next morning, just as they were finishing their breakfast, the bell for the front door rang. Edmund looked up from the papers he was perusing—matters of the estate—and Charles from his newspaper.

“Are you expecting anybody?” Lenox asked.

Edmund shook his head. “No.”

A moment later the butler came in. Waller was his name, a young man, just past thirty years, the best part of them spent in some capacity here at Lenox House, until finally two years before he had ascended to his current august position. He was part of a new guard; with one thing and another there were no old staff left from their youth. Lenox rather preferred it that way. It meant there was no fust of olden times upon life at the house, as there was at so many country houses. To be sure, their father's steward—the older Mather—lived in the village, as did the astonishingly ungifted cook of their childhood, Abigail, upon whom Lenox called every Christmas with a goose. (She was probably the last person alive who called him “Master Charlie”—though she did it with mischief in her eye, an astute older woman, seated every day of the winter by her daughter's fire, knitting and telling stories to her grandchildren, emphatically not cooking.) Otherwise the people had all been here only since Edmund had inherited the house and the title.

“A Mr. Arthur Hadley, to see Mr. Charles Lenox, sir,” said Waller.

Edmund and Charles exchanged glances. “I don't know anyone by that name. And I don't think I've told anyone I was coming to the country, either.” He looked back at Waller. “What is his business?”

“He has not said, sir.”

“What sort of fellow does he look like?” asked Edmund.

“Sir?”

“Does he look likely to point a pistol at us and ask for our money?”

“Oh, no, sir. A respectable-looking gentleman, sir.”

“Charles?” said Edmund.

“Show him in, by all means.”

After the butler had left, Edmund said, “You have more faith in Waller as a judge of character than I would,” then turned his eyes back to his tenant rolls.

Mr. Arthur Hadley was, though, a very respectable-looking gentleman, it was true. He wore a twill suit of clothes, the cloth an ideal weight for this brisk autumn day, and had in his right hand a walking stick with a brass knob on its end. The bottom was covered with fresh mud—from the look of it he had walked here. Lenox put his age at about fifty. He was clean-shaven, with a strong, square face. Under his right arm was a folded newspaper; his right hand was in the pocket of his jacket.