The September Society (3 page)

Yet people whispered that a kind of sadness trailed her cheerful figure: solitary for so many years, childless, and a widow, after all. Lenox knew that loneliness played no significant role in her life, but he also wondered whether it sometimes came to her in brief, uncertain moments. Still, he never stepped an inch over their friendship’s wide borderlines to discover whether his speculation might be correct. When he thought he detected sadness in her mien, he only aimed to be a better friend to her.

That was Lady Jane Grey; Charles Lenox’s best friend, and the woman he loved better than anyone else in the world.

They walked arm in arm to the dining room—the room next to Lenox’s study, straight down the front hall—where food and coffee were laid out at the far end of a long mahogany table with intricately carved legs and high-backed chairs all around it.

“Well, how have you been?” she asked as Lenox held her chair. “Solved anything recently? Seen much of Edmund?”

“I had lunch with him yesterday, actually. He’s quite well. There’s some upset with the Ordnance’s finance at the moment, but he’s working to clear it.” Lenox sat across from her. “No cases, though. I wish one would come along.”

“I could rob a bank, if you like.”

“Would you? Thanks.”

She laughed. “But perhaps it’s nice to have a break, don’t you think? Plan out a trip somewhere”—Lenox was a great armchair explorer, though his elaborate plans were often sidetracked by real life—“and figure out what they ate breakfast off of in ancient Rome? Rest your mind, until your next case arrives?”

“You’re right, of course. I ought not to complain.”

“What
did
they eat off of, back then?”

“Plates, I should have said.”

“Charles,” she said in a tone of mock exasperation.

He laughed. “I’ll find out. Promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that promise.” She took another corner of toast from the tray that lay between them and set it by her egg. “Do you know who I saw last night?”

“Who?”

“You won’t like it.”

“Ah,” said Lenox grimly. “Barnard, then?”

“Yes.”

George Barnard was the director of the National Mint, a former Member of Parliament, one of the richest men in London, and—Lenox was certain—one of the worst thieves in England’s history. For the past several months he had been slowly untangling the web of protection Barnard had built around himself, dismantling the high fortifications of rank and reputation that obscured the truth. He had discovered a seam in the Hammer Gang—Barnard’s henchmen—that he
might exploit, and had traced back north a possible instance of the director’s treachery. But it was long, slow work, and because he had to do it secretly took twice the time with half the results it would have if Barnard had been a common and well-known criminal.

“Was he in good form?” Lenox asked, grumpily pushing a fried mushroom around with his fork. Thinking about Barnard had even managed to dispel his quiet happiness at being alone with Lady Jane.

“Oh, yes, talking about some silver urn he had acquired for his collection.”

Lenox snorted. “Collection.”

“Don’t make that noise,” said Lady Jane, though tolerantly. “Have you found anything else out about him?”

“I’m waiting for Skaggs to return from Sheffield. I expect he’ll have news.”

“Remind me who Skaggs is?”

“The private investigator I use from time to time. He finds the pub an easier fit than I do. Useful chap. More coffee, Jane?”

“Yes, please,” she said, and Lenox beckoned a maid to fetch it. In addition to her absence, here was another thing: She seemed—as she had in previous weeks—slightly preoccupied, careworn, and fretful over some secret anxiety. He did his best to cheer her, and wondered how he could discover what that anxiety was.

Their talk turned to the parties that were to occur that week, touched on politics, veered off toward a painter Jane had discovered, and then moved on to a mutual acquaintance of theirs, one Mr. Webb, who had been discovered cheating at the racetrack.

In all their long conversation, however, Lenox never said the only words he had hoped to before her arrival.

T
hat night in the small hours, just past four o’clock, Lenox lay dreaming beneath the heavy covers of his bed when there was a knock at his door. At first it just nudged his consciousness, and he turned over, hugging the blankets close to his chin. At the second knock, however, he started out of his rest.

“Yes?” he called out.

“May I enter, sir?”

“What? Oh, yes, certainly, Graham. Come in.”

Graham opened the door and came a few feet into the room.

“Just a social visit, then?” Lenox said with a smile.

“I’m afraid you have a guest, sir.”

“Who is it?” he said, sitting upright and blinking his eyes awake. “Is anything the matter? Is it Jane?”

“No, sir,” said Graham, and Lenox’s shoulders relaxed an inch. “It is Lady Annabelle Payson.”

Annabelle Payson? He had met her once or twice. She must have had a pressing reason to come, as it was well known that she detested London. At eighteen she had made a
spectacularly unhappy marriage to James Payson, a captain in the army and lad-about-town in the forties, who had moved her into his West End flat. They had had one son before he died off in the East (some said shot over a card table, though others said it was in battle), and now she lived entirely in the country with her brother.

“Has she said why she’s come, Graham?”

“No, sir, though I might venture to say that her ladyship seems agitated.”

“Very well,” Lenox said with a sigh. “It’s a bit of a bother. Do give her some tea, though, won’t you? And I’d like a cup myself. I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Decent of you to be so stoic about the interruption to your own rest, by the way.”

“Not at all, sir,” said Graham.

After the butler left, Lenox went to the west window of his bedroom, which stretched from his knees to the ceiling. Outside there was a dense fog, though he could make out a few figures on Hampden Lane, heads bowed, on late errands of mercy and menace. The sound of wet leaves dropping from the trees made its way to him. And a small smile crept onto his face. A cup of tea, and who knew what after that? Another case in play, and all the better that it came at this hour. These late ones were often the most interesting.

He appeared downstairs a while later, changed from his striped blue and white pajamas into a gray suit.

“How do you do, Lady Annabelle?” he said.

He could have answered his own question: She was not at all well. A gaunt and frightened-looking woman, she wore a dark brown dress that bespoke her long widowhood. Once she had been pretty but no longer. She was several years older than Lenox, perhaps forty-five. He racked his brains for a memory of the terrible Payson. Handsome; awful temper;
that mystery around his death. He had fought somewhere or other and picked up a violent red scar on his neck, Lenox remembered. It was the strangeness of his death more than anything else that stood out in his scant memory of the man.

“I’m terribly sorry to bother you, Mr. Lenox,” she said, worriedly clutching at a long stone necklace she wore.

“No, no, don’t be,” he said. “I’m an early riser anyway.”

“I should have waited until morning, I know, but sometimes a problem is so burdensome that one feels it cannot wait.”

“Of course,” he said. “You wouldn’t have slept. What is the problem?”

“I need your acumen, Mr. Lenox.”

“And my discretion?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Lenox shrugged. “Well, if you’ve come to me I suppose you haven’t gone to the police.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Lenox, you’re correct. You see, in the first place, I wouldn’t want to go to the police. But in the second place, I think the police would have laughed. I know you won’t laugh.”

“Certainly not, no.”

“You can’t go to the police and simply say, ’There’s a dead cat in my son’s rooms at college,’ can you. They’d think you mad.”

“A dead cat?”

“Yes, Mr. Lenox; that’s the root of all the problems.” Again she reached for her necklace.

Wearily he thought,
Oh, no, not one of these
.

“You seem preoccupied, Lady Payson. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Yes, please,” she said as he motioned to Graham, “but Mr. Lenox, will you come to Oxford with me?”

“I suppose that depends,” he said. “Is the problem a dead cat? Is that the only problem?”

She seemed slightly calmer. “It’s certainly not the only problem.”

“What is, then?”

“I’ve come because my son, George, has disappeared.”

I
n Warwickshire there were two families: the Lucys and the Wests.

The Lucys were the more famous of the two, for one thing because of the long-told, possibly apocryphal story that Shakespeare had been a tutor in the family of Sir Thomas Lucy and even poached his deer. But the Wests were richer. A West had played an important role in the crucial Battle of Edgehill during the Revolution, and now they lived in the north of the shire on land the King had granted to them after the Restoration, around the large towns of Nuneaton and Bedworth. It was far from the glory of Stratford and the beauty of the southern canals, but it was where the money lay.

Lady Annabelle was a West, and her brother, John, was the current patriarch of the family. John West was a kind, stolid, churchgoing, and thoroughly countryish man who loved his sister and hated London nearly as much as she did. He had tried to make up for her unpleasant marriage by making her widowhood comfortable, if not happy. As a result, she and Lenox were bumping along the road away from Hampden Lane in a beautiful six-horse carriage of the very best sort,
with blue plush seats and a warm little fire in a steel grate at their feet. They hadn’t spoken about the case yet. Once Lenox had heard that her son was missing, he had grabbed an overcoat and the small valise that Graham always left at the ready by the door for occasions like this, and been off. A packet of the cook’s toasted tomato sandwiches served as a makeshift breakfast. As he opened them, the carriage was pulling away from London, moving quickly in those early hours that found the streets abandoned, and he said, “Now, will you please tell me the full details of the matter?”

“Yes, certainly. Where shall I begin? Today?”

“Tell me a bit about your son, if you would.”

Tears came into Lady Annabelle’s eyes. “George is a student at Lincoln College, where he is in his second year reading modern history. He is my only child, and I scarcely need to add that I value every breath he takes as much as my own life.

“The trip from my brother’s house to Oxford takes only an hour, and though George is very busy with his work and his friends, I visit him whenever I can, sometimes as often as three times a week. I don’t always see him, but sometimes I do, and occasionally I have lunch with the master there.

“But one meeting of ours is firm, and that is tea on Saturday in his rooms. Saturday was yesterday, as you know, and I set out earlier in the morning than I usually do, planning to spend an hour in the Christ Church Picture Gallery before I went to see him. But I was so excited when I arrived in Oxford that I went straight to Lincoln and asked the porter, who knows me by now, to let me into my son’s rooms.”

“His rooms?”

“George has a sitting room with a desk and a few chairs, and a smaller bedroom behind it, looking out onto the Front Quad.”

“Are there also windows in the sitting room?”

“Yes, a short row.”

“Go on, please.”

Her hand reached for her necklace, which she clutched and worried. “I knocked on the door to his bedroom, which was shut. Then I looked in and saw it empty, so I sat in one of his chairs to wait with a book. At about noon I was very excited indeed, and stepped out of his room to go look in the quadrangle for his arrival. I saw him the second I walked out—and how I wish I had clung to him then, and not let him out of my sight! He was paler than usual and his hair was disheveled, but when I mentioned that he looked upset, he only said that he had been up late, working in the Bodleian.

“I asked him if he would like to go out then, and he said very rapidly that he would meet me at the tearoom down Ship Street where we sometimes go, opposite Jesus College. I started back to the doorway for my book, but he said, ’For God’s sakes, go, I’ll bring it!’ and then kissed me on the cheek and told me he loved me.”

There was silence for a moment, as she cried into her handkerchief.

“What a terrible mother I am! I went and waited in the tearoom, worrying slightly about how run-down George looked and drinking a cup of black coffee to steady myself. But the minutes dragged on until it had been nearly three-quarters of an hour since he had said he would be right down to meet me.

“I waited indecisively for another fifteen minutes before I paid and went back to the college. The porter—nice enough, though he seemed puzzled—let me into George’s rooms again. My things were still lying as they had been by the chair, and nothing had changed in the room, though the fire in the hearth had guttered out. I knocked on the door to his bedroom—which was closed, though I had opened it earlier—and there was no answer. Then I plucked up my courage and opened the door.”

“Was it closed tightly?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a thick door? Might the wind have closed it?”

“No.”

“Had the porter seen George leave college?”

“No—that was the first thing I asked him.”

“Please, go on.”

“It’s a very spare room—just a bed and a chest of drawers. The bed was ruffled, but generally everything looked as usual. Except George wasn’t there, and on the floor of his bedroom there was a white cat, stabbed straight through the neck with my late husband’s letter opener—dead, needless to say.” She shuddered at the thought.

“Did you recognize the cat?”

“I thought I might have. I know that George and his friends shared a cat.”

“Shared it?”

“They each had it for a few days at a time, if you see what I mean. At any rate, I’m not sure.”