A Beautiful Blue Death (12 page)

“I went
up
stairs, old chap.”

“Can anybody confirm that?”

“Anyone you like. Messes of people. Maids and things. Footmen by the dozen. And the other guests. The man called Potts was in the room most of the time, reading a paper, and when he flitted out someone else was always there.”

“You seem to have thought this through.”

“Only the facts, you know.”

“Do you have any reason to believe that any of the other guests, or any of the servants, committed the crime?”

Claude frowned. “No, not really. Oh, but perhaps it was Eustace,” he said brightly.

“Your cousin?”

“Old Barnard wouldn’t like that,” said Claude, talking as much to himself as to Lenox. “The bad apple. Might turn him against his sister, mightn’t it?”

“You don’t like Eustace?”

“Can’t stand him. Grim chap. Horrid company. Always reading, you know. Just reads. I chalk it up to bad early influences. The child is the father of the man, I always say. Heartbroken parents, all that sort of thing.”

“In that case why did you submit his name for the Jumpers?”

“You don’t miss a trick, do you? I did it because Uncle asked me to. No doubt saw the boy’s defects and wanted to place him among good sorts.”

“You want to please your uncle?”

“Always obliging. Strong family connection. Jumpers through a few hoops.” Claude laughed uproariously at the pun.

A few moments later, the carriage had drawn to a halt on a thin dirty street, where the fresh snow was already covered by a layer of dust and children were running about. A few of them ran up to Lenox and Claude, and the elder man gave them each a coin and asked them to watch his carriage.

Claude led his questioner into a dingy wooden storefront with the name THE PAINTED DUCK on a weatherbeaten sign hanging above the door. It appeared to Lenox that they had come to a coffeehouse.

Inside it was dark, even with daylight outdoors, and smelled strongly of dark coffee and tobacco. There was wood paneling on the walls and a great Rumsford fireplace in the center of the room, with horsehair chairs and low tables all around it. Above the bar were bookshelves with souvenir cups on them, and horseshoes hung on the walls. There were dozens of men sitting around sipping coffee, not so much because they liked it as to rent space in the shop, and only one woman, a redhead with furious freckles who sat at the bar and talked to the proprietor. Most of the men were wearing out-of-fashion clothes, mended
several times over, and they all talked in low voices, as if they didn’t want to be overheard.

The heyday of the coffeehouse had been a century ago, and they no longer drew many of the literary crowd, but they still received support from Parliament. They were thought to provide an alternative to drinking in pubs.

“Your treat, my friend?” asked Claude, finding a table.

“Of course.”

Claude ordered them both coffee, and then had for himself some toast with black-currant jam and a hard-boiled egg. Lenox declined food and neglected the coffee after his tentative first sip.

“You have business here, I believe?”

“Of a sort. After all, this is business, too,” said Claude merrily.

“I suppose.”

“And I have a meeting in a few minutes.”

“Then I shall try to be brief. What do you know of your uncle’s work at the Royal Mint?”

“Virtually nothing.”

“That seems odd.”

“It is his private mint which interests me most.”

“Does he confide in you?”

“No. You don’t think my uncle did it, do you? He’s a decent enough chap, I should say. Not the type. Bit flinty, bit imperious, but a leader of men.”

“I do not suspect him, no. What do you know of your other guests?”

“Well, there’s Eustace, who’s a tick. Of the first order. He’s probably your man. And there’s Soames, who’s nice enough. Duff is a hard sort but full of moral fiber. Not likely to murder a girl unless she blasphemed in his presence or something. Potts—well, as vulgar as the day is long, my old man, but I don’t see that there was any money in the business.”

Lenox had his own opinion of people’s vulgarity, but the boy was accurate enough.

“All told, not a very criminal lot,” Claude went on. “I should guess that a man slipped in from the street. The papers always have things like that, you know. I saw only the other day about a man who tried to rob a bank by kidnapping the manager’s daughter. When he couldn’t find her, he took the manager’s dog instead! Sorry to say he failed. Gives one hope when a chap can kidnap a dog and get a thousand pounds out of it.”

“And the servants?”

“Does one notice servants? There’s no butler, which is queer. I wouldn’t bet against the housekeeper in a fight with an angry tiger. One of the footmen was engaged to the girl. She herself was the only pretty one.”

Lenox rose. “I’ll leave you to your business, then.”

Upon hearing this, the freckled girl at the counter stood up.

“Good to see you,” said Claude.

As he neared the door, Lenox turned around. “Don’t tell anyone that we met, Claude?”

“Why on earth not?”

“Because, I hope, you desire the capture of this girl’s murderer.”

Claude sighed. “As you say. I shan’t.”

“Thank you.”

“Though perhaps I’ll tell Eustace that the Yard is closing in on him.”

“Please don’t.”

Claude sighed again. “It’s a hard world, when an honest young man can’t have a bit of fun after the daily grind.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Very well.”

Lenox walked out toward the sidewalk, where the young boys were watching the carriage intently, as they had been paid to do, and discussing what they would spend their newfound riches on. He looked up and down the street. If only there were some way to fix this, he thought, these children with their
worn-through shoes and dirty caps; the women reusing tea leaves until they were nearly white; the men spending their pay on gin, not food; the beggars, often no more than children, playing what they called hookem-snivey: pretending to be badly ill to encourage sympathy. A way to change all that.

Perhaps he would stand for Parliament someday. Somebody there needed to make their primary concern the debtors’ prisons, the Rookery, the Dials, the children looking in the gutters for something to sell. The Board of Trade and the India Commission and the Irish question were all very well, but here were human beings in their own city, suffering too.

As he stepped into his carriage he looked back to the coffeehouse and saw the girl sitting on Claude’s lap, kissing him on the cheek, and money quickly exchanging hands, and while he considered himself a progressive, he felt again disheartened.

E
ustace would be more difficult to track down than Claude, who seemed to use the Jumpers as a daily office, but he would be easier to catch than any of the other guests. According to Graham, whose research was impeccable, he usually ate lunch either at Barnard’s house or at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, which was somewhat subdued in comparison with the Jumpers and thus, in all probability, more attractive to the lad.

The Oxford and Cambridge was on Pall Mall, near Lenox’s house, and he arrived in front of it just in time for lunch. The streets were snowy and cold, and as he went through the heavy wood doors he sighed with relief at the warmth.

And here he struck it lucky, saving himself the unpleasant task of lurking about Clarges Street, waiting for the boy to leave his uncle’s house: Eustace was in the dining room.

Lenox sat down for a bit of food himself, a bubbling steak and kidney pie with lovely plump pieces of egg hidden inside it. His table was under a portrait of Henry VI where he could keep an eye on Eustace, who was across the hall eating a leg of lamb and reading what Lenox guessed was a scientific periodical. He was a
thin lad with dark hair and a pinched, unpleasant face, small dark eyes and a sharp chin, without any sense of lightness about him.

Lenox ate only a little and, as a result, finished before his counterpart. He sat and sipped a glass of Madeira while he waited for Eustace to leave, enjoying, at least, the minor increase of civility that the club presented after Claude’s coffeehouse. Although, to be sure, the coffeehouse presented prettier company. Most of the men in the dining room were half asleep and all of them would have fared poorly if judged solely for beauty by a jury of their female peers. The youngest might have been sixty-five, but for Lenox and Eustace. Strange company for a boy up from university.

He followed Eustace downstairs and into the small smoking room, after another ten minutes, and sat quite near him, in an armchair by the window. The young man’s clothes were old-fashioned. He had a leaf and several sprigs of some bush peeking out from his pocket, and while he read he touched them absent-mindedly. Clearly, Lenox thought, he was passionate about his subject. Perhaps he had been in a garden just that morning.

Lenox had barely had a chance to speak when Eustace said to him, “What do you think of these horrid liberals, sir?”

Lenox sighed inwardly, but smiled. “I am afraid I count myself in their ranks, though they’re not so horrid when you’ve eaten supper with them once or twice.”

The boy frowned. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he said.

Lenox realized that he had run into the worst sort of young man, the one who hangs about clubs for older men, imitating their gentle lives, talking gravely about politics, and always learning the club rules to the letter. On the very lower cusp of the upper class himself, but absolutely firm about maintaining clear rules for the servants. No doubt he sat on the house committee and argued strenuously against the admission of scholarship boys. Lenox would have preferred even Claude.

“I daresay I do have it wrong. But youth is to correct the aged, as they say.”

“Well, some of the aged have the right opinion. At this club in particular, you know.”

“What political issues do you feel especially strongly about?” Lenox couldn’t help but ask.

Eustace perked up at this. “Well, for instance, there’s the matter of feudal responsibility. This country was founded on a model of master and man. It’s why the sun never sets on our empire, you know: feudal responsibility. And now they’re trying to give every man the vote—give
women
the vote, for goodness’ sake. What was wrong with the old system?”

“Surely the reform acts make England more democratic, fairer to all its citizens?”

“Read Plato on democracy. Just the mob’s appetite running wild. What you want is an oligarchy of the elite. Rotten boroughs are absolutely sound, you know. The Duke of Albany knows better who should be in Parliament than the man who digs his vegetables.”

Lenox pegged him as a young man on the lower fringe of the landed gentry, clinging hard to some idea of gentility. It gave him some sympathy for Eustace Bramwell.

“How about imperial reform?”

“Don’t get me started: the Indians, the Africans—they need us. Don’t you see that? Look at the way we’ve brought Christian spirit to Burma and rudimentary education to Bengal.”

Lenox decided to turn the conversation. “Don’t you frequent the Jumpers as well as this club?”

Eustace seemed surprised. “I did, of course, but it was the mistake of a man who is first coming to London, and I fell in with the bad company of my cousin, who forced me to drink, and all sorts—just a moment, sir. Was that a general question, or do you know me?”

“I confess that I know you. I am a friend of your uncle’s.”
Eustace looked at him suspiciously. “My uncle is no liberal.”

“As we get older, there is common ground between us aside from politics.”

“I suppose.”

“To confess fully, I am here to ask you about the servant who died.”

“Are you from the Yard? How did you get in here?”

“No, no, I am an amateur. Charles Lenox.”

“Surely not the great expert on Roman life?”

“If you please.”

“Why, what an honor, liberal or otherwise! Do you know, I often find myself consulting that book you wrote—that
was
you, I take it?”

“It was,” said Lenox. A monograph on daily life from beggar to soldier to emperor, during Hadrian’s reign.

“I have to say, that was an ingenious book.”

“Thank you.”

“And then, you know, the article you published last month in the Academy’s journal, about the historical life of Bath during Roman occupation—sheer inspiration, to do that kind of on-the-ground research.”

“I appreciate it,” Lenox said. “And I would be pleased to talk about my writings another time. But the young girl is dead, and I really do want to see the matter through—only as shadow support for the Yard, you know.”

“I see.”

“It shall only be a very few questions.”

Eustace Bramwell put his journal aside and nodded, acquiescent now that he knew he was talking to the author of
Hadrian’s People.

“Good,” said Lenox. “Good. First things first. Do you have any idea who killed the girl?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

“You didn’t kill her?”

“Sir, if this is the sort of question which I am meant to answer, then this interview is at an end.”

“It is a necessary question.”

Eustace did not seem mollified. “The impertinence—”

“Very well, very well,” said Lenox. He was growing weary of nephews. Jane would sympathize. “Have you heard of
bella indigo
?
”

“Of course I have.”

“How?”

“I graduated with a first in botany and won a prize in the bargain, sir.”

“Of course.”

“Are you implying that
bella indigo
killed this girl?”

“It may have,” said Lenox. “Have you ever come into contact with the substance?”

“No. Cambridge quite rightly considers it too volatile.”

“But Oxford cultivates it?”

“Oxford is less rigorous, in many ways—”

“Yes, yes, thank you. Have you ever been to Oxford?”

“Yes, as a child, and once several years ago to visit my cousin.”

“How many years ago?”

“Perhaps three.” Eustace lit a cigarette as he said this.