A Beautiful Blue Death (2 page)

He stepped back from his window and told himself that he would see about the note in a few minutes. Perhaps Jane would have another cup of tea for him, at any rate. For now, he picked up the evening paper again and read with great interest, while Graham arranged his things, about the parries that Disraeli and Russell were trading back and forth; for Parliament was just back in session.

E
ven his meager boots, which had failed him all day long, were able to carry Lenox a distance as short as next door without his feet getting too wet. He tapped on the door, cheerfully calling out “Lady Jane!” through a side window.

Among the qualities that made Lenox perhaps the premier amateur investigator of his era was his memory. He could call up in his mind without any trouble crime scenes, people’s faces, and, most easily, notes from his friends. Lady Jane’s note had said:

After a moment’s worry, Lenox had decided not to be alarmed. Close friends can write such notes to each other over small matters. He grew gradually more certain that it was something usual—one of her nieces was in love with the wrong man,
one of her nephews had gambling debts—the sort of thing she always consulted Lenox about.

Lady Jane’s butler was an enormously fat man named Kirk. He had gone into her service when Graham had gone into Lenox’s, and the two butlers had been friends ever since, though Graham gave the impression that he slightly disapproved of Kirk’s gluttony. At Lenox’s knock, Kirk opened the door, looking graver than usual, and led him into the drawing room where Lady Jane sat, waiting alone.

She was a very pretty woman, almost pale, with dark hair, red cheeks, and red lips. Her eyes were gray and often seemed amused, but they were never cynical, and her intelligence shone out of them. She wore her usual white frock top with a gray skirt.

Her husband had been Captain Lord James Grey, Earl of Deere, and they had married when they were both twenty. Almost instantly he had died in a skirmish along the Indian border, and since then she had lived alone in London, though she paid frequent visits to her family, who lived near the Lenoxes in Sussex.

She had never remarried and was considered one of the high rulers of the best part of society. Such was the general respect for her that nobody ever so much as breathed a question about her friendship with Lenox, which was long and very close—perhaps the closest in either of their lives—but admittedly somewhat odd, given the general restrictions that governed the interaction between men and women. Lenox counted on her as the brightest and the kindest person he knew.

The drawing room was Lady Jane’s equivalent of Lenox’s library, and he knew its contents by heart. It was a rather wide room and also looked out over the street. The wall on the right side was covered with paintings of the countryside, and on the far end was a fireplace that reached nearly to the ceiling, with a bronze sculpture of the Duke of Wellington standing on the mantel, to the left of which there was a desk. In the middle of
the room was a group of sofas, one of which, a rose-colored one, being where Lady Jane always sat.

And there she was when Lenox came in.

“Oh, Charles!” she said, standing and rushing toward him.

There was no deviant nephew, he saw immediately. Something had gone seriously wrong. He took both of her hands and led her back to the couch.

“Have you had your tea?” Lenox said.

“No, I’d forgotten,” she said. “Kirk—”

She stopped speaking and looked to Charles, still gripping his hands.

“Kirk,” he said, to the butler still standing at the door. “Bring us two glasses of warm brandy. Have someone come in to fix the fire, as well. And then bring us tea, with a bit of food.”

“Very good, sir.”

Lenox looked at Lady Jane and smiled. “It will be all right, old friend,” he said.

“Oh, Charles,” she said again, despairingly.

A footman came in and gave them each a small silver-handled glass. Lady Jane drank her brandy, and then drank Lenox’s when he handed it to her, while the footman prodded the fire back into shape. Then she began to speak.

“It’s ridiculous, I know,” she said, “but I feel a bit as though I’m in shock.”

“What happened, my dear?” asked Lenox.

“Do you remember a girl named Prudence Smith, Charles, a maid I used to have? We called her Prue.”

He paused to think. “No, I don’t,” he said.

“She left about three months ago to work for George Barnard, because her fiancé is a footman in his house.”

“And what’s the matter with her?”

“She’s dead,” said Lady Jane, and took the last sip of brandy in her glass to steady her nerves.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “It’s too, too awful.”

“Do you have any idea of how she died?”

“Poison, I think. That’s what the housemaid here says. It was she who heard the news.”

“Murder?”

“Or suicide. I don’t know.”

“How appalling!”

“It’s too much to ask—”

“Never.”

“I was hoping—”

“Of course,” he said.

He looked outside. He would have to begin right away. The snow was falling even harder, and it was almost dark, but he turned back to her, smiled cheerfully, and said, “I’d better go over while the trail is fresh.”

She smiled through her tears, and said, “Oh, Charles, it’s too good of you. Especially on a day when it’s so cold.”

He sat with her a few minutes longer, making small talk, trying to comfort her, and then asked Kirk for his hat. Lady Jane walked him to the door and waved goodbye as he stepped into a hansom cab and directed the driver to Bond Street.

George Barnard would dislike this, thought Lenox as he rode along. He was a man of immense personal pride, which extended equally to his finest paintings and his lowest pots and pans. A death by poison in his house would offend both his own impervious sense of order and his certainty that most of the world ran by his clock.

He was a politician—once a Member of Parliament, though more recently he had been appointed to a variety of more permanent government roles. He and Lenox were friends, or, more accurately, acquaintances who came into frequent contact. Lenox had too little personal ambition to be counted among Barnard’s truest friends. And had begun with too much money.

Barnard, by contrast, had grown up in impoverished
middle-class gentility, somewhere slightly south of Manchester—a far cry from Whitehall. How he had made his money was considered a great mystery, and London society was constantly speculating about it. Some said he had made his first fortune playing on the Exchange, or even as a merchant, but if either was true he had long since thrown it off. He had arrived in London as a conservative MP but had quickly left elective government for unelected posts.

He was currently the director of the Royal Mint, a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton, which explained why he had begun to buy the physicist’s possessions at recent auctions. He had done well as the mint’s director, a job in which he worked hard—apparently, according to most people, because he so loved the material of his labor: namely, money.

George Barnard’s single quirk was the orchid. Atop his house was a glassed-in greenroom, to which he admitted very few people and in which he tenderly cultivated his flowers, splicing their delicate hues in search of a perfect subtle shade, closely guarding the amount of water and sun each plant received. He traveled far and wide, in his rare holidays, to collect species of a commensurate rareness. The destination didn’t matter to him, unless you could call some genus of orchid a destination.

Lenox could say this of him: He did not stint in his generosity in the field of his chosen passion. Whenever he went to a party, he took the lady of the house a flower of exceeding beauty and rareness, one perfectly chosen to match her temperament and sense of style. There was no lady of his own house. Barnard was a bachelor.

It was thus said that you could monitor George Barnard’s social schedule by following his blossoms from address to address. Depending on whom you asked, this habit was either charming or cloying. Lenox was neutral on the issue; though if Barnard had not been so proper, so trustworthy, so unblemished, he would have seemed to Lenox to be sinister.

B
y the time the cab drew to a stop, Lenox’s watch had nearly ticked to seven o’clock. He had stopped at Bond Street to up his friend Thomas McConnell, which had put him a good deal out of his way.

As he had guessed correctly Barnard’s first decision had been to bring in a high-ranking officer from the Yard. From the other carriage in front of the house, it looked as if it might be Jenkins, a young detective. His presence wouldn’t be a bad thing usually, but Lenox guessed, again correctly, that the owner of the house had told Jenkins to come alone. It was all a struggle between Barnard’s impulse to keep things quiet and his impulse to exercise his authority. If Barnard had his way, there would be no doctor, no routine examination of the premises, only an imperious dictate to resolve matters, and quickly.

So it had been necessary for Lenox to bring Thomas, who was a doctor.

The house was a very large yellow one, of the kind that was sometimes called a mansion. It had a garish coat of arms over the door, which made Lenox wince every time he saw it, and each of its dozens of windows showed some light. Barnard always had a
surfeit of guests. He also threw parties by the dozen and had a famous annual ball, which wasn’t far off.

Lenox stepped gingerly from the brougham, avoiding a well of slush by the curb. He had had, just a little while before, the happy anticipation of supper and a night in his library ahead of him, but that loss couldn’t still the tiny hum of excitement in his mind—who knew what was inside this house, where it would lead him, how it would end? He loved his work.

Barnard was standing on his stoop, engaged in a solemn conversation with the young detective, when he spotted Lenox and Thomas approaching.

“Charles!” he said.

“George, how are you?” said Lenox. “I’m sorry about this business.”

“Terrible matter. Under my own roof. No end of embarrassment, you know.”

“Did the girl serve upstairs?”

“Indeed she did! Only for two weeks or so, of course, or I would have been able to spot it before it happened.”

“Of course,” Lenox said. Barnard was already fibbing. Hadn’t Lady Jane said that it had been three months? “I’m here because Jane asked me to come lend a hand.”

“Not necessary,” Barnard said. There was a pause. “How is Jane?”

“Well enough, I think.”

“Still, not necessary. Not at all. We’ve got Jenkins here. Good man.” He spoke as if Jenkins weren’t present.

“Have you met Thomas McConnell, George?”

“I haven’t had the honor. George Barnard,” he said, reaching out his hand.

“A pleasure,” said Thomas, who had met Barnard dozens of times.

There was a brief pause; then Lenox spoke again. “Still,
George,” he said, “you won’t mind us having a quick look inside? To put Jane’s mind at rest?”

Barnard was evidently troubled by this request and paused before he answered. He was weighing his desire to please Lady Jane, whose good graces he wanted to be in, against his annoyance with Lenox for coming. At last he said, “For Jane, yes, I suppose. But Jenkins has seen to everything already. Says we need a doctor, but I don’t see why. Clear case of suicide.”

“Suicide?” said Thomas.

“Suicide,” Barnard said emphatically. “There’s a note, plain as day. Still, go in if you wish.”

“Thank you, George.”

He walked into the house with Thomas and Jenkins at his side, while Barnard walked toward the grand front staircase, seemingly dismissing them from his mind. Lenox had seen this front hallway many times, at the beginnings and ends of parties, but now, for the first time, he concentrated on the small gilt door to the side, which was guaranteed to be of cheap wood on the reverse and stood beneath a vast mirror, one of the dozens of doors concealed all over the house that led downstairs to the servants’ quarters.

He opened the door, and the smell of the kitchen drifted up. Barnard always served good food; you could say that for him.

When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Lenox waited for Jenkins to take the lead. But apparently he wanted first to have a word.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Lenox. We’ve never been formally introduced.”

“It’s an honor for me too,” Lenox said to the inspector.

Thomas stepped to the left and took a sip from a flask, while Jenkins hurried after him.

“It’s down here,” he said.

“I know,” said Thomas. “In houses of this design the servants’
bedrooms are always to the left, and the kitchen is always to the right.”

Lenox smiled to himself and followed the two men.

They were walking along a clean well-lit hallway, slightly wider than Lenox had expected, with small drawings of flowers in between each set of doors. Some of the doors had small personal details—an embroidery that said SARAH, a garland pinned against a hinge. The noise from the kitchen receded behind them, but they could still hear the business of the house being conducted.

At the end of the hall, a door was slightly ajar. Thomas stopped and asked Jenkins if it was the correct room, and Jenkins answered that it was. Both men stepped back for the first time, and allowed Lenox to come forward. He put a leather glove on his right hand and opened the door.

“Why do you wear a glove?” Jenkins asked.

McConnell answered for his friend. “There’s a new technology emerging—fingerprinting. Have you heard of it?”

“No.”

“A chap named Herschel, magistrate in India, started to put prisoners’ handprints next to their signatures. At first he did it just to scare them into being honest. But then he noticed the individuality of the fingers and decided he would focus on them rather than on the entire hand. Ingenious, really. Still rather hit-and-miss, the whole thing, but Lenox and I agree there’s potential in it.”