Home by Nightfall (28 page)

In his boyhood, one of the least reputable streets in Mayfair had been a few blocks down from the family house in London. It was a shabby, paint-chipped little lane, with a cheesemonger, an unsavory pub, and a number of scroungy fourth-rate lodging houses—oh, and at number 10, for it was the street called Downing, the residence of the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

To Lenox, raised in the rigid divisions of country society, by which two neighboring landowners might not enter each other's houses for forty years because of slightly uneven ancestries, it was enthralling to see how London pushed every kind of person together into cheek-by-jowl life. Gladstone and the boot boy at the pub next door had the same right to the pavement. Downing Street had become more refined since the 1840s—in fact, partly at Gladstone's insistence—but you could still find anyone out upon it at any hour, a merchant, a duke, a vagrant, drunks, priests, bricklayers, paviers, basket-men, a greengrocer, the Prime Minister, a cabman or chimneysweep. A detective. The Queen.

Here, however—well, he had played a London trick on Liza Calloway. The fact was that he bore one of the well-known surnames of Sussex, and now he stood in the sitting room of his brother-in-law, who bore another of those great last names. All of the advantage in the room was his, therefore, and in Markethouse that meant that he had a greater duty to the others than they did to him. Elizabeth Watson was a charwoman, Claire Adams a housemaid, Adelaide Snow the daughter of an orphan, and Liza Calloway was a thready pulse away from being a murderess. He had forgotten—something,
noblesse oblige,
perhaps, you could call it.

“I am sorry to have tricked you, Miss Calloway. I needed to see if the dog would identify you.”

Calloway's daughter ignored these words and went on weeping. Edmund handed her his handkerchief. “Would you like a glass of champagne?” he asked. “Or something to eat?”

“Yes, sort her something to eat,” said Elizabeth Watson commandingly. Now she, too, had risen and come to the sofa. “She'll feel better.”

It took a minute or two for a footman to return with a glass of champagne and a wooden board of cheese, apple, ham, and bread. By this time, Liza Calloway had wiped her tears. She drank a sip of the champagne and nibbled at a small hunk of bread, holding what remained in the fingertips of her two hands and staring at it, as if willing herself not to cry again. And then she did start crying again. Her aunt and Adelaide Snow embraced her.

“Can you explain to us what's happened, Charles?” asked Edmund.

“Miss Calloway, would you like to explain?”

“Mrs. Evans,” she said. “My husband's name was Evans—may he rest in peace. He contracted cholera and died last year.”

“Mrs. Evans,” said Lenox gently. ‘Would you care to explain how you've come to return to Markethouse?”

She was silent, though at least she was no longer crying. After a moment, Lenox nodded and began to explain.

“Mr. Calloway may not be a murderer,” he said, “but his confession was the most important clue we had about the case. Why? Well, from all we've heard, he has no strong personal ties remaining in Markethouse. He may live here, but his allegiances are dissolved. His wife's family—the wife whom by all accounts he loved passionately—”

“He did,” said the daughter of that marriage.

Claire Adams nodded her agreement with this assertion.

“That family, including the two sisters present in this room, had become strangers to him, and though both Elizabeth Watson and Claire Adams seemed to me to bear some personal animus toward Stevens, it was impossible to imagine that Calloway would care enough about their prejudices to act upon them, or to sacrifice himself for either of them.

“Add that, of course, to the other facts that didn't square with the idea of Calloway as the murderer—the use of the gamekeeper's cottage, when he had his own house, the theft of the library books, the map of Markethouse, the mistake of thinking that Stevens still lived in Potbelly Lane, in what is now Mr. Hadley's house. It was clear to me that an outsider to the village was involved.”

Calloway's daughter looked up. Though he was old and bearded and mad, it was possible now to see the resemblance between them; both had strong cheekbones and penetrating eyes. Hers were trained on Lenox. “How do you know that I went to Hadley's house?” she asked.

“Hush, Helena,” said Adelaide.

“How did Miss Snow come to be involved?” asked Clavering.

“Give me a moment and I'll explain,” Lenox said.

The mood of the room had changed. Now they were upon the terrain of firm fact. Sandy was curled up happily at Mrs. Evans's feet, eyes already settling closed in the warmth of the fire. Edmund, standing near the fireplace, was gazing at the scene with a calm, steadying sympathy.

“I asked myself,” said Lenox, “whom Calloway might then have cared enough about to protect. He more or less invited us to hang him, after all. And I thought: Who could inspire such a cheerful suicide but a child? I myself am a father—and it is no sacrifice, the idea of sacrificing yourself for a child. Your self doesn't even come into it.

“So it was that I came to the answer: this woman, before you. Mad Calloway's daughter.”

“Please don't call him that,” she said.

“I apologize. In fact, I remember Miss Snow, Miss Adelaide Snow here, stopping herself just short, yesterday, of saying Mad Calloway, and saying, much more politely,
Mr.
Calloway. It struck me as an odd hitch in her speech at the time, until I realized she was sparing your feelings, Mrs. Evans. I also wondered why you took such a pressing interest in the condition of Calloway's imprisonment, about which you asked us several questions. As a cousin visiting from out of town, you could scarcely have known anything about him. Now, of course, I understand.”

“But what was it for?” asked Edmund suddenly. “If Mrs. Evans did indeed attack Stevens,
why
?”

“Ah.” Lenox looked at the two young women on the sofa. “There I enter into the realm of speculation. Mrs. Evans?”

She remained silent. Lenox glanced at Adelaide Snow's usually kindly face and was startled to see in it something stony and strange. It took him a moment, but then he realized what it was: rage, sheer rage.

He looked at the two Watson sisters, and upon their faces, too, was deep emotion.

“I suspect that Stevens Stevens is not a—not a good man,” he said lamely, and then went on. “Mrs. Evans, Miss Snow, you have both been in his employ. Can you tell us the truth of his character? Of what happened?”

“Never,” said Adelaide Snow fiercely. She gripped Liza Calloway's shoulder again. “Just leave us alone. You can't prove a thing.”

Lenox glanced at Edmund and raised his eyebrows slightly. He was about to speak again when there was a knock on the door, and then, without waiting for a reply, the knocker pushed it open a few inches. It was Lady Jane.

“Charles, there you are, and Edmund, too,” she said. “What have you been doing?”

Despite the circumstances, Adelaide Snow rose to her feet, and Lenox realized that of course his wife was famous in this part of the world. He watched her take in the entire scene with her quick, intelligent gray eyes.

“This is Miss Liza Calloway,” he said, “or more properly, Mrs. Evans.”

“Ah,” said Jane. She still had a hand on the doorway. There was a long pause, and then it was clear that she had apprehended the situation, the tenor of the room, and she said, “Well, perhaps I might sit with you.”

It was Edmund who saw the merit of the idea most quickly. He strode forward. “Listen, perhaps all of us had better clear out,” he said. “You and I, Charles, and us, Clavering and Bunce. Jane—these young women have had some trial. Ladies, you may speak to my sister-in-law with utter confidence that she will keep your secrets—or not, if you prefer, but at any rate you ought to have a few minutes to yourselves. It's been a difficult night, I'm sure. We'll return in a little while.”

 

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

They left. Lady Jane was closeted with Adelaide Snow, Liza Calloway, and Elizabeth Watson and Claire Adams for the better part of an hour. Halfway through she came out and told Lenox to go and find Toto for her, which he did. Clavering and Bunce were in the kitchen, eating and drinking; the two brothers sat in the hall outside the room, on a wooden bench beneath a comically bad portrait of the seventh King Henry, waiting. Off to their left was the ceaseless roar of the ball, and behind them the close little room, from which a raised voice would occasionally emerge.

They passed the time first by playing five-across noughts and crosses (Edmund won five games out of fourteen; they drew six; Lenox won three) and then by attempting to throw playing cards into an empty wastebasket across the hallway. Lenox had a blue deck, Edmund a red one, and after each had thrown all of his cards they would go and count up how many of each color was in the basket. They were more or less even, Edmund perhaps edging his younger brother more often than not. His sideways flick of the wrist achieved less glamorous results than Lenox's tomahawk motion—but was more reliable.

He didn't ask about the case until they had been sitting there for forty-five minutes or so. And then all he said was, “Stevens, then—from the sound of it he was a kind of—of vicious exploiter of young women, you believe.”

Lenox nodded. “That's my guess.”

“How do you know?”

Lenox sighed. “A feeling, I suppose. He hired this long series of young girls as his secretaries, and the list Pointilleux found showed that almost half of them left immediately. Including Miss Adelaide Snow, for example. Do you remember her saying that she hoped Miss Harville enjoyed the job—and then adding, ‘I gave her fair warning that she might not'? And don't forget Miss Ainsworth, the young girl Clavering told us disappeared to London after only a few weeks of working for Stevens.”

Edmund shook his head, disgust on his face. “It wasn't because it was less expensive to hire women, then, or because he believed them to be more intelligent than men.”

“I doubt saving the village fifteen pounds a year was his first priority, in a budget of so many thousands. Though perhaps it added to his pleasure.”

“And Miss Calloway—or Mrs. Evans, I suppose we should call her—”

It was then that Lady Jane opened the door. Her face was sad, full of concern. “You may come in again, if you like,” she said. “I think we can have a reasonable conversation. I've assured them that you're not trying to hound them onto the gallows. I hope I'm right.”

“Don't be absurd,” said Edmund.

They followed her into the little room, where the four women were sitting as they had been. Toto, perched on a small armchair next to the fire, her arm resting on a card table, had tears on her face, and the spaniel, which was still lying between Liza Calloway's feet, looked up as they entered, thumped his tail once, sniffed the air, and then laid his head between his paws again, his eyes quickly closing.

“Charles,” said Lady Jane, “tell us exactly what you know, please, and then we can have a conversation.”

Lenox and Edmund were still standing. “What I know?” said Charles. “Very little, really. The timing is suggestive.”

“Timing?” said Miss Calloway—Mrs. Evans—looking up at him. Her own face was now dry.

“Your father began to withdraw from society approximately ten years ago, a little while after your mother's death, and more exactly after your departure. To Norfolk, from all we learned—but I wonder if that's true. It seems to me that perhaps his grief was at losing you without an explanation. Did you think that he knew about Stevens's treatment of you, and leave without telling him why?”

He saw that his supposition had gone home. “Well. Go on,” she said.

“Perhaps it was your own grief at the death of your husband that drove you back here, seeking revenge on Stevens. You had nothing else to lose, after all. I take it that you don't have children?”

“We were not so blessed.”

Lenox didn't need to look at Lady Jane to know that he was correct—that she knew the whole truth. “The drawing on the wall, of a schoolgirl,” he said. “Was it some kind of message to Stevens?”

Suddenly Toto stood up. “This is all very well,” she said angrily, “but what are we going to
do
? This young woman cannot go to prison—not after what she has endured. I'll put her on a train myself, and you can try to stop me, Charles Lenox.”

Lenox shrugged. “I have no legal standing here,” he said. “Clavering is downstairs. I think you could do worse than to place your trust in me.”

Calloway's daughter looked him in the eye for a long moment and then nodded, inhaled to brace herself, and began to talk.

The mayor had come into her life on the day she first made that drawing. Or a version, anyhow—that particular schoolgirl had been smiling. She had been nine years old. Stevens had seen her drawing as her father socialized on the steps of the Bell and Horns and praised her for it, asked, even, if he might have it.

After that, he had always been very friendly to her and to her father, and when he had seen her he had nearly always mentioned the drawing. (“Still drawing, my dear?” “Well enough supplied with charcoal, I hope?” That kind of thing.) Finally, five years later, he had offered her a position as a secretary. She had been unusually young for the position, just fourteen, but as he had told Calloway, he'd had his eye on her for a long time.

Lenox had known Stevens as an acquaintance for many years, and even the euphemistic description of what he had done to his young secretary seemed … well, impossible. Dull, number-bound, impersonal old Stevens, his name the only interesting thing about him, a market mayor in a market town.

And yet there was Adelaide Snow's face: confirming every detail. Lenox hoped that her short term as Stevens's secretary meant that she had been strong-willed enough to resist his assaults.