Home by Nightfall (33 page)

“Yes, he admitted it straightaway,” said Dallington.

She shook her head. “How beautiful that music was, though.”

“Was it Pascal who said that all of man's miseries come from not being able to sit alone quietly in a room?” said Lenox.

“Very odd. Still, the good news is that we shall be famous throughout Britain tomorrow, fellows. We found him.”

“And thoroughly routed LeMaire,” said Dallington.

Yet none of them could feel quite as enthusiastic as they ought to, watching the dray—and after they parted, agreeing to meet early the next morning, Lenox, for his part, carried that melancholy all the way home, hoping that Lady Jane, who could always cheer him up again, would still be awake.

 

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Two weeks later it was truly winter at last, and Lenox, more fool he, was sitting outside on a public bench near Wallace Street very early in the morning, as slow, heavy snowflakes drifted down in the windless air, whitening the awnings, dotting the streets. He was warmly bundled, though, and the company was fair: Graham sat next to him, just as deeply buried in warm cloaks and wrappers and gloves, only their eyes and mouths exposed to the cold. Between them on the bench was a large stone bottle of hot tea that Lenox had brought, from which they frequently replenished their small tin cups.

“There he goes, meeting that gentleman in the carriage,” said Graham.

“Damn him,” said Lenox.

“The third time.”

They watched as Obadiah Smith stood at the door of the carriage for a few moments, then, after receiving a piece of paper, ducked back into the begrimed public house that served as his headquarters—the sort of backstreet establishment, not uncongenial, that would put your cut of beef on the gridiron if you bought a drink, and bring it to you with mustard and walnut ketchup.

“What is he doing, I wonder?” Lenox asked for the tenth time.

“All three carriages have been well appointed.”

“I noticed.”

Smith was a long-term quarry of Lenox's, a score he intended to settle on his own time, and this sort of casual ongoing observation of him wasn't unpleasant, a piece of the puzzle, not a moment of urgent action. The afternoon before, Graham had asked him to breakfast, and Lenox had invited him instead on this escapade—a dirty trick, to be sure, except that Graham had always enjoyed this extracurricular aspect of his work, when he'd been Lenox's butler, and they'd had the better part of an hour to talk.

“Back to the subject we were discussing—spring, you are fairly sure?” asked Lenox.

“I think so,” said Graham.

“In that case we will have the supper outdoors.”

“Supper?” Graham said, raising his eyebrows.

“Myself, Jane, you, Miss Winston of course, McConnell, Dallington, Lord Cabot—” Cabot was an old political ally of Lenox's, in failing health but still stubbornly sociable, who had become extremely intimate with Graham in the past year—“and anyone else you care to invite.”

“Neither Miss Winston nor I wants any bother. I say that quite sincerely.”

“I'll see you to hell myself before I let you get married without a supper, Graham.”

Graham shook his head. “My calendar is full this spring.”

“Every night!”

“Every night.”

Lenox laughed, and was about to reply when Smith came out again. The detective scowled and leaned forward slightly, peering through the narrow slit between his scarf and his hat. “What could he be doing?”

Graham studied Smith, who was a hardened criminal, a diabolical and clever person. “I wonder if he's working in his old line again.”

“Prostitution?”

Graham nodded. “He's only receiving papers. Addresses, perhaps?”

Lenox narrowed his eyes. “Perhaps. But why would the carriages come to him? And why would they leave behind a trail of paper? I wonder if it's something more complex. Stockjobbing, for instance.”

“You could find out by following him at night. If it's prostitution, that's when he'll be busiest. If it's stockjobbing, he'll be off the clock then.”

Graham had always been an invaluable second set of eyes. “You're right. If only it were warmer out.”

“Mr. Pointilleux is enthusiastic, is he not?”

“I wouldn't want to put him in the way of danger. It's my case.”

“Then you and I might do it one night this week.”

“I can't risk the neck of a Member of Parliament, Graham. Not to mention what Miss Winston would think of it.”

“I think my neck will be all right,” said Graham drily.

Lenox continued to peer at the public house, wishing Smith, who'd disappeared inside once more, would come out again. They had a cab waiting and intended to follow the next carriage that came for him. “Well,” he said, still staring, “if you're busy all spring it will be a luncheon. And if you're not careful, I'm going to ask Jane to speak to Miss Winston directly.”

“Heaven help us,” Graham said.

Lenox laughed.

Several hours later, still pink-cheeked but dried and warmed, and having dropped Graham near Parliament, Lenox was sitting with Polly and Dallington at the weekly meeting of the agency's three partners.

“Our finances are not spectacular,” Polly was saying, tapping the end of her pencil against the balance sheet she was studying. “Not disastrous, but not spectacular.”

“Not disastrous has always been my ambition in life,” said Dallington, and smiled at the look of exasperated affection that Polly shot him. “Anyhow, why be so gloomy? We've wiped LeMaire's eye, we're the heroes of Fleet Street, and we have half a dozen meetings with new clients today alone.”

“All six of them put together won't add up to what we lost by Chadwick. I'm not joking. If it weren't for the reserve fund, we would be in debt right now. I still think we might be wise to let one of the new detectives go. Mayhew probably.”

Lenox grimaced. It was true—Chadwick had cost them a few of their steadiest clients. “This is why it's quite right that Polly is in charge,” he pointed out to Dallington. “Best to have a pessimist making the decisions.”

“I'm not a pessimist!” cried Polly. “A realist, perhaps.”

“Are you not pleased that the
Daily Mirror
called you ‘fetching,' then?” asked Dallington.

“I'll quit if you mention that again.”

Muller was in dock; the newspapers agreed that he wasn't likely to serve a long sentence, since murder would be near impossible to prove, and a half-emptied sachet of arsenic had been found among Miss Schiller's effects at the Hotel York. More than that, the palace had a strong interest in a pleasant relationship with Germany, as several of the John Bull–ish rags took pleasure in pointing out.

Lenox and Dallington had been to speak to him twice more, and also been to the Yard to receive Broadbridge's brusque praise. (Most of that credit they pushed toward Nicholson, who looked likely, all fingers crossed, to be promoted on the strength of running Muller to ground. It would be valuable to have a chief inspector among the agency's friends.) It was true that the three detectives had become briefly famous recently—to such an extent that even the Monomark papers had given them a few terse mentions, because it would have looked odd had they not.

But would it translate into income? That was the devilish thing about business, Lenox had discovered—never knowing quite whether the blend of publicity and word of mouth and good work would come together to create something that might be sustainable. If they sacked Mayhew he would probably be outraged, given how the business had hummed since Muller's capture. What he couldn't know was the difficulty of living by the books.

Let nobody say that Lenox, as he approached fifty, couldn't learn new ways.

“Not spectacular,” said Polly again, glaring at the paper. “I really would like spectacular.”

She was their best chance of spectacular. He glanced over at Dallington, who was staring at her with unconcealed fondness, and thought that perhaps the notion wasn't unique to him. “Let's give it two weeks,” said Lenox. “We have quarterly payments coming in from Deere and Steele. Then we can decide about the staff.”

Polly nodded. “Fine. Next order of business, then. Dallington, have you spoken to your friend at Bonhams about looking at my client's porcelain collection? She is adamant she has been defrauded.”

Lenox only half listened to Dallington's reply to the question, sitting back in his chair, turning his head to look through the window at the snow that was still falling outside. He'd accept Graham's offer to come out with him that night and follow Smith, he thought. Not far from Parliament there was a prison called Tothill. In another country, where criminals were held far away from the footpaths of respectable daily life, that would have seemed odd—but in London, the prisons were as integrated into the streets as surely as the banks and the baths. With any luck, Smith would be behind the bars of a cell there before the calendar turned over to 1877.

 

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

“Take my word for it, the great thing with a Smoking Bishop is to use
oranges,
not lemons,” said James Lenox, who was twenty-two, and consequently knew everything. “It's much finer that way. And first you put cloves in the oranges and roast them over a fire.”

The debate was on the verge of growing heated. “You must be mad,” Edmund said. “Lemons are the most important ingredient of a Smoking Bishop.”

“Surely wine is the most important ingredient,” said Lady Jane.

Just to cause trouble, Lenox said that he had heard of making it with Rhine wine—and then it was called a Smoking Archbishop. James nodded and said you could also make it with raisins and burgundy and that was called a Smoking Pope. He was about to continue when Edmund, running his hands through his hair and looking ready to move into Calloway's cottage and dedicate his life to silent study, said that it was his house and the wassail would be made with lemons—that was all.

This was Christmas at Lenox House, and though all of them missed Molly, they were making a fair fist of it. There was going to be a little party that evening. Everything was planned for it except the punch, which was what they were debating in the most beautiful room of Lenox House, which stood at the corner of its L-shape, with enormous windows looking over the pond and the front avenue. There were life-sized portraits along one wall, and above them a small minstrels' gallery where musicians might sit. The floor of this particular was always beeswaxed and shining, and Edmund and Lenox had often passed the time playing badminton here in their formative years, until they broke a window and had been whipped for it, after which they had played in the stable.

Lady Jane, Lenox, and Sophia had been here two days. That afternoon, after the punch debate was finally settled, they had gone into town and walked around the market—a notable one, because people saved their fattest gooses and gleamingest trinkets for this time of year, an especially cheerful day—and only thirty or forty people had congratulated him on moving back to the country, which he considered progress.

On the way home he took Jane and Sophia to the turnoff where he and Edmund had waited every morning for the mail coach—known as the mails—to pass, usually just after nine o'clock, driven by Fat Sam, a jovial figure in a crimson traveling shawl. Lenox could vividly remember the cart's four strong dray horses, so familiar that when one was replaced he had spotted it half a mile down the road.

“What a thrilling boyhood you had,” said Lady Jane. “How did you stand the excitement?”

“It
was
exciting, too, I'll have you know,” said Lenox. “For one thing it meant news from London. It was painted on white pasteboards they hung alongside the coach. I can still remember when they announced that King William died. I was ten, I think, or thereabouts. It was Edmund and I who broke the news to the chaps at the Bell and Horns. Everyone gathered in the square. I remember all the men removed their hats, and the women were crying.”

“Funny, I remember my father coming into the nursery to tell us the King had died,” said Lady Jane. “And he never came to the nursery.”

Lenox had followed after Fat Sam that day—his usual smile nowhere to be seen—and seen him accept a “pint of wet,” the dark local ale, from Lenox's father's butler, then hand across the mail and the London newspapers, which had been full of Victoria's somber reaction to the death of her uncle: grief, respect, reluctant readiness to take the throne.

“It's true, then?” one of the men at the Bell and Horns had asked.

Fat Sam had nodded. “Which we a'had the news at the Swan just afore we left. Erased the boards and wrote um again meself.”

The Swan had been, to the Lenox brothers, a place of legend—the Swan with Two Necks, the famous coaching inn of Lad Lane, where the mails departed from before dawn each day. In Lenox's mind, back then, London had been little more than a street containing the Swan, Buckingham Palace, a few street urchins (these had always been held out to him as an example of his great good fortune, and therefore the especial awfulness of his disobedience), and perhaps a large stone bridge, London Bridge. Though of course, that had been replaced, just a year or two before—after six hundred years as the city's symbol of itself.

Long-ago days! Now he had lived in London for twenty-five years himself, and probably passed the Swan a hundred times, going to and from the scene of a crime or a witness's house. As they walked away from the turnoff, he looked down at Sophia, splashing in the puddles (after weeks of snow, it was unseasonably warm now) and wondered what her memories of childhood would be like. That was an unexpected joy of fatherhood: It was living a second time, in a way.

It was just after four when they returned to Lenox House from the market. It was draped with pine garlands and wreaths, festooned with red ribbons, had candles in every window—a credible imitation of Molly's old decorations, whose exact placement James and Edmund had spent many hours squabbling over in the last few days.