The Last Passenger - A Prequel

by Charles Finch

  “Only since his turn to politics. I think it surprised him to win his seat, but once he did, he wrote to me immediately—I was in Maine then, working on my autobiography, on the strength of an advance from a publisher in Boston—and proposed the trip. I accepted.”

  “I hear a great deal of Portland, Maine,” said Lenox in a careless manner—a gentleman of the world.

  Hollis looked surprised. “Then you can count yourself better informed than I am. I have never been.”

  “Is Portland not a—one of the great cities of America?” Lenox asked.

  “I would not necessarily call it one of the great cities,” said Hollis.

  Graham and his blasted rum riots. “Oh. Well. Is the autobiography complete?”

  “Nearly so,” said Hollis. “I came here hoping to seek its publication in London. It would be a financial boon. I was supposed to meet with a gentleman in Drury Lane yesterday.”

  “Have you written him?”

  “Not yet.”

  They sat in silence for some while, Lenox gazing out at the streets. They halted near the Strand for a while as two men in soft caps endeavored to shift a large crate onto its side. Evidently it had fallen off a dray. They finally managed it, only for the part that had been facedown in the muddy street to spring open, revealing dozens and dozens of black silk hats, a waterfall.

  Boys darted in and started grabbing them, the men shouted, a constable appeared, activity subsided; the life of a city.

  “Atlanta and Minnesota are very far apart,” Lenox ventured.

  “Yes, that’s true. Since I obtained my freedom I have spent as little time in the Southern states as possible.”

  “For fear of being returned to your—to—”

  “My owner?” Hollis looked at him. “No, sir. I am legally free. I have no owner. But I am conscious of the possibility of recrimination for that fact in the South.”

  And yet he had met it here, not there, Lenox thought. “How did you come to be free?”

  Hollis glanced at a pocket watch—silver, the young detective saw. “That is a long story. I will tell you at some other time, perhaps.”

  Lenox smiled. “And if not, I can read your memoir.”

  The Thompsons greeted them with the information that the march in Hyde Park had now been not canceled but postponed. Another blow for Hollis. The organizers of the London Anti-Slavery Society feared another attack, Mr. Thompson said. They proposed instead a series of salons before Hollis left again for America.

  “I had thought to leave by the earliest ship.”

  “I can see why,” said Mr. Thompson. “But I hope we may entreat you to stay.”

  “If I may,” said Lenox, “I would not board any ship upon which you are scheduled to sail until we know what happened. Your assaulter knew you would be at the Greensleeves. He may know what berth you intend to travel by.”

  Hollis saw the sense in this.

  The Society was also planning a full public repudiation of the violence against Gilman in the press, Thompson said, and had printed a second run of his pamphlet, anticipating high demand once it was in the papers, beginning that afternoon no doubt, that he had been murdered: a member of the United States Congress.

  Lenox stayed for a few minutes, but he had much to do, and after his coachman had fetched Hollis’s belongings into the house, Lenox excused himself. As he traversed the town toward Scotland Yard, he reflected upon what he had heard.

  He had thought of the case as belonging to Paddington, being about the peculiarity of a body on a train. But the matter belonged to a much wider sphere—it was, he supposed, an assassination.

  That gave him a chill, and he took out his trusty brown leather notebook. He wrote some words at random as they came to mind—this always helped him—and among them included that one, “assassination.” Eleazer Gilman was perhaps a fatality in the long, undeclared war between the states, South and North, slave and free. Lenox thought of what Edmund had told him about the delicate situation there now. He hoped Gilman would be one of the last fatalities. A peace might come. It all seemed very uncertain, though. By 1856, he supposed, in a couple months’ time, things could look very different indeed.

  These thoughts took him all the way to the Yard. With the permission of the American consulate, Mayne had set aside a desk at the Yard where the two inspectors and Lenox could examine Gilman’s correspondence and journals at their leisure. It was on the busy first floor, where a great deal of administrative work took place. To his surprise, he found Hemstock sitting at the desk, reading.

  “Hello, Inspector,” Lenox said, coming up behind him.

  Hemstock turned. He had a flask in one hand and a letter in the other. “Eh? Oh! Lenox. How are you?”

  “Curious to see what you’ve found,” said Lenox.

  “Not much. There are ten letters in all. Five friendly, three threatening, and two merely confirming meetings. I’ve divided them up.”

  “That’s a good start. Where is Dunn?” asked Lenox.

  “He didn’t tell me where he was going.” Hemstock took a sip from the flask, his belly pushing against the desk as he tipped his head back. “I thought perhaps I’d give these a look before you arrived.”

  Lenox felt a brief flash of sympathy. Hemstock was not unlike some of the boys that Lenox had known at Harrow—heirs to great estates, barely qualified to operate a fried potato cart. It wasn’t Hemstock’s fault that his father had been a hero. The son ought to have been running a pub somewhere into slow, genteel default. In any event he was giving the case his best now.

  “And the journals?” said Lenox.

  Hemstock put his hand on two of these, one blue, one black. The latter had the seal of Congress embossed on it in gold. “One is a diary with his schedule. The other is full of Gilman’s personal experiences. I cannot find anything interesting in either, except that there is a list of the people he had seen in the north and those he intended to see in London.”

  Lenox nodded. “Perhaps I shall start with those, then.”

  “Feel free. I mean to go find myself a bit of grub,” said Hemstock, heaving himself up from the chair. “Take the prime pew.”

  “Thank you, Inspector,” said Lenox.

  “Not at all.”

  Lenox sat down. If Hemstock had stayed even a moment longer, Lenox might almost have told him—out of sheer puzzlement and desire to discuss it—what he had seen at St. Bartholomew’s. As they had been leaving, when Hollis had thought he was unobserved, he had reached out and taken from the front desk an inkwell and a brass pen, not a cheap-looking one, and put them in his pocket. Theft: pure theft.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  An hour and a half later, Lenox thought he had excavated three firm suspects from this modest handful of documents.

  It was quicker than he had any right to expect. He glanced at the clock, eager to get home and talk things over with Graham. Just after two. He was engaged to dine out that evening and wondered if he ought to cancel those plans. No; that would be rude. He tidied the papers, stood, and departed, nodding to one or two men on the way out.

  Leaving the Yard, he discovered that what had dawned as a clear day had turned gray and menacing, with a whipping wind. He pulled his overcoat up around his neck.

  Just outside the Yard was a fellow in a blue serge jacket selling newspapers, tobacco, and baked potatoes. Lenox, who had skipped lunch, stopped and bought one of each.

  “Rain, do you think?”

  “If it don’t turn snow,” the man said, counting change with fingerless gloves.

  “Snow! In October?”

  The man paused and looked up at the sky. “Coin flip’s chance of it,” he said. “In ’49 the whole last week of October was a blizzard. Couldn’t get a cart through the streets, could I? No. And could I sell newspapers? Not to a soul. Hungry December that was.”

  “Then I hope it will only rain,” said Lenox.

  The man handed him his change. Lenox tipped him a farthing, and the man touched
his cap. “Kindly, sir.”

  Lenox hailed a cab; only when he was seated, and chewing his first welcome bite of the warm, salty, buttery potato, did he realize that the newspaper he’d bought was reporting Eleazer Gilman’s death.

  MURDER AT PADDINGTON SOLVED! it announced in a bright headline.

  A bit of a fib, that.

  The papers had amassed a good deal of information on Gilman, however, including several details Lenox didn’t know. (For instance, that an audience at court actually had been arranged for him, possibly even with the Queen.) He read the three articles the paper contained. None mentioned Tiptree or Hollis by name, though one did say, “Gilman had planned to speak at the march in Hyde Park in the company of a former slave, known for his true-life tales of captivity and escape.”

  He stepped down from the hansom at the end of Hampden Lane and walked the few hundred yards up its thin, meandering course to his own house, passing the familiar colorful storefronts on the way, interspersed with rows of quiet houses, each intimately recognizable to him. The flowers had finally been taken in at that of the widow Mrs. Cochran, a green thumb who had lived here thirty years and minded every one of her neighbors’ growing things in addition to her own. Maybe it really would snow. Lenox felt a queer kind of loneliness suddenly, perhaps because of the overcast sky, perhaps because of … well, but what? Then he realized it was the memory of Edmund’s warm, jolly morning room, and the contrast it made to Lenox’s own quiet residence. He was sure it cut both ways—that there were many a father and mother in the houses around his who would have longed for an hour alone in his study with a book and a glass of wine—but in his case it was cutting one way, and it never helped when you knew something cut both ways.

  He thought: Do I want a family? And realized, with a kind of strange and unexpected intensity, that yes, he did.

  Perhaps his mother had intuited before he knew it himself what he would need next in life. Mothers could be like that, irritatingly.

  He went up his steps and inside. To his surprise, he found that his neighbor was in his study, hands in pockets, looking at the bookshelves. “Hello, Deere,” Lenox said, putting down his papers and unfurling the scarf from around his neck. “How are you?”

  “My older friends call me Grey, you know,” said the young lord. “I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

  “Do they!”

  His name was James Grey—but his father had died when he was barely ten, and he had very early in life succeeded him as the 19th Earl of Deere. In the circles in which they moved, an acquaintance with a title was usually called by the title, not the name.

  It was not a problem Lenox faced, of course; he had no title.

  “I was wondering if you wanted a quick game of chess. But I see that you are busy.”

  This was true, yet Lenox realized that Deere (as he went on thinking of him) had never asked him to play before, not so directly as this.

  “Of course,” said Lenox.

  They discussed whether there would be snow as they set up the pieces, and Lenox brought Deere up to date on the case.

  “An audience with the Queen?” said Deere.

  “Yes—and there were no names in his diary that you would not have recognized.” Deere sat in the House of Lords. “Palmerston, Aberdeen, Gladstone, Disraeli, Lewis.”

  “Goodness.”

  “Those are only some. Half the cabinet, half the shadow cabinet. He meant business, Gilman.”

  Deere whistled. Viscount Palmerston was Prime Minister at present. (Parliament was made up of two chambers, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and could draw its ministers from either—Palmerston belonging, as a Viscount, to the former.) He had replaced the Earl of Aberdeen only that January. Sir George Cornewall Lewis was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, an office both Gladstone and Disraeli had previously held as well. Gladstone, for his part, had the unusual distinction of being the MP for Oxford University.

  They began to play their game. “Were you there on Gladstone’s budget day two years ago?” asked Deere.

  “I wasn’t. Why?”

  Deere smiled, looking down at the pieces on the board. “It was memorable. He began his presentation. Very long they are, those presentations. After an hour his private secretary came forward with a silver cup of sherry and a dish with an egg in it. A spoon, too, I suppose. Gladstone put down his speech, beat the egg into the sherry, and drank it very slowly.”

  Lenox laughed. By tradition the only alcohol allowed in the chambers of Parliament was the “budget tipple”—the drink of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s choice, usually something simple like whisky, to see him through a long speech. Even the Queen could not drink in the Parliament. Gladstone, a dry but theatrical soul, had taken advantage of the fact that he could. He would likely be Prime Minister himself, soon enough; in part because of that theatrical flair.

  They played a tight game. Deere liked to castle early and then build a fortification of pawns and bishops, Lenox had learned, before deploying his rooks and knights with a bit more dash. Lenox himself had less strategy: He played the board, which sometimes resulted in fine attacking moments but also often left unexpected vulnerabilities in his back line.

  He would make a poor criminal in this regard, as Deere had pointed out.

  For a few moments Lenox was sure victory was his—he was up a rook—but then one of the young earl’s bishops darted out of its protective shelter to even the board and put Lenox in check, and thenceforth, though they fought it out hard, Deere was fated to be the winner.

  Lenox sighed when he at last knocked over his king. “Well played,” he said.

  “And you. I was careless.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea before the next game?”

  “Ah! Very much.”

  Lenox rang for Mrs. Huggins, who was inordinately fond of the earl, and ordered a pot of tea. Deere lit his pipe, sat back in the comfortable armchair by the window, the small card table between them, and looked out at the gray day.

  Lenox waited patiently. He had interviewed enough witnesses to know when some disclosure was forthcoming. The only dread he had was that it would force him to side in a secret against Lady Jane—something he did not think he could do, as sincerely as he considered both halves of the couple his friends now.

  But he should have known Deere better than that.

  When at last the lord spoke, it was to say, “I’m in a devil of a spot, you know, Lenox. I would appreciate your advice on how I’m to tell Jane something.”

  “What is it?” asked Lenox.

  “It’s my regiment. We’re going to India just before Christmas.”

  Lenox raised his eyebrows. “So soon! I thought you had twelve months.”

  “So did we. But Catlett’s regiment was to go, and he has fallen ill. He asked me as a special favor to take his place.”

  “What a pity.”

  “Yes. It means I shall have two years here when we return, but I do not console myself with that fact—I think Jane shall still be very upset. Besides which, we may be at war then, for all I know, in which case the promise of those two years evaporates.”

  “Could you not take her with you to India?”

  Deere shook his head. “I would not wish to. She is too happy and busy here—and she would come, if I invited her. We should scarcely see each other, and she should have to muddle along with the other officers’ wives—all lovely women, and courageous to come to India, of course. I don’t think Jane would dislike them. But it’s difficult to join an entirely new set of people.”

  “Of course,” Lenox said.

  Deere looked unahppy, pipe in hand, eyes out upon the street. “She’ll kick hard, I imagine,” he said.

  Funny how some men always reverted to the language of horses. Lenox could forgive him, though. Indeed, most military officers wouldn’t have thought twice about their wives when assigned overseas—might have missed them, but wouldn’t have spent time worrying over their feelings. Duty was duty. Deere, t
hough, with his amiable sweetness of spirit, was different.

  “How long will you be gone?” asked Lenox.

  “Five months.”

  “It’s not quite so long as last time.”

  “No, that’s true.”

  “Well—you ask me my opinion. I think you should tell her the situation outright and then take shelter.” He smiled. “I’m afraid you’re in for it.”

  “Ha! Yes, I’m afraid I am. Head-on, then, you think?”

  “Anything else she might well perceive as a condescension.”

  “Hm.” Deere nodded, still staring out the window. Then he looked across the chessboard at Lenox. “Take care of her while I’m gone, would you?”

  “Of course,” said Lenox staunchly. So this was the true reason Deere had come over. “And really, five months, Grey—it will go before you know it. You can celebrate Christmas in May. I don’t think the Savior would take it unkindly, even, a delay like that.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  And then all at once, just past five o’clock, there was a driving snow across all of London.

  Inspector Dunn was predictably displeased. “Don’t see why we had to meet in person,” he said darkly to Hemstock, staring out at the blizzard. “It will take all night to get home.”

  He wouldn’t even look at Lenox. The three of them were waiting—with Graham off to one side—in a handsome marble vestibule outside the office of Sir Richard Mayne, on the top floor of Scotland Yard, which commanded wide views of the river and the south bank. There was already a patchy topcoat of snow on the steeples and chimneys. The sky was ghostly.

  “Did you find anything in Manchester or Liverpool?” Hemstock asked.

  “It was productive,” Dunn said curtly.

  Lenox took that to mean that he had not. He could not help but observe—indeed, it gave him a fierce private pleasure to observe—that the breakthroughs in the case had been his so far. The murdered passenger aboard the 449 from Manchester to London would still be anonymous if not for him. Josiah Hollis undiscovered or dead, in all likelihood. Their pursuit at a thwarted end.