The Last Passenger - A Prequel

by Charles Finch

  “Why did you accept the meeting?” Lenox asked.

  “One does. If the letters of introduction are worthwhile. It happens a few times a month—usually an American or a Frog. I can’t remember anything about Gilman. You are free to stop in and ask my secretary about his letter though.”

  “I wonder why he thought the Queen would help him,” said Lenox. “She never interferes.”

  “Behind the scenes she does. And she has that absurd goddaughter. Excuse me,” Fry, who had been peering around the room the whole time he and Lenox spoke, suddenly said. “I see someone whom I had promised to visit with.”

  Then, to Lenox’s astonishment, for he’d always thought Fry a tart and unpleasant fellow, he put an absolute beam of happiness onto his face and made in a straight line toward the other side of the room.

  Left alone, Lenox noticed that Lady Jane was not five feet away. He took a glass of wine from a tray and went over to her.

  She turned and both saw Fry approach a group of women, among whom happened to be Kitty Ashbrook. Together they pondered this spectacle together for a few moments.

  “I wonder what it is like to be beautiful, as she is,” said Lady Jane.

  “Gallantry demands both that I insist you are and that I ignore the subject of your appearance entirely, since you are married,” said Lenox. “But—being forced to forfeit one kind of politeness or the other—I will say that you are very beautiful, of course.”

  She laughed. “You’re kind. But a woman knows by the time she’s sixteen what the world thinks of her, down to the eyelash. It is why I hope never to have a daughter. Catherine Ashbrook is unusually beautiful. Watch the room move with her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Watch.”

  Lenox did, and after a moment he perceived, to his astonishment—he, who prided himself on his skills of observation!—that Jane was correct. Conversations shuffled a tenth-step to the left if she moved, drew to the door when she seemed to, or the hearth when she sat.

  “She knows, too, then.”

  Lady Jane narrowed her eyes, considering this. There was no envy at all in her mien. “Most of it, I imagine. Not all.”

  “I had not quite noticed it myself.”

  She laughed. “A very becoming way of telling on yourself—that you hadn’t noticed at all! But now you will value her twice as highly, so I am glad, since I would like to see her often, which I will when you are married.”

  “I valued her before this conversation.”

  “Yes,” murmured Lady Jane. “You did. I’m glad of it. I should also like a good line of credit with your mother.”

  “Yours is probably better than mine with her.”

  “No. She never liked my mother.”

  Lenox frowned. “I don’t think that can be true. They are always so cordial to each other.”

  Lady Jane laughed. “I can only teach you so much about the behavior of my sex in one evening before I shall be forced to charge, Charles.”

  “She looks as if she’s going to marry Fry.”

  Kitty was laughing happily at some joke the dry old stick had told.

  But Jane was having none of it. She turned to him. “Charles Lenox. Can you really be so witless? Miss Ashbrook’s eyes have only followed one person as the room’s have followed her. And that is you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  That absurd goddaughter. After he had gotten home and sat up for a while—so late that he was fairly sure even Graham had gone to bed before him, a rare occurrence indeed—that phrase came back to Lenox.

  It had been Fry who’d said it. And the queen did indeed have a black goddaughter. Her absurdity was a matter of opinion; Lenox had yet to meet a person whose unalterable existence was absurd to them, and he would have to guess that Sara Forbes Bonetta—that was her name, he remembered clearly now from the articles about her, his memory prompted—did not consider her own existence absurd.

  And Fry’s own existence was the very reverse of absurd to him, of course. As was Wilt Sheridan’s: more intimately concerned a thousand times over with the health and lineage of his horses than with that of his father’s slaves in Jamaica. With his waxed mustaches, for that matter—Sheridan.

  The absurd goddaughter had once been a princess in a tribe in Africa. Another tribe had captured and enslaved her when she was five, killing her parents. They had prepared her for human sacrifice. So the story went, at least. Then some Briton in that area had rescued her from this fate and made a present of her to the Queen. (A present! Like a mangosteen, or a porcelain place setting.) She must have been ten or eleven now, and if there was callousness in the young naval officer who had made her a present, at least the girl had lived.

  Lenox wondered if perhaps it was in the favoritism shown this small girl, who lived at court with the full perquisites implied thereby, that Eleazer Gilman’s hopes had resided. He must ask Hollis.

  Lenox was warm in his chill study. Wrapped in a smoking jacket, he had his feet propped up against the ledge of his window. The snow had stopped. Now there was only the eerie emptiness of Hampden Lane beneath cloudless moonlight; ahead, the whispering late hours, his own in which to think.

  After a long time he turned back to his desk, where he had laid out the documents Stevenage had given him. They detailed the activities of the Patriots Abroad (the less respectable of the two groups, or at least the less affluent) and the Knights of America in England (whose rolls included self-exiled merchants of the American middle class).

  Not a very knightish place, America. Wasn’t the premise of the whole project that they no longer had knights? Still, an American had received a lordship from the Queen the year before, by special dispensation, and the time it took to travel between the countries by ship shortened annually. During the revolutionary period the crossing had taken anywhere between six weeks and sixteen, depending on the season and the weather. (That had acted tremendously to the colonials’ advantage.) Now it rarely lasted longer than two. Perhaps one day the countries would be reunited. He tried to imagine as far forward as he could: 1950, say, a time of instantaneous travel, and America and Britain a single nation once more …

  He stopped woolgathering and settled in to read carefully over Stevenage’s useful summaries.

  The Patriots met in some configuration nearly every night in the White Horse Tavern, near Whitechapel. The Knights congregated in a tonier establishment, a restaurant without an official name but generally called the Stilton, where they had a private room and a tun of wine reserved for the second Monday of each month.

  He scanned the names of the members of each group. There were some two dozen Patriots, roughly the same of the Knights. No crossover, nor did any name jump out at him except the unusual ones—a fellow who evidently went through his days encumbered with the name Christmas Byrd, for example. (In a crossword you would have put goose.)

  With a sigh, he began the toilsome labor of cross-matching these names to the ones he and Graham had gathered from the newspapers over the years. He found no matches in the first ten or so names. Then he must have—he supposed—fallen asleep, for when he woke, it was with a confused start. His soft desk chair protested ferociously at the way his body shifted, squeaking beneath him and clattering against the desk.

  After a moment the door opened. “All well, sir?” said Graham—still dressed, of course, bother him.

  Lenox rose, rubbing his eyes, and smiled. “I thought I had stolen a march on you. But perhaps we both ought to get to bed.”

  “It’s rather late, yes, sir.”

  His eye fell on the paper he had been studying. “These are the names of men who may have threatened Gilman.” He sighed. “I feel no tremendous confidence that any of them are involved. But the rope is running out of our hands.”

  The case should be his, he could tell that now; he had enough information that he ought to be able to pick up the scent again, find the sham conductor who had slipped through his fingers, the gray-haired man who had attacked H
ollis and sent Willikens off after buying out his newspapers and tobacco.

  He had the clues. Only he didn’t know where they went.

  “I have been researching Mr. Gilman further, sir.”

  Lenox rubbed his eyes. “Have you? What did you find?”

  “There isn’t a great deal of other information, sir. All of the articles from the papers on file at the British Library were about the declaration of censure he hopes Parliament will pass against America.”

  Lenox nodded, thinking. “I saw his outline of the idea in his journal. He was a determined chap, anyhow.”

  After a brief further exchange, Lenox climbed upstairs to bed, falling asleep quickly and dreaming confused dreams in which Kitty Ashbrook appeared, and then Deere, all of it taking place in a house he could not name somewhere far from his own—a place with a bad feeling in it, in America, perhaps, or India. It was threatening snow, someone told him, someone just behind him and to his left. He saw his father, and then Edmund.

  He woke in the darkest part of the night, overheated in body and mind.

  He went to the window, pulled the curtains apart, and opened the latch slightly. The cool air was an instant relief.

  But a feeling bedeviled him from the dream, which it took him five minutes of total silence, standing before the window, to name: loneliness.

  There were a few flurries in the air again. At some length Lenox saw a figure pass beneath him on Hampden Lane. It was a tall man in decent clothes, certainly not at first glance the type to seem as if he would be out at—Lenox glanced at the clock—three o’clock in the morning. Perhaps something was preying on his mind, too.

  It sent Lenox’s thought to that evening at Paddington. The carriage; the horror of the strong young body torn open and slumped over. The stationmaster. Hemstock. The labels. And that blasted false conductor, fooling them all and making away as cleanly as you please on—

  And in that instant, just as the man walking below slipped beyond view, Lenox’s instincts came alive. Quickly he drew the window shut, locked it, then took the stairs to his study as quietly as he could manage, a candle in hand.

  He went over to his desk and looked at Stevenage’s report on the Patriots Abroad.

  There it was: the White Horse Tavern.

  Could it be a coincidence? He turned over his own notes, taken from his meeting in Mayne’s office. He found what he was searching for. The porter at the Great Western had reported seeing a solitary man with dark hair leaving on “a bright white horse.” He had been clear on that, Dunn said.

  Those were not so very common. Uncommon in London, actually.

  Lenox gripped the paper, reading the names again. He wanted badly for this theory to be true, which was a warning to be cautious about believing it to be true.

  But it was a coincidence—and in the past five years, he had grown to dearly love coincidences. Or what seemed to be coincidences. They were the coin of his realm. For where he found a coincidence, six times out of ten it was no such thing at all but rather an odd sort of magnetism between two facts, such that the two magnets only had to be drawn closer and closer until they snapped together, seemingly at random—as if by coincidence.

  The white horse, the White Horse Tavern. It struck him as very definitely possible that the way the murderer had departed had been a purposeful statement—of whatever dim ideas they had about racial purity (a white horse) and their own trumped up notions of symbolism.

  He sat back, thinking about the Americans, trying to collect himself. He had always wanted to visit America, Lenox. He imagined it as a strange hybrid beast: a place that in some ways—fashion, importance, money—was still a colony subordinated to England, but in others a vast empire that seemed, between its promise of land and opportunity, certain to surpass this country. A strange place, in other words. In New York, he had heard, some of the houses were very nearly as fine as a home in London. But travel not far at all, less than a day, and you could be alone for twenty miles in every direction.

  Standing at the desk, Lenox felt alone for twenty miles in every direction himself—far from the evening before and the dawn to come, far from the person he loved, wherever she might have set her head to rest in this great world, the person he hoped would bear his children, and whom he might still not even have met.

  Far from himself in a way, in that queer hour; for it had stung when that chap from Oxford cut him. It still hurt that any fool with a coal baron’s half-foot in the upper class could look past him because he had chosen this odd profession—which he could scarcely wait to pursue, in his current state of excitement, when the next morning arrived.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Night two. Hemstock looked wistful, as if he wished it had been he to draw the duty of sitting in a pub. Instead, for the second evening in a row, he, Lenox, and Graham were in a coffeehouse directly across the street from the White Horse Tavern, hoping, in Lenox’s case with mounting desperation, that something would happen.

  The snow was gone. It had risen as high as fifty degrees that afternoon, though the mercury was quickly dropping back toward freezing, and the puddles in the muddy carriage tracks on the street had begun to harden and craze.

  “Another round of coffee?” Graham asked after a long period of silence, rising.

  It was nine o’clock. “Not for me,” said Hemstock.

  There were five of them on the job in total at the moment. Three here, and two others being paid out of the Yard’s coffers.

  One was Walter Swain, the impoverished young apple picker who had ridden on the 449 between Tamworth and Nuneaton. He was sitting in a slouch hat and his own clothes—none too clean—in a table in the window of the White Horse.

  On the windowsill next to him was a short stub of candle. If he saw the man who had been passing himself off as the conductor—the murderer of Norman Haase and Eli Gilman—Swain was to light it.

  The other was little Willikens, who had temporarily given up his post at Paddington. (He had protested that his business would suffer, and so Lenox’s own footman was selling the newspapers and tobacco from Willikens’s cart, telling anybody who asked that he was an older cousin, covering for Willikens while he had the rheum.)

  The boy was seated by a hot potato cart outside. Lenox’s snack outside Scotland Yard had given him the idea of hiring it. He was wrapped in a new rough-hewn suit of clothes and coat he had chosen for himself, each at his insistence several sizes too large, and sticking close to the warm grate over which the potatoes were baked and buttered. If he saw the gray-haired man who’d bought his stock on the day of the murder, he was simply to come inside the coffee shop and tell them.

  Dunn—off somewhere pursuing his own leads, related to Carel Seamen and the man called Lyman or Liman—had wanted no part of this business. Mayne had been hesitant, too, until he was won over by the enthusiasm of Stevenage, who had said that in fact the members of the Patriots Abroad did keep two white horses at the White Horse Tavern, proud fools that they were. Whether they represented racial purity, or nothing at all, or some confused muddle of the two (which seemed most likely) was unclear.

  “One more whole night of this again tomorrow,” said Hemstock gloomily.

  Lenox didn’t reply right away. They had been here between 8:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. the evening before, with one of Stevenage’s constables. He had confirmed at least nine members of the gang by sight—he was local—but neither Swain nor Willikens had spotted their man.

  Nor had Lenox, of course. His eyes were constantly tracking the street for the charlatan conductor.

  He realized that he must do something to lift Hemstock’s spirits. Graham was at the counter, ordering coffee and, from the look of it, toasted cheese.

  “Tell me,” Lenox said, “if you weren’t at the Yard, what do you think would you do, Hemstock?”

  “I? What a question.”

  “Only wondering.

  “Well. I should like to run a country inn.”

  “A country inn?” Lenox
mused on this for a moment. “Yes, that seems a nice life.”

  “Seems, to be sure,” Hemstock said, pointing a pudgy finger in the air as if he had caught Lenox in a fallacy, and sitting up higher in his chair. “But consider this: When have you met an innkeeper whose wife didn’t run him very close—nag him from drinking his own beer, at that?”

  “They do exist, probably.”

  “Yes.” Hemstock sighed. He sat back in his chair again, as if his dream had gone in a puff. “And not a murder in sight.”

  “Do you dislike murders?”

  Hemstock looked at him as if he were insane. “Yes. I jolly well do.”

  “Well, I know that. We all dislike murders. But do you dislike solving them, being involved with them?”

  “Why do you think I came to you for help?” asked Hemstock. He shook his head, bewildered. “Cor. Your type. Dunn. I’ll never understand you lot.”

  It was only at this exchange that Lenox thought again that Hemstock wasn’t necessarily lazy, or stupid—though he was both in at least some measure. He was mostly just badly out of place.

  “You might quit.”

  “Yes, any day I expect to inherit a great fortune,” said Hemstock, gazing across the street at the window where Walter Swain sat. “I can hardly wait.”

  (It was lucky for them that Swain fit so seamlessly among the White Horse’s clientele, which drew from three categories: members of its ownership, the prostitutes they managed, and down-and-outers with a penny or two in hand. Swain, in the character of the last, was drinking cider rather than gin to keep his head moderately clear. So he told them, anyway. He had proven trustworthy so far, but few Londoners could be trusted to stay too sober alone in a bar for five hours with an unlimited budget and no company. Few humans, in all likelihood.)

  “It can’t cost very much to set up as an innkeeper.”

  “No, I have the savings by,” Hemstock admitted. “But once they’re spent, they’re spent, you know—can’t come back. If you fail, you’re back to being a young jack, traded out.”