A Death in the Small Hours clm-6

by Charles Finch

“It’s very beautiful,” the governess said soberly, gazing upon its littoral calm.

  “Well, she’s not bad,” murmured Frederick, but his tight lips showed that the comment had pleased him.

  Indeed Everley was famous in Somerset, famous even in England, among the people who knew of such things, for its serene loveliness. It had none of the grandeur of a palace, or of the great medieval castles — it was only two stories — yet it had a beauty all its own.

  In color and build it looked something like an Oxford college, made of the same honey-colored stone, which looked beautiful no matter how the light struck it; it was in the shape of an open-ended square, with a medieval hall at one end, dating from 1220, and opposite that a matching Tudor hall. The front was more recent, dating to the reign of Queen Anne, and had two rows of four great windows and a large archway that led to a grassy inner courtyard. Ringed around it were small gardens with gravel paths, not grand but perfect in their beauty; Frederick tended them very carefully. The whole picture was one less of uniform imagination, like Chastworth or Castle Howard, than of a modest, gradually evolving, lived-in place. Yet the effect, between the pond and the quiet gardens and the house itself, was one of almost supernal beauty.

  “It looks as if a nobler race than ours made it,” said Miss Taylor.

  “You are very kind and I welcome you,” said Frederick. “You must admire it later, at length — for now I imagine all of you want tea.”

  “Oh, badly,” said Lenox.

  Soon they had been deposited in their rooms, complete with their luggage. He and Jane had a timbered-ceiling sort of hall with at one end a slim window of pink stained glass, which discouraged the light very beautifully against the walls. It was the oldest part of the house.

  That evening they all ate supper together, Sophia coming in for a visit just beforehand. Afterward Lenox and Frederick retired to the latter man’s small library, a tiny half-moon — shaped room, cluttered with odds and ends, very comfortable for reading. It had just enough space for two chairs and a bottle of port. The rosewood table between the chairs held a chessboard.

  “A game?” said Frederick, pouring the port into two glasses.

  “With pleasure.”

  He lit his pipe and opened with his queen’s knight. “Well, Charles, I sent you that note without any very great hope that you would come, but here you are.”

  Lenox smiled. “Thank you for having us all. I’ve missed it. Hold for a moment — what is this smile you’re giving me? You look as if you have a secret.”

  “No, no. Only I wonder what brought you down here?”

  “What can you mean?”

  “Was it that postscript of mine? There, yes, put out your pawn, I’ll take him soon enough.”

  “I was intrigued by it, of course, but I came down because—”

  “No, I’m only having fun with you. I know you would come oftener if ever you could.”

  Besides his servants Frederick lived alone; Lenox did wonder whether he grew lonely. “Of course I would.” He moved. “In fact I shall come more often. You don’t know how it’s been, with Jane pregnant, that trip to Egypt—”

  “Yes, the reports of it reached me in the Times. And your letter, of course, telling me you were safe long after I knew it.” The older man chuckled. “Old Rudge, the farmer who lives on the county line, wouldn’t believe you were my own cousin.”

  “We shall have to call on him.”

  “He’s a curmudgeon — would think you a charlatan, I don’t doubt. There, I told you I would have your pawn.”

  “Though it means I take your knight.”

  “Damn your eyes,” he said good-naturedly. “But I may have some plan? No, I look over the board and see that I do not — I thought I had — but no. Still, let’s follow the game through. Neither of us is very good, or likely to set the world afire with our brilliance, but it passes the time.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  They played on in silence. When Frederick finally spoke again his face had grown more serious. “I’ll tell you why I’m glad you’ve come down, however. I’ve some news I had rather tell you in person.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m passing Everley on to Wendell.”

  Lenox laughed. “Is that so?”

  “I’m quite serious, Charles.” The older man looked obstinate. “I plan to do it some time in the next eighteen months, in fact.”

  Wendell was the eldest son of Frederick’s first cousin. He was a moon-faced, respectable, surpassingly dull soul, a barrister at Gray’s, and Everley had been his due from birth — but not until his cousin died. Lenox felt the disorientation of a sharp shock. It was impossible to imagine Everley otherwise than it had been, and impossible to imagine Wendell appreciating Everley’s charms — he was a man full of the same romance and poetry as a fair-sized rock.

  “I pray you aren’t ill?”

  “No, but I am old.”

  “You’re not yet sixty. I don’t call someone old until they’re eighty-five, these days, and even then I have a look at the withers.”

  Frederick smiled. “No, I’m not sixty, not for a month, and there’s a bit of youth in me yet, but I feel a great strain in taking care of Everley — to be alone here, to be responsible. I am tired, Charles, heartily tired.” As he said this, the squire’s incipient old age suddenly showed in his eyes. “Wendell has a large family, a good wife. He will be happy here.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I’ll buy a house in the village, I imagine. At first I thought it ill-mannered, to stay so close, but I think Wendell won’t mind. He might even let me continue in the gardens — the Ribes Rubrum that Rodgers and I planted are very beautiful this year — and I know he will keep on the staff, if I ask him to.”

  “Freddie, you cannot—”

  “Cannot leave? I can, and I shall.”

  “Is this decision financial?” he asked.

  If they weren’t relatives it would have been an inappropriate question; it was still very near to being one. “No.”

  “But Uncle Freddie, how can you leave your library? The card room where the two of us used to play hands of whist with my mother and old Kempe? I cannot understand it.”

  “Your mother would understand it.”

  “Would she?” Lenox was beyond forty now himself, a member of Parliament, but he felt the frustrated anger of a thirteen-year-old. “What about your responsibility to the house?”

  “If I think that responsibility is best discharged by passing it to a good — to a very reliable — gentleman, then that is what I shall do.” Now the squire looked severe. “We might discuss it some other time, but before you say anything else I beg you will consider my position.”

  Lenox, rebuffed, still bewildered, inclined his head. “Very well. I’m glad my daughter has come to stay here, then, though she will not remember it.”

  “There’s no need to find melodrama in the situation, Charles. Wendell would take any number of your daughters in if you asked him to.”

  They played their game of chess on in a tense silence. It was Lenox who broke it. “I suppose you have lived here a long time alone.”

  “Yes, a very long time. I like to believe that I have stood a fine sentry over the house.”

  “There’s no doubt of that.”

  “The gardens, in particular.” Frederick’s face looked softer now. “You aren’t my age, yet, Charles. When you are, you’ll see that it is wiser to make your own decisions than to let time make decisions for you. I hate to think of rotting away here, unable to shift for myself, a burden on everyone.”

  Lenox pondered this. “My reaction was selfish. I suppose I have the attitude toward Everley that some people do toward church. I don’t always go, but it’s a relief to know that I always could.”

  The squire laughed. “Precisely how I felt about leaving. I never thought I would — I love the place too much — but now I find that I would like to do it. Life is strange, I suppose.”

  “Nobody coul
d contradict that.”

  “Shall I show you my final project?”

  “By all means,” said Lenox.

  The older man stood, and beckoned his cousin to his small desk. “Here it is. The Flora of Somerset.”

  “Your book?”

  “Yes.”

  “At long last!”

  “Easy for you to say, my boy! It hasn’t been quick work.”

  Lenox leafed through the loose pages, each of which bore a drawing of a different plant. They were artfully done, and at the bottom of each page was a short description. “Will you publish it?”

  “The horticultural society in Bath is eager to publish it, but I may take it to a London firm. More professional.”

  “Is there not a definitive work on the subject?”

  Freddie shook his head. “Only a penny-pinching little volume from the year ’twenty-eight, by someone called Horace Hargreaves. I don’t think he could have told you a tree from a sheep, to be honest — dozens of mistakes.”

  “I congratulate you.”

  Frederick tapped on the window. It was dark outside, but the silhouettes of a line of trees were visible. “Most of these plants I have managed to cultivate out there, too. A living monument. Another glass of port?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Frederick poured his own. “You’re tired, I’ve no doubt — I should let you retire. Yet—”

  “What is it?”

  “If you are not too upset with me—”

  “Never in life,” said Lenox.

  “Then let us circle back for a moment,” Frederick said, sitting. “I do wish you would give me your counsel, your professional counsel, as it were, on the vandalism we’ve had down in the village. It’s giving the constables a fearful time, and to be frank, people are beginning to grow scared. I don’t like it at all.”

  “Is it as bad as all that? I assumed it would be schoolboys.”

  Frederick shook his head. Outside the wind picked up, rattling the windows. “No,” he said. “I fear it is more mysterious than that.”

  “I would like to hear the facts of the matter.”

  “Tonight?”

  Lenox shrugged. “Why not? Start from the beginning, if you like.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Frederick stood again and began to pace the small room, hands behind his back, brow furrowed. “It began not a few weeks ago, in late August. In a larger town — in Bath, say — I doubt it would have been much remarked at all, or if it were then they wouldn’t have taken it very seriously, but of course Plumbley is a very small village.”

  “Six hundred people as I recall, or thereabouts?”

  “When you were a child, yes. Perhaps nearer eight hundred now. The curate could tell you an exact figure. He’s been collating the parish registers. At any rate, one sees very few unfamiliar faces in the village. Occasionally a traveling salesman of some sort will pitch up and stay at the Royal Oak for an evening, or a sister from London or Taunton will be resident with one of the townspeople for a month’s vacation. Yet I can say with almost perfect certainty that there has been nobody here over the course of the time in which these vandalisms have taken place who is unknown to me.”

  The chessboard forgotten, Lenox slouched back in his chair, eyes sharp and narrow with attention. “What about over the past year, to take a longer view of things? Has there been anyone new come to town during that time?”

  “Captain Josiah Musgrave and his family, yes. He moved into that pretty little house — it has an acre or two attached to it — that Dr. McGrath used to live in, down at the bottom of Church Lane. I’ll come to him.”

  “Pray go on.”

  “You remember Fripp, the fruit-and-vegetable seller? I mentioned him in my letter?”

  “I do. Is his shop still just off the village green?”

  “That’s the one — little place, not much room to move about inside, but it’s by way of being an institution here, not unlike the saddler’s or the butcher’s. Very little change there.”

  “He still has the cricket bat nailed over the door?”

  “Yes, and he’s eager to see your form — but that’s for another time. Here, wait there a moment.”

  “As you like.”

  Frederick stood and went to his cherry-wood desk now, pipe locked into his teeth, and sorted through the rich profusion of papers, books, and old teacups that concealed the desktop beneath them. At last he found what he had been looking for. “There we are,” he said in a quiet voice. “I don’t like to look at it, myself.”

  He passed a piece of paper to Lenox. Upon it, in dark ink, was a stick figure, something akin to a pictograph, of a man hanging by a noose.

  It sent a chill up Lenox’s spine.

  “This was in Fripp’s shop?”

  “In a manner of speaking. One morning Fripp arrived at his shop — he lives with his mother, who is a very ancient personage, on the Mill Lane — and found all of his front windows broken. There were two or three rocks inside that had evidently done the job. A piece of paper was wrapped around one of them with this image upon it.”

  “Crudely drawn.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the original?”

  “No, that’s a sketch, a fairly accurate one, I can confirm, as they sent for me straight away, my being the magistrate.”

  “Was anything taken from the shop?”

  “No — at least, not anything of value. Perhaps they swiped an apple or two as they went, whoever did it.”

  Lenox studied the simple outline of the hanging man. “Not a happy sight.”

  “No, and it frightened the poor man half to death.”

  “I can imagine. He must be close to seventy,” said Lenox. “He was in the shop when I was a boy.”

  “Yes, and his mother well over ninety. They’re a hardy lot, the Fripps, but I cannot blame him for reacting unhappily. There was something horrifying about it, Charles, I swear to you — just a mute picture but I shouldn’t like to gaze upon it again. It had an ominous feel.”

  “Who is the police constable in the village?”

  “There are two: There is Oates, a good man, who’s been in the job twenty years or more, and his new assistant, a boy, not much past eighteen, named Weston.”

  “They haven’t been able to find anything?”

  Frederick sat opposite Lenox again, his amiable face now grave. “Patience. We’re still near enough the beginning of the thing.”

  “Go on.”

  “Fripp was panicked, naturally. He thought it might be a threat of violence — violence at a minimum, in fact, or worse still of murder.”

  “Had he any cause to believe he had enemies?”

  “None. He chaffs the fellows at the King’s Arms, the other pub in town, about cricket, but really, I cannot imagine … anyhow, after that morning a few of the local men set up a watch around Fripp’s house and his shop. That lasted a week. Then the second incident happened, on the other side of town, and rather diverted everyone’s attention.”

  “What was the second incident?”

  “It was identical, only it happened to a different man.”

  “Who, now?”

  “Wells, the grain merchant.”

  “He must be even older than Fripp.”

  Freddie shook his head. “No, you’re thinking of the father, who’s been dead for three or four years. His son runs the shop now, Frank Wells, a lad of only thirty or thirty-two. Means business, though. He has much the most prosperous shop in town, and really the only one in Plumbley that attracts people from other villages, in order that they might buy. He’s built it up to no end from when his father owned it, and it was a rather sleepy place. I’m afraid it’s gone a bit to his head — a gold watch chain, a carriage for his mother. Last year they expanded the building, that high-beamed Tudor place on the corner of St. Stephen’s Street. It was a hellish noise, and caused a great fuss because he brought men in from Bath to do it, rather than hiring locally. Ironic, you see.”

/>   “And the crime was the same?”

  “Yes. All the windows broken, rocks found inside the shop, one of them wrapped in a paper with the same drawing. This time whoever had done it took something of value out of the shop, however.”

  “What?”

  “A brass clock that sat above the doorway. It was there in his father’s day, too. Frank Wells minded that far more than the windows.”

  Lenox’s brow was furrowed, the beginnings of half a dozen ideas in his mind. “What did Oates and Weston make of it, your constables?”

  “That the criminal was emboldened at going free after the first vandalism.”

  “What do Fripp and Wells have in common? But no — perhaps you’d better finish by telling me about the crimes. How many of them were there in all? If they can be called crimes?”

  “If they can be … certainly they are crimes! I would give the man who did it thirty without the option today, if I could. But to answer your question there have been four, the most recent not five days ago.”

  “Was the third crime another broken window?”

  “No. This time — you recall the white doors of the church?”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone had painted on them, in black paint, writ very large, a roman numeral: XXII. Twenty-two, as I scarcely need to inform you.”

  “How strange.”

  “Yes.”

  “The curate had it whitewashed immediately. Then, three nights later, this image appeared on the same door.”

  Frederick passed across another slip of paper. Like the hanging man it was eerie: a black dog, very simply drawn, and again with an air of definite menace.

  “And nothing in the last five days?” Lenox asked.

  “No.”

  For some time Lenox was silent. Finally, he said, “It’s bizarre, to be sure, but how can you be sure that it wasn’t schoolchildren all along?”

  The older man sighed, and swirled the last sip of port in his glass before drinking it down. “We congregated, a few of us men who are concerned with the village’s well-being: Mr. Crofts, who has a little land west of here, a very fine gentleman; Dr. Eastwood; Mr. Kempe, who lives now in the old parsonage. There are only thirty-two boys in the village who are of any age to make that sort of mischief. In the end we asked their parents to keep them under lock and key until the problem had been sorted. It seems extreme, I know, but as I said before this is Plumbley, not one of your great cities like Bath, like Taunton. The symbols were very menacing, Charles.”