“Did you know that the Chinese — well, of course they wouldn’t have the constellations the Greeks set out, the bears, the dippers, Orion, would they? I’d never thought of it before. Instead they have what they call the Twenty-eight Mansions of the Moon, I learned recently. Really rather interesting. At the moment you’re looking at the White Tiger of the West. More specifically its neck, or at any rate what they call its neck.”
“I can’t claim to see the resemblance.”
“No, and the Black Tortoise of the North is less like a tortoise than anything I ever gazed upon. With a little imagination the Vermilion Bird of the South comes good, however.” Freddie chuckled. “The Chinese. Funny to think of them, for the last few thousand years, seeing the stars we see, but spotting such different things there.”
“They saw animals, too.”
“Yes. I wonder whether that means it’s a human need, the fact we all see animals in the sky.”
“Or a human superstition.” Lenox paused. “How were Weston’s people, then?”
“He was well loved. What have you and Oates discovered?”
Lenox described, in brief, the series of interviews he had conducted. Frederick laughed at the encounter with Carmody. “I’ve always had half a mind to go meet these boys of Covent Garden, next time I’m at the flower show,” he said. “I wonder if they’ve ever heard of him at all.”
“Nonetheless his story is suggestive.”
“Then you think it was outsiders who committed this terrible crime?”
“I can’t imagine it likely that Carmody should take that route so often, two or three times a week, without great incident, and then on the night a lad is murdered on the town green, happen by sheer coincidence to find two abandoned horses to be standing in his way.”
“It is a danger to confuse correlation with causation.”
“Just so, and I don’t rule out that it might be randomness at work. Especially because the motivation of these two horsemen is obscure to me. Why would they want to kill Weston? And what does it have to do with these petty crimes in the town?”
“I’m wholeheartedly glad you’re here,” said Frederick. “Though I fear it will do your speech little good, to investigate this crime.”
“No matter.” Lenox found that he meant this: Compared to the visceral urgency of the case, the noble, papery pursuits of Parliament seemed insignificant. He couldn’t deceive himself that it was otherwise. “Tell me, Freddie, do you think Jane and Sophia should go?”
“To London? I think they’ll be safe in the house and the gardens.”
“Perhaps a word with your staff—”
“Nash has already spoken to them. All the verticals are to be on the lookout while they work, and the gates and doors are to be triple-checked by the horizontals.”
The outdoor staff had vertical stripes on their waistcoats, the indoor staff horizontal ones. “That puts my mind at ease,” said Lenox.
“What is your next course of action?”
“I mean to have a word with that man Musgrave. After that … well, I would like to see Mr. Weston’s charwoman.”
“Mrs. Simmons? I dropped in on her this evening, the poor soul.”
That was Frederick Ponsonby: quiet, in his way, but full of surprising knowledge and of deep consideration for others. Lenox felt a burst of love for him, not unmingled with a burst of love for his mother, who shared those two qualities. “How did she seem?”
“Devastated. I think she mothered him. His own mother is dead.”
“So I learned. Did you ask Mrs. Simmons if she knew anything, had seen anything?”
“Gently, yes. She kept repeating that Weston was in a very high mood yesterday afternoon — very excitable.”
“I wonder why.”
“She didn’t know. It may be nothing. It’s all the information she had, anyhow, though of course you have a better idea of how to speak to people when — in circumstances like these.”
“Yes.”
“Speaking of poor souls, by the by, you’ve provided me with a new houseguest?”
Lenox smiled ruefully. “I’m sorry for that, I am.”
“I suppose it’s all right. Can I ask—”
Lenox set forth, then, with straightforward honesty, Dallington’s character and history. His cousin listened carefully, his stare growing hard. Lenox rather trailed off. “If you wouldn’t mind, for a day or two …”
Frederick was kind, but he had the sharpness and shortness of a squire about him, too, on occasion. “Damned nuisance,” he said.
“I know it.”
“You’re coming it a bit high, filling my house with the dregs of every London gin house.”
“I can only apologize.”
“Ah, well.” Freddie showed the hint of a smile. “We can always set ’im to gardening, I suppose. Rodgers would like that.”
Lenox’s next stop was to see Dallington himself. The young man had sent him a note earlier in the evening, rather formal in tone, requesting a moment of his time. Lenox was in no hurry to see Dallington — still felt too vexed by the lad’s behavior, and its timing — but he decided it was best not to spoil his sleep by putting the meeting off till morning.
As if by way of censure Frederick had chucked the boy into the house’s least comfortable rooms. These belonged to an airless warren built many centuries before, when glass was a dear commodity, and were generally only just less warm than Hades. No question of a draught, anyhow. The ceilings, ancient and wooden, were the perfect height for even a small man to bang his head at every lintel. The fireplaces smoked.
Dallington sat up in an armchair, wrapped heavily in a dressing gown despite the heat of the room. His things had followed him down to Plumbley by the train — McConnell’s work, very likely — and he was reading from a novel, different perhaps in quality but not in kind of those beloved by young Weston, about an orphan who is discovered to be a countess.
“Hello, John,” said Lenox.
“Charles, how can I—”
“Are you quite comfortable?”
“Yes, very.”
“You’ve eaten?”
“Yes.”
“And has Dr. Eastwood visited you?”
“Not yet, but I know my constitution well enough. There’s no grave danger to my health at present.”
“Very well. I shall bid you good evening, in that case, and—”
“Oh, damn it, Charles, leave off the stern fathering. I’ve had it from everyone a day or more older than since I was in short pants.”
Lenox paused. “You’ve heard something of the case?”
The moral superiority in a conversation can shift very quickly. Dallington blanched, perhaps sensing that it had now. “Yes. May I help?”
“No, thank you. You heard of the timing of my trip to London, too, then?”
“You would scarcely have been on the town green at two in the morning if you weren’t in London, Charles,” said Dallington. Yet his voice was unpersuasive.
“It’s impossible to say where I might have been.”
“Come, now, I feel badly enough—”
“That is an easy way to feel after the fact.”
Dallington sighed, and set his book down. He took a sip from the glass of water on the table next to him, then leaned forward, face earnest. “I am in your debt, I know,” he said. “It was boredom, that was all. And seeing the wrong people at the wrong moment of boredom.”
“And the women?”
“Charles. Please, let me help with the case.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Lenox. “And now I must say good night.”
“Charles, I—”
“Good night.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Lenox went out riding on the house’s chestnut hack again the next morning. He hoped it would be a full day so he only rode for thirty minutes or thereabouts, but the exercise and the crisp wind flushed all the commotion out of his mind, and he returned feeling vigorous, revived.
The groom, a dark-haired man named Chalmers nodded at him as Sadie ambled into the stables. “How far did you take her, sir?” he asked.
“There are orchards a mile or two west of here?”
“Aye, McGinniss’s apples. Famous cider.”
“She’s a graceful jumper.”
“Isn’t she, though, sir?”
Lenox looked up at the high trees that fringed the gardens of the great house and circled the lake, all of them beginning to shift from green into orange and red. He could smell a fire. “I took an apple.” He pulled it from his pocket. “The temptation was very great.”
“You’re not likely to be the last,” said the groom, straight-faced.
Lenox smiled, handing the reins over. “Perhaps I’ll go confess to the magistrate.”
“See you again tomorrow, sir?”
“I hope you shall. If I’ve time I’d like to ride again.”
He went inside, rabid with hunger; according to his pocket-watch it was still shy of eight in the morning. He heaped a shaky pile of marmalade onto a piece of toast from the toast rack and champed it, pouring himself coffee from a silver pot as he chewed. There was always the freshest milk at Everley, and just as he was thinking it was his favorite part of visiting, he remembered the riding, and the clear air, and the happiness of the tumbling dogs about his feet, and, though an ardent Londoner, found himself thinking: Is there any reason we should not live in the country?
Just as he was committing a violent attack on a second piece of toast Miss Taylor walked in. She was the last person in creation before whom one wanted to appear at any disadvantage, and hurriedly he brushed the crumbs from his lips.
“Good morning,” he said. “I trust you’re quite well?”
“Yes, thank you,” she said.
“Will you join me for a bite?”
“Thank you, I will.” She went to the sideboard and took a plate, nodding her thanks to the attendant behind the chafing dishes, and started to spoon decorous quantities of egg and kedgeree onto it. She paused when she reached the kippers, and turned. “Sophia is with Lady Jane,” she said.
“I had surmised as much, but I thank you.”
The governess permitted herself a softening kind of smile. “I didn’t like you to worry.”
“Most considerate.”
She arrived at the table and sat down, Lenox standing to help her into her chair. “You take coffee, Mr. Lenox?”
“In the mornings, exclusively. I learned that aboard a ship. I used to take tea at every hour of the day, but nothing cuts the salt out of the air like a bracing cup of coffee.”
“For my part I find tea too mild before noon.”
“Will you allow me to pour you a cup of this coffee, then?”
“Oh, thank you.”
Again she smiled and Lenox apprehended, with a sense of surprise, that he liked this young woman, her grave, quiet manner, her seriousness. She had arrived with a fearful reputation for seriousness — the rudiments of Hebrew, competent to teach dancing without a master — and had cowed him for some while, but in the past weeks she had slipped, unnoticed, into his affections. “Are you quite comfortable?” he asked.
“I am,” she said, “and I feel singularly fortunate to walk Sophia in these beautiful gardens.”
“D’you know, when we were children, my brother and I used to dig up the flowers, simply to annoy the gardener. He threw a trowel at Edmund once, with my hand to God I swear it. Nearly took his head off.”
“It was too kind a punishment for the two of you, if the gardens were anything like this,” she said.
Lenox laughed. “My uncle still might toss me in a cell, if he found out. Have you had a chance to speak to him about the flowers? I can promise you an uninterrupted monologue of three or four hours if you would like one.”
“I haven’t spoken to him, no,” she said.
Governesses were often in a precarious position, Lenox understood, lying as they did somewhere between the staff and the masters, but now he perceived for the first time that Miss Taylor, whom he and Jane had striven to make feel welcome in Hampden Lane, might nevertheless feel that prejudice. “I hope you feel free to meet anyone here on — on equal terms,” he said, haltingly and in truth without much tact.
“Yes,” she said.
“I mean to say—” but he knew well enough now to stop himself. “I don’t think I ever heard where you were from in the first place?”
“My family lived in Berkshire, just outside the village of Crowthorne.”
“I passed through it once.”
“It was a lovely place to grow up,” she said. Then, perhaps sensing the question he hadn’t asked, she added, “My mother and father died a year apart, when I was thirteen.”
“I’m so very sorry.”
“My father was a gentleman,” she said, her voice rather rushed, “and I was raised as a gentleman’s daughter, but unbeknownst to us he had financial difficulties — some peculiarities in a business dealing — and it left me with something under sixty pounds a year. With the help, I may say the begrudging help, of an uncle, my father’s brother, I went to Miss Crandle’s school, where I helped teach the younger children to earn my keep.”
“How difficult it must have been.”
“No!” Her cheeks were suffused with a red color. She took a sip of coffee to steady herself. “No, I was very happy there, indeed.”
“And you learned much,” said Lenox, smiling at her.
“Exactly so. No, I have been fortunate, very fortunate, and now I do what I love best and look after children.”
“To happy endings,” he said, and raised his cup.
She smiled and raised hers. “To happy endings.”
Sixty pounds a year! What enormous strength this young woman must have had, to be left with such a pittance upon which she might live and to fashion out of it, through industry, through her natural gifts, the career she had! It filled Lenox with admiration, and, rather more obscurely, with guilt. The story also made him wonder whether it was primarily shyness and not severity that had held her tongue — though he remembered, too, being sharply checked by her when he did something incorrectly about his daughter.
They passed the rest of the breakfast in friendly conversation. Just as they were leaving the room, Dallington arrived; he bowed to Lenox, stiffly, and to the governess with slightly more ease. Seeing him, a shadow of worry passed across Lenox’s mind. He wondered if he had been too hard on the lad, too astringent, and he wondered if it was in part because he didn’t want to cede any of his claim to the case.
“May I have another cup of coffee with you, Dallington?” he asked.
“Certainly.”
“Miss Taylor, please tell Lady Jane I’ll cut along to see her and Sophia shortly, if you wouldn’t mind?”
When Dallington had piled a plate high with food — his appetite was a good sign, Lenox thought — he came to the table. “First allow me to say—”
“No, drop it, leave it. Listen, though — there’s a Frenchman called Fontaine, whom I met a few days ago …” Lenox elaborated for Dallington now upon the scant facts the lad had heard about the murder, telling him about the vandalisms, the two horses Carmody had seen, the note in Weston’s ticket pocket, all of it. “But I can’t shake this man Fontaine from my mind. Why did he beat his wife on an arbitrary Tuesday morning? Why did he have enough money in his pocket to run riot over half of Bath?”
“You think it’s connected,” said Dallington, ignoring his food.
“I don’t know. But as I concentrate on the murder, if you could—”
The young man stood up. “I’ll go now.”
“No, no. Finish eating first. You need the strength. You still look pale.”
“Well, just after breakfast, then.”
During that meal Lenox, a man with a forgiving heart, forgave Dallington. But the juxtaposition of his self-indulgence, a young man who had been given everything, with the austere self-discipline, the breadth of spirit
, that he discerned in the young governess, would linger in his mind through the days and weeks that followed. No particular sense of judgment obtained to the comparison: only that constantly self-renewing sensation all intelligent people feel, of wonder and surprise at one’s fellow man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Oates arrived at the great house not long after breakfast adjourned. “Have you that note?” he asked. “The one in Weston’s pocket?”
Lenox nodded. “Has it rung a bell?”
The constable, stoutly, said, “I don’t know that I was myself last night. Perhaps if I could see it again.”
“Yes, sit and have a think while I speak to Freddie.”
Lenox had expected his cousin to look exhausted, but perhaps the local certainty of his fragility had been overblown; he looked galvanized, ready to fight. “Shall we collar him today, Charles?”
“I hope we may.”
“How can I be useful?”
“You know of Carmody’s tale, about the two horses?”
“Yes.”
“I should have asked him for a more detailed description. Perhaps you could have someone do that, while Oates and I inspect the spot in the wood to which he referred. After that we shall call on Musgrave, but if you would spread the word about, to see if two riders have been spotted at any of the coaching inns — perhaps, for instance, the cart drivers who frequent these roads might have noticed them.”
“Very well.”
“On top of that I would like another canvas of the town green. Someone, besides Carmody, must have seen something, someone who had been in the pubs, perhaps. I can do it myself, but it will take time. Would the pub owners help us?”
“They will,” said Frederick.
Lenox rose. “Good.”
“The vandalisms — they must be linked to his death, mustn’t they?”
“I think so, yes. I think they were darker in nature than I suspected.” He nodded decisively. “Very well. We’ll reconvene here this evening.”
When Lenox went back to find Oates, the officer was sitting, brow knitted, the note loose and forgotten in the fingertips of one hand. “Anything?” said Lenox.
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