A Death in the Small Hours clm-6

by Charles Finch

  “You live …”

  “Three streets south, on the corner of Maiden Lane. A large white house. My servants”—this word delivered with an inflection of pride—“can attest to my presence there yesterday evening. I was up rather late, past midnight, working on my books, and at least two of them stayed up with me, fetching drinks, managing the fire. They’ll tell you I never left my study.”

  “Is anyone else in the village accustomed to passing time here in the evenings?”

  Wells narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “Perhaps the vicar,” he said. “Or his curate. They have keys to the church at any rate.”

  Lenox paused, now, uncertain of how to ask what he wished to ask next. At last, he said, “Your incident with Captain Musgrave—”

  “Yes?”

  “Was it possible as you saw him to gather anything of Mrs. Musgrave’s mental state?”

  Wells shrugged. “You might say as she seemed unhappy — but then with tales passing around the town like ’flu, it leads to an active imagination.”

  “Confidentially, what have you heard of her mental state?”

  “Nothing of her mental state. Only that she is unhappy — fearfully unhappy — and kept captive in that house.” Wells looked troubled, and Lenox remembered Frederick telling him that Wells had been one of Catherine Scales’s suitors, before she met Musgrave.

  He wondered, as well, if he was duty bound to investigate that scream. Perhaps he would return with Oates.

  For now, though, he bade Wells good day, lifted his hat to Fripp and the women on the church steps — still yattering away, to Musgrave’s bedevilment — and walked to Carmody’s. Carmody provided Lenox with a great deal of unasked-for information about the gentlemen in Covent Garden, as a sort of tax upon entering his home, before finally condescending to hear his question.

  “Which way was Captain Musgrave walking when you saw him at eleven thirty — toward Yew Walk or home, toward Church Lane?”

  “Toward Yew Walk,” said Carmody without hesitation.

  So. It was not a lie, perhaps, but it was an infringement upon the truth. If his walk had been very long he might well have seen — spoken with — even murdered Weston on his way home.

  “Did the bark of a dog ever wake you, that night?” Lenox asked.

  “No,” said Carmody, “and I am a very light sleeper.”

  “Thank you,” said Lenox. “Oates, I shall stop by the police station later today to speak with you.”

  “Sir.”

  He could feel that he was circling closer to the truth. His mind went to Dallington, who would perhaps return that evening with some account of Fontaine’s behavior. Might that prove the key?

  He walked to the bar in a meditative disposition.

  Frederick was sitting at a table in a private room upstairs in the Royal Oak. It was a friendly pub, full of highly polished brass and gleaming oak, with glasses and tankards hung above the bar and a worn sign that said DUCK OR MUTTON — the diners’ options, presumably — hung from two chains between a pair of bow windows, and swaying each time the front door was opened or closed.

  They spoke for some time of the case but the facts, Lenox felt, were beginning to become stale to him, his energy growing inward and sterile.

  “I think the solution will come to me more readily if we turn away from the subject,” he said.

  The mutton had just arrived, ringed around with heaps of peas, potatoes, and smashed turnips. There was a bottle of claret on the sideboard. Frederick nodded. “Very sensible,” he said. “Occasionally when I have been too long at my desk, describing the properties of the Hyacinthus sylvestris or sketching a dried Spiræa ulmaria that I have picked — meadow-sweet, you would know it as, or meadow-queen — I can become rather muddled, and when I feel it, I immediately make the decision to go three or four days without once looking at or thinking of flowers. In general I spend the time off wandering about the house, finding things that need to be patched up or painted. Drives the servants mad, I’m afraid.”

  Lenox took a sip of wine. He paused before he spoke. “Can you really be thinking of leaving Everley?” he asked. “Your gardens?”

  Frederick, whose mood had been light only a moment before, scowled. “None of that, Charles.”

  “I remember coming here with my mother, in ’fifty-four, and—”

  “No, no reminiscing, either. I love Everley, and for that reason I must do my best by her.”

  “The best she could have is your presence, Uncle Freddie.”

  “Sentimental nonsense, Charles. There is no sense in resisting time, or change. Both will come to all men, whether they accede gracefully or kicking. I’m old, now, and let that be an end of it. There, eat some peas, you need a bit of greenery, you look tired.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  After their mutton Lenox took himself back to the house, while Frederick packed his pipe, unfurled a newspaper, and waited with the last quarter of the bottle of wine for his foot soldiers to report to him. He invited Charles to stay, but the younger man declined, restless still, a bit befogged from being in the warm public house on this cool and wet day, in need of the clarifying brace of the outdoors.

  He made the walk back to Everley quickly. At the gates, and passing down the broad, tree-lined avenue, he gazed at the house, at its beautiful reflection in the rain-scattered pond. It was difficult to imagine it without Frederick inside. The thought reached some sorrowful place in Lenox, bound up in his mother’s early death, in his own advancing years … but it was better not to think of that. He decided he would go and find Sophia.

  In fact, once he had so decided he felt a primitive need to lay eyes on her. In the activity of the past few days, dating back to his trip to London, he had gone longer spells without seeing the child than he had since her birth.

  He went to the nursery. The door was pulled-to but not closed, and he hazarded a gentle tap of two knuckles against the frame. “Miss Taylor?”

  Her nearly silent footsteps came to the door. “Yes, Mr. Lenox?”

  Her face was forbidding, steadied for rejection, Lenox saw. “Could I see her, do you think?”

  “I think just at the moment, since she’s sleeping—”

  There was a faint sound behind the door, something between a cry and a yawn. “She’s stirring,” said Lenox.

  A polite governess could not roll her eyes — but it must nevertheless have been a very great temptation to Miss Taylor, standing in the doorway, having anticipated a quiet forty minutes in which she might read or knit. “Come in, then,” she said.

  Lenox approached the bassinet and looked down over it with love in his eyes. His daughter was stretching out her arms and legs upward, languorous with rest. “Shall I take her out?”

  Miss Taylor looked through the window at the gardens. “Let me change,” she said.

  “No,” said Lenox quickly, “you sit and read here. I shall take her — I’m dressed for it anyhow. You can watch me from the window if you like, to make sure I haven’t spilled her.” He looked up. “Or introduced her to tobacco, or whatever paternal vice you might suspect me of.”

  The governess finally smiled now. “I’ll just prepare her, then.”

  Lenox watched as this was done — as Sophia was bundled like a bag of flour into warm clothes, layer upon layer of them, and then into her bassinet — before asking, “Has Lady Jane been in to see her, already?”

  “Oh, several times.”

  “Perhaps while I find an umbrella to cover us both and put her in her perambulator you could cut along and ask her if she cares to walk with us?”

  The governess went to do so, and Lenox, very carefully, fetched Sophia — who was gurgling pleasantly upon his shoulder, wide-eyed now — down the curved main flight of stairs. He settled her in her contraption, a buggy they had ordered especially from a workman in Kent, upon the advice of Toto McConnell, and then found two umbrellas, one of which he jimmied in between the handle and the bassinet so that it hovered above the child an
d one for himself.

  Lady Jane sent word back that she was busy at just that moment, but would see them when they returned, and so Lenox and Sophia went along on their own into the gardens, accompanied by Bear and Rabbit. He insisted that Miss Taylor return to the nursery as a respite from her duties.

  The dogs, restive after a day of sitting and staring at the rain, bounded ahead of their humans and then came back in tearing sprints, breathless, rendered simple by their excitement. After they settled they began to show signs of wanting to dig, and Lenox had to remonstrate with them, having been on the receiving end upon his arrival of a sharp, just barely respectful speech from Rodgers about dogs and gardens.

  There were miles of paths extending out from the house at Everley. Lenox picked one at random, a long thin meander with sunken gardens full of Somerset flowers on either side.

  “Well, Sophia, though your Uncle Freddie didn’t care to hear of it, perhaps I shall tell you of ’fifty-four.” He spoke conversationally, trying not to use that near-universal tone of loving condescension with which most parents spoke to their children, the same one men and women would use with dogs, though he had moments of weakness.

  She looked up at him, big-eyed, clutching occasionally at the air with her small fist. The rain had stopped and he removed the umbrella from her pram so that she could look out at the world.

  “I would have been, what, twenty-three, twenty-four, I suppose. I thought I knew a very great deal about life.”

  She laughed.

  “Yes, it is rather funny, though you will be civil to your papa, please.

  “My mother and I came here for two weeks at Christmas, your grandmother. How she would have loved you! It’s a pity you never met, but then I daresay you will like Jane’s brother very well, and Jane’s mother, and Edmund, and of course your cousins.

  “Where was I? I suppose I was going to remind Freddie about the widow McReary, but perhaps he wouldn’t remember. I do. It was a cold day, there may even have been snow. McReary was the wife of a farmer who lived four or five miles south of here, upon a little allotment, two acres, perhaps three. He died, a cataleptic fit as I recall.”

  How many years had it been since anyone discussed Frank McReary? Lenox wondered as he pushed Sophia along. Yet villages have long memories, and he had, no doubt, had cousins and nephews and uncles in Plumbley and the countryside around it. Look at Weston.

  Sophia sent up a fidgety noise, not quite a cry, perhaps because her father had fallen silent. He resumed his story. “Shall I tell you something about the widow McReary? She was a thief! I don’t know if she became a thief before her husband died or after — she was childless, so she must have had a terrible time with the farm — but she was known in town to be a thief.

  “Freddie was magistrate back then, too, you know, and could have put her in the dock with a dozen witnesses against her — she stole at the Sunday market, which earned her no friends, picked vegetables that weren’t hers, for all we knew stole from the church plate. And in fact my mother — who was a very gentle soul, not much for punishment — advised Freddie to have Mrs. McReary up in court.”

  He could see miles and miles of westward country rising upward away from him as he walked along slowly, hedged into tidy squares and rectangles, mostly a lovely shamrock green but with lined fringes of red and orange and golden trees. It was the kind of vista that reminded you that you were in England, that lifted your heart. He thought of Parliament and his place there with a flash of solemnity and deeper comprehension. The world was a larger place than one ever seemed to remember.

  Sophia started to squirm and her father, in his calming voice, began to speak to her again. “What Freddie did, however, was something more intelligent. He enquired about her condition. He spoke to her younger sister, who lives still in Plumbley I believe, and to her brother, whom I know must be dead by now — he was well beyond sixty then. Though perhaps not, perhaps I’ll ask Fripp if he’s still alive, since Freddie doesn’t want to hear it.

  “He asked her friends. The people who had been her friends. They weren’t any longer. Which is one of the many reasons you must never steal, Sophia.” He frowned at the child, comically, and she smiled up at him. “And what did Freddie learn? That she was close on starving, the widow. She was perhaps too proud for help, or it may be that she simply liked to steal. I don’t claim that she was any saint, of course.

  “So he …,” Lenox looked up at the skyline, eyes narrow, contemplating his visit of all those years ago. “It was one of the first times I had an understanding of justice, of its fluidity,” he said. “There have been more than a few times when I looked the other away, during a case, you know. It was Freddie who taught me that lesson.”

  His eyes were still up, and he had come to a stop. He glanced back at the house, some ways off now, its beautiful yellow stone, the white paint around its windows.

  He shook his head briskly, as if to clear it, and began walking again. “So he put her in the way of something good to steal. He visited her — stopped in on his way to a nearby farm, he said, to ask if she still had any quince preserves laid down that he might buy, for Christmas supper — which she didn’t — and he left behind a billfold and, so that it might not seem like charity, a pair of gloves. I was with him, if you can credit that. Seems like yesterday.”

  They were some ways off from the house now, the pace of the dogs slackening, and Lenox decided he would go in. As they set back toward the house, he said, “I know she didn’t return the billfold, or the gloves, in the next week. After that I was gone. I don’t know what became of her.”

  He thought back to that time with a quick, piercing sorrow. How strange to be forty-five and miss one’s mother, like a child in nursery!

  As they returned he told Sophia other stories, allowing his voice to float soothingly over her, not especially listening to himself. He was thinking. It was a pleasure to walk with his daughter, but perhaps more importantly he understood, without acknowledging the feeling, that the facts of the case were revolving in the back of his mind, latching together, leading him somewhere. He was almost there. It wouldn’t be long now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Upon his return Lenox learned from Nash that Frederick was waiting to see him in the drawing room of the house. As he and Sophia entered the room, his cousin was having a quiet word with Miss Taylor.

  “You must give me a tour,” she was saying.

  “With great happiness. We have some flowers blooming even this late, Rodgers and I. The autumn snowflake in the bay by the east window is especially beautiful, though very, very delicate. Leucojum autumnale. We picked them up in Chelsea this spring, the bulbs. They’re Iberian by origin.”

  As Frederick was delivering this short lecture the governess had nodded and, at the same time, gone to Sophia, taking her up in her arms. “Did she enjoy the walk?” Miss Taylor asked Charles.

  “Tolerably well, I daresay. It started raining again toward the end, but a little damp shouldn’t harm her too much, should it? And she was covered for all but a moment by the umbrella.”

  “I will listen to her chest. I have a device. Though I’ve no doubt she’s fine — blooming, like your uncle’s flowers.”

  She was worth the money they were paying her, Lenox reflected. “Thank you. And, Freddie, you wished to see me?”

  “Yes, come and sit down here.” Both men stood until the governess had left, and then sat, silent, while a footman wrestled the pram back into some discreet corner of the front hall. “It’s about the coach drivers.”

  “Oh?” said Lenox.

  “We’ve asked about half of the drivers who were along the roads last night if they saw two riders a-horseback. None of them did. We’ll ask the rest as they trickle in this evening.”

  “Would you have expected them to?”

  “They all seemed fairly definite that they would have spotted anything out of the ordinary. Then again it is possible to sneak on and off the roads, ride across open country �
�”

  Lenox shook his head. “No, standing in that clearing, I felt — I think those were Plumbley horses. I think perhaps they were even left there to be found. How many men in town, and in the surrounding country, have two horses?”

  “At least thirty, in all likelihood closer to forty. Several just in the town of Plumbley, for a start. Many of those old houses have stables attached to them — Dr. Eastwood’s, Musgrave’s, even Fripp’s.”

  “Could you make a list of the names of all these men?”

  “I’ll ask my groomsman to do it. He’ll know a sight closer than I would who has what in the way of horseflesh.”

  “Excellent. And the canvass—”

  “Nothing, I’m afraid.”

  “It was still worth the try. Did you see Oates?”

  “He was off to meet with a representative from the police force in Bath, last I saw him.”

  Lenox furrowed his brow. “Is that common?”

  “If there’s a murder in these parts one of the larger constabularies will usually check for themselves the proper steps have been followed.” Frederick looked pensive for a moment. “Charles, do you feel you have any idea of who killed Weston, the poor lad?”

  “Nearly,” said Lenox.

  “And who do you think—”

  “I cannot say, yet, even to you. I’m not sure myself what I think; it is only an intuition. I should not like to stake anything to it.”

  Frederick looked set to protest this, when Nash entered the room. “Your wife requests a moment of your time, Mr. Lenox,” he said.

  Lenox rose. “I shall go back into town, soon. I’d like a skulk around. May I speak to the publican, as he speaks to the coach drivers?”

  “Yes. Ah, but before you go, I promised I would remind you that the cricket match is in only a few days. Fripp is in a lather for you to play.”

  “They’re going on with it?”

  “Oh, yes. There will be a moment of silence, I expect, but it’s the last weekend, the pavilion has been erected, yes, we must have the cricket. It’s the fifth match of the summer. And the decisive one, this time — for the first time since ’sixty-eight the sides have split the first four matches.”