A Death in the Small Hours clm-6

by Charles Finch

  “Oh, she’s not so bad,” said Lenox. “Did you approve the gray?”

  Lady Jane smiled. “I recommended something more vividly colored, if she had it. Charles, could you see her with young John?”

  “Enough of that, please. Where is Kirk? I need my shirt pressed.”

  They prepared for the party together, in the comfortable rhythm of a couple that by now had done so together many times. Lenox told her about Wells and the coining machine.

  “Your uncle must be relieved.”

  “He is primarily exhausted, I think. His strength is not what it once was.”

  Jane stopped what she was doing. “Perhaps it’s not a bad idea, him moving into the village. A smaller house.”

  “How can you say that?” he asked. “It would be such a loss — for the village, for you, for me, for Sophia. Not to have Freddie in Everley?”

  “You did not say that it would be a loss for him.”

  “Of course it would be!” he said, his voice rising with anger.

  “You have the luxury of coming here when you like. He must manage a great estate all on his own, year-round. I can understand why he might want to leave that responsibility to his nephew.”

  Now Lenox became positively vexed and she, usually so good-natured, said a word or two back to him — and the result was that when they finally went downstairs to the guests, they were thoroughly fallen out with each other. It happened rarely enough, though they had been married several years now. Still, Lenox remembered with a sort of resigned dread, this sort of argument often lasted a day or two when it finally arrived.

  Dallington, despite his exertions of the day, seemed fresh; by contrast Frederick looked squinty and out of all sorts, and when he was addressed responded only with a few short words, occasionally even with silence. He needed a good night’s sleep, thought Lenox, and then perhaps a day or two of quiet recreation in his small study, with his books, his manuscript, his telescope, his evening wine. His routine.

  For her part, Miss Taylor had dressed up very finely indeed. When she came into the drawing room the three men stood and bowed, all, to one degree or another, dazzled by the transformation that had come to her face simply from loosening her rather severe plaits of hair. She looked pretty now, less ascetic, softer. Her dress was a vibrant blue color, and cut slightly lower than they might have been used to in Somerset, though it would have been modest for London. She smiled graciously when Dallington offered her a glass of champagne.

  The conversation at dinner was not, it must be observed in the hopes of maintaining the strictest honesty, very sparkling. Still, Lenox was genuinely glad to see Lucy — he had known her in other years — and sat next to her, laughing softly with her throughout dinner about the people in town that he had met and re-met in the past few days: Carmody, Fripp, the women on the church steps. Mr. Marsham told Dr. Eastwood a few hoary anecdotes from his days at Clare and Emily Jasper was content to be kept company by Lady Jane, being something of a snob. This left Dallington and the governess to talk, with occasional, now more spirited interjections from Freddie, who had recovered something of his color with a glass of wine.

  Inevitably conversation turned general, however, when Wells’s name arose. Dr. Eastwood said, his face grave, that he thought it was a very bad thing for Plumbley, whose name now would be bandied around the county, possibly even the country. “Such associations tend to linger,” he said.

  “I am an old woman,” said Emily Jasper — a statement that it would have been impossible to contradict—“but I cannot see why he was not apprehended sooner.”

  “He was concealing his activities, Aunt Emily,” said Lucy, voice gentle. “I think it was very clever of Mr. Oates, Mr. Ponsonby, and Mr. Lenox to catch him.”

  “Hm! I like that. Did he think of us at all?”

  “I doubt it, ma’am,” said Dr. Eastwood, and Lucy laughed.

  By the time dessert was being served Lenox had to stifle a yawn every thirty seconds or thereabouts. Coffee perked him up, however, and when the men withdrew to smoke, he was alert enough to pull Dr. Eastwood to the side.

  Lenox glanced over at Dallington, Marsham, and Frederick, who were discussing cigars, though the young detective, with his usual keenness of perception, plainly had an ear bent toward this conversation. “Did you receive the parcel I sent you this morning?”

  “I did. I didn’t mention it before supper because you’ve caught—”

  “I’m still very much curious.”

  “Unfortunately I cannot say what the powder is. I have a friend in Liverpool, from my days at St. Bart’s, who might be able to help. I can tell you it is nothing in the ordinary way, not flour, not sugar, not arrowroot. I did one or two basic catalytic reactions to determine that much.”

  “Could it be poison?”

  “Yes, I suppose it could. Would you like me to send it to Liverpool?”

  “Thank you, no, I have a friend in London who is already looking into it.”

  “Please tell me what he finds.”

  “I shall, of course,” said Lenox.

  The men and women reassembled soon therafter and heard Lucy play, ate walnuts and apples from a silver tray, and drank port. At eleven, finally — too early for some, including the indomitable Emily Jasper, too late for others, including Lenox, whose entire determination it took to keep his eyes open — the party broke up.

  It had been another surpassingly long day, and Lenox felt he might sleep without any trouble until the same time the next evening. He gave word that he didn’t need to be awakened at any particular hour.

  Soon he and his wife were alone in their room again, and he could let himself give way to exhaustion. He loosened his tie and slumped into a soft armchair by their window.

  Throughout the evening Jane had been affectionate with him, but now, alone again, she was silent, undoing her hair and removing her jewelry.

  He granted her the right to silence, not doubting that he had been too harsh in his speech before supper.

  At least he spoke, trying to make her smile by teasing her. “I would not call it your most successful party.” She didn’t respond, and so after another moment he added, “But did you see Dallington speak to Miss Taylor?”

  Here was bait she could not help taking, though she knew it was offered for precisely that reason. “They were barely apart for the last hour of the evening,” she said. “So there, Charles Lenox.”

  “Freddie was on the couch with them, dear.”

  “Mark my words, it will be the making of him, to marry that young woman. She has a great spirit.”

  “There we agree.”

  They were quiet again for five or ten minutes after this, Lenox at his desk very casually looking over his speech, Lady Jane finishing a letter to her brother, in Sussex, that she intended to send in the morning. Yet their interchange had left them feeling more inclined to softness with each other, and when Lenox apologized she circled his neck with her arms and said that she, too, was sorry — and so they made it up.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  You hear of the calm that comes before the storm,” said Frederick Ponsonby two mornings later, “but I find I much prefer the calm that comes afterward.”

  “Alas, the storm usually causes enough damage to make the aftermath unhappy,” said Lenox.

  “Yes, you’re right of course — poor Weston.”

  They were sipping coffee at a small wrought-iron table on the veranda outside the library. It was the warmest day since Lenox had arrived in Plumbley, brilliant with golden sunlight, though it was still before eight o’clock in the morning. Off a quarter mile into the gardens they could see Lady Jane, Sophia, and Miss Taylor walking, the dogs barking them to order when they slowed.

  The men did not wear their customary clothes — Ponsonby his quiet gray flannel and subdued cravats or Lenox his more metropolitan dark suits and ties — but instead were dressed identically in whites, ironed white pants, white sweaters, and snub-nosed white caps. The day was i
deal for cricket.

  “It seems somehow more and less tragic at once, that he has no close family,” said Lenox.

  “There is Oates.”

  “Yes, there is Oates. Who knows what condition he is in, however,” said Lenox.

  The constable had been drinking heavily in the King’s Arms the past few nights, according to the gossip that had worked its way up from the servants’ quarters. True to his word, however, Wells, in the Plumbley jail, remained unharmed. Oates and a series of reliable townsmen took shifts watching the prisoner, always in pairs.

  “Oates will have himself dried out by the time of the funeral,” said Frederick.

  This was to be the next afternoon. “I hope so, certainly.”

  In fact the murder seemed already as if it had happened a long time before. The past few days had been wonderfully peaceable, the kind Lenox had looked for when he decided to visit his cousin. Freddie had retired to his study for the whole period, other than meal times, and looked better for it, while Jane, in between stretches at her desk, was helping to plan the refreshments they would have at the cricket. For his part Lenox rode out upon horseback at nine in the morning and at three in the afternoon, and otherwise worked with steady application at his speech, which was all but drafted now. He was proud of it. As he had written to his brother in a letter that morning:

  I imagined that what I needed to focus on the writing of the speech was time away from London, in the country. In fact what I needed was this case — the matter of the coining you have no doubt read about in the papers — to free my mind from the task at hand. It has worked beautifully. My hope is that this speech shall shame the other side into doing something for the poor — something more. It is past time.

  The case had, as Lenox learned almost immediately, made the London papers. In general he preferred to keep his name away from the investigations in which he participated, retaining, as he did, some sensitivity to the sneers of those members of his caste who believed his work was beneath his station — it was this that drove him to privacy, and not, as he would have preferred in himself, modesty.

  Nevertheless it was sometimes impossible to keep his name out of things. There had been a raft of telegrams congratulating him on his role in the case’s solution, including one from his friend Inspector Thomas Jenkins at Scotland Yard, who was chasing a criminal in the gin bars of Brussels (and drinking a fair bit of the stuff himself in the process, from the sound of it) but took time to write; another from the head of the Royal Mint; and several from colleagues in Parliament, all of whom managed a joking reference to his speech. No doubt they thought he had been neglecting his duties. On that count, however, his conscience was entirely clear. The speech was in excellent fettle.

  A team of men from Scotland Yard was, even now, dissecting the great coining machine that Wells had stored in his cellar. Apparently it was of an uncommon type, producing the kind of fraudulent coins that tended to pop up in the western part of England, which led them to believe that a great deal of coining was centered in Bath — peculiar, given that town’s affluent reputation. There was a fresh excitement and endeavor to their efforts: here was a new lead, a chance at halting the production of hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal money. They were mildly grateful to Lenox; he had solved the murder, and discovered the coining only incidentally, and for these men, who had something of the air of obsessives, the latter was a more serious crime.

  The only loose end the case had left, as far as Lenox could discern, was Musgrave’s behavior. There had been no report of him in Bath, which meant that he must have switched roads in the miles of road between that city and Plumbley, but why had he left? Why had his new wife been so decidedly homebound since their wedding? Lenox hoped McConnell might provide the glimmer of an answer, if he could identify the powder that had been marked as Mrs. Musgrave’s “sugar.” The doctor had written in a telegram that he hoped to have some idea in a day or two, not longer.

  As they sat on the veranda the men did not discuss any of this, however. They talked instead of the cricket, and then of old matches they had played in, many years before, when Lenox was a schoolboy permitted to stand in the field for the last few overs, never to bat. By the time he reached the age of sixteen he was the Royal Oak’s second to last batsman (both men always played for that side, for reasons lost to history), desperate to overcome the invincible King’s Arms side. The KA, as they were called, had then boasted a blacksmith named Millington — dead now, kicked by a horse he was shoeing — who had seemed like Hercules himself, back in the fifties. It wasn’t until Lenox was past twenty-two that he saw Millington go out for less than a half-century.

  “Have you played at all recently?” said Lenox.

  “Not for five years. In honor of your return, however, I may let them stick me at the end of the queue to bat. I expect the game will have been called for dark well before then. Hopefully, that is.”

  Lenox smiled. “Have you got the same bat?”

  “Oh, yes, though she’s a bit yellow now.” Freddie’s bat was made of an old Everley willow tree that had been struck dead by lightning. He had made it himself, many years into the distant past.

  “I’d have brought mine,” said Lenox, “though it was only store bought.”

  “Fripp will have you sorted.”

  Lady Jane was wandering in their general direction now, and waved at them, her soft smile visible even from a few hundred yards.

  Lenox felt a flash of love for her. He stood and started toward her, to say they ought to leave soon.

  Indeed by half-eight they were at the cricket pitch, an enormous expanse of closely shorn meadow just beyond Musgrave’s house on Church Lane. (Dallington had been spared, there being enough players for both teams, and was left behind at Everley.) It was an absolute carnival already when they arrived, though the match wouldn’t begin for another half an hour; there were men in their whites striding everywhere, calling out hearty taunts in each other’s direction, and women congregated around a white pavilion, cloth-topped and erected the week before. Jane went in that direction, greeting Mrs. Richards, the wife of the local butcher, as an old friend and enquiring as to the state of the tea, which was being brewed in frantically large quantities, by quite what method nobody could entirely agree — tea being a substance that provoked sharp and definite opinions in nearly every person present. Off in the distance four men shifted a sunscreen, white and as tall as a two-story building, so that the batsmen of the morning hours should be able to see.

  Nominally the captain of the Royal Oak side was a man named Symes, who owned the public house. He was an ill-natured fat person, generous, and above all desperately and misguidedly in love with new technology. His most recent acquisition — which he rode with quiet dignity around Plumbley, despite near universal derision — was a penny-farthing. This was a kind of bicycle with an enormous front wheel and a small back one, in proportion roughly the same as a penny and a farthing sitting side by side upon a table.

  Symes had an ugly cut on his forehead.

  “The high-wheeler?” said Frederick sympathetically. “Well, well. You can only improve at it.”

  Symes scowled. “It is very difficult to mount, Mr. Ponsonby, but once the position upon the front wheel is ascended, is achieved, it is a marvelous — I assure you a very marvelment of — well, yes. I don’t like to hear a word against the machine, myself. That is my own prejudice I grant you.”

  Even Symes, who ran a pretty rigorously decorous public house, could not commandeer Fripp: here the fruit-and-vegetable man was absolutely and entirely in his element. He walked off the boundaries, double-checking them, with the captain of the King’s Arms, Millington Junior, the town’s new blacksmith, whom Lenox had never seen — the dead spit of his father, though perhaps even larger in the arms. Fripp, wiry and brown as a nut, looked miniature next to his opposite number, but he exuded a kind of calm authority that made the mismatch seem, obscurely, to lie in favor of the Royal Oak; even the tea debate s
ubsided when he went round the pavilion to check that all was in order for the midday break.

  After that errand was complete he returned to his team and spotted Lenox. “Charles,” he said, with a tight smile.

  “Mr. Fripp. Are you—”

  Just then the umpires arrived, gentlemen imported at some expense from Taunton, and the cricket ground went silent, somber. Fripp and Millington hurried toward them. The Royal Oak side said good-bye to their wives and their children and assembled at their benches, many of the men nodding deferentially — perhaps uncomfortably — at the two aristocrats in their midst.

  “Are we taking anyone’s places?” asked Lenox of his cousin, swinging a bat to loosen his shoulders.

  Frederick said, “No, Tolbert took a bad leg, Walcott inherited a piece of land in Devon, and someone else — oh, yes, Crockington is in London, for who-knows-why. I wouldn’t have played myself, if we didn’t need a final batsman. Fripp made me swear up and down or I should be in my gardens, now.” He nodded toward the costermonger, who was arguing vehemently about the state of the wicket. “I hope nothing is riding on my innings, either,” Freddie said. “Fripp looks liable to give someone a hiding.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The Royal Oak won the coin toss — Lenox wondered in passing whether it was truly one of her Majesty’s ha’pennies that the umpire flung into the air — and Fripp, in consultation with Symes and a beefy farmer named Truelove, elected for his side to take the field first. So much in cricket depended on the patch of grass between the two boxes where the complementary batsman stood, and Fripp claimed it would be more favorable as the day warmed, that the bowls in the afternoon would come in harder but truer, with less spin. Besides, everyone knew the KA was a shabby place and if they didn’t show Millington and Apswell that the Royal Oak was superior they should be ashamed of themselves, properly and heartily ashamed. Oh, and welcome to Mr. Lenox, the member of Parliament.