“I have clean forgotten,” said Jane, when at last they looked up from Sophia. “Edmund, we saw Molly.”
“Did you? In the park?”
“Yes. She invited us to supper tonight.”
“I hope you’ll come.”
“Certainly we shall. I do not think either of us is bespoken, Charles?”
“Lord Furze,” said Lenox shortly, and with a petulant sigh returned to the tottering stacks of paperwork upon his desk.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
By great fortune Dallington had almost immediately, upon returning to London, received another case. His health was fully intact again — that remarkable resilience of the young — and while he sent Lenox small notes, apprising him of new facts as they arose, the two men did not see each other after their return from Everley.
When he was announced as a visitor that Saturday morning, Lenox assumed it was because the young lord wished to consult with him about the case. It was a theft of some important blueprints from a clockmaker and watchmaker in Clerkenwell. Because there was no evidence of forced entry Scotland Yard refused to make an investigation, but Inspector Jenkins, returned from his foray into the ginsoaked parts of Belgium, had passed the matter onto Dallington.
“Clerkenwell?” he asked when Dallington came in.
The young man was holding a clutch of flowers. “For Lady Jane,” he said, though Lenox wondered, rather to his own surprise, whether they had been in fact intended for Miss Taylor. “And about Clerkenwell — no, that is finished. It was Aguetti.”
“The watchmaker next door?”
“Yes. Not a matter of professional interest, either, for he is far and away the better craftsman. No, Thomson was carrying on with his wife, and Aguetti wished to harm his business.”
“How is it being handled?”
“By the Yard, you mean? I have not passed it to them. Aguetti made restitution of the papers and apologized, Thomson apologized too, and they are in the Coach and Horses, drinking pint after pint of ale. Mrs. Aguetti is in a fine pique, being ignored as she is — both men have sworn off of her.”
Lenox smiled. “Just a social call, then?”
“No — but where is my brain! It is this!” From his back pocket Dallington produced a telegram. “It is from Archer — have you not received it?”
“No.”
“Then I daresay yours will be coming soon, if it has not already.”
Lenox rang the bell and asked if there had been any telegrams; in fact there had been one while he and Lady Jane were at a champagne breakfast for the First Lord of the Navy, whose daughter had been married, but it had been forgotten, perhaps mislaid, the footman was most terribly sorry, it would never happen again — at any rate here it was.
“Shall I read it or will you tell me?”
“It’s Musgrave. He was run to ground. Among other things they found him with six sea chests of false coin.”
Lenox, who had stood to receive the telegram, stopped where he was, looking agape at Dallington. “Where?” he said.
“Read the telegram, if you like.”
Archer did offer a location — Musgrave had been hidden away at a rented estate in Surrey — but little more, promising only that he would write again should further information make itself available.
Dallington had taken a seat upon his sofa and was snipping the end of a short cigar. “Odd, no?”
Lenox still stood. “I’m a fool.”
“Come now.”
“Really I am. It is the clearest conspiracy I ever saw. Musgrave had the machine, but Bath had obviously become too hot to hold him, and he wanted to apportion the risk to somebody else. Wells could take that on, and had both space in his shop and the opportunity for distribution, as well as being above suspicion. Having poor Oates on their side squared away any chance of local detection.”
“You stopped Wells and Oates.”
“Not before Weston died.” Lenox slumped down into his chair. “From the start I should have asked myself how Wells had made criminal contacts, a country grain merchant. Clearly it was Musgrave who came to him. For that matter, I should also have asked myself why Musgrave ever moved to Plumbley.”
“For his wife, was it not?”
“I imagine his wife would have been perfectly content to live in Bath. I also think Musgrave needed to leave; that perhaps his wife introduced him to Wells. I wonder whether she was complicit. Anyhow their argument on the town green will not have been about her, but about the money.”
“But the vandals?”
Lenox shook his head. “No doubt Musgrave had partners still in Bath. And the black dog upon the church door — perhaps it was a signal that they needed to see him, to consult with him. Or a threat?” At this Lenox smiled, despite his anger with himself.
“What is it?” asked Dallington.
“Only that for all their seeming hysteria, the people of Plumbley are proved quite correct in the end. Musgrave was an evil presence, and that black dog of his, Cincinnatus, corresponded to the black dog painted upon the church door.”
“A stopped clock is right twice a day.”
Lenox read the telegram again. “We must hope that Musgrave peaches on his friends in Bath.”
“Funny that Wells should have been so afraid to name Musgrave even after he had left.”
“No, I saw the shading of a terrible temper in the captain. Perhaps Wells did too, that day when they argued on the Plumbley green. When McConnell suggested that Mrs. Musgrave was with child I dismissed her husband from my mind as a suspect, but I ought to have done better. It is well that I’m out of the business, John.”
“I cannot agree.” Dallington lit his cigar, now tidily cut. “Do you think the wife was involved?”
“Time will tell.”
This they would never know, in fact, for Plumbley took her in, her and her new daughter as well, and cloaked her in its silent care. Cousins, friends, enemies, all of them together provided her with a small set of rooms, with food, with friendship, and above all with silence. She had undergone a dreadful pregnancy, indeed seemed half a ghost and would never speak of Musgrave’s treatment of her, or indeed of his affiliation with Wells. The village’s propensity for judgment stilled itself and withered away in this case, replaced with generosity. She was, after all, a broken woman. Some time later, when Lenox very gently broached the subject to Fripp, the fruit-and-vegetable seller said, “It is all in the past — and better to let it lie there.” In this sentence he summed up Plumbley’s attitude toward Cat Scales, as had been Cat Musgrave.
All of that was in the months to come. As Dallington and Lenox sat in the study at Hampden Lane, chewing over the case anew, Musgrave was being taken to a prison in Bath.
In the next week many different people attempted to make him speak, but he would not; in the end they could only charge him with possession of fraudulent monies, a great deal of it, to be sure, but never enough to put him in jail for a very long term. His solicitors said there was no proof whatsoever that Musgrave knew the money was fake at all.
At the trial, in which both Dallington and Lenox testified, he received a sentence of two years. Yet it might be just as well to round off the tale here, and say that, despite the assiduous scrutiny of police in both Bath and London, upon his release Musgrave did nothing illegal, until one day, three or four months after his release, he took a train bound for Manchester, a very small valise in hand. He never came out at any of the stations along the voyage, and, as a final trick, didn’t alight at Manchester either — in fact seemed to vanish straight into thin air. The police were confident he would appear in London, but in this they were wrong. Nobody caught sight of him again.
As for Wells, there was only ever one incident that proved him still alive.
His wife and his son had gone down in the world upon his departure, sold off their carriage, sold off their weekday china. Still, by dint of hard work in the shop they did manage to keep their large house, and to retain one of their horses. It hel
ped that Mrs. Wells was a very pretty woman — blond, plump, and flirtatious, and the men of Taunton and Bath liked to deal with her. Slowly the shop, still called Wells and Son, grew to be successful.
At last, when she had saved enough capital, she and her sisters began a small sideline in selling scents. This was a talent they had cultivated since girlhood, and though at first only a small, dim shelf in the shop was devoted to their perfumes, after they received the patronage of Emily Jasper and several of her friends in Bath, this part of the business began to grow — until at last there was no more grain merchant at all upon the town green, and Mrs. Wells’s small, crystal bottles of lavender and primrose adorned the bureaus even of Mayfair.
Only she was no longer called Mrs. Wells — her name now, after a small ceremony presided over by the groom’s master, was Mrs. Chalmers.
In a village as small as Plumbley no wedding is ever wholly surprising. This one came near it, however. Mrs. Wells had gone to visit the groom when he was recuperating and their friendship had, in the course of several slow years, grown into love. Her marriage having been dissolved by a court, on grounds of desertion, she was free to wed the man her husband had nearly killed.
Around the time of the wedding, and not long after the conversion of the shop to its new business, was when Wells popped his head out. A postcard arrived at the house one day that said, without any additional comment, FOR SHAME, MY FATHER’S SHOP.
It was tracked to a sailor in Kilkenny, who said he had been asked to post it by a man in Paris — but there the tracks ran cold. Lenox, for his part, never looked back on the case with much fondness or satisfaction, because the two men who bore perhaps the most responsibility for its crimes were somewhere out upon the face of the earth, settled and, if not contented, at any rate still free. While Weston and Oates were both cold in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s.
If it bothered him overmuch, however, he consoled himself with two thoughts: first, that Chalmers was alive and well, still at the stables of Everley, and freshly married to, of all people born to womanhood, irony of ironies, Mrs. Wells; and second, that his Uncle Freddie might yet live to a ripe old age.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Is your uncle quite well?” Dallington asked Lenox, still smoking his small cigar on that autumn day in Hampden Lane.
“Yes — in fact, he shall be here Monday, if you would like to dine with us.”
“Oh, happily. Perhaps he will have more news from Archer.”
After another fifteen minutes Dallington took his leave, eyeing the flowers as he went.
Almost immediately there was a knock at the door — another Parliamentary visitor for Lenox, who greeted him with a very convincing false cheer that, even as he acted it out, sent a chill down his spine.
At last I have truly become a politician, he realized. Yet he wanted desperately to change the laws of his country, and if this was the way to do it, so it should go, he thought. He took the man into his study, gave him a glass of sherry, and straight away began to cajole and bargain him around to supporting the new poor laws he had proposed.
That Saturday and Sunday passed as the days before them had, in great avalanches of parliamentary chatter. Graham for his part slept not more than three or four hours a night, while Lenox was constantly between his desk at home and his offices in Whitehall, rarely eating more than a piece of cheese between two breads.
“People speak ill of the Earl of Sandwich but I am grateful to him,” he said to his brother when they passed each other in Bellamy’s one day.
Therefore he had nearly forgotten that Frederick was arriving on that Monday. Fortunately it was a bank holiday, and the Commons wouldn’t sit until the next evening. There were still meetings to attend, but by five o’clock he was home.
Jane was in her small rose-colored drawing room, writing at her desk, as Sophia slept in the bassinet next to her; the last lines of yellow light crossed the floor at a diagonal. When they had been simply friends it had been this room Lenox found the most comforting and homey of all the ones he knew, and still it offered him some evanescent pleasure — a woman’s touch in the small framed mezzotints, in the particular draw of the lace curtains, in the ornate cedar coffee table.
“What news?” asked Lenox. He kept his voice soft.
She sat down by him, having kissed him on the cheek. “Sad news, I’m afraid.”
“Oh?”
“It’s Toto. I’ve just had a letter from her, down at her father’s.”
Lenox’s heart fell. “Have they been arguing?”
“She has Georgianna with her, too. It must be terrible for Thomas — he so dotes on them both.”
“But what quarrel can she possibly have with him?”
“Her letter is unclear on that point — only says that she cannot tolerate London at the moment, cannot tolerate the country either, and feels heartily sick of it all.”
“I hope there is nothing of a permanent rift.”
Jane raised her eyebrows. “It is difficult to say. I wonder whether I should go down to see her.”
“Are you not planning the ball?”
“I would miss it, of course, for Toto.”
“Shall I speak to Thomas?”
“No, don’t. Or let him speak to you, if he likes.”
Lenox shook his head. “I cannot imagine he will.”
“As long as he has not taken advantage of the solitude to — anyhow, you know as well as I do.”
“He didn’t have his laboratory, his experiments, his marine studies, back in those drinking days. Not to so great an extent. Work is a great distraction.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Shall I call tea for you?”
“Thank you, no. We dine early tonight, do we not?”
“At seven, if Freddie really does come.”
Lenox gestured toward the desk. “You were returning Toto’s letter?”
“Oh, no, that is already sent. I was only — but can I tell you tomorrow?”
“Of course,” he said.
She smiled up at him. “I think you will like the surprise.”
They sat in companionable silence for some moments then, watching the listless light lose its color and then begin to disappear altogether. Through the window he could see smoke rising from the chimneys in Grosvenor Square. How nice it was to be inside and warm, on such a day; how fortunate. “Has Sophia had a productive day?”
“Miss Taylor read to her this morning, and she dined on a very great — a prodigious piece of meringue.”
Lenox frowned. “Can that be healthy?”
“Children need eggs and milk, as far as I can gather.”
“So much sugar, though?”
Jane laughed, pulling a strand of glossy dark hair behind her ear. “She is not so roly-poly as some children.”
“No, she is perfect, of course. I suppose I should not wake her?”
“You may as well, or she won’t sleep tonight. I shall ask Miss Taylor to change her into something fetching, too, for Freddie — her little yellow dress, perhaps.”
The squire of Everley arrived punctually at a quarter to six that evening. As he always did in London he looked more harried than easy. He offered up some parcels to the footman, and took off his coat. “Cabman shouted at me,” he said.
“Did he?” asked Lady Jane. “How rude!”
“I did fall asleep in his cab, I suppose, and we were blocking a line of traffic, from what I saw as I was … as I was hustled out. Still.”
“Was your journey down happy?” asked Lady Jane, guiding him toward the drawing room and setting him in an armchair.
“Endurable, thank you.”
“And Plumbley? Plumbley is well?”
Here they launched into a conversation about Musgrave — the town was taking it with shocking smugness, and also relief that the ordeal was finished.
There were other guests to arrive soon: Edmund and his wife; Dallington; and one or two of Frederick’s acquaintances from schooldays. J
ane thought that before they did and the tone of the evening grew more formal Sophia might be brought down.
She was, by Miss Taylor, who wore a fetching blue dress. “That reminds me,” said Frederick. “Charles, if one of your men could fetch my parcels? I brought you, Miss Taylor, some cuttings of the flowers we spoke about in Somerset.”
“How kind of you!” she said.
There was a knock at the door as he was presenting her with this parcel — it was Dallington, who came in, saw her, and rather seemed to blush. He was able to put a good countenance on his embarrassment. Lenox wondered whether there was anything at all to Jane’s speculations. Perhaps, he thought.
It was a long dinner, with a great deal of laughter and storytelling. When it was finally over, and the men were putting on their cloaks in the hallway, Frederick started to don his as well. They had offered him a room here, on Hampden Lane, when he planned his visit, but he was an old bachelor and admitted freely that his club would best tolerate his idiosyncrasies.
“Did you not want to speak to me?” Lenox asked him. “Your letter—”
Frederick smiled at him. “Not just now. Perhaps in the morning you would have breakfast with me, at the Carlton? I will know my mind better then — best not to speak on serious subjects after a day of travel, a rich dinner, and a few glasses of wine.”
“I should be very glad to breakfast with you. Eight, shall we say?”
“Capital.” Frederick smiled, and Lenox recognized some ghost of his mother’s smile therein, a fine lineament. “Charles,” he said, the din of the other guests’ conversation still covering their voices, “you will not be too down in the mouth, when I pass Everley on?”
“Not in the slightest,” said Lenox stoutly, at last, in this very moment, having determined himself not to be.
“I’m glad to hear it. Until the morning, then.”
“Until the morning.”
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