The Vanishing Man

by Charles Finch

  “Then look at Craig, Your Grace. Is there anyone on earth for whom he would have betrayed you other than Corfe? Listen to me—I have been delirious with fever, as I imagine you have been. To me it seems implausible that even the deepest fever sleep could remain undisturbed by a painting being hammered to the underside of one’s bed.”

  The duke looked at him for a long moment and then slumped back. “It’s not possible,” he muttered. He looked out through the window, thinking. “Did you know the last person executed here was a woman?”

  Lenox had not. He did not especially want to know it now. “No, Your Grace.”

  “In 1780. Gordon Riots.”

  “Oh, right, yes.”

  “Gordon himself, of course, went free.”

  Another Etonian, Lenox almost muttered, thinking of Lancelot, who was probably leading a riot somewhere right now, and Corfe, too.

  Lord Gordon had been a Protestant who stirred up a mob of sixty thousand or so because some very elementary rights had been restored to English Catholics. A fool. His timing could not have been worse: directly after the American revolution, and as the French one was simmering. The Gordon Riots had become a byword for brutality now; Lenox could recall his own father’s anger at the stories of violence in London that year.

  “I remember now,” said Lenox. “The three traitors.”

  Dorset nodded. “They give you a ghastly kind of introduction when you come here. Or at least they did to me. Wellington was here, which I thought civilized in him. The first thing he mentioned was that there were a hundred and twenty-two executions here between 1388 and 1780. This poor woman apparently being the last.”

  “Mm.”

  The duke got up and strode around. Lenox noticed that he had the paper with the poem on it clutched tightly in one hand. “Ninety-three beheaded. Ninety-three! Twelve hanged. Three shot. Two burned at the stake. Eleven hanged, drawn, and quartered.

  “And one, he told me, with a relish that I didn’t quite like, who had his stomach cut open and his entrails thrown into a fire. After that they castrated him and threw him into the fire. Which must have been a mercy, all things told.”

  “Good Lord.”

  The duke nodded grimly. “Yes, quite.”

  “Well, they’re not going to execute you, Your Grace.”

  Dorset waved an irritated hand. “I know that, of course.” Still, he looked as if it weren’t the worst of the options he faced at the present moment.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Lenox measured his words. “My friend Cabot tells me that he thinks a hundred years hence all executions will have ceased. In his opinion we will be viewed as barbarians for having had them at all.”

  “By 1953. Lord Cabot?”

  “Indeed, your Grace.”

  “A sound man, if a liberal.” The duke wandered around his capacious cell. Outside, the hushed chattering of the black-cloaked men continued, just audible. But the duke was not concerned with them at the moment. “If we follow your theory,” he said suddenly, “why was Craig unscrewing the portrait of Shakespeare?”

  There was a gleam of hope in his eye—but Lenox had anticipated this question. “I think Lord Vere believed he needed it. The second stanza of the poem.”

  The duke read it over. “Well?”

  “The third line: It would have been easy to mistake it, behind the name my portrait gloss, as an indication that there was another clue about the lost play behind Shakespeare’s own portrait.”

  “Oh, I see,” said the duke, pacing again. “Yes, that is possible, I suppose.”

  Then he muttered something to himself that sounded like “Kent.” Lenox wondered: Was everything Shakespearean in the end? Because he looked like Lear now, certainly, this hopelessly rich and privileged gentleman in his cell.

  “Your Grace?”

  “Kent, I said. Everybody knows Kent, don’t they—apples, cherries, hops, and women.”

  Lenox smiled politely. It was a famous line of Dickens’s. “Not much else.”

  “No. It must be a small churchyard.”

  “Yes,” said Lenox.

  The duke seemed to have accepted the detective’s theory whole cloth now. He read the poem again.

  But then, all at once, he shook his head violently. “It still doesn’t make sense. I told you—Corfe has an allowance that a prince would find generous. He is not a gambler—nor is there a woman I know of—and in either case, there is no financial situation from which I would be unable to extract him. We could afford ten ruinations over. He is my heir.”

  Lenox nodded. “Perhaps he is embarrassed.”

  “No. He would never risk this embarrassment rather than coming to me. I told him when he was five that there was nothing I could not get him out of.”

  Perhaps that was the problem, Lenox reflected. “Then it must be that he is interested in Shakespeare.”

  The duke shook his head. “I know my son. He doesn’t care a whit about William Shakespeare.”

  That was curious. “Might he have been Craig’s accomplice, then?” he suggested.

  The duke rejected that idea, too, though. “After all these years?”

  “Perhaps he just learned of it.”

  “If Craig wanted money, there were a million things he could have stolen without my even noticing. He has a key to the jewel room at Dorset Castle, for pity’s sake. Anyway, I trust him—trusted him—implicitly.”

  “And Shakespeare?”

  “If there has ever been a person less interested in Shakespeare in all of Great Britain than Corfe, it was Alexander Craig. The only thing I ever knew him to read was the army gazette.”

  “I see.”

  And indeed Lenox was troubled by this assessment of the duke’s household, by its head. His mind turned the facts over but could not quite make them add up. Something was missing.

  Someone, too. The maid, Maggie McNeal.

  The duke sighed. “Will you wait to dig until I am free? We may share the credit,” he said. “It is just that it should be so, given that you have sleuthed out the poem.”

  Lenox was shocked at this offer. He admitted as much. “You surprise me, Your Grace.”

  The duke gave him a tired glance, but his voice was strong, unbowed. “Then we are both experiencing a day filled with surprise,” he said drily.

  “If you wish, Your Grace. Of course. I had planned to sit down with an atlas myself later today and begin investigating the churchyards of Kent. But I will naturally not dig without you.”

  Unless you are imprisoned for life, he thought to himself.

  “Find out everything you can. Just keep going. As for Corfe—and Craig—all of that, leave in my hands.”

  “I have one request,” Lenox said.

  “Not money?”

  “No,” said Lenox coldly. “It is that if we should search for the play together, I may be allowed a friend to come along.”

  The 15th Duke of Dorset looked at him for a long while. This had been his own secret for many years. But he nodded. “As you please,” he said.

  Lenox returned to Hampden Lane not sure how to feel. What had he solved? Who had he helped? He ate lunch, a consoling cream of tomato soup, slices of cheese with hard biscuit, and a glass of ginger ale, the meal he asked for when he wanted sleep but before he knew he wanted sleep.

  He napped once more before the low warm fire in the grate, this time with a novel on his chest. He dreamed that he was a child again.

  When he woke this time, he could tell that it was midafternoon. There was a glimmer of yellow light in the branches of the trees, the sun at last showing itself. He heard a knock at the front door and realized it was this that had woken him.

  The knock had apparently attracted Lancelot, too, because Lenox heard a noise like a large suitcase falling from a cliff on the stairs.

  Lancelot and Lady Jane appeared in his study at once, her hand protectively on his head. She held a newspaper. Evidently it had been her at the door. “Hello, Charles,” she said.
<
br />   He stood up. “Hello. What are you reading?”

  “The afternoon Times. I have missed the Dunmow Flitch again,” she said.

  “What is the Dunmow Flitch?” he asked, still blinking his way out of sleep.

  She had walked over to the fire and was prodding it, paper in one hand. “Charles, really?” she said chidingly, looking up at him.

  “Am I supposed to know?”

  “The winners this year were a Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cheese. Though numerous couples received the side of bacon, obviously.”

  “Jane, if you value my sanity, explain what you are talking about, or leave.” He glanced over at his cousin, who was rooting through his desk. “Preferably with Lancelot.”

  She smiled and rose. “Every Whit Monday in Essex they award a handsome side of bacon to any couple that presents themselves and swears on a Bible that they have not broken their marriage vows or quarreled for at least the space of a year and a day. The Times has a full column on it.”

  “That is one of the silliest things I ever heard,” said Lenox. He sat back down and suddenly realized that for the first time in days he was in a fair mood.

  “Charles! Where is your sense of romance!”

  “Anyhow it is not closely associated with slabs of dead pig.”

  “Think how easily James and I should win. We scarcely see each other three months a year, and I cannot recall quarreling with him during those. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cheese would stand no chance against us.”

  “What did they do to win?”

  “They wrote a poem. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Less than anything.”

  “Oh Mrs. Cheese, it begins, who brights when I awaken—”

  “Jane, I beg of you.”

  “Celebrate our love with me, and with this side of bacon.”

  “What meter is that?”

  “It’s only fifty lines—shall I go on?”

  “No.”

  “Almost all of it is bacon themed.”

  Lenox glared at her. “Leave me alone, I beg of you.”

  “Lancelot, come tell your cousin about the zoo. I know from my long friendship with him that he’ll want to hear every last detail you can offer about the health of Obaysch the hippopotamus.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Jane had come in part to remind him that they were meant to dine that night; she had broken up her own party because there was to be a larger one at a friend’s house. Would they ride over together? she asked. He said of course, promising to fetch her at quarter past eight.

  Though his visit to Bedlam was some ways off, something had been nagging at him since his last trip. When Jane and Lancelot were gone he composed a wire to Dr. Hansel, his friend at the asylum.

  Wondering if you have patient Belmont STOP alternatively Irvington STOP if so would like interview STOP warm regards STOP Lenox

  He sent this out by a footman. He was thinking of the man who had approached him at the very end of his last visit, claiming to be falsely imprisoned—Irvington, he had called himself, before the guard called him Belmont.

  It hadn’t sat well with Lenox all week, and he was glad to have gotten the wire off. That done, he sat down and faithfully recorded the events of the day both for his own edification and to keep the facts straight in his mind. The Duke might be finished with the case, but he was not.

  Graham returned just before six. “Hello, sir,” he said.

  “There you are. I was wondering.”

  “I have been searching for Maggie McNeal, sir, but unfortunately without luck.”

  Lenox frowned. It was very rare for Graham to fail. “No sign of her?”

  “None, sir. Even within the household she is not remembered except perhaps hazily—that perhaps there was a Margaret employed there for a week or two some time ago. Yet it seems implausible that she should have had a more formal name below stairs than above.”

  “That is bizarre.”

  “I thought so, too, sir.”

  Lenox pondered this. There were often loose ends in his cases, false trails. He didn’t like this one. “Thank you, Graham,” he said. “I wondered if you wanted to tackle another job for me over the weekend. No rush.”

  “What is that, sir?”

  Lenox smiled. “Don’t get too excited. It is the churchyards of Kent I have in mind.”

  Soon the two were upstairs in their more traditional roles, Lenox shaving, Graham pressing his evening suit, a distracted chatter passing between them. By half past seven Lenox was dressed and his cheeks patted with sandalwood—a gentleman of London town.

  Downstairs, he saw that a reply from Hansel had already arrived.

  Odd you mention Belmont STOP transferred by family St Cs Edbrgh this week STOP no record Irv now or past STOP welcome any time STOP Hansel

  Lenox was used to the doctor’s economical style. He frowned as he read this over a second time. So that dark-eyed, dark-haired man, so urgent in his entreaties, had been pulled out of Bedlam after confiding in Lenox.

  He would go to the asylum soon if he could.

  But for now his duty was next door. On his way out he passed Lancelot and Mrs. Huggins playing checkers intently over an enormous supper. (Lancelot sat cross-legged on the floor across from the housekeeper, about eye level with the board, chin resting on his hand. He reported that she had won thirty-seven times in a row, but he had hopes of breaking through soon, and Lenox felt a quick involuntary burst of affection.) He decided to leave without even asking about Mr. Templeton, or the long shot in the fifth race.

  He picked up Lady Jane, who was dressed in a lovely rose-colored gown with a blue taffeta shrug. Her hair was whipped into a high pile of curls.

  “You look lovely, Your Ladyship,” said Lenox, bowing.

  “And you, Mr. Lenox,” she said, curtsying.

  Soon his carriage was on its way, headed toward the home of Mr. and Mrs. Caliban Edwards. Cal and his wife, Emily, lived in a rather shabby house near Bloomsbury. It was the envy of all their friends. Cal was the son of a very famous explorer and an equally famous beauty, she the daughter of two houses whose lineage dated to the Norman invasion.

  They didn’t have a penny between them. Cal rubbed along as a writer—a novel and some stories, the occasional tale of travel. Nevertheless, there was no house Lenox knew that was more full of happiness or of, because his father was always climbing some Himalaya or wading some Nile, interesting artifacts. A crocodile with its jaw wide open greeted you in the hallway. A walking stick carved with the symbols of the natives of America—it wouldn’t have been out of place in Bergson’s shop—was propped against it. The walls were covered with prints from Mr. Audubon’s beautifully colorful book about birds. They had all 435 in frames, given them by the artist, and rotated the birds constantly; Audubon himself had been a dedicated visitor here until his death, two years before.

  They dined cheaply but happily, all their friends having brought along additional viands and drinks, Lady Jane herself providing an excellent punch, sent over earlier in the day, which tasted of raspberries.

  Lenox was seated next to Effie Somers—and the time flew away, as if it were on wings.

  After dinner the men and women divided. Cal’s father, a noble soul with a finely shaped head and a great coiffed sweep of gray hair, briefly back in London before he left for the interior of Africa, spent a great deal of time asking Lenox about his methods and his ideas.

  At the end of it he offered a word of oblique praise. “They called me mad, too, you know,” he said. “Perhaps they still do. I wouldn’t trade a lifetime over again in the House of Lords for a single day of doing what I loved.”

  The two sexes rejoined in the drawing room, and Lenox moved into other conversations. But he was heartened by that one: He did love his work.

  And he was improving, surely he was improving—or he was trying to improve, at least, which must matter in its own right.

  He found Lady Jane and Effie Somers together on a couch as the hour ne
ared midnight. “You look as if you’ve been brooding,” said Lady Jane.

  They were in the center of the small, comfortable drawing room, which was populated by a mix of generations, aging Explorers Club members and young society sorts.

  “Only a bit.”

  “What about?” asked Miss Somers, accepting a glass of champagne from a footman with a graceful nod.

  “Shakespeare!” said Lenox, and grinned. “How dull.”

  “Did you know he minded the horses for the theatergoers?” Effie said.

  “I was always told he wrote the plays,” Jane replied. “But then they never educate girls.”

  Her friend smiled, and in that instant Lenox almost loved her. “No, it was his first job in the business. When he was new in London.”

  “Was it!”

  “I like to think of him standing there. He must have heard the laughs and groans from inside the theater and wondered what was prompting them.”

  “Every long silence,” said Lenox.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  Lady Jane excused herself. “Will you take care of Miss Somers for a moment?” she asked. “I have to ask Cal something.”

  Her motive in leaving them alone was transparent enough that when she had gone across the room, there was a slight humorous tension in the candid look Lenox and Effie Somers exchanged.

  She wore a summer dress, yellow and white. Around her neck was a gold chain with a gold ring on it. She had pinned her thick golden-chestnut hair up, and Lenox could imagine, from the trace of scent he had caught when he said hello, what it would be like to stand before her as she unfurled it just for him.

  A painful absence glanced through his insides. He thought, unbidden, how he wanted someone to love.

  “How are you finding your return from America to England?” he asked.

  “When I was last there everyone was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But I observe that it has followed me here.”

  “I haven’t read it.”

  “No? It is quite wrenching. All of the people on the right side of things—the abolitionists—have high hopes for it.”

  “Did you not meet anyone on the wrong side of things?” Lenox asked.