The Vanishing Man

by Charles Finch

  “People have remarked that life is unsatisfying, sir,” said Graham.

  Lenox smiled. He knew his immense good fortune, and felt a guilt shadowing it—perceived it even in comments like this, which he knew were not personal. “Indeed,” he said. “Indeed.”

  When they pulled up at Lenox’s house in Hampden Lane, he saw that an arrangement of flowers was visible along every sill of his house. They hadn’t been there that morning. He pointed them out to Graham.

  “Peculiar, sir,” said the valet.

  “You see what it means?”

  “No, sir.”

  “My mother is here. The only person whose opinion Mrs. Huggins truly cares for in my family.”

  Graham raised his eyebrows. “Do you think so?”

  “I’ll bet you Mr. Templeton’s tenner.”

  “I shall have to respectfully decline the offer, sir. I see that the lights are on in the lower drawing room—and I smell gingerbread, Mrs. Huggins’s specialty. I think you must be right.”

  And he was. Seated comfortably in his study were Lady Emma Lenox, along with Edmund. They both rose when Charles came in.

  “Hello, Mother,” he said. It was so ingrained in him not to ask a direct question of a woman that he said, first, “I hope you are doing well,” before adding, more directly, “How are you? What brings you here? Am I being shipped to the colonies?”

  “Where have you been all day?” his mother asked.

  “Kent.”

  “Kent! Apples, hops, cherries, and women? For shame, Charles. And I hear you have murdered a duke, or something of the sort.”

  “Mother,” said Edmund chidingly.

  She gave Charles the kind of hug only a mother can give, in which part of her love passes into a person, truly and physically, a press of the body holding in its few seconds a history of tenderness that dates to the time when the two of you were one.

  Lenox hugged her back, suddenly exhausted and feeling very, very young, where just twenty minutes before, staring at Dorset’s back, he had felt old and wise.

  “If you don’t mind giving me a minute, I will wash and change. It has been a long day.”

  “Of course,” said his mother.

  In the hallway he met Mrs. Huggins. “Your mother is here,” the housekeeper hissed, forgetting all formalities.

  “Yes, I know. You just saw me leave the room in which she’s sitting.”

  “What are we supposed to do?”

  “Do?”

  “About it, sir?”

  Lenox looked at her with genuine bafflement. Of all the people to pick in his family, Lancelot and his mother. After them came the cats, and then Charles a very distant sixth, probably. “I’m not sure I see it as quite the emergency you do, Mrs. Huggins. Has she tried to steal something? What’s wrong?”

  She looked at him with a face full of despair and betrayal and stormed away, off toward some task only she understood.

  Edmund caught up with Charles in the hallway as Mrs. Huggins was going. “A quick word?” he said.

  “Yes, is everything all right?”

  “Of course it is. But what on earth are you doing with Thaddeus Bonden? Thomas Clapton almost fell to the ground when he saw you, Charles. You must be more careful.”

  Lenox was bewildered. “What?”

  “Have you involved yourself in politics?”

  “Politics! No. He was helping me with Dorset. Politics?”

  “Oh.” Edmund looked relieved. “That’s all right, then.”

  “What does Bonden have to do with politics?”

  Edmund shook his head. “I cannot say much. Only that he is our side’s greatest spy against the French. If we fight a war with them again and win it, he will be the cause.”

  “Bonden? At the Dovecote?”

  “Yes. Why? How did you hear of him?”

  “About, I suppose. He is an expert in finding things.”

  “Oh, that. Right. He refuses a government salary above his naval pension.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “I’m going back to Mother. Be discreet if you wander around with him again, and don’t mention what I’ve told you. Clapton will be comforted.”

  “I am so pleased to be able to comfort him,” said Charles, but Edmund had never done very well with catching sarcasm, and only nodded.

  Lenox went upstairs and washed. Looking into the mirror, he saw that his face was tired, sun-beaten. He realized that he had needed his mother. How did she always know?

  Since his father had died, Charles and Lady Emma—who had always been closer than she and Edmund—had stuck close, but she had also transferred a great deal of her attention to her elder son. He was the baronet, and though Lenox House was hers, its ways, its history, its custodianship, its people would all slowly have to become his. It was perhaps in this that she had found consolation from her grief at being widowed—she had observed firsthand her husband discharging his duties for forty years, and nobody could be better positioned to help pass those duties between generations.

  But the oceans could dry, the sky fall into darkness, Charles knew, and she would find him, one way or another.

  He went downstairs, where he was immediately asked if he was going to marry Miss Auburn; he coughed into his brandy with alarm, and when he had recovered said no, not just at that moment, it had been a long day; his mother told him he mustn’t be facetious; he told her not to gossip so much with Lady Jane—and all in all, to both parties, the visit had thus commenced satisfactorily.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The two brothers and their mother stayed up late that night, talking over local matters from their hometown of Markethouse. Every name that came up was as familiar as their own; when Edmund and Charles heard that Mrs. Carter was marrying yet again they rolled their eyes at the same instant.

  At long length, when the last bits of cheese, fruit, and biscuit on the tray had been eaten, when the teapot was empty and all three were yawning, and Mrs. Huggins seemed at last satisfied that she had discharged her responsibilities toward Lady Emma, Sir Edmund rose and said he ought to be getting home, and that he would drop their mother at the Savoy—where she always stayed when she didn’t want to open her own London house. She added before she left that she would be by in the morning to inspect Lancelot.

  “You won’t like what you see,” Charles warned.

  “Neither of you were as angelic as you seem to believe.”

  “I was,” said Edmund.

  “Ha!” said Charles.

  “Charles!” said their mother. She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I wish you wouldn’t tease your brother.”

  “Well, you may go on wishing if it pleases you,” Lenox said in a grumbling way, and saw them to the door, closing it after they were in a carriage with a tremendous yawn.

  Before he turned in, he decided to quickly check his desk. It was piled with notes and telegrams. He sifted through these until he saw one that attracted his attention.

  It was a letter from a woman named Mrs. Anderson Withering, posted at Cowgate, Scotland. That was, if Lenox recalled correctly, the long thoroughfare that lay between the old town and the university in Edinburgh.

  7 June

  Dear Mr. Lenox,

  Thank you for your solicitous concern about my brother. He is here at Mrs. Walsh’s House for the Incurably Mad. (It is not a name I like, but offered the best care that was recommended to my husband, who sought several medical opinions.) He has a private room there and I visit him twice a week. He is a lovely companion—but as you have apparently witnessed, erratic in his behavior. He had known for some time that we were to resituate him in Scotland, and he was displeased with that. Perhaps it was this that motivated him to approach you.

  The name Captain Tankin Irvington means nothing to me, and my brother has no naval background, nor has he spent any time in Australia—to answer your three questions. You are welcome to visit either him or me should you happen to be in Edinburgh.

  Best wishes,
/>   Kitty (Belmont) Withering

  PS: I write this having just seen your second telegram. I was never required to sign a visitor log at Bedlam. I do not know why.

  Lenox quickly dug through the rest of the letters on the desk. He checked the previous wire—the Edinburgh Asylum. He had written to the wrong institution. A creeping feeling of dread, just the initial stage of comprehension, crept up the back of his neck.

  He knew he must act or he would sleep badly; he wrote out a few questions for Dr. Hansel and sent a sleepy footman out to send the telegram and pay for return post, so that Hansel could write as voluminously and as quickly as he wished.

  This done, Lenox sat in his chair, holding the letter and thinking about Belmont. He fell asleep there—and it was long after two in the morning when he woke, stumbled heavily upstairs, and, a cool breeze running in from the windows, took with gratitude to his bed.

  A reply from Hansel awaited him when he woke, just after seven. It was tucked under a glass of apple juice with chips of ice in it, next to his teacup. Lenox slid into a dressing gown and, picking up a piece of bacon with his fingers simultaneously, tore open the wire.

  Dear Lenox STOP received your wire and shall endeavor to answer all questions STOP in first place families have not for some seven hundred years been required to sign in STOP shame of association STOP only medical visitors and so forth STOP in second place Belmont was indeed billeted with a former member of the navy for a time STOP full name Carleton Wexford unsure rank STOP standard lunacy STOP finally Mrs Walsh an excellent home by all accounts STOP smaller and more discreet STOP in hopes this helps STOP Hansel

  This was a tremendously expensive number of words, but Lenox didn’t care a fig. He flattened it on the table, running over its folds with the side of his hand, and read it once more.

  “Graham,” he called.

  The valet appeared, already dressed in his crisp gray suit, hair newly clipped. When did he find time to go to the barber? Before Lenox awoke, obviously. There was an old man who walked from house to house with scissors and mirror. “Sir?”

  “Will you fetch me the naval register from the study—the big blue one on the upper shelf near the windows—and then come and join me?”

  Lenox ate his eggs and pondered Belmont until Graham returned a moment later. Lenox leafed through the oversized book until he came to the name Wexford. There were two of them.

  Only one he needed: “Midshipman Carleton Wexford, sometime officer of Her Majesty’s ships Isabelle, Livia, Victory, Roseanna, Julia, Victoria, retired Her Majesty’s service 1844, living Cable Street, Portsmouth.”

  And later Bedlam, it would appear.

  Lenox saw immediately that Wexford had been on at least two ships upon which Captain Irvington had also served, the Livia and the Victoria.

  “That settles it, Graham,” he said.

  “What’s that, sir?”

  Lenox sighed. “I have been made a goose of—by an inmate.”

  “Belmont, sir?”

  “The same.”

  They sat and picked over the news as Lenox picked over his eggs. Obviously Belmont had picked up Irvington’s name from his bunkmate; obviously he was no more unfairly asylumed than most men at Bedlam; obviously his sister cared for him greatly.

  Lenox felt very, very stupid. It was unlike him to be so credulous. He said so to Graham.

  “Perhaps there is a lesson in it, sir,” said Graham.

  “Not to trust the passing comments of insane people? Most people learn that lesson some time before the age of twenty-six.”

  Graham smiled. “That sometimes there are simple, unsuspicious reasons behind a mystery, sir, I would venture. The profession you have chosen cannot always be portraits of Shakespeare.”

  Lenox speared a sausage moodily. “I suppose. It’s not as if even that was very satisfying.” He considered his lunch with the duke on Monday. “I wonder if we shall ever see that play in England again.”

  At that moment Lenox felt, out of absolutely nowhere, a sharp pain on his chin, like a bee sting. It took him a bewildered second to realize what had happened, and then he stood bolt upright.

  “Lancelot,” he shouted, as the boy, with his peashooter, sped away upstairs to his hideous den.

  “Shall I fetch him, sir?” Graham asked.

  Lenox sat down, rubbing his face. “No. I deserve it for falling for Belmont.”

  “You are done with him, then?”

  “I shall ask a friend in Edinburgh to verify what the letter says. But I have no doubt it will all prove out.” Lenox grimaced, rubbing his chin. “It really does hurt, that little hellion.”

  “I can fetch ice, sir.”

  “Oh, sit down, bother you, pour yourself some tea.” Lenox thought for a moment. “Do you know, of the numerous arguments that I have seen London make that the world is a cruel and meaningless place—murder, theft, fraud—none is more profound than that Mrs. Huggins should love that boy.”

  “She is childless, sir.”

  “And that is the child to make her regret it? No—mark my words, I will never have children, Graham. Poison my soup one supper if I ever tell you otherwise.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “Make it some quick and painless poison, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “To be sure, sir.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  There was a table at White’s that belonged exclusively to the duke, one of just three members accorded the honor, and was otherwise kept empty. The headwaiter led them to it—the center of the most important room at the most exclusive club in the British Empire.

  By leading him here, the duke had discharged a certain duty; Lenox was a gentleman who could be respectably met in the highest echelon of London society, up to Buckingham Palace. There would be new invitations on his hall table when he returned home that afternoon, some so brazen as to be given again after an earlier withdrawal, he reflected as they looked at the menus.

  They ate salmon, pheasant, mashed potatoes, and long beans, with the house popovers, light and eggy, serving as sauce-pushers, per tradition. Lenox was a member at White’s, and when the check came with coffee and brandy, he offered to sign it. But the duke gave him a look somewhere between contempt and amusement, and just waved it away, unsigned.

  They had spoken so far only of neutral matters. The duke reminisced about Lenox’s father in kind terms, and they spoke at some length about how Edmund was managing his new responsibilities.

  “Please tell him that he is welcome to call on me if he should need any advice,” Dorset said, sipping his coffee black.

  “It is very kind of you, Your Grace.”

  “Meanwhile I wonder if you would join me in nominating Ward for membership here. It is perhaps slightly above his station, but he has been loyal to me, and he is well educated and very sound.”

  Lenox looked down at the petit fours. “Of course,” he said.

  It was remarkable how rapidly the duke had returned, unstained, to his previous sphere of social activity. That night, he mentioned in passing, he would be dining with the Queen, and the next week he planned to do some stag shooting at his friend Lord Mountjoy’s estate.

  Lenox thought of General Pendleton.

  “Tell me,” Lenox said at last, “only because I am inveterately curious. Will you seek the play?”

  The duke’s expression flattened. When he spoke, it seemed to pain him; he did not even say his daughter’s name, merely, “She has married one of my cotters.”

  “I know,” said Lenox.

  This was an ancient race of farm laborers, many of their families on the small parcels of land just as long as the dukes and earls who rented to them had been on theirs. Their dwellings, over time, had taken their names—cottages.

  “You went to Harrow and Oxford. Your father was a traditionalist. You must have some comprehension of my position. Imagine your own position, but magnified a thousand times.”

  It was exhausting, this arrogance. He was only a man,
the fellow across the table, with his lined face, his smooth gray hair, his gold ring, his cup of coffee. One day the last person who had ever loved him would die, just as was true for everyone within these convivial walls. What lay beyond this earth they none of them knew—but nobody could believe there would be dukes there.

  Or perhaps they could. “I can see the difficulty, Your Grace,” said Lenox. “But it is Shakespeare.”

  “Yes, Shakespeare,” said the duke, turning his eyes to the windows. “William Shakespeare. I think it is time for that portrait to be stored in the vault at Dorset Castle, and perhaps in three or four generations someone will take it out, and read my letter. But not till then.”

  So Campion would not be coming back to England! Could that be? Lenox felt a shiver of rage—but knew he might just as profitably yell at the crashing shore as at the Duke of Dorset.

  To his credit, the duke, before they left, invited him to play a few games of billiards, doubles. The message was clear: that it was a social luncheon, this one, a friendship. He was loud in his proclamations of affection for Lenox, free in his teasing, before half a dozen men who would each tell another half a dozen about it. 6+x+y.

  They went to the cloakroom together and fetched their hats at a little past two o’clock. Emerging into the lobby, Lenox saw his brother.

  “Edmund!”

  “Oh, hello, Charles.” He bowed to the duke. “Edmund Lenox, Your Grace.”

  The duke inclined his head in response. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance. I have been telling your brother that you ought to call upon me if you need any advice about that small estate of yours.”

  Only someone who had known Edmund exceedingly well over the course of many years would have discerned the anger in his voice when he said, “I will be sure to do so at the first possible chance, Your Grace. Thank you.”

  “Well!” The duke slapped his gloves against his palm. “I will bid you both good day.”

  “Good day, Your Grace,” said Charles, with the peculiar consciousness that they were passing out of each other’s lives. “I will write Ward’s letter this evening.”

  “Capital.” The duke looked briefly troubled. “And you will be … discreet.”