An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries)

by Charles Finch

  What was one supposed to feel, meeting one’s monarch? She came in with a rollicking bustle of spaniels around her feet, four or five of them, tan, white, and black in coloring. (Lenox still remembered Dash, her first and favorite, who had been memorialized in the newspapers as if he were an officer in the Guards.) The most striking thing was her size, always—she stood just under five feet, a crumb of person. There was a reason the people called her “our little queen.”

  In public and social life Lenox had occasion to see Victoria relatively often, sometimes as many as six or seven times a year. He always felt the same complex blend of emotions. There was reverence, first, then incredulity that so much power and meaning resided in one rather inconsequential-looking person. There was even something comic, faintly disappointing, in her plain, rather portly personage, but this recognition was always succeeded by a great wave of affection and wish to protect her.

  Perhaps this was because of Albert. On the day in her eighteenth year when she took the crown, she had once said, she watched two of the greatest men in the realm—her two ancient uncles—bow before her, and at that moment it had been borne in upon her that she would never again have a true equal. She had been wrong, however. In Prince Albert she had found both love and mutual respect. When he had died, fourteen years before, it was widely acknowledged that the world had grown dark for her—that even now she only went on out of a sense of duty, without any pleasure in life, even, somewhat shockingly, in her children.

  Albert had been something of a laughingstock, in truth, a derision encouraged in part by Victoria’s overfondness for him. When he had arrived she had been less kind: She had banished his childhood friends from his retinue, back to the Continent, permitting him to keep only his beloved dog, Eon, for whom she bought a silver collar, which in itself seemed a gesture of proprietorship.

  Albert had handled his submission gallantly. He was exceedingly gentle and loving with the Queen from the start, until soon she came to depend on him utterly. She had made him a consort when the public took against him—they feared a war with the continent—and would have made him a king, if she could have.

  After his death, nobody in London had seen her face for three years.

  She emerged a statelier woman, her own sorrow close to death itself. She had strength, certainly. Often Lenox remembered the story, much whispered in his childhood, of her first days as Queen. During all of her adolescence she had shared a bed with her arrogant, domineering mother, but upon taking up residence here at Buckingham she had banished that woman, furious, to a distant suite of rooms. Yet she had kept through an adjoining door her childhood governess, who, until the day of her death, brushed Victoria’s hair every night.

  As she entered the room now, gray of hair and lined of face, that arrogant, vulnerable child-queen seemed both unreachably gone and at the same time visible in her lineaments, her expressions. Time had shaped her. It took no courage to be a nobleman, or even a prince, but to be a monarch for thirty-eight years, as she had been, took mettle. Privilege was no bulwark.

  “Gentlemen,” she said, as all four men in the room bowed, “I am told that someone may mean to make mischief here this evening.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Jenkins, who was the official presence of their trio.

  She had insisted upon seeing them herself, apparently. “You are Charles Lenox,” she said now, reaching down to scratch a dog’s ear. “And you are James Dallington.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they both said, Dallington apparently willing to let her slip pass unremarked.

  “Lady Jane Lenox is pregnant, Grete tells me,” said the Queen. “It is the hazard of being a wife, unfortunately.”

  “She has had the child, Your Majesty,” said Lenox and then, though the lieutenant had warned them to be as brief as possible, could not help himself from adding, “a girl named Sophia.”

  A flicker of a smile passed across the Queen’s face. “I’ll tell Grete she was wrong—she won’t like it. Sophia, then. I don’t dislike babies, though I think very young ones rather disgusting.” There was virtually no appropriate response to this, but she didn’t seem to mind the ensuing silence. She walked toward a window and pulled back the diaphanous curtain, looking out at the black of evening. “Our gathering begins in thirty minutes, gentlemen. Is that correct, Shackleton?”

  The lieutenant—who had a thin martial mustache, a strong jawline, and hair slicked into a neat mold—consulted his watch. “Thirty-one minutes, Your Majesty.”

  “What a pointless correction.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “I am surrounded by lawyers everywhere, making minor corrections. Such exactitude—everyone wishes the Queen to know the exact facts. Shackleton, it is foolish.”

  “Certainly, Your Majesty.”

  “You have my permission to approximate the time by half a minute, if it will save me a further line of dialogue with you.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Mr. Jenkins,” she said, “we are using four rooms this evening: this one, the State Dining Room, the Music Room, and the Ballroom. We will also walk down the East Gallery together, the King of Portugal and I. Will I be in any danger?”

  “There are already dozens of constables from the yard around the perimeter of the palace, ma’am.”

  “You think this thief means to mingle with the crowds?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  She was still looking out through the window. “What does he hope to steal?”

  “We don’t know, Your Majesty. There are no doubt a great many objects of value here.”

  She smiled again, as if acknowledging a certain dry wit to be found in such a trifling assessment of her possessions. “Yes, a few. Would he have gotten in, were all these constables not at their posts, Mr. Jenkins?”

  “I cannot say, ma’am.”

  “Yet I insist.”

  “Then yes, ma’am, I believe he would have.”

  “Do you agree, Mr. Lenox?”

  “I do, Your Majesty.”

  She looked back at them and inclined her head imperceptibly. “Then I thank you. Shackleton, let me know when he is caught, unless I am speaking to the King himself.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” she said, and, the dogs responding to some invisible tether they must have felt pulling them toward her—one that Lenox felt, too, and that he could see Dallington felt, Shackleton, Jenkins, every one of her subjects—she left.

  There was a moment’s silence. “She is very calm,” said Jenkins at last.

  “There is little enough that can surprise her after all this time,” Shackleton responded. “At any rate you know her famous quotation. ‘Great events make me quiet and calm—it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.’”

  “One does feel—well, something,” said Dallington.

  Indeed there was electricity still hovering in the air of the room, or perhaps being communicated between the four men, including Shackleton, who must have seen her every day. “She was uncommonly obliging,” said Lenox.

  “Yes, I thought so,” said Jenkins.

  This was by her own standards, of course. In most people her behavior would have seemed inexcusably haughty, but such haughtiness, Lenox reflected, contained some measure of self-protection. He thought of the black crepe she still wore upon her shoulders, and then of the inexhaustible line of people who wished a word with her, a moment, beginning with the King of Portugal.

  As in every occasion of life, Shakespeare had said it best. “I would not be a queen,” he had written in Henry the Eighth, “for all the world.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The next night Lenox and Dallington sat in a carriage outside the bright palace, both full of nervous energy. The night before nothing had happened. It must be tonight, they agreed. It was ten, and the party—this one given for a retiring member of the Queen’s retinue, an ancient woman called Lady Monmouth—was approaching its busiest moments. Now would
be the time for the thief to strike. The men of Scotland Yard, as well as the Queen’s own guards, had melted into the crowd, or attempted to, to give the thief the illusion that he was unwatched.

  “Yet how could he obtain access to the palace?” Dallington asked moodily, lowering his head to peer through the window. “It is guarded on three sides, and on the fourth there is a high wall.”

  “That is his best chance,” said Lenox.

  “But it would be impossible to scale.”

  Lenox shrugged. “Whenever I have a moment of doubt I consider the key.”

  “The key?”

  “How did you find the block of wax—opened or closed?”

  “Opened in half. Why?”

  “Whoever killed Wintering must have taken the key from the block. He had no time to do anything else, but he took the key.”

  The Yard had taken the wax impression and made a key from it, then tested it. As Lenox and Dallington had suspected, it belonged to a window on the lower level of the palace’s east side—not far, in fact, from the East Gallery, and for that matter from the State Dining Room, where Lady Monmouth was at that moment being honored.

  “Perhaps he has been scared off, because he killed Wintering, this person,” said Dallington.

  “I don’t think so. We’ve kept Wintering’s name out of the papers. All of the extra men on duty here are discreet, in plainclothes. Besides, the Queen is leaving for Balmoral—every item of value in the palace will go into a safe immediately.”

  “Bar the pictures.”

  “Which could not be resold with any ease,” said Lenox. They had consulted with several members of the palace’s staff, all of whom agreed that one of the decorations only put out while the Queen was resident—diamond-encrusted clocks, ancient royal artifacts, jeweled decanters—was the most likely target.

  “I don’t know why he would come,” said Dallington dispiritedly.

  “I think he will.”

  Two hours later, it was the younger detective’s pessimism that looked more prophetic. Shackleton and Jenkins, who were both inside the palace, had promised to fetch Lenox and Dallington immediately should an intruder enter the palace, or any guest—for this third man might have obtained an invitation, for all they knew—be seen to snatch at one of the Queen’s possessions.

  They had occupied the time in reading about Wintering. Though none of his neighbors knew him—or had even heard the shot—the Yard had still managed to put together an impressively thorough dossier on the dead man.

  Wintering was the scion of an impoverished but extremely ancient and distinguished family; there had been Winterings in Staffordshire at least since the Norman invasion, perhaps longer. His father, fifth son of a third son, was the curate of a small church just west of Stoke, where he lived with his wife. Leonard was their only child.

  Lenox knew several curates. It was no life for a man without private means. The rector of a parish took for himself the greater tithes (traditionally 10 percent of his parishioners’ income from the harvest of hay and wheat, or the sale of wood from trees) and the rector and the vicar split the lesser tithes, from the collection plate. The curate merely got a “cure,” a small fee, and ended up doing most of the work of these two greater men. The curacy was where one found the true believers without a shred of social grace, and it inclined its holders toward either saintliness or bitterness. A curate bore the education and status of a gentleman, without the funds to live in a gentleman’s style. There was many a stoop-backed sixty-year-old curate all across England, never able to marry on such a low income, eating only two or three hot meals a week, and then mostly of Mr. Campbell’s tinned soup—and looking forward with tremendous excitement and hunger to the church supper on Sundays.

  Of course, it was possible—the dossier offered no indication—that Wintering’s mother had brought money into the family, but Lenox thought he discerned the beginning of Wintering’s motive.

  For at the age of seventeen, Wintering had gone up to Oxford, and if life in a northern curacy had seemed at all grand, Oxford, with its aristocratic disregard for money—such an easy pose to adopt when one had money—would have placed it in a different context. Wouldn’t it have made Wintering yearn for suits from Ede’s, for hats from Shipp’s, for shotguns from Parson’s?

  After two years at Wadham, Wintering had left for London.

  “Did you see this?” Lenox asked Dallington, as he came to this part of the report. “About his first job?”

  Dallington looked across the carriage and smiled. “The Chepstow and Ely?”

  “Yes. Sales representative to France and Ireland.”

  “Only for a short period,” said Dallington. “Then the trail goes cold.”

  Lenox read on and saw that, indeed, the Board of Inland Revenue had lost track of Wintering entirely some six years before. “Hm.”

  “Godwin must have arranged for Wintering to get a job,” said Dallington, “and then perhaps Wintering fouled his own nest. This has been his revenge.”

  “Why wait so long? Then, who killed Wintering?”

  Dallington shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Wintering’s residence in Dalton Mews dated back just three months. He had received no forwarded mail and offered no previous address. “I want to know what gave him the idea of robbing the palace,” said Lenox.

  For another hour the two men sat and traded desultory conjectures about Wintering, his motivations and history. Neither had his heart fully in the conversation; both, too often, peered out toward the palace, as if a flare might go up when the thief was caught.

  At one o’clock, the final carriage having rolled away down Constitution Hill, Shackleton and Jenkins came outside. The party had concluded, they reported, without incident. Members both of Scotland Yard and of the Queen’s guard would remain on duty throughout the night.

  “They might as well go home,” said Dallington dully. “To break into the palace without the noise and cover of a party would be tantamount to suicide. I was so sure of it, too.”

  Jenkins was more positive. “We scared him off, the scoundrel. I don’t mind going back to good old detective work to find him, either.”

  “The Queen thanks you.”

  “Bother her thanks,” said Dallington.

  Shackleton, normally imperturbable, looked scandalized. “Will you withdraw that statement, sir?”

  “Oh, bother you, too. We’re sixty years past dueling, you know.” Lenox had to conceal the look of amusement pushing its way onto his face, and then Dallington, with a change of heart, or perhaps just wishing to leave on good terms, said, “I only meant that we haven’t deserved her thanks—that we ought to have done better.”

  Shackleton looked only slightly mollified but said, “Ah, I see. Yes.”

  “I apologize if it came out improperly.”

  The officer bowed slightly. “Not at all. Good evening, gentlemen.”

  It was very late, and the mood in the carriage, as they drove away from the palace, was disconsolate. Lenox had missed two important nights in Parliament. Dallington had said when the night began, only partly joking, that they were both sure of lordships. Now here they were, driving away empty-handed.

  As they approached Half Moon Street, Lenox said, “Do you know who had the most to lose in this situation?”

  “Who?”

  “Grace Ammons.”

  Dallington shrugged. He knew that the Queen’s secretary had lived in Paris for a while, and he had perhaps deduced that she had some unsavory past there, but he did not know the full extent of the story. “Her work?”

  “And her fiancé, George Ivory. Everything in her life.”

  “Yes,” said Dallington.

  Lenox almost went on—but didn’t, because the idea wasn’t quite formulated in his head yet.

  Still, he could not help but dwell on two facts, revolving them in his mind.

  First, that as the representative in France for the Chepstow and Ely, Wintering had likely spent time in Pa
ris when Grace Ammons was there, several years before.

  Second, a single sentence: She also lent me a small pistol to protect myself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  When Lenox took his breakfast the next morning, it came with several letters tucked under his plate. One of them was from Hampshire.

  He had forgotten writing to his old school friend Peter Hughes, who lived in his family’s dilapidated castle not far from Farnborough. Once they had been very close friends indeed, and still, whenever Peter came to the capital, they had the same easy rapport they’d had when they were both fourteen, sneaking off to the shops near Harrow to buy sweets.

  Leck Castle

  March 26

  My dear Lenox,

  Are you sure you’ve come across Archie Godwin, and not mistaken someone else for him? He is not tall, nor fair-haired—quite the opposite, in fact. He is a member of White’s, however.

  The Godwins have an odd reputation in this part of the world—not so much Archibald or Henrietta, for they keep very much to themselves, and decline nearly all social interaction—Archie barely even hunts, though he is, ex officio, as a Godwin, a member of the Beagles, which his great-grandfather founded. People in this part of Hampshire remember his father, Winthrop Godwin. I believe Winthrop was a cousin—who can say how distant—of William Godwin, the political philosopher, whose daughter married Shelley. Winthrop was a vicious old fellow, according to my own pater. He was always in and out of court, died some years ago. I believe very late in life he might have married again.

  As for Archie—one would scarcely call him a farmer, but there is no other suitable description of him to offer. He is not an esquire in any proper sense of the word. He doesn’t keep horses, other than for a handsome barouche Hetty uses now and again, doesn’t take tenants (there is a great deal of money at Raburn Lodge, and the houses he might let sit empty and unused). His sister was near marriage once but it was called off, for some reason. Their mother died when they were very young. Frankly I cannot imagine him going to London at all—he cannot find the will to make it to Farnborough for a winter ball—but the whole countryside knows that he went to London a few days ago.