Gone Before Christmas

by Charles Finch

  But it had returned to the capitol without event, and he to Hampden Lane.

  Now it was Christmas Eve, and, the long journey to Suffolk completed, he had only the short one left to make: to Sloane Square.

  * * *

  Mrs. Austen was at home. “Mr. Lenox?” she said, in confusion.

  “I apologize for the intrusion,” he said, standing at her doorstep. “I had just one or two more very simple questions.”

  She looked unenthusiastic, but turned and led him inside.

  The little flat was no homier than it had been before. Upon the windowpanes there was the icy frost of the day. It would snow overnight, they said, the men who tracked the weather from Greenwich.

  Lenox, fresh from the street, rubbed his hands together. “May I offer you a cup of tea?” she said.

  “That would be lovely, if it’s not an imposition. It’s very kind of you.”

  “Of course,” she said, and went to put the kettle on the little stove. The tea leaves she carefully took from a towel. Lenox saw they had been used once already, and the economy touched a pained part of his heart. When she offered milk and sugar, he was quick to decline, wondering to himself how precious her stores of those two staples must be. She presented him with a very pretty cup and saucer, painted with forget-me-nots. “Here you are. These were my husband’s mother’s own cups.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  Mrs. Austen gestured for Lenox to sit again by the potbelly stove, and herself went again to the chair in front of the closet door, so that the awkward length of the sofa lay between them.

  That awkward length.

  “She died when he was young, unfortunately,” said Mrs. Austen.

  “I imagine that was difficult.”

  She didn’t reply directly. “What did you wish to ask me?” she said.

  Ah. Here they arrived at the center of the matter.

  Lenox took his teacup in both hands to warm them, and took a slow sip, buying himself a moment to respond.

  At last, setting the cup down, he said, “You observe that I have come alone, this afternoon. Without Inspector Larchmont.”

  She looked puzzled. “Yes, quite clearly.”

  He stood up, hesitated, and then sat down again. “I am a little hoarse at the moment,” he said. “The weather. I wonder if you would mind moving to the sofa, so that I could preserve my voice?”

  “I am more comfortable here,” she said.

  It was precisely her discomfort in the chair she had chosen that interested him, however. “Or the settee, would you call it?”

  She reddened. He had aimed his arrow to wound, and it had—“settee” being the lower classes’ synonym for a sofa. “Excuse me?” she said.

  Lenox looked down at the floor, still thinking. “Well,” he said at last, “perhaps I shall tell you my ideas, and then we may have a frank conversation. The only question is whether you would prefer to move.”

  “Why should I?”

  “So that your husband can come out of the room behind you.”

  Her eyes widened. There was a brief, electric silence, and then the door was flung open, and Lieutenant Allen Austen strode past his wife into the room, thunder on his face.

  * * *

  “Get out!” he said.

  Lenox didn’t move.

  The three remained there for another moment of strange silence, the noises of the street filtering up to the cold room, in which each figure, two seated, one standing, his body tense with readiness and rage, remained motionless.

  “Get out!” said the Lieutenant again.

  He looked very little like his father; he was much taller, had blond hair swept tidily back, and wore a moustache of dark blond hair. Though he was out of uniform, to a detective it was easy to spot him as a military man; his bearing said it all. (Professions Lenox could identify with a single glance: soldier, butcher, chimney sweep, journalist, barrister, lacemaker, gentleman.)

  He wore a sack coat and dark blue trousers. They were a handsome couple.

  Very mildly, addressing Austen’s wife, Lenox said, “Have you been to the Army officers’ cloakroom at Charing Cross Station, Mrs. Austen?”

  “No,” she replied, her features chilled. They had been caught.

  Lenox crossed one leg over the other. “One of the first things I noticed there was the extreme heaviness of the bolts of the grate through which Lieutenant Austen was reported to have been abducted.”

  “Bolts,” she repeated, too much in shock to be very coherent.

  “Yes. The abductor would have needed precisely the right tools to get the grate off. The bolts wouldn’t have come away by hand.”

  “Is that so?” she said.

  “Certainly not. Beyond that, the abductor would have had to rely on Lieutenant Austen re-entering the room alone, would he not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The concatenation of fortunate circumstances aiding our theoretical abductor only grows more far-fetched from there,” Lenox went on. “How could this imagined assailant, for instance, whatever powers we may credit him with, have been sure of overpowering Lieutenant Austen, removing the grate, and getting through the ventilation system before one of his friends reentered the room?”

  “I do not know.”

  “And indeed, what if one of these friends had also forgotten some object in the cloakroom? And returned in the middle of the attack? Immediately—immediately—I felt uncomfortable with the theory that Lieutenant Austen had been attacked and abducted.”

  Austen looked furious. “Get out,” he said again, though the energy was draining from him.

  “And yet there was that enigmatic spray of blood, and there were his objects on the bench in the cloakroom—your objects, sir, including your very rail ticket—and there was, most importantly, no sign, anywhere, of Lieutenant Ernest Austen.”

  “Will you toy with us, then?” said Austen, still standing. “What is it you want?”

  Lenox looked down, his eyes hooded. “As I informed your wife, Lieutenant Austen, I came without Inspector Larchmont.”

  “What is that supposed to mean, then? You wish a bribe?”

  Lenox ignore that. “I traveled to Ipswich yesterday.”

  “Much good may it have done you,” said Austen bitterly, and crossed the room, flinging himself down on the sofa, leaning against an armrest so that his right hand half-covered his face.

  “Having spoken to your father, it seemed doubtful to me that you would have planned to return to that part of the country for the holiday.”

  “Oh?”

  “Was Annie in your father’s employ, when you were still on terms with him, sir?”

  For the first time Austen looked him straight in the eye, and his face softened slightly. “Annie?”

  “She is fair browbeaten, I fear, sir. But a courageous person.”

  Austen meditated upon this for a moment. “Anyhow,” he said at last.

  “Shall I go on?” Lenox said.

  Neither of the couple had the vigor to resist the question’s implications. “If you wish,” Austen said.

  “I reached into the tunnel by which you were meant to have departed. My hand came away as dusty as an abandoned house. It was then that I knew nobody had been down it. It is also when I thought to look under the sofa.”

  The sofa in the cloakroom was one of those pieces of furniture in which the age specialized, enormous and ugly. It could easily have seated eight. It was upholstered in a heavy crimson color, and had gold tassels hanging heavily from its base.

  Underneath it, if you looked past the tassels, there was a sort of joist for support, usual for such a large piece of furniture.

  “There was just space enough for a man between the two parallel boards, I thought,” said Lenox. “A conscientious inspector would have looked behind the tassels, but no further.”

  Austen’s eyes told Lenox that he had found the truth. “Well?” said the Lieutenant.

  “Then there was the bench. The
spray of blood looked injurious, but not fatal, nor even profoundly inconvenient. From an arm, perhaps?” Lenox looked over Austen, but saw no bandage. His clothes were probably concealing it. “At any rate. Underneath the spray of blood were your things. An interesting assortment!”

  “Oh?”

  “I have visited your apartments here twice now, and though it may sound indelicate to say, I would imagine that money is a difficulty for you. Hence the third-class ticket. If you weren’t going to use the thing anyway . . .”

  “Oh, finish, would you, damn it,” said Austen.

  Lenox knew he was home. “And money is the reason, I take it, for all of this?” There was a silence. “Anyhow. I also noticed that there was no tobacco among the objects, though you were clearly a very heavy smoker. Too precious to leave behind, I imagine.”

  “Finish, finish,” said Austen, restlessly. He had no doubt been in these confined rooms all week. “Have it all out, damn you.”

  Lenox nodded neutrally. “Very well. As I envision it, you cut yourself, scattered your belongings on the bench, removed the grate, concealed yourself under the sofa, and waited to be missed by your friends. If you had the right tools—and I don’t know how long you were planning this operation, whether you did reconnaissance work—you could have had the whole thing done in under a minute.

  “At some moment in the ensuing commotion you found time to slip away. That wouldn’t have been hard. It was thirty minutes before any real police officer was present; all would have been in chaos, people in and out of the room. May I ask when you left, just out of curiosity?”

  “When Boothby went to fetch a second constable, and the first was examining the grate,” Austen said flatly.

  “Very good. Out of the room, you were in Charing Cross—invisible. You returned home. Your wife, when she had visitors, sat in the least convenient and least comfortably situated place in the sitting room, so that she could guard against anyone going into the room in which you were concealed.”

  It was this, Mrs. Austen’s strange choice to sit in the room’s least comfortable position, in front of that door, that had produced Lenox’s moment of realization.

  She looked at him helplessly. “What do you intend to do?” she asked.

  He glanced down at the traveling bag he had noticed in the kitchen, with the sewing kit atop it. There was also the needlepoint she had straightened. “Your finances are desperate enough that you have taken sewing in, I see,” he said. This was hard, poorly paid work. “Your bag is ready.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the cost of even the simplest officer’s life in the Grenadiers,” said Austen, his voice still terribly bitter. They had been so close to escape. “It is oppressive.”

  “And the next ship bound for the Azores departs on the twenty-seventh,” Lenox said.

  He had done much to astonish the pair; but this was the first time they both looked at him, simultaneously, with astonishment.

  “How did you know?” Austen asked.

  “I have told you a very great deal, now,” said Lenox. “Come clean with me, and we will see what can be done for a poor and unhappy couple at Christmas time.”

  * * *

  It was only Austen himself who had planned to take the ship three days hence to the Azores. These islands, just off the Portuguese coast, were less than two weeks’ journey away; he could have been in Ponta Delgada, a very great distance indeed from the Wellington barracks, not long after Epiphany.

  The travel bag with the sewing on top—it was his. Their plan was that his wife would follow him in the spring, after she had been paid out the sum fetched by his commission, be it seven or eight or twelve thousand pounds—a fortune, given that they were getting by on shillings a day now. Until then she would live upon the wages of her sewing, and on the aid of the regiment’s wives, who had already proven themselves kind to her.

  By the time she reached the Azores, MacLean, their dear friend, who was there, would have helped Austen decide on a course of action. He might try to make his fortune in India; America; even Portugal. A man with energy, money, and love could do very great things in any number of colonies.

  “You shouldn’t have told me that Mr. MacLean went to Canada,” Lenox said, “when I knew that he was not there. A lie too far.”

  Mrs. Austen said nothing. Her husband shook his head. “You’ve played cat and mouse with us, Mr. Lenox. Now decide whether you have pinned us to eat us, or to play with us. No more of these little insights.”

  Lenox nodded. It was a fair and gentlemanly request. He had one question left, however. “Why not just sell your commission?” he asked.

  “That money would have reverted to my father by law,” he said. “Whose stated goal, on the day of my marriage, was that he might outlive me. Not that he would murder me—only that he would hang on as tenaciously as a barnacle to see me in the ground, without a penny of his or of my dear, mistreated mother’s.

  “We never got on, he and I. My sisters were much more awed by him; he turned them against me early. I was fortunate to be sent away to Winchester at nine by my mother’s family. And yet”—here he reached a hand to his wife, who took it and squeezed it—“I never doubted, from then to this day, that I loved Letitia. She is the best woman I have ever known, Mr. Lenox, the most steadfast, kindest, happiest—she is my life.”

  “And if you were to die, the commission would become hers, by army code.”

  He nodded. “Yes. It was the only way to salvage any money from the disaster of my father’s unkindness, following my mother’s death. They were never suited to each other. But he was more reasonable in early days, more pious. His flaws were always present—but only in the brief years preceding her death did they predominate, did he become the gnarled, angry person you met.”

  Lenox nodded, thoughtfully. “Did you feel no guilt about leaving the Grenadiers?”

  “There is not much else I have felt in the past four days, Mr. Lenox. The Grens were my brothers; my men, as sons to me. But Letitia must come first, and her life has grown close to intolerable, with no way out of it, no way forward. In three and a half months I could have committed to another five years in the regiment, without a thin penny to support the lifestyle it demands, or I could have sold out my commission, and enriched my father, who needs no enriching, while leaving us destitute—without even this modest home, which the Grenadiers provide.”

  Lenox nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I see the dilemma.”

  Suddenly Mrs. Austen leaned forward, an urgent look in her eyes, as if for the first time she understood that Lenox was not there to harm them. “Will you help us?” she asked.

  Nobody had been hurt. A young love was at stake; two tender hearts.

  “Inspector Larchmont’s theory is that the French intelligence agencies have abducted your husband. He entertains no other suspicions. Yesterday I wired and told him to hold the corpses that come through Scotland Yard morgue—there are generally seven or eight of these a day, many of them unclothed, or clothed very lightly. Most turn up in the Thames. Few have identifying marks.

  “Can you be brave, Mrs. Austen?”

  She looked at him curiously. “I can be brave.”

  “Then you know what you must do. I shall inform Larchmont that my sources have confirmed to that me French intelligence tortured and killed Lieutenant Austen; you go in, choose a body with blond hair, roughly the size and shape of an army officer, and tell them that it is your husband.” Lenox rose. “In three days your husband boards a ship.”

  “Won’t someone else claim the body?”

  “Nine of ten are never identified, much less claimed.”

  She looked at him searchingly. “Thank—”

  But Lenox still wasn’t sure they understood the gravity of the situation. “If you’re caught you’ll be hanged for desertion, Lieutenant Austen.”

  “I’m only on leave.”

  “For another day? They can hang you in the Azores if they wish. Listen to me, since it is now my own neck
on the line, too—go to some anonymous hotel in Clapham, Lieutenant. Shave your moustache. It has been the first word in idiocy to conceal yourself here.

  “Try not to carry yourself so distinctly as a soldier does. Think of a new name for yourself. And pray for the best. It is not ever, ever, ever as easy to begin a new life as people suspect it is, in my long experience of such endeavors. Here is a five-pound note to pay for the hotel and to get you by. No—I insist. It is Christmas. I’ll leave you know. I wish you luck. With any of it on our side, we will never see each other again. Good day, Lieutenant Austen. Good day, Mrs. Austen.”

  Lenox stood up and touched his hat. Mrs. Austen rose, too. “How can we possibly thank—”

  “None of that,” said Lenox. “Clapham, and shave, Lieutenant Austen.”

  He left as quickly and discreetly as he could, huddled under the collar of his overcoat. It had finally started to snow.

  * * *

  Dozens of generations before Lenox was born, the French had begun bottling their wine in what they called bouteilles, glass bottles; not long thereafter the cupbearer to the feudal lords was rechristened the bouteillier; and at some mysterious moment in the 1500s, the word had crossed the channel and been anglicized: butler.

  Kirk, Lenox and Lady Jane’s butler, was a passionate expert on the subject of wine, the house’s chief cherisher and manager of the cellar. (Lenox himself preferred a whisky and water.) This was one of the two traditional roles the English butler had, along with that of the guardian to the family silver; indeed most butlers slept in a room with the silver safe in it. Of course in these days the job involved a great deal other than these duties, but they were the ones Kirk approached most sacrally.

  Lenox finally understood, then, that the Christmas luncheon they were hosting was of great significance, when Kirk approached him and began to ask in grave, precise terms about a certain Médoc he had considered—only considered!—serving that afternoon, produced along the Gironde estuary, and wondering whether Lenox approved or disapproved of the thought, only the thought, not its necessary eventuation, merely the conceptual uncorking of–