“It’s different than it was thirty years ago,” Edmund had said, running a fork through his boiled cabbage, the terraces by the river crowded with other MPs. “Men walking home across Hyde Park from the countinghouse, tipping their hats to each other, don’t want to see a gallows being dismantled.”
“No more Rotten Row.”
“Right. England’s bloody days are past. She’s an empire now, to be managed.”
Lenox let that pass, though he knew, always a better student than his brother, that empires could be bloody enough. He smiled. “So then, murder moves into the drawing room.”
Edmund laughed. “Yes. It’s a capital way to fall asleep, a murder mystery. I like Bulwer-Lytton myself. Decent tales, those.”
“Decent murder tales,” Lenox grumbled.
In the stories that circulated through Britain about the so-called perfect crime, the criminal was nearly always from the Continent—an evil, mustache-twirling aristocrat, a Bluebeard.
Not a clerk, not that he remembered.
Lenox and Graham talked through the specifics of the case for some time—the shilling in the woman’s hand, the flowers, the obscuring, almost mocking thickness of the white makeup upon her face, the spectacles, the dryness of the plank upon which she was laid, the trunk on Walnut Island, and of course the letters, which now numbered two. They read these over again carefully, studying them for details.
“How will you proceed, sir?” Graham asked at last.
“Walnut Island. There’s a warehouse in Ealing where the evidence of unsolved crimes is kept. Tomorrow morning I intend to go there. You’ll come?”
“Only too happy, sir, if I’m not required here.”
Lenox waved a dismissive hand. “I would like to go back to Bankside, too.”
“I thought it was the first murder you were fixed upon solving, sir,” said Graham.
“It is. But they cannot stop me from thinking about the second one. Or walking a public part of the riverside. Everyone in London will be doing the same when the papers come out.”
“True, sir.”
“Why the Challenger?” Lenox asked in a voice soft enough that it was clear he was talking three-quarters to himself. “And these two women: Where in London do you come across two wellborn women to murder, who will not be missed?”
For Mayne had been very clear: every report of a woman’s disappearance in this city since the start of the year had been tracked down and resolved, for better or worse.
Graham, silent, shook his head. The air was cool; below them, in the park, the little flowers of spring moved imperceptibly in the afternoon breeze. There were clouds passing across the heavens. The authority and high-spiritedness of the noonday sun was dissipating; a moment to feel things, to ask of oneself what it all meant, the white loveliness of the sky an answer and an evasion at once, sufficient, never enough.
It was at this sort of time that Lenox’s thoughts always turned to Elizabeth.
“I’ve kept you from your duties,” Lenox said at last, after they had both stayed in silent reflection for some time. “And you no doubt need some time after your day—exhausting, I know, I know. Apologies.”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Could you ask Clara or Mrs. Huggins to ship in some more tea for me, before you retire? I want to sit here and gather my thoughts before I dine out.”
“Of course, sir.”
When he was alone, Lenox made a few fruitless lists, tore them up, scattered their remains in the fire. He leaned back and traced his fingertips along the spine of a random book on the side table next to his chair. The material was cloth, and it felt like trying to run his hand over the case: the very slight changes in texture, the very slight rises and dips, barely perceptible. Murder was a dramatic, violent act; the chase after the murderer was a matter of nuance and feel.
With that thought in mind, he took the paper notebook back up and started to write random words, connecting them with lines.
The shilling. The spectacles. Walnut Island. The Thames. Field. Mayne. Bankside. The tide. Nathaniel Butler. Death. Women. Brown hair. Strangulation.
Mrs. Huggins appeared with one of her trays.
“Ah, Mrs. Huggins,” he said, “thank you.”
“By all means, Mr. Lenox.”
“Do you know when I can expect my rug back?”
“By tomorrow.”
“Will it still bristle up in that pleasing way, or will it be softer?”
“Sir?”
He smiled. “Never mind. Thank you, Mrs. Huggins.” (In a moment of levity early in their relationship, he had once called her “Madame de La Huggins,” and her responding frown, though unaccompanied by reproach, had been so deep that it threatened to permanently contort her face.) “What is Graham doing?”
“Polishing silver, sir.”
Lenox winced. “Do tell him to take a break, would you?”
“If you wish, sir.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course, sir,” she said, and withdrew.
Lenox liked his tea smoky, and he took a deep draft, feeling it warm his chest. He ate quickly and happily.
His eyes began to feel lazy and soft; the fire flickered; and before long, with a mostly empty teacup cradled in two hands in his lap, he had nodded off to sleep.
He was woken by a bell. In the quick lurch from sleep, he felt momentarily confused, glanced down at his list, imagined that it was Mayne—didn’t know what to think—but then remembered that of course it must be his mother, and stood up, happy at the prospect of her arrival.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the house where Lenox had grown up, there was a full-length portrait of his mother. Its painter, Thomas Lawrence, had been old and grand—near the end of his life—and she had been very young. He had captured that youth, her pale face flushed with excitement, full of the future, lips parted in a slight smile. She was standing in the private study of a country house, a clean-hedged landscape visible through a window behind her, one hand resting lightly on a desk, the other holding the place in a small book, her figure slender in a brilliant lapis lazuli–colored dress.
She came into Lenox’s rooms now, nearly thirty years later, and her face was aged, but in its expression identical: tender, lively, curious, warm, haughty, loving. Still always full of the future.
“There you are, Mother, hullo.”
She kissed him and held his face between her hands. “You’ve been asleep, haven’t you?”
“No!” he said indignantly.
“I must be losing my touch then.” She kissed him one more time. “Is any of that tea left? I’m chilled to the bone.”
“Have you been to the Savoy?”
“No, I came straight here and sent my bags there. The train was late.”
Lenox glanced up at the clock—past five. “That’s a nuisance.”
“It always is.”
“You haven’t seen Wallace?”
“Wallace? Oh! No, not yet.” She had poured herself the tea, deemed it (Lenox could read her gestures as well as his own mind) too cold, and had now turned her hand to tidying the tray so that it could be taken away—returned with hot water, hopefully. “Tomorrow, I suppose. You’ll give me a ride to Edmund’s? If so, we have an hour or so to ourselves.”
“Of course.”
She looked at him with a mother’s eyes, and he felt her engulfing love with an unexpected sensation of gratitude. “How lovely it is to see you, Charles.”
“You as well.”
“Go on, then,” she said, leaning forward. “I can see you have news. What is it?”
He laughed. She had always been slightly uncanny. “I do have a case.”
He spun his tale. She was one of those people who bored easily, and whom you therefore wanted to entertain—even Lenox felt that, though he knew he couldn’t bore her. Of all the women she met in society, she was easily the best read and usually the smartest, but she had rejected any specific channel of energy, and there was a sense of
idleness in her, idleness alongside brilliance. Perhaps it was that she was one of those people who are poetic without the forced-flower unhappiness that makes for a poet—she loved nature, she felt deeply, but she never seemed to expect anything in return from that love or those feelings, as a writer would. She took violently against people; grew sick of places very quickly; treated her husband high-handedly. Virtually everyone with whom she was acquainted was in a state of continual exasperation with her, and also loved her very much.
Universally, in Lenox’s experience, they wished to know what she thought of them.
For Lenox’s part—his father was a figure he revered, and upon whose opinion he counted. But his mother was his best friend upon the earth.
It was rather the reverse in Edmund’s case. Interesting how such things fell out.
They spent thirty minutes in intense conversation about Lenox’s morning by the riverbank. It was interrupted only when the housekeeper came to take away the tea. Apparently Lenox’s mother had let herself in (she had a key), because Mrs. Huggins startled at the sight of her and curtsied low.
“How are you, Mrs. Huggins?” said Lady Emma, smiling.
“Very well, ma’am, I am pleased to say.”
“Would it be a terrible bother to ask for hot water?”
“I can prepare a new pot of tea instantly, of course, ma’am—if that will do, Mr. Lenox?” she said abruptly, remembering that he was in fact her employer.
“I think we can stretch to a new pot for my mother, Mrs. Huggins.”
“Straightaway, sir,” the housekeeper said, betraying none of the longing that no doubt lingered in her bosom to ask for news of Lady Hamilton as she left the room.
“Make sure it’s the cheap stuff!” Lenox called after her.
She pretended not to hear. “Charles,” said his mother chidingly. “How has she been, anyhow?”
“She is the scourge of my existence.”
His mother smiled once more. “Good. A young man of your age and means in this city needs his existence scourged once an hour. You’re not gambling, are you?”
He gave her a very severe and skeptical glance. This was her greatest fear, and one of the few points on which she was truly naïve. Perhaps that was because it was the great theme of so many cheap novels, an art form to which she was susceptible: vast fortunes gambled away in a single night, the red-rimmed eyes of a tragic young fellow stumbling out of a club at dawn worth nothing more than the expensive clothes on his back.
For some reason, she never suspected it of Edmund for a minute, though he was the one who in fact did enjoy a hand of whist at his club now and again. But then, Edmund had money that would never be his, in that peculiar paradoxical British first-son way—that is, he would inherit the baronetcy and Lenox House with the entrusted funds those meant. Whereas Charles, though it was less, had his own money outright, his to lose on the fall of a pair of dice if he wished.
“Still no gambling,” he said. “I’m too busy with opium.”
“Charles.”
“And duels, of course. I may take it up at any moment, though. Your vigilance is wise.”
“Charles.”
“Truly I don’t gamble, Mother.”
“Well—mind you don’t start.”
“I’ll wager you five pounds this minute that I haven’t started by Michaelmas.”
“Very droll,” she said. “How is Jane?”
“She’s well, I think.”
“Is that all you know? You must stick together up here, you children who move to London from the country.”
“It’s not as if we’re in the South China Sea. She has her own friends.”
She smiled at him fondly. “To me you’re still each about nine years old.”
Impulsively, he said, “What do you think ‘wondrous affable’ means? Not what it means, the words, but what—it’s a strange thing to call someone, isn’t it?”
“Not someone valiant as a lion.”
He frowned. “Say that again?”
“It’s from Shakespeare, my dear.”
“Oh.”
“Nearly everything is.”
He waved a glum hand. “I know it, I know it. That or the Bible or Bunyan.”
“You should have paid attention in school.” She stood, saying, quite directly, “I’m going to snoop until the tea comes.”
They went on discussing the two women who had died upon—or beside—the Thames. For her part, Lady Emma couldn’t have cared less that Lenox had elected to become a detective, and anyone who had cared, in her presence, would have met a lion, wondrous unaffable.
She studied the map of Russia that he had open on a card table, asking what certain ink lines on it meant, put a gloved finger to the sill of the window and came away without any dust for her effort—spied, in short, as good as her word.
The two of them had always been like this. During the two-year window after Edmund had gone to Harrow but before Lenox had, they had been closest friends; she had learned the texts and the maths his tutor set him, they had taken long walks around the grounds as his father worked on important Parliamentary matters, often dining alone together afterwards. That was unusual; but she was unusual. They often read together—Charles, adventure stories still at the time, his mother, most often, Jane Austen.
Sometimes they would talk incessantly, sometimes not at all. It didn’t signify either way.
“Do you really mean to travel, Charles?” she asked. “Russia?”
“Not anytime in the next forty minutes.”
“I’m being quite serious,” she said, and her face was serious. “Those were the two things you said when you came down from Balliol—that you meant to travel, and you meant to be a detective. You have become a detective.”
“Well, yes,” he said guardedly. “I do mean to travel. Why?”
“When?”
“I don’t know to any great certainty. At the moment, I really am caught up in my work, you know.”
“I do know, my dear, I do know.” She came and touched his cheek again. “Good Lord, how young you are.”
She had always had an uncommon physical intimacy with her sons—in an age of decorum, she ruffled their hair, drew them into hugs well past their boyhood, rested a head on their shoulders: her sons. Once it had embarrassed Charles a little (there was a horrifying memory of a kiss on the cheek at Harrow in front of dozens of boys from his house, which could still make him blush), but he valued it, too, her touch.
“Twenty-three now.”
“I’m so awfully proud of you.”
“Are you? I haven’t done anything.”
“I’m proud of the man you’ve become, I suppose I mean.”
In the far distances of his mind, a single alarm bell pealed. “Is something wrong?”
She smiled slightly and enigmatically, perhaps at his intuition, inherited from her, and sat. “You know, you’re stronger than Edmund, Charles.”
“Me? I am?”
“Yes.”
And suddenly in that moment he realized that he did know this to be true, though he hadn’t known he knew it. His brother was an innocent, in many ways. He belonged to the country, as their father did; Charles belonged to the city, as their mother did. His brother was larger, but Charles, slender, could bend like a reed without breaking.
“Why do you say so?”
“I worry it will hurt him terribly—it will hurt you both terribly—but—ah, well, Charles, your father. He’s ill.”
“Ill?”
“There is a growth in his chest.”
“His chest,” Lenox said dumbly.
She nodded, her face grave and sorrowful. “Dr. Rivers has given him six months to live.”
“So you don’t have a meeting with Wallace at all,” he said, still not quite thinking logically.
“No.”
He hesitated. “This can’t be.”
He knew perfectly well that it could, but—it couldn’t. She let a moment pass, then said, “It may b
e less. Either way, Dr. Rivers says he’ll be gone before the year is out, I fear, Charles. My poor boy.” She reached for his hands and clasped them in hers. Though her voice remained steady, there were tears spilling from her eyes. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Eleven hours later, Lenox was, as one old Irish friend from school would have called it, heavy drunk.
He had one hand on the wall of an alley. He was somewhere in West London; he knew that much. The culprit was wine, which in his heart of hearts he had never actually believed could get him properly drunk, only tipsy. As it happened, he had disproved that hypothesis this evening. He was barely upright, and only a small animal part of him was still conscious, willing the other nine-tenths of his carcass to carry on.
“Oy! Guv! Ride home!”
At the end of the alley, there was a hansom cab. It must have been just out of the stable for the morning—its horse’s coat was glossy, and Lenox, had he been slightly more alert, would have noticed that its driver’s jacket was brushed, too.
With almost indescribable gratitude, he nodded, lurched toward the cab, and heaved himself inside, mumbling his address.
Fifteen minutes later, he woke up with a jolt outside his own familiar home. Thank goodness for that. The driver could have made for the ends of the earth, and Lenox wouldn’t have woken up to stop him. He somehow managed to pay, stumbled out, and went upstairs.
He fell asleep on the chaise in his room.
At ten the next morning he was washed, shaved, and sitting with the papers.
“Oh hell,” he said to no one in particular—Graham had gone to the kitchen—when he picked up the sixth newspaper of the stack he was examining.
“Sir?”
Lenox glanced up and reddened. It was Mrs. Huggins, carrying a coffeepot. He hadn’t heard her enter and wouldn’t have sworn in front of her (shouldn’t have sworn at all, really). “Oh, nothing, Mrs. Huggins. Apologies.”
“Can I bring you anything else, sir?”
“Oh no, not as long as Graham will be by before too long.”
“Only a moment, sir, I believe.”
The Woman in the Water--A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series Page 8
