The Woman in the Water--A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series

by Charles Finch

  “Thank you, Mrs. Huggins,” Lenox said humbly.

  In fact, he didn’t feel all that awful—only wretched, wretched down to the bottom of his soul. Physically he would survive: he was young, and he had slept for a little more than five hours, besides which he vaguely remembered that before he had collapsed onto the divan in his room, Graham had been coaxing him into drinking water, brick that he was.

  Now, having had coffee and toast, he felt nearly human, and at that moment Graham came—as tidily dressed as ever—with a plate of bacon and eggs. Lenox had been truly drunk just four or five times in his life, and knew from those experiences that he would benefit from eating as much as possible the next morning. In the years to come, of course, he would look back with a sense of tragic hilarity at the youth who had believed these were the elements of a full recovery from a drunken night—but for now, while he was twenty-three, they were.

  “Thanks very much,” he said to Graham. He held the newspaper out. “Did you see this?”

  He did feel fearfully low in his emotions. He had been too drunk; now this newspaper; and above all, like the thrumming of a heartbeat in his ears, the fact of his father’s illness, news that right now, in a sitting room a few streets over, his mother would be gently relaying to Edmund.

  Graham took the paper. “Ah. Yes, sir, I did.”

  The paper was the Daily Star. “Why on earth have they included an illustration of me? No other paper has even mentioned me! And it’s—”

  Lenox came up short. He had seen the answer to his own question before he was finished asking it. “Sir?” Graham said quizzically.

  “It’s the favorite of the police. That’s what I was going to say.”

  Graham raised his eyebrows. “Ah.”

  “Exeter’s revenge, I hazard. He knows my position in society will be—well, who cares. Compromised. But who cares?” Lenox shoveled a forkful of scrambled eggs into his mouth. “None of that matters. Listen here, are you ready for a trip to Ealing?”

  “Yes, sir. Are you, sir?”

  “Yes, I am,” said Lenox indignantly. He wasn’t, still foggy, still tired, but that was his own fault, and he wouldn’t take it out on the victim of Walnut Island. “Get my suit ready, if you would.”

  “It’s on the back of your door, sir.”

  It was a long ride to Ealing. Plenty of time to lament every bump in the road, as it jolted his tender head, and plenty of time to think.

  Lenox believed himself to be a very honest person; and yet he supposed that he must not be. Because he knew that there were some men and women who couldn’t have lived with themselves, keeping the news about their father a secret from Edmund.

  Edmund himself, in fact, was this sort of person. So was their father. It would never have occurred to either of them—and in some self-punishing part of his soul, still full of anger at itself for his wasted night and sickly morning, Lenox realized this made them better than he was—to hesitate for a moment. They would have come to him without waiting.

  Lenox and his mother were different, however. Not dishonest; “practical” would have been the generous word, “slippery” the ungenerous one. “Deceitful” the cruel one. But the deceit had been practiced from love.

  After they discussed his father’s condition, the night before, his mother had sighed. “The question before me now,” she had said, “is how I am to tell Edmund.”

  “Just as you told me,” Lenox had replied.

  She had sighed, then smiled wanly. “He is receiving different news than you are, Charles,” she said. “He is also receiving news about himself.”

  Lenox had felt just an instant of irritation. When you were the younger brother, you were always the younger brother; whether you minded or not; on days you forgot and days you remembered; always.

  At moments of late-night introspection, he wondered if it was what had driven him into his current profession.

  “Yes,” he’d said.

  His mother had exhaled, steadying herself. “A wife takes a vow to obey, you know. That seemed immensely serious to me when your father and I married. It does still.”

  “But?”

  “But he would never have told you. There’s no vow for a mother, either. And maybe that’s because there’s no—there are no words, Charles, to express the promise a mother makes to herself and her children when they are born. You can just about make up a contract between a man and woman, just. But a mother and a child—”

  As she pulled up short here, deep in thought, her fingers on her chin, her eyes on the floor. She was going to have to tell Edmund, her firstborn, that he was going to assume his title, his responsibilities, his land, all far, far sooner than he had expected, too soon.

  “Perhaps you should leave it until the morning,” Lenox had said.

  She looked up at him. “I had thought of it.”

  Lenox nodded. “You and he and Molly.”

  “He would want you there.”

  “I’m sure, but it’s better the three of you.”

  “Could you manage dinner, though?”

  He had managed dinner. The one thing that public school indisputably taught you was how to put a brave and cheerful face on things. (No doubt this was useful in battle.) As soon as he could do so without being noticeable, however, Lenox had made his excuses and gone off to a party with his friend Hugh, who was pleasant company on occasions like this because he was always so forlornly in love—it was a French princess at the moment—that one never felt very scrutinized.

  There Lenox had gotten so roaring drunk (on wine!) and he could recall, in the cab to Ealing, that he had made a fool of himself. He had remained in close conversation in a way he never would have dreamed to do sober with Cynthia Stark, whose husband was infamously indifferent to her behavior—being, it was said, in love with his groomsman, which left Cynthia at ends too loose for her own good, her own reputation.

  Wincing, he realized that he might even have discussed Elizabeth with her.

  Worse still, at the next party Hugh had taken him to, near Jermyn Street, Lenox had been absolutely cut by Lord Markham, who would one day be the Duke of Rotherham, though at Harrow Lenox wouldn’t have deigned to let Markham carry his cricket bat.

  It might have been this slight that triggered his final plunge into drink.

  “Did you see that?” he had asked Hugh indignantly.

  Markham had very politely said hello to Hugh. “That’s a bad family,” Lenox’s friend had said. “He’s going to have to marry an American. The father is a gambler and the mother is addicted to laudanum, takes it in strength enough to kill horses, they say. They cut down all the timber on the property. He only wants someone to feel superior to, that’s all.”

  “Glad I was here, then,” Lenox had replied bitterly, and then—another point of shame—throwing off his friend’s attempt at comfort, he had joined a party of the drunkest people, who were leading a weaving charge toward some twopenny wine bar where it was as likely as not one of them would get his throat cut.

  Now, in the new day, the carriage toward Ealing rattled on, and more and more of the night came back to Lenox. He felt sickened by himself; and he pictured, somewhere behind them a few miles, Edmund suffering the news that Charles had known for a full night, standing up, and insisting that they must go see Charles immediately. Let me do it, his mother would say—slippery, like her younger son. Soon enough, they would all know. And it would change nothing at all. His father—his father, his only father!—would still have just six months left to live.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Ealing was far into outer London. As the city thinned, they passed freestanding homes with chickens running in their front yards; small groves of trees; empty fields; churches that needed their stones repaired. There were Irish flags here and there, too—by reputation, every Irishman who moved to England ended up in Ealing, and it was said that there were more than a few pubs it was wise not to enter if you spoke with an accent that originated east of the Isle of Man.
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  The police warehouse was a large brick building. With the help of Mayne’s seal, and a little explanation, Lenox and Graham were soon enough in a private room, with all the physical evidence of the Walnut Island case laid out on a table in front of them.

  “Bleak,” Lenox said.

  His hands were stuffed in his jacket pockets, and he felt queasy. He sat down in one of the small wooden chairs around the large central table. Light came into the room from yellowing windows, but it still felt stifling.

  “Bleak,” Graham agreed.

  “We had better start with the trunk, I suppose.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  There were six pieces of itemized evidence here on the table, tagged with a case number (#454) and beneath it in a very fine cursive hand the words Walnut Island and Unsolved. There was also a receipt describing them. Credit to Mayne, who had organized the acquisition of this warehouse for the Met the year before and instituted a new recordkeeping system.

  Three of the items were probably useless. Then again, credit to Mayne once more, for organizing a police department that retained useless evidence—which was, if Lenox’s reading was an accurate indication, occasionally very useful. These were, first, a scrap of fishing net that had no doubt gotten bound up on the outside of the trunk on its journey down the Thames; second, an old ale bottle that had been among the rushes of the island as well, not far off from the trunk; and third, a chunk of driftwood that had been inside the trunk.

  The other three were interesting.

  The first was a tortoiseshell clasp. Found in victim’s hair, the evidence list had recorded, and Lenox, rising from his chair, went over and touched it gently, this last personal ornament of a human being’s life. She had been “unclothed,” as the papers said. But this remnant of her taste, her selfhood, had slipped through that immeasurably unfair stripping-away.

  The second was a woman’s ring. This had been found loose in the trunk. It was not likely to have come from the victim’s hand—she had swollen—and it was inscribed with a name, LIZZIE. It was made of tin silver. Cheap, though of course not free. Like the spectacles.

  And then the trunk. That was third. Two knickknacks and this hulking object, a true seaman’s trunk—five feet across, four feet wide, four feet deep—enough space to last a fellow with multiple uniforms and presumably the odd personal item for a voyage of two or three years. It had a rounded top. A woman curled on her side could have fit into it easily, especially a smaller one.

  “What does it say about the trunk?” Lenox asked Graham, brushing his fingers over it.

  Graham looked down at the inventory. “Dimensions first, sir. Then it says, Victim found lying unclothed on left side within; cause of death strangulation. Two boards loose. Found unlocked; hasp broken. Stamped HMS Gallant (out of service thirty years; consistent with age of trunk). Water damage on all sides new.”

  “Yes, it’s quite warped out of shape.” Lenox could also see where it said HMS GALLANT in faded-but-still-tidy stenciled black, at the very center of its domed lid. “Anything else?”

  “Careful examination reveals no name inscribed within or without. Cleaned of corporeal fluids and remitted to locker at Ealing. Then a date and a signature, sir.”

  For some time, Lenox studied the trunk’s exterior. Then he opened it and looked inside with equally careful attention. Nothing here. “I wonder that it didn’t open, considering that it was unlocked,” he said.

  “The lid looks to fit fairly firmly, sir.”

  Lenox nodded. “Yes, it does.” He returned to the chair, his head a bit sore still. “The Gallant was in some of the famous battles of the Napoleonic Wars,” he said.

  “Was it?”

  “Yes. Massive ship. Must have been thousands of these trunks issued out of it.”

  “Interesting, sir.”

  “A decent anonymous vessel for a body, in other words. Does it point the finger at someone … well, he would have to be over forty, wouldn’t he, to have served on the ship?”

  “It seems more likely to have been circulating. Peddlers use these naval trunks, sir, I have sometimes noticed.”

  Lenox nodded. “True. And the dockyards use them for storage on land.”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  Lenox frowned. “On the other hand, it is very rare to see one entirely unmarked, in my experience. You generally find the owner has scratched something on the underside of the lid, or—” He stood up again and one last time opened the trunk, wishing a sign would appear.

  “Issued late, perhaps, sir,” said Graham. “Or to someone orderly in his habits.”

  “Help me flip it over, would you, Graham?”

  It was heavy, but they managed to move it first onto its side, then upside down. The constable outside the door peeked inside but said nothing at the noise.

  Nothing personal here, either. There was a serial number printed on the bottom, G957, but that was all. “The nine hundred fifty-seventh trunk issued to an able seaman aboard the G-for—Gallant, I suppose, sir,” Graham said.

  “No doubt.”

  Lenox drifted away from the trunk and spent some time studying the ring and the tortoiseshell clasp; and from a sense of diligence the netting, the driftwood, and the discarded ale bottle as well.

  They were back on their way to London before lunch. It was reassuring to return to the busy streets of the city’s center, after the unearthly quiet of that room and its objects.

  Lenox asked Graham to drop him at Edmund’s house, and added that he would dine out at his club; the servants could have the afternoon off if they liked.

  “That goes for you, too.”

  “Is there anything I can do to assist you with my free time, sir?”

  Lenox paused. “Do you really want to?”

  Graham looked at him gravely. “I am very invested in the solution to the case, sir.”

  Lenox glanced through the window, thinking. “You could clear Nathaniel Butler. I’ve no doubt it was the sheerest bad luck that landed him in prison, but he does match our idea—my idea, I won’t ascribe it to you—of the murderer.”

  Graham nodded. “Very good, sir.”

  “Thank you, Graham. Here’s my stop. I’ll see you later this evening.”

  Edmund and Molly’s house in the city was a medium-sized and unassuming place, made of that pink Georgian brick you saw too rarely nowadays. The railings were of black wrought iron, and gleamed so brightly that one might almost have been hesitant to touch them, thinking they were new painted.

  Lenox, who knew better, used one to haul his sluggish body up the steps.

  When he had reached the very top, though, just as he was lifting his hand to knock on the door, he held back. He hesitated, then retreated down the steps.

  He walked three streets over and two streets up. The cane he sometimes carried (most often at night—she was a city where a potential weapon could come in handy with sad frequency) tapped against the pavement as he went.

  He came to a little lane and turned up it, then stopped at a house, a bit larger than Edmund and Molly’s.

  Here he did knock on the door. A redoubtable housekeeper answered. “Is Lady Elizabeth in?” he asked. “I know it’s out of hours, but you may tell her it is Charles Lenox, if she is not receiving.”

  Elizabeth was dining alone. There was a book in front of her place setting. She stood and smiled when Lenox came in, giving him her hands and her cheek. “This is a lovely surprise.” She glanced down at her lunch. “It’s only soup and bread and butter. Will you take some?”

  “Happily, if it’s no inconvenience.”

  “None at all.”

  She gestured toward a maid, who withdrew. “What are you reading?” Lenox asked.

  “Only a novel.”

  “A good one?”

  “A brilliant one. It’s by a fellow named Currer Bell—and yet I have never read a man who could understand women quite so well.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Jane Eyre.
Have you heard of it?”

  “No.”

  “Read it before you get married.” She smiled at him once more. “You look rotten, you know.”

  “I feel rottener.”

  She gave him a concerned glance, then returned her eyes to her soup, too wellborn either to stare at him or to eat. It was a conundrum, and he laughed. “What?” she said.

  “There are times one wishes one were married,” he said. He smiled this time, to undercut the sadness of the words.

  “There are times one wishes one weren’t, or so I’m told,” she replied. “Anyhow, you’re twenty-three. A man shouldn’t marry till he’s twenty-five. So my father has always said.”

  He knew Elizabeth’s father, who was indeed happily married. “That gives me two years. Whom shall I marry?”

  She leaned back and let her eyes go up to the ceiling, thinking. His soup arrived, and there was a very orderly commotion as his place was laid, his bread cut and buttered, a glass of lemonade set next to it, the flowers in the middle of the table shifted.

  When the servants were gone, she said, “Not Jane Eyre. What about Eliza Blaine?”

  “She’s very pretty, and sweet.”

  “Not smart enough, you mean. What about Eleanor?”

  “We’re too close.”

  Elizabeth thought further, and Lenox began to eat. He felt slightly better as the food went down—a hearty country soup, with carrots, potatoes, hot and salty. His friend, his dear friend, offered another name, another. She wouldn’t ask him why he felt rotten until he was willing to say himself.

  “That half-French girl is charming,” she said. “What of her? She’s rejected George Wilkes, too, so she has taste. Marie West?”

  “Hm, a possibility.”

  She frowned. “Before I move in the autumn, I shall make it my business to find you someone to love.”

  There was someone he loved: her, her, her. And she was taken. He put his spoon down, and said, in a measured tone, one that tried for lightness anyhow, “I came by for a cowardly reason, I’m afraid. I couldn’t face my brother.”

  “No?”

  “No.” And he observed that his voice, ridiculously, was hoarse. “Nor my mother, for that matter. Somehow my feet brought me here.”