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

by Charles Finch

  “My goodness,” his father said, smiling, “you know a great deal. But you were always a very complete child.”

  “Complete?” said Charles.

  The porters took away the leftover food, openly eating it themselves as they went, and then brought them a hard kind of biscuit for dessert. It wasn’t bad if you dipped it in the wine.

  Edward Lenox lit his pipe and leaned back against the dull blue metal siding of the ship. “I remember that before you had your first horse, you learned the name of every horse that had ever won our little race in Markethouse, back to, oh, 1770 at least. Your own horse was the descendant of several of them, it turned out.”

  Lenox smiled. “Yes, that’s right. So was Edmund’s.”

  “Yes. Before your time there was a farmer, Julian, who bred the fastest horses in our part of the country. That was when I was a child. He was quite mad for horses—let his farm go to seed in his passion for them. Anyhow, I think several of them must have been his. Died childless, though, and they sold off his horses, whatever nieces and nephews he must have had. Robinson bought the land.”

  This reminded Lenox of Edmund’s tour of the grounds of Lenox House over the last week, and he said, “Our neighbor.”

  “Eh? Oh! Yes. A good neighbor, too, he’s been over the years, Robinson. I hope I’ve been the same to him.”

  It was twenty-six hours after their departure—nearly to the minute—that their swift little mailboat pulled in to the docks of St. Petersburg.

  It felt as if it had been faster still. Lenox’s father, who had been changing below deck into a suit and a fur-lined overcoat, came on deck, took in the sight of the city, and whistled.

  “Gracious me,” he said. His pipe was in his hand. Before them was an absolutely enormous dull-golden dome, which seemed even larger because of the busy stone bridge that passed underneath their view of it, peopled with miniature figures. “Keep your wits about you.”

  The ship’s captain, a Finn with excellent English and Russian, personally arranged for them to hire a private carriage that would take them to the British consulate. There they were greeted very warmly, and offered small dishes of caviar and salted nuts, along with wine, by a minor diplomat, Aspern. He asked if they weren’t very tired.

  Charles looked at his father, who said that on the contrary, they would like nothing more than a little bit of the city—and some advice on where to stay. Well, then; they must go to the ballet. They could have the ambassador’s box. He was out of town, fishing. As for where to stay, that was the least conceivable trouble. He would arrange it all himself.

  “It’s very kind of you,” said Charles’s father.

  “Not in the slightest, sir. We are honored to have a Member of Parliament in the consulate.”

  They were off.

  The next three days passed in a lovely flash, like one of those vivid countryside strokes of lightning that stays illuminated an unnaturally long while, more than a second, a second and a half, which feels an eternity even though it’s still gone before you’ve begun to see it.

  The hours were very full. They were met at the palace by Nicholas I, who had the most outlandish mustache Lenox had ever personally seen. (Its ends began at his lip and curled roughly up to eye level.) He was severe but gracious in his greeting. There was a spectacular ball, of the kind that Lenox had never imagined, much less seen. The least jewel there would have been the talk of Lady Hamilton’s. They had a sense of magnificence, certainly, the Russians. It was borne on the backs of uncountable serfs, and in England you could find many people who would tell you that one day that bill would come due. Nevertheless, like the pyramids or an egret in flight, it was something to behold—something one would never forget.

  But Lenox valued these moments less than the wanderings he made with his father through the city. In many respects—being the capital—it was like London. There were clerks and officials everywhere one looked. The guide the consulate had provided them, a very eager young Russian, took them through gardens full of enormous quilts of spring flowers; pointed out old women bundled under their wares, exotic creatures in the new, modern Russia; guided them through unmarked doors where they found small restaurants serving wonderfully fragrant stews.

  Lenox’s father had his usual durability, and he was in a superlative mood. Never would you have guessed he was living under a death sentence. Everything delighted him. The little Russian coins, their guide’s interminable lectures, the ball. He didn’t drink any vodka, and did decry the lack of beer. On the other hand, there was nowhere like Russia for champagne—the aristocracy spoke to each other exclusively in French, and thought nothing of putting away a dozen bottles of Jacquesson in a single sitting.

  On their last evening, they were wandering through the Winter Palace. “I’ve never seen anything like it, I admit,” Edward Lenox said.

  Charles nodded. It faced the river, this building, constructed by Catherine the Great. Its beautiful, symmetrical frontage was a wintergreen color he had never seen in England—and ever so long, endless. “Do you think it’s three times as long as Parliament, I wonder,” he said.

  “Yes, and a third as democratic,” said Lenox’s father stoutly. Then he smiled at his patriotism. “I never imagined I would see it in person. I must thank you for that, Charles. The etchings don’t do it justice, do they?”

  “No,” said Lenox.

  They decided to have supper in their suite of rooms at their hotel; their ship left at midnight. It was a merry meal. Charles didn’t mention his father’s health, but he did allow himself to ask a few questions about his boyhood, his father’s own parents, and he found that Sir Edward, so often taciturn, was in an expansive mood. The wine, perhaps—it was a rich yellowish Hungarian wine—inclined him to reminisce.

  There was a great deal awaiting Lenox in London: Elizabeth, who had never been gone from his mind; and Graham, whom Lenox had asked to take an initial look into Rupert Clarkson’s little problem, their actual paying client.

  But he found himself wishing this trip would last forever.

  It didn’t, of course. Soon enough they were in Tallinn; soon enough they were in Stockholm; soon enough they were approaching the English shore; soon enough Lenox would be not twenty-three, but seventy-three, and his father would have been gone for fifty years—and as he watched the older man in his little swing chair, reading Gibbon and smoking his pipe with great absorption, he felt overwhelmed with tenderness and sorrow, with loss, a desire to hold each moment.

  As they were boarding the train, his father said, “Well, I wouldn’t trade that.”

  “Nor would I.”

  It was a sleeper again—late in the English evening—and for the first time, Edward Lenox looked tired, old. It was only natural, probably. After summoning up something from inside, he said, “You were right about traveling, weren’t you! Let no man say that I am immune to changing my mind, even at my old age. But—”

  Charles looked at him curiously. “Yes?”

  “I hope you will entertain the idea of other careers.”

  “Ah, that. I suppose I will.”

  “You’re only twenty-three,” his father said. He sighed. Lenox felt his heart sink horribly. “All right—I’d better sleep, I think. I’ll see you at Waterloo.”

  They both slept heavily, waking up to a hurried cup of coffee and biscuit as they pulled in to the station. They parted there with an amicable handshake, Sir Edward changing trains to return to Sussex, Charles promising to come down to the country within the next week. It seemed too abrupt, too informal. He was tired and irritated in the hansom ride back to his flat. Already the trip was like a dream—with the peculiar estranged beauty of a dream, to be sure, but also with the pastness of a dream, the vanishedness of it.

  Except that then, as he climbed the stairs, he found a little folded piece of paper in the pocket of his jacket.

  Inside it there was a pound note, which was what his father had always given him when he left for school. He must have wr
itten it while his son was asleep, and placed it in his pocket as they were parting.

  Charles,

  What I would have said, had I not been quite so tired and so pompous, is that there is no conceivable life you could lead of which I wouldn’t be proud—because you are yourself—and also, that you should be sure to swallow a little bismuth—very heavy food in Russia, very heavy—but then again, how glad I am we went. Until I see you next, know me to be both in this life, and in whatever life comes next,

  Your loving father,

  EL.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The city to which Lenox returned after five days’ absence was somehow more, not less, obsessed with Jonathan Pond. That surprised him.

  The fashionable thing now was to say that he had been as good as his word: he had committed the perfect crime. This viewpoint rather breezed over his suicide, but was otherwise compelling.

  “Randomness. That’s the key to it. Kill someone completely random, and they’ll spend perpetuity attempting to figure out what you did and why you did it. Rather brilliant, really.”

  That was Lord Markham speaking—the young, porcine toff who’d cut Lenox dead only three weeks before—at a very sparkly cocktail party in his broad-beamed house in Half Moon Street. Lenox’s position had changed during his absence. It was known that he had been in on the kill, as it were—there at Pond’s last breath. There was a certain prestige to this. You couldn’t call him a detective quite, people were saying now. He was more of an adventurer. He didn’t mind a bit of violence if it came his way. Indeed, wasn’t it rather glamorous, what he did? So the word went around London.

  Markham had written him personally twice, virtually begging him to come to this party. Now he gave his opinion on Pond. “Eh, Lenox?” he said.

  They had all looked down on Markham at school for exactly this quality, being a know-it-all and a bore, but Charles, his mind only half there, said, “Oh, yes, I’m sure that’s probably about right.”

  Markham nodded with deep self-satisfaction. “They’ll be chasing their tails down at the Yard for a while, I guess.”

  Lenox had come because he’d been hoping that Elizabeth would be here. Most people were—most people in his London, his small London.

  But not she. He knew she was in town. Lenox had called upon her twice (in the morning, at the appropriate hour), and she had been out on her own calls. Or perhaps—his fear—in, but “out.” Either way he was miserable. Whenever he thought of the letter, he wanted to melt into a puddle of shame.

  The only person in whom he confided this misery was his friend Hugh, whose forlornness in love was so constant that it amounted to a variety of good cheer in circumstances such as these.

  “She’s a brick,” was Hugh’s analysis. “She’ll let it go. Or maybe she loves you, you know.”

  “No.”

  “You can never say. I’ve seen more lost causes pulled back from the brink than you would believe.”

  Lenox, heartsick, half-leapt at this idea. The trouble was that he didn’t know what would be worse, though, reciprocation or rejection. He could never compromise her. He would rather eat crushed glass than say the word “divorce” to her face.

  But in the last three or five weeks he had somehow begun to think of her so constantly, so deeply, other women had come to him to seem such diffident and insubstantial creatures, that the idea that she might love him was impossible to keep himself away from, though he would have thought better of himself if he could.

  Two mornings after his return from St. Petersburg, he and Graham were sitting at the breakfast table. Graham had been very assiduous in his researches into their case—the Clarkson case—and come up with nothing, very exactly nothing. As he said, however, with a certain angry glimmer in his eye, he was still gathering information.

  They sat in the quiet late spring light and clipped articles. More than half were about Pond. The media had tracked down his mother, who seemed slightly addled, and would admit only that she would miss the half pound he sent back to her each month, though she had wept copiously in front of the correspondent from the Telegraph. They’d found a few old friends to testify that he was a decent chap—but not very many, and certainly the image of him that emerged from his village was of a silent, rather reticent, queer person, studious and guarded.

  One paper had discovered a young woman who had rejected his proposal, before he’d come to London; she had dark, wavy hair, and many saw this as a galvanizing incident to the young madman. Her name was Ella Beth Williams, however; not Susan. Otherwise, there were a huge number of articles with headlines like POND’S BLOOD-SOAKED JOURNALS, made up wholly, or, in more reputable papers, MURDERER’S MOTIVE REMAINS MURKY.

  “That one’s true enough,” Lenox said with a sigh as he cut it out.

  He turned it to Graham, who had looked up. “Ah. Yes, sir.”

  Lenox sat back, tossing his scissors onto the table with a clatter. “I have tried to stop thinking about it, to turn my mind slowly to what the identity of the two women may be, but I—”

  He went into a long silence, staring at the branches as they dipped and rose in the breeze.

  At very great length, Graham said, “Sir?”

  Lenox started. “What’s that?”

  “You said you’ve tried, sir, to stop thinking about something?”

  “Oh.” Lenox shook the cobwebs out of his head and sat up. “I only meant that I’ve tried to let it all go. But there are—there are details that have been bothering me. Beyond the most obvious one, of wondering who the two women are.”

  “You think Pond guilty, though, sir?”

  “Oh, certainly, that has been proved. It’s only that I am trying to understand the exact dimensions of his guilt. For a wild moment, I even entertained the idea of an accomplice.”

  “What are the details that are bothering you, sir, if it is not impertinent to ask?”

  Lenox smiled a melancholy smile. “You can ask me anything, Graham,” he said.

  There were three things that had bothered him through his trip to St. Petersburg, faint echoes in his mind at first, but more insistent as time passed, more and more insistent. He told them to Graham now.

  The first was the nature of the second victim’s death—Ophelia, as the press had named her. She had died of poisoning, he was nearly certain from consulting Courtenay, but there had been an attempt to make it look like strangulation.

  “And the other two points?”

  The second was Pond’s spectacles. They seemed wrong to Lenox, somehow—that they had been crushed directly beneath the door that he must have carried down to the waterside. They had been on a chain, for one thing. Perhaps they had been in his pocket just at that moment, but even then he wondered how they would have ended up underneath the door.

  “I have thought, myself, sir,” said Graham, “that perhaps Pond intended to push the door into the water, and see how far it might float—like the trunk.”

  Lenox pursed his lips. “I’ve thought about that, too. It was such a staged, odd scene, that part of me thinks he wouldn’t have wanted it overturned—the door, the body—but part of me wonders whether he wasn’t interrupted, just as you suggest.”

  “What is the third detail, sir?”

  “I am almost embarrassed to admit it, but—well—I have the strangest feeling that there is some face I saw twice.”

  Graham frowned. “A familiar face. Can you recall where, sir?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps at the warehouse? One of the clerks?”

  Lenox paused, and then shook his head slightly. “I don’t think so. No.”

  “Interesting, sir.”

  It was no more than a feeling along the back of his neck, a sense of recognition—misplaced recognition, like being sure he’d seen someone in a crowd that he recognized, only to tap their shoulder and find that he had been mistaken.

  Graham watched him respectfully, despite the vagueness of this last point. Lenox sighed. It was very thin
porridge, he knew, his three questions.

  He shoved the papers to the side. One of the cats was down at his feet, and he gave it a distracted stroke. “Listen,” he said. “Tell me everything there is to know about Clarkson. Pond is gone, but we still have our twenty pounds to earn. We might as well earn them.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Everything there was to know about Rupert Clarkson was not very much.

  The only time Lenox had seen the elderly engineer, he had asked him to write, on a pad, his addresses in Dulwich and London, the names of all his household staff and his most frequent companions, along with any other information that might be of value.

  Graham had looked into all of this thoroughly. The list of household staff consisted of a valet, two maids, a cook, and a boy, who was the valet’s first cousin once removed. Except for the boy, none of them had been in Clarkson’s service fewer than six years, and the boy, who was twelve, and whose annual salary was fifty pounds plus board, was hardly likely to have benefacted thirty pounds anonymously upon his employer, even had he not been working under the exacting supervision of his relative.

  Lenox recalled that Clarkson had also mentioned a charwoman. “Did you find her?” he asked Graham.

  “There was one in each location, sir,” Graham answered, consulting a notepad, “but Mr. Clarkson rotated them out in the midst of this ongoing trouble, and had all his locks changed. It altered nothing. The two new charwomen were hired out of the clear blue sky, after three envelopes had already been left, so they are beyond suspicion, of course, and the first therefore seem to be as well.”

  “I see,” Lenox murmured, thinking. “Hard on them to lose their jobs. You have been to Dulwich?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The servants’ stories match Mr. Clarkson’s?”

  “They do, sir.”

  “I see.” Lenox tapped his fingers on the breakfast table, and took a sip of tea. “Have there been any more envelopes?”