The Woman in the Water--A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series
Page 26
But the showstopper was the re-creation of the Ophelia, laid out upon her board.
“Tell me, how many times have you been?” Lady Elizabeth said.
They were at Houghton House for supper. It was just July. Lenox’s father, who had been growing fatigued easily recently, had remained home, and Charles and Elizabeth had a great deal of time to converse.
“Only once.”
“Too good for the hippopotamus, but not for this gaudiness,” she said, with faux displeasure.
“I didn’t have a hand in creating the hippopotamus,” Lenox pointed out.
“It would be deeply disturbing if you had.” A beat passed, and she burst into laughter. “You should see how wide your eyes just became, Charles!”
“Make your jokes now, because I don’t think they will find favor with Lady Deere when you move there in the fall.”
She sighed. “You’re too right. What a pity. I do love my little house in London.”
“Worse things happen at sea,” Lenox said.
“I’ve always wondered what those were.”
“Whole ships going down with all hands aboard, Jane, goodness me. And getting eaten by sharks. That sort of thing.”
“Oh, yes.” She ruminated on this for a moment. “I suppose I had imagined they meant quarrels and running out of water and everything.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t join the navy.”
“I may not be ready,” she agreed. “Elizabeth, by the way, please.”
He reddened. “Of course. I’m very sorry.”
Down the table, there was a roar of laughter at something her father had said. “Speaking of my house,” she said, “there’s one for sale next to it. We should be cheek by jowl. How nice that would be.”
His heart beat painfully. “On Hampden Lane?”
“Yes, indeed. Finer than ours, in some way. And since we will only be in town for the season, your neighbors would be eligibly quiet.”
“I’ll come round and look.”
“Yes, do.” She glanced around to be sure they weren’t overheard, and then said, “Tell me, if it’s not too intrusive a question, how your father fares.”
“Not too badly, taken all in all. He is nearly done with the fence around the sheep pen. A very pretty white.”
She smiled. “He painted that last year, I recall. It was quite a comic sight, him in his smock.”
This passing statement stilled Lenox’s heart. For of course, his father generally painted the fences every three years, and he had painted them all the summer before.
But in two summers he wouldn’t be here.
In that moment it hit Lenox with awful force that one day, not too long from now, his father would not be alive.
How stupid the thought was. And yet how strong and immediate and vivid in his mind, as if he had missed it before somehow. And yet it was true! How real his father seemed, and soon he would not exist any longer!
Lady Elizabeth noticed the change in his face. She asked if everything was all right.
“Oh! Yes, yes. I was just thinking about all that must happen at sea.” He shook his head. “If I do intend to travel, I hope I’m not—well, eaten by a whale, or anything of the kind.”
She laughed. “I hope the same for you.”
He returned home very late that night, head heavy with champagne. His brother was due at midday. He woke up at around nine o’clock, fuzzy and in a disagreeable mood.
He called for Graham, who came instantly, bless his heart, with coffee, toast, eggs, and a glass of iced water. Lenox took a long sip of water. “A letter, sir.”
“A letter?” He took it off the silver tray. Its return address was from a Solomon Amberson. He tore it open and read it through. “I say, Graham, what do you think of this?”
Graham, who had been retreating to the door with the tray, turned back and took and scanned the letter. “An opportunity for employment, sir.”
“Yes, it would appear. But did you catch the postscript?”
Amberson was a barrister at Gray’s Inn. He had a problem: his housekeeper’s son had gone missing. The Yard would not look at the case.
Young men run off, they tell us, usually to the army, but I can attest to the young man’s steadiness of character and the unlikelihood that he would make such a plan without consulting his mother. He was in training to go into service himself. His mother, who has been in my employ for many years, is frantic with anxiety. I wish to alleviate her worst fears, at a minimum.
Graham turned the paper over and saw what Lenox had—he was writing, he said, on the advice of his friend Mr. Rupert Clarkson.
He looked at Lenox. “Are you committed to your retirement, sir?”
Lenox thought of the wires he had sent, crisscrossing various nations, in pursuit of Cairn. “Fairly.”
“I observe that we have continued our practice of clipping the newspapers, sir.”
Lenox frowned. “Don’t browbeat me, Graham.”
“I apologize, sir.”
“Fellow can’t have three minutes of peace.” He lay back on his pillow, looking up at the alabaster ceiling. “Still, I suppose you could go to London this morning and collect one or two details from Amberson, if you wanted to. Or would that put you out of your schedule?”
Graham looked at his pocket watch. “I could catch the nine fifty, with luck.”
Lenox paused. “I suppose you’d better do it.”
Graham smiled. “Very good, sir.”
“It’s not your retirement, after all—it’s mine.”
“Just so, sir. Would you like the kitchen to send anything else up, sir?”
“Yes, fourteen more plates of food.”
Charles finally emerged from his room at a little past ten. His father was in the drawing room, reading the Times. “Charles! Long evening?”
“Only averagely long.”
“You’re in a mood, I see.”
He denied this. He was, though—consulting his feelings, he traced it back to the realization that his father was painting those fences for seasons he would never see. It wasn’t the kind of thing to know when you had a stomach full of wine; scarcely even the kind of thing one wanted to contemplate sober.
But his father was evidently having one of his good days, for he was very keen to go out riding. Lenox would have preferred not to, feeling tired and heavy. Nevertheless, he consented.
And the exercise actually improved his morning head, that and a great deal of water and sunshine. They rode very hard over the soft summer grass, not speaking for more than an hour. At last they stopped at a different point in the same brook that wended throughout the Lenox land.
“My gracious,” said Sir Edward when they had both rinsed off and watered their horses. “What a lovely day. And I think with luck we may miss the rain on our way back, if we move quickly.”
“Rain? I don’t see a cloud.”
“No, but it’s coming.” Sir Edward looked over at him. “Crump says that Graham has gone up to the city?”
“There’s a case he’s looking into.”
“Not you?”
“I’m retired.”
“Ah, of course.” He squinted up through the trees toward the sun, his gray hair tidy despite the beads of water in it. He chuckled. “When I was your age, I believed, oh, mightily in the government, I recall.”
“Do you not now?”
“I do! I do. I only mean that the young tend to believe very pure things. Nor am I sure they’re wrong. The old tend to think they remember the feeling of being each age, but I doubt they really do.”
“Mm.”
Lenox’s father looked him directly in the eye. “The hardest part of losing a person, Charles, is that grief is only an absence. There is nowhere to go to touch it.”
In later years, Lenox would wish that he could have that moment back. But he supposed, too, that at least he remembered his father’s words with perfect clarity. That was something.
“You seem very well at the moment,” he
said.
His father smiled. “Oh! I, yes I’m fit as a fiddle. Race you back, in fact. A shilling on it? Your mother is eager for you to start gambling.”
His father had been correct: It began to rain when they were about three-quarters of the way. It was pelting down, kicking up the dirt at the edge of the woods like gunfire. Lenox felt the water stream down his face, though it was still somehow also very warm, the heat lingering in the day.
The freshness of the rain at this time of year was remarkable, wiping clean something that was already close to immaculate; a scent, a silvery half-catchable scent, the smell of the living world returning to its full summer greenness, to its memory of itself, of what it had re-become every summer forever, this little green patch renewing itself back year on year through all the infinity of time.
Edmund Lenox, who would soon be its steward, arrived at home just in time to see his father and brother storming up the heath. They rode very closely side by side, father and son, and though it was too far to see their faces, even at this distance, Edmund smiled to see the pure physical joy in both their two bodies; the way that in the most intense moments of being alive, it was possible, lost in living, to forget that one was even alive at all.
Also by Charles Finch
The Last Enchantments
The Charles Lenox Series
A Beautiful Blue Death
The September Society
The Fleet Street Murders
A Stranger in Mayfair
A Burial at Sea
A Death in the Small Hours
An Old Betrayal
The Laws of Murder
Home by Nightfall
The Inheritance
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLES FINCH is the bestselling author of the Charles Lenox mysteries, including The Inheritance and A Beautiful Blue Death, which was nominated for an Agatha Award and was named one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2007, one of only five mystery novels on the list. He lives in Chicago with his family.
Find him online at www.facebook.com/charlesfinchauthor and on Twitter @CharlesFinch. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Also by Charles Finch
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE WOMAN IN THE WATER. Copyright © 2018 by Charles Finch. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover painting © Art Collection 3 / Almay Stock Photo
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-13946-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-13948-1 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250139481
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First Edition: February 2018
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