The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

  “I would go down to the country if it weren’t for the case Polly and I are working upon,” Lenox said.

  Over the years McConnell had assisted upon innumerable matters for his friend, as a medical man. “Is it a serious one?”

  “A friend of mine, recently returned to London.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “No—as I told Polly, he’s been away from England these thirty years. A very fine chap, though. Gerald Leigh.”

  McConnell, who had just been flipping idly through a copy of Punch, looked up suddenly. “Not the Gerald Leigh,” he said.

  “What do you mean, the Gerald Leigh?”

  “Not the scientist? The colleague of La Rhome?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. He would be about our age. He’s been aboard ships most of the last decade, I believe.”

  McConnell’s eyes were wide. “That’s him. Gerald Leigh. He’s traveled extensively in South America, I know. Several of his most profound discoveries occurred there.”

  Lenox frowned. “Profound?”

  McConnell wasn’t listening, however. “You’re telling me that Gerald Leigh is in London!”

  “I earnestly hope he is, anyhow.”

  “Yes—missing! My God! We must find him!”

  “I concur.”

  Polly, drawn in by McConnell’s reaction, said, “What makes this fellow so noteworthy?”

  McConnell looked as if he didn’t know where to begin. He shook his head. “I think him probably the finest living British scientist. There are those who would cite—oh, Meriweather, Ashgate. But I would argue with them all down to the end of the matter, I assure you.”

  McConnell began to describe some of the works Leigh had published in recent years, and soon Lenox felt an odd displacement, the kind that happens when it turns out we have misestimated someone. Or perhaps only misunderstood: the description McConnell was giving didn’t fit Gerald Leigh, perhaps, and yet in a strange way it did, too.

  Lenox interrupted to say, “Do you have any idea why he would have been in London? A conference, a meeting?”

  McConnell frowned. “There are no great conferences impending. Where was he staying?”

  “The Collingwood.”

  At this the doctor brightened. Punch was curled in his hand, forgotten. “Why, that’s where all of the guests of the Royal Society stay, of course, per immemorial custom. But Gerald Leigh is not on the Society’s schedule. I would have noticed immediately.”

  “The Royal Society!” said Lenox. “Can he really have been their guest?”

  It was the most august of institutions, located in a beautiful alabaster building on Carlton Terrace.

  McConnell looked at him with chastising solemnity. “It is Leigh who would bring honor to the Society, Charles, and not the Society who would bring it to Leigh. I know for a fact that he has been invited to speak there dozens of times—so often that he ceased replying to the invitations some time ago, according to a friend of mine who is a fellow.”

  There was a wistful inflection to that word, for to be a fellow of the Society was perhaps McConnell’s truest ideal of happiness.

  “We could ask after him there,” said Polly.

  “May I come?” McConnell asked.

  “Aren’t you tired from working overnight?” she said.

  “I’ll pull the carriage if it means shaking hands with Gerald Leigh.”

  Lenox shook his head. “You may come,” he said. “But not to the Royal Society. I suddenly have an idea where he might be.”

  It took just over an hour to find him.

  Three stops in that time; two angry encounters; and a few pieces of tidy detective work.

  And there, at the end of it, sitting at a small table, dressed more shabbily than ever, a copy of the newspaper and a huge bowl of coffee in front of him, sat Lenox’s old friend, looking very much changed and also utterly the same.

  “My God, Charles!” he said, rising, as the detective, in his breast, felt a huge surge of relief to find his friend among the quick. The mystery was solved; the mystery could begin. “How did you find me? Never mind that—thank goodness you did, thank goodness you did!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Leigh pulled an extra chair to the table, adding it to his own and the two empty ones nearby, beckoning his three seekers to be seated.

  They were in a comfortable and low-lit coffeehouse that had no name, only a sign advertising coffee and newspapers. It was known far and wide as Mr. Covington’s—the name of its proprietor once, no doubt, now as impersonal an appellation as “The Queen’s Arms” would be for a pub.

  It was a cheerful, warm place, particularly with the wind howling in the streets. On the scarred bar was a line of glass jars filled with pickled onions, hard-boiled eggs, and squares of chocolate. Two huge copper urns steamed at the very end, leaving the whole room fragrant with the scent of coffee. At their side was a small glowing orange rack with pieces of toasted cheese beneath it, the house specialty.

  Lenox was shaking his head. “For heaven’s sake, Gerald,” he said, “where did you go? Why did you not keep the appointment you set to come to Hampden Lane? I’ve been worried.”

  Leigh’s face clouded. “Yes. I must offer you my apologies.”

  Middle age suited his friend better than adolescence had, Lenox thought. His small, trim figure had never run to fat, and the gray at his temples and the scored lines around his eyes bespoke seriousness, enterprise, intelligence, qualities valued more highly in men than in boys. “Well?”

  “The trouble is that I know that you have a family now,” said Leigh, “and I didn’t wish to risk bringing whoever is chasing me to your doorstep. I mean to leave London as soon as humanly possible. I’ve been skulking here until I could do so. I intended to write you from Paris.”

  “Chasing you!” said Lenox. “Who was chasing you?”

  “I don’t know.” Leigh looked from McConnell to Polly. “This is a question I would never normally ask, but might I inquire as to your—your identities, sir, madam?”

  “Oh, in my haste—these are my very good friends,” said Lenox, “Dr. Thomas McConnell, a well-known physician, and Mrs. Polly Buchanan, my partner in our detective agency. You may trust them as you trust me.”

  “Gerald Leigh. A pleasure,” said Leigh, bowing his head to each of them. Lenox had rather forgotten his old-fashioned, rural manners, which had been teased at Harrow but evidently remained intact withal. “If you are friends of Charles’s, you may as well know what I had hoped to tell him—that for the second time in two days, yesterday, somebody tried to kill me.”

  “Twice!” cried Polly.

  Gerald Leigh nodded. “Yes.”

  In nearly any other man, Lenox would have suspected either grandiosity or error in such a declaration. But Leigh had always been precise, and had never been one to affect any posture to his own benefit, nor to become dramatic over a small incident. It was partly what had made him unsuited to life at school: a completely pragmatic approach toward life, verging on blindness to the basic things expected of him. He had once written “I don’t care” at the top of a history paper he handed in about Herodotus, for instance, for which he had been skewed, ripped, caned by old Fairfield, caned again by the headmaster, and nearly expelled.

  Lenox grimaced. “Do you know who tried to kill you?”

  “No. I wish I did. By appearance I might know him again.”

  “Have you a secretary, Gerald?”

  Leigh raised his eyebrows. “A secretary! No, I do not. Nor an equerry, nor a butler, nor a pack of hunting dogs.”

  McConnell, who was agog with admiration (and had a butler himself, the hypocrite), laughed with merry delight at this sarcasm. Lenox said, “I ask because someone answering to the description of your secretary picked up your correspondence at the hotel this morning. A redheaded fellow. Among it my own card.”

  “Ah! So I have led them onto your heels even as I meant to protect you.” Leigh looked distressed. “I’m v
ery sorry for that.”

  “No, it’s in our jobs. We have strong bars on the lower windows of the house—and the address on the card is my office’s.”

  Polly looked around. “I wonder whether perhaps we ought to go there now,” she said. “The office. This is a very fine coffeehouse, but not the last word in sanctuary.”

  Leigh looked at her and then to Lenox. “But wait, that reminds me—how did you find me?”

  How indeed?

  Lenox and Dallington had been arguing the week before about whether London was large or small. Large, indisputably; and just as indisputably small. For one thing it was made up of uncountable small overlapping communities, as little as a kitchen, as large as a neighborhood. For another, everyone had their own London—a huge London, in the case of, for instance, an omnibus driver, a far smaller city for most others.

  Leigh had spent so little time in the city that Lenox had almost immediately felt he could isolate the few places where his friend might go. Covington’s was one of them—the third they tried, as it happened.

  The heyday of the London coffeehouse was now a century in the past. In 1750 there had been thousands of them, including many hundreds jammed close to each other around Exchange Alley, and the most famous of these, for instance Garroway’s, might plausibly have been called the very epicenter of the British Empire, which controlled a quarter of the entire world, from the Leeward Islands to the Windward Islands, from Manchester to Bombay. For men of every conceivable commercial and artistic interest, the coffeehouse had been where the day began and ended, lords sitting cheek by jowl with poets and merchants. It was the place from which news spread and toward which it was directed. Lenox’s own grandfather had often recalled going into a coffeeshop and sitting down next to any perfect stranger to discuss the news.

  In the century since that peculiarly fluid and democratic moment of British history, when fortunes had been made and lost upon the nearby ’change with breathtaking rapidity, class, England’s old bugbear, had reasserted itself: now there were gentlemen’s clubs for the gentlemen, taverns for the workers, and often something in between for the professional classes: supper clubs, members’ lounges, public houses with particular affiliations to, say, journalism, or politics.

  But the one profession that had never abandoned the coffeehouse was science. This might have been because its most natural home was either in the field or at Cambridge, which meant that its practitioners were often slightly lost in London; or it might have been that it was a naturally collegial field, in which the mingling of its knowledge was pleasant to both amateur and professor; or it might have been that its customs changed more slowly, since its debates often took place across continents and decades, at their own leisurely pace.

  Whatever the reason, it was to the coffeehouses that Lenox suspected that his friend, unpretentious, afraid, and mostly unfamiliar with London, must have betaken himself.

  That still left dozens of choices, and they had guessed and missed a few times before Lenox and Polly had grown frustrated and begun to consider practically where they ought to try. Which coffeehouses were open through the night? Which offered drink but also food? Which had been here at least ten years, since Leigh had last passed a significant amount of time in London?

  And most importantly, which had a naval association, since Leigh had spent most of his previous sojourns in search of a ship to sail away on?

  They had posed these questions to a few unhelpful people, before a boy of fourteen, who was out buying coffee grounds for half a farthing the pound, stopped and answered them thoughtfully and good-naturedly.

  Either Lugaretzia’s or Covington’s, he had said, finally, and happily taken the coin Lenox passed him, flipping it in the air and catching it overhand.

  They had tried Covington’s first and found success.

  Lenox described this trek briefly, Leigh smiling at the tale. “I ought to have been more intelligent about where I hid, if it was as easy as all that.”

  “We are dogged, and know your habits,” Lenox pointed out.

  “I fear that they are dogged, and know me, too,” Leigh replied. “But I had nowhere else to turn.”

  “Any member of the Society would have been more than pleased to offer you a welcome,” said McConnell. “And I still would.”

  “Are you a fellow, sir?” asked Leigh, with interest. “My contacts there are few.”

  McConnell looked sick at the question. “I! No. No. But I attend all of the lectures—and let me say how wholeheartedly I admire your—”

  Lenox waved a hand at him. “Is your mother not in England any longer?” he asked Leigh.

  “She died two years ago.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear it.”

  Leigh inclined his head, as if acknowledging the history that went into these words. It was the first time their schooldays had arisen, even tacitly. “Thank you,” he said.

  Lenox paused, then said, “I was astonished, Gerald—not at the news, since I know your qualities perfectly well, but because I had not heard it earlier, you see—that you are become very great in your field?”

  Leigh shook his head, frowned. “In my field? No, no. Not particularly. No.”

  McConnell looked about to take violent exception, and Lenox hurried to cut him off. “Well—anyhow. Gerald, if you come back to our offices in Chancery Lane, we can promise you safety, while you are in our care at least, and if anyone has come searching for you there on the strength of my card we will know it immediately.”

  Leigh stood up. “I am your man,” he said. “Lead the way.”

  Lenox, a little surprised and also a little touched at this instant faith, also stood up. “Good. I wonder whether you want to retrieve your things from the Collingwood first?”

  Leigh brightened. “Oh! Would it be possible? I have some papers there of the first importance, and a silver snuffbox that I acquired in the China Sea, and should be very sorry to lose. Everything else is disposable—though I haven’t changed my collar in two days. If only it weren’t for these villainous fellows who set about me.”

  For the first time Lenox observed an ugly welt on Leigh’s left hand. “Anixter will go,” said Polly.

  “A first-rate idea,” said Lenox. Polly went out to the carriage to tell the former seaman, and McConnell signaled to the barman for the bill. “Do you have anything to bring?”

  Leigh shook his head. “Only a book. I had better pay for my last coffee, though—thank you, Doctor.”

  When he had paid, the three men went to the door of the coffeehouse. It was midday outside, and Lenox kept close to Leigh, glancing left and right as they went out.

  He needn’t have worried, however. Polly, bless her soul, had returned with a constable.

  “This is Vickering,” she said. “He’ll see us to the carriage. Do you have tuppence?”

  Lenox handed over the coin. He wasn’t fond of the (entirely legal) ways that police constables had of making extra money by their profession, such as watching the crowds at theaters or, more innocently, knocking on doors in the morning to wake households that hadn’t a clock, but he found himself grateful for it in circumstances such as this.

  Vickering put them in the carriage, and as he closed the door promised to see they were not followed.

  “Well, Leigh,” said Lenox, turning to look at his friend across the carriage. “Let’s have it, shall we? What is all this business?”

  Leigh sighed heavily, as if he were unsure how to explain it all. Then he said, “Do you remember the MB?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Chance might have thrown Lenox and Leigh together on that lengthy afternoon at the beginning of their Fifth Form year at Harrow, but they hadn’t immediately become friends thereafter. The social hierarchy of a schoolboy playground is infinitely less flexible than that of a king’s court, far more finely shaded in its calibration, and universal in its intuitive comprehension of rank. When Lenox’s friends returned from the summer hols, in the day or two following Leno
x and Leigh’s long conversation, there was no question whatsoever in Lenox’s mind of integrating Leigh into the group. Nor in Leigh’s, probably.

  Still, they had taken to nodding cautiously toward each other from time to time. Here and there they traded a word. And then, toward the end of September, chance had thrown them together again.

  It was a chilly Saturday, with a blustery wind sweeping down the tall, lingering summer grasses. A mist hung in the air, perpetually a hundred feet away.

  They met by coincidence at the turning to Mrs. Allison’s house. She was the laundress to whom most boys at Harrow sent their clothes; she generally returned them each Monday and Thursday, but it was known that if you were caught in a bind, if you stained your house tie for instance, she would sometimes oblige you by getting it fixed before then.

  This meant a walk to her little cottage, a mile from the school’s grounds.

  “Ahoy, Leigh,” called Lenox. They were in view of the small thatch-roofed domicile. “What brings you here?”

  “I’ve torn my only decent bluer.”

  “Sew it.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  Lenox frowned. Every boy at Harrow knew how to sew—it was essential, given how closely the prefects scrutinized the uniforms. He saw that Leigh was holding his bluer (the standard blue jacket all the boys wore) in a limp tangle. “Have you got needle and thread? I can do it for you while I wait.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Mrs. Al will. Let’s go.”

  A thin woman, passing by middle age, her gray-brown hair back in a bun, greeted them with her usual brisk friendliness, listened to their requests, and agreed that she would try to find Lenox’s extra pair of gray trousers (“Spilled again, Master Charles?” she asked) before leading the boys into a sweltering kitchen, where she rummaged in a drawer until she found a spool of thread and a needle.

  “It’ll be a bit,” she said, “while I go out the washing shed.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Allison,” said Lenox.

  When she was gone, Lenox took the bluer from Leigh. Its right arm was in shreds—an unnatural tear, he saw immediately. “What happened?”