Home by Nightfall

by Charles Finch

  “Do you remember the person’s hair?” Lenox had asked.

  Hadley had shaken his head. “Nothing so distinct, Mr. Lenox. It’s only a feeling, you understand. I would never swear to it.”

  At last they had come, gradually, to the subject of Mr. Hadley’s gemstones. Charles had suggested that Edmund be the one to bring it up, and he had—a surprisingly capable assistant. “You’re certain the sherry was the only thing that was missing when you returned from Chichester last Thursday?” he had said.

  “Yes, quite sure.”

  Edmund had nodded. “Good, good. I only asked because I know you mentioned your collection of gemstones. I am pleased to hear that it is intact.”

  For an instant of an instant, Lenox thought he saw something flare in Hadley’s eyes—something possessive, something angry—but when he looked again, it was gone, as surely as if it had never been there. “They are all as they were,” Hadley said, “though it is not such an astonishing collection as all that, only a hobby.”

  “Are they under lock and key?” Edmund asked.

  “They are now, though the cabinet is not very—not a citadel, if you take my meaning, not impenetrable. Fortunately, I don’t advertise their presence, so it would take a thief some time to discover them.”

  “I might suggest removing them to a bank,” said Lenox.

  Hadley nodded. “Yes, perhaps.”

  But it was plain he was only being polite. “What is the collection, precisely?”

  “They are rough gemstones—uncut, unpolished—some very valuable, some, many of my favorites, in fact, entirely forgettable, at least from a monetary point of view. Such stones have been my passion since I wandered over the cliffs with a chisel as a boy, Mr. Lenox. I am fortunate enough to have attained some expertise upon the subject. Indeed, I have published articles in several small journals, and been in communication with leading scientists in London.”

  Hadley’s ardor wasn’t at all uncommon. Theirs was an age of fanatical amateur geologists, who roamed the countryside in clubs, covering twenty and thirty miles in a day with ease. (Prince Albert himself, Queen Victoria’s late husband, had been one of these men.) Many of them, recently, had taken to visiting the quarries near Oxford, where they were uncovering most remarkable fossils, unknown to science, with elements common both to birds and lizards; the eminent naturalist Richard Owen, an acquaintance of Lenox’s, whom many of these amateurs revered, and to whom they took any bones that they struggled to identify, had given these ancient animals the collective name Dinosauria. The press—abjuring Latin—called these strange beasts “dinosaurs.”

  Gemstone collectors were a subset of this cultishly zealous group. If Hadley was a known figure in that particular field, he might well have attracted the wrong sort of attention.

  Lenox nodded, understandingly. “That’s excellent,” he said. “But I would consider removing them to a bank, as I said, or failing that precaution I would at least consider buying a safe. I am far from persuaded that the crimes of which you have been a victim are at their end.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The next day was Saturday: market day, which might as well have counted as two days of the week here. In the morning, Lenox rode again, his muscles loosening slowly as he went, for he was sore as the devil from the previous two mornings’ rides. It was gray and wet still, though bracingly open. He wished Jane and Sophia were here to take the air. He might miss any number of things about London—his office, his friends, his clubs, the noise, the light—but he didn’t miss the soupy fog that rolled through the streets this time of year, troubling every pair of lungs in the street.

  When he returned to Lenox House, Edmund was again gone, though it was scarcely eight o’clock. “Where is he now?” Lenox asked Waller.

  “Out upon a walk as he was yesterday morning, sir. He gave me to understand that he does not expect to return for a period of one to two hours.”

  Lenox was vexed; he wanted to get to the market early, before it grew too busy, and interview the stall-holders who had been the victims of the thefts Clavering had described. After lingering over breakfast, checking the window every other minute for Edmund’s return, he decided he would go on his own. He asked Waller to tell his brother to meet him in town.

  To save time, he borrowed an old dray horse from the stables, Matilda, a gentle, lolloping beast, fifteen years old and still just about faster than a man on foot. She carried him to the square, nuzzled him when he patted her mane, and gracefully accepted an apple from his pocket. He found a boy in the square—a local, who spent market day hanging around the central square to do odd jobs—and gave him a penny to take her back to Lenox House.

  “Don’t hire her out to your friends for rides on the way, either, or I shall hear about it,” said Lenox. “There’s another halfpenny if you find me within the hour with the news that she is home.”

  With that finished, he stood at the top of the square, gazing down at the gentle slope. Dozens of stalls were crammed higgledy-piggledy into it, the noise and smell already impressive.

  “Lo there, oysters?” called a fellow passing him, with a yoke around his neck and a tray hanging from it full of cracked oysters. A pepper box and a salt cellar hung from his belt.

  “Later, perhaps, thank you,” said Lenox.

  There were other wandering vendors of this type, selling ale in flagons, coffee in tin pots, apples, flowers, long braided strings of turnips and onions. A teenaged boy had rock sugar for a farthing. A bargain: As Lenox knew from his boyhood, with careful husbandry a medium-sized piece of rock sugar could be made to last through a full market day.

  Then there were the stalls. Cockerels, more substantial varieties of fruit and vegetable, trout (from Edmund’s and Houghton’s waters, almost certainly), fat pheasants, white sugar in twisted brown wax paper. What an infinity of things to buy! Down the west lane were the patent medicine sellers—all fraudulent, McConnell had assured Lenox, and most of the medicines simply alcohol, though many in the lower classes all across England swore by their effects with sacral fervor—and down the east lane were stalls selling jewelry, muslin, bombazine, perfume, soapstone carvings, slippers, sponges, cloaks, squares of glass, penknives, anything you could imagine. Out in front of these stands, knife-cleaners and tin-menders sat on low stools, the tools of their trade close at hand. Down near the fountain, a barber was warming water over a small covered fire to give his shaves and cuts.

  “Mr. Lenox?” said a voice.

  Lenox turned. “Constable Clavering, how do you do?”

  Clavering looked overrun of his capacities, but he nodded bravely. “Hoping for uneventful, sir,” he said. “Uneventful would be ideal.”

  “I wonder—could you point me in the direction of the sellers who were stolen from, the last two weekends?”

  They spent the next hour going from stall to stall, Clavering walking with the assurance of a man who knew precisely where every stray potato in this marketplace had fallen.

  None of the vendors could explain the thefts. Lenox asked them to describe any customers who had stood out, but the crowd was too various and bustling to allow for such recollection—yes, there were regulars at each stall, and among the irregulars most of the faces at least were familiar. That still left two or three in every ten who were strangers, or whom the vendors had only seen once or twice.

  The most audacious of the thefts had been the half wheelbarrow of carrots. “Gone,” the fellow who had missed them said to Lenox, his astonishment undiminished by time. “Gone! Simple as that. Talked to a customer for a moment or two, turned back to the barrow I’d been unloading, and it was gone.”

  “You didn’t see anyone lurking about?”

  “There are always boys in and around the market. But we’ve never had a problem—always deal very severely with anyone caught stealing, several months in jail from the magistrate, ’cause we all know Markethouse needs the market, don’t we?”

  Clavering nodded emphatically at that.
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br />   It made Lenox think, this. The two sets of crimes were very different. On the one hand, there was the simple theft of necessities—food, blankets. On the other, there was the rather uncanny victimization of Arthur Hadley, including the telegram, the chalk drawing, and the sherry.

  Were these crimes necessarily related? he wondered.

  He spent the next half hour moving around the market. He saw a great many people he knew. There was Mrs. Nabors, who had been the housekeeper at Lenox House some years before, but had been fired when she’d been found selling the house’s food from the back door; apparently she had continued in that business, for she had a stand full of meat pies and gave Lenox a very dirty look as he passed it. He saw Mad Calloway again, wandering with his herbs, simples, dandelion greens, mushrooms, and nettles, stopping occasionally to accept a coin for a bunch of them. And he spotted Mrs. Watson’s older boy, in full health apparently, sprinting up an alleyway with a group of children around his age.

  He found Edmund near the Bell and Horns at a little before eleven o’clock. He was with the mayor of Markethouse—a slender, staid-looking man whose name was, for some reason that had gone into the ground with his parents, Stevens Stevens. It was really the only notable thing about him.

  “Hello, Mr. Stevens,” said Lenox.

  “Hello, Mr. Lenox. Wet day, isn’t it?”

  “Clearing, I would have said.”

  The mayor looked up doubtfully. Lenox had known him for forty years, since he was a swottish, pedantic boy at the village school, and more or less the same look of circumspection had been on his face the whole time. He had never in that time evinced any vivacity except a complete, joyful absorption in numbers. Markethouse—a market town, after all—liked that, and his rather stooped figure, permanently hunched forward from a lifetime of peering over his glasses at balance sheets, inspired a fond confidence. He’d run unopposed several times in a row now.

  “I don’t know—it could be more rain,” he said. “I find these Saturdays exhausting, though of course necessary, too. Louisa, could you run inside and fetch me a glass of sherry with an egg beat up in it, and a sandwich if they have it?”

  The young secretary next to him, a girl of fifteen or sixteen with thick spectacles, clutching a stack of loose papers, said, “Roast beef or cheese?”

  Stevens pondered this question as if a great deal hung upon it, hemming and hawing, were they the same price, they were, interesting, before deciding upon roast beef.

  The glass of sherry Stevens had asked for reminded Lenox of Hadley, and he said to the mayor, “Do you know a man named Arthur Hadley? He lives in Potbelly Lane.”

  Stevens shook his head. “Sir Edmund has just been asking me the same question. I do not. I fear that my work has kept me indoors much of the summer, when I ought to have been out, behaving sociably. In politics, as you gentlemen know, that common touch is vital.”

  “He’s been a victim of a theft,” said Lenox.

  “So Sir Edmund told me.” Stevens shook his head, looking, like Clavering, overwhelmed. “And beyond that there are the chickens, the carrots, the books, the blankets, the—”

  “Books?” said Lenox sharply.

  Stevens nodded. “Yes, books have been stolen.”

  “Clavering didn’t mention that,” said Edmund.

  “Four, stolen from what is already a very small lending library here in town. I started it with a surplus of funds we had—sixteen pounds—because of a rather elegant legerdemain, if I say so, that I was able to perform, with the budget of the—”

  “What were the books?” said Lenox.

  Stevens narrowed his eyes, trying to recall. “One novel, I believe, perhaps by Mrs. Gaskell, and … but Louisa will know, when she returns with my food and drink. I wonder if I suddenly wanted a sherry because of Edmund’s telling me about Mr. Hadley. Funny, how the brain works. Do you know, I often think that—”

  But Lenox, who was not very eager to hear Stevens Stevens’s speculations on the nature of the brain, interrupted him again, saying, “When were the books stolen?”

  “Last week.”

  “Could they have been stolen to resell?”

  Stevens shook his head proudly. “Upon every page of every book we acquire, there is stamped the name of Markethouse Library, and at random throughout the book there is a stamp informing any potential buyer that the book is not for sale, nor ever will it be. They did the same at Massingstone. Rather a clever idea.”

  “Very, very curious,” muttered Lenox.

  Stevens’s young secretary came back with his food, blushing as she intruded upon their conversation to hand it to the mayor, and after a few minutes Edmund and Charles bade him good day.

  When they were alone together, Edmund asked, “Why were you so fixated on the books?”

  Lenox shrugged. “Because they change the whole complexion of the matter, at least as far as I’m concerned.”

  “How is that?”

  “How many men in England who are desperate enough to live upon stolen chickens, and sleep under stolen blankets, can even read—let alone care so much about reading that they’d steal books, too?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  They remained at the market until one o’clock. Then they went into the Bell and Horns—the village’s main inn, gathering point, public house, stables, a large, flourishing place of two stories—and had a lunch of roast, potatoes, and peas, served inside a golden Yorkshire pudding.

  As they left the pub, they nearly bowled over young George Watson, the smaller of Hadley’s charwoman’s two sons. He was covered in mud and offered to sell them a toad, as he had before. Edmund said no thank you, and George said what about a songbird, they were dead cheerful, and Edmund said no thank you again, but he would give him half a penny if he went and fetched a cup of water from the bar so Edmund could rinse his hands off. George was back in a jiffy and had disappeared down into the welter of the market with his halfpenny before Edmund’s hands were dry.

  “I cannot see how you plan to proceed,” said Edmund, shaking out his wrists. “We’ve spoken with anyone who might know anything about the intruder at Hadley’s house, and we’ve looked it over for ourselves. It’s all dead ends as far as the eye can see.”

  “Yes. It’s bad. This is generally the point where I give up,” said Lenox.

  Edmund’s eyes widened. “I never! Is it really?”

  “No, of course not. Don’t be preposterous.”

  Edmund looked abashed. “Oh.”

  “There is always somebody else to speak with, of course. Just now I think we ought to talk to the milk and egg man of Markethouse, whoever he may be.”

  “Pickler.”

  “Is that his name? Yes, then, him. In my experience, nobody knows a village more intimately than its milkman. He crosses every line of class, respectability, geography—he knows the inhabitant of every house by name—he’s called Pickler, you say?”

  “Yes,” said Edmund.

  “It was Smith when we were young.”

  “So it was. This is his son-in-law,” said Edmund. “In fact Smith is still alive. His daughter Margery married Pickler, and together they took over the business. They buy some of our milk at the house.”

  “Then sell it back to you?”

  “In bottles, and half-skimmed, and on the doorstep, with a pint of cream, too,” said Edmund.

  “I see.”

  “And furthermore, we don’t miss out on having milk if our cows fall sick or don’t feel like giving any. It would mean hiring a whole other fellow to be sure of all that myself.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “Of course, Molly always said we ought to have more than two cows, but she was more faithful to the country than I am. I couldn’t be bothered with the trouble of it. Give me horses any day.”

  “Horses are much more interesting than cows. Less milk, however.”

  Lenox had said these words quickly, hoping to push the conversation ahead, but his effort at distraction was unsuccessful. Edm
und’s face hadn’t exactly changed as he mentioned Molly, but he had somehow nevertheless seemed to fade, to exist a little less. It was terrible.

  “I probably ought to have done it,” he said—not quite to Lenox.

  “Come on, let’s see if we can find Pickler.”

  “Right-o,” said Edmund, shaking his head sharply, as if to clear it out.

  They found the milkman shopping for himself, as it happened, near the cattle pen to which local farmers had driven their calves for sale. He was happy to step away from the pen and speak with them for a moment, he said, tipping his cap respectfully to Sir Edmund.

  He was a man of about five foot five inches, with a sportingly angled houndstooth hat. Apparently he and old Mr. Smith’s daughter scrimped all they could in order to buy a cow every two months or so, because of course the more milk they provided themselves, the greater their profit.

  “Nor do we feed them on the spent mash out the breweries,” he added, “though it would be cheaper in the short run. But they make more and better milk on real grazing.”

  Pickler himself lived in a small pair of rooms; the cows were all stabled on a local dairy farmer’s land, where they could graze to their hearts’ content for a small fee.

  Lenox and Edmund asked him if he had heard of the thefts. He laughed; he had, the implication being that you would have to search much farther than him to find someone who didn’t know about the thefts.

  “Have you seen any unfamiliar faces around town?” Lenox asked the milkman.

  He shook his head. “Not recently, no. Mrs. Hargrave had a nephew visiting, but he’s been gone this week and more. Other than him, nobody.”

  “In that case, I am wondering if there is any particular spot in Markethouse that might serve as a bolt-hole—where a person might conceal himself, sleep at night, lurk during the day.”