And yet when Clavering returned, he looked and sounded as if he would desperately have liked to invoke the old Riot Act. His shirt was torn at the collar—actually torn!—and he was red in the face. He shook his head despairingly at Lenox and Edmund.
“The whole town wants to string him up this evening, the poor devil,” he said, nodding toward the cell. “They’ve worked themselves into a frenzy.”
“I know a simple enough way to calm them,” Lenox said.
“And which is that, sir, when they’ve gone through eighteen barrels of ale in the last three hours!”
“Tell them that he’s innocent.”
Clavering looked confused. “Innocent?”
“Yes.”
It was Edmund who glanced at the cell behind them to see, and the other two followed his gaze. Calloway was staring at them. “Is it true?” Edmund asked. “Are you innocent, Mr. Calloway?”
“No,” he said.
At least he had spoken. Lenox stood up. “You maintain that you entered the town hall yesterday morning, stabbed Stevens Stevens, left him for dead, and have been in your house since then?”
“Yes.”
“Where is the knife?”
Calloway said nothing. Lenox met his gaze, and they stared at each other for some time, Lenox with the feeling that there was perhaps not much madness at all in this old fellow.
Calloway’s personal history was murky even to those, like Clavering, who had lived in Markethouse their entire lives. Both Atherton and Clavering had said that Calloway had had a wife and a daughter until roughly a decade before, the three of them living happily in the small stone cottage, but that then the wife had died of a sudden fever one winter. The daughter had gone to live with an aunt and uncle in Norfolk, Atherton remembered, her father unable to look after her properly.
Lenox had asked, as they stood huddled away from the cell, whether it was this sudden solitude that had driven Calloway mad.
“Well, he was always an odd bird,” Atherton had replied in a quiet voice. Because he was a farmer, and his goods sold at market, he had a much firmer grasp of the local characters than Edmund, so often off in Parliament, did. “Never a very avid gardener until around the time he went silent.”
“No?” said Lenox curiously. “Did he have a job?”
Atherton had shaken his head, no. “I believe he inherited some money when his wife died, or perhaps that she brought it with her in the dowry. At any rate he never worked. But it was only after her death that I think he became a—a recluse, you know, for lack of a better word.”
Clavering had nodded. “His wife was right sociable, you know, Mrs. Catherine Calloway.”
“And who were his friends? Who are his friends now?”
Neither Clavering nor Atherton had been able to answer that question. A village was peculiar: so deeply intrusive, in a way, and in another way pig-blind. Once Calloway had become Mad Calloway, Lenox guessed, people had stopped acquiring any new ideas about him. They had pegged him to his role as the town’s eremite, as surely as the local baker or the local hostler or the local thief.
But somebody in Markethouse would have a sharper recollection than Clavering or Atherton. It was simply a matter of finding the person.
Clavering was just asking Lenox again why he thought Calloway was innocent when Bunce came into the room. He had been down to see Dr. Stallings at Clavering’s request.
“Any improvement?” Edmund asked.
Bunce shook his head. “The same,” he said. “Weren’t no better nor no worse.”
“In such a case steadiness may be counted improvement, I hope,” said Edmund.
Behind them there was a noise—Calloway had snorted in disgust.
They asked why in every way they could think of, over the next few minutes, but nothing would induce him to speak.
It was late afternoon now; it had already been a long day. Lenox suggested they leave Bunce with the prisoner, get a bite to eat, and discuss the case, and Edmund and Clavering agreed.
Though the Bell and Horns was the most visible and popular, there were several public houses in Markethouse. Lenox’s favorite was the Lantern, in Pilot Street, whose presence was only indicated by a single lantern above a low wooden door. Behind this door was a dark room, full of flickering candle- and firelight, pewter flagons lining the stone wall behind the bar, and long varnished oak tables scored a thousand times with keys and coins. It was a place that served food, but would close shop before calling itself a “restaurant,” that London word—in Lenox’s youth he had never heard it, and when he first did, at the age of fifteen or so, it referred only to European dining establishments, as opposed to the beef houses, oyster rooms, and coffeehouses that served British food. More and more, though, anywhere could be a restaurant, and the beef houses, oyster houses, they had begun to have an old-fashioned air, a Regency air, which Lenox rather regretted. This kind of simple eatery was being replaced by finer ones, even toward the bottom of the economic scale, with cloth napkins, complex puddings, waiters in aprons. To be at the Lantern was to step back a foot or two from that particular progress of the modern age.
Edmund, Clavering, and Charles were the only patrons there, having slipped the crowds by leaving through a side door. The owner, a quiet but friendly older chap named Lowell, fixed them three pints of mild. Following them soon thereafter was supper: Lady Jane might have dined with three royals, but Lenox was certain that none of them had had as satisfying a meal as he did, which he ate ravenously until it was all gone, and he could sit back with a happy sigh and watch Clavering chase a last dab of applesauce around his plate with a chunk of roasted potato.
“When you said earlier that Calloway was innocent,” Edmund said, “were you being provocative?”
“Does nothing strike you as odd about his confession?” Lenox asked them.
“Only that he spoke.”
Lenox frowned. “Well, then,” he said, “let me tell you what I noticed that struck me as odd. First: Why would he take the risk and trouble of inhabiting an abandoned gamekeeper’s cottage when he has his own house in Clifton Street? Second: Why would he need a map of Markethouse, after having lived here for sixty years or longer? Third: Why would he need to steal books, or clothes, or food, if, again, he has his own cottage, his own food, his own clothes, and was perfectly entitled to take books out of the library? Fourth: How is it possible that he would believe Stevens still lived in a house he hadn’t inhabited in several years?”
Both Edmund’s and Clavering’s eyes had widened. “Hm,” said Clavering, his round face knit with concentration. “When you put it that way.”
“Fifth: Why would he have stolen a dog? And sixth, why, for all pity, would he suddenly, after all this time living a few streets away from him, attack the mayor of the town?”
Edmund nodded, tapping his fist lightly against the oak table, his postsupper pipe clasped in it. “On the other hand,” he said, “seventh, why would he tell us he had done it?”
Lenox recalled that strange look of relief and exhaustion in Calloway’s face when he had asked if they had arrested anybody. “To protect someone,” said Lenox. “The real intruder at Hadley’s house, whoever that was.”
Edmund frowned. “Who would a friendless loner, a hermit, want to protect?”
“What we need is someone who knows Markethouse backward and forward,” Lenox said, “and won’t mind filling in all of the missing details of Calloway’s history for us.”
Clavering and Edmund exchanged a glance, then said, almost simultaneously, “Agatha Browning.”
“Who is she?” Lenox asked.
But he would have to wait for his answer. The door of the Lantern swung open, and a handsome young fellow carrying a shining black leather overnight case entered. It was Pointilleux.
“Gentlemen!” he said happily. “The estimable Monsieur Bunce has inform me you are here!”
“Hullo, Pointilleux,” said Lenox, “decent of you to come.”
The young F
renchman inclined his head gravely. “Of course. Tell me, though, this supper you have all eaten so gluttonous that your plates are clean, in true English fashion, is there another of it? I could not be more hungry, I swear to you, not if I am to ran from here to Marathon and back.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The food was ordered, cooked, delivered; Pointilleux fell to it heartily and happily. As he ate, the three men informed him of the situation and discussed their plans.
The clerk said he was refreshed by his trip—he had that incredible constitutional springiness of a twenty-year-old human—and didn’t need to sleep. He listened intently as they described their progress in the case thus far. When they had finished, he asked them to put him to work. This was a holiday, and he looked appropriately eager: no clerking for a few days, for once all of his energies put toward detection, ever so much more engaging than copying and filing.
“In that case, I would like to set you loose in Stevens’s office,” Lenox said. Pointilleux had proven himself adept at parsing documents in the matter of the Slavonian Club. “Look for anything, anything at all, personal, public, particularly anything at all that ties Stevens to Calloway. Don’t forget the budget is coming up, either, a contentious local matter.”
“I don’t think Stevens would like that,” Clavering said.
“That’s too bad for Stevens,” said Lenox firmly. “It would have been very helpful to know before now that Hadley bought Stevens’s old house—it would have saved us a measure of time and work. If there’s any similar piece of information in his office, we need to have it.”
“And what shall the three of us do?” Edmund asked.
Lenox had several ideas on that score, too. He enumerated them now, and the others nodded in agreement. After Pointilleux had thrown off a glass of ruby red wine—“Wretched swill,” he said, a phrase he must have learned from Dallington, “but it will do”—they walked him down to the town hall.
Clavering had a key now, and they took him up to Stevens’s office.
“Will it not bother you to pass time here alone, with that horrible drawing on the wall?” Edmund asked.
“No,” said Pointilleux cheerfully. “Charles, you tell me there are papers here and across the hall, too?”
“Yes,” said Lenox.
“And if I slow, how you say, if I desist in feeling awake—how do I arrive to Lenox House, to sleep one hour or two?”
“We’ll send a boy back with a horse,” Edmund said. “He’ll wait outside.”
“Thank you.”
“And he’ll hear it if you scream,” Edmund added in a mutter, as they left the agency’s clerk to do his work.
“Chin up,” Lenox said as they walked downstairs to leave the hall. “I think the attack was meant for Stevens. Not anybody else.”
“It’s that blasted drawing which bothers me,” said Edmund.
Clavering, who badly needed a rest, nevertheless insisted on stopping by the jail again before he went home, and Lenox felt a flare of admiration—not spectacularly intelligent, this small, round-faced man, but stout, honest, and dogged. They were lucky to have him.
All three of them went and looked at Calloway. He was asleep, as Bunce and his cousin, equally reedy and tall, played a hand of cards by candlelight.
“You’re staying overnight?” Lenox asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Bunce.
“Fair enough. And Clavering, in the morning you’ll take us to see Agatha Browning?”
“Bright and early,” said Clavering.
“Good.”
They were finished for the day then, finally, and all of them shook hands, before Lenox and Edmund betook themselves slowly back toward Lenox House.
They went by the same route that they had taken so many hundreds and thousands of times in their vanished youth. Then, of course, their parents had been waiting; more recently, Molly, usually, and often Jane, too; now they were alone together.
As he did at any moment when they weren’t actually following the trail of the crimes that had been committed in the village, Charles sensed Edmund’s preoccupations returning to him. His silence about them—it did him credit, perhaps, but it was sorrowful to behold.
“Do you know when James will hear the news?” Lenox asked quietly as they walked along.
Though it was dark out, it wasn’t too terribly cold. Above them the stars were brilliant as they can be only in the countryside, where the soft whisper of wind in the grass, the motion of the leaves in the trees, seems somehow to make the heavens even more still, more immense, their innumerable scattered lights more mysterious and beautiful.
Edmund waited for a while to respond, eyes on the ground, hands in his trouser pockets. At last, he said, “He may know now.” Then he added, “I fear it will be very hard on Teddy.”
To an outsider, this would have sounded unkind, but not to Lenox. James had always been more like their Uncle Harold than either of them—sharp-witted, funny, flashy, adventurous, not notably contemplative. He would take his mother’s death hard, but on the other hand there was no doubt, either, that he would be able to live past it.
By contrast, Teddy was a vulnerable soul—a thoughtful, worried boy, more inward than his older brother. From what Lenox could tell, this disposition had survived even its immersion in the rough world of the Royal Navy.
“I know,” said Lenox.
“They say that you can’t protect your children—one of those great saws, you know. It’s appalling to find out how true it is.”
They approached the gates where Edmund’s land began, ahead of them the long, peaceful, tree-lined avenue leading toward the pond and the house. “I’m just so sorry, Edmund, you know. I really am.”
“Well, thank you. It’s a trial.”
“More than that,” Lenox said.
Edmund nodded, taking in his words.
Had asking about James and Teddy, Lenox wondered, made things worse? As they came to the door of the house, he feared it had. One thing about Molly was that she had been a person without very many cares—rather like James, now that he came to think of it—and she had always been able to lighten Edmund’s mood, whether he was tired from Parliament or cantankerous because they had to be in London.
Who would do that now? For his part, Lenox felt as if he kept making mistakes.
“What’s that noise?” Edmund asked, frowning.
Lenox looked toward the house, which was now about a hundred yards off. “Is it music?” he asked.
“I think it is—the piano.”
“Waller,” said Lenox.
Edmund laughed. “No. Atherton, I imagine, if anyone.”
As it happened, they were both wrong. When they came into the front hallway, they heard women’s voices from the long drawing room, and when they entered it they found, sitting together at the piano, mauling a sprightly waltz for four hands, Lady Jane and Toto.
“Jane!” said Lenox.
“Toto, too,” said Toto.
Lenox laughed. “My goodness, how are you both? Why are you here?”
“We took a train earlier this evening,” said Jane, who had risen up and was coming across to them. “London seemed too quiet once the party was over.” She embraced Lenox, then Edmund.
“Not quite the thing, living plain old life without a royal in sight,” said Toto. “And on top of that, we were desperate to go to Jane’s brother’s ball in two nights. It’s been years since an overweight country gentleman trod on my feet. I intend to make McConnell very jealous.”
“I’d forgotten the ball. Is Sophia here?”
“Oh, yes, and George, too, both asleep in the nursery,” said Jane. “The servants looked pretty het up about having to help us, especially because both girls were crying and miserable by the time we arrived, since it was past their bedtimes. But Edmund, can you hold all of us?”
“Of course,” he said, and he was smiling. “It will be a pleasure to hear the girls’ footsteps.”
“Well, until they step in
mud and then go into the Palladian room,” Toto said. “On the other hand, I bet we can solve all your murders.”
“That will be convenient,” Lenox said.
“It’s not even a murder yet,” Edmund put in. “Our mayor is still alive. Touch wood he may be come the morning.”
“Anyhow, let’s skip all that now. Could we have supper?” Jane asked. “Mr. Waller said it was ready. I’m famished. The royals ate all the food before I could have any, and there wasn’t a tea cart on the train.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The next morning at eight o’clock, Mr. Chapman, from Tattersall’s, knocked on the door at the jail. Clavering let him in, and before they had even introduced themselves, Lenox and Edmund heard him say, “Yes, that’s him.”
He was looking at Calloway. “Are you sure?” Clavering asked. “This fellow in the jail cell?”
“Yes, not a doubt of it. He sold me the horses. He’s welcome to return my sixty pounds any time, too.”
“You’re welcome not to buy stolen horses,” said Clavering.
“Well,” said Chapman, stiffly, “that’s him. Will that be all?”
“Mr. Calloway, do you recognize this man?” asked Clavering.
Calloway was sitting up in his cell, reading an old newspaper that Bunce, in a moment of kindness, must have passed him. There was a roll and a cup of tea mostly eaten and drunk up next to him.
Unsurprisingly, Calloway didn’t respond, and after repeating the question and waiting for a moment, Clavering sighed and thanked the horse auctioneer for coming to Markethouse.
After he was gone, Lenox said, “Mr. Calloway, you do know we have enough evidence to hang you now. I hope you appreciate how serious your position is.”
Calloway looked at them steadily, as if to say they ought to go ahead and hang him, then. He would buy the rope.
They had already been to see Pointilleux that morning. After asking where he could order in coffee and a sandwich from, he had shooed them away. Miss Harville, Stevens’s secretary, had been helping him, which was surprising. Then again, Pointilleux was a handsome lad.
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