Death in Kew Gardens

by Jennifer Ashley

  “Much better,” Mrs. Redfern said, her relief apparent. “She et a bit of supper with no trouble, and says she’ll leave her bed in the morning. She’s taking Lady Cynthia’s advice to return to Liverpool. To her people, as she puts it.”

  “Will you go with her?” I asked as she led us up the back stairs.

  “No, indeed. The household will be broken up. I’m out a place, but it’s just as well. London is my home, and I don’t wish to leave it.”

  At the top of the stairs, Mrs. Redfern opened the green baize door and admitted us into the main hall filled with the mishmash of screens, tables, lacquerware, settees, and cushions.

  “What is it you intend to do, Mrs. Holloway?” Mrs. Redfern asked, clearly not about to let us any farther without explanation.

  “I’d like a look into the front drawing room, please. I believe we won’t need to go anywhere else.”

  Mrs. Redfern raised her brows but moved to the pocket doors and slid them open. She lit the gas sconces inside, lighting the cluttered room.

  I beckoned to Mr. Li as I walked to the collection of Wardian cases near the front window.

  “Is this the tea?” I asked, pointing to a case that stood on a table with straight, white-painted legs. The small plants inside had leaves very like what Mr. Chancellor had cut from the back garden.

  Mr. Li stared at the cases, and for a moment he ceased breathing. I caught him as he swayed, but he waved me off and seized the top of one case. It didn’t budge.

  “They’re sealed with lead,” I said quickly. “Daniel, can you help?”

  Daniel came forward, James behind him, with Tess hovering near, Mrs. Redfern curious in the background.

  James removed a stout folding knife from his pocket and handed it to Daniel. Daniel knelt beside the table and worked the knife under the edges of the case. Very slowly, he peeled the lead from the wood, loosening the case from its base.

  The small case was very much like the Temperate House in miniature, white-painted beams around which glass was fitted. Daniel went painstakingly slowly, not wanting to mar the plants inside. Mr. Li shifted in some agitation, and my own patience began to wear thin.

  At long last, Daniel and James lifted off the heavy cover. Mr. Li’s hand shot in, and he uprooted a handful of the tea plants.

  He sniffed them, held them to the light, ran his fingers over the leaves, sniffed them again, then reached out his tongue and tasted one.

  “Yes!” His word was a cry of joy, his weariness falling away. “These are the plants from my father’s garden. Mrs. Holloway, you are, as your people say, a worker of miracles.”

  “Well.” I tried to keep my smile modest. “I’ve had a while to think it through, ever since I saw the cases knocked about the day after Sir Jacob was murdered.”

  Mr. Li made a low bow to me, his face stretched with his smile. “I have no words to say how much I thank you.”

  Tess leaned to gaze at the plants in the case. “They don’t look like much. Little bitty things.”

  “It takes time to grow a full tea bush,” I said. “I should have thought of that when—”

  I broke off as Mr. Li strode to the fireplace, poked the glowing coals to life, and dropped the tea plants into the growing flames. Without a word, he headed back to the Wardian case.

  “No!” Tess cried. She leapt in front of the case then dodged out of the way, eyeing the poker Mr. Li still carried. “I heard Mr. Sutherland say this tea is worth more than gold.”

  “That is true,” Mr. Li said calmly. He reached past her and took another fistful of plants, hobbling back to the fire to thrust them in.

  “But don’t ya want to be rich?” Tess protested. “Mrs. Holloway, what’s he doing?”

  “I understand,” I said quietly. I gathered a handful of plants—the case was quite full of them—and carried them to the fire. Mr. Li sent me a grateful look.

  “Well, I don’t,” Tess said in anguish.

  Daniel answered for me. “Because if these plants are propagated and replicated here, then those growing in the remote mountains of Wuyi will be next to worthless. No one would pay to ship that tea all the way from China—they wouldn’t need to. And so Mr. Li’s family and everyone who makes their livelihood from the tea will go hungry.”

  “Why will they?” Tess’s brow wrinkled. “The Chinese people will still buy it, won’t they?”

  “Some.” Daniel pulled out a tea plant, gazed at it with regret, and handed it to Mr. Li who’d returned for another load. “But that won’t be enough. It is what happened when Chinese tea was stolen nearly forty years ago and taken to India to be cultivated. The market for exported tea from China shriveled, and many tea growers were ruined. The man who sneaked the tea from China in 1848 worked for Kew Gardens—or at least was hired by men employed there.”

  Tess listened, watched Mr. Li and me burning the tea, and shook her head. “I still don’t understand. I’ll stick to cooking, me.”

  Daniel lifted the Wardian case and carried it to the fire so we wouldn’t have to make back-and-forth trips. James joined us, and he and Daniel, Mr. Li and I, emptied the small greenhouse of its contents. Mrs. Redfern watched but didn’t stop us as we burned the lot. The aroma from the flames was heavenly.

  When the case was empty, Daniel brushed out even the soil and sent it into the fire.

  “Poor things,” Tess said over my shoulder.

  I agreed, but I understood Mr. Li’s great fear. A work of art was unique, worth much in cash and simply for existing—pictures stamped out at a factory by the thousands were not.

  We checked all the other cases, but found no more tea. Flowers, exotic and strange, yes. Tea, no. I wondered how rare and precious the flowers were, and if lives would be ruined because of them.

  Mrs. Redfern let us search the other rooms, and Daniel and I went quietly to Sir Jacob’s bedchamber itself, but we found no more Wardian cases in the house.

  Mr. Li waited for us downstairs, his expression a mixture of sorrow and satisfaction. “Thank you, Mrs. Holloway. You have saved my family.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “You were kind to me, and I do feel sorry for you, so far from home. You will go back now, won’t you?”

  “As soon as I can arrange it. Though I believe I will check at your Kew Gardens again, thoroughly, and make very sure Sir Jacob did not give them any tea to plant there.”

  “I’ll help you,” Daniel said. “I already know my way around the place, and I’ve discovered I like gardening. Maybe I’ll take up the post permanently.”

  “You?” I asked, my brows arching. “The peripatetic Mr. McAdam?”

  “I’m not as much a wanderer as you might think, my dear Mrs. Holloway. Mr. Li, the police will want to question you, I am afraid. But again, I will help you, and so will Mr. Thanos.”

  “Not tonight,” I said briskly. “We have done plenty for now, and I am about to drop off my pins. Thank you, Mrs. Redfern. I believe we should all return to my kitchen and have a nice cup of tea.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I wasn’t to be allowed to drink my tea in peace after I poured cups all around in the servants’ hall. It was plain tea from the shop, nothing fancy, but no one seemed to mind.

  When I sat down, the others demanded I explain how I’d worked out the killer’s identity and where the tea plants had been hidden. At least Daniel, Tess, and James demanded. Mr. Li sat in quiet satisfaction.

  “I didn’t discover a thing,” I protested.

  Daniel rested his elbows on the table and regarded me skeptically. “It looked to me that you’d cornered a murderer and told my son to make sure I ran in with constables just in time to take him away.”

  “Exactly,” James said, and Tess nodded beside him.

  Mr. Li only calmly sipped his tea, as though he had no more interest in the mystery.

&
nbsp; “I wasn’t certain of anything until Mr. Thanos sent that note,” I said. “James knew there was something fishy about it, and fortunately, he came to me when he couldn’t find you, Daniel. I had to wonder why Mr. Thanos would send someone a sheet of formulas with no explanation. I suppose another mathematician would understand it, and I realized that if he needed to send out a note of distress, he must do it in a way that whomever was with him wouldn’t realize it was indeed a call for help.”

  “But why’d Mr. Sutherland let him send anything?” Tess asked. “If he were holding Mr. Thanos prisoner, why would he want anyone to know he was there?”

  “Because we knew Mr. Thanos had been stopping in to make certain Mr. Sutherland was well,” I said. “No doubt Mr. Thanos, once he realized he was in danger, made sure to tell him we knew about his visits. Mr. Sutherland couldn’t let on that Mr. Thanos was there for any other reason. If Mr. Thanos truly was supposed to help another mathematician with a lecture, and he didn’t send the notes, an inquiry would be made—at the very least someone would be sent to find the notes. Mr. Sutherland looked over the paper to be certain Mr. Thanos wasn’t sending a letter begging to be rescued, but there was nothing but mathematics on it.” I looked at Daniel. “Did the note contain a message? A code?”

  Daniel shrugged. “I have no idea what any of it meant. I think they are Maxwell’s equations he’s constantly working on. But I knew good and well Thanos wasn’t assisting at a lecture tonight. I would guess he spied James in the street and took a chance to tell him—and me—that he was in trouble. You understood that as well, Kat, and ran to his aid.”

  “A bit too late,” I said dejectedly.

  “But you knew they went to Kew Gardens,” Tess pointed out.

  “Only because the landlady overheard them give directions to the hansom driver. She never said the word Kew, but that was the only place that made sense.”

  Mr. Li lifted his attention from his cup. “Mr. Sutherland was quite certain I knew where the tea was. I told him Kew Gardens. I thought if I got him there, in a place with people and constables, we could flee him. But he kept a knife on Mr. Thanos the whole time, and I could not risk Mr. Sutherland would not stab him.”

  “As he stabbed Sir Jacob,” I said. “I always thought it odd that Sir Jacob wasn’t at home for his appointment with Mr. Li. He liked showing off his Chinese things, which was why his wife held all those garden parties. What if Mr. Sutherland, realizing what a valuable thing Mr. Li was looking for, deliberately told Mr. Li the appointment was on a different day—or perhaps he didn’t set an appointment at all. Mr. Sutherland had secretly learned of the tea and didn’t want to give Mr. Li a chance to find it before he could. I believe he set up an appointment with Sir Jacob for himself alone on the night of Sir Jacob’s death.”

  “He is a demon,” Mr. Li said. “They can take the guise of humans, and smile at you until you believe them.”

  “You have to look for the cloven hooves,” Tess put in. “That’s what my mum always said. Or—if they’re wearing shoes—a tail.”

  Mr. Li considered this seriously. “A good thing to remember.”

  “As I say, Mr. Sutherland must have set an appointment for himself that night,” I went on, pretending to ignore Tess. “Unbeknownst to him, Sir Jacob had yet another appointment that evening, at Kew Gardens, most likely with his son. Though we’ll never know unless we find someone who happened to see them both there.”

  “Sheppard,” Daniel said. “It should be safe for him to come forward now, if he is alive.”

  “We will hope for the best,” I said. “And continue searching if Lady Roberta finds nothing.”

  “We certainly will,” Daniel agreed. “Please continue, Kat.”

  I turned my cup absently on the table. “What I think happened is this: Mr. Sutherland turned up sometime after nine, after Sheppard had left Sir Jacob for the night. Sir Jacob, I suspect, let Mr. Sutherland in himself. He had the habit of admitting callers he knew were for him, even if he was already in his dressing gown. Sir Jacob wasn’t raised as a gentleman—a wellborn man with plenty of servants wouldn’t dream of answering his own front door.

  “Mr. Sutherland came to interrogate Sir Jacob about the tea. Perhaps he argued with Sir Jacob, or he wanted to search the house and garden himself, and Sir Jacob tried to stop him. Mr. Sutherland is quite strong, and Sir Jacob was a smallish man, getting on in years. The police say Sir Jacob was killed in the bed, which was already turned down for him by Sheppard, so perhaps Sutherland, in their struggle, forced him down on the bed and stabbed him through the heart, probably with that knife he was so easily waving about.” I paused to shudder.

  “Mr. Sutherland risked a look about the house but found nothing,” I continued. “He opened the window in the drawing room, to suggest a burglary, and slipped out. He’s tall enough and robust enough that climbing out the window wouldn’t have been difficult for him. That would explain why Caleb, the constable walking his beat, didn’t see the window open until half past ten—Mr. Sutherland likely waited until Caleb had gone around the corner before he left, and was far away by the time Caleb walked by again.”

  “So Caleb was right,” Tess said, sounding proud.

  “Mr. Sutherland had quietly set a few tables on their sides to make it look as though a burglar came and went through the drawing room in a hurry,” I said. “No one in the house heard any crashing about, I realized, so how did those things get knocked over without making a sound? The funny thing is, he had to move the Wardian cases with the tea in them so he could reach the window. Never noticing the very thing he’d come to steal. I imagine he didn’t know, like many of us, what growing tea looks like.”

  Mr. Li nodded. “It was the right thing to happen.”

  Ironic, I suppose he meant. “Anyway, Mr. Li decided that night to enter the house himself and look around, finding the kitchen door unlocked—likely Mrs. Finnegan left it open for Mr. Pasfield. Mr. Li saw Sir Jacob murdered in his bed, and fled.”

  “I did.” Mr. Li bowed his head. “I am ashamed. I should have run for help. I did not notice the tea either in my haste, which is my punishment.”

  “The police would only have arrested you,” I said. “If you hadn’t run off, you’d be this moment at Newgate, or perhaps even already hanged for the murder.”

  “I never suspected Mr. Sutherland,” Mr. Li said, downcast. “He’d seemed a good man, a fellow scholar. I suppose I grew fond of him because he spoke my language. That can be a comforting thing.”

  “It must be,” I said. “Probably why all the Englishmen live together in foreign parts.”

  “Fear has something to do with that,” Daniel said. “And a knowledge that the natives don’t necessarily want them there.”

  “Perhaps, but I understand what Mr. Li means. Same reason so many Chinese live in Chinatown.”

  “It is true,” Mr. Li said. “But Mr. Sutherland did not only speak Chinese—he spoke the language of the court. The men in Limehouse are laborers from what you call Canton, which might as well be another world.”

  “So he was a dab hand at languages,” Tess said. “But a bad man all the same. I always knew too much book learning weren’t good for you.”

  “In any case—” I cut firmly through Tess’s speech. “Mr. Chancellor, probably the only person that night not paying a call for a nefarious reason, made a fuss about seeing a Chinaman. Mr. Sutherland might have thought at first it was you, Mr. Li, but he also knew about Sir Jacob’s son. Perhaps Sir Jacob told him; or Mr. Sutherland, as a scholar, thoroughly researched his mark. Fearing Zhen might have seen him, Mr. Sutherland found Zhen and lured him to the gardens, killing him there. This would not only silence a witness but prevent Zhen from laying claim to the tea as Sir Jacob’s son. Doing the murder at Kew would throw suspicion onto Mr. Chancellor, and possibly even Daniel, Mr. Thanos’s friend who wormed his way into a post at Kew and asked so many
questions.”

  Daniel pursed his lips. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  I sent him a smile. “Perhaps you should consider that next time you are so eager to help the police.”

  “I could say the same for you, Kat,” Daniel said. “But Chancellor did have a nefarious purpose. The next day he was crawling through Sir Jacob’s garden stealing cuttings of a tea bush.”

  “True,” I said. “But he might have been helping himself to anything Sir Jacob brought back, either to propagate and sell, or simply from scientific curiosity. If he was after Mr. Li’s tea, he was disappointed.”

  “The price of obsession.” Daniel grinned. “I will have to ask him what he was about, to satisfy my own curiosity. But finish your story, please.”

  I gave him a deprecating look. Daniel had gall to say my inquisitiveness led me into trouble. His was just as dangerous.

  “Very well—this is what I believe happened next. Mr. Sutherland heard Mr. Thanos was searching high and low for a learned Chinese man called Mr. Li, so Mr. Sutherland produced him, or at least told Mr. Thanos about him. It would look odd if Mr. Thanos discovered that his old friend knew Mr. Li and never mentioned him. That same day, Mr. Li was arrested. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Sutherland betrayed his whereabouts to the police, anonymously, of course, hoping Mr. Li would be blamed for the murder. And that would be that.”

  “Mr. Sutherland must have decided to pretend to help you through the questioning,” Daniel said to Mr. Li. “He couldn’t have foreseen that Kat would speak up for you so stoutly. But being the helpful friend worked to his advantage. When you were released by the police and grew afraid the killer would hunt you down, as many now knew where you lodged, you turned naturally to Mr. Sutherland, the fellow scholar, one of the first people in London to befriend you.”

  “I am a fool,” Mr. Li said. “My father always says so.”

  “Does he?” I asked in surprise. “But you took those very difficult exams, and did so well at them that you work in the house of the emperor.”