The Last Passenger - A Prequel

by Charles Finch

  “And he what, ran off after that?”

  “No. At that moment—by pure chance—a group of young men turned the corner. It was fortunate timing. The man who had attacked me was preparing to strike again, and it was not a busy alley. The young men didn’t rush to my help, but one of them did call out. My assaulter turned, saw them, and fled.”

  “Did you go to the police?”

  “I did not. I assumed it was a racial attack.”

  “Even given Gilman’s absence and Tiptree’s death.”

  “It hadn’t occurred to me until I met you that Gilman might be dead, or Tiptree’s death part of any larger plot.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Now I am ready to take the first ship back to Boston.”

  Lenox glanced at his notebook. “After the attack you came to Mrs. Thompson’s.”

  “Yes. Mrs. Thompson, whose mother and father worked hand-in-glove with William Wilberforce himself, was kind enough to take me in.” Lenox nodded politely toward Mrs. Thompson. “I needed a doctor. I also wanted to consult with her about Gilman. We decided to place the ad against which you appear so dead set—and yet which brought you here.”

  He had Lenox on that score. “I see.”

  Mrs. Thompson added, “Dr. Harrison said he wasn’t to be left alone following a head wound. I insisted he stay here.”

  “Mrs. Thompson placed the ad for me and tended me all day,” said Josiah Hollis. “At four o’clock, I went to the public house. There, you and I met. Fifteen minutes later, I learned that Eli Gilman was dead. And now you are apprised of my present circumstances, which are as great a puzzle to me as they are to you.”

  Lenox contemplated this tale in silence for an instant. What he really wished to know was if Hollis’s attacker was the same person who had cleared the papers and tobacco out of Master Willikens’s cart. From the description it might well be.

  He glanced at his watch. Half past five. With any luck, Mayne would still be in the office.

  But he didn’t like the look of Hollis’s wound.

  “Will you come to Scotland Yard with me, after we see a friend of mine who is a physician? There is nowhere you would be safer.”

  “It’s as good a plan as any, I suppose.”

  Lenox produced a card. “Mrs. Thompson, here is my information.”

  Outside, Lenox whistled down a cab, which turned sharply off Three Colt Street. He asked Mrs. Thompson if she would find Graham at the Salted Herring and tell him—surreptitiously—that they could meet at home. She said she would, and the Briton and the American rode off west together under the sinking sun.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Lenox was eager to share his discoveries at the Yard, but he had heard too many stories of men and women sustaining blows to the head and dozing off comfortably, only to remain in that slumber forever after.

  “St. Bart’s,” Lenox told the cab driver. “King Henry Gate.”

  “What is that?” Hollis asked.

  Lenox was already looking at his notes. “Hospital,” he said, not looking up.

  It was more than just a hospital to many. St. Bartholomew’s had stood in the same spot since the early 1100s; Harvey had discovered and delineated the circulatory system there, perhaps the greatest accomplishment a British scientist had ever made.

  But to Lenox it was first and foremost the place where he had an acquaintance who would be awake and helpful. Lemuel Dominic was a surgeon Lenox had consulted professionally. He kept eccentric hours, luckily, working and seeing patients between four in the afternoon and four in the morning.

  As the cab picked up speed, Hollis packed a pipe and smoked it in thoughtful silence. No doubt Gilman was on his mind.

  After some time, Lenox addressed him. “Can you think of a reason anyone would want to kill the three of you?”

  “Yes,” said Hollis briefly, an answer that plainly showed how naïve he thought the question.

  “Do you have any person in mind? Or group?”

  “I have never given a speech in my home country without receiving a death threat beforehand.”

  That stopped Lenox short, and he contemplated the dimensions of the problem before him with growing dismay.

  They arrived at St. Bart’s. The porter at the Henry Gate—above which stood London’s last remaining statue of Henry the Eighth—knew Lenox, and he and Hollis were seen straight to the North Ward. Lenox led Hollis to Dominic’s door, halfway down a hushed wooden corridor.

  “Lenox,” said Dominic when he answered the knock, taciturn as ever, with keen hooded eyes. “Good evening.”

  “Good evening, Dominic. Are you busy?”

  “Unoccupied.”

  He was a short, fat person, an expert in tumors. “This man has a head wound,” said Lenox. “He is an American. I would take it kindly if you looked at him.”

  Dominic glanced at Hollis, then back at Lenox.

  “A quick word first, if you would.”

  “Of course.”

  Lenox went into the bright chamber and closed the door behind him—and there heard, to his astonishment, Dominic say that he would not treat a Negro. Lenox expressed his surprise. Dominic said that he was not expert in their kind, to which Lenox replied that it was no doubt like treating any other adult male, upon which Dominic said that Lenox should know better than to be so coarse in his distinctions. Coarse! Lenox answered that he had heard of an oath that doctors took whose contents eluded him now—could Dominic remind him—named for Hippocrates he thought—and the conversation ended soon thereafter, without any great amiability on either side.

  Lenox came back into the hallway. “He is in the midst of a dissection,” he told Hollis. He looked up and down the corridor. “We will have to find someone else.”

  Hollis looked as if he knew full well the meaning of the word “dissection” and merely nodded. He did wince, though. The blood on his bandage had reddened.

  The detective, increasingly alarmed, asked Hollis to wait upon a bench. He walked quickly back to the stairwell, his footsteps making a loud cracking racket through the empty building. There, he consulted a list on a wooden board of every doctor by his office number.

  He scanned it carefully, until he stopped at a name he recognized. It was a very slender acquaintance. Still, it might work.

  They found office 119 after two left turns, and Lenox knocked on it tentatively. After a moment it opened, and a tall, extremely handsome fellow, with large dark brown eyes and hair fashionably windswept, stood before them in a white coat.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  “Dr. Thomas McConnell?” Lenox asked.

  “That is I.”

  “You will not recall me, I think, but we met twice—perhaps two years ago, or just a bit more. You were kind enough to come to the country to see my father, and then we encountered each other at Lady Hamilton’s ball. Charles Lenox.”

  “Charles Lenox! Yes, I remember, of course.” He was too delicate—or perhaps too callous, with a doctor it could be difficult to tell—to ask about Lenox’s father, who had died of the illness that had caused them to enlist McConnell as a specialist, though through no fault whatsoever of McConnell’s own. “In fact, I saw Lady Lucia Chatham the other day.”

  “Engaged, I hear,” said Lenox, with a smile. “Listen—I know it is very awkward, my showing up on your doorstep, but Mr. Hollis here has a head wound. We called upon Dr. Dominic, but—”

  There was no need to continue, however. Before a few words of this short speech had emerged from Lenox’s mouth, McConnell had already nodded, shaken Hollis’s hand, and begun ushering them into the small round chamber that evidently served as his consulting room. He seated them in a pair of dark chairs and sat down opposite, leaning forward on the edge of his chair so that only the balls of his feet touched the floor.

  “Have you seen a doctor, sir?” he asked Hollis.

  “A Quaker doctor, sir.”

  Lenox had observed that there were scientific journals and a cup of
tea upon McConnell’s desk. “You are sure we are not interrupting you?”

  “Only in the most welcome way—interrupting the sheer boredom of maintaining one’s professional competence. That is, I should add, welcome, if we can alleviate Mr. Hollis’s suffering.”

  McConnell moved Hollis to a taller chair. Lenox offered to leave, but both men said he could stay. With long, subtle fingers, the doctor unfurled the bandage, sponging some clear liquid from a white basin nearby onto the wrapping where it stuck.

  The wound looked considerably worse than Lenox had expected.

  “Goodness,” he said under his breath.

  “These Quaker doctors mean very well,” the surgeon said, carefully gazing at the wound. “But sometimes their good intentions outpace their medical ability. Still, between the two, good intentions and good medicine, there is often nearly an equal need.”

  Dominic had proved this true, certainly. “I really do thank you, McConnell,” Lenox said.

  The surgeon studied the wound for what seemed a very long time. At last, he said, “This wound will do very well, Mr. Hollis. The bone is unfractured. You have not lost a worrying quantity of blood—or rather, you have lost a worrying quantity for yourself, of course, but not for your medical outlook.”

  “You will patch it up?” asked Lenox.

  “I will. First he shall have this laudanum.” The Scot brought forth a small bottle of tincture. Hollis took two drops on his tongue. In the pain of the unwrapping of the wound he had closed his eyes and barely opened them since; he was sweating heavily. “Then I shall ask him to rest somewhere. This sofa is free.”

  “But ought he not to stay awake?”

  “On the contrary, nothing would do better than for him to sleep twelve or fifteen hours. There is no hemorrhage within the cerebellum.”

  Lenox looked at McConnell carefully. “And you are sure that he can sleep here? I would not dream of imposing upon you. Yet I fear it is not safe for him to return to his hotel.”

  “Ah, your profession!” McConnell nodded his head firmly. He was already rewrapping the wound, quickly and expertly. “Yes. He is your friend—he shall stay here. Does that suit you, Mr. Hollis?”

  The American muttered something that sounded like a yes. The laudanum had taken hold even in this short stretch of time, combining no doubt with fatigue, shock, and vigilance to render him stupefied. He allowed himself to be guided to a long and comfortable blue sofa in the corner of McConnell’s office. There he lay down. McConnell found a loosely woven military blanket in his cabinet and placed it over Hollis.

  Within what seemed like thirty seconds, perhaps less, he was asleep. “I am deeply in your debt,” Lenox said, voice low.

  McConnell grinned. “Yes, to the tune of nine shillings. However, since we are not in Harley Street, where I have my clinical practice, but at the hospital, we shall waive it.”

  “I insist upon paying,” said Lenox, reaching for his pocket.

  McConnell put a hand out. “Go further and you shall insult me.”

  Lenox stopped. “Then you must accept my gratitude. But can you really leave him here?”

  “Yes. I shall be here another hour or two. When I go I shall write a note for the nurse on the wards. You may leave one for Hollis if you wish, too. They will see that he gets it.”

  This was just what they did. Then Lenox, thanking McConnell with quiet but fervent gratitude once more—Hollis was in a deep sleep—said it might be vitally important to him to go to Scotland Yard, that time was of the utmost importance, and McConnell urged him away, with his good wishes and his assurances that the next day when Hollis woke up they would find him a bed on the ward.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “You were due a stroke of luck.”

  That was what Sir Edmund Lenox said to his younger brother over breakfast the next morning. They were discussing a large steamer trunk—the stroke of luck in question.

  Charles tipped a spoonful of brown sugar over his bowl of porridge and shrugged, face philosophical, as if to say that the people due strokes of luck didn’t always receive them. He watched the sugar slowly turn liquid and then took a bite.

  “It was still luck,” he said, chewing. “We shall see what we can make of it.”

  Just then, Molly passed through the sunny breakfast room. In the corner, the couple’s two young sons, Charles’s nephews, dressed in matching white sailor’s pants and blue jersey shirts, were deeply absorbed in some saga of their invention involving a toy sloop.

  “Make of what?” she asked.

  It was Edmund who replied. “Charles’s murder victim, the one from the train, sent his things ahead of him from Manchester to London. A whole steamer trunk.”

  Charles frowned. “I don’t know that it sounds quite right to call him my murder victim, Edmund.”

  “No, true. I meant the murder victim Charles didn’t murder, Molly.”

  “That still makes it sound as if there’s one I did murder.”

  Molly suggested that they might go so far as to suspend all discussion of murder until the boys’ nanny had fetched them—a request the older pair of brothers both acknowledged was reasonable.

  Leaving again, though, Molly congratulated Charles on his steamer trunk.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Not to mention Kitty Ashbrook!” she called gleefully over her shoulder.

  “There is absolutely nothing—” began Lenox.

  But the door to the servants’ pantry between the morning room and the dining room had already swung closed behind her.

  “She’s having friends to tea this morning,” Edmund said, by way of explanation for her hurry.

  Usually she ate with them—a part of their tradition that every Friday, when they were both in the city, the two brothers had breakfast together. It was a ritual that dated to their childhood. Back then they had gathered in the great hall at Lenox House at seven thirty to breakfast with their father, who always commuted back from his seat in Parliament late Thursday nights, long after their bedtime. It was his first meal of the weekend—which was his favorite time of the week, and the boys’, too, for they had him, then, until early Sunday afternoon.

  “I heard as much, before you came down,” Lenox said.

  “They’re from when she was quite young, but they have kept up a correspondence over the years. One lives in Bath, the other in Northhampton. She hasn’t seen them in ages—has been excited for so long.” He glanced at the pantry wistfully. “I only hope it goes as well as she would like.”

  “It will.” Though life could take odd turns, Lenox couldn’t imagine Molly ever having friends who had grown angry or spiteful; not ever. “What about you, this morning? The House of Commons?”

  “Yes. Unending meetings.”

  “At least you can give me a lift.”

  At that moment one of the boys came over with the toy ship, and the conversation turned toward its significance. Lenox loved his brother’s house, partly for moments like this. It was a short, homey dwelling with a curved window in front, always full of noises, good smells, calling to and fro, busyness. It felt full, with little reminders everywhere, forgotten toys, hastily flung-up jackets, that the whole whirl of life was transpiring here, mother, father, children, their growth and happiness an ongoing and complex matter.

  The house sat on a wide, leafy street in Belgravia called Cadogan Lane. This was slightly farther from the heart of Mayfair—and from Parliament—than Charles’s own residence. Edmund often commented, however, that the half-hour walk into the relative quiet here salvaged his spirit after a long day.

  Lenox had walked here this morning in high spirits himself. He had woken to word from McConnell—most kindly phrased—that Josiah Hollis was asleep in the North Ward and already recovering. A good constitution, McConnell said. Then, news nearly as welcome, an overnight hunch had paid off: Graham had returned from the Greensleeves with the news that Lenox’s suspicion had been right, and Gilman’s trunk from Manchester was sitting in
the hotel’s luggage office, waiting to be claimed.

  He had already been in good standing at Scotland Yard the night before, for finding out Gilman’s name and unearthing Hollis. Now he knew the solution was within his fingertips’ reach. He felt it with all the urgency of his young blood.

  “I notice you’re still dressing these boys like sailors in a costume contest,” Charles said to his brother when his nephews had turned back to their game.

  Edmund sighed. “Yes.” He had a piece of crispy bacon, and took a ruminative bite of it. “Molly’s sister swears by it.”

  “Better than the pinafore they made you wear for our portrait.”

  “It was not a pinafore!”

  Charles looked at his older brother skeptically. “If you pin it afore the dress, I think it must be a pinafore.”

  “It wasn’t a dress. As you know full well!”

  This portrait (whose composition predated Charles’s own memories of life) was a source of great shame to Edmund, who did indeed at least appear to be wearing a navy pinafore in it. The picture was one of their mother’s most treasured possessions.

  Now Charles repeated her favorite comment on it, always said with the same nostalgic passion. “You were such a beautiful child, Ed.”

  “Shut up.”

  Unfortunately Molly came through the door at just that moment and shot her husband a deadly look at this display of rudeness in front of the boys. Edmund immediately transferred the look to his brother, who acknowledged it with an apologetic smile. A maid brought in two cups of black coffee. Another habit of their father’s—a cup of tea with breakfast, a cup of coffee afterward, and one could work all the night through, he was fond of saying.

  The boys soon departed, shuffled off to the morning’s amusement (the zoo), and Molly was busy in the larger drawing room across the hall. The sun slanted in onto every surface, broken here and there into accidental geometries.

  “Sir Richard was pleased then,” Edmund said.

  “Yes, I think he was,” Charles replied. “I was glad he was still at the office when I left McConnell. He set out straight for the American consulate. How they shall handle it I cannot say.”