The Last Passenger - A Prequel

by Charles Finch

  He thought: I am in love.

  It was slightly warmer in 1856 than it had been in 1855, and, buoyed by his visit at Eaton Square, Lenox walked home. At any rate it was dry; a wet winter was what Londoners dreaded, when it grew so damp that a small gust of breeze froze your bones.

  At a bookstore on Cate Street Lenox broke his stride. It was a sign that had caught his eye.

  Travails of an American slave!

  Hear the brutality of the masters; sufferings of the enslaved; and more, from

  MR. JOSIAH HOLLIS in person, seven o’clock in the evening, Jan. 5

  Curious. He’d been quite sure Hollis had already gone back to America. The discrepancy troubled him, and he decided he would go to the talk two evenings hence.

  This afternoon, however, he had plans. He went home, changed into more comfortable clothing (and with the change, out of the dreamy mentality induced in him by Eaton Street and Kitty—Kitty Lenox, she might be called soon!), and went to fetch Cobb.

  Soon they were in a hansom heading west. They were on their way to see Edmund. “Now you shall meet my brother,” said Lenox, “and you may judge which of us is a truer representation of the decadence of our English way of life—as opposed to the invigorating purity of American capitalism.”

  Cobb shook his head sadly. “I fear that we are no model at the moment. We’re trying to spread too much country across too little compromise these days. It will tell sooner or later.”

  “You don’t think there will be a civil war?” asked Lenox.

  “If there is, I am prepared to fight. I shall return to Vermont and enlist there. But to answer your question, I do not think there will be. The slaveowners will never dare secede, though it be their great threat.”

  “I do not think you mentioned whether you have a family,” said Lenox.

  He had not phrased it as a question on purpose, to give Cobb the chance to politely decline the confidence, but the American said, “I am recently married—in June of last year.”

  “My congratulations! And you find it a happy state of affairs.”

  Cobb smiled almost shyly. “Very. My wife is from South Carolina—Eliza—and she has turned our garden into something magnificent, complete with a little lamb for wool, and an icehouse. A very castle, you know—though you can see the next house over, two hundred feet off.”

  “Indeed, it sounds idyllic.”

  “It is, Mr. Lenox.”

  “Does your wife object to your line of work? Its dangers?”

  “Less strenuously than she objected to this long absence.”

  “Ah, of course,” said Lenox. “I have a friend who is enduring just such a thing. He is in the military.”

  They arrived at Edmund’s house and found him in his study. He welcomed his brother very gladly.

  “May I introduce you to Mr. Winston Cobb, who is a member of the militia that guards Washington, D.C.? Mr. Cobb, this is my brother, Sir Edmund Lenox.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” said Edmund, and he and the small, tidy American shook hands. “Welcome to London.”

  “Edmund, to hurry to the point, we came to ask about Samuel Jonas.”

  Edmund frowned. “Jonas? Whatever for?”

  “Never mind. What do you know about him?”

  Edmund had resumed his seat, and Charles and Cobb had taken the two chairs across from him. “Not all that much. He rarely comes into Parliament. Quite rich, quite idle. Never leaves the Carlton.”

  “What do you mean—that he rarely comes into Parliament, Sir Lenox?” asked Cobb.

  Edmund smiled at this misnomer and said, without commenting otherwise, “Please, call me Edmund. What I mean is that he’s only in Parliament every tenth day or so that it assembles. Here in England I’m afraid that’s not uncommon. We’re very lax about attendance compared to you.”

  “How did he make his money?” asked Cobb.

  “The colonies.”

  Lenox felt a buzz of excitement. “Which?”

  “I can’t remember. Do you want me to look?”

  “If you would.”

  Edmund pulled down his thin light blue parliamentary record, a diary and registry that only Members possessed.

  As he leafed through it, he said, “Of anyone on earth to want to see—that great oaf—but here we are. S. Jonas. Yes, here we are. He was … let’s see, he was briefly in South Africa, then a long while in Jamaica, and finally in Australia. Not a colony anymore, of course. I—”

  Australia had been granted sovereignty to govern itself just a few months before, but nothing could have been of less interest to Lenox at present.

  “When was he in Jamaica?” he said.

  Edmund frowned. “It doesn’t give exact dates. The biographies are very brief. You may look for yourself.”

  They did, and to his disappointment, Charles saw that his brother was right. It mentioned that he had spent “a good part of his thirties in Jamaica and America” but otherwise gave no detail.

  Still, there it was: The three men, Sheridan, Witt, and Jonas, were all connected to Jamaica. Was it meaningful?

  “You would not call him a powerful man in the House of Commons, then?” Cobb asked of Edmund.

  “I would call him just about the least powerful man in the House of Commons,” said Edmund, “which is to say that he has one vote—a goodly measure of power for any Englishman.”

  “I see.”

  “Counterbalancing that is the fact he will be turned out in the next by-election. It is quite a certain thing.”

  “Why?” said Charles.

  “It’s a close district, and he has a good challenger this time. Last time he didn’t. I can’t remember his name, the new fellow. One from our side. Not that it matters, for Jonas is the greatest layabout you ever met, and even constituents hear of such a thing sooner or later.”

  “Do you think we would find him at the Carlton now?” asked Lenox.

  “I would bet a thousand pounds on it.” Edmund scorned the Carlton Club, a beautiful building on St. James’s Place, which served as both spiritual and second home to much of the conservative party. “Mr. Cobb, if you go there, have Charles take you over to the Athenaeum afterward for a cup of tea, so you don’t leave these shores without the experience of a real gentleman’s club.”

  They called at the Carlton; and Edmund would have lost his thousand pounds. As it happened, Charles knew the club’s head porter fairly well, not least from the times he had dined with the Duke of Dorset there. He was a cordially peremptory fellow named Whyte, who spoke to them while making notes in his register.

  “He’s usually here, sir, Mr. Jonas, but not today.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Whyte. “And the preceding … say, fifty. But you are the second fellow looking for him! I did not give the other his address.”

  Lenox frowned. He would pay the thousand pounds himself rather than let Dunn solve this case before he did, if it were Dunn. “Could I trouble you for his address? I know information that may be in his interest.”

  Whyte picked up a piece of paper. “I had already written it down, Mr. Lenox. Best regards to your brother. I’m sure he’s quite welcome anytime he’d like to cross the aisle.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Jonas lived in Elizabeth Street in Belgravia, not far, in fact, from Kitty Ashbrook. The address proved to be that of a handsome, substantial house, which had been divided into apartments for bachelors. Jonas’s was number 2.

  No one answered the bell; to Lenox’s surprise, quiet Cobb pulled a shimmy from his pocket and in a jiffy had them inside a resplendent foyer, with a subdued landscape of London on the dark blue wall and a vase of hothouse tulips.

  Lenox said to remind him not to fight the Militia of the District of Columbia.

  Cobb laughed. “You may treat for a truce in advance, after the hospitality you have shown, Mr. Lenox.”

  There were three floors, each with its own proprietor. They reached the second and saw what
was evidently Jonas’s door, for there was a 2 painted on it in black.

  Lenox stopped several feet short of the door. “It’s open,” he said in a low voice.

  Cobb looked, and indeed the door was ajar. “Carefully, then,” he said, and without hesitation stepped in front of Lenox and pushed it open slightly farther.

  Lenox, young and eager to prove himself, wished he had done this, but now that it was done he had no choice but to follow his American counterpart. A floorboard creaked as they entered, and they paused. But no replying sound came. If the house held Samuel Jonas, he was either hiding or dead.

  His rooms were a mess. Clothes, old plates of food, newspapers crumpled rather than folded, pewter flagons fetched up from the pub and never returned for their deposit—all these lay strewn over the floor and tables and chairs. Lenox reflected that he would have gone to the Carlton Club, too, if he lived here. Yet it was a quite obviously expensive life he led.

  There were touches of domesticity. On the wall was a pair of portraits that from their dress Lenox guessed must have been from around the turn of the century. Perhaps Jonas’s grandparents. On either side of the portraits were framed pictures in cross-stitch. One was of Parliament, and the other was of a large white house with high white columns supporting a broad balcony that shaded a large front porch, with Jonas Hall in scroll across the bottom.

  “I’ll check the bedroom,” said Cobb softly.

  As he did this, Lenox investigated the large living room, checking behind the sofa, in the single closet, and through the swinging door—with his heart in his throat—that led to the servant’s quarters.

  These were small, a kitchen and a narrow bedroom. Lenox checked both thoroughly, and both were empty. There was a quartet of oranges, a luxury, out on the counter. He felt them: firm. Jonas had been here recently. But the servant’s room looked unused. That would explain the mess as well.

  “Empty,” said Cobb when he came back into the living room.

  “So are the kitchen and the servant’s room.” There was an unspoken moment of relief, a slackening of vigilance. “Then what do we make of the door?”

  “Nothing good,” said Cobb.

  Lenox gestured around the room. “On the other hand, nobody could accuse Mr. Jonas of being overnice in his style of life.”

  Cobb shook his head. “No. I can’t believe he represents an entire constituency of people but can barely hold together two rooms.”

  “I think his servant has left him.”

  “Why?”

  “The quarters look unused. All of Jonas’s meals have been brought in.”

  “There’s a diary and some papers on the desk in the bedroom,” said Cobb. “I didn’t look, but perhaps we should.”

  “I think the open door justifies it.”

  The diary was empty of commitments—except, strikingly, for on this day. Sav, 4:00, said the entry, underlined twice for emphasis. “What could that mean?” Cobb asked.

  “It’s bound to be the Savoy.”

  “What’s that?”

  Now that was very hard to explain to someone who didn’t live in England. In essence, long ago a member of the royal family had been given a tiny sliver of London as a duchy, and while it was still subject to the Queen’s laws, it had strange, ancient laws of its own, too. The most famous of these involved debt. No writ of debt applied in the Savoy. That had made it a famous hideout for men who could afford the high prices there but not the tens of thousands of pounds they owed; George Mowbray, a cousin of Lenox’s own, hadn’t left the Savoy in ten years. There were always debt collectors waiting at the edges, even in the dead of night, looking for people who thought they could dart in and out of the Savoy’s protection.

  Lenox explained all of that as briefly as he could. “But do you imagine Jonas is in debt?” Cobb asked.

  Lenox said that he didn’t think so. “He could be arrested at the Carlton any time. But it may be that his meeting is with someone who is dodging the collectors.”

  “True.”

  “Debtors’ prison is a fearful place. Have you read the books of Mr. Dickens?”

  “I have. He may be the most popular writer in our country, aside from Mr. Cooper,” said Cobb. “And Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, of course.”

  “If we ever manage to get rid of them, it’s Dickens who will have done it,” Lenox said.

  It was just past one. The two men agreed that they must of course be present in the Savoy at four, though as Lenox said, there were a variety of pubs, lodging houses, and inns there. Their best chance was to be out in the streets a bit beforehand. For that they would need Graham—an extra set of eyes.

  They looked through the rest of the flat—quite unabashedly, for there was something in its squalor that seemed to disqualify its inhabitant from privacy—without finding much. The rolltop desk held quite a lot of money, in pounds and dollars; even this was pretty casually kept. There was a half-composed letter to Jonas’s haberdasher, ordering two new top hats “of the kind I bought in July.” In short, everything gave the appearance that Jonas might reappear any minute and resume his normal course of activities. It was this—perhaps the letter—that hastened their search, and finally they left.

  “Door open or closed?” asked Lenox.

  “Ajar, I suppose,” said Cobb, after thinking. “They trained us to leave everything as we found it in cases like this.”

  An unbidden thought flashed across Lenox’s mind: Cobb was not merely a soldier, or a detective. He was a spy. Lenox believed that he was in London as a detective, and he did not doubt that Cobb was playing straight with him. But could he be wrong?

  These thoughts didn’t cause him to miss a step in the conversation. “Before you leave, I wish you would give me a list of these injunctions. I am trying to learn the profession, but it is uneven progress.”

  “With pleasure,” Cobb said. “I feel no very great confidence at the moment myself, though. Jonas might simply have left the door open and have a meeting with a friend. The connection to Jamaica might be accidental.”

  “Perhaps,” said Lenox.

  He knew it wasn’t. Something about the double line under the appointment; something about the crimes, and the people; something about Sheridan’s stubborn ignorance; something about Winfield Bell’s sudden fortune: All of it felt linked; all of it must be linked.

  They agreed to meet at three o’clock on the steps of the royal chapel in the Savoy, a church built to order by one of the Henrys a few hundred years before, a miniature jewel of stained glass and paneled wood. From there they could explore the nooks and clefts and hiding places of the old district, in search of an answer, at last, to the mystery of who had murdered Eli Gilman and why.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Gentlemen’s clubs were well and good. Officers’ messes, coffeehouses, restaurants, and tearooms, too, all had their place. But sometimes one wanted nothing more than a spell in a good pub.

  Lenox, Graham, and Cobb had spent an hour trawling through the Savoy without luck. About halfway through the journey it had started to rain—a cold, driving rain, the kind that made you long to be indoors with a cup of something strong and an engrossing novel. At last they had taken refuge in a public house called the Duke of Lancaster, a winding burrow of a place with several rooms and two enormous fireplaces.

  They sat at a table in the shadow of one of these six-foot hearths. The barmaid came round, and the three all ordered hot spiced cider with rum. Meanwhile Lenox shivered, with that horrid feeling of being cold and hot at the same time in wet clothes. Someone—perhaps his brother?—had once told him that a turkey without its feathers was hideous, clammy, pale, pimpled, trembling at the slightest touch. Those same physical symptoms were present when someone quit drinking or tobacco or opium suddenly—went, as the saying had it, cold turkey. Well, so he felt now.

  “They must have met in someone’s lodgings,” Cobb said.

  “It may also be that Sav stood for something else,” said Lenox.

 
“Mr. Graham, would the Savoy have been your first guess?”

  “Without a doubt, sir,” and though Lenox was not sure whether honesty or loyalty played a greater role in this reply, he was grateful for it.

  Their ciders came, hot and delicious. Cobb had a bacon sandwich; Lenox, a paper sleeve of chipped potatoes, warm, crispy, salty and filling. As for Graham, he had a slice of steak pie with his cider. The rain lashed the windows, fierce and relentless, the gray sky dimming even faster than usual. Lenox tried to remember the shortest day of the winter and failed. He hoped they were past it. December, wasn’t it? Or was that wishful thinking? Still, it was a companionable little meal.

  As Cobb and Graham talked, Lenox’s mind turned to Kitty Ashbrook, and he thought of the contrast between this afternoon—welcome as it was—and her warm, inviting sitting room, the feeling of her light hands in his.

  And then, in the midst of his idle thought, as the three of them sipped their cider, two men entered the Duke of Lancaster: Samuel Jonas, whom Lenox recognized faintly, but surely, and with him, as if by way of confirmation, Wilt Sheridan, blithe Wilt Sheridan, with his mustaches waxed carefully to the tips and not a hair out of place.

  Lenox nudged Graham and Cobb. “It’s them.”

  None spoke further—all three recognizing that they were placed, as if some divinity had set them there on purpose, in the perfect half-concealed spot to observe what the two men did.

  Jonas waddled to the bar. He sat down heavily, his thinning hair tossed up in wild torrents by the weather. He looked miserable. A day away from the comforts of the Carlton.

  They couldn’t hear the two men. “Graham?” said Lenox. “They know me.”

  Without further prompting, Graham took, with his usual knack, the most natural path in the world toward a spot at the bar just by the two men.

  Lenox could see that Jonas had ordered a double brandy, Sheridan a glass of hot red wine. Their talk was very brief. Graham, next to them, ordered and sipped a pint of ale, studying—or at least appearing to study—a folded journal that he had drawn from his jacket pocket.