“What happened?”
“The Roman numeral appeared on the door of the church, overnight. We checked in with all of the parents, and none of the boys had been out past dark.”
“Boys are very sneaky, you know.”
“I had your brother and yourself here once upon a time, did I not? We enquired carefully, however, and though of course it is not a certainty I think it unlikely that any of those thirty-two boys did this. For one thing the images are so strange and unlikely, and for another, I know the boys. None of them are a bad sort. Not that we haven’t had those, through the years, but most of them have gone off or grown up.”
“I wonder,” said Lenox, “whether the second pair of crimes, the defacement of the church doors, is connected with the first pair.”
Frederick shook his head firmly. “We might go fifteen years without one incident like any of these,” he said. “When there are four in as many weeks they must be connected.”
“Yes, very likely.”
“The village is trying to pretend that nothing is wrong. Meanwhile all the shops are barring their windows and people are afraid to walk about after dark. It’s a terrible state of affairs. I do wish you would put your mind on it.”
“I shall be rather busy with my speech,” said Lenox, and then, seeing Frederick’s disappointment, added quickly, “But I mean to think it over, perhaps even have a word with one or two people. Yes, you may count on that.”
Though he fooled himself that he made the promise on Frederick’s behalf, in some deeper part of his mind he knew that it was for himself, too; and there swelled up inside him the pleasure of anticipation.
CHAPTER NINE
From a distant part of the house a cry went up. “Is that the child?” asked Frederick.
“It is, but I must not go to her. Miss Taylor would be fierce with me indeed if I should. Tell me, who do you suspect of these crimes?”
“Still, it’s late, now, and you’ve had a long day’s travel. Shall we go on in the morning?”
“If you prefer it.”
Frederick’s slightly plump, kind face took on again a troubled aspect. “In truth I would like to tell you all now.”
“Are you not tired?”
“Me? It’s the deuce of a thing, getting older, but I will say in its favor that one sleeps less — and no worse. I spend many hours in this particular nook, in fact, when the rest of the house has gone to bed. And d’you know, I find it rather cozy.”
“It’s an eligible sort of room,” said Lenox.
“I could never use my father’s study — the large one. Too much room to think. Here I have my telescope”—he gestured toward the window—“and my books, my papers, and a drop of something to drink. No, I am happy to stay up with you.”
“Perhaps you will give me all the facts now, then.”
Fate intervened, however. There was a soft knock on the door and without was Kirk, who said, “Begging your pardon, sir, Lady Jane would like a word with you.”
“Tell her I’ll light along in a moment,” said Lenox, and when the butler had gone, said to his uncle, “Here, then, quickly tell me—”
Frederick had risen and was tapping out the ash of his pipe. “No, it’s late. Tomorrow I’ll give you luncheon, if you like, and we may talk about it then. Good night. It is pleasant to have you here, though — I say, it is.”
As he mounted the stairs toward the small set of rooms that his cousin had allotted him and his family, in the old, east wing of the house, Lenox felt rather glad that they would leave some until tomorrow. He was tired. Perhaps the port had gone to his head? Or perhaps it was only the swirl of a long day, a quickly planned journey, the still fresh prospect of the speech …
Jane was in a chair by her window, feet tucked under her, a blue shawl of wool wrapped around her shoulders, reading. She smiled when she saw him and put down her book. “There you are.”
“Hello, my dear,” he said, and bent down to affix a kiss to her cheek. For some reason he didn’t feel inclined to tell her that Frederick was giving up the house; tomorrow he would.
She received his kiss very becomingly, and took his hand. “Did I interrupt you?”
“No, or leastwise not in anything significant.”
“Your uncle must be happy to have you here.”
“And I’m happy to be here. I hope you are, too?”
“Oh, yes. I only called you up because I wanted a sort of family reunion.”
“A reunion?”
She pointed. “Look, in the corner.”
Sophia was there, in her bassinet. “You overrode Miss Taylor, then?”
“Yes, I said we would take her in here for the evening. I know it’s self-indulgent, and Miss Taylor began to be cross with me, but in a new place, I thought — and then, she quieted down right away.”
Lenox smiled. “I heard her cry.”
Lady Jane stood up. “She’s asleep, now.”
They spent ten or so minutes, then, in admiring their daughter, the kind of minutes that pass slowly for a stranger introduced to a baby — for even the most precocious infant’s conversation cannot be admitted as very sparkling — but which seems to pass in the instant of a breath for two parents. Her skin, which Lenox brushed with the back of his finger, was so warm, and soft! It reminded him of a warm bed on a wet night, of the sun on a mild summer’s day, out by a lazy stream — of every comforting thing.
At last they left the child alone. Lenox began to take out his cufflinks and Lady Jane returned to her chair and her book.
Soon she was laughing. “What’s that?” asked her husband.
“Only Through the Looking-Glass.” She had undertaken a project of re-reading her favorite children’s books, in order to begin to build a library for little Sophia to hear before bed each evening when she reached a more advanced age. “This part reminds me of us, when Alice and the Queen are running in place.”
He went into the small study adjacent to their bedroom and poured a glass of water from the jug left on his desk. “May I hear it?” he asked as he came back through to the bedroom.
So she read out loud:
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Lenox laughed but said, “How does it remind you of us?”
“It reminds me of you, you goose. All of your callers yesterday — was that not running in place? Here you may work properly.”
“Just so,” he said.
“It’s not far different for me. Nothing social — nothing more taxing than a walk with Sophia, you know. It’s lovely.” She put down her book and stifled a yawn. “I think I must go in to sleep, now. Will you be up long?”
“Only a few minutes more.”
“Good.” She stood up. “It’s a funny book, but I think I prefer Wonderland. Sophia will like it better, too — I know she will.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
He kissed her and returned to the small study and sat down. Kirk had laid out his papers, his royal dispatch bag, and his blue books — those slim Parliamentary files on the issues of the day, which each member of the House received in avalanches. There was also a fresh notebook in which he might write.
On its first page he found himself sketching out pictures of the hanging man and the black dog.
Soon he was writing in earnest. He made a small map from memory of the locations of the four vandalisms, deciding he would check it tomorrow — it had been many years since he was resident in Plumbley, after all — and at each location wrote a short list of questions to ask. “What sort of paint?” “Who found and reported each one?” “Connections?”
He was by no means convinced that a schoolboy was not in the e
nd behind it all, despite the efforts of Frederick, of Mr. Kempe, of Dr. Eastwood, and of Mr. Crofts. Yet if an adult had been breaking windows and painting doorways around the town of Plumbley, what could have been his motivation? Did the images convey a message? Or were they only some unhappy soul’s bad-natured purgation?
Lenox’s own black dog was by his feet, at the moment, Bear, along with his golden companion, Rabbit. They had come down with Kirk in the coach. They were gentle creatures, two retrievers, a present from Lady Jane.
“Why would they’ve painted a dog like you?” said Lenox in a soft voice.
Of course in folk tradition a black dog meant death. All of the images were therefore deathly, except perhaps the Roman numeral. It made him wonder whether that was the one upon which he should concentrate.
He decided that after he had had the remainder of the story from his uncle, he would go into town and see Fripp, the victim of the first vandalism, and perhaps the grain merchant, Wells. Fripp anyhow was an old friend, and might have some information.
Upon making that decision Lenox set aside his notepad and endeavored to read a blue book upon the subject of rural education in Scotland. He had been much in the committee rooms that produced the report, and felt very strongly on the issue, yet his mind kept circling back to the Roman numeral and the black dog, wondering what they meant, and the broken windows, too.
But of course it was pointless. He had very little information still. With a sigh he snuffed out his candle, patted the dogs on the head, took a final sip of water, and started out for bed, obscurely dissatisfied.
CHAPTER TEN
That mood was gone by the next morning. Lenox rode out early across the fields on a neat little chestnut hack that his uncle kept stabled at Everley, primarily for visitors, occasionally for himself. When the member for Stirrington fetched up to the hall after his ride he was happy, hot, and in a tearing hunger. He fell eagerly to the eggs and bacon laid out upon the sideboard.
“How is Sadie?” asked Frederick when he came into the breakfast room. “Chalmers was delighted to have her taken out. Wishes I did it more myself.”
“She was in very fine form, quick as a bee when she jumped the stiles. I must have ridden her eight miles and she was still fresh when we returned.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I can never give her enough exercise, though I let one of the lads from the village take her out on Saturdays. Would you like a cup of tea? Or is it coffee?”
“If there’s coffee—”
When he had had his two cups of coffee and read the Times back to front, and the local paper from Bath more cursorily, Lenox, quite satisfied with his morning, sought out his uncle again. For his part Frederick always took his own breakfast in his study, even when guests were there; he had spread out on a table beside his telescope a single egg in a silver cup, a crust of toast, a blot of marmalade, and a pewter cup full of dark red liquid.
“Oh, Charles,” he said, turning at the sound of the door. “Will you join me in a glass of hot negus? It settles the stomach wonderfully, I find.”
Lenox sat down. “Thank you, no. I thought we might resume our conversation of yesterday evening, if you remain so inclined?”
“By all means, yes.”
“My question was whom you might suspect, or indeed who it is that the town suspects. They must have someone in mind, mustn’t they?”
Frederick, who had been standing over his breakfast, occasionally peering into the lens of his telescope, sat down, too. “There we come to Captain Musgrave.”
“Who took Dr. McGrath’s house.”
“The very one, and in fact he has bought the parcel of wooded land that lies behind it from old Turnbridge and is planning to clear it. He’s rather rich, I believe.”
“He’s not from Plumbley?”
“Oh, no, he’s from Bath. Tenth Regiment of Foot. I don’t think anyone here saw him before six months ago.”
“Why does the village suspect him?”
Frederick pursed his mouth thoughtfully, considering how to answer. “I half wonder if it’s only because he’s new to these parts, yet I confess that I don’t like the set of his sails much, myself. He’s a very handsome man, light-haired, rather tan, very tall, and even his worst enemy would have to admit that his manners are fair.”
“How did he come to Plumbley?”
“He married one of our local girls, Catherine Scales. Do you remember her?”
“I do not.”
“No, I wouldn’t have thought you would, but she was a very beautiful child around the time you visited Everley most often, working for her mother in the dress shop, always about town, quite beloved — spoiled, you might say, by those who knew her. She has pale skin and black hair.”
“A dress shop? I take it their birth is unequal, then?”
“Yes.”
“How did that come to pass?”
“Catherine’s mother died two years ago. The girl had an aunt in Bath and went to live with her. This aunt had married well herself, to a manufacturer, and just managed to keep a carriage, could nod at some of the finer women in Bath in the streets — was always very hard on her sister when she visited Plumbley, I know, came it very grand. Anyhow she was childless and took an interest in Catherine when the girl’s mother died. Catherine met her husband when she spent the season in Bath. Of course, a military man will set his cap at anything, much less a girl of her beauty. I would reckon she won the captain without much difficulty, to be honest, handsome though he may be. Men are fools.”
“Nevertheless, I’m surprised that he consented to move here.”
“As was I. Stranger still has been their behavior since they arrived.”
“How is that?”
“Nobody has seen more than a glimpse of her for these six months, Charles.” Frederick looked grave. “If I hadn’t nodded hello to her at the church, a few weeks ago, as she was rushing away, I swear I would have feared there had been some foul play.”
“How strange.”
“Yes, it is. And it has given rise to tremendous gossip, of course.”
“What does the aunt say to it?”
“She trusts wholly in Captain Musgrave. I would venture that she stands rather in awe of him.”
“Is he much seen, any more than his wife?”
“No. He takes his custom in most things to Bath or to Taunton”—this was a larger town not far away—“and that alone would have made him unpopular, if people hadn’t decided that he was mistreating Catherine.”
“Yet you said he had good manners.”
“Manners; yes. Personally I didn’t see the incident.”
“Incident?”
Frederick rose and returned to the small table by the telescope, where he took a sip of his negus. “Before Catherine left Plumbley she was, of course, wooed by several gentlemen. One of these was Wells.”
“The grain merchant? Whose shop was vandalized?”
“The same.”
“And the incident?”
“Captain Musgrave and his wife were walking through town one afternoon and Mr. Wells approached them. Nobody quite heard their conversation — eyes in windowpanes, you see — until Musgrave’s voice rose. Said that if Wells was a gentleman he would call him out; that he expected him not to address Catherine Musgrave again; and that he would thank him to continue along his way. Then Musgrave grabbed his wife by the wrist — most cruelly if accounts are to be believed, though it’s possible that the myth has grown rather out of proportion to the event itself — and dragged her away. It was after that that we begin to see much less of her about Plumbley. Of course the timing may be coincidental.”
“What was Wells’s account of the matter?”
“He was very free about it in the Royal Oak — said he had merely been wishing them a good day, and was astonished at Musgrave’s reaction. Said a sort of black jealousy came over the man, though he had won his wife fair and square.”
Lenox waited, but his uncle didn’t say anything else.
“And that is all?” the member of Parliament asked.
“Yes.”
“Nothing else on earth encourages people to attach Musgrave’s name to these acts of vandalism, then? I call it very thin, to think that a captain of the Tenth Regiment of Foot has been setting out about a small Somerset village with rocks and a bucket of paint to frighten the locals, simply because he may be unkind to his wife and has had words with one of her former suitors. Does that seem plausible to you?”
“Not phrased as such.”
“And what use could he have with a brass clock that might seem very fine to a grain merchant, but likely not to a gentleman?”
“None. You’re right.”
“If anything it sounds to me as if he wants privacy. Beyond that we know that he has no fear of speaking directly to Wells, which makes me wonder very sincerely why he would go to the wearisome effort of staying up half the night to break his windows.”
The older man frowned, hands clasped behind his back. “Yet there is something in the man’s air — well, perhaps you shall see, if you meet him. I fancy myself a judge of character, you know.”
“Yes,” said Lenox. “And it’s all damnably puzzling to be sure.” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps I’ll have a word of conversation with Oates, the constable, after I drop in on Fripp.”
“You’ll find that he and Weston are very eager for help.”
“Where are they?”
Frederick gave Lenox instructions about where to find the small police station. “Tell them I sent you,” he said at last.
“I shall. And is there anything else I ought to know?”
“No. I don’t think so, anyhow.”
“Nothing about Musgrave?”
“No, I don’t— Oh! I quite forgot. I should have added that it is held against Musgrave in Plumbley — held as almost damning, I fear — that he is attended everywhere he goes by a large black dog.”
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