A Death in the Small Hours clm-6

by Charles Finch

  Weston had taken out a pencil and was writing. “Hadn’t thought of those questions,” he muttered.

  “I’ll look at whatever possibilities I can,” said Lenox. “Meanwhile, Captain Musgrave. Where does he enter into it?”

  Both of the constables’ faces darkened. “We’re keeping an eye on him,” said Oates. “A very close eye.”

  “Only because he’s new in town? And because he has a black dog?”

  “If you meet him you’ll see why folk’re suspicious, Mr. Lenox, sir.”

  “That woman is in trouble,” said Weston sadly.

  “Catherine Scales?”

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you say so?”

  “Nobody’s seen her, have they?”

  A troubling thought struck Lenox. “Are you sure she’s alive?”

  Oates nodded. “Went up to check not ten days ago. She received us, after we fair insisted, but she didn’t look well. Weston’ll tell you.”

  Weston had no trouble elaborating on this point — was shocked, most shocked to see the lady so pale — striking beautiful lady, too — damn shame.

  “And if you had to assemble a narrative in your minds of what Musgrave is doing, what would it be?” Lenox asked.

  “Causing trouble,” said Oates.

  Weston nodded stoutly. “Causing trouble.”

  Lenox held back a sigh. “Very well. Perhaps I’ll see the captain myself, if I can find the time. In the meanwhile let us hope that nothing further happens.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Lenox and the dogs walked home. His mind moved slowly from the mysteries of Plumbley to the mysteries of the nation. When he got back he found the house empty, Jane, Sophia, and the governess on a walk, his uncle working in the muck of the gardens. Lenox went straight to his desk and began to work on his speech.

  This age of Queen Victoria, through which he was living, regarded itself as one of great social rigidity, of great propriety — and it was true. The beefeaters stood guard before Buckingham Palace, the banker in his sitting room smoked his pipe and read his evening newspaper, his wife paired people off by rank as they went into dinner, the pound was worth a pound of silver.

  Nevertheless, Lenox was persuaded that one day, long after he had slipped out of life and been forgotten, this epoch would be remembered equally for its profound social changes. Look how far they had come! The Reform Act of 1832 had begun the movement toward equality, permitting hundreds of thousands of new people to vote, an expansion that the act of 1867 had widened. The government was growing less brutal, too. In 1849 a husband and wife, convicted of murder, had been hanged by the neck before thirty thousand people, but five years ago Parliament had finally banned all public executions. Transportation to Australia, whose consequences had been occasionally tantamount to execution, ended ten years before that. Even more astonishing, until 1823 very nearly within his own lifetime, it had been the law — the law! — that a suicide must be buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart. Those days were gone. Society was growing gentler, more inclusive, perhaps, even, he hoped, less stratified. This was the change he had stood for Parliament in the hopes of achieving.

  Finally it was happening. His hardest work as a member had come earlier that year, when he fought for a bill, a special pet of his, called the Agricultural Children Act; it had been a bill he championed in the face of widespread indifference even among his friends, had absolutely forced his brother and the cabinet members he knew intimately to stand behind. The act forbade children under the age of eight — he had been hoping to make it twelve, but was forced to compromise — from working on farms, and, as an extra step won in the compromise, had provided for the education of the same children. Fighting for the bill had been exhilarating, with sleepless night after sleepless night, the thrill of productive work, strong cups of coffee as the House debated into the small hours, the maddening lassitude of the lords. In the end it had passed.

  There was still so much to do. That was to be the subject of his speech. Even as he jotted notes now he came across a new fact: apparently a study that year had determined that about a quarter of men and women who registered for marriage signed their name only with the letter X. They were illiterate. He frowned and started a new piece of paper with that at the head.

  He knew what the Tories would say — that God would provide for his children — and smiled when he thought of an old quote. Was there a collected Shakespeare in here? He walked over to the bookcase and saw that there was, the usual ornament of any English bookcase, and found what he had been looking for, by way of preemptive riposte. “Our remedies often in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven.”

  Occasionally it crossed Lenox’s mind that he came to this problem from a perch of exceptional comfort and ease, manufactured for him by hundreds of years of tradition and accumulation. When the thought came he pushed it away, knowing that he lacked the strength to sacrifice any of his personal comfort; ill at ease with himself for it, but also, as a man of his age, forgiving himself, and half persuaded that it was all part of the order of things. Mightn’t he do enough good to make it up?

  He wrote steadily on for an hour, then two, the thoughts coming to him in phrases, little strings of inquiry. Soon it would all begin to knit together into a speech. He had been writing the same way since his English tutor set him All’s Well That Ends Well at Harrow, when he was fourteen.

  Just when he was thinking that a cup of tea might not go amiss, he heard the door to the east wing open. It was Jane and Sophia returning, the governess with them. He greeted the adults with a smile, then he peered down at the child in her bassinet and chucked her under the chin. She had a curious, mobile face, which broke into a grin now.

  “I’ll feed her,” said Miss Taylor.

  “How was it in town?” Jane asked, busying herself with her gloves, her hair, and her shoes before sitting down tiredly in the soft yellow armchair by the window.

  “Not bad. I returned with fig jam.”

  “My conquering hero.”

  “I thought you would like that. Where did you go?”

  “We walked all over creation. Your uncle went along part of the way, but he kept seeing flowerbeds he didn’t like the look of, so it seemed cruel to keep him.”

  “He was in the garden when I returned two hours ago.”

  Lady Jane laughed. “And still is. We just passed him, down in the dirt, a sight filthier than the gardener who was with him. Oh, did you see you have a letter? I left it on the mantel there, see, yes, that’s the one.”

  “From whom? Edmund?”

  “No, Dallington. Just like him to write three sheets, too.” The penny post permitted each page to be sent for a penny; any additional pages cost a few shillings, payable by the letter’s addressee. In effect Dallington had spent their money with his prolixity.

  “I don’t know,” said Lenox indulgently. He had the letter in hand and was tearing it open. “We’ve had enough free post from the British government, I suppose.”

  Because he was a member of Parliament all of his correspondence was franked without charge and sent on. The day he had taken his seat it seemed half his acquaintances had handed him bundles of letters, to be distributed across the aisles. It was common enough practice.

  “True,” said Jane.

  The letter, sent in from the Beargarden Club, read:

  Dear Lenox,

  How do you do? I trust that the country is still full of all those trees and patches of green that you went to find, a bane to any thinking man, and that you are happy there with Jane and Sophia. Here in the more salubrious climes of London we are well enough. A bit of tedium now that the Waugh matter has been resolved. I’m writing about that, in fact — to tell you about the full confession we’ve had from Florence Waugh. You’ll be surprised to hear it, I know, since you believed the servants to be involved, and yet I fancy in this matter our conjectures redounded to both of our credit, for Florence had the help of one of them. As you
guessed, he was named in Arthur Waugh’s will, and it was he who poisoned his master’s final meal. The constant service of the antique world, I know.

  Enclosed you will find Florence Waugh’s statement. Apologies about the postage. Inspector Jenkins took her into brig, quite unrepentant. I expect she’ll do well in front of a jury. Apparently Arthur Waugh was a brute to her despite her money. The servant fled the day before yesterday, apparently in the direction of Newcastle. Florence Waugh should have been content to let the crime ride on his shoulders, but I found the apothecary where she bought the antimony. It cost me half a sovereign of shoe leather, too, I can promise, traipsing all over London with her photograph. When I finally said “Jensen’s Apothecary” to her, just those words, she broke down crying, and from then it was easy.

  Letters will find me here. Try not to breathe too deeply down there, the air isn’t healthy. Love to all.

  Dallington

  Lenox spent some time reading over Florence Waugh’s confession. He was proud of Dallington — it had taken real effort to find the apothecary who sold the woman the antimony, and the young man had occasionally been more inclined to lazy, penetrating supposition than to tenacious police work in the past — and also, somewhere within, and to his surprise, jealous. The role of mentor had suited him. It had allowed him to keep a hand in the old game, to play the sage, but more and more often now Dallington’s judgment surpassed his own. It was rustiness, he supposed.

  It made him want to discover who had been threatening Plumbley.

  He returned to his desk. He shuffled aside his parliamentary papers, and for the first time in years began to make a complex, encoded chart of the crimes he was tracking, the kind he had made all the time when the cases came in more quickly than he could take them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  For much of the next day, however, Lenox was forced to work on his speech. Fresh letters had come in the evening post from his brother and two members of the cabinet, each with detailed thoughts, each franked with Parliament’s stamp. It was advice he valued, and he rushed through a very rough outline in time to send it to his brother on Monday morning.

  At about ten o’clock, after he had been out riding on Sadie and eaten breakfast, Frederick sent for him.

  “Working hard?” he said, when Lenox appeared in the doorway.

  “I am. But you’re all gussied up, Freddie. Why?”

  The older man wore a dark suit and a pair of gold spectacles hung from a gleaming chain around his neck. He gestured toward a robe made of lawn, lying over the arm of his chair. “I’ve five cases to hear this morning. I thought you might want to observe.”

  They had spoken about the possibility at supper two evenings before. “Of course,” said Lenox. “With great pleasure. I had forgotten.”

  Like the great majority of justices of the peace, Frederick heard his cases in his own home. The household staff, however, did their best to imbue at least a part of it — the second hall, a large room with very high windows looking out upon the pond, mostly out of use in the daily life of Everley — with the formal mood of a government building.

  Frederick sat at the center of a large horseshoe-shaped table, gleamed with beeswax to a brilliant pale brown. Behind him a wood fire was lit. There were a pair of chairs and a small table about ten feet away, with a jug of water and a glass upon it, where the accused would sit. In the corner of the room was a St. George’s cross, and upon the table were the seal and rolls of office. Standing at the door, in a suit that had seen better days, was Rodgers, Frederick’s gardener, a man whose sensibilities were of profound coarseness in all matters not pertaining to the flora of Somerset. He acted as the bailiff on these occasions. Oates and Weston were in a narrow servants’ passage with their five charges, four of whom were well-known enough in Plumbley to have been sent home on the promise that they would appear. The last man, the fifth case for Frederick to hear, had been in the town’s lone jail cell.

  Lenox took a chair near the window, where he hoped to seem unobtrusive. That was not to Frederick’s plan, however. The first cases were two young men of sixteen or seventeen, whom the magistrate had evidently known from infancy. Both were accused of drunkenness and brawling. He lighted into them with identical tirades. “Aren’t you ashamed, to be called before me,” he said, “and what’s worse, what’s much worse, on the day when my house is graced by a member of Parliament? A lawmaker, no less? I feel ashamed of my village, I promise you I do.” And so on, at great length.

  Lenox noticed that the appeal to the boys’ civic pride was relatively ineffective; what really struck home was when Freddie began to talk about the shame their mothers would feel, if they heard of their sons in jail. The second boy actually cried.

  “Rodgers, what shall I do with him?” asked the magistrate at the end of each testimony. “Jail?”

  “Set him to gardening,” said Rodgers. This was his invariable advice on the punishment of all criminals, which Frederick liked to hear but had never enacted save once, when the head shrubbery keeper of his rival in this parts, Lord DeMuth — who had a great whacking hall called Saltstow, with miles of gardens — had been scraped up after a fight in the pub; this criminal Freddie had kept for two weeks. Rodgers had been in a state of ecstasy.

  “No,” said Frederick twice, “I think it had better be a real lesson.”

  Each boy was fined ten pence.

  “No worries there, he’s a good sort,” was all Frederick added, after each had gone. “And neither has a farthing to spare. Rodgers, you know full well they can’t take time away from the farms to garden. Of all the advice.”

  “Humph,” said Rodgers, whom long service had entitled to a certain very modest degree of disrespect.

  The third case was one of uttering, as it had long been known, or passing bad coin. This one Frederick seemed to take more seriously. The young man in question, a Jack Randall, had paid for a passel of candles with several coins, among them two bad ha’pence. Randall, too, Frederick had known for much of their mutual time upon the earth — he was a man of perhaps thirty-five, ill-favored, with unpleasant hooded eyes — and he questioned him with great ferocity.

  This in itself was unusual. In general the criminals who appeared before a justice of the peace were not permitted to speak, but Frederick, once he had heard the testimony of the officer, always gave them a chance.

  “You realize that until not long ago you might have been hung for holding a snide, as they call it, a false coin?” Of course he didn’t add that the same was true of a host of crimes — opening a tavern on Sunday, doing damage to Westminster Bridge, impersonating an army veteran — that, in practice, had rarely met with capital punishment.

  Randall looked unfrightened. “No, sir.”

  “And if I choose I may still send you to jail, essentially for as long as I please.”

  This roused Randall out of his insolent silence. “No, sir! Which it was an accident, sir!”

  “Your worship, you call him, Jack Randall,” chimed in Rodgers. “As you ought to know, being here week in, week out like.”

  “Your worship, I didn’t know! I got them dimmicks off a trader at the fair in Taunton, hand to God!”

  Frederick held up the coin in question. “And their extremely battered appearance, their, I would say, unnatural appearance, didn’t spark any doubt about their validity in your mind?”

  “I trust the Queen,” said Randall immediately.

  “Hm. Rodgers?”

  “Set him to gardening.”

  Coining was one of the great problems of the age; it had been since the pence, the ha’pence, and the farthing had ceased to be copper and become bronze, some fifteen years before. The Bank of England possessed a machine that could sort good coins from bad, and Lenox knew, from a parliamentary report, that of the nine million coins it sorted each week it threw out two hundred or so. The question was whether the machine was entirely effective.

  In the end Frederick let Randall go with a fine, though a rath
er heavy one, of ten shillings, a half-sovereign. When Weston had escorted him away Frederick said to Lenox, while filling in an official form, “The fine is to keep him out of trouble more than anything. I doubt he had the sense to know the coins were false.” Here he looked troubled, however, and the motion of his pen stopped. “He’ll come to a bad end, though. I very much fear it.”

  Lenox leaned forward, so that Rodgers might not hear, and said, “Do you think he could be involved—”

  “No, he lives on a farm far out of town. Little chance of him taking a horse back and forth half the night to do it, even if he could take a horse without being noticed. Which is unlikely. It’s DeMuth’s land, too, and he knows where his crofters are. That much is sure. Rodgers, nod the next one in, would you?”

  The cases were always heard in order of ascending seriousness, and there was little doubt of the guilt of the man who came in now, from Oates’s testimony, a French laborer named Fontaine, very large and very strong. He had beaten his common-law wife badly one morning, apparently unprovoked by drink, which was unusual, and then gone to Bath by coach, where he passed a night spending money very freely before the police hauled him in. Dr. Eastwood — who along with the squire and a few others was one of the great men of Plumbley — came in and testified to the woman’s wounds. Fontaine himself was silent but stared unerringly, some might say threateningly, at the magistrate, even when other people addressed him.

  “Where did you come by this money?” asked Frederick.

  Fontaine was silent, his face expressionless. Even when Rodgers tried to bully him into speaking the Frenchman remained that way, perhaps secure in the knowledge that the law could not compel him to speak, and finally Frederick sentenced the man to thirty days in jail without the option of a fine, for the violent mistreatment of his common-law wife. He would be tried in Bath for his crimes there. When he had gone out, Lenox asked Frederick if this was about the usual run of cases he saw.