“King’s Arms against the Royal Oak, as in the old days?”
Frederick laughed. “When that changes, England will be no more, Charles.”
“Have you played this summer?”
“Oh, I’m too old.”
“If I play you must, Freddie.”
“I wouldn’t pin your hopes to it.”
Lenox left his cousin and went upstairs. Jane was seated at her desk, surrounded by piles of books and papers. Now that Lenox thought of it she had been spending a great deal of time here in the past few days.
“Too busy to come along on a walk with Sophia?” he asked, sliding in through the open door.
She turned in her seat, her face bright. “There you are!”
“What are you writing?”
“This and that, letters. Tell me, will you be able to come to supper tomorrow evening?”
“I should think so. Why?”
“It would be nice to have a little company, I think. I told Freddie as much and he agreed, but I wanted to sure you’d be here. It would be nicer for Dallington and Miss Taylor, I think, to have a few fresh faces around here.”
From the indifferent tone of this last utterance, Lenox detected its primacy. “You cannot be matchmaking, Jane, can you?”
She had stood up, and she took him by the lapels of his jacket and kissed him on the cheek. “No, no, of course not. Though have you observed how often they’re together, in the gardens and the drawing room? Fast friends.”
“Jane, not two days ago I was dragging John Dallington—”
“Yes, dear.”
“I cannot imagine his mother would congratulate you on that match, either, considering—”
“No, I know, dear.”
“Even if it is true that she would wish to see him settled, a governess, over thirty, without more than what she makes by the sweat of her brow, with parents who—”
“Yes, dear, you’re quite right,” said Lady Jane. “Let’s talk of something else.”
“Who will you be inviting to supper?” said Lenox crossly, unfooled.
“Oh, I’ve had a word with the housekeeper and Freddie.”
“Is that what you were writing?”
“No!” she said. “Something very different. You shall know before too long.”
He saw that this, anyhow, was true. He changed the subject. “I’m to play in the cricket.”
“Do you have the whites?”
“I shall have to borrow them, but there are always a few spare sets lying about Everley. Will you watch?”
“I suppose my nuptial duty dictates I must.”
Lenox laughed. “Hardly, no. You ought to come if you like the sport as a general proposition, however.”
She frowned. “As far as I understand you play by attaching mattresses to your legs and waddling back and forth between two sticks, while occasionally gesturing with your own personal stick at some sort of red ball. But then I don’t call myself a great sportsman.”
“You do yourself an injustice there.”
“Still, I should like to see you bat.”
“And my friend Fripp is a great bowler, even at his age, I expect,” said Lenox. “You can come around during the breaks, if you prefer. They’ll have tea and cakes, the wives of the players.”
“I should be involved in those preparations, then?”
Lenox pictured Lady Jane, as he had seen her many times, closeted in private conversation with the great and good of the royal court, of London society, and was tempted to laugh. Then he realized she would be just as comfortable in the pavilion, and felt a flourish of love for her. “If you like. Freddie can tell you which of the women in Plumbley to consult about it.”
Miss Taylor knocked at the door then; this was the hour, customarily, just before tea, when they took Sophia — but if they wished to skip it today, Mr. Lenox having taken the child on her walk, then—
Of course they did not want to skip their half hour, and played very happily with the child, showing her rattle to her, making faces over her bassinet, and generally making fools of themselves until the bell rang for the afternoon repast.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Dallington had still not returned by five that evening. According to Frederick, who presided over the cakes and the sandwiches — in addition to Lenox and Lady Jane an old and unmarried woman of the parish, Miss Wilson, was in attendance, as apparently she was each Thursday — that morning the duke’s son had asked the kitchens for roast beef on a roll, tucked it into his pocket without so much as the benefit of a napkin to wrap around it, and been off before seven.
When they heard a footstep in the hall, then, all of them looked expectantly toward the door for him.
It was Oates, however. Lenox and his cousin went out to greet the constable, who had taken off his helmet and stood, rather drenched, in the hall. “It’s Musgrave, sir,” he said. “Sirs.”
“What of him?” asked Freddie.
“He’s done a scarper.”
Lenox raised his eyebrows. “He’s left town?”
Oates, who again looked and spoke as if he had taken a few drinks in the King’s Arms that afternoon — not quite enough for full impairment, but hardly a professional quantity either — pulled a notepad from his pocket. “Reported by Mrs. Flora Criscombe, Musgrave and his household in three coaches, with equipage, headed on the road to London.”
Lenox turned to Frederick. “Does he often travel?”
“Oates?”
“Not since he moved into Church Lane, in my memory, and what it is, I reckon he’s done poor Weston and — and now — and knows we’re getting close to him,” said Oates, slurringly.
Lenox felt badly for the man; at the same time he wished for a more professional ally. “To so incriminate himself would be exceedingly stupid, and Musgrave did not strike me as a stupid gentleman.”
“No,” said Freddie. “Has his wife gone with him?”
“Only a footman was left behind,” said Oates. “He was covering the furniture when I knocked on the door.”
“Where did he say Musgrave had gone?”
“He didn’t know. He—”
“I say it would be foolish of Musgrave to leave,” Lenox interjected, his chin in his hand, arms folded, eyes cast down with concentration, “but if there is some devastating piece of evidence soon to arise it would, perhaps, be wise in him to go to the continent.”
“And he took poor Catherine Scales, too,” Frederick murmured. “I dread to think of the life he’s leading her.”
Lenox turned to a servant. “Fetch me my hat and coat, please, would you?”
“Charles?” Frederick asked.
“We must look over the house. If he left in haste perhaps there is some evidence to parse. Oates, will you come with me?”
“Of course.”
Frederick was looking rather askance at Lenox, who smiled, reading his thoughts. “We cannot stand upon much refinement in this business,” he said “Certainly Musgrave has not.”
They directed the carriage to Church Lane, and were there only a few minutes later — luckily the horses had been warmed already, from their evening exercise. The house was dim.
“Does the footman you met live in?” asked Lenox.
“I don’t know,” said Oates, and thumped the door with his nightstick. “That should rouse him if he does.”
There were no footsteps inside, and the doors were locked. Oates, tapping his nose, went to work on the lock with a small metal rod he took from his pocket, and soon had the door open.
“It’s an interesting brand of police work,” said Lenox, disconcerted.
“If he killed Weston it’s better than he deserves.”
They went inside. The rooms already looked as if they had been vacant for months, drop cloths on the furniture and over the paintings, that peculiar stillness of an unlit and uninhabited house. Each man took a candlestick and lit a candle, and they started their way into the place.
The lower floor revealed
nothing to them, despite an extended survey of it, and finally Lenox, with a mixture of compunction and determination, suggested they seek out the sleeping quarters. They went upstairs.
These rooms, too, were disappointing. One of them quite evidently belonged to Mrs. Musgrave — its wardrobe full of women’s clothes, its dresser scattered with bottles of scent and old scraps of ribbon — but whatever evidence it might have offered of her daily life beyond these objects had already been scrubbed away.
It was Oates, to his credit, who remembered that they ought to look in the basement. They went down the narrow staircase with careful steps, Lenox for his part made slightly uneasy by the dark, the close walls.
“How many servants did Musgrave have?” he asked, in part to break up the eerie silence.
“At least four,” said Oates. He seemed more sober now. “Here are their bedrooms. Shall we look in them?”
“Yes, certainly.”
The servants’ bedrooms were to the left of the stairwell, down a thin hallway, while the enormous kitchen, dominated by a vast oven, was off to the right. They turned left, tipping their own candles to spark the candles in sconces along the walls, providing further light.
These rooms, too, were cleansed of any sign of their former occupants, though Lenox and Oates inspected them all carefully, ultimately finding a few small pictures, a child’s toy, and a great deal of bed linen. It wasn’t much help.
“The kitchen,” said Lenox.
The pantry was still full — and here, at last, he found something. Oates was sifting through stacks of plates on the other side of the room, and Lenox called him back.
“This was next to the tea chest,” he said.
“What is it?”
Lenox held up a small cloth bag. Written on a tag, hanging from its drawstring, was Mrs. Musgrave’s sugar, one teaspoon to be included with her morning pot of tea.
“Her sugar?” asked Oates.
“Yet here is a fat jar of sugar, as you can see,” said Lenox, gesturing toward the open cupboard.
They both stared at the bag for a moment, indecisively, until Oates, too quickly for Lenox to object, dipped a finger in and tasted the bag’s contents.
“Not sugar,” he said shortly. There was a pitcher of water standing nearby, and he swirled his mouth and spat into the sink. “Bitter.”
Lenox nodded. He drew the bag’s string tight and put it in his jacket pocket. “We shall have to see what it is, then. Dr. Eastwood might help us. Certainly my friend McConnell could. In fact I may send a little of the powder to each of them.”
“I hope Cat’s life isn’t in danger,” said Oates. “Such a pretty girl, she was.”
Energized by their discovery, Lenox and Oates continued to look as closely through the kitchen and the rooms around it — the servants’ dining room, the washing room — as they had upstairs. It must have been ninety minutes they had been here now, perhaps longer. They traced each other’s footsteps to double their work.
Nothing new came up, however, for all their looking.
“Shall we leave, then?” asked Oates.
Lenox looked around. “Have we looked everywhere?”
Oates pointed at a bucket of slop underneath the sink, old carrot peelings and the like, and said, smiling wearily, “Not in there.”
Lenox sighed. “Perhaps we should, just to be thorough. It’s as good a hiding place as any. Will you start on it? Don’t worry, I’ll do the other bucket in a moment.”
“I suppose,” he said. “This stuff’s only fit to give to pigs anyhow.”
As Oates dug into the slop, Lenox closed the cabinets he had opened, then began to extinguish the candles in the hallway.
He heard a yelp from behind him. Oates. He ran back toward the kitchen.
“What is it?” Lenox asked him.
Oates was standing over the bucket of compost, his hands filthy; in one of them he was holding something. It was too dim, with the candles gone, to tell what.
Oates had inspected it over his own flame. His eyes were wide. “It’s a knife,” he reported. “I nicked myself. And I think where there’s older blood on it, too, sir.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Lenox quickly took the knife, laying it in a white handkerchief. “Well done,” he said, “very well done.”
Both men peered down toward the object, dipping their candles better to illuminate it. “Is it the murder weapon?” asked Oates.
“Wash your hands and we’ll take it back to the station,” said Lenox.
Fifteen minutes later they were there. In the station were bright lamps, of long residence it would appear from the greasy black circles that had formed on the ceiling above them. Now they could inspect the knife more minutely.
Its smooth, nonserrated blade was perhaps four or five inches long, its haft about the same. Lenox asked for a tape measure to be sure. Yes; it was just a shade over five inches long, the blade. Which meant that it conformed to the description Dr. Eastwood had offered of the weapon that had killed the young police constable.
“Let’s have a look at the bucket,” said Lenox.
Oates had carried the slop bucket with them from Musgrave’s, and now he tipped it over and spread its contents thinly upon a long table, which the two men had covered with old newspapers. Wearing white cloth gloves, he and Lenox went through the mess.
They were looking for anything maroon and sticky, at the detective’s suggestion, for that was what covered the blade, and Lenox wanted to be sure that it wasn’t beet juice, colored meringue, discarded grapes, anything of that nature. Satisfyingly, none of the slop bucket’s contents, not its potato eyes, not its cauliflower stalks, looked likely to produce a red liquid.
“I think it is blood,” said Lenox at last, as he and Oates cleaned up.
“Have you seen blood on a knife before?”
“I have. Have you?”
“No. It’s what I imagine it would look like, though.”
“Quite.”
With a faintly chastened feeling they went back to the knife.
“I don’t like to look at it,” said Oates.
Lenox’s face was pensive. “What I cannot figure is why a man of military self-possession, or even a man of rudimentary intelligence, would have left the knife behind. Why not take it with him?”
“Fear of it being found among his possessions, I suppose?”
“Why not wash it, then!” said Lenox. “Why not wash it and leave it in with the other knives? He might have called for hot water at any time and attracted far less notice than his presence in the kitchens would have.”
“For that matter, why not leave it with the body?”
Lenox shook his head. “No, I believe such a knife might have been traced back to his kitchen, if it is part of a set. We will have to see about that. Although it may be that we are getting ahead of ourselves. Perhaps it was used to dress a chicken or a pheasant, after all. It’s the correct size for the job.”
“But if that was all anybody used it for, then why—”
“Why was it in the compost pile, hidden,” said Lenox impatiently. “I understand the situation, Oates.”
“Apologies, sir.”
Lenox looked up. “No, I apologize. If only it made sense! Either way we must send word along to Bath and Taunton that Captain Musgrave is wanted for questioning, in connection with Mr. Weston’s death.”
Oates’s face had a shadow upon it. “Do you think he did it, the bastard?”
“I think it’s too early to reach any conclusions. We must send our telegrams now, though, even if it means fetching the dispatcher out of bed.”
It was Oates who committed to do this job. Lenox took the knife in his pocket, for safekeeping, bade the constable good night, and — having dismissed the coachman and his horses when they dropped him at Musgrave’s house several hours before — began the walk back to Everley.
When he reached the hall there were still lights on in the rooms of the ground floor. They would have had din
ner without him, in all probability. His own hunger had vanished when he saw the knife; even as he took a step now he could feel its weight in his coat pocket swing away from his body and then return with a thump against his hipbone. He didn’t like it.
He found his cousin and his protégé smoking a pipe and a small cigar, respectively, in the large library.
“How do you do, Charles?” said Frederick. “I was on the verge of asking your friend here whether he was much of a hand at cricket. Are you, Lord John?”
“Oh, none at all,” said Dallington cheerfully. “In school I forged my own sick notes.”
“Ah, excellent,” said Frederick, “we can give you to the King’s Arms. They’re a bowler short.”
Dallington looked prepared to object to this recruitment, but Lenox said, rather sharply, “You’ll enjoy it, John.”
Looking as if he doubted that assertion, the young man nevertheless said, “Yes, of course.”
“Do you have a report to make on Fontaine?” asked Lenox.
Now Dallington’s face brightened, exchanging the ease of an after-dinner smoke for a new sharpness. “Yes. Would you like to hear it?”
“Certainly. First, though, I should show you what I found at Musgrave’s.”
He unwrapped his handkerchief, now stained with a faint rust, to reveal the knife. His uncle gasped. “At Musgrave’s? Is that blood?”
“Yes, on both counts.”
Dallington, with the procedurally sound method that Lenox had taught him, used his own handkerchief to turn the knife over and examine it from every angle. “Fingerprints?”
“I am hopeful. I propose to send it to McConnell, in London, along with another little parcel.” He had almost forgotten about the white powder, but patted his breast pocket, took out the bag, and showed it to the men. “I’m rather curious what it was that the kitchen staff fed Mrs. Musgrave every morning and afternoon.”
Frederick was still absorbed by the knife, however. “Fingerprints, you mentioned? What does that mean?”
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