The Vanishing Man

by Charles Finch

  Lenox nodded. “I see. Very good. In the meanwhile, Your Grace, could I recommend a glass of brandy and supper with your family?”

  The duke regained a measure of his composure. “Yes. Yes, of course. I shall expect you tomorrow at noon.”

  “I apologize again for my cousin’s words,” Lenox said.

  He watched the duke step into his carriage and depart. Almost at the same instant, Lady Jane flew down her steps and up Charles’s.

  “What was that!” she said when Lenox had gone to the front door and let her in.

  “He’s apologized.”

  “Ha!” she crowed. “Everyone in Hampden Lane saw his carriage in front of your house and knew he’d come to apologize. I’m going to tell Lady Helton as quickly as can be.”

  “He’s in a dark place, poor fellow.”

  Lady Jane was giddy, though. “Let him be. We’ve won!”

  He heard that word, “we,” and though he smiled, something pierced him.

  It had been nearly two years since he had made the enormous error of telling Lady Jane that he was in love with her. For six months afterward they had existed in a state of tense amity, the secret always between them, and at times he had wondered if their true friendship was permanently corrupted.

  Then had come something surprising. For a three-month period, Jane’s oft-absent husband, James Deere, had returned for an extended stay in London with his regiment.

  Lenox had never known the man well. When Jane had married him, it had seemed quite within the cosmic order, she being the daughter of an earl, he the son of another. He was a tall, fair man, with thin nostrils, kind blue eyes, and a handsome forehead. The world thought him better-looking than Jane, and he was certainly more at home in London, having been raised primarily there.

  All of this had rather predisposed Lenox to look upon him as a cavalier, one of those soldiers who marries and then never, much as they are glad it exists, off in the distance, waiting for them, thinks of their home as very real.

  Yet upon Deere’s return, Lenox discovered that he had been wrong. The soldier might have looked that way to the world, but as they had grown haltingly close over his three-month spell at home, at Jane’s insistence really, for she would push them together—saying that Charles and Edmund Lenox were brothers to her—he had realized Deere was not at all the man he’d imagined.

  His great pleasure in life was his own curiosity, Deere. He met all other human beings with a totally open interest, almost as an artist or a novelist might. When he learned Lenox—whom he had probably not spared much thought for, one of his wife’s Sussex people—was a detective, he evinced no disapproval at all, but on the contrary was all delight, pressing upon him the most delicate but apposite questions, fascinated by every detail.

  He was the same in all situations. He took like a duck to the culture of each place his army visited—not true, to put it mildly, of most army officers, who ate Yorkshire puddings on Sunday whether they were in New Delhi or Kabul or Yorkshire itself—and always brought home great troves of incidental objects, which he studied and collected at a high amateur level. He could name the grasses of the field, the trees of the meadow, the constellations; he had a taste for port wine and had read it up until he could describe its journey from grape to glass in the most charming, least self-serious terms; he cared deeply for dogs, knew the ancient legends about every breed, and would happily spend hours in conversation about the Clumber Spaniel with a stranger in the street.

  At the end of the three months of his return to Hampden Lane, Deere hadn’t merely won Lenox’s affection—he had won Lenox’s love, as he had once won Jane’s.

  This was both painful and a relief. Deere was a man of great parts, worthy of Jane’s heart. One day he would make a very fine, fair, and kindhearted landowner. He loved his duty—but lightly, which was just as Lenox thought proper. He loved his wife—and dearly, which was also just as Lenox thought proper.

  After he was gone, Lenox’s friendship with Lady Jane had returned to its state of initial purity. He even called her Jane again; for a while she had been Lady Elizabeth, still her name at court. For instance, they could stand here, celebrating his victory over a duke, as if they really were a shadow kind of couple.

  But it was still painful to him that they were not, he realized.

  “Incidentally, what do you make of my Effie Somers, upon reflection?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will you marry her?”

  “She hasn’t asked me yet.”

  “I believe the custom is that you should ask her.”

  Lenox frowned. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  Lady Jane laughed. “It’s true that Victoria asked Prince Albert. Then again, she was queen.”

  “Is Miss Somers not a queen? I call that a disappointment.”

  “What an oldster I shall be at your wedding. Too old even for a bridesmaid.”

  It was an ironclad rule that the bride’s bridesmaids be younger than she. “You could stand best man.”

  “Edmund might be put out,” said Lady Jane. “Listen, I had better go. My aunt Elyssa is over for tea.”

  “Have you left her this whole time!”

  “Don’t waste your pity—she is looking through my letters right now.”

  Lenox spent the rest of the day reading quite an interesting book about Shakespeare that Duncan Jones had lent him—there was a theory that he had been a secret Catholic, among other things—before dining out at the Athenaeum, where several men approached him and said they were bloody glad the duke had apologized, and it was a disgrace that he had caught Lenox unawares in White’s.

  He slept well that night. Early the next morning he was awake, dressed, brushed, and fed by seven o’clock, waiting with the papers. He would leave soon to meet Bonden on the east side of the city, at the Dovecote.

  Just as he was in the hallway preparing to leave, however, he heard the door ring.

  He opened up: Bonden.

  “Oh, hello,” said Lenox. “I was meant to come see you, I thought.”

  “Hello,” said Bonden. Then, after allowing himself a leisurely draw on his pipe, he said, placidly—perhaps in coming, as he did, from the watery world, where death could descend from above or below or crossways at any instant—“Your duke has shot and killed someone overnight. His manservant, Craig. You had better get there quickly, I suppose.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Lenox had begun to carry the little soft leather book of quotations from Shakespeare with him everywhere, and as his hansom cab drove toward Dorset House, he opened it.

  Lord, what fools these mortals be.

  —A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Well, even he knew that one. He closed the tiny oracle and placed it back into his breast pocket.

  Bonden had been in possession of only the most basic facts. The fatal shot had been fired at five in the morning, before first light, and though Dorset had called a doctor instantly, Craig had died after an hour’s struggle. Bonden had come west to tell Lenox—he was apparently an early riser—and ask if he wanted to meet the next day or cancel altogether.

  “Tomorrow will do, or sooner if I can get free,” said Lenox. His feeling was that finding the missing painting might yet be very important.

  “I will be at the Dovecote tomorrow morning,” Bonden said. “I may be there later today, though I’m not sure.”

  “Very good.”

  Now Lenox rode in solitary silence toward the river, contemplating this strange case. The streets on a Monday morning were crowded with carriages, and passage was slow—so slow that innumerable vendors had time to approach Lenox’s open window. Whelks, spice cakes, jellied eel, lemonade, plum duff: He declined all of these as politely as he could. Such carts were the cafés of perhaps a third of London’s population, who lived quite poor, and even the remaining two-thirds, up in all likelihood to the Duke of Dorset, partook of their wares at least occasionally.

  At last, Lenox assent
ed to a small boy who was selling ginger beer, and whose clothes told against his business being very successful, poor lad. He paid and tipped, then took the stone bottle and drank it—refreshing, actually, sparkly and bittersweet. The boy followed the carriage at a slow trot and took the bottle back with his thanks when Lenox was done.

  They pulled clear of a traffic mixup (a “jam,” as the younger constables sometimes called it, because it was so sticky) involving two hansom cabs that had locked axles, and soon enough they were at the great palatial house of Dorset, overlooking the Thames, whose austerely beautiful alabaster front now seemed a marmoreal sepulcher, ghostly and hant.

  What could Lenox recall of Craig? He was of middling height; very strong; a faded Scottish accent; curt, never even marginally ingratiating. Shot! He recalled the duke’s tense, nervy state the day before.

  There were two unmarked police carts in front of the house, a far cry from most crime scenes, no doubt out of deference to the augustness of this one. Near one of them was Sir Richard Mayne, who had the grim and forbidding look of a powerful man in the last place he wishes to be.

  He saw Lenox first and came to the hansom as Lenox was paying the driver. “Exeter would call you a bad penny.”

  “What would he call Dorset?”

  Mayne jerked his head. “The duke is expecting you. I’ve never seen anything less like an arrest, I must tell you.”

  In the entranceway they met Ward, who was ashen. “Hullo, Ward,” Lenox said sympathetically.

  “I don’t know what to make of it,” said Ward, shaking his head. “Truly I don’t. They were as thick as could be, Craig and the duke. One soul in two bodies, I sometimes thought.”

  “I wondered if it was an accident?” Lenox said. “The duke seemed wound tight.”

  Ward shook his head. “We don’t know. Last night the duke had had all the portraits in his study screwed into the wall by one of the footmen. Then he hid in his closet, sleeping on a chair. Craig was in the process of unscrewing one when the duke woke up.”

  “Craig!” Lenox said.

  In a way this attempted theft was a bigger surprise than the valet being dead. But Mayne nodded, the three of them in a tight circle just inside the front door. “The duke says he took Craig for a thief. Shot him right away.”

  This changed the complexion of the case completely. “Good heavens.”

  Just before he had come here, Lenox had quickly charged Graham with the task of finding out whatever he could about Craig—Alexander Arnold Craig, as Lenox had made note of his name when he had asked for details about all of the duke’s staff.

  Now he was doubly curious what Graham would uncover.

  “The duke is distraught,” Ward said, “though I cannot tell whether he is more upset about the betrayal or the death.”

  Lenox kept a dark thought to himself; it was the second time the Duke of Dorset had shot someone accidentally—or “accidentally.” Pendleton’s son had been first.

  “Where is the duke now?” Lenox asked.

  Sir Richard, leading them through a vast and beautiful drawing room, answered. “In the family’s private drawing room, with his wife and his children. We are taking him into custody shortly, but we permitted him time to shave and dress.”

  “Good of you,” said Lenox.

  “Nice to be a duke,” said Mayne. “He has also asked for a private word with you should you come. Which you have.”

  Lenox glanced around the room, filled with delicate porcelain, medieval tapestries, satinwood side tables, and example after example of fine old Louis XIV furniture—a thin-boned Mazarin desk, just for example, of ebony and copper, inlaid with the most beautiful pattern Lenox could remember seeing in such a desk, and he had been in no few houses with pretensions to attractiveness of interior design.

  Not a house for a murder.

  The Dorset family was congregated in the smaller drawing room Mayne had mentioned, and they proceeded there.

  “His Grace’s son, Lord Vere, is still fragile, but he has risen for this occasion,” Ward said just before they entered, as if they were discussing a lunch party.

  Lenox nodded. This was Corfe, whose fever had kept the family in London, in a way beginning this chain of tragic events. “Understood.”

  The family was arranged along two sofas. The duke rose as they entered. His son and daughter remained seated, as did his wife. “Lenox,” said the duke. “I requested the courtesy that they wait to arrest me until I could hand you this letter.”

  “Letter, Your Grace?”

  From the breast pocket of his handsome black suit, he withdrew a thin sheaf of papers, tied with string. Lenox saw that the reddish string was just to the left of a rust-colored stain it must have previously made on the outside of the papers—evidently it had sat somewhere for a very long while undisturbed until recently being reopened.

  “After reading this there is little you will not know. Work as quickly as you can, please. Find out what Craig knew. I have instructed the servants to give you all access to the house that you wish. Ward will help as far you both see fit.”

  Despite their conciliatory meeting the night before, Lenox was surprised at this act of faith. “Thank you, Your Grace.”

  The duke looked more serene now than he had before he killed Craig, oddly. “You are my best hope. Protect it—and find it.”

  “Protect what?” said the duchess.

  The duke ignored her. “I will be in the Tower of London if you wish to speak to me.” He smiled ruefully. “My schedule there will be clear from as early as this afternoon, I understand.”

  As a member of Britain’s nobility, it was his right to be imprisoned in the Tower. (Certain tourists from the continent would no doubt have paid a fortune to spend a night in the Tower—so long as they were allowed to leave in the morning.) He would pass his incarceration in very great luxury, that was a given. It was also the case that no common court would try him, only, if it came to trial at all, the House of Lords.

  Goodness, the papers, Lenox thought for the first time. A former cabinet member; more significantly still, for circulation numbers, a Duke of Dorset.

  “Very good, Your Grace.”

  “My daughter has agreed to act as my go-between—she will see my solicitor, call upon my friends. The duchess has a great deal of responsibility in her own right, so please call upon Violet should you need assistance that Ward cannot provide.”

  Lenox bowed to Lady Violet, who was sitting with great composure next to her brother. “Lady Vere,” he said.

  “Mr. Lenox.”

  Lenox watched the constables come to stand at either side of the duke. Time to go, one of them said, and the duke nodded. He looked at Lenox and said once again, to the mystification of all there except the detective, “Protect it.” The fervor in his voice was remarkable; it was easy to believe that he had shot Craig without vacillation.

  “I will do my level best,” Lenox said.

  “Thank you,” said Dorset.

  The elaborate process of arresting the duke commenced. The heir, Corfe, handsomely dressed, stood unsteadily, watching. As for the duke’s daughter, she was full of solicitous suggestions, in a sort of ceaseless soothing chatter, telling her father about the meals that Fortnum would be delivering, naming all the ways they would be sure he was comfortable, asking which books he needed from his study, that sort of thing. None of this prevented the constables on charge from doing their duty, and locking the fifth-highest-ranking nobleman in Great Britain in a pair of scarred steel handcuffs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  He asked Ward if he could sit in some private place for twenty minutes, and the young secretary guided him to a sitting room with heavy velvet draping over the window, in the fashion of the moment. It felt stifling; when Ward had gone, Lenox opened the curtain and the window, and then at least a little breeze came in.

  Lenox opened the papers cautiously. They were foxed with age, though the paper was of such quality that they had not grown brittle. Th
e hand was legible, indeed elegant, and belonged very obviously to an earlier age.

  On top was a hastily scrawled note from the Duke, written on one of the very cream-colored notecards that had given away his farcical kidnapping scheme to Lenox.

  Lenox: The poem is on the portrait of S.—Dorset.

  That was all it said, and Lenox frowned, not sure he understood, then riffled through the pages of the older letter beneath the notecard. He saw that there were seven in all. There was a heading at the top of the first:

  Dorset House, London

  22 April 1771

  And on the bottom of the last, a signature:

  Your father, Thomas,

  13th Duke of Dorset

  So this letter had been written, eighty-two years before, by the man in the stolen portrait.

  In this very room, for all Lenox knew; certainly in this house.

  He sat down and read.

  Dorset House, London

  22 April 1771

  My dear Clarence,

  I was pleased at the sincere curiosity with which you treated our conversation this morning. I wish to elaborate upon it in this letter, which, I flatter myself, might also serve as a guide to your heir some day when you have a similar conversation with him. Even should that not be the case, I hope you will permit your father this one circuitous story. It is indeed half-expected of men who reach my age; and I have never been voluble with you, so it may be that I can draw on that particular line of credit.

  (I do not recall my own father saying more than a word or two before I first went to school. His advice when he left me there at 8 was “Don’t peach, don’t gamble more than your pocket money, don’t cry when you’re beaten, and don’t be top of your class.”)

  To begin the story long ago:

  In a lively market town in Warwickshire around the year 1570, a leather merchant and glovemaker, once very prosperous, was edging toward financial ruin.

  Previously he had been one of the town’s leading citizens—afeeror (here we run into a word I have watched pass out of existence in my own lifetime—an afeeror, in your great-great-grandfather’s day, was the official in charge of assessing fines for which no specifically predetermined fine existed) bailiff, burgess, chief magistrate, and eventually mayor. A prominent person, you’ll agree.