The Vanishing Man

by Charles Finch

  He moved fifteen feet here or there, and at least did not think he was observed. The same constable—one that he knew to say hello to, in fact, Sam Shepperton—passed by on his beat five times over the course of the next few hours without noticing Lenox once.

  He observed the house’s comings and goings. The duchess left and returned four times, three of them by carriage. The duke went out just once—for lunch, Lenox presumed—and returned after about ninety minutes. Lord Vere came out twice, once very quickly to run around the corner, returning with a bouquet of flowers, and then a second time to get into his carriage. Busiest of all was Ward, constantly in and out down the road to the Lords, though naturally various servants came and went too many times to count. They took deliveries from the butcher, the upholsterer, and the postman.

  Staring at the house for such a long while, Lenox begin to grow almost fond of it. There were six majestic marble archways on its face forming an arcade that reached past the second floor. Above them were large Corinthian columns with rectangular windows between them. At the very height of the house were two enormous round windows, with a statue of the 1st Duke of Dorset standing between them, and statuary representing England and the county of Dorset around him.

  Who made such a thing! It was glorious and absurd in equal measure; it belonged in the deepest woodlands of Pembrokeshire, not here, taking up a hundred feet on the river in the most densely populated city on earth.

  But then, it always helped to have built in the year 1550—plenty of space back then, 250-odd years before they even conceived of Buckingham Palace.

  He stood there as the long summer hours passed, watching. By the time the sun began to glow over the river he had finished the first third of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and was desperate to eat something other than chestnuts—and he was very tired.

  At four o’clock, he left. He knew it all now. It was just a matter of braiding the strings together. He felt exhausted, but triumphant.

  He hailed a cab and went to Scotland Yard. Sir Richard Mayne, fortunately, worked seven days a week, was known for it.

  He greeted Lenox warily, as if expecting to be criticized for the duke’s release. “Well?” he said. “What is it?”

  “I know what happened,” Lenox said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that the coroner was right. The duke is innocent. Listen—will you travel down to Dorchester with me tomorrow morning? I do not feel equipped to go alone.”

  Mayne looked at him inquisitively. “Dorchester? Could one of the inspectors go? You may have your pick.”

  Lenox shrugged. “If you prefer,” he said. “But it is the Duke of Dorset we are discussing. The Queen herself intervened in his release.”

  Mayne nodded. “Very well. Dorchester.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  They consulted the timetable in Bradshaw’s. There were thirty trains to Dorchester from London each day. They picked the earliest one, agreeing to meet on Platform 19 at Waterloo at five past six o’clock the next morning.

  Lenox went home and had a quick dinner, doubtfully enlivened by a long monologue from Lancelot, which might, had he been presenting it to the Royal Academy, say, have been titled “A Schoolboy’s Field Guide to the Practical Uses of Laxatives.” From the sound of it there was not a beak at Eton who had gone unpunished by Lancelot and his two apparently likewise Luciferian friends, Mott and Wutherington-Fassett.

  “Except the Head,” said Lancelot, wistfully. “We can never get near his tea. He keeps it in a flask.”

  “That is how you get to be Head.”

  “They always say there must be something ‘going the rounds,’ which is awfully funny, don’t you think? The way they bolt from their desks in the middle of a lesson.”

  “I do not think it is funny,” said Lenox. He made a mental note not to drink anything whose decanting he had not personally supervised for the rest of his cousin’s visit. “Did Templeton’s horse win, by the way?”

  “Dead last,” said Lancelot cheerfully, and returned to his game pie with his customary gusto.

  “I suppose the lesson there is not to gamble.”

  “The lesson,” Lancelot corrected him, mouth full, “is not to trust a scrub like Templeton.”

  Lenox gave up. He finished his supper and soon was upstairs. Though it was barely eight o’clock, he fell immediately and deeply asleep.

  The next morning he arrived at Waterloo early.

  It was only five years old, this rail station, fresh and clean—it had replaced Nine Elms, though that superannuated terminus had remained open for the convenience of one cantankerous young person: Queen Victoria, who liked the privacy of traveling from a vacated station.

  Lenox bought a cup of tea and a soft chocolate crescent roll, still warm, from a stallholder, then stood on Platform 19, watching through the enormous windows as the mist rose over London’s uneven buildings.

  Soon enough Mayne strode up the platform hailing Lenox, accompanied by his highly efficient secretary, Wilkinson. “You’re sure of this?”

  “Quite sure,” said Lenox.

  “On we go then.”

  The first-class carriage was comfortable; the trip took two hours and twenty minutes, during which time Lenox consumed much of the second volume of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which he had had a footman run out to buy for him. As they were pulling into Dorchester Station, he pulled his little leather book out for luck and let it fall open.

  In nature there’s no blemish but the mind; none can be call’d deform’d but the unkind.

  —Twelfth Night

  He frowned. No idea what that one meant.

  At the station they hired a carriage. They were in it for around forty minutes, until roughly twenty-five past nine, before they reached an immense black gate. They had arrived at Dorset Castle.

  Except that it then took a long and winding drive down a tree-lined alley, ten minutes in its own right, to reach the building itself. Only at the last instant did it come into view—beautiful, isolated, a working wreck.

  It was built as an extension from the partially ruined foundations of a very ancient castle. On one side there was a high turreted tower, but more recent architects had built behind it: two long sides in similar gray stone, around an open, grassy courtyard. It looked something like a college at Oxford, except the wrong color. To the west there were miles of wild gardens and forest—the opposite of the tamed and mown beauty at Lenox House, but immensely bigger, and impressive as only nature left to itself can be.

  They knocked upon the heavy oak door. There was no answer. A quick sortie from Wilkinson revealed that the real front door was around the side (the private private door), where evidently the living quarters were situated.

  A dignified, silver-haired butler answered. “May I help you?” he said with a face full of perfect incuriosity, though he must have heard the carriage coming for at least the last five minutes.

  Mayne produced his royal seal. “We are with Scotland Yard. May we come in?”

  The butler examined the identification and then surveyed the three of them unflappably—clothes, faces—before finally saying, “Excuse me for a moment.”

  They stood and watched the door close in front of them. They waited for about a minute, and then it swung open.

  It was Lady Violet Vere. “Mr. Lenox?” she said.

  “How do you do, Lady Violet,” he said, bowing.

  There was a moment of confusion upon her face, and after that—she was a bright woman—a moment of realization, then one of resignation.

  That quickly! She had a rapid mind; she had outfoxed everyone more than once.

  “Come in,” she said with poised courtesy. “Come in.”

  When Lenox had stood before Dorset House in London the day before, he had watched every person who came and went—Corfe, the Duke, the Duchess—but in that time he had not seen Lady Violet once. This had been the confirmation of his suspicions that he needed.

  She led them into a dark room fu
ll of heavy old furniture, its roughly coursed stone walls decorated with medieval hunting tapestries. It was cool here, by ancient design; the warmth of the day could not penetrate the walls.

  She offered them tea, which they accepted. When they had sat down near the empty fireplace (there was a skeleton staff here, as she told them, but you wouldn’t have guessed—Lenox never saw the same face twice as people tramped in and out of the room bearing tea, scones, cakes, and sandwiches), she gathered her skirts under her.

  Why was she not beautiful? The world was treacherous hard on women, he thought. For Lenox, the whole impression was his only means of judging these things, really. He knew, or did not know, whether a person appeared attractive to his eye. If he focused he could see that Lady Violet’s eyes were too close together and too small, her chin and nose too sharp, her cheeks low, her forehead high.

  He knew his own looks—he was about the average run of the gentlemen of his class, he reckoned—and had the luxury of thinking about them rarely.

  For Lady Violet Vere, by contrast, born to everything, absolutely everything, except beauty, and in a world where even for an heiress it must matter—he could only imagine how the fact had racked her days, her weeks, her years with self-doubt and self-hatred.

  At last the tea was all set before them, she having poured four cups and added sugar and cream as directed, an ideal host, and Lenox could speak.

  “You shot Mr. Craig, I think, Lady Violet?” he said.

  She took a careful sip of her tea and then set it down with its saucer, which had been in her left hand. “Yes, that’s so,” she said.

  “Your father was not there?”

  “He was not. Mr. Craig was sleeping in the closet, it would seem, to surprise intruders. I went to get the portrait. He surprised me.”

  “You know about the portrait, then.”

  She looked at Mayne, who was wide-eyed and silent. In much of the world he was a great man, but she was the daughter of a duke, and her glance toward him was dismissive. “Yes,” she said.

  “Why were you carrying a gun?” asked Lenox.

  “I wasn’t. Craig was. I shoved him and it went off, just like that.”

  Lenox nodded. It had been a detail of great uneasiness to him that the wound the duke had supposedly inflicted on Craig went upward through his chest, since the duke was the taller of the two men. But Craig would have had six inches or so on Lady Violet, and if the gun was between them, a stray bullet might easily have been fired upward.

  For all that, he was not sure still that it was a stray bullet.

  “Did he know it was you?”

  “I don’t think he did,” said Lady Violet. “I did not know it was him. I thought it might be you, or a police officer my father had hired. I was scared.”

  “I’m very confused,” said Mayne.

  Lady Violet took a sip of tea. “I started out with a very simple plan. As it happens it has turned into a nightmare.”

  “You wanted to steal your father’s portraits?” said Mayne.

  Lenox intervened. “There is reason to believe that the two portraits, together, hold the clue to a very significant treasure.”

  “But you are—”

  The commissioner did not finish his sentence, but his meaning was clear. She was privy to immense wealth. Hundreds of thousands of acres in any direction were rented to pay for the glories of her life, in immemorial custom. Out upon the heaths men raised crops and paid their duty out of them to the duke, and those sheaves of corn, those bushels of potatoes, transmuted magically into silver dinner plates, ruby necklaces, kid gloves, boxes at the opera. Ball gowns, taffeta, silk.

  The tarnished ring on a gold chain that never left her neck.

  It was in fact Miss Somers who had unwittingly forced upon Lenox the revelation that Lady Violet might be the prime mover behind the whole mystery. Lady Jane’s friend had spoken of her American courtship, and her hand had gone unconsciously to the ring on a slim gold chain around her own neck—a ring not very different from Lady Violet’s. When he had seen her doppelgänger the afternoon before, he had connected the two.

  “I believe Lady Violet is engaged,” Lenox said gently, “but that her parents will not approve the match. Thus it was that she needed money.”

  She looked at him. “Yes, that’s the way it stands,” she said, looking at him coldly, daring him to go on.

  “Her grandfather had once told her of a treasure that might be had from the paintings she stole.” Mayne looked puzzled and sat silent. The word “treasure” sounded foolish even to his ears, but Lenox pushed ahead. “The question now, as I see it, is whether Sir Richard will arrest you.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The staircases in medieval castles were all identical—narrow and spiraling upward to the right. This design served two practical purposes. First, they were slower to ascend; second, they blocked the right arm on ascent but freed it on descent, meaning that only someone coming down from the keep had the use of his sword.

  In the sieges of the very old days, they said, some unfortunate improvised troop of left-handers always had to make the first assault upon the stairs.

  Lady Violet’s rooms were in the castle’s keep, she said, not in the modern wing. Sir Richard Mayne insisted that they had to accompany her as she gathered her things, to prevent some act of self-harm. She was to be taken in, Mayne said, and held until they consulted the duke.

  They did not enter her actual bedchamber but lurked just outside, watching her consult with her maid. Lenox felt, to use Lancelot’s words, a scrub, standing in the doorway.

  Nor did he like Mayne’s plan. “Are we to let her walk into the streets of London?”

  Sir Richard turned full upon him. He had a great deal of authority he had suppressed in front of Lady Violet, and he let the store loose upon the young detective. “I suppose we are, Lenox, yes.”

  “That seems wrong.”

  “It certainly does.”

  They agreed then. The Queen made no intercessory requests about the fate of the prostitute who put a knife into the ribs of a man assaulting her. And it would take longer than they had now to ponder the father who would not allow his daughter to marry to suit her happiness, yet was willing to risk a trial for murder rather than let her come to public shame.

  “I think of Craig,” Lenox murmured.

  “He will not wake up tomorrow morning either way.”

  Lenox could not let it go. “Is that the point of justice?”

  “That is the reality of justice,” said Mayne. “You would call upon it yourself if it were your brother or your nephew in question, I reckon.”

  And there he had Lenox. Every aristocrat with his politics wanted greater fairness, but they went on sending their sons to Oxford. How would any of it ever change?

  Lenox fell silent and set to wondering about that tarnished ring around Violet’s neck. What declarations had come with it, and how sincere they were. Most of all who had given it.

  But she refused to say. After having packed, she was very becoming in following their instructions, in attending to their plans—she would be confined to Dorset House in London, with a constable—but would not add a word to what she had confessed.

  She did ask how Lenox had known. “Was it just the ring? Such a minor error. Though I suppose it is out of keeping with my habits that it should be tarnished and made of nickel.”

  He shook his head. “You overplayed your hand, my lady. When I realized that I could find neither the maid Maggie McNeal nor General Pendleton anywhere in London, I knew that you had tried to misdirect me.”

  She looked at him. “I see.”

  “Nor could I, for the life of me, make any of it stick to Corfe.”

  “No, he is an innocent sort, my brother.”

  When they reached the gravel courtyard, Mayne asked if he might retire inside before their return trip, which they would take in her ladyship’s carriage. Wilkinson was a little ways off, smoking.

  Quickly, Lenox said,
“The poem—you have misread it.”

  Lady Violet looked at him expressionlessly. “Is that so?”

  “The clue is not in Shakespeare’s portrait.”

  She studied him, then turned away in the gravel courtyard and touched the nose of one of her horses, feeding him a cube of sugar from her pocket. “What is the clue, then?”

  “Were you planning to leave the country while your father was in the Tower?”

  She turned back to him. “What a contemptible idea. Of course not.”

  “Yet you would have run away from him if you had found and sold the play.”

  “To the Americas or India, yes.”

  “Who is the young man?”

  She ignored the question. “I could not live upon a single strand of pearls, like some heroine in a novelette. My own possessions are pretty but minor.”

  “But the play…”

  She rubbed the horse’s nose. “I consulted a friend who said that the bidding between Oxford and Cambridge and the British Library would be fierce. And there are these Americans, you know, coming pretty hardy into the fray. The Astor family has unlimited wealth, they say. Unlimited. Soon enough people like you will be marrying them.”

  “People like me,” Lenox murmured, and smiled. “How much did you think you could fetch?”

  “I was told I could be guaranteed a minimum of thirty thousand pounds in a private auction. My father need never have known.”

  “Your grandfather told you the legend?”

  “He told us a great deal, yes. He was a wonderful person.”

  “Corfe was in on this scheme, then?”

  “My brother?” she said. “No.”

  She turned away, walking a few steps to the third horse in her cortege of four. So much money around her! Each of these horses was flawless, twice the price of a house. Yet she needed her very own thousand pounds a year to live happily—even in love.

  “What about Craig? He helped you?”

  “He and I have always been friends.”

  “And now he is gone.”

  She brushed the remaining sugar off her hands. “Excuse me,” she said, and stepped into the carriage.