A Beautiful Blue Death clm-1

by Charles Finch

  Lenox ate only a little and, as a result, finished before his counterpart. He sat and sipped a glass of Madeira while he waited for Eustace to leave, enjoying, at least, the minor increase of civility that the club presented after Claude’s coffeehouse. Although, to be sure, the coffeehouse presented prettier company. Most of the men in the dining room were half asleep and all of them would have fared poorly if judged solely for beauty by a jury of their female peers. The youngest might have been sixty-five, but for Lenox and Eustace. Strange company for a boy up from university.

  He followed Eustace downstairs and into the small smoking room, after another ten minutes, and sat quite near him, in an armchair by the window. The young man’s clothes were old-fashioned. He had a leaf and several sprigs of some bush peeking out from his pocket, and while he read he touched them absent-mindedly. Clearly, Lenox thought, he was passionate about his subject. Perhaps he had been in a garden just that morning.

  Lenox had barely had a chance to speak when Eustace said to him, “What do you think of these horrid liberals, sir?”

  Lenox sighed inwardly, but smiled. “I am afraid I count myself in their ranks, though they’re not so horrid when you’ve eaten supper with them once or twice.”

  The boy frowned. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he said.

  Lenox realized that he had run into the worst sort of young man, the one who hangs about clubs for older men, imitating their gentle lives, talking gravely about politics, and always learning the club rules to the letter. On the very lower cusp of the upper class himself, but absolutely firm about maintaining clear rules for the servants. No doubt he sat on the house committee and argued strenuously against the admission of scholarship boys. Lenox would have preferred even Claude.

  “I daresay I do have it wrong. But youth is to correct the aged, as they say.”

  “Well, some of the aged have the right opinion. At this club in particular, you know.”

  “What political issues do you feel especially strongly about?” Lenox couldn’t help but ask.

  Eustace perked up at this. “Well, for instance, there’s the matter of feudal responsibility. This country was founded on a model of master and man. It’s why the sun never sets on our empire, you know: feudal responsibility. And now they’re trying to give every man the vote—give women the vote, for goodness’ sake. What was wrong with the old system?”

  “Surely the reform acts make England more democratic, fairer to all its citizens?”

  “Read Plato on democracy. Just the mob’s appetite running wild. What you want is an oligarchy of the elite. Rotten boroughs are absolutely sound, you know. The Duke of Albany knows better who should be in Parliament than the man who digs his vegetables.”

  Lenox pegged him as a young man on the lower fringe of the landed gentry, clinging hard to some idea of gentility. It gave him some sympathy for Eustace Bramwell.

  “How about imperial reform?”

  “Don’t get me started: the Indians, the Africans—they need us. Don’t you see that? Look at the way we’ve brought Christian spirit to Burma and rudimentary education to Bengal.”

  Lenox decided to turn the conversation. “Don’t you frequent the Jumpers as well as this club?”

  Eustace seemed surprised. “I did, of course, but it was the mistake of a man who is first coming to London, and I fell in with the bad company of my cousin, who forced me to drink, and all sorts—just a moment, sir. Was that a general question, or do you know me?”

  “I confess that I know you. I am a friend of your uncle’s.” Eustace looked at him suspiciously. “My uncle is no liberal.”

  “As we get older, there is common ground between us aside from politics.”

  “I suppose.”

  “To confess fully, I am here to ask you about the servant who died.”

  “Are you from the Yard? How did you get in here?”

  “No, no, I am an amateur. Charles Lenox.”

  “Surely not the great expert on Roman life?”

  “If you please.”

  “Why, what an honor, liberal or otherwise! Do you know, I often find myself consulting that book you wrote—that was you, I take it?”

  “It was,” said Lenox. A monograph on daily life from beggar to soldier to emperor, during Hadrian’s reign.

  “I have to say, that was an ingenious book.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And then, you know, the article you published last month in the Academy’s journal, about the historical life of Bath during Roman occupation—sheer inspiration, to do that kind of on-the-ground research.”

  “I appreciate it,” Lenox said. “And I would be pleased to talk about my writings another time. But the young girl is dead, and I really do want to see the matter through—only as shadow support for the Yard, you know.”

  “I see.”

  “It shall only be a very few questions.”

  Eustace Bramwell put his journal aside and nodded, acquiescent now that he knew he was talking to the author of Hadrian’s People.

  “Good,” said Lenox. “Good. First things first. Do you have any idea who killed the girl?”

  “I can’t say that I have.”

  “You didn’t kill her?”

  “Sir, if this is the sort of question which I am meant to answer, then this interview is at an end.”

  “It is a necessary question.”

  Eustace did not seem mollified. “The impertinence—”

  “Very well, very well,” said Lenox. He was growing weary of nephews. Jane would sympathize. “Have you heard of bella indigo?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “How?”

  “I graduated with a first in botany and won a prize in the bargain, sir.”

  “Of course.”

  “Are you implying that bella indigo killed this girl?”

  “It may have,” said Lenox. “Have you ever come into contact with the substance?”

  “No. Cambridge quite rightly considers it too volatile.”

  “But Oxford cultivates it?”

  “Oxford is less rigorous, in many ways—”

  “Yes, yes, thank you. Have you ever been to Oxford?”

  “Yes, as a child, and once several years ago to visit my cousin.”

  “How many years ago?”

  “Perhaps three.” Eustace lit a cigarette as he said this.

  “Are you close with your cousin?”

  “Far from it. I visited him as a gesture of familial kindness, and while I was there he nearly had me arrested.”

  “Did you visit the botany department at Oxford?”

  “And acquire enough bella indigo to kill the girl? No. At any rate, if you knew anything, you would know that the poison becomes neutral after a year’s time, when its use as a fertilizer for certain rare flowers may begin. The chemical structure is, from what we can gather, unstable.”

  “What were you doing between eleven and one two days ago, on the day Miss Smith died?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but I was painting the entire time.”

  “Painting?” Lenox asked, leaning closer.

  “Yes.”

  “What were you painting?”

  “The view from a window in the drawing room. I was concentrating deeply.”

  “Did you finish the painting that day?”

  “No. I never finished it at all, just added a few hasty strokes the next day to make it look complete. I was tired of it.”

  “Did you leave the drawing room?”

  “Not for a moment. I was absorbed by my work.”

  “Who can vouch for that, among the others in the drawing room?”

  “I’ve no idea. I wasn’t consciously trying to generate an alibi. None of us had an idea that a girl was being murdered, or I daresay we should have been more attentive to people’s comings and goings. I myself would have made a point of seeing which other people left the room, if I knew that this sort of insulting suspicion were going to be directed at me.”
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  “How well do you know the other men who are staying with your uncle?”

  “Well enough.”

  “Do you have an opinion of them?”

  “Soames is a wastrel. Potts is lower class. Duff, on the other hand, is a man with sound ideas about things. A Cambridge man too, you know. Rigorous standards for the poor. No more free rides. Good about India, too. Very sound.”

  “Are you close with your uncle?”

  “Extremely. More so every day.”

  “Is he close with Claude?”

  “Not at all. Kind, for the family’s sake, but sees him for what he is.”

  “Do you know anything of your uncle’s work at the mint?”

  “No.”

  “If I may ask a delicate question, what is your financial situation?”

  Eustace reddened. “Good lord. I’m fine, thank you.”

  “May I ask how?”

  “If you must, I receive income from my investments.”

  “What investments?”

  “Uncle Barnard gave Claude and me each ten thousand pounds upon reaching the majority. I invested mine soundly.”

  “And Claude?”

  “I’ve no idea what he did with his.”

  “Which of your housemates do you think is most likely to be guilty of the crime?”

  “If you ask my opinion, it was some urchin from the streets who wanted to steal from the house. Or perhaps this maid was stealing, and someone taught her a lesson.”

  “Barring that possibility.”

  “Soames. Man’s a wastrel, I spotted it from fifty yards.”

  Lenox stood up. “I shan’t take any more of your time.”

  “Yes, yes, well, nice to meet you.”

  “Please don’t tell anyone we met.”

  “And why on earth not?”

  “Your silence will benefit the girl who has died. We must try to remember her claims in this situation.”

  “I shall tell whomsoever I please. But I shall consider your request.”

  “You would do the girl a grave disservice. She has had a hard enough fate.”

  Eustace seemed to falter. “Well, perhaps,” he said sullenly.

  Lenox left the smoking room without another word. It was the second time of the morning that he had become disheartened at the prospect of the generation to which he was meant to bequeath the earth. Interesting that each of the cousins had called the other a wastrel; neither seemed a particular prize to him, but did that sort of mutual animus have a deeper basis than incompatibility? It might simply have been that they were related to Barnard and were competing for a spot in his last will and testament. An unfortunate thing in a family that. Lenox thought with some sense of comfort that at least his own nephews, Edmund’s sons, wouldn’t care about his money. They were bright young lads, polite and kind besides.

  Chapter 17

  After an unsatisfying morning, McConnell aside, and an unsatisfying lunch, Lenox made his way not homeward, though in truth he wanted to, but rather to Oxley Crescent, a small neighborhood on the periphery of London. The driver of his carriage, he felt, was beginning to tire of these trips to obscure and occasionally lower-class sections of London and would have preferred to travel solely to Piccadilly Circus and back, but Lenox felt, with some sense of self-righteousness, that the driver’s purposes ranked, at the moment, below his own.

  As they drove he read the Daily Telegraph, the Whig paper, and before too long they had arrived at their destination. It was a street of somewhat better repute than that in which he had found Jeremiah Jones, and also of better repute than that to which he had accompanied Claude Barnard that morning, but he could imagine that it might offend his driver’s higher feelings. His driver lived on Hampden Lane.

  Lenox, however, thought it a nice quiet street, with small houses spaced close together but not in disrepair, and pleasant little gardens dotted along the sidewalk, and old women sitting on their porches or, in this colder weather, at their front windows.

  It was on Oxley Crescent that Skaggs lived, and it was to Skaggs’s abode that Lenox had come, in search of a private investigator. Several cases had passed since he had been here, he thought. He knocked twice on the door of a white house with dark shutters, and after a moment a young girl appeared.

  “May I help ye, my lord?” she said.

  “I’m Charles Lenox. Are you the lady of the house?”

  “No, my lord, I’m the girl.”

  “Is Mr. Skaggs at home?”

  “Just a moment, my lord.”

  The door closed, and a moment later Skaggs himself appeared. He was a man in his late thirties, dressed in a brown suit, with a bald head and a fat face and a long scar across the left side of his neck. He had once been fearsome, and still could be when asked, but in truth he had been tamed by his wife in recent years and had settled down to respectability. He was the private investigator Lenox had been looking for.

  “Sorry about the girl, Mr. Lenox.”

  “Not at all.”

  “We’ve only just hired her.”

  “A significant thing to do.”

  “The wife was always on about getting someone. We had our third, you see.”

  “Congratulations, Mr. Skaggs. A boy or a girl?”

  “All girls, Mr. Lenox. A pride and a joy, though.”

  “You’re a lucky man.”

  “Thank you, sir. Will you come in?”

  The two men walked into a small room at the front of the house, with only two chairs and a table in it. This was Skaggs’s place of business. Lenox sat down, and Skaggs asked how he could be of service.

  “Do you know of Roderick Potts?” said Lenox.

  “Yes, sir. ’E’s often in the papers, sir.”

  “That’s the man. I’d like you to follow him, closely enough to hear and see what you can.”

  “I can do that, Mr. Lenox.”

  “Excellent. Here’s five days’ wages.” He handed over nineteen shillings. “Can you begin right away?”

  “Yes,” said Skaggs.

  Just at that moment, a woman walked in the door, dressed in a new bonnet and an old frock and carrying an infant.

  “Is this the new baby?”

  “It is. Sorry for the intrusion, Mr. Lenox, it’ll only be a moment.”

  Skaggs began to gesture at his wife to leave, but she paid him no mind.

  “This is Emily,” she said, and offered him to Lenox. “I’ve often seen your carriage through the front window, Mr. Lenox, but never to meet. I’m Mrs. Skaggs.”

  “You have my sincerest congratulations, Mrs. Skaggs.”

  “Thank you, sir. It was an ’ard labor, sir, but all worth it.”

  “There can be no doubt of that,” Lenox said, smiling. “But I’m afraid, if you’ll excuse me, that I must take my leave.”

  “Always a pleasure to welcome you, Mr. Lenox, sir,” said Mrs. Skaggs. “Can we have the girl get ye anything?” She blushed when she said girl.

  “No, thank you, but you have my warmest wishes.” He smiled. Then he turned to the husband, who was looking plaintively at his wife, still hoping she might leave the room. “Skaggs, you’ll begin soon?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He’s staying at George Barnard’s house in Clarges Street.”

  “Yes, sir, I know the spot. Straightaway.”

  “Good. I’ll expect to hear from you when anything comes to light.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lenox bowed to Mrs. Skaggs, nodded toward her husband, and left them in a minor quarrel, which began as soon as he closed the door, about the sanctity of his place of business. On his way to the path he handed the girl, who was on the porch and seemingly daunted by her responsibilities, a sixpence. She curtsied and blushed.

  Skaggs was a man who could assume either an air of respectability or an air of disrepute, which made him infinitely useful, and he had ways that Lenox did not of squirreling into situations. For a day or two, at any rate, he could ease his mind about Potts.


  The other members of the house? Barnard he could never question. But he would try to waylay Soames tomorrow, perhaps at the Parliament—Lenox was to eat again with his brother, who was so rarely in town; they had agreed after yesterday’s lunch—and he felt sure that he could question Soames in a way that didn’t appear to be a questioning.

  Duff would be a harder matter.

  There were a few hours until he was due to have tea with Lady Jane, and no way to fill them effectively. He had done what he could for the day thus far; at least until Graham explained what he had learned from the servants about Prue Smith.

  Chapter 18

  Once every so often—not frequently enough to call it a habit but not infrequently enough to call it a rarity—Lenox returned to his bedroom after he had eaten lunch, changed into a pair of pajamas, and slept for an hour or two. It was a nice thing to do when he was tired, or on a cold day such as this one, when the bed was warm. And while he thought it somewhat lazy, and refused to let himself nap other than as a treat, he dearly loved the days when he did.

  He changed into fresh clothes when he woke, a black velvet jacket and gray trousers, and read in his library for a while, taking out maps to look at now and then—for he was reading a history of Persia—and waiting for Graham to return so that they could discuss Miss Smith’s social habits.

  When he got restless with Persia, he opened his letters. There was one from Edmund’s wife, full of news about her sons, and another from a correspondent of his in Paris. The only note that he read twice, though, was from Barnard. Written yesterday, it read as follows:

  Dear Charles—

  I was unsettled after our breakfast this morning, because I felt I had been abrupt. I hope you will trust the Yard as I do, and that you will give the business up unless it comes to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Above all, let us be open with each other.

  Faithfully,

  Barnard

  Now this was unfair. Barnard had secrets from three quarters of London. He was known for his secrets. But in all probability he knew he was appealing to the part of Lenox that did hesitate to deceive anybody and was reluctant to conduct a case in such a back-handed way; in short, the part of him that was a gentleman. Though Barnard himself would have felt no such compunction, he knew that the amateur detective would.