A Beautiful Blue Death clm-1

by Charles Finch

  So Lenox brooded over this letter, and read it again, but at last he set it aside, determined that the interests of Prue Smith could be favorably compared to the instincts of his own upbringing. The only question that remained with him, after this conclusion, was why Barnard had felt strongly enough to write him. It was another thing to remember, as the case grew more convoluted.

  At the end of this conversation with himself, there was a soft step in the hallway and a knock upon the door, and when Lenox called out that the knocker should enter, Graham came into the room.

  “How are you, Graham?”

  “Very well, sir. The weather is more pleasant today than it has been recently, sir.”

  “A sight better.”

  “I have gathered the information which you asked me to, sir.”

  “Have you? Excellent. Take a seat.”

  Lenox was already behind his desk, and Graham sat in a chair facing him.

  “What have you got?” said Lenox.

  “Before I describe what I have learned of the victim, sir, may I add one note to the information I gave you last night?”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “There is one member of the household who is apparently, sir, without question not the murderer—or, at least, had not the opportunity to commit the murder.”

  “Who might that be, besides Miss Smith herself?”

  “One of the two nephews, sir, Eustace Bramwell.”

  “Why, pray, is he so disbarred?”

  “Numerous members of the staff who confided in me have confirmed independently that he never moved. He was painting a picture or eating lunch, but he never left the drawing room or the dining room for even the briefest moment.”

  Lenox sighed. “Whenever I hear that someone is absolutely innocent, Graham, I tend to conclude that I have found my criminal. But I suppose in this case you’re right. I spoke with the lad this morning.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Offensive, but too essentially snotty and petty to make such a grand gesture as murder.”

  “Shall I continue, sir?”

  “By all means.”

  “I went to the girl’s funeral this morning, sir.”

  “Did you? I thought of going, but it wouldn’t have been quite right—her funeral, after all, not an excuse for me to do work. There are limits.”

  “Yes, sir. Having known her, however, I felt I could strike a balance.”

  “Of course, Graham, of course. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

  “At any rate, sir, between a visit to the servants’ quarters at Mr. Barnard’s house and the funeral, I amassed a good amount of information.

  “The girl’s full name was Prudence Smith, sir, and she was born in London. She went into service at the age of sixteen, and at her death she was twenty-four. In the intervening time she worked three years for Lady Helena Adeline and four years for Lady Grey, and for the past three months she has been working at Mr. Barnard’s house.”

  “Of course.”

  “Her family is all dead, sir, and her strongest current relation was James, her fiancé, a footman. He is from a good family, all in service, and seems genuinely grief-stricken. I may add here that I know his father and do not believe the lad to be in any way a suspect, sir, though of course that is not for me to judge.

  “Her strongest acquaintance besides James was a girl named Lucy, whom I believe you have already met, sir, the servant at Lady Grey’s house who informed you that Prue Smith could not read. They were very close, having served together a long while at Lady Grey’s residence, though Miss Smith was friendly with all the servants in that house and with many of the female servants here.

  “This information, sir, is merely preamble to the unfortunate facts which I have discovered. It was uniformly agreed that she was a good girl and did her work well, but I fear she was led astray in the last year. She was engaged to James that entire time, sir, but in the last six months she had begun to have a relationship with a man named Bartholomew Deck, sir, known as Bart to his friends.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A young man of Miss Smith’s age who is the proprietor of a tavern that his father owns called The Bull and Bear.”

  “What do you mean by a relationship?”

  “I fear that the two young people were having an affair, sir.”

  “Is this what exotic meant? Was she generally this way?”

  “No, sir. I have assembled information in that direction as well, but I thought that the information about Mr. Deck might be more relevant.”

  “Indeed.”

  “The other servants thought of her, I believe, sir, not as a lady of ill repute or someone likely to have an affair, but as someone with hopes and ambitions and a sense of possibility that exceeded what most would contend was her excellent position with Mr. Barnard.”

  “What were her hopes and ambitions?”

  “She spoke of moving to the country when she was married, sir, and of having a girl of her own—nearly all the servants remember that—and she spoke of James living as a gentleman farmer. I cannot say whether any of this was attainable, sir, but when I heard these declarations they were very familiar to me. It is rare, but some girls are that way. You may recall Elizabeth, who was in service here some years ago, sir. She was of that ilk.”

  “Did Prue Smith’s friends know about Deck?”

  “Only Lucy betrayed any knowledge of the name, sir. I found out by accounting for the people at her funeral this afternoon. The only person unknown to me was Mr. Deck, and when I followed him I saw his place of business and learned his name from a man in the street. Lucy verified for me that they were more than friends, sir.”

  “Did it strike you as strange that the funeral was so quick on the heels of her death? It did me.”

  “Yes, sir, me too. I spoke to a maid, who said Mr. Barnard wanted to have a quick funeral—according to James, who made the arrangements—so that the business would be at an end.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you have an address for this man Deck?”

  “Yes, sir.” Graham handed Lenox a piece of paper. “The information is copied here, sir.”

  “Anything else?”

  “One further note, sir. You expressed some curiosity about the changing of candles in servants’ rooms. I was assured by a young lady at Mr. Barnard’s house that the servants are expected by an exacting housekeeper, a Miss Harrison, to use their candles until the very last.”

  Lenox nodded, with raised eyebrows. “A tough type.”

  “Very tough, sir. To conclude, Miss Smith had changed her candles only recently, according to one of the girls I spoke with. She was surprised to hear that Miss Smith had already been due for a new candle, but I managed, I hope, to convince her that I might have been confused.”

  “Excellent, Graham. Very good.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I mean it. I hope it wasn’t too unpleasant, you know.”

  “Not in the least, Mr. Lenox, sir.” Graham stood up. “Will you be having your tea in, this afternoon?”

  “No, no. At Lady Jane’s. Take the afternoon off; have a holiday if you like. Good work all around—thank you.”

  “Of course, sir,” said Graham, and walked out of the library.

  With this report, Graham’s role in the case was at all probability at an end, and both men knew that Graham would thereafter resume his normal functions, but perhaps it is appropriate, nevertheless, to explain the relation between the butler and his employer, which was by many men’s standards—Barnard’s, for instance, or Sir Edmund’s—unorthodox.

  It had begun at Oxford. Graham was raised nearby in a small thatched-cottage village called Abingdon and became the scout on Lenox’s stairwell the year Lenox went up. For three years he had remained in that role, always formal—a little too formal, even—and always efficient, until one night. Lenox had been reading late, taking occasional breaks to visit his friends’
rooms, when Graham had burst through his door without knocking, disheveled, without a tie on, and clearly overwrought.

  “Will you help me?” he had said. And it was in those few words that Lenox realized how much he liked the quiet, intelligent Graham—indeed, how much he relied on him. He wanted to help.

  “Of course.” Lenox turned his book face downward and followed Graham out. It was past curfew hours, but Graham led him through a strange route by the college’s kitchen and they slipped out undetected.

  From there it was a twenty-minute ride in a hired carriage to Abingdon. Neither Graham nor Lenox spoke. Finally they drew to a halt in front of a small white house with a little bit of grass around it, surrounded by miles of farmland which Lenox assumed belonged to the Prince of Wales.

  “It’s my father,” Graham said at last. “I didn’t know who else to ask for help.”

  “Me, of course. How many times have I asked you for help?”

  Inside, a single candle threw a dim light over two rooms. The one toward the back was a kitchen with a low straw pallet in it. The front room held a sturdier brown bed, where Graham’s father lay, clearly dying.

  “I see,” said Lenox. “Is there a doctor nearby?”

  “Only Colfax, down the road, sir. He wouldn’t come.”

  “Wouldn’t come?”

  “He’s a proper doctor. The village’s nurse died last year.”

  “Where is Colfax’s house?”

  “First one, half a mile down.”

  Lenox found a rusty bike outside and rode furiously toward Colfax’s house. When he got there, the doctor consented to come after a short conversation, plainly only because of Lenox’s accent and appearance. It took about ten minutes of walking.

  When they arrived, the elder Graham was dead and Graham was sitting on a chair by the bed, still holding his hand. Colfax offered a brief condolence, took the shilling from Lenox’s hand, and left. Lenox sat up with Graham that night, fixing coffee and letting him ramble, and in the morning he arranged for the funeral. Finally, that evening, he went back to Oxford.

  Three days later he called in. It emerged after a while that Graham had nowhere to go; the house belonged to a landlord. Lenox saw the defeat in his eyes.

  “Well,” said the student, “you’ll go work for my father. That will be easy enough.”

  So it happened; and three months later, when Lenox moved to London, Graham went with him. They never spoke of it, but there was an allegiance between them because of that strange week, perhaps even stronger in Lenox than in Graham. He was honored that Graham had trusted him.

  Their relationship had always been what was proper and right between two men of their positions: friendliness without familiarity, comfort without excessive fluency And soon after Lenox came to London, he stumbled upon the Charterhouse case, which involved the loss of some crucial papers in connection with the government, and in the solving of that crime, Graham had played a small but critical role by befriending a young lady in service with the criminal and extracting from her a vital piece of information.

  Since then, Lenox had occasionally asked for Graham’s help on cases. When he did not, the butler went about his normal work, but when asked he always fulfilled his duty excellently. As in this case, he had an uncanny ability to gain the trust of talkative maids and footmen.

  Thus the situation stood. The truth was that they had known each other for more than twenty years and had been through the major events of their lives together, and while there was always a correct distance between them, they each felt at times that it was appropriate to set aside the barrier and act as what they truly were to each other, should all concerns of rank, money, class, and society be demolished—namely, friends.

  Chapter 19

  It was after four o’clock by now; Lenox had been to Lady Jane’s and had his tea and his hot muffin, and the two friends had chatted comfortably for a little less than an hour. He told her about Barnard’s two nephews and said that they confirmed her worst suspicions about that species, but he did not tell her about the information that Graham had given him about Bartholomew Deck. He had decided to protect her from it unless it became material to the case—which, he feared, was a real possibility.

  For her part, Lady Jane told him she had been to the girl’s funeral that morning. She had seen Graham, she said, who had only bowed to her. Very few people had been present, and it was James, Prue’s fiancé, sitting in the first pew, who wept. Lady Jane did not add that she herself had cried; but then, it was not the sort of thing she needed to add for Lenox to understand.

  It was perhaps unusual for her to go to the girl’s funeral—Lenox could think of no other woman of her class who would have done so—but Lady Jane simply was unusual, in her persistent refusal to remarry, in her close relationship with Lenox, in her ability to do what she felt was right—even if it meant skipping lunch with a duchess to attend a maid’s funeral—and maintaining her rarefied position at the same time. It was simply who she was. Her strength was in the integrity of her actions; she never compromised what she believed she ought to do.

  They sat together on the rose-colored sofa for quite some time and talked, also, about Jack Soames and Newton Duff, and, more happily, about Sir Edmund and his two sons. Both Lenox and Lady Jane planned to return to the country soon—Lenox to visit Edmund and Lady Jane to visit her brother, who sat at the family seat—since her father’s death a few years ago—as the Earl of Houghton. They agreed that they would plan their trips to coincide, though Lenox, for his part, wanted a little time to hunt as well.

  He left her house at a few minutes before five o’clock. Though it had been a long day, the cold was unobtrusive, compared to the last two days, and he still had energy left. Therefore he stepped into his carriage and directed the driver to the Bull and Bear.

  Lenox’s mind had that quality which many great minds have—the ability to consider several opposing ideas at once—and, though he felt stifled in the case thus far, he had begun to consider its nuances, the possible relationships that may have existed, in secret, in Barnard’s house. And while Bartholomew Deck played no role in the beginnings of these thoughts, Lenox now admitted the young man to his mind as another possibility. It was one idea that was best either to dismiss or to embrace as quickly as possible, which was why he placed the task of visiting the tavern at the forefront of his plans.

  The carriage crossed the Thames and made its way toward the docks as the sun fell. At last, in front of an empty pier, it drew to a standstill in front of a large well-lit pub, with a placard of the Queen protected by a bull and a bear on either side hanging above the door, and cheerful noises coming through its windows. Lenox got out and went inside.

  It was an old makeshift building, and there was a sign over the bar, to the left, that said THE BULL AND BEAR SURVIVED THE FIRE OF 1666. Several men sat at the bar, rivermen, mostly, who trawled the Thames from these docks, ferrying passengers, searching for treasure, and drinking at the end of the day. Behind the bar were a row of wooden barrels tapped for ale; the last barrel was darker and said MILD in white stencil on its side. There were chairs and tables scattered around the warm room, and at the main table there was a game of nine-men’s morris going on. The place served some kind of food; Lenox saw a young woman by the door eating a plate of pickles, ham, bread, cheese, relish, cabbage, and egg.

  Behind the bar was a young man, polishing the pewter tankards the beer was served in and, it seemed, crying.

  “A pint of bitter, please,” said Lenox, and sat down at the bar.

  The man behind the bar was handsome and fair, and upon Lenox’s request he took one of the tankards he was cleaning, gave it an extra wipe, drew full from the tap of a barrel, and said, “A penny, please,” crying all the while. If any of the customers seemed to see anything peculiar about his behavior, they did not show it, much less mention it. Occasionally one of the young waitresses nipped around the bar and kissed him on the cheek, but this seemed to have no effect on him be
yond impeding his free movement among the barrels and taps.

  To the man on his left, Lenox said, “Do you know why he’s crying?”

  “ ’E’s sad,” said the man.

  “How long has he been crying?”

  “All evening.”

  “Ah.”

  Lenox stood up and finished his pint. He went down to the darkened end of the bar, where there were no patrons, but several empty stools and a dartboard that had fallen into disrepair. When he was seated, he beckoned to the young man behind the bar, who looked around for other customers and then walked toward him behind the bar.

  “Bartholomew Deck?” said Lenox.

  “I’m ’im.”

  “I’m Charles Lenox. I’m investigating the death of Prue Smith.”

  Deck leaned his head over the bar and continued to cry.

  “May I ask you a few questions?”

  “Why not,” said Deck, with a gesture of futility.

  “How did you know the girl?”

  “I loved her. Nobody knows what love is.”

  “This is an unpleasant question, Mr. Deck, but I ask it nevertheless: Did you kill her?”

  To this Deck had a not altogether unexpected reaction; he whipped around the bar, and his hands flew toward Lenox’s throat. Nobody in the room looked their way. Lenox blocked his left hand but caught a blow on the chin. Then he put his foot behind Deck’s knee and pushed him backward, tripping him, and pinned his hands to his chest.

  “I know it’s unpleasant, Mr. Deck, but I’m afraid it’s necessary.”

  Deck had given way entirely to tears and didn’t struggle at all against Lenox’s grip on him. Weakly, he called out, “Fa?”

  After a moment, a man appeared through the door.

  Lenox released Deck, prepared, if need be, to leave as quickly as possible. But Deck only said, “Cover me, would ya?” The older man nodded and Deck began to walk toward the front of the bar, apparently with the expectation that Lenox would follow him—which he did.

  Out in the cold air, the young man seemed to sober up. He lit a small cigar and tucked it into the left side of his mouth. “Sorry,” he said.