A Beautiful Blue Death

by Charles Finch

  He asked the girl for his slippers, and she fetched them, and in the space of fifteen minutes, happiness had returned to his face, and before he had even had a chance to read the headlines the newspaper had fallen from his hands and he had dozed off pleasantly into sleep.

  He awoke thirty minutes later, first half-sleeping and then gently opening his eyes. As he gazed into the whitened street, he thought drowsily that it had been a perfect nap—the sort a man runs into now and again by chance, when he has had a difficult day but comes back to his hearth to find a brief moment of peace and rest, the sort that leaves him renewed, still sleepy, and at ease with the world.

  There was a knock on the door, and he heard the maid walking briskly across the hallway to answer it. It occurred to him then that Graham must not have returned yet from the two tasks he had set out to do.

  The maid tapped on the door to the library, and Lenox said, “Come in.” She swung the double doors open, and Lady Jane, who was on the threshold, said to her, “Bring the tea now if you would, my dear.”

  Lenox stood up and smiled.

  “I’ve only just woken up,” he said, “from the loveliest nap.”

  “What a lucky thing!” Lady Jane said, pulling off her gloves and leaning back, with an exhale, into the red sofa. She was wearing a pale blue dress that brought out the flush in her cheeks.

  “Oh, it was very nice.”

  “Such a horrid day, too. I saw you coming back home from my window, Charles, and I saw your poor leg was drenched, and I thought I would give you an hour to rest, but it’s only been forty-five minutes and here I am already. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Never,” he said. “Or, if ever, I would have minded forty-five minutes ago, when I first came in. But at the moment nothing could bring me more pleasure. Now, have you had your tea?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “I know,” she said. She smiled. “Your maid told me that she brought it in, but you were asleep. She’s bringing a fresh pot now.”

  “I thought I heard you say something to her.”

  “It will only be a moment, I think.”

  “It seems ages since lunch. Though the company was good; I was with my brother.”

  “Edmund!”

  “I enjoyed seeing him, of course, but it was hours and hours ago. You’re lucky you didn’t find me fainted dead away on the sidewalk.”

  “Did you have a trying day, otherwise?”

  He smiled. “Of course not,” he said.

  “Oh, I know you did, you fibber. Was it too terrible?”

  “I’ll only admit I was cross with the city when I came home, but it passed within a moment and I no longer have any idea of moving to the American prairie.”

  “Thank goodness. We should have seen much less of each other.”

  “Not a fashionable enough neighborhood, my lady?”

  “Not by half,” she said, and they both laughed.

  The tea came a moment later, and Jane, as she always did, served it.

  “Two pieces of toast?” she asked.

  “How about four?”

  “Four!”

  “Yes.”

  “A bear couldn’t eat four pieces of toast!”

  “A bear who had walked through London all day, and stepped in a puddle, and been betrayed by a cabdriver, very well might eat four pieces of toast.”

  She laughed and handed him his tea and his toast and began to talk about a ball that her friend the Duchess Marchmain was giving next month. They fell into a conversation about old friends, and soon he realized, with a pang of gratitude, and love, that though she had rushed here to speak about the murder, she had seen his weariness and sacrificed her own anxiety to put his mind at rest.

  He let her talk a little while longer about the Duchess and her sons—who were known to be as vain as women—and whom they might marry. But when the conversation turned, he told her that he had spent all day on the case.

  He recounted what he had done: about bella indigo, about his breakfast with Barnard, and about Graham, who was out working on a few basic leads Lenox hoped would reveal something he suspected. And last he told her that he had discovered something else, something potentially important, but had been sworn to secrecy over it at lunch.

  It wasn’t much of a bounty to give her, but she seemed comforted, by the time he stopped talking, and said only that she hoped she would be able to do something herself.

  “I’ll get to the bottom of it,” Lenox said.

  “I know you will.” Her face betrayed a moment of worry, but then she took a last sip of tea and began to put on her gloves again. She stood up to leave and they said goodbye, agreeing that they would have tea again the next day, just to check in.

  After she left, Lenox thought about what he knew so far. It had been slightly less than a day, and he had learned a great deal: that Prue Smith had definitely been murdered; by what instrument; the clues at the scene of the murder; the probable origins of the poison; the definite motive of the mint’s gold; the restricted group among whom the murderer might reside.

  But all the same he felt as if he knew nothing. Who were George Barnard’s houseguests other than Claude, the young man he had met? Had any of them discovered the gold? How had the murderer’s path crossed the housemaid’s; had they had some relationship? Was he dismissing too quickly the possibility that a friend or a lover had done it because he was focused on the cost and obscurity of the poison and the presence in the house of the mint’s money?

  Many murders, he knew, are solved within twenty-four hours. The rest, from his experience, were never solved or took weeks. But at least, he thought with grim satisfaction, he was ahead of Exeter, who was still twisting his whiskers and thinking the girl had destroyed herself while his underlings stroked his ego.

  There were too many pieces to the puzzle, if anything. The factors that usually determine a murderer’s identity had been thrown into doubt immediately.

  He pondered the case for half an hour—and then remembered something that Jeremiah Jones had said, thought curiously about it for a moment, and decided he would wait until Graham had come home to think about Prue Smith again. He searched through the books on his desk, found his old copy of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and opened it in the middle.

  He read quite contentedly until eight, when he had to dress for supper with his friend Lord Cabot, who shared with him a sportsman’s interest in politics, and a few friends, at their club, the Travelers. He had put on his dinner jacket and combed his hair when, just as he was nearly ready to leave, he heard the servants’ door open and close and knew from the buzz of voices that Graham was home.

  He went down to the hallway and at the same time heard footsteps on the stairs below, and a moment later his butler came in, looking worse for the day’s wear, much as Lenox him-self must have looked when he had come home that evening—cold and unhappy.

  “Graham!” he said.

  “Sir.”

  “Lovely day out, isn’t it?”

  “No, sir, if I may contradict you.”

  Lenox laughed. “Why are you up here, anyway?”

  “I thought you might want to discuss the matter we spoke about yesterday evening right away, sir.”

  “No, no,” said Lenox, “go to your room, have a fire, change your clothes, and doze off. If only to please me. And have some tea.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We can talk later this evening or tomorrow morning.”

  “Very well, sir. Good evening.”

  Graham began to walk back down the stairs tiredly. Lenox stood and listened, heard a door shut beneath, and turned to the housekeeper.

  “Will you take him the tea yourself?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” she said.

  “It’s my fault he had to go out at all.”

  “I will indeed, sir.”

  “Excellent.” He turned and began to walk toward the front door but stopped and turned around. Then he paused and didn�
��t say anything.

  After a moment, the housekeeper said, “Sir?”

  “Mary,” he said, “will you also take one of those little chocolate cakes I like so well, when you take him his tea? He might enjoy that.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “That’ll do,” he said to himself, and opened the front door to leave.

  Chapter 12

  Most of the gentlemen’s clubs of London were on Pall Mall and St. James’s Street, near Hampden Lane, and Lenox belonged to several of them. Every group of people had a club—the Gresham for merchants, the Hogarth for artists, the Army and Navy, called Rag and Famish by its members, for veterans—but Lenox’s clubs were of a higher caste, being clubs dedicated not to a pursuit, by and large, but to the aristocracy.

  They mostly resembled one another, being wide white town-houses, usually in the Italianate style, and four or five stories high. Each of them served a different mood or clique.

  For instance, he had first joined the Athenæum Club, on Pall Mall, and still spent several evenings a month there. It had the best club library in England and excellent food, and most of his friends from school and university belonged there.

  He also went to the Savile Club, which was less politics and more art and science, to the Devonshire Club, which was for members of a liberal bent, and to the Eton and Harrow, on Pall Mall East, for graduates of those two public schools. He belonged to the Oriental Club and the Marlborough Club, the latter of which was considered perhaps the most prestigious in London. And then there was the Oxford and Cambridge Club, at 71 Pall Mall, which was shortly to play a role in the case.

  They were almost all in limestone buildings, and they were all very comfortable inside, particularly the Athenæum and the Devonshire. They all had central halls, where ceremonies and large dinners were held, and where you checked for your friends in thick chairs next to warm fireplaces. Beyond the large halls were a series of smaller rooms for smaller groups: billiard rooms, card rooms, grand old libraries where members dozed off with The Times on their laps, chess rooms, tearooms, and, of course, places to eat.

  The reason these clubs flourished, Lenox felt, was that this was an age of unusually rigid separation between men and women. He and Lady Jane ignored that separation, but most men spoke very little with women except at parties, and were most comfortable playing a hand of cards or smoking a cigar with their friends, a kind of solidarity encouraged in grammar school, public school, and university, all of which excluded women.

  Lenox also belonged to the Travelers Club, on St. James’s Street, and there, in the long lounge that evening, the last two members by the fire were Lord Cabot and Charles Lenox—both of whom, it could be presumed, had at least once traveled 500 miles in a straight line from the center of London, which was the very minimum requirement of that club. Lenox wished he had gone farther than Russia—he wished he had gone to the Cape of Good Hope, like Stanley Foster, another member—but he enjoyed the club’s company nonetheless. Its members were the most interesting and idiosyncratic of the aristocratic class, from every field and every pursuit, with an emphasis on scholarship. Lenox’s father had helped found it, because his own clubs were too full of bores; everybody in the Travelers was an expert on something—ancient Welsh agriculture or Persian illuminated manuscripts or Shakespeare’s problem comedies, or imperial Rome, like Lenox—even those with other careers. The building itself was an old stone one, comfortable inside, with a sizable library and a good dining room. Lenox often went there to read at night and perhaps run into a friend who also loved to travel.

  But now they were in the lounge, which was a long hall with a painted ceiling and heavy armchairs. Each man had a drink in his hand, and Cabot held the poker and constantly shifted the dying embers in the hearth. He was a fat man with white hair, tidily dressed, and with a quick smile.

  The fire was warm, but outside the sounds of a blizzard shuffled against the windows, the fiercer wind that rises when the streets are abandoned at night, the swirls of wet snow against the ground, and the boots of the last men out hurrying along the pavement toward home.

  They were talking about the Commons, as they always did when they had supper. Their other friends had melted away by now.

  “Your brother,” said Lord Cabot. “There’s an example.”

  “Of what?”

  “A man with no more idea of leadership than of becoming a chimney sweep! Great fella, you know, and votes well, when he comes to town, but my question is, Who, when he sits in his seat, tells him what to do? Leadership!”

  “You may underestimate my brother. He surprised me today.”

  “But you do see my point, Lenox!”

  “You think we have no man the equal of Disraeli on the liberal side.”

  The political situation of the moment was complex. Disraeli had initiated tremendous social reform, but he was a Conservative, and the Liberals were trying to find a match for him. Lord Russell was the Prime Minister and a Liberal, but by common consent he was no Disraeli.

  “I should say not.”

  “Gladstone?”

  “Perhaps in time, my young friend,” Cabot said. “But Disraeli—”

  “He will go down in history as a liberal.”

  Both men laughed.

  “And here we are again. It always signals the time to sip our last sips, when we reach this subject.”

  Cabot smiled happily and set the poker against the hearth. Both men rose and began to walk across the great hall. Lenox corrected himself; they were not the last members present. An old white-haired man slept on a chair in the corner, his drink still in his hand. The stewards would leave him alone all night, if he slept. Particularly in a blizzard.

  “A ride?” said Lenox.

  “No, thank you, dear friend, my carriage should be along any moment.”

  Soon both men were on their way home, having promised each other to have supper again soon. Lenox, stepping into his carriage, sighed and leaned back in his seat. Nearly midnight, he thought, looking at his watch. The streets had a ghostly feel. Who walks among us, he asked himself, with a young maid’s death on their hands?

  When he reached Hampden Lane, he saw that Graham was still awake; the light in the hallway shone through the front windows. He climbed the steps, opened the door, and saw his butler reading over a set of handwritten notes, in his usual seat along the front hallway.

  “Graham,” said Lenox. “How are you?”

  “Well, sir, and you?”

  “Excellent. Just what I needed to get my mind off the case for an hour or two.”

  “I am gratified to hear it, sir.”

  “Do you feel more human, Graham?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Had a rotten day?”

  “Far from it, sir. I admit I was fatigued by the end of my investigations, sir, but as you kindly suggested a cup of tea and a moment by the fire put me right again.”

  “Always does the trick for me.”

  “Yes, sir. A good English remedy.”

  While they spoke, Graham had removed Lenox’s coat and quickly brushed his hat, while Lenox hung his cane on a hook to the right of the door, by a small table with a silver bowl on it. He dropped his keys in the silver bowl, and they rang out briefly

  “In my library, Graham?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is there a fire?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They walked into the library, but instead of sitting in his armchair, Lenox went to his desk and sat down. He motioned Graham toward another chair, by the side of the desk, and then unlocked the top left drawer with a small brass key he removed from his waistcoat pocket. From the drawer he took out a pad of paper and a pencil. Then he locked the drawer again and put the key back in his waistcoat. He cleared a space on the desk, knocking a few books to the ground by accident, and waving Graham off when he tried to pick them up.

  “I’ll get them later,” he said.

  As a final preparation, he searched through the p
apers on his desk and at last lit on what he was looking for, a short mahogany pipe with a silver mouthpiece and, next to it, a leather pouch. He painstakingly prepared the pipe, which he only smoked in the evenings, during his quietest hours, lighted it, and then sat back and looked at Graham.

  “What did you find out?” he said.

  Graham began to speak.

  “I will not have the full results of my inquiry into Miss Smith’s character until tomorrow afternoon, sir, if you would be so good as to release me for two or three hours at that time, but I have a full report of the inmates of Mr. Barnard’s house and have confirmed that all of them were present and for the most part in the dining room together, eating lunch, or in the drawing room, playing cards, between eleven and one, the period when Miss Smith ingested the poison.”

  “McConnell said twelve and one.”

  “Yes, sir, but to be cautious I extended the window, in the remote case that it was ingested earlier than Mr. McConnell determined. It could not have been later, of course, sir, because she died.”

  “Go on.”

  “As you are no doubt aware, sir, Mr. Barnard will hold his annual ball in four days’ time. The preparations for the event began long ago, and several of the houseguests arrived in the past few days, to stay until the ball ends.

  “Except for Claude Barnard, who seems to live with his uncle, the guest who has resided with Mr. Barnard for the longest time is his other nephew, Eustace Bramwell, who is Mr. Barnard’s sister’s son. He is a young man of perhaps twenty-two, sir, who has just come down from Cambridge, where he was in Caius College and studied botany.”

  “Botany?”

  “Yes, sir. He has been in his uncle’s house for more than a month now and doesn’t work during the day. But he has an active social life, I believe, and is a member of the Jumpers Club, which caters, from what I understand, to the younger members of the aristocracy.”

  “Lady Jane’s nephew is a member. Gives her fits. They drink all the time.”

  “I believe that to be an accurate picture of life at the Jumpers, sir. Eustace Bramwell spends some of his time there. But he is very proper, according to the servants, and, with the exception of his almost constant lectures on class responsibilities, he is quiet and not troublesome.”