“I can’t stay long,” Lenox said.
“Of course, and thank you for coming—I thought perhaps you might not be able to get away from the Commons at all. It’s only that I’m due out to meet a client at eight in the morning, and finally decided two hours ago that I don’t think I can go.”
“You couldn’t reschedule?”
“That’s the damnable bit, I—” Here Dallington broke into a fit of coughing, before finally going on in a hoarse voice. “I have no way of reaching the person who sent the note. An enigmatic missive, too. You can pick it out from the birdcage, if you like, the red envelope.”
This brass birdcage, absent of avian life, was where Dallington kept his professional correspondence. It hung near the window. Lenox went to it and found the letter Dallington meant, tucked between two bars. It was undated.
Mr. Dallington,
The police cannot possibly help me; perhaps you might. If you are amenable to meeting, I will be at Gilbert’s Restaurant in Charing Cross Station from eight o’clock Wednesday morning, for a space of thirty-five minutes. If you cannot contrive to meet me then I will write to you again soon, God willing. You will know me because I am dining alone, and by my light-colored hair and the striped black umbrella I always carry.
Please please come.
“Well, what do you make of that?” Dallington asked. “It is unsigned, of course, which tells us that he desires anonymity.”
“Yes.”
“Moreover, he cannot know me very well, to address me as Mr. Dallington. I don’t stand upon much titled formality but I generally receive it anyhow.”
“What else?”
Dallington shrugged. “I cannot see much farther into it.”
“There are one or two telling details,” said Lenox. “Here, for instance, where he says he’ll wait for thirty-five minutes.”
“Why is that odd?”
“Such a specific length of time? Given that he proposes meeting at a train station, it suggests, to me, that he will catch a train shortly after 8:35. Do you have a Bradshaw?”
“On the shelf there,” said Dallington.
Lenox pulled the railway guide down and browsed through it, frowning, until he found the listings for Charing Cross. “There is an 8:38 for Canterbury. The following train doesn’t leave until 8:49. I think we may presume that your correspondent is traveling to Kent.”
“Bravo,” said Dallington. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes,” said Lenox. He paused, trying to define his reaction in his own mind before he told it to Dallington; for the letter had unsettled him.
“Well?”
“It is something in the tone. I don’t know that I can identify it precisely.” He gestured toward the page. “Its despairing scorn for the police, for instance. His carefully generic description of himself.”
“He is being cautious, you mean?”
Lenox shook his head. “More than that. This phrase, ‘God willing,’ and then this rather desperate final line. All of it together makes me believe that the man who wrote this letter is living in a state of mortal fear.”
CHAPTER THREE
Just before ten that evening Lenox’s carriage pulled to a slow stop in front of his house in Hampden Lane.
“A great many lights on downstairs for the hour,” he murmured to Graham, who was sitting beside him. “Yet Jane must be done with supper by now.”
Graham, who was reading the minutes of an electoral meeting in Durham, didn’t look up. “Mm.”
Lenox glanced over at him. “Do you never tire of politics?”
Now Graham did pull his eyes away from the paper, lifting his gaze toward his employer. He smiled. “I find that I do not, sir.”
“I sometimes think you’re better suited to all of this than I am.”
“As for the lights, I would hazard that Lady Jane is waiting for you to arrive home. Not Sophia, hopefully. Well past her bedtime.”
Lenox clicked his tongue in disapproval at the idea, though in truth he would have been selfishly pleased to find the child awake. Sophia was his daughter, now nearly two years of age, a plump, pink creature. All of the mundane achievements of her time of life—stumbling around in a mildly convincing impression of upright mobility, speaking fragmentary sentences—were an unceasing enchantment to her parents, and even to hear her name in passing, as he just had, still made Lenox happy. After a lifetime of polite boredom when confronted with children, he had finally found one whose companionship seemed a delight.
Lenox stepped onto the pavement from the carriage, Graham behind him, and started up the steps toward the house. It was a wide one for a London street; before they had married, Lady Jane and Lenox had been next-door neighbors, and by knocking down a few walls strategically they had merged their houses. It had only taken two or three hundred arguments (between two generally mild people) before it was finished to their satisfaction. It was done at last, at any rate, and thank the Lord for it.
With a nod good night, Graham opened Lady Jane’s old door, on his way to his rooms there, while Lenox took the front door to the left, the one that had been his own for so many years.
As he came in, the house’s butler, Kirk, greeted him and took his coat. “Good evening, sir. Have you eaten?”
“Hours ago. Why the hullabaloo?”
“Lady Victoria McConnell is visiting, sir.”
Ah, that explained it. Toto often visited at unusual hours. She was Jane’s cousin and also closest friend, a vibrant, sometimes flighty woman, good-humored, even in her thirtieth year now exceedingly youthful. She was married to an older man, a friend of Charles’s, Thomas McConnell; he was a doctor, though he didn’t practice any longer, such work being conceived as below the dignity of Toto’s great, very great, family.
“Are they in the drawing room?”
“Yes, sir.”
This was down the front hall and toward the left, and it was here that Lenox turned his footsteps, walking briskly past the flickering lamps in their recessed sconces along the wall. It was good to be out of the Commons. The debate was still going, and he had spoken several times more after returning from his visit to Dallington, but it had become apparent quickly that there would be no immediate vote—many men had much to say upon the merits and imperfections of the bill—and that the truly consequential speeches, from the frontbenchers, would be delayed until the next evening.
He came in and found Lady Jane and Toto side by side on the rose-colored sofa, speaking in low voices.
“Charles, there you are,” said Jane, rising to give him a swift kiss on the cheek.
“Hello, my dear. Toto, I fear you look distressed.”
She ran a hand through her blond hair. “Oh, not especially.”
He went to the sideboard to pour a glass of Scotch. “Did you have money on Scheherazade in the fourth at Epsom? Dallington lost his shirt.”
It was then, to his surprise, that Toto burst into tears, burying her face in Jane’s quickly encircling arms.
In a woman of slightly lower birth it would have been a distasteful spectacle. Rules soften toward the top, however. It was not the first time Toto had cried in Hampden Lane, usually because of a mislaid necklace or a serial novel without a happy ending, and it wouldn’t be the last.
“Don’t be beastly, Charles,” said Jane. “Toto, you and I shall go to my dressing room—come along.”
Toto, wiping her eyes, said, “Oh, who gives a fig whether Charles sees me cry. I cried in front of Princess Victoria when I was a child after my aunt pinched my neck—to keep me quiet—and had a square of chocolate as a prize, so who knows what good may come of crying in front of people, I say. Charles, come and set yourself upon that couch, if you like. You can hear it all, the whole truth about your horrid friend.”
As he sat Toto gave a fresh sob, and Lenox, having believed it to be another trifle, saw that Toto, whom he loved, was truly upset. Alarmed, he asked, “What has happened?”
There was a long pause. At last, sof
tly, Lady Jane said, “She is worried about Thomas.”
Immediately Lenox’s thoughts flew to drink, and he felt a lurch of worry. There had been a time when McConnell was lost to that vice, in the earlier years of his married life with Toto, when she had been perhaps too callow to support him, he perhaps too weak to handle the disappointment of abandoning his vocation, finding himself lost in so many empty hours.
Matters had improved since that time, especially after the birth of their child, Georgianna—or George, as she was called—but not to the degree that bad news would ever come entirely unexpected.
As it happened, however, his fears were misdirected. Toto, steadying herself, said, “I believe he has taken up with another woman.”
Lenox narrowed his eyes. “McConnell? I can’t credit that.”
“It’s Polly Buchanan, the shrew.”
Lenox lifted his eyebrows. “Ah.”
“I don’t believe she’ll rest until she’s turned Sydenham into Gomorrah, Charles,” said Toto—her voice imploring, as if she wished it to be true, and then for him to believe it. Her doubts about her suspicion stood in the way of her anger, he could tell. Her face was anguished.
Polly Buchanan was a woman of twenty-five, the relict of a dashing and red-cheeked young soldier named Alfred Buchanan, who had married her in the year ’71. The week after their wedding breakfast he had gone out on a hunt in Middlesex wearing neither a coat nor a hat, contracted pneumonia, and almost immediately, with an appalling lack of consideration for his new wife, died.
With the sympathy of the world wholly hers, Polly had used the subsequent three years to flirt with every married gentleman in London, until she had a terrible reputation among their wives and rather a fond one in the clubs of Pall Mall. (“She turns a fine leg” was the sort of thing one portly gentleman at the Oxford and Cambridge might say to another.) Since she had never positively trespassed upon conventional morality and had excellent connections, she was still widely received—though rarely, any longer, much pitied.
“But Toto, dear,” said Lenox, “what cause can you have to suspect Thomas of seeing this woman?”
“They rode together across Hyde Park two mornings ago, three turns, and again, I am reported, this morning, three turns.”
“You were not there?”
“No. I was taking care of Georgianna while he complimented her hideous green eyes, I don’t doubt, the swine.”
There was a moment’s silence, into which Toto sobbed. When he spoke, Lenox’s voice was skeptical. “So based solely upon this rumor you have concluded—”
Toto looked up at him with furious eyes, but before she could reply Jane did. “No, Charles, you have come into the conversation halfway through. Thomas has been a different man for some weeks now.”
“Six weeks,” said Toto with profound emphasis upon the number, as if it were dispositive proof of an unspecified crime. Then she added, miserably, “He’s never seemed so happy in all the time I’ve known him.”
“Toto, dear, it must be something else. His work, for instance.”
“He’s working less than ever.” McConnell had a variety of scientific interests and an extensive chemical laboratory. “He goes two days sometimes without entering his study.”
That looked bad. “How does he occupy his time?”
“At his club,” said Toto. “Or so he says. I cannot face him tonight, Jane. I cannot face a lie from my own husband.”
“You may stay here,” said Charles.
Jane scoffed at that notion. “No, don’t say that, Charles. Toto, we would be pleased to have you, always, but you cannot run from your husband at the drop of a hat. Think, what if he is innocent of these trespasses and you stay away from home? Imagine his bewilderment. And then, is it good for George? You must rein in your imagination, Toto. It is for the best that way. Believe me, I only want you to be happy.”
But Toto, however, determined to deny her cousin this gratification, burst into a fresh sob, and for the next fifteen or twenty minutes said very little and would take no refreshment or consolation. Finally, with only a meager attempt at appearing reassured, she left, promising to call in again the next evening. She might have more information then, she thought.
It was bad, no doubt of that. When they had closed the door behind her, Charles and Jane looked at each other with tight-lipped sympathy, sighed at the same time, and without needing to speak about it to understand what each felt—the sorrow, the doubt, the faint tincture of intrigue—began to walk toward the stairs leading up to their bedroom.
CHAPTER FOUR
Just before noon each Tuesday, Arthur, a footman belonging to the staff of Lenox’s house, took the London underground to Paddington Station, carrying two pocket watches. Usually with a minute or two to spare he arrived at the terminal and watched, with a feeling of stale drama, as the large railway station clock ticked toward the hour. When it finally struck twelve o’clock, he reset both watches, one in each hand, to the same time.
This accomplished, he returned to Hampden Lane and wound all the clocks to match the hour upon the pocket watches, or at any rate an average thereof, which usually put the house within five seconds or so of British railway time.
So it had been for many years; it was a quirk of Lenox’s, from the days when he had used the rail system at every odd hour of the day, several times each week on occasion, in his detective work, and needed to be absolutely sure of where he stood in relation to the timetables the railways printed. Like the copies of Bradshaw handily situated in half a dozen rooms of his house, it was an essential professional advantage.
When the clock chimed for half past seven the next morning, therefore, Lenox, sitting over a cup of coffee and a plate of toast and eggs, the Times kinked just inward in his hands to give it a firm spine, knew that it was precisely 7:30—that he was not, like most London houses, three or four or twelve minutes out, in who-knew-which direction.
He rose, buttoned his jacket, took a final sip of coffee, and went outside, where the horses, warmed ten minutes before, were waiting with his carriage.
It was a crisp, white-skied spring morning, with a firm breeze minutely rearranging the world every few seconds as it gusted, a collar flicked up before it settled again, weak new petals scattered from their branches into the streets. When he was settled on the blue velvet bench of the carriage and the horses had begun to pull, he gazed out of his window at the day. He wondered about the man who had written to Dallington—what troubled him, why he was seeking help.
The horses carried Lenox with tolerable briskness down the Strand, and soon the new Eleanor Cross came into view. This tall, thin gray monument was only ten years old—or nearly six hundred, if you accepted the spirit of the thing. In 1290, when Eleanor of Castile had died, her grieving husband, King Edward the First, had ordered a cross to be erected at twelve locations between Lincoln and London: each place where the retinue had slept for the night during the procession that bore her body to Westminster Abbey. Cierring, a name that denoted a specific turn of the Thames, had been the final stop, and in time, the vicissitudes of spelling having finally settled, it became the Charing Cross. During the English Civil War it had been taken down and lost; now Victoria had installed its replacement.
In practice it was now most often a meeting point rather than one of reflection or piety, for of course Charing Cross was also the site of one of the busiest rail stations in London. As they pulled into the drive outside of it, Lenox could see the blue and white striped awning of Gilbert’s Restaurant.
He pulled out his pocket watch. Six minutes shy of eight. “Thank you,” he called up to the coachman. “Wait here, if you please.”
Gilbert’s was a place for a quick meal, with a simple menu, fish in the morning, chops at noon and night. It was also small. There were three mirrored walls and one glass one, looking out at the carriages and hansoms in front of the station.
As he came in, his eyes worked over the room. There were a handful of solitary diners, a
ll men, but all were dark-haired, and none had a striped umbrella. The author of the letter to Dallington had yet to arrive.
Lenox took a seat in the corner farthest from the door, where he could see anyone who entered the establishment. A waiter, whom Lenox had overheard at another table speaking in an Italian accent, approached him. “Sir?” he said.
“Bring me a cup of coffee and a copy of the Telegraph, if you would.”
“Yes, sir. Anything to eat, sir?”
“In a moment perhaps.”
In a rack near the bar at Gilbert’s were all the day’s newspapers, hanging over wooden dowels. The waiter fetched the Telegraph—at a penny a bit further down-market than the fourpenny Times, but Lenox had already read that this morning—and soon after it a silver pot of coffee. In past years Lenox had read nearly every newspaper published in London, the very yellowest rags, in a hungry pursuit of information about the previous day’s crimes, but now he restricted himself. There was so much reading to be done for Parliament—blue books, those slim, blue-bound parliamentary reports, on nearly any subject you could conceive—that he had little choice. To belong on the front benches it was necessary to feign what nature had made impossible, which was a comprehensive knowledge of the world’s ills and fortunes. What was the price of tea in Siam? Why was the union leader of Newcastle’s ironworkers divorcing? How well kitted-out was the 9th Regiment of Foot for the coming summer? Every man in politics claimed he knew the answer to every question. Only Disraeli, the sharpest mind in every room he entered, might have been telling the truth.
Lenox read the news in the Telegraph with mild interest, always aware of the door as it opened and closed. First it brought in a rough-looking man with a long beard, delivering three dozen loaves of bread in oversized wax paper bags, then a woman who took a table not far from Lenox and, seated, began to pore over her diary, biting her lip, scribbling out old appointments and replacing them with new. (What a mystery these women’s appointment books were to Lenox. Even Jane’s always looked like it bore a madman’s private philosophies, scratched and cross-written over and over.) Soon thereafter a gentleman came in, going directly to the bar to order a glass of negus and a hot muffin. Dark hair, no umbrella.
An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) Page 2