The Woman in the Water--A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series

by Charles Finch

  “Thank you, Terrance. The air is considerably fresher here, I’ll say.”

  “Perhaps it’ll keep you out of the papers, too.”

  Lenox scowled at the old servant, who said pretty much what he pleased these days. His father smiled. “Your mother will be happy you’ve decided to visit.”

  “Yes, just a quick one,” said Lenox, forcing a smile of his own.

  “Care for a shot?”

  “Eh? Oh—go on.”

  There was about twenty minutes of light left, and they traded rounds of shots. This was his father’s best gun. On his first attempt, Lenox missed twice. (“I’ll have to fetch ’em, of course,” Terrance muttered in a voice he either did or did not believe to be under his breath, but which regardless could have halted traffic in the Strand.) But then he got the measure of the light and the surroundings, and fired off several good shots, culminating in a double.

  “Very fine shooting,” his father said, and Terrance grunted, which in his case was roughly equivalent to a notarized letter of praise from the Queen.

  His father took the gun back with a “thankee”—in certain mannerisms, he was still very, very old-fashioned, plucked from 1740-odd—and sat in his chair. He split every pigeon cleanly in half, sighed with happiness after the tenth, and broke the shotgun over his arm as he stood up.

  He turned to Charles. “Now, that’s a lovely evening. Son back at home, clay taught its lesson, and Terrance has something to complain about because you missed those two.”

  Lenox’s father was named Edward. He was a half inch shorter than either of his sons, and he always seemed to walk back in his shoes, as if he were assessing the world carefully. He had gray hair, a gray mustache, and very shrewd, watchful hazel eyes, which Lenox had inherited, though in other respects he more resembled his mother.

  Sir Edward had spent his career in Parliament. Twice he had declined positions in the cabinet. This had always gnawed at Charles, though not at Edmund. There were eight hundred baronets in England, and five hundred peers; several hundred members of Parliament; but only twelve in a cabinet. Lenox, churlish though he knew it was, had sometimes felt among people of his class (at Harrow, especially) that he was always just shy of the mark: second son; not in the peerage, though for the most part he could not have given a fig for that, because the Lenoxes had been on their land twice as long as most of those newish Elizabethan earls; his father never prime minister or anything so exalted as that.

  A disgraceful way to feel. Nevertheless, real.

  Edmund, though, who had a slower metabolism and had been raised from the instant of his birth in the knowledge that he would inherit, said he thought that his father, first, always kept his primary loyalty in the countryside, not Thames-side, and second, preferred the flexibility of being in every significant meeting of his party without being bound to a single duty within it—the treasury, say, or the war department.

  Lenox could understand the wisdom of this. But there were moments when he wondered if his father could have been more, done more, gone higher.

  None of that was to imply that his father was in any way a diminished figure in his eyes. On the contrary, Lenox knew instinctively that his own father was more right, more substantial, more significant, than any of the dukes’ sons he knew could ever say their own were. Indeed, Sir Edward was like a royal to his sons—more important than the Queen, in some indefinable way—and it was commonly said in town that he was the best baronet the family had produced.

  He was sixty-one now. As they walked toward the house’s side door, Lenox glanced surreptitiously, but could detect no real change in the older man’s physical appearance.

  “The newspaper, then,” he said mildly as they reached the mudroom.

  Charles had been dreading the revival of that question. “Yes, sir. I didn’t know you took the Daily Star in Sussex now.”

  His father tilted his head. “News will always reach you if it’s bad,” he said. “It’s the kind people are most eager to give.”

  They went to the large double sink and both washed their hands. “It’s not all bad to be invited in to consult,” Charles said.

  His father looked up very quickly. “No! No, not at all. I didn’t mean objectively bad news, you know. Any man can turn any piece of information to his pleasure. The devil can cite Scripture, and all that. One of the curses of each of us being a person, you know.” He shook out his hands, drops flying from them in the golden light. “I’m going to change for supper. I expect your mother will want to see you, though. She’ll be in her study.”

  Charles nodded, dried his hands, then walked through the entrance hall, up a short flight of stairs, and into the study.

  His mother had a small, beautiful room on the second floor of the house, full of her personality, with a small desk whose fine intricacy had fascinated Charles endlessly when he played underneath it as a boy; the wallpaper was a pale lilac, and there was always a clean scent here that didn’t exist in the rest of the house, too light to be perfume, never absent.

  “You’re here!” she said with an enormous smile when he knocked on the open door.

  He came in and returned her embrace. “Susceptible to cats,” he said.

  “You got my wire!”

  “I did. You might have been clearer! I wasn’t sure if it was from you or if the French government had sent an encoded message to the wrong fellow.”

  “And yet I’ll bet you four pounds she was susceptible. Wasn’t she?”

  He frowned. “Have you taken up gambling? I hate to see that vice in someone your age.”

  She hit his arm in frustration. “Was she?”

  Lenox smiled and said that yes, his mother had been right, or at any rate right enough to buy him ten minutes of freedom, though the Lord alone could know what the consequences would be. Some hissing, scratching creature, no doubt. It was almost too great a cliché—a widow who liked cats.

  Here his mother interjected, though, that it wasn’t like that at all. According to Lady Hamilton, Mrs. Huggins had grown up solely with dogs. It was her husband who had loved cats.

  That was moderately interesting, and Mrs. Huggins took them through ten minutes of conversation. His mother rang the bell and asked for a whisky and soda for her son, and a Chartreuse for herself. “The curate and his wife are coming to supper this evening, and Jane’s father,” she said. “Nothing very out of the ordinary. By the way, you looked lovely in the paper! They captured you beautifully, I thought. I’ve half a mind to write the draftsman and buy the portrait.”

  “When are they arriving?”

  “Not for half an hour.”

  “Oh? Listen, then. I have two doctors coming down on Thursday and Friday.”

  She frowned. “Yes, you wired.”

  “They’re the two best men in London. One a consultant, the second a surgeon. I did a great deal of looking into it.”

  She shook her head. “Well—may you live in interesting times, they say the Chinese tell each other. For now I shall just be happy to have you back here. I can’t tell you how happy. Go get changed for dinner, you look like you came from a long day of cleaning chimneys.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Graham was in Lenox’s room (when each boy turned fourteen, they had moved from the east wing of the house, where the several small rooms comprising the nursery were warrened, to the south wing, where the bedrooms befitting adults were situated) and was brushing his suit there.

  “Good evening, sir,” he said.

  “Good evening, Graham. They were civil to you downstairs?”

  “Exceedingly so, sir. Mr. Crump shared a glass of wine with me from his personal cellar.”

  That was the butler, a stern old fellow. “That was decent of him. I say, Graham, about that trunk.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  Lenox was loosening his cuffs, preparing to change. There was a bowl of hot water at the mirror into which he dipped his hands and face, and he patted them dry with a towel. “You said it was sold
primarily for train trips.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lenox shook his head in frustration. “Then I am more convinced than ever that these two women are not from London.”

  “Sir?”

  In his meeting with Mayne that morning before departing for Lenox House, Charles had described Graham’s inquiries about the Walnut Island trunk.

  Mayne and Exeter, who had been present, said that Field’s investigation was heavily focused on four prostitutes missing near Shoreditch. Three of them were of the precise physical description of the victims.

  Nevertheless, Lenox saw two difficulties in the search, which made it exasperating that Field had expended so much time upon it. The first was that prostitutes were a fluid population—they might return home to the country, go to another part of the city, or to another city altogether, for that matter. Take up with a single suitor. Save enough to buy an apprenticeship in a dress shop. Virtually anything.

  (“Still, you must concede that four is a high number,” Mayne had said.

  “I’m not sure,” Lenox had replied. Exeter had looked outraged at this impudence, but Lenox was already more confident with Mayne, if still deferential. “We don’t know how many there are in general.”)

  The second was that they had only two victims, not four, to account for, and both had died within the few days before their discovery.

  Lenox took a fresh shirt from Graham. “I think they were transported by trunk. One of them, at least. And our killer—bear in mind he believes himself to be committing the perfect crime, and is at a very minimum quite clever—stenciled the name of the HMS Gallant on one to make it seem local to London.”

  “Throw us off the scent, sir.”

  “Yes,” said Lenox. “The question is what it means that both bodies were found on the river.”

  “Doesn’t it imply that the man lives near the river, sir?” asked Graham.

  This had been the working theory of the police, and until now the two of them had accepted it.

  Lenox tilted his head, thinking. “It’s possible,” he said. In his room there was a small leatherbound book he had received from his aunt Martha before he left for school. It was filled with intricate maps of London. He went and got it from the shelf now. “On the other hand. Consider: He would want to spend as little time as possible in public carrying the bodies. Do you agree?”

  “Of course,” said Graham.

  Lenox found the page he was looking for. “Let us theorize, then.” He turned the book to Graham. His finger was on a spot. “Look at this spot.”

  “Waterloo Bridge, sir,” Graham said.

  Lenox nodded. “Two train stations within a stone’s throw of it. Charing Cross and Waterloo. The two busiest in London, perhaps?”

  “One would need to look at the numbers, sir. Victoria Station and King’s Cross, among—”

  Lenox waved a hand. “But—”

  “Yes, sir,” said Graham, making a rare interruption to concede the point. “Among the busiest, certainly.”

  Lenox tapped the book. “Then I think it is this. Our murderer is going to another city to commit these murders, returning by rail, and then disposing of the bodies on the river as quickly as he can. He is coming into Charing Cross or Waterloo to do it.”

  Graham frowned. “But why, sir, would he risk traveling across England with a corpse, and then be so immediately eager to get rid of it?”

  Lenox smiled, shaking his head. “Yes, that’s the question. My first instinct would be to say that he has killed two women from a population small enough that they would be noticed. But we might well have heard of that—a village missing two women, for instance.”

  “Most likely, sir.”

  “Therefore I think we must look to motive.”

  “Motive, sir.”

  “Our Walnut Island trunk—designed to deceive. Our Ophelia—never floated upon the water, merely left upon the bank. Again, designed to deceive.”

  “There is method to the madness, you think, sir,” said Graham. “The perfect-crime business.”

  Lenox had sat back upon the bed, and crossed one leg over the other. The fire at the other end of the room was low, and the evening was cold. Still, he stared at the page. “Yes, I think he knows a hawk from a handsaw,” Lenox muttered.

  If he wasn’t purely a madman, chasing the “perfect murder,” what was he, this killer?

  A bell rang. Cocktail hour. That must mean someone had arrived, and Lenox registered dimly that he had heard a carriage a few minutes before, though he had assumed that it was the mail or the butcher or someone like that.

  But it was no doubt Jane’s father, the Earl of Houghton.

  “Your tie, sir,” Graham said.

  He put it on Lenox as the latter stared down at the map of London. “You realize one person this implicates.”

  “Sir?”

  “Nathaniel Butler.”

  Graham and Lenox’s eyes met in the mirror. “A trip from Birmingham to Charing Cross, sir?”

  “Yes, exactly. Two trips, in the dead of night.”

  Graham accepted this impassively, though Lenox, who knew him, saw that he still didn’t believe Nathaniel Butler capable of the murders. “The heavier or lighter of the black jackets, sir?” he asked.

  “Eh?” Lenox was distracted, still staring at the map. “Oh. The heavier, I suppose.”

  “It’s true the wind is southerly, sir.”

  Lenox smiled.

  Over the next days, Lenox, his father, and his mother settled into a happy pattern.

  The single rule of these happy hours was apparently that nobody mention Sir Edward Lenox’s health; or at least, nobody did. There had been two years when Edmund was at school and Charles wasn’t, which Lenox was reminded of. (They weren’t all that distant, after all.) He and his mother spent their mornings together, while his father attended to the estate; except that instead of doing his schoolwork—though he and Graham did doggedly continue to take cuttings from the newspapers—Lenox was now focused obsessively on the case, making list after list, drawing maps, immobile in thought for extended periods as he tried to circle closer to the personality of the person he was chasing.

  At lunch all three of them read. It had been a shock to Charles when he learned at the age of nine or ten that there were families that didn’t do this: the soup coming in (always something fresh and full of vegetables, soup being his father’s favorite food, though Edmund would argue him into a powder, tirelessly, that soup couldn’t be a person’s favorite “food”), then a chop and some potatoes, and usually fruit from the hothouse for dessert, each of the three absorbed in some kind of reading. For his father, generally a Parliamentary report or a biography; for his mother, a novel or poetry; for Charles, though in his youth he would have been reading a tale of adventure, the reports of London newspapers.

  Lenox had always considered this silent state of affairs highly companionable, though Elizabeth had once said they all ought to be institutionalized.

  Then, in the afternoon of these few days, he and his father would find an hour or two to spend together. On the first they shot again, then bowled cricket to each other on the great lawn as Terrance fetched the cherry-red balls, calling fours and sixes (quite unfairly, Lenox thought) by eye. Eventually Lenox’s father ran short of breath, and Charles bowled to the old servant, who would only tap the ball, but whom it was impossible to spin anything whatsoever past: a truly maddening state of affairs.

  The second day, Lenox and his father went on a long ride over the whole land.

  Lenox had grown up on horseback, and his father never looked more natural than atop his beloved charcoal gray gelding, Clarence, a beast of great sensitivity and almost human intelligence. His father had an extremely light seat, a formal refinement in riding that had always seemed to his son to arise from the earth itself, through the animal, and into his limbs, as though by some mysterious ancestral grace.

  Lenox loved to ride with his father almost more than anything on earth
. It had nearly always been Edmund (who, though he adored horses, looked like a sack of wheat tied to a saddle when he was aboard one) who took these sorts of rides with Sir Edward, however. Lenox had understood that this was part of his elder brother’s birthright, and that some transmission of—what? duty, knowledge, familiarity?—took place on their outings.

  But occasionally his father would invite him, and the two of them were a more natural pair, could ride far harder together; and even now Charles took a childish pleasure in that.

  They rode very hard now, floating as lightly as two tufts of down across the great upslope that lay west of the house, two miles in all.

  At the top, his father pulled up, breathing heavily, grinning.

  “I do love a thundering good ride better than anything,” he said, smacking Clarence’s haunch proudly.

  “Likewise,” said Charles, heart pounding from the exercise.

  His father stared back the long distance toward the house and the pond for a while. “Most anything,” he said, clarifying.

  They rode back. Soon enough it was time for supper. Three or four times a week Lenox’s parents had someone or other to dine (often just a particularly close friend of his father’s named Johnson, who owned a good deal of farmland) or went out themselves.

  There was no reading at supper, of course. (That would have been indisputably eccentric.) To Charles’s surprise, they were both inordinately curious about his life in London, his parents. They quizzed him endlessly about his friends, about which public houses and shops received his custom, about whether he ever saw Lady Quilt or that young Cynthia or the Reverend Marblehead, about what hour he rose, about Mrs. Huggins. Even about his case.

  At any rate, three days passed in this contented state of affairs; “most anything” the closest Edward Lenox came to acknowledging his position; and then the doctors began to arrive.