“I?”
She looked up at him with her large eyes. “Say you will.”
“I would be the luckiest man here, of course,” he said.
She smiled and wrote his name down. His own card, which was blank, she took from his jacket pocket—it was peeking out—and wrote her name upon it. “There. That’s settled.” She leaned back, stretching her arms. “What happens if I am drunker than I expected, Charles?”
“What happens if I’m drunker than I expected?” he replied, laughing.
“Nothing will happen to either of us, is the answer.” They were strangely alone in the little bower, despite the incredible din of the party, and it didn’t feel wrong when she gave him a very quick kiss on the cheek. “See?”
He realized they were both probably very much drunker than they had thought.
“There you two are!”
Charles and Lucia both looked up, startled, no doubt with guilt in their faces. Elizabeth and their friend Hugh stood in front of them. Elizabeth was wearing a blue dress, light brown curls falling around her face. There was that Gioconda smile in her eyes: it was how Lenox had always pictured Jane Austen, deep brown eyes that missed nothing, took it in, saw the humor and the irony in it, and refused to pass judgment.
“Hugh is going to commit suicide. The princess isn’t here.”
“How are you going to do it, Hugh?” asked Lenox.
He sighed. “Probably the river.”
“You can be the third victim!” said Lucia.
Elizabeth caught Lenox’s eye. The princess was not a proper princess—or, she was, but a French one, and therefore a tier beneath their duchesses, because the French were backward in virtually everything. The Princesse de Parme. She was odd looking; also exceptionally alluring, somehow. She was here for the season, and Hugh had fallen hard for her, having finally given up on their friend Eleanor.
Just at that moment, the orchestra struck up inside. Lucia grabbed Charles’s arm. “This is my dance, Charles! Come, let’s go, let’s go.”
“I’m yours, my dear,” said Lenox, offering his arm.
“We’ll be late for the switch—the best bit—hurry, would you, hurry. Hugh, if you’re dancing, come along.”
“Back in a moment,” Lenox said to Hugh and Elizabeth. (Elizabeth wouldn’t dance at all—Hugh’s card he had no doubt kept strictly clear, poetic soul that he was.) “Save a little daylight for us.”
He felt Elizabeth’s eyes on him as he walked half a step behind Lucia, inside to dance. He was certainly much drunker than he had thought.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Lenox wobbled into consciousness late the next morning, first barely aware he was there, then aware that it was unpleasant to be there, then finally awake enough to realize that he was awake. It was late. Cripes, could suns be this bright? Who allowed that? With intense irritation, he pulled a pillow over his eyes.
He had the most awful taste in his mouth. He reached blindly and realized, with gratitude, that there was a glass of cider with chips of ice in it next to his bed. Graham, bless his soul. He sipped it and then shoved the pillow on top of his face again.
He felt shame down to the bottom of his soul. Twice in two weeks, to be as hungover as a parson, when for three years at Oxford he had kept a clear head.
As he lay there, the night began to return to him in bits. Above all he remembered the gliding, carefree, dizzyingly happy feeling of dance after dance with Lucia Chatham—she had scratched Laurence off her card for the ninth dance and given it to Charles, to scandalized murmurs in the room, which had seemed quite funny to them at the time—and the equally happy sensation that Elizabeth, sitting with the other married women along the side of the grand pink and gold room, so many of them much older than she, never stopped watching them. He had a vague recollection of her face growing dark, and the wholly unbecoming gladness that it gave him to wound her. How awful a part of him. Then there had been the orchestra packing up, the final drinks, the thinning of the crowds, the grandiose plans with Hugh and Lucia and Eleanor for day trips the following afternoon.…
Could his father really be dying?
Deep in the night, when it had finally been time to go home, he’d realized that through the whole night this question had been passing through some deep and wintry ravine in his mind, on a journey that even he could see only from afar.
Lenox had never been a drinker, and in the cold, lonely moonlight outside his flat he had, in a moment of lucidity, wondered if this was why he had agreed with Lucia to scandalize everyone at the ball, to be the center of attention, to drink too much.
He forced himself up onto his elbows, blinking hard and angrily at the windows. Next to the glass of cider was some toast. He ate it, and when it hit his stomach, he felt immediately a little more human. (“A morning head lasts twenty minutes at your age,” he remembered his mother telling him when he set out for Oxford. “Treasure that. It will all change when you’re thirty. Then again when you’re forty.”)
He reached for a notebook next to his bed. The last page he had written in was from his trip to the police warehouse in Ealing. It was headed with that name:
EALING
Shoes ✗
Door ✓✗
Trunk ✓
Flowers ✓
Spectacles ✗
Shilling ✓✗
Strangulation ✗
Lenox studied this for some time. Where he had made a checkmark, he felt fairly confident; an x, still confused; both, he thought he had some idea of what was going on.
He pushed the small white button on his side table, which was wired to clang a bell in the servants’ quarters. He rarely did this, since he considered it, if not rude, at least imperious. But his limbs felt as though they were full of wet sand, and he desperately wanted some more iced cider, some toast, and some very strong tea.
It was Graham who appeared. “Hello,” said Lenox moodily.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Ha! A wry observation. What time did I come home?”
“I did not notice the hour, sir.”
“Please be so kind as to stop lying.”
“Four o’clock, sir.”
“Hm.” Lenox rubbed his face. “What time is it now?”
“Just before eleven.”
“It’s not looking likely that I’ll make six o’clock church service.”
“No, sir.”
“I suppose I’ll go to hell.”
“I couldn’t speculate, sir.”
Lenox held up his list. “I want to ask you something. But could you get me some more of that—more of both of those?” He gestured at the cider, the toast. “They are the only reason I’m speaking to you this politely.”
“Not at all, sir. As for the—”
Just then a raw-cheeked young footman came in without knocking (he had been employed for under a month here, Roger was his name, a very decent fellow of around fifteen with bright orange hair) and bearing a silver tray with the things Lenox had asked for, and also tea, milk, sugar, and a plate of digestive biscuits. He put it on the small circular dining table near Lenox’s bedroom window about as inelegantly as any human possibly could have done, then withdrew, tripping over the threshold on the way out.
“He’s doing very well for someone who was born nine days ago,” Lenox observed.
“Come now, sir,” said Graham, smiling.
That chastisement was quite right. None of these people were responsible for his condition—and it was base in him to take it out on them.
He vaulted out of the bed, ignoring the screech of his nerve endings, and went to the breakfast table. “I apologize.”
“Not at all, sir.”
“And the papers?”
“Would you like to read them in here?” Graham asked.
“I cannot face Mrs. Huggins.”
The bedroom was a place she did not breach, at least not while Lenox was present. “She has been mostly absent, sir,” said Graham.
Lenox looked at his valet curiously. “Absent?”
“Yes, sir,” said Graham, with an imperceptible shrug. “I have seen her—dressed to go outdoors—now and again. But she has mostly been away from the apartments, sir.”
“Anyway, I don’t mind eating in here. I’ll take the papers if it’s not too much trouble.”
“By all means, sir.”
Graham was at the door when Lenox had a thought. “Wait. Graham.”
“Sir?”
Lenox was staring down at the list in his hand. He took a sip of tea.
“Do you remember my telling you how bothered I was by the shoes of the second victim? The Ophelia?”
“I do, sir.”
Lenox studied the list in silence for another moment. “I think,” said Lenox slowly. “I think I know why they bothered me.”
“Why, sir?”
“They were not part of the picture.”
“The picture, sir?”
“The delicate nymph, laid out upon the board. The flowers, the white dress—wet, don’t forget, though the board was dry! And yet she was wearing the kind of shoes that Mrs. Huggins might.”
Graham tilted his head, thinking. “The significance is not quite clear to me, sir.”
“Haste,” said Lenox. “Something in his plan went wrong.”
“Such as, sir?”
But Lenox was in a study, staring at his piece of paper. Finally, he looked up and said, “No word back from Wilton’s?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Hm. Tomorrow, perhaps.” He looked at the paper and muttered, “By God, I’d like to get him.”
The sun flashed across the window, and Lenox winced. He looked up. At the ball the evening before, he had met Lord Billingsley, who was the current and 17th Earl of Sedgewood. The Sedgewoods and the Lenoxes were related, though the Sedgewoods were much grander—they would have considered the Lenoxes a cadet branch of the family, while the Lenoxes, who were as prideful as the next group of men and women God had chosen to place on earth, considered themselves in key respects better than the Sedgewoods.
Nevertheless, Billingsley and Lenox’s father were deep friends, with twined roots. There were few men the earl met on equal terms, but Edward Lenox was one of them.
Charles, drunk, had greeted his second cousin with affection—he had spent many weeks at Sedgewood House as a child—and was taken aback when his relative’s lined old face remained stony.
He couldn’t remember the exact words. That nobody else would say it, but Charles was making an embarrassment of himself as a detective; that his father deserved better; his brother; that he had better not expect to remain in society much longer if he chose to stay on this course.
No doubt the old earl, deferred to by probably tens of thousands of people in the course of his life, had expected Lenox to immediately internalize this piece of chastisement. But now, with morning come, all he could think was that he had a strong feeling about the door; he was sure he knew about the trunk; and he was quite certain that if his hunch was right, he would have his hand on the murderer’s collar the next day.
Let them try and stop him then.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
At a shade before six o’clock on Thursday morning—feeling fit as a fiddle, Lady Hamilton’s ball a distant memory—Lenox stood by the river and watched its gray waters reconstitute themselves over and over, rise, fall, sweep, crest, wave, dip, splash.
It could be argued that the Thames hadn’t changed in seven thousand years. Or—that it changed at every second, and in every decade, and in every century, while remaining eternally itself. The millions of boats that had passed down it, just think! Yet here it was, dark, flat, as stark as a god. They said a body a day was fished from its waters. They said every Londoner drank thirteen cups out of it one way or another between dawn and dusk, in wine, in beer, as water itself. King John had signed the Magna Carta on one of its islands. Millions of generations of fish plucked from it. A city rising, falling, rising around it. And none of it changing the river even slightly; not really.
How separate humans were from nature, thought Lenox.
He was standing on Bankside. In fact, he was at precisely the point where the second “perfect” had been discovered. (That was the awful nickname the press had settled on for the two victims, and for their murderer, simply “The London Murderer.” No doubt that gratified him, its exclusivity: The.)
He could see four bridges. One was Westminster Bridge, which touched Parliament, and a memory came to him unbidden of his father taking him and Edmund to the House of Commons when they were, oh, perhaps five and eight.
“Do you know why the bridge is green?” he’d asked them as they pulled across it.
“Why, Papa?” Edmund had said—it was for him, this trip, though Charles had suspected of himself, even then, that he might like to go into that grand building every day and decide what the nation should think.
“It matches the color of the benches in the Commons exactly,” his father had said with a soft smile. “Vanity, isn’t it? But pleasant.”
Now, eighteen years later, Lenox turned around, away from the river and its bridges, and examined the thin shingle behind him.
Facing the Thames here was a row of warehouses, interspersed with thinner countinghouses, almost all of them to do with the great shipping concerns around them—rather as, on the water itself, small fry lived in the wake of the whalers, outfitters, accountants, the kind.
Lenox’s scull was tied onto one of the posts scattered at intervals along the river. He was red and sweating, deep in thought: the spectacles, the door. He looked down at the small pebbles mixed into the sand.
At last, he took out his notebook and scanned the buildings in front of him one by one. The address was Bankside, as simple as that—here, numbers 30 through 114, roughly.
He stared for a long, long time—perhaps twenty minutes—without anyone passing by, and finally, with a sigh and a feeling of significance, a certainty that this was the day, he got back into his scull.
The vital thing was to hear back from Wilton’s, the trunkmakers, Lenox thought. The earliest they might conceivably write was nine o’clock, so naturally he started to look for their wire at around eight fifteen.
It kept on not arriving. He would have settled for a note from one of the constabularies, the identity of one of the perfects. Nor did that arrive, however.
Instead Lenox and Graham spent the morning catching up on their newspapers. (Crime went on occurring around London, which seemed rather unfair.) There was one note: Mayne reported that Sinex was irate that Lenox had gone to Ealing against direct orders, and demanding that Lenox be fired summarily.
Moreover, he had still yet to pick up his pay. He would do that in person today, Mayne said; or Mayne would follow Sinex’s advice.
Lenox crumpled this message and hurled it across the room to the fireplace, though it fell just short. On the side table nearby were the two ten-pound notes of Rupert Clarkson, like a couple of shreds from the tattered flag of his dignity.
He sat in silence for a long time, then burst out at a charwoman who was passing through the front hall. “Where on earth is Mrs. Huggins?” he called to her.
She looked absolutely terrified, and Lenox felt instantly guilty. “I can’t say, m’Lord.”
Lenox was not a lord. “If you see her”—this was hardly likely, given that she was leaving—“tell her to come here immediately. Graham, do you know where she is?”
Graham first nodded in courtly fashion to the charwoman, who had been standing rooted to her spot, and now hustled away. “She was here this morning, sir.”
“Was she? How splendid for her. Nevertheless, please inform her that I intend to stop her pay if she is not present during working hours.”
“The house has never looked finer, sir.”
Lenox looked around, and saw to his intense irritation that this was indeed true. There were beautiful vases of hydrangeas on every surface; every dustless sur
face. It was just like Mrs. Huggins to be most superlative in her work as she was shirking it. “It looks fine,” he said shortly.
“Shall I send the wire?” Graham asked.
It was on the table, waiting—a wire to Wilton’s, asking for their progress. “Not till eleven o’clock.”
They waited, and at eleven on the dot, Graham went out to send it. Meanwhile Lenox went to collect his pay. His name was in bright red on a white board by the pay window, as if he’d committed some crime; the man behind the counter laughed nastily at him.
“Not many’s too good for their pay,” he said.
Evidently Lenox was—known, here, too. “Nor am I.”
“Here you are, then.”
“It comes in coins?”
“‘It comes in coins,’” he replied in falsetto.
Lenox gave the coins to every beggar who asked for them along his path home, indiscriminately. Then he almost traced his step to ask for them back, because he hated the arrogance of the gesture. But of course, it was too late. Half the coins were no doubt spent already.
He wished he could cast himself back to that morning on Bankside, when it had all seemed so clear.
Wilton’s had responded. Graham handed over the telegram when Lenox entered. Lenox read it. “Damn them.”
“Sir?”
He passed across the wire, which read, with infuriating economy given that it was postpaid,
Assembling STOP Regards STOP
“No indication of when it might arrive,” Lenox said.
“Would you care to tell me your theory, sir?”
“No, because I don’t want to be wrong,” said Lenox bluntly.
Graham nodded. “I understand, sir.”
The day was saved, unexpectedly, at a little before noon. There was a ring at the door; it was Elizabeth.
At seeing her, Lenox felt, first, a sudden consciousness of shame at how he had behaved Tuesday night, though he could see no clear reason for it, and second, the release of the nervous tension in his limbs, the toll of that morning of waiting.
“Hello, Charles,” she said. “I was just out calling and I thought I would make you give me lunch.”
The Woman in the Water--A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series Page 16