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

by Charles Finch

  “None. Mr. Clarkson has remained in London, sir, with his whole staff. The new charwoman in Dulwich, a Miss Maria Horsepool, has wired Mr. Clarkson daily to inform him that nothing new has happened there.”

  “And what about his companions, his friends?”

  “I’ve looked into them thoroughly, sir.”

  There were three men with whom Clarkson was fond of fishing, and perhaps a dozen with whom he dined in London. (Fishing and food: his dual passions, in semiretirement.) Graham had spoken to the three fishermen, and to a man they had been baffled. They were deeply fond of Clarkson, one of them going so far as to say how much he wished his friend might marry again, another that he looked upon him as a brother, if a slightly irascible one.

  As for Clarkson’s dining companions, they were a more varied lot, but Graham had looked closely and found nothing untoward. Many of them chaffed Clarkson for his lack of taste (he had an almost illogically stubborn aversion to wines of the Rhône valley) or his stinginess (he counted a supper bill closely), but all were affectionate. Nor were they in any way dramatic or interesting people, not a single one of them, no gamblers in their number, no adventurers. The steady burgher class, rather—the one quickly becoming the face of Victoria’s England.

  Lenox sat back, thinking. “What to do, then,” he said at last.

  “I am curious as to your thoughts on that subject, sir, as you can imagine,” said Graham.

  Lenox stood up and started to pace. “Four things are clear.”

  “Are they!”

  Lenox laughed. “Anyway—seemingly clear. First, it is someone with access to the house, access that was not interrupted even by a change of locks. Second, it is someone who wishes to send Mr. Clarkson a message. Third, it is someone with a comfortable amount of money. Fourth, it is someone intimately acquainted with Mr. Clarkson’s daily movements.”

  Graham nodded. “My thoughts, sir. And yet those with an intimate knowledge of his plans are his staff, and they are not rich. Nor can I imagine them wishing to send him a message.”

  “What was your impression of the servants?”

  “They are a very dull, faithful lot, about averagely compensated, none in the least bitter or … intriguing, sir, I would have said.”

  Lenox frowned. “Interesting.”

  “Vexing, sir.”

  Lenox was still standing. He tapped his pipe against the table thoughtfully. Finally, he said, “I have a suspicion, Graham.”

  “Do you, sir?”

  “What is your own guess?” The valet looked as if he were going to answer, but hesitated. “You can speak as freely as you like. Any idea at all.”

  Graham looked pained but said, “I have wondered whether perhaps he might have made it all up, sir.”

  Lenox nodded. “A lonely old man, not happy in retirement, intriguing against himself.” He pondered this for a moment. “But he seemed too genuinely anxious, I think, for that to be our best guess.”

  “What is your suspicion, then, sir?” he said.

  “Well—as to that.” Lenox tapped his pipe one last decisive time. “The thing to do would be to set up a trap. But I think we can save ourselves the trouble of that. I’m going to Dulwich.”

  “Dulwich, sir.”

  “Please come if you like. The likelihood that his fishing companions are there is high, correct?”

  “Overwhelmingly high, sir.”

  Lenox nodded. “Good enough.”

  “What do you propose to ask them, sir? It is a daily habit.”

  “We shall see. You may recall that when we first met Mr. Clarkson, I said there were two possible explanations I could imagine, one benign, one sinister. It is time to find out which it is. I have a suspicion, as I say.”

  They took an early afternoon train. There was a new kind of building going up all along this northbound rail line; made of dark red brick, turreted and dormered so that they looked like castles, in their odd way, but situated upon plots of land smaller than the average castle’s stable.

  “What do you think they call those?” Lenox asked Graham curiously.

  “Houses, sir.”

  The young aristocrat rolled his eyes.

  It was true that they were something new—they lay between the closeness of the city and the emptiness of the country, but they couldn’t be said to belong to villages. Villages had always been there; that was what a village meant, at least to Lenox, who came of a village, in his own way.

  As they neared Dulwich, the rural pastures of Lenox’s father’s childhood slowly took over the landscape, however, unmowed, dotted with modest yellow dandelions, edged with woodland. They passed a pond with children splashing in it. Lenox smiled, thinking of himself and Edmund and their friends at that age.

  It was a short walk from the train station in Dulwich to the gentle incline by the town’s river where Clarkson fished. Graham led the way. “They call it Lord’s,” he told Lenox. “A joke referring to the cricket ground.”

  It was certainly peaceful. Trees spread their quiet branches over the lazy stream, which was spotted with pools of gold light.

  Two men were sitting in slatted wooden chairs there. “It’s Mr. Graham,” one said when they were near.

  “Hello, gentlemen,” Graham said. “This is the employer I mentioned to you—Mr. Charles Lenox.”

  The two men were both of Clarkson’s age. Neither stood. “How are you?” Lenox asked.

  “Passable,” one answered.

  He was a leathery old chap, short. Ex-military, Lenox would have bet. The other was a bit softer in the middle. Both were carelessly expert in the way they cast their flies. “Did you need something else, Mr. Graham?” the second fellow asked curiously.

  Lenox patted the thin leather case over his shoulder. “Actually, I proposed the trip. I thought I should hear it all from you, though it seems as if there’s not much to hear. To be honest, fishing didn’t sound a bad way to pass the afternoon.”

  “You’ll have to settle for the grass,” said the first fellow. “I’m Joshua King. My friend here—Rupert’s friend, too—is Jack Stuart. Cast away!”

  Lenox did. Graham (as they had agreed) went into town to order lunch from the public house there, leaving them with two bottles of a very fair Sauternes that had been packed in London, chilled and delicious. The conversation drifted by like the river, slow and pleasant; Stuart proved easily the best fisherman of the three.

  “This is England,” said Lenox, sighing happily.

  “It’s not Brazil,” said King.

  Two hours passed, when finally Lenox, who was thoroughly enjoying himself, at last set down his rod. He stood, stretched his arms high—his shirtsleeves were up, his jacket long abandoned, the remnants of a meal of cold chicken and brown bread nearby—and said, “Well, gentlemen, I wish you would tell me something, if you please.”

  “What’s that?” said Stuart.

  “Why are you leaving these five-pound notes for Mr. Clarkson? The sport has gotten out of hand.”

  King—the military man—remained impassive, eyes on the river, but Stuart started, and turned to Lenox, wide eyed, lulled, through the drowsy afternoon, into thinking he was no figure of suspicion.

  In that moment, Lenox had them—and it was an exhilarating little victory, exactly what he had imagined being a detective might be like.

  An hour later, when he and Graham boarded the train to return to Waterloo, they had their answer, or at least enough of it to be going on with. They discussed Clarkson’s case on the return trip, teasing out the details.

  Lenox’s intention was to go straight to see his client, but at home, where the cats greeted him, there was a note that immediately commanded his whole attention.

  Charles,

  Come to the Marchmains’, would you? I shall be there between six and nine o’clock—they will give you supper, I’m sure, if you’ve not eaten and have no plans.

  Elizabeth

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Lenox put on his favorite sui
t, a light gray twill which was appropriate enough on a late May evening. He felt pure terror, standing in the mirror and tying his tie. It wouldn’t do to get there at six o’clock; it also would be impossible to get there later than 6:05.

  At 6:04 he stood on the steps of a wide terraced house, bright with lamplight inside, which made the evening, pink and still not close to dark, feel unnaturally still, almost lonely.

  He knocked on the door and was brought in. The Duchess of Marchmain greeted him. “Charles! How welcome you are. Elizabeth said she had mentioned that you ought to come—having been all over Russia, and catching murderers, and generally becoming infamous.”

  He smiled. “You’re sure I’m not troubling you?”

  “Quite the reverse. There’s a mountain of cabbage salad that only you can make a dent in.”

  “I say, what an enticement.”

  She laughed and led him inside. She was a woman of thirty-three, cheeks highly colored, pretty and very cheerful and affectionate, friend to several of Lenox’s closest friends, though they had never been more than acquaintances.

  It was a newer dukedom—but a dukedom nonetheless, and the front hall was very grand, with a Van Dyck portrait of Charles II over a table dominated by a huge bowl of brilliant purple and white flowers.

  Just as Lenox was about to ask the duchess how she had been, there was the clatter of a door, and a little boy came sprinting across the black-and-white checkerboard tiles, running hell-for-leather. He wore a suit jacket, a tie, short pants, and brown shoes with white socks. He had very knobbly knees, much bruised and cut.

  With a swift, effortlessly athletic motion—she was a mother to four—the duchess caught him in a strong arm.

  Suddenly a harassed-looking governess emerged from the same door, breathing heavily. “I’m very sorry, Your Grace.”

  The duchess was scowling at her son. “John Dallington, what were you doing? Can’t you see we have guests? Say hello to Mr. Lenox.”

  The little boy, bright faced, probably about four, looked at Lenox directly and said, “No, thank you.”

  “John,” said his mother threateningly, and the little boy, sensing he had gone too far, said a sullen hello to Lenox.

  “Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Lenox said, smiling.

  “What was he running for, Susan?”

  “He stole a tin of biscuits, Your Grace.”

  It took only a quick search to find and confiscate this contraband, and within less than a minute, the prisoner was being led upstairs toward bed, badly out of countenance.

  “Never have children,” the duchess told Charles as she took him into her sitting room, where she entertained most evenings.

  “I see no immediate prospect of it.”

  She smiled. “Oh, you’ll be caught soon enough.”

  Lenox followed her into the room, expecting a small gathering. To his surprise, only Elizabeth was there, sitting upon a pink sofa, a book in her hand. She looked up and laid the book down in her lap. “Oh, hello, Lenox! I had hoped you would come by. We are desperate to hear about this murder.”

  “Wait,” said the duchess. “Don’t start. I’m going to run into the kitchen and tell them to bring in more food—and I want to say goodnight to poor Lord John. He had been hatching plans to steal those biscuits for days.”

  “You’re a soft touch,” Lenox said.

  “I am, it’s true. The duke should be home any moment, too—at any rate, wait five minutes, and then you will sing for your—well, for your cabbage salad, because really it is priced to go—absolutely mad amount to have made—”

  And the duchess left them alone, Elizabeth laughing.

  When Lenox turned back to her, however, her face had changed entirely.

  She was sitting straight upright, and staring at him intensely. They were alone.

  He felt his heart begin to go faster. “Elizabeth—”

  “Listen to me,” she said in a quick voice, “for we may only have a moment. By every law of marriage to which I swore, I ought to send your letter directly to James. That is the truth.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t plan to do so. He would tell me never to see you again, and he would be quite right. But I care for you as a friend, Charles.”

  This was all said so quickly that Lenox barely had time to absorb it. “I—”

  “We shall of course not be alone together again. Not now. I am happy to meet you, whether it be at dinner, or a ball. But we cannot be alone together anymore. We cannot even be in a group as small as three or four.”

  In his worst imaginings, it had not been quite this bad. “Very well,” he said.

  “I love my husband,” she said.

  “I know—I knew that when I wrote.”

  She looked at him searchingly, and then, with an air of release, leaned back into the soft cushions of the sofa. “I cannot begin to imagine what you were thinking.”

  “No,” he said. “I apologize.”

  “I have imagined something of your feelings, but our friendship—I cannot conceive what your motivation was, except to hurt me.”

  “Never that,” he said miserably.

  “Then what?”

  Now he leaned forward on the sofa. “I think you are being very hard, Elizabeth,” he said quietly. “I am—I am beyond sorry, if there were a word stronger than the word ‘sorry,’ I would speak it, you know I would. But I think you are being very hard.”

  “Hard!”

  “Well—yes,” he said.

  She sat up again, too, and looked at him, eye to eye. “Hard, you say! Think for a moment in your simple life what it means to be a woman, Charles.”

  “I know that, it’s only—”

  “No—stop, and please, think of it for a moment. Use your brain. You would have to murder a man to suffer the same damage to your reputation that would occur to mine if I were to kiss one.”

  He paused. “I know that.”

  Her voice had fallen to a low hiss. “A single whisper of a romance between us, and my name would be gone forever. It is also all I have. Nothing is my own. When I married, every penny that was ever mine passed to James. And I made that bargain willingly! I love him. But do not speak to me of hardness—please, don’t, when my life will be so irredeemably worse without your friendship, and when I am bound for the great empty countryside in five months, and when—when—”

  He saw that she was near crying, and with his whole being he wanted to reach out and take her hand. Instead he leaned even farther forward and said, in an insistent voice, “You are right, and I am wrong. That is all there is to it. I have been hideously thoughtless. I hope you will forgive me.”

  “I forgive you, you fool,” she said.

  In that moment, he could almost have sworn that she loved him.

  She stood up and went to the sideboard, where for fifteen or twenty seconds she busied herself with something. Then she turned back. Her face was a mask. “Lucia Chatham has been talking about you virtually without stopping, you know.”

  “Has she?”

  “She’s very beautiful.”

  “Indeed she is,” Lenox said. He had never been unhappier. “Indeed she is.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Three days passed. The only joy Lenox had in this time came from rowing down the river, the exercise emptying his mind.

  On the third morning, unable to help himself, he rowed all the way down to Walnut Island. It was just barely light by the time he got there—he had taken to setting out earlier and earlier in the day, well before dawn, since his sleep was restless—and after pulling the scull to, he watched the sun rise slowly over London’s eastern edge. He had brought a sandwich wrapped in a cloth napkin and a bottle of water, and he gulped down both.

  When he was finished, he turned the scull and pulled more evenly, though still with effort, the roughly half hour it took to get to Bankside.

  Here it was already busy, large men hauling cargo in and out of the various anonymous warehouses,
including that of Corcoran and Sons, where evidently business carried on.

  Lenox wondered if its title partner had returned from Scotland upon hearing of Jonathan Pond’s death. He must have. Daughters married badly every day.

  When he had been standing there for fifteen or twenty minutes, perhaps even longer, a fat little boy passed. There had been maybe fifteen or twenty similar boys, but he was the first who was juggling four eggs as he walked, easy as you please. Lenox smiled.

  “I say, are those hard-boiled?” he asked.

  The boy turned. He was perhaps thirteen, with an angelic mischievous round face. “Not yet. Why?”

  “They’ll break if you drop them.”

  “Don’t mean to drop them.”

  Lenox laughed, and the boy started to juggle again, standing there, showing off a bit. He had a battered rucksack made from coarse cloth. In large faded black letters, it said HMS MATILDA and in smaller faded black ones, underneath it, MCEWAN.

  “I’ll give you a shilling if you can do a fifth,” Lenox said.

  “Haven’t got the egg,” the boy replied, eyes on the four that were flying in the air. “Could I have the shilling for this?”

  “Can you do it on one foot?” In response, the boy, who was almost uncannily graceful given his bulk, first stood and then began to hop on one foot. Finally Lenox laughed, passed him the coin, and said, “Here you are, then. What do you do on the Matilda?”

  “Rope maker’s mate.” The boy looked at him suspiciously, flipping the shilling across his knuckles to check it was real. “Why?”

  “Just curious. You’ll be shipping off soon, I expect.” Lenox gestured at the bag. “The Matilda.”

  “Us? No, we just arrived in London last night, thank the cross. She’ll be going up into dry dock for six weeks. We’ve been away eighteen months. Plenty of ropes to remake, but it’ll be nice to have a bit o’ London. My mother and father’s here. Going to see them now.”

  “But—”

  “Shore leave,” the boy added importantly.

  Lenox looked at him strangely. “Last night?” he said.

  The boy pointed upriver two docks. “You can see her there. Not a lick of paint left on her hull. Hard weather down the cape.”