The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

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  This book is dedicated to Rachel, Matt, John, and Ben. For why? For Bingham, for Broadway Pizza, for the CCDC, for Summer ’05, for Praha mismatches, for Cashier #4, for Jane Street, for upstate, for AFV, for doing it right, for 1377, for walking the dog, for E3s, for fweakin’, for public consumption, and for setbacks. Thank you for being my best friends! Without your splendid company this book would have been finished in half the time.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Every year at this time I thank my editor, Charlie Spicer, and my agent, Elisabeth Weed, and then somehow immediately fall deeper into their debt. I think this is the economic model Greece was working on. But it’s mostly their fault: they’re such thoughtful readers, such warm people, and such true friends that my deficit can only continue to grow.

  There’s a group of professionals at Minotaur who really understand and love Charles Lenox and who make publishing these stories about him a joy. Andy Martin, April Osborn, Paul Hochman, Martin Quinn, Sarah Melnyk, Hector DeJean—you’re a dream team.

  My family and my friends are the best part of my life, and whatever is good in this book I owe to them. It would be convenient to blame them correspondingly for whatever is bad in the book, but those parts, alas, are always the writer’s own.

  CHAPTER ONE

  London was silent with snow; soft flakes of it dropping evenly into the white streets; nobody outside who had somewhere inside to be. It was the third day of the year. Already the light was fading, though it was scarcely past two o’clock in the afternoon, and in his study in Mayfair, Charles Lenox allowed his watchful eyes to rest upon the large set of windows at the opposite end of the room, the long room, far from the dying fire by which he sat.

  He was alone in the house but for servants. His wife, Jane, and their four-year-old daughter, Sophia, were still at her brother’s house in the country, but business, on behalf of the detective agency of which he numbered one of the three partners, had drawn him back to London earlier than he had anticipated.

  But not enough business, alas, to keep him occupied for more than a few hours the previous afternoon, so that on this lonely and endless Sunday he had already reorganized the long rows of books that lined the walls, had gone through several pots of tea—and above all had waited, waited, waited, all the infinite day through, for a certain visitor to come.

  And still no sign of him.

  Lenox hadn’t looked at the letter heralding this visit since late that morning, but he was conscious at every moment of just where it sat on his desk in its long, crisp envelope, its cryptic contents never far from his thoughts. Out of sheer nervous energy he wanted to open it again. But if he closed his eyes he could probably recite it.

  It was on the stationery of the hotel from which it was addressed.

  The Collingwood

  3rd January 1877

  Lenox,

  I am writing in some haste—too much haste, certainly, to set down the reflections I wish I could of our distant friendship. As you can see, I am in London at the moment. Only briefly, however. Your address (I hope it may still be the correct one) was in the school directory.

  It comes to this: I am in trouble. And yet I am not even quite sure how I am in trouble. I think it may be connected to that business that you and I once

  Here the letter broke off abruptly.

  It began again after some space on the page, with the darkness at the outset of this new passage making it clear that its author had taken a fresh nibful of ink—had resumed his communication after being momentarily drawn away from it.

  I must go. No time to explain further. Send word by return post and I will call upon you there in Hampden Lane, most likely after three o’clock.

  Even in such circumstances I will be pleased to meet again. Until then believe me to be, in sincerest regards and fondest remembrances, your friend,

  Gerald R. Leigh

  The carriage clock on Lenox’s desk had just swung its small bells to tap each other together once, which meant it was two forty-five. Sitting motionless in his armchair, after his restless day, he felt an irrepressible urge to do something—to act. But there was nothing to do, and no act to perform. He had forbidden himself another examination of the letter.

  Which of course meant that at 2:48 he found himself, not quite consciously, standing up out of his chair and striding across the room to examine it again.

  The hotel’s stationery revealed precious little. Lenox was forty-seven now—a tall and thin man, with a close brown beard and a thoughtful, kindly, but undeceived face—and had been a detective since roughly the age of twenty-two, first as a private investigator, now as a professional in the agency he had founded with two close friends. (For several years between these stages of his career, he had been in Parliament, the ancient family game, but that was in the past now.)

  Across that long period, one of the few things he had very definitely learned was how to look at a letter. Some of the most innocuous among them had also been the most decisive—in an early case, he recalled, the Hoxley silver thief had been sent away for life on the strength of a note to his partner that said “A bit peckish”—but this one stubbornly refused to reveal anything to him.

  The Collingwood was a first-rate hotel. That was just faintly surprising, perhaps, since Leigh was an unpretentious soul.

  His handwriting here had a ghost of familiarity to it, long-ago familiarity, dormant now for nearly thirty years. (Gerald Leigh, no less! Well, he could marvel at this reappearance at his leisure. For now he must concentrate.) There was one obviously notable thing here, the letter’s sudden interruption and its reference to Leigh’s trouble. And one more subtly interesting clue: He had sealed the envelope with a signet ring, and Lenox could just make out that its looping intertwined initials were not Leigh’s own.

  RSR, he thought. Or perhaps, upon closer scrutiny, BSB. Maddening, the artistic freedom these jewelers felt it within their rights to take with the alphabet.

  Lenox stood up from his bent position, tapping the envelope thoughtfully against the desk, a hand thrust in the pocket what his wife had named his study-jacket. Brushing its torn lining with his fingers he felt, just somewhere in the back of his consciousness, a pang of anxiety about Lady Jane, and a puzzlement, too.

  Study-jacket, that was her all over—a denomination designed to remind him, not especially gently, that it was a garment unwelcome in any other room of the house, the jacket being a deeply injured old quilted blue smoker, covered with burn marks and the stains of innumerable spills from coffee and teacups, its wrists singed and smudged.

  But she also knew it was the jacket he thought best in—he didn’t care if that was silly; a detective needed superstitions—and as a consequence made certain, in her loving way, that it was always on its hook, brushed as clean as it could get in these latter stages of its life, and with a charcoal pencil in the pocket in case Lenox needed to jot something down.

  He hoped they w
ere all right, he and Jane. They had to be, of course.

  The hands of the little clock on the desk ached forward. Two fifty-four, two fifty-five. Outside, the snow fell. The little bookshop across the way had a drowsy low fire in its window, and Lenox knew that its proprietor, a friend of long standing, would be sound asleep in his armchair with a book open across his belly. The image made him consider what could have brought Leigh to London, and what problem (or what “trouble,” to use his word) could have driven him out of doors on a day such as this one.

  That business that you and I once.

  This was the sentence that had kept its hooks in Lenox throughout the day. For he knew full well, or thought he did, to what it referred: his very first case as a detective, in a way.

  The clock took Lenox past the hour and he went to sit in the cushioned window seat that looked across Hampden Lane. The panes were very cold to the touch; the snow was relentless, reckless with the plans that Londoners had made.

  Three-fifteen and the bells touched once; three-thirty and they did it again, twice now.

  At four, Lenox began to worry.

  It was at five o’clock, having spent the hour in no more fruitful activity than willing it to pass, and, now that it had, having nothing to show for it, that he cried out “Kirk!” in a loud, irritated voice.

  After a long beat the house’s phlegmatic, pear-shaped butler appeared. “Sir?”

  “You can tell Rackham to get the horses ready. Ten Arlington Street—the Collingwood.”

  Kirk raised his eyebrows very slightly, which was the equivalent in him of asking outright whether Lenox had gone insane, and perhaps needed to check into a sanatorium known for its particular specialty in madness, and should he call a doctor.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “It’s no use giving me that look. I don’t want to go out any more than Rackham does, or in all likelihood the horses for that matter.”

  “Yes, sir. You would not care for the footman to call you a cabriolet, sir.”

  “No, I wouldn’t care for the footman to call me a cabriolet, Kirk, because I might need to make several stops and you never know where the next blasted cabriolet will come from in weather like this, unless you want the footman to follow me around London stalking cabriolets for the next several hours.”

  “I see, sir.”

  “Cabs, you know, is what we started calling them at the advent of the modern period, oh, a thousand years ago.”

  Lenox was rarely in such an acid mood, and Kirk inclined his head deferentially to the celebrity of the moment. “Of course, sir. It will be heavy sledding, but I’m sure Mr. Rackham won’t mind.”

  “Ha, ha,” said Lenox bitterly.

  “Will there be anything else, sir?”

  Lenox said no, there wouldn’t be, but then remembered to ask Kirk to fetch him a proper jacket, too, after he had gone to alert the groomsman that his services were required.

  When Kirk had withdrawn, Lenox looked out the window at the weather. It was night out now. They said the year was lengthening, but on the present evidence he doubted it. Barely five and dark as pitch, except for the eerie black-violet light that a snowy street colored back up into the sky.

  He sighed. But then, Gerald Leigh: a very old and deep call upon his loyalties, one that would have drawn him into taking far greater troubles than this one; and might yet, he thought. For he felt a real uneasiness about that letter.

  CHAPTER TWO

  What would he be like, Leigh, thirty years on?

  Their friendship had begun when they were schoolboys at Harrow. In this age that valued education so highly, there were now a dozen or so great British public schools, among them famous ones such as Charterhouse, Westminster, Rugby (which had already lent its name to a sport), Shrewsbury, and Wellington—but two stood preeminent still, Harrow and its infamous rival, Eton, each ancient, each situated upon beautiful grounds, each a nursery for the aristocracy.

  Eton was the more hallowed of the two, Harrow the more sophisticated and smarter. Each was snobbish about the other. The nation and the empire bent the knee to both—one needed only look at their cricket match, the oldest in the world, played each year since 1805 upon the hushed springy turf of Lord’s Cricket Ground, with the batting and bowling skills of carbuncular little boys drawing, for a day, the attention of an entire globe and its news services.

  Harrow lay ten miles of rural road north of London, a miniature Oxford. Lenox’s family had always gone to Harrow, and despised Eton, and his older brother, Edmund—now Sir Edmund, having ascended to a baronetcy upon their father’s death—had cut the trail there ahead of him, smoothing Charles’s way into a group of amiable fellow students, most neither too brilliant nor too athletic nor too brutally arrogant. It had been a soft transition from home.

  Not quite so for Leigh. He had been one of the school’s strangest fellows, and by some stretch Lenox’s most unusual friend. Also one of his dearest, however, even if the two had barely spoken in the decades since their long afternoon rambles across the countryside.

  Leigh had been famous within the houses for the most part as a singularly awful student. Indeed, it was commonly accepted that he was one of the worst students in the history of Harrow School. That was never thought to be an exaggeration: The beaks said it themselves.

  A dimwit, though, was one thing—plenty of space remained for them at the school, if they had other qualities. Half of the education was Latin or Greek, and the boys understood intuitively that Latin and Greek did not form half of the sum total of life’s potential achievements. There were young ladies, for one thing; the school nurse, Miss Farquhar; and cricket, for another.

  But an awkward boy was another kettle of fish. Leigh had been shy, undersized, hopeless at sport, and had had an unfortunate, fatal tendency to color brightly the instant anyone mocked him.

  On top of that he had arrived late. The four forms at Harrow, from youngest to oldest, were numbered Third to Sixth, though by common parlance they were called Shells, Removes, Fifth, and Sixth. Leigh hadn’t come in until Removes, the second year, after all the friendships of Shells had already been consecrated by the things that tie boys at boarding school together so tightly: rising on miserable winter mornings to trudge to chapel, unfair canings, shared sweets from home, minor triumphs on the game fields, late-night chatter between beds.

  If Leigh had been either a sportsman or a swot, he would have found his group, no doubt. But neither had been the case.

  And so he had been utterly alone for the entirety of his first year at Harrow; alone in a way it is possible to be only among four hundred other fellows of your age when you are fourteen, and even the teachers despair of you. So alone that he hadn’t even been among the regular targets of the older, bullying chaps, because he was such a diffident specimen. They gave him the occasional jibe—his background was undistinguished for their taste—but for the most part he was simply undetectable, isolated. Nobody.

  How, then, had Lenox found himself friends with Leigh, for the five months the latter had ultimately survived into Fifth Form?

  Thereby hung an hour’s tale.

  As Lenox sat huddled upon the bench of his carriage all these years later, wind slicing remorselessly through its smallest points of contact with the outdoors, like sad memories late at night, and Rackham up on the box guiding the horses toward the Collingwood, he brought Leigh into his mind.

  Trouble.

  They approached the hotel swiftly, the horses moving well over the untrammeled snow. Two men in greatcoats stood outside of the Collingwood’s brightly twinkling glass doors. Both stepped forward to the carriage as it pulled to a stop.

  Lenox, after he had climbed down the two weak steps, called up, “Give me five minutes, Rackham, don’t stable them if you can help it. I’ll send someone out if I mean to stay longer.”

  The driver touched his cap. “Aye, sir.”

  As he entered the hotel, Lenox felt an immediate and welcome warmth, originating from the e
normous fireplace, taller than the average man, which stood next to the stairwell. Everything was clean and comfortable at the Collingwood, shined wood and shined brass, a fine series of portraits of racehorses along one wall. None of the dust of an old coaching inn. There was a splendid oceanic crimson rug across the whole stone floor. A few discreet groupings of armchairs and sofas were ranged upon it.

  Hard to picture Leigh here, Lenox thought again. He had never been overly solicitous of his own personal comforts. Nor had he been rich.

  Lenox approached the hotel’s counter, which was spaced evenly with small brass bells. There was no occasion to use them, however, since a nattily dressed young man, one hand resting on an open ledger, had been observing him since he entered.

  “Good evening, sir,” he said as Lenox approached. “May I help you?”

  “I hope so. My friend Gerald Leigh is staying here. I wondered if you might ring up to him for me.”

  Looking as if he wished for no more from life than that he might, the clerk shook his head, rueful. “Mr. Leigh is out, sir.”

  Lenox frowned, wondering if they had crossed each other’s paths, and Leigh was at Hampden Lane after all. “Did he leave just now?”

  “This morning, sir. I would be happy to take a message for him on your behalf.”

  Behind the young man there was a large wall hived with pigeonholes, some full, most empty, each with a number upon it and about half with keys hanging from hooks above them. “I would appreciate it. You may tell him that Charles Lenox called. Here is my card.”

  The clerk accepted it. “Of course, sir.”

  He transcribed the name, tore a page theatrically from a small notepad, folded it, and placed it along with the card in the pigeonhole belonging to room 29.

  Where faithfully sat, Lenox saw with a sinking in his heart, his own letter from earlier that day. He could have recognized the dark blue trim of his envelopes from a hundred paces.