“At any rate I thank you for taking care of Jane and Sophia longer than you had planned.”
“Not at all.”
He had been widowed the fall before, and since that terrible event had only been half himself, Charles thought, as if he and Molly had traded parts of their souls into each other over the long course of their loving marriage. But now, for the first time, there were glimpses of a thaw inside. “Was it taxing?”
“I wish we all could have stayed down there for the whole of January. We need to enlist some philosopher king to run this country once and for all, so that we can have a respite.”
“I nominate Graham,” Lenox said.
“You could do worse. Bear in mind that we have Her Majesty.”
“True, very true. Tell me, did they seem mopey, snowed in like that, my wife and daughter?”
Lenox’s voice was light—but his brother caught its tone. “Oh! Yes, I think so. Sophia mostly sprinted across the ballroom for five or six hours at a stretch and then would take a very civil little nap of six minutes before resuming her exercises. Jane was a perfect guest, obviously. The housemaids will be sadly lost without her.”
Lenox smiled, and asked, “Incidentally, do you know who I’m working for?”
“Who?”
“Gerald Leigh.”
“Gerald Leigh! I haven’t thought of his name in years. Is he in trouble?”
“Did you know that he has become one of England’s most famous scientists?”
“Leigh, who got ripped over and over? I always reckoned him a dunce.”
Lenox frowned. “Yes, I remember that you refused to take my word to the contrary.”
“Old Tennant must be vexed. He’s still up there, you know, though none of us are younger than we were then. Gerald Leigh, bless my heart. Tell me, why have you begun working for him?”
They had only another two or three minutes, but Lenox explained. Edmund promised to drop in at Hampden Lane later, and they said their good-byes with a mutual clasp of the shoulder, each, perhaps, more worried about the other than himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY
In the next three days there were fits and starts of progress. Frost reported that the constables keeping watch over Anderson had observed him meet with Singh and go to King’s Cross Station at the hour the train from the Dover ferry was expected on two days consecutively.
“I find that deeply puzzling,” said Lenox after a moment, when he heard this news.
“Why?” asked Frost. “It seems the most obvious thing in the world.”
“Does it?”
“Plainly they are waiting for Mr. Leigh’s arrival. I’m inclined to arrest them now.”
Lenox nodded. “Yes, it might be for the best.”
“But then why are you puzzled?”
“Because it isn’t clear to me how they know that Leigh is returning.”
Frost started to formulate an answer, then stopped short. He thought for a moment, and then nodded, grimly. “Yes, you’re right, though I hadn’t seen it. Somehow they’re keeping a pair of eyes on him, and know he’s set to return this weekend.”
“Precisely.”
Frost shook his head. “That’s bad indeed. We’ll need to watch them closely.”
Meanwhile the young solicitor who had taken over Middleton’s business, an ambitious fellow named Greyscale, without chambers himself but with a father who had long known Beaumont, informed them that he could find no papers regarding a large recent will, nor anything connected to a person named Townsend.
“The missing valise,” Frost said to Lenox as they exited this interview.
“The missing valise,” Lenox agreed. That was quite obviously where their answers lay. “I am not optimistic that we shall recover it.”
So the days passed. On the Friday evening before Leigh was due to return, Lenox dined alone at his club. His house was off-limits—Jane was having supper with a small circle of friends, including Toto, the Duchess of Marchmain, a fair, plain, and penniless young person named Matilda Ludlow, whom Lenox liked tremendously, and one or two others.
After he ate it was very dark out, black. He went into the streets, thinking to kill time and perhaps ponder his case over a cigar, with the vague intention of stopping in at a small performance of chamber music that his friend Baltimore was hosting.
The air felt mild; above freezing, certainly. But the streets were still quiet after the storm, the sallow light of the street lamps falling on huge empty banks of melting dirtied snow, this indomitable city for once disheveled.
It was the kind of walk to make you look into your own heart—and Lenox felt a strange inkling there, and knew that his wife was still unhappy.
At Baltimore’s, Lenox sat and listened to a lovely rendition of Albinoni, then, at the intermission, met a few old acquaintances and exchanged news. There was a great deal of interest in Middleton’s death. He ran into his creaky but upright friend Lord Cabot, who was a father of seven.
“Would you care to see something genuinely remarkable?” Lenox asked.
“Yes. But it has been seventy-four years and I find myself waiting still.”
Lenox felt in his breast pocket for a small object that had remained secure upon his person continually for two weeks now. “Look, there you are.”
Cabot peered close. “What is it?”
“Why, any thickhead dullard ignoramus could see that it is a penwiper. Sophia made it for my Christmas present. She made it! Look, there, at how she has scored the edge with little daisies.”
Cabot inspected the little scrap of cloth closely. “I admit that it is fine. And how well does it perform its function of wiping pens?”
“As goes without saying, I have not degraded it with the ink of a pen. It’s more in the line of a decorative object, you see.”
Cabot’s eyes twinkled. “In all sincerity I think it a handsome penwiper.”
Lenox folded the little bit of cloth in half and put it in his pocket again. “Yes, thank you. I will pass on your approbation to Sophia.”
“These great artists do not tend to work for praise, though. It’s the act of creation itself.”
Lenox smiled. “Very true.”
Lenox left Baltimore’s before the third act started, cheered by his little burst of sociability; he and Cabot had made plans to dine together at the Travellers’ Club the next Wednesday.
He walked down Pall Mall, mulling over Middleton’s death.
Suddenly a thought came to him. They ought to intercept Leigh at Dover the next morning, he realized. He hailed a cab and directed it to Chancery Lane, where he found a few remaining clerks. Hard at work on a Friday night! It was to Polly’s credit—she being the person who managed their employees.
A young detective they had hired from the constabulary in Liverpool was there. He was a little undernourished sprightly person named Cohen, Jewish, which rather set him apart from the common run of fellow, only middlingly clever but very energetic.
Lenox asked if he would take the morning train to Dover with a note and meet a man at the train station named Gerald Leigh; gave Cohen a detailed description of his friend; and sat down and wrote a note for Cohen to deliver, signed with Lenox’s schoolboy nickname.
“Bring him back by coach, if you would,” said Lenox. “Here, I have the money for it in my office desk. Is that all clear enough?”
“Clear as a bell,” said Cohen in his heavy scouse accent.
“Two men would probably try to kill him if he came into King’s Cross with the Dover train.”
“Blimey.”
“So bring him straight here if you would. Or if he kicks up a fuss, take him to his hotel—but tell him I would like to see him when I can.”
“Done,” said Cohen.
Feeling better, Lenox returned home. The women were still up, noises of laughter emerging occasionally from the sitting room where they were lingering over their coffee, and Lenox slipped by the doorway without interrupting them. He tried to stay awake to see Jane w
hen she came upstairs, but fell asleep in the attempt.
The next morning he was woken early by Kirk’s gentle knock on the door. He went to see what it was, and the butler told him. “A visitor, sir.”
“Who? What time is it?”
“Just past seven, sir. An Inspector Frost.”
“Oh. Offer him tea, please. I’ll be down directly.”
Frost was pacing nervously in Lenox’s study, and accosted the detective when he entered, still cinching his tie. “There you are. I’ve just had a wire. The constable following Anderson had to let him go.”
“What? Why?”
“He and Singh went to King’s Cross Station this morning. After a brief conference at the ticket window, Singh boarded a train for Dover.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yes. Anderson stayed behind. My constable decided to follow Singh. He wired from the first station to explain and apologize—”
“No, I think he did well.”
“The result is that Anderson is lost. Three men are crawling over King’s Cross but he’s not there.”
“Hell.”
“Yes. They’ll have two shots at him.”
Lenox thought for a moment. “Can you wire down the line to tell your man to arrest Singh?”
“I have,” said Frost.
“Good. Because Leigh won’t be arriving back in London by train.”
“No?”
Lenox explained how he had sent Cohen down to Dover to catch Leigh. He was glad he had, now, obviously.
The question was what Anderson would do in London. “The time has come to arrest them, I think,” Frost said.
They had waited because it would be difficult to send either Anderson or Singh to jail without a more direct attempt on Leigh’s life.
But Lenox agreed—better to settle for a short sentence and save Leigh’s life. “I doubt we’ll be able to smoke Anderson out again, though.”
“Why?”
“He knows from our last meeting that we haven’t got him nailed down. What’s the point of putting his head above the ground?”
“What to do, then?”
Lenox shook his head grimly. “We have to figure out who is willing to murder Leigh for the sake of twenty-five thousand pounds. I hope Pointilleux has discovered where Townsend’s son is. I would like to speak with him. As for Anderson and Singh—I have an idea. Perhaps we can set them a trap they won’t be able to squirm out of.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
That evening at five minutes past six o’clock, Lenox and Leigh stepped out of a carriage in front of Burlington House, the home of the Royal Society.
It was one of the most beautiful and recognizable of the enormous houses built along the north side of Piccadilly Street, in the very innermost center of London, with a long, intricate, symmetrical façade, and a squat tower rising above the central doorway.
“How dreary,” Leigh muttered.
Lenox laughed. “You haven’t changed.”
Five or six steps, past two heavy doormen, and they were inside.
For many years this building had been in private hands, but now it belonged to the government. The Royal Academy—the equivalent to the Royal Society for painting and drawing—was also housed inside, having, a decade before, signed a 999-year lease, at the princely cost of a pound a year. Probably not the canniest bit of business Parliament had ever conducted, but a boon to the city, for now there were wonderful exhibitions here.
Lenox and Leigh walked down a colonnade. At the end was a marble door with a Latin phrase inscribed above it, NULLIUS IN VERBA.
Lenox smiled and pointed at it. “Unlike you I paid attention in Latin.” That was true—he would quite literally rather have died than failed to follow Edmund to Oxford, when he was seventeen and a more melodramatic soul. “And as a consequence I can translate that.”
“Can you? How splendid that must feel.”
In an intentionally ponderous voice, Lenox said, “Well, you should have worked harder in school. How truly it has been observed that the boy is the father of the man.”
Leigh rolled his eyes and Lenox laughed. Both of them were perhaps feeling a little foolish—sixteen again for a brief while, whatever their aging bodies might have told to the contrary, and pleased to be in each other’s company.
“I think I can manage the translation of something so simple, anyhow,” said Leigh. “Take nobody’s word for it.”
“Sound advice for a detective too, if it comes to it,” Lenox said. “Not just for a scientist.”
Behind the door was a marble-floored entrance hall, with two staircases curving up to meet each other on a balcony. An attendant took their coats and indicated that they might take either staircase.
Upstairs was a smallish but grandly appointed room with about twenty people in it, gathered in small civil groups. Lenox and Leigh hesitated at the threshold. Portraits of Britain’s great natural philosophers ran along each wall, between large windows overlooking the inner courtyards of Burlington House. There were graceful touches: a terrarium sitting upon a priceless French card table, a beautiful gold-and-diamond chronometer situated at the center of various other treasures on a long oak chest. Servants moved quietly across the thick crimson carpet, offering champagne.
One head turned toward the door—then another—then all of them, and though the men here were too well mannered to accost Leigh at once, Lenox felt the room’s energy drawn toward him.
A young person came forward, wiry but handsome, with curling dark hair. “My dear Leigh,” he said, “how glad I am to see you. We feared we might not.”
Leigh smiled. “I gave my word.”
“Yes—but I know it was given reluctantly.” The man turned to Lenox and introduced himself. “Alexander Rowan,” he said. “Your servant.”
This was the wunderkind who had finally enticed Leigh to the Royal Society. “Charles Lenox.”
“Lenox is a close friend of mine from our schooldays—a detective, now. Previously a Member of Parliament.”
“My goodness, a detective,” said Rowan. “What a fascinating field that must be.”
Lenox inclined his head. “One that intersects with your own, increasingly.”
A look of disdain arose in Rowan’s eyes but was immediately suppressed, gone before it had dawned. Still, Lenox was not a person on whom much was lost, and he felt irritated, as the Society’s president led them around the room, introducing them. For many years there had been people of his class who snubbed him for his profession, and, now, as he was in business, they had begun to return. That he was used to. But Rowan’s condescension was rather bitter—particularly, perhaps, because of the reverence with which the many distinguished-looking men to whom they were introduced greeted Leigh.
At supper Lenox had the luck to be seated next to a lively and easily amused professor from St. John’s College at Cambridge, who in his spare time acted as the historian of the Royal Society. He gave Lenox charming little flashpoints about this history, now and then—how the Society had published Ben Franklin’s famous experiments with the kite and the key, for instance, or how they had appointed a foreign secretary some sixty years before Great Britain got around to it.
“Mind you,” he added, over pudding, “we are not always so brave. In ’64 we gave Charles Darwin the Copley Medal—our highest honor—but without any mention whatsoever of his theories of evolution. And as for Franklin, the less said about that the better.”
“Why?” Lenox asked.
The professor sighed. “It has long been the practice of the government to refer questions of scientific substance to the Society. That was one of our failures. Franklin was an advocate of pointed lightning conductors, while one of our own, a fellow named Wilson, preferred blunted ones. Franklin was quite clearly correct, but the Society did not endorse his point of view.”
Lenox laid down his spoon, pudding half eaten—the food had been abominable, the wine excellent—and asked, with genuine curiosity, “And why did they not?”<
br />
“Think of the time. Anyone taking Franklin’s side was accused immediately of pro-Americanism. Their rebellion was ongoing. And so we fell on the wrong side of science, imagining ourselves to be on the right side of history.”
“I see.”
“Science knows no borders. That is why I find Leigh so admirable. He has never stuck very close to England. For my own part, coming in to London is an adventure. If only he hadn’t declined to give us the Croonian Lecture this year—our most famous lecture, a true event.”
“Has he declined, then?” said Lenox curiously.
“Yes, alas. His lecture tomorrow night is in the smaller theater. Still, we have had Sanderson and Page step in. I received their paper today: on the mechanical effects, and on the electrical disturbance consequent on excitation of the leaf of Dionaea muscipula.”
“I cannot imagine a more consequential lecture.”
“Yes, I know!” the professor said, apparently without irony. “And somehow I am nevertheless confident that Mr. Leigh would have delivered it, I positively am. Still, we may hope that his speech tomorrow is some consolation. For my part I would like to hear about the earlier parts of his career, when he explored South America. A second Banks.”
After supper there was a round of toasts, apparently a tradition at small gatherings like this. The first was to the Queen; the second to the fellows; the third to the “invisible college” of eminent natural philosophers who had begun the Society in 1660; the fourth to Charles the Second, the Merry Monarch, with his twelve bastards and endless intemperance, who had given them their royal seal; the fifth, made by Rowan, to their guest, Gerald Leigh, and with it a long enumeration of his accomplishments. Lenox liked Rowan slightly better after this speech.
From there they retired for port and cigars into a small smoking room. Here Leigh and Lenox had a few minutes together for the first time since they had arrived.
“I sincerely hope I am not shot as we leave,” he said.
Lenox shook his head. “There are dozens of exits. Cohen will take you to safe lodgings. And Anderson and Singh are out of commission.”
He had filled Leigh in on these two nemeses. And on the trap they had set: At Dover, just before the train bound for London was to depart, the conductor had called Leigh off the train, with the enigmatic message added that his “party was waiting for him at the Dover Arms Hotel, where several rooms are booked.”
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