The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

  “Many fellows go months and years without setting foot in the periodical library, of course. Probably fewer than two dozen take an active interest in the outstanding submissions. Of these, I think I may say that I am exceptionally active. One of my great pleasures in life is to survey the new submissions—to see what discoveries have flowered in our country, recently. I am there every weekday afternoon; I am intimate with the periodical library’s contents.”

  The old man stopped and removed his glasses, rubbing them against his sleeve. “Has this to do with Leigh’s papers, then?” asked Lenox.

  Bartram nodded. “We received three papers by Mr. Leigh at the end of September. A treasure trove, given that he has not published with the Society before! May I ask why you decided to, now?”

  Leigh shrugged. “I had been invited several times that year by the Society—both to speak, and to write. I think finally I decided it would be well enough to do it.”

  “I see. As it happened, I nearly missed your papers. There were three of them, and only because I happened to be present when the mail arrived, one day, did I see your return address on the envelope, and, as it was opened, the three separate papers. The next day, they were gone.”

  “Gone!”

  Bartram nodded. “Yes. It was the librarian’s clerk who opened them for his master—a boy of fifteen, without any scientific knowledge—and between his opening them, in front of me, and leaving them on the librarian’s desk, and the librarian’s return the next morning, they had disappeared.”

  “How very strange.”

  “And yet not so strange as this: two days later, one of the papers reappeared, and was duly entered in the ledger. In fact it formed the bulk of your recent speech, Mr. Leigh. Your initial discoveries, but not your farther-reaching ones.”

  Suddenly Lenox saw a partial answer to a question that had been bothering him: Why Rowan was so keen for Leigh to speak.

  Leigh, too, looked as if something was dawning on him. “Two weeks ago, when I was last here, Mr. Rowan warned me not to reveal the contents of the remaining two papers I had submitted, though he assured me that they would be published.”

  Bartram leaned forward. “Did he! They are not shelved in the library—have not been passed to the committee.”

  Leigh shook his head slowly. “I took his advice. He said there might be unscrupulous Continental scientists present. That didn’t bother me—any man may turn his hand to my work, if he pleases—but as it happened, I hadn’t time to address them fully in my speech, anyway. The first paper was more than enough to begin with.”

  Lenox nodded. “I suppose he was content for you to have credit for that one.”

  “It was a breakthrough—but it is the third paper, on the growth of microorganisms, that I think may have reverberations across Europe. Rowan asked me to return and speak about it in two months, upon publication.”

  “By which time you would have been dead, had his plan succeeded,” said Lenox, “and he would be the author whose name was appended to them. So that is how he meant to steal your work. Piecemeal, convincingly.”

  Bartram looked as if he had been thrown into deep waters. “Dead!” he cried. “What is that?”

  Leigh grimaced and then explained, to the old gentleman, the nature of Rowan’s misdeeds. Bartram, in his turn, described his own search for the missing papers. He had never spoken to Rowan directly about them; the librarian, meanwhile, had become convinced that there was only ever one paper, which had been briefly mislaid. But Bartram had stubbornly maintained what he had seen, leading to his secretive request for a moment of Leigh’s time at the Royal Society’s supper two nights before.

  It was around noon when the two old Harrovians found themselves at last taking their leave, having consumed a pot of tea and a plate of gingersnaps, and Leigh having promised to dine with Bartram later that week.

  As they walked out into the street, Leigh said to Lenox, “Well, there. We have an answer of how Rowan planned to do it.” Then putting on his gloves, he added, “You know, that man is the glory of my field.”

  “Joseph Bartram?”

  “Utterly disinterested—utterly fair-minded—committed, generous, honest. He has, I would venture, the precise quantity of brilliance that Rowan does, a modest quantity, that is, more than a layman but not of a sort destined to achieve greatness—and yet how well one turned his abilities to use for our greater good, how productively, and how evilly the other! Men are strange, Lenox.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “I cannot understand it.”

  “Because you are gifted,” said Lenox. “You have that fortune.”

  Leigh shook his head. “I suppose so.”

  “You would hate my work, if you are so easily dispirited by the depths of behavior to which our species can descend.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Lenox’s desk at the offices in Chancery Lane was guaranteed to be a demoralizing vision, and he approached the offices with some gloominess. But it was necessary. Leigh had taken the carriage onward, going to see Frost and provide a more complete accounting of their adventures the day before.

  As Lenox entered the sunny main office, he observed immediately that there was a hushed nervousness in the air. A moment later, as muffled but obviously angry voices rose from behind Polly’s door, he understood why.

  He said a few mild hellos as he walked through the little neighborhoods of the room, wondering whether he ought to go to his own office and leave well enough alone. But curiosity—or concern, if he were more generous with himself—turned his steps at the last moment to join his colleagues.

  He knocked on the door, got a very curt invitation to enter, and found himself with Polly and Dallington. Both of them were standing, both, plainly, upset.

  He realized that he had a card he had not played—already Rowan’s villainy was settled news for him, but he hadn’t been to the office again, and they would have had no way of learning of what had passed. “Leigh was shot at yesterday,” he said. “I was about a foot from him. Very close quarters, too!”

  The anger dropped out of both of his friends’—his partners’—faces right away, and each began at the same time to express their concern and anxiety. “But what happened?” asked Dallington, speaking for both of them.

  “We have caught the fellow who killed Middleton, and wanted to kill Leigh, I think,” said Lenox. “It was Mr. Alexander Rowan. The president of the Royal Society.”

  A dozen questions ensued from this declaration, simultaneously again, and by the time Lenox had begun to answer them, detailing the events of the previous afternoon, all three were sitting, Polly in her usual high-backed chair before the large windows of her office, looking out at the smoky chimneys, across from her Dallington and Lenox.

  It took some twenty minutes or so to unspool the tale. “Can you make it stick to him?” asked Polly at last.

  Lenox shook his head. “We shall see. I fear it may be difficult. It is our word against his.”

  “There are two of you, at least. Both reputable.”

  “Yes, true.” Then he said, turning a cigar from Polly’s desk over in his fingers, hoping they were pacified, “And may I ask how things have been here?”

  Immediately an angry guardedness returned to Polly’s face. For Dallington’s part, when Lenox glanced at him, there was only a resigned look. He was the one who answered. “We have had a letter from Lord Sumlin.”

  “Who is that?” said Lenox.

  “I can’t believe we have found someone Debrett’s knows and you do not!” said Dallington. “A Member of the House of Lords. Dear, dear. What will Lady Jane say?”

  “Well? Who is he?”

  “He’s a lord.”

  “I had grappled my way that far into the matter, complex though it might be.”

  “And he is not often in London, living mostly on the Continent—but when he is, I suppose, he doesn’t like to have his private use of the back halls impeded. He has written an angry note to Chees
ewright because I very gently inquired who he was and why he was visiting the cabinet’s private office—the one at the end of our corridor with the broken window, you know.”

  “I see.”

  Polly held up the letter. “Direct rudeness,” she said. “That is a quotation.”

  “What an old maid,” said Dallington dismissively.

  She looked dangerously angry. “You are threatening to leave us two thousand pounds short a year—and our most prestigious standing client. I would beg you not to treat it so lightly.”

  Lenox frowned. “Can Lord Sumlin’s word carry very much weight with Cheesewright, if he is not often present at Parliament?”

  Dallington and Polly exchanged a glance. The former tilted his head, then admitted, “Cheesewright is getting rather itchy. Finished business, he says.”

  “And you disagree.”

  “It isn’t finished business. We still don’t know exactly what happened—and right at the heart of the Commons!” Dallington said. “Fifteen feet from the chamber in which you yourself sat for several years!”

  Polly looked close to standing again. “We have had this out already for an hour, Charles—the better part of ninety minutes—and I cannot abide the answer Lord John deigns to give me. He is not a free agent. Let us put the issue to a vote. I say that he gives the inquiry up and returns to work. Neither of you has earned a penny for the agency in the last week.”

  She reddened, perhaps realizing her infelicity so close to Lenox’s brush with death, but said nothing more. Dallington sat there looking neutral. He was never prone to confrontation—and Lenox saw, in his face, almost wholly concealed, a pain, which must have originated from it being Polly who was so angry with him.

  But all he said was that he wished to continue.

  Lenox weighed his thoughts, and then said, “I think Polly must be right, John. It is not that I do not admire your tenacity—but that I think if Mr. Cheesewright is satisfied, we must be, too. If Lord Sumlin can make matters tenuous for us, imagine what some greater figure, a cabinet minister, could do?”

  Dallington looked between them, and then stood up. “I am going to continue for a night, anyway,” he said in a mollifying tone, his face etched with irenic apology. “Something is amiss. It has all come too easily, and been too fine, and now they are pushing us away? No. I am not settled in my mind about it.”

  “John—”

  Dallington shook his head, soft in manner but resolute. “They may fire me—or of course you may—but I must follow through on the matter, I fear, for my own conscience.”

  “When did you develop a conscience?” said Polly.

  There was a horrid silence.

  The blow, coming from her, had struck too deep—all three of them saw that instantly. “Excuse me,” said Dallington, and picked up his hat and cloak from beside his chair.

  Polly and Lenox looked at each other, regret already in her eyes, and then Lenox, after a beat, stood up to follow Dallington. But only long enough to see him ducking out of the office and down the flight of stairs into Chancery Lane.

  They did not see him again that day. Lenox—as he had expected—had an interestingly unsteady mountain range of papers along his desk, and three of their inspectors needed urgent help, one of them necessitating a meeting at a local pub with a man named Randolph, who for two pounds and an open bar tab running through midnight sold them the name of an embezzler. (He would vouchsafe the name only to “that Member of Parlyment what works with you.”)

  As a gesture of conciliation, Lenox, before he left, sent over to the Houses a basket containing a few bites to eat and a bottle of Médoc; if Dallington meant to keep his vigil, he might as well be provisioned.

  When he returned home he found that Leigh and Lady Jane were playing cards, laughing over something. Both looked so full of happiness to see him that his heart, hardened by the afternoon’s work, immediately softened, and he settled down with a sigh into a third chair, asked Kirk to bring him something to eat—anything, it needn’t be hot—and then took up a hand of cards himself.

  “The news of my day is that I am to be brought suit against,” said Leigh. “By Rowan.”

  “What!” said Lenox. “Rowan?”

  “Yes. I have been stealing his work for years, it emerges.”

  “That is nerve, I must say. Can anyone believe it?”

  Leigh shrugged. “I hope not. The scientific trail does not bear him out, and he could not re-create my results were Isaac Newton himself to come and garland his brow for the achievement—but any man may say any word he likes, in a court of law, and test the credulity of his fellow citizens.”

  “You seem awfully calm.”

  Leigh looked mystified. “I? Oh—well, I know it to be false.”

  He had always been a fellow out of the ordinary way, Lenox thought, and with a shake of his head laid down a knave atop his wife’s four.

  The next morning was genuinely warm, chasing the last banks of snow down a foot before ten, watching them vanish, in full retreat, into the watery, bright streets by noon. It made the city more cheerful.

  And yet not the office at Chancery Lane: Polly was in a fearsome temper, querying old expenses to their benefit, shouting at Anixter, while Lenox snapped at one of the clerks that he needed half an hour, an hour, without intrusion. The mood was sour. Dallington was often gone—but then, he was often there, too. He was more than a talisman, but his good cheer, his idle words, his neat appearance, Lenox realized, were essential to the happy workings of the agency. When at lunchtime he left to go see Frost and Leigh, he felt their absence himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Frost was in equal parts pleased and frustrated, Lenox found, arriving to meet him at Scotland Yard—pleased to have found the murderer of Middleton, frustrated that he could not extract a confession from him. A careful search of both Rowan’s home and his laboratory on Chilton Street had turned up no incriminating papers.

  “Even if we found Leigh’s missing articles,” Frost said, “they aren’t enough to convict him of murder. Some scientific papers, in the possession of such a man. What jury could find that unusual?”

  “Was there nothing at all out of the ordinary?”

  “Nothing. And yet we now definitively know that he owns the building that houses the Blue Peter, the very public house of the Farthings itself! We are leaning mightily upon the gang’s members we have in custody to implicate him, but they are holding steady, filthy, gap-toothed, knockabout lot that they are.”

  “Hm.”

  “Sooner or later we shall have to let them go. Meanwhile Anderson and Singh may well have murdered a woman in Cheapside last night. Unconnected. A baker’s wife.” Frost sighed. “Ugly, ugly, ugly.”

  Leigh was present again to offer his consultation, and he and Frost and Lenox went through the case point by point, searching for the moment when Rowan might have exposed himself. There was the typewriter, but that was weak proof; Middleton’s meetings at the Collingwood, but those were highly circumstantial; Beaumont, who had finally returned, looking, according to Frost, as scared as a schoolboy who had seen a mouse, could not attest that he had ever seen his partner in conversation with Rowan. The connection to the Farthings had existed for years.

  Leigh grew graver as this litany of misses was stated. “What is our recourse, then, gentlemen?” he asked.

  Frost and Lenox looked at each other uncomfortably. The courts were odd. Many a sixteen-year-old boy had been hanged on slender evidence; but on the other hand, a well-bred person, testifying on his own behalf, without more than another man’s word against him, always stood a chance. Then there was the slippery matter of juries, which so stubbornly followed their own logic. Lenox had once attended a trial at which a boy of thirteen, who had stolen a horse in plain sight of twenty-five people, was convicted of stealing a bridle—the horse following along quite incidentally, the jury explained, which happened to free them from the responsibility of sending him to the gallows. Very sensible,
their prevarication, in that case.

  But it showed the unpredictability of the thing. In three months’ time Rowan might easily be free.

  Frost and Lenox explained the situation to Leigh, who listened carefully. At last, he said, “I think it is my turn to play detective again, then, since you have had yours, gentlemen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But he wouldn’t be drawn out; saying, only, that he had to pay a call to the Royal Society.

  At Chancery Lane again that afternoon, Lenox was surprised to receive a call from Graham. He appeared, with his small unflappable smile, at around three o’clock.

  “You’re most welcome!” said Lenox. “Here, sit. Will you take a cup of tea?”

  “I would, very gratefully,” said Graham.

  Lenox popped his head out and asked their landlady to fix it. Coming back, he said, “I am surprised to see you here. Parliament is in session this evening, is it not?”

  “It is. I am to speak.”

  Lenox smiled. “It has been too long since I came and sat in the gallery. But then, it has been a busy time.”

  “Have you had a case?” asked Graham.

  “Indeed I have—the one to do with my old friend Leigh, which I mentioned when we dined.”

  “And is it resolved?”

  “It is—for now.”

  Lenox told the story once again, and Graham, as he generally did, asked a few probing and thoughtful questions. He was extremely curious about Rowan; the father, he said, had several seats in the House at his command, and held one for himself on the Tory side, though it was rare to see him attend. This was the kind of political trivia that had once been at Lenox’s own fingertips, but now he was surprised to hear it.