The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

  When they had exhausted the subject of Rowan and Leigh, however, Graham said, “I am here on other business.”

  “Business? Are you?”

  “There are strong motions under way to release this agency from its post in Parliament.”

  Lenox, taken aback, repeated, “Motions?”

  “Yes. I have heard of it several times today already—and given our particular affiliation, I feel certain I am not hearing the worst of it. Word has been spreading. Too intrusive; too little use. One of the gentler terms I heard was ‘incompetent.’ It feels like a campaign against you.”

  Lenox ought to have been disturbed by this news, but instead he was confused. “Incompetent,” he said. “And yet we have resolved the most recent cases Mr. Cheesewright has put before us. As for an intrusion—I know Lord Sumlin—”

  “Not a serious person.”

  “He has been complaining. But I cannot imagine Dallington affecting the daily interactions of any of the House’s Members. I don’t doubt you in the slightest, you understand—I am only taken aback.”

  Graham’s lips tightened in thought, as he considered this. “We know that there are Members who wish you ill.”

  “Monomark.”

  The agency’s old partner, LeMaire, had become a rival, under the unscrupulous patronage of Lord Monomark, an eagle-eyed and vindictive press baron. “There are also people you voted against—the average rub of disagreement that you find in politics.”

  “They have held their tongues till now, if it’s them—the Wickstroms and Killingsworth-Smiths of the world.”

  “Perhaps they have found their moment,” said Graham, shrugging.

  The tea came in. The old friends passed an amiable twenty minutes drinking it, and yet Lenox saw that something was amiss in Graham, and when the latter departed, offering as his apology for visiting so quickly the evening schedule of Parliament, he felt again that Graham must, perhaps, have been unlucky in love. Lenox had invited him to Hampden Lane to dine the next night—offering Leigh as an inducement, “a capital fellow, you know”—but Graham regretfully declined, busy as ever.

  When he had gone, Lenox, sipping the sweet final ounces of his tea, had a realization that should have been obvious but struck him as significant: Rowan must have an office at the Royal Society, in addition to those at his home and in Chilton Street.

  He sent a note asking Frost to meet him there, and at a little after six o’clock they were again in the building’s large and charming rotunda.

  Rowan’s office was in an aerie overlooking London’s smoking rooftops. There was a large appointment book on the desk, and Frost and Lenox both made a beeline for it. In the event it was rather drear—tidy inked reminders of very specific duties at the Society—but Lenox was intrigued to see that the day of Middleton’s murder had an appointment not far from the solicitor’s office in it.

  “Perhaps that is our angle,” he said to Frost. “Tracking his movements upon that day.”

  “I’m going to fetch his secretary to see what he can remember. It was scarcely a week ago.”

  But the secretary was gone for the day, and as the light failed Lenox and Frost had to examine the room alone. They found nothing resembling Leigh’s papers—many, however, in Rowan’s own hand, describing various actions of the microbe. Were these the plagiarisms? Lenox put them in his valise to show to Leigh.

  They left, each a little discouraged, but agreeing that they would return the next morning to speak to those who had been closest professionally to their quarry. A tacit agreement had emerged in the conversation between them, somehow: They couldn’t leave it to an amateur scientist to find proof of a murder in the very heart of London, their city.

  That evening Leigh was out, and Lenox and Lady Jane had the kind of old, happy supper that he remembered so well from his bachelor days, when they were only neighbors, and yet near enough that neither needed an invitation to enter the other’s house—days when their love had been unspoken, perhaps even unrealized, and yet, like a spring within the earth, moving with cautious ceaselessness toward the day it would surface. When he went to bed, it was in a state of contentment.

  A voice woke him in the dead of night. “Sir,” it said, low, but urgent, from the doorway. “Mr. Lenox. Sir.”

  Lenox struggled up to his elbows, still half away. He glanced at the dark lavender light behind the diaphanous curtains. The late calls of a detective had skilled him in guessing the time over the years. Just three o’clock, he would have said.

  “What is it, Kirk? Is Sophia all right?”

  “She is, sir.” There was an unwonted note of sorrow and sympathy in the undemonstrative butler’s voice. “It’s Lord John, sir. Mr. Cheesewright has sent word for you. His Lordship has fallen from the roofs of Parliament—three stories—altogether deprived of consciousness—may not live the night.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Prostitution was not illegal in London. One could be arrested for it, to be sure—but only on some auxiliary charge. “Annoying passersby,” for instance, or “public drunkenness.” It was one of the stranger facts of their judgmental age, which in most matters of morality condescended dreadfully toward England’s prior eras—the highwayman lawlessness of Queen Elizabeth’s time, the libertinism of the Restoration, the debauchery of the Regent’s reign.

  Lenox thought of this very Victorian paradox as he saw, from his carriage window, the night’s women ranged along the periphery of Green Park. It was awfully cold, and they were huddled around barrels of fire. It filled his spirit, already heartsick over fear for Dallington, with something like a mortal sorrow. Like the majority of his friends, and in fact many of his more sincerely Christian friends too, he could never fault these women for their choice of work—money was scarce and allocated unfairly, gin and bodies were cheap and allocated without much partiality at all—and yet he might wish such a different life for them than this. Was the law the answer? Gladstone had gone into the alleys to preach to them; Dickens had founded a house where they might retire, these women; and yet here they were, along Green Park, waiting out the hours of the night.

  What a vale of tears the world could seem at the wrong hour, in the wrong place, and particularly when you had heard the wrong news.

  In the instant after Lenox had absorbed Kirk’s information he had been out of bed. “Get the horses up, please.”

  “I gave the order immediately, sir.”

  “Thank you. Was there a note?”

  “No, sir. The messenger came only with word. Lord John is in the Parliament’s infirmary.”

  “Very good.”

  “Can I offer any assistance, sir?”

  “Send for McConnell. Go round yourself if you must.”

  Kirk nodded. “Immediately, sir.”

  Lenox was dressed in under a minute, downstairs in four long strides. Kirk, waiting in the front hall, handed him his coat, gloves, and hat. Through the narrow band of window by the door, Lenox saw Rackham perched unmoving atop his box, the little orange glow of his cigar occasionally intensifying and then fading.

  “Wish him luck, Kirk.”

  “I will, sir. Give His Lordship our very best—all of us, sir. The finest gentleman.”

  The finest gentleman! That was not Dallington’s reputation, of course; London was quick to name a person, and devilishly slow to unname him.

  The cab moved quickly through the silent streets. Down Whitehall, the enormous gray buildings stood alone, without sentry. Always a strange experience to see nature’s light in a city—a reminder that humans, for all they had built, were not automatic, were not essential, were not indispensable.

  There was a low lantern slung above the visitors’ gate of Parliament. Lenox stepped down from the carriage and knocked on the door.

  A night porter was there. “Who is that?” he asked.

  “Charles Lenox. You must remember me from my own days here, Drinkwater.”

  “Of course I do, sir, of course. A differing context is all
, sir. Of course I do. If you are here for Lord John Dallington, he is in the infirmary.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How is he?”

  “I cannot say, sir. Not being in the medical line myself at all.”

  And yet Drinkwater’s face had answered the question. They walked quickly through the back corridors. “Who found him?”

  “The other night porter, sir, Wilson.”

  “Where?”

  “Directly beneath the south gate. There was a crash.”

  Lenox thought of this: just beneath the knee-high crenellations that made Parliament appear so beautiful from the opposite side of the river. His stomach turned over at the thought of it. He had been on that roof. Could one survive a fall from such a height?

  The infirmary was one of Parliament’s little peculiarities. It was in a room canted just so over the river, and was provided for emergencies like this one, rather than for lengthy care—though Lenox had heard of it being used most often when a Member was dead drunk, or, in the more generous parlance given out to the press, “tired and emotional.” He could picture it from his first tour of the building, small, with a single cot and a medicine stand in the corner. He hadn’t been back since.

  He tracked Drinkwater’s squat, hurried gait through various slender hallways, up two stairwells, down the reverse of a small hidden corridor. “Who is with him?” he asked.

  “The physician we have on call from Harley Street, Melman, and his assistant. Along with Mr. Cheesewright, of course.”

  “And what has Melman said?”

  “Nothing to me, sir.”

  They came to the door. Drinkwater tapped gently upon it, and pushed it open.

  Inside there was the low light of a single candle, flaming back at itself from the window, growing large and small in its own shadows against the wall as it quivered. Three men were standing toward one side of the room, Cheesewright among them.

  Lenox looked at Dallington and gasped.

  He had been expecting a calmly comatose patient—but here was carnage, devastation.

  Dallington’s left leg was elevated. The pants were ripped back to reveal a huge, open wound, and the sickening white gleam within it of bone. The arms were folded over his chest, hands enrobed in bandages, one of the elbows horrifically out of joint.

  And his face, his poor face—a mass of red and black, the hair shorn away in huge uneven swaths, cuts crossing it.

  The doctor was in shirtsleeves. He looked at Lenox. “Family member?”

  “Yes,” said Lenox.

  “Virtually,” said Cheesewright.

  “Will he live?” asked Lenox.

  Melman looked him directly in the eye. He was a large, ruddy man, with huge hands. “I don’t think so.”

  Lenox felt his heart cave in. “No?”

  The doctor shook his head. “The damage to his internal organs is severe. There is blood in them. He has not regained consciousness—is concussed, certainly—no. He will not survive this fall. We will attempt to keep him alive. We have sewn him and patched him where we could. But I do not think he will live to see the dawn.”

  Lenox looked at the window. Already there was some paling in the sky.

  He went and sat on the small stool by the bed. His inclination was to reach out and touch Dallington’s brow—how young he looked!—but he reached for his hand. “I’m here with you, John,” he murmured. “Just so you know.”

  There were perhaps two or three minutes of silence. Finally, the doctor said, “There is fever, sir. We must apply the cold compresses.”

  Lenox nodded and stood. He and Cheesewright stepped into the hall. “What happened?” asked Lenox.

  “I don’t know. There was this note at his station, however.”

  Lenox saw an envelope with his own name on it—again. Polly’s was next to it. He grabbed the envelope and ripped it open. Inside, in a desperately quick hand, was a line from Dallington.

  Nothing to do with lovers. It’s Labrenz. Giving chase.

  Lenox stifled a gasp. Labrenz was a Prussian spy, wanted throughout England. He’d been thought dead for nearly a year now.

  They would never have even imagined a connection between him and the broken window. But now, his mind racing, Lenox wondered what the truth of the business in Parliament had been. Was the story of the lovers’ quarrel a red herring, designed to lead them off the scent of the real reason Labrenz was there—something to do, presumably, with affairs of state, after all?

  It had come too easily, that information about the affair, even Polly had acknowledged that, the chattering servants revealing without any hesitation what had supposedly gone on between Lord Beverley and Mr. Winslow, all of it secondhand, their sources perhaps not in on any particular lie, but only too happy to gossip it forward. He, Polly, and Cheesewright had all been too credulous. Only Dallington had felt that something was off. And meanwhile, a spy had been lurking around Parliament, the true cause behind that broken window.

  Which meant—he realized—that it was eminently possible that Dallington had been pushed.

  As he was reckoning with this information there was a footfall in the hallway behind him. Wilson, the other porter, appeared, leading McConnell.

  “Lenox!” cried the doctor. He was carrying his leather bag. “For Christ’s sake, what’s happened? Kirk came to my door.”

  “It’s Dallington,” said Lenox. “He fell from a great height. The physician—a man named Melman—says he won’t live two hours.”

  McConnell pushed forward without hesitation. “What utter nonsense. Melman is a fool. Let me see him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Dallington made it into the morning hours of the new day, long enough that, had he been conscious, he would have heard the world awaken and begin its gradual reclamation of its daylight routines: deliveries first of all, daily servants second, then slowly the workers, and then the clerks, a ceaseless processional in the streets of black jackets and furled black umbrellas. Last of all, mingled in among them, and not looking so very different, the Members of Parliament.

  And yet McConnell was worried—too worried to move his patient. Melman’s dark prognostication, Lenox could see, had perhaps not been so cynical that it could be declared wrong outright.

  McConnell called in help immediately, first a friend from the surgeon’s college, then another from Harley Street. They passed the hour of seven o’clock in grave conference, phrases falling from their mouths that Lenox misliked: compound fracture; hemorrhage of the kidneys; concussion; damage to the cranial hemispheres; and worst, far and away the worst, “ease of passage.”

  At last McConnell turned to him. Cheesewright had gone, as had Melman and his assistant. “We cannot move him. My colleagues and I agree.”

  “Will he survive?”

  One of the men’s faces said no; the other said it was difficult to say. For his part, McConnell nodded firmly. “If he makes it past noon, which he will, then he will survive. Yes.”

  “What is wrong with him?”

  “Generally—everything. Acutely—there is internal bleeding.”

  “And how shall you handle it?”

  “A great deal depends upon his constitution.”

  The news went out that day. Edmund was the first to stop by, having heard from Cheesewright, and then Jane, evidently having been apprised of the news by Kirk. She wished to know how Dallington’s parents were to be informed. Lenox didn’t have any idea. When she said, steeling herself, that she would do it, he felt grateful, realizing that he had been anticipating the horrible task as his own—and then, chiding himself, offered to do it.

  But she was close to Dallington’s mother. Jane reappeared together with the duchess an hour later, this older lady, always so comfortable a figure, transformed into one instead of terrible austere grief, streaks of tears lining her face. She was as set upon her son’s bedside as an arrow upon its target, ignoring all the people nearby, including Lenox. She w
ent and sat beside her son, brushing his hair back. Thereafter she didn’t move.

  The minutes crept by. There was a crisis just after eleven o’clock, a convulsion rising in Dallington’s body. His color was suddenly awful, something like a very pallid sea green.

  “Christ,” said McConnell, and without ceremony pushed Dallington’s mother aside. “He’s having a seizure.”

  They were all expelled from the room except for the duchess. Her husband appeared, deeply grave.

  At the same time, Lenox was being pulled away by a series of increasingly alarmed officials. All of them wanted to hear it for themselves: Labrenz? At noon, he went up to the roof with Drinkwater and a diplomat named Barkley. This was a difficult part of the building to gain access to from the inside, and yet, a flaw, not terribly difficult from the outside, provided you could do a bit of climbing.

  They looked down. Two sets of footprints; no others.

  “This is where he fell,” said Drinkwater.

  They all peered over the edge at the flagstone court below. Lenox felt a wave of nausea—a visceral terror. Hell, to fall that distance, just long enough to register the pain that you were about to experience. There was a disturbance in the muddied snow below, and he saw, amid it, even from this distance, a crumpled red flower—the carnation that Dallington always wore in his buttonhole.

  Up on the roof, one trail of footprints continued on toward the east side of the building, hardened in the icy snow. It left off by a drainage pipe. Barkley had seen all he needed to. “Thank you, Lenox,” he murmured. “I must go now.”

  “And Labrenz?”

  “If he is in this country, he will be found. The danger is that he is not.”

  “Papers are missing, then?”

  Barkley was no fool—a young man with hair parted slickly to one side, endowed with heavy responsibilities. “We cannot yet know. It would be of immense value to hear His Lordship’s account of last night’s events.”

  Lenox nodded, agreeing; though the significance each man would find in such a conversation differed.

  At one o’clock Polly arrived. Her cheeks were colored, her bearing rigid. “Is he in there?”