Home by Nightfall

by Charles Finch

  Inside was a single room, full of natural light from the series of windows ringed just above eye level. There was an altar at one end. Along the walls were busts and statues of previous baronets, as well as flat marble stones inscribed with the names, dates, and achievements of various second sons, cousins, wives. Two large medieval swords were crossed under one window.

  There was a fresh bust now—on a plinth near the door, Molly’s face. The sculptor had captured something of the ease with which she laughed. Edmund went instead toward the busts of their parents, saying, “Mother, Father,” with a dry smile, which seemed at once to indicate the absurdity of such a greeting, and therefore apologize for it, while also allowing him to deliver it—for he paid his respects sincerely, Lenox did not doubt that. He did, too. He touched the figures with a feeling of loss. He had loved them both. They would meet Sophia in the next life; indeed, perhaps they already knew that the pretty, sharp-eyed Houghton girl had become his wife, the love of his life.

  Edmund was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, an arm along the back of the bench, staring at the altar. At last, he said, “They didn’t do the beard very well on Jesus.”

  “Have it touched up.”

  “Are you mad? It’s three hundred years old.”

  Lenox smiled. “Leave it, then. I suppose we could light a candle?”

  “Yes, certainly,” said Edmund, and he stood up. “Where are they? I know for a fact they were in this room the last time I was, so they can’t have gone. I think they’re in this little box.” He tried to open the box, but it was locked. “Who on earth would have locked this?”

  “Waller, of course.”

  “That seems like an excess of caution,” Edmund muttered, patting his pockets. “I can’t think where the key is—unless—”

  He hopped onto the bench and reached behind a carved wooden scroll on the wall, which bore the Lenox coat of arms and the family motto, Non sibi, “Not for one’s self.” Had he lived by that? Here and there—nobody could do it comprehensively, nobody but a saint, and they weren’t very common in Lenox’s experience.

  Apparently there was a small latched cubby concealed behind the wooden fanwork, because Edmund opened it and came out triumphantly with a key.

  When they were young, they had come to the chapel very infrequently—two or three times a year, on special holidays, to light a candle. Otherwise they’d gone to St. James’s in Markethouse, sitting in their pew there. Of course, when a family member died, the service was held in this small chapel. It was a matter of understanding within the family that no matter how far the person had strayed, no matter how many years it had been since he or she had come to Lenox House, no matter what enmities had existed in life, no matter the person’s character, a Lenox was entitled to a service here.

  Lenox’s mother had also spent a fair amount of time in the chapel, particularly after her own parents died, it seemed to him now, as he watched Edmund take a candle from the box he had unlocked, light it, and place it in front of the altar. She had treated the chapel very casually, bringing a book up to read there, or even her sewing.

  They sat in silence for some time, until Edmund said, “Shall we go down into town, then?”

  “Yes, all right,” said Lenox. “I suppose after the service we could call on Clavering and see if he’s made any headway.”

  “By all means.”

  The two brothers went to church and listened to the sermon, stood on the steps afterward and shook a great many hands, and then walked over to the station house, where Clavering was filling paperwork.

  His one jail cell was occupied, but he said he hadn’t made any progress.

  “Who is this, then?” asked Edmund. “Not related to—”

  “No, no, it’s young Adams, sir, that’s all. He got himself black drunk and fetched up a brawl. Thirty days in jug, I reckon.” Adams’s punishment sounded as if it had already begun—he was groaning. “I took him in some water. Not a bad sort before his eighth pint, you know.”

  “Have you been to Snow’s cottage?”

  Clavering nodded grimly. “Bunce and I went this morning. Exactly as you described it, sir. We brought back all of the stolen objects and left the rest. I’m waiting to hear if they’re the church’s blankets, but I reckon they are. Bunce is over checking with Reverend Perse now.

  “As for Sandy, the springer spaniel, I saw his owner last night at the Bell and Horns, Mickelson. He said he would keep an eye out for the pup. Didn’t reckon he would find his way home, though. Not a smart creature, he said.”

  “Mickelson. Why do I know that name?” asked Lenox.

  Edmund shook his head. “He was involved in a bad business a few years ago. He’s a farmer in these parts. He was at a coaching inn near Whitson and quarreled with a fellow, a gambling debt—”

  “I believe it was over a woman, if you’ll allow me, sir,” said Clavering.

  “Was it, though? I certainly heard it was a gambling debt, but these stories get distorted. Anyhow, he struck the man with a cane and blinded him in one eye. He only avoided prison very narrowly, if I recall.”

  Clavering nodded. “Not a friendly fellow.”

  Edmund frowned. “Could he be involved?”

  “Anybody could be involved, unfortunately,” said Lenox.

  “Could he have been the one staying at the cottage, though?” said Edmund. “With his dog?”

  “But why would he, if he’s local?”

  “There you’ve got me.”

  Pondering that, Charles and Edmund bade good-bye to Clavering and then returned to Lenox House, planning to ride out again to see the gamekeeper’s cottage; Lenox wasn’t satisfied with the thoroughness of their inspection the evening before.

  When they returned, however, there was a telegram from Dallington that caused him to forget Markethouse’s problems, at least momentarily.

  Dreadful news STOP three clients gone over to LeMaire STOP somehow has gotten our client list Polly thinks STOP planned assault STOP lower fees and now name in every paper STOP all in a jumble here STOP please advise STOP best Dallington

  Lenox read over this twice. Then a third time, as if upon rereading it might give up some secret he hadn’t spotted yet.

  Three clients! This was cataclysmic news. They kept their list of clients jealously guarded, knowing that LeMaire and his ruthless backer, Lord Monomark, would be willing to operate at a loss to put them out of business.

  He showed Edmund the telegram, and Edmund shook his head. “That’s very unfortunate.”

  How unfortunate his brother didn’t quite understand. The ground that had felt so firm under Lenox’s feet two days before—their new detectives, their new clerks—was all at once shifting. If they lost three more clients, they might have to let someone go. Three more than that, they might have to let two more go. Three more than that, they might have to close. And Monomark’s pockets were very, very deep.

  Lenox forgot about the trip back to the gamekeeper’s cottage; he sat in the long room brooding on the problem, wondering whether he ought to go back to London. There was no solution that came to him, though. If LeMaire had the agency’s list (and how had it gotten out?) and was willing to undercut them on prices, he would be able to pick off their clients one by one. It was as simple as that. A few might remain out of loyalty, but they were mostly businessmen, accustomed to the exigencies of competition, used to seeking out the lowest prices for the best services.

  They would still have Polly’s clients, and Dallington’s intermittent ones. But those weren’t enough to keep them afloat in anything like their current form. Things had grown precarious very, very suddenly.

  Lenox closed his eyes, feeling rotten. Sooner or later he must have fallen asleep—the room was drowsy, with the fire burning quietly, the sofa soft beneath him—because when he woke it was with a feeling of disorientation, and with the thought that he was in his house in London, but that it didn’t look right.

  After a moment he realized where he was
, and his breath slowed again. He blinked his eyes several times to open them—and then it came to him, with breathtaking clarity.

  “Edmund,” he said, “I have to get to London immediately.”

  “Because of these clients?”

  “No, no. Because I know where Muller is.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  He spent the ride back to London thinking not about the German pianist, whose whereabouts he thought he now knew, but about who had betrayed the firm. That was the question that had carried him through the trip, from the silken fields of Sussex to the bright din of King’s Cross Station.

  It was so hard to say. The names and files of their clients were all held securely in a safe in Lenox’s office. Only the three partners had access to that safe and therefore the list, though obviously each of the agency’s detectives, Atkinson, Weld, Mayhew, and Davidson, knew some of the names on it, since each was responsible for the day-to-day needs of four or five of the companies who retained the agency’s services.

  Of the three clients that had taken their business to LeMaire, one had belonged to Mayhew and two to Davidson, the new fellow.

  Could it be that Davidson had turncoated them? He had come with impeccable references; had an honest, open face; worked very hard.

  He was also close with Mayhew, however, and despite his best precautions, Mayhew might have let a name slip.

  Or Davidson might have—two names, and Mayhew, who was talented but mercurial, a bit of an enigma, perhaps too smart for his own good, could have sold them to LeMaire …

  In a way, that would be the best thing. It would mean that the damage was contained. What was really frightening was the idea that someone had the entire list and was selling it piecemeal to LeMaire, or his backer, Monomark, the cross-grained, eagle-eyed old lord.

  As his train pulled into King’s Cross, Lenox was so deep in contemplation of this question that it took him several minutes to notice that they had arrived and to disembark, one of the last men on the platform. He nearly directed the cab he hailed to Chancery Lane, and the office—then thought perhaps he would go straight to Dallington’s, in Half Moon Street.

  But home won out.

  Soon he was pulling into Hampden Lane. In the upper windows of the house there was the yellow flicker of gaslight, and upon the door a pretty garland of evergreen boughs. Through the front curtains he could just see the pale blue wallpaper of the forward drawing room, and the edge of the dainty spruce pianoforte that stood near the window there, surrounded by armchairs and sofas of light green velvet.

  He slipped inside. “Hello?” he called out.

  “Charles!” said Jane. She happened to be close and came into the front hallway, her reading glasses folded in one hand, a book beside them.

  He kissed her on the cheek. “Hello, my dear. How are you?”

  She looked uncertain. “Is there any trouble? Is Edmund well?”

  “Oh, perfectly, yes. I wired before I left—didn’t you receive it? I’m back for twelve hours, no longer, alas.”

  She shook her head. “I was out. I only arrived home a few minutes ago. I was just about to look in on Sophia before she goes to sleep, in fact. Come along, let’s go upstairs. But why have you come back?”

  As they walked upstairs he told her that he thought he had an idea about Muller that he wanted to look into (“I knew I selected those clippings beautifully,” she said) and also about what Dallington had wired.

  They came to Sophia’s buttercup yellow nursery. At the unexpected sight of both her parents, her plump face broke into a smile of delight, and she waved her arms up and down furiously and cried out their names. The nurse gave them a severe look. They lowered the volume of their greetings apologetically, but Lenox couldn’t help lifting Sophia up and kissing her, giving her warm little body a squeeze to his shoulder.

  When he and Jane left the nursery twenty minutes later, he felt happy. They walked downstairs together, talking, for while they had only been apart for four days, there was an infinite amount to discuss—what each of them had been doing, Edmund’s state of mind, Jane’s forthcoming luncheon, whether the Queen might come, all the hazy news on Muller, Sophia’s hair-pulling activities. Lady Jane kept Lenox company as he ate a quick supper, and then they moved into the drawing room, where there was a little fire against the chill on the windowpanes.

  He poured himself a whisky. “Then there’s this mysterious business down in Markethouse, though I only wrote you about it yesterday, so you may not know about it yet, depending on the mail.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know anything about it. I can’t think what the postman has been doing. Burning your letters in a grate, I suppose, the moment they reach his hands. What mysterious business?”

  So he told her about Hadley, about the gamekeeper’s cottage, and about Edmund’s absorption in the problem, which Charles hoped was a useful distraction. “It’s better than the two of us moping around the house.”

  “Which is what he will do while you’re gone,” Jane pointed out.

  “I rather hope not. I asked him to go to Snow’s cottage again tomorrow morning and see what he can find. That will at least occupy his time—and who knows, he may find something. I have little enough faith in Clavering, the constable in Markethouse, though he’s a well-meaning fellow.”

  Lady Jane shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t like it. What is the meaning of that drawing chalked on Mr. Hadley’s step?”

  “There you have me. Child’s mischief?”

  “And the gemstones,” said Jane. “And the knife you found in the cottage. No, I don’t like it.”

  “Nobody has come to any real harm in Markethouse since the Glorious Revolution. Anyhow, whoever was staying in the cottage left the knife behind, which must surely be a good sign, mustn’t it?”

  “What if he has a pistol?”

  “What if he has a unicorn?”

  “You laugh, but he has your two horses.”

  Lenox shook his head. “Really, I give you my word that I think you may rest easy about us.”

  She was curious about his thoughts on Muller—it was still the talk of every drawing room—but he told her only that he wanted to have a look at Muller’s dressing room for himself, that LeMaire’s involvement had raised his competitive hackles. It was true, too. Of course, he also didn’t want to tell her his idea—in case he was wrong. If he was right, she would know tomorrow, a few hours before the rest of the world, and then he could return to Sussex triumphant.

  What a thing it was, vanity!

  The next morning, when Lenox woke up in his own bed, he was again momentarily confused as to his whereabouts, that old feeling. Then almost in the same instant he remembered that he was home, and he would therefore be able to breakfast with Sophia, which was great fun as long as you managed to dodge the flying porridge.

  It was at around nine o’clock, when his daughter was asleep for her morning nap, that Lenox, dressed in a woolen autumn suit, his beard shaved close and his cloak over his arm, went down his front step and in the direction of the City. As he often did when he had thinking to do, he felt the urge to stroll—what Dickens, that most inveterate and observant of London walkers, had joyfully called “a little amateur vagrancy.”

  It was a half-hour walk to the City, the tiny scrap of London that was in fact the only place that could technically be called “the City of London”—the other boroughs having their own names, Westminster, Hammersmith, and so forth. The City was London’s center of business, and to say that someone worked in the City meant that he was in one of the professions: law, business, the stock market.

  Chancery Lane, for instance, where the agency’s office stood, was in the City.

  The City was divided from the idler sectors of the West End by the Temple Bar, a narrow stone gateway that had been widened but nevertheless always had a long backup of carriages waiting to pass through it, what locals called the traffic-lock. He came to this gateway after twenty minutes or so.

&nbs
p; Sometimes, as Lenox passed through it, he felt a strange little emotion: one foot in the West End, his old, aristocratic life, and one in the City, his new, money-centered one. Would his father be disappointed? Time bulled its way forward, of course. Lenox saw more familiar faces than he would have expected in this side of town nowadays. The Earl of Allingham’s third son owned a stockbrokering concern two doors down from them. It was true that two or three men in his clubs had snubbed him since the agency was founded, though few people with any social ambition could afford to alienate Lady Jane. His good fortune, that.

  He walked on. The season was changing, he saw. For the first time since April, the pea soup vendor was selling hot elder wine, too, in halfpenny and penny measures. Lenox touched his hat to the man, who was doing a brisk business, then moved with expert agility between the ale sellers and the horses spattered up to their blinkers with mud, touching his hat to a different fellow, this one something of a local celebrity, named Joz, who always stood on the same corner selling pamphlets, stationery, newspapers, and “the smallest Bible in the world.”

  Finally, this gauntlet run, Lenox turned down Chancery Lane, eager to find Dallington and Polly and tell them his suspicions.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Two hours later he stood in the unprepossessing doorway of Muller’s dressing room, backstage at the Cadogan Theater.

  Just behind him were his two partners, accompanied by Thurley, the manager of the theater; just ahead of him, opening the door and going into the dressing room, were two men from Scotland Yard. One was a friend, Inspector Nicholson, tall, hook-nosed, and gangly. The other was Nicholson’s superior, Broadbridge, a froward, scowling individual in his fifties, with close-cut white hair, smelling strongly of a morning visit to the barbershop. He wasn’t pleased to have Lenox there. Then again, he wasn’t pleased not to have found Muller, either, and for the moment at any rate it appeared that that displeasure outweighed this new one.

  Nicholson looked nervous. “I’m not even on the case,” he had said that morning, standing at a coffeehouse near the Yard with Dallington and Lenox, as they attempted to persuade him to intervene on their behalf.