Home by Nightfall

by Charles Finch

“How did Miss Snow come to be involved?” asked Clavering.

  “Give me a moment and I’ll explain,” Lenox said.

  The mood of the room had changed. Now they were upon the terrain of firm fact. Sandy was curled up happily at Mrs. Evans’s feet, eyes already settling closed in the warmth of the fire. Edmund, standing near the fireplace, was gazing at the scene with a calm, steadying sympathy.

  “I asked myself,” said Lenox, “whom Calloway might then have cared enough about to protect. He more or less invited us to hang him, after all. And I thought: Who could inspire such a cheerful suicide but a child? I myself am a father—and it is no sacrifice, the idea of sacrificing yourself for a child. Your self doesn’t even come into it.

  “So it was that I came to the answer: this woman, before you. Mad Calloway’s daughter.”

  “Please don’t call him that,” she said.

  “I apologize. In fact, I remember Miss Snow, Miss Adelaide Snow here, stopping herself just short, yesterday, of saying Mad Calloway, and saying, much more politely, Mr. Calloway. It struck me as an odd hitch in her speech at the time, until I realized she was sparing your feelings, Mrs. Evans. I also wondered why you took such a pressing interest in the condition of Calloway’s imprisonment, about which you asked us several questions. As a cousin visiting from out of town, you could scarcely have known anything about him. Now, of course, I understand.”

  “But what was it for?” asked Edmund suddenly. “If Mrs. Evans did indeed attack Stevens, why?”

  “Ah.” Lenox looked at the two young women on the sofa. “There I enter into the realm of speculation. Mrs. Evans?”

  She remained silent. Lenox glanced at Adelaide Snow’s usually kindly face and was startled to see in it something stony and strange. It took him a moment, but then he realized what it was: rage, sheer rage.

  He looked at the two Watson sisters, and upon their faces, too, was deep emotion.

  “I suspect that Stevens Stevens is not a—not a good man,” he said lamely, and then went on. “Mrs. Evans, Miss Snow, you have both been in his employ. Can you tell us the truth of his character? Of what happened?”

  “Never,” said Adelaide Snow fiercely. She gripped Liza Calloway’s shoulder again. “Just leave us alone. You can’t prove a thing.”

  Lenox glanced at Edmund and raised his eyebrows slightly. He was about to speak again when there was a knock on the door, and then, without waiting for a reply, the knocker pushed it open a few inches. It was Lady Jane.

  “Charles, there you are, and Edmund, too,” she said. “What have you been doing?”

  Despite the circumstances, Adelaide Snow rose to her feet, and Lenox realized that of course his wife was famous in this part of the world. He watched her take in the entire scene with her quick, intelligent gray eyes.

  “This is Miss Liza Calloway,” he said, “or more properly, Mrs. Evans.”

  “Ah,” said Jane. She still had a hand on the doorway. There was a long pause, and then it was clear that she had apprehended the situation, the tenor of the room, and she said, “Well, perhaps I might sit with you.”

  It was Edmund who saw the merit of the idea most quickly. He strode forward. “Listen, perhaps all of us had better clear out,” he said. “You and I, Charles, and us, Clavering and Bunce. Jane—these young women have had some trial. Ladies, you may speak to my sister-in-law with utter confidence that she will keep your secrets—or not, if you prefer, but at any rate you ought to have a few minutes to yourselves. It’s been a difficult night, I’m sure. We’ll return in a little while.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  They left. Lady Jane was closeted with Adelaide Snow, Liza Calloway, and Elizabeth Watson and Claire Adams for the better part of an hour. Halfway through she came out and told Lenox to go and find Toto for her, which he did. Clavering and Bunce were in the kitchen, eating and drinking; the two brothers sat in the hall outside the room, on a wooden bench beneath a comically bad portrait of the seventh King Henry, waiting. Off to their left was the ceaseless roar of the ball, and behind them the close little room, from which a raised voice would occasionally emerge.

  They passed the time first by playing five-across noughts and crosses (Edmund won five games out of fourteen; they drew six; Lenox won three) and then by attempting to throw playing cards into an empty wastebasket across the hallway. Lenox had a blue deck, Edmund a red one, and after each had thrown all of his cards they would go and count up how many of each color was in the basket. They were more or less even, Edmund perhaps edging his younger brother more often than not. His sideways flick of the wrist achieved less glamorous results than Lenox’s tomahawk motion—but was more reliable.

  He didn’t ask about the case until they had been sitting there for forty-five minutes or so. And then all he said was, “Stevens, then—from the sound of it he was a kind of—of vicious exploiter of young women, you believe.”

  Lenox nodded. “That’s my guess.”

  “How do you know?”

  Lenox sighed. “A feeling, I suppose. He hired this long series of young girls as his secretaries, and the list Pointilleux found showed that almost half of them left immediately. Including Miss Adelaide Snow, for example. Do you remember her saying that she hoped Miss Harville enjoyed the job—and then adding, ‘I gave her fair warning that she might not’? And don’t forget Miss Ainsworth, the young girl Clavering told us disappeared to London after only a few weeks of working for Stevens.”

  Edmund shook his head, disgust on his face. “It wasn’t because it was less expensive to hire women, then, or because he believed them to be more intelligent than men.”

  “I doubt saving the village fifteen pounds a year was his first priority, in a budget of so many thousands. Though perhaps it added to his pleasure.”

  “And Miss Calloway—or Mrs. Evans, I suppose we should call her—”

  It was then that Lady Jane opened the door. Her face was sad, full of concern. “You may come in again, if you like,” she said. “I think we can have a reasonable conversation. I’ve assured them that you’re not trying to hound them onto the gallows. I hope I’m right.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” said Edmund.

  They followed her into the little room, where the four women were sitting as they had been. Toto, perched on a small armchair next to the fire, her arm resting on a card table, had tears on her face, and the spaniel, which was still lying between Liza Calloway’s feet, looked up as they entered, thumped his tail once, sniffed the air, and then laid his head between his paws again, his eyes quickly closing.

  “Charles,” said Lady Jane, “tell us exactly what you know, please, and then we can have a conversation.”

  Lenox and Edmund were still standing. “What I know?” said Charles. “Very little, really. The timing is suggestive.”

  “Timing?” said Miss Calloway—Mrs. Evans—looking up at him. Her own face was now dry.

  “Your father began to withdraw from society approximately ten years ago, a little while after your mother’s death, and more exactly after your departure. To Norfolk, from all we learned—but I wonder if that’s true. It seems to me that perhaps his grief was at losing you without an explanation. Did you think that he knew about Stevens’s treatment of you, and leave without telling him why?”

  He saw that his supposition had gone home. “Well. Go on,” she said.

  “Perhaps it was your own grief at the death of your husband that drove you back here, seeking revenge on Stevens. You had nothing else to lose, after all. I take it that you don’t have children?”

  “We were not so blessed.”

  Lenox didn’t need to look at Lady Jane to know that he was correct—that she knew the whole truth. “The drawing on the wall, of a schoolgirl,” he said. “Was it some kind of message to Stevens?”

  Suddenly Toto stood up. “This is all very well,” she said angrily, “but what are we going to do? This young woman cannot go to prison—not after what she has endured. I’ll put her on a train myself, and
you can try to stop me, Charles Lenox.”

  Lenox shrugged. “I have no legal standing here,” he said. “Clavering is downstairs. I think you could do worse than to place your trust in me.”

  Calloway’s daughter looked him in the eye for a long moment and then nodded, inhaled to brace herself, and began to talk.

  The mayor had come into her life on the day she first made that drawing. Or a version, anyhow—that particular schoolgirl had been smiling. She had been nine years old. Stevens had seen her drawing as her father socialized on the steps of the Bell and Horns and praised her for it, asked, even, if he might have it.

  After that, he had always been very friendly to her and to her father, and when he had seen her he had nearly always mentioned the drawing. (“Still drawing, my dear?” “Well enough supplied with charcoal, I hope?” That kind of thing.) Finally, five years later, he had offered her a position as a secretary. She had been unusually young for the position, just fourteen, but as he had told Calloway, he’d had his eye on her for a long time.

  Lenox had known Stevens as an acquaintance for many years, and even the euphemistic description of what he had done to his young secretary seemed … well, impossible. Dull, number-bound, impersonal old Stevens, his name the only interesting thing about him, a market mayor in a market town.

  And yet there was Adelaide Snow’s face: confirming every detail. Lenox hoped that her short term as Stevens’s secretary meant that she had been strong-willed enough to resist his assaults.

  I gave her fair warning that she might not.

  “I was in a savage grief after William died,” Mrs. Evans said. “You were correct about that. I had a little money, and no connections at all in the world. His family were mostly dead, my own was a father I believed had betrayed me. I decided that I could at least—at least right one of the wrongs of my life, I suppose.”

  “You poisoned the sherry,” Lenox said.

  She nodded. “I did. The sherry, well, he enjoyed it, of course. And he always offered me a glass—after. As if I were an adult then.”

  “The scoundrel,” said Toto.

  “I chalked that drawing on his steps, first, though,” said Calloway’s daughter. “I wanted Stevens to know that I was back—to go in, pour a drink to calm himself, and then know, as he was choking on the floor, dying, who had done it to him.”

  “How did you find out that it was the wrong house?”

  “I went straight to my father after it was done, to spite him. I was exhilarated. I was planning to leave that night, return to London.”

  “Did you never live in Bombay, then?” asked Edmund suddenly.

  “We did, yes, for several happy years.”

  “I’m sorry—go on.”

  “When I saw my father, my heart broke,” she said. Next to her, Adelaide Snow gave her arm a little extra squeeze. “He looked a thousand years old to me. And then, his garden. He had always liked plants, but now, I could tell right away, it was all he had. His garden—all these years taking care of something, if you see what I mean, after my mother and I had both left him. I think I would have forgiven him then and there, regardless of the past. But it emerged that he hadn’t even known about Stevens. Foolish child that I was, and missing my mother, too, I had assumed he was as evil as the world. I’d been wrong. And to think—he never met William!”

  She burst into tears, and it was some while before she could resume. “Take your time,” Lenox said.

  “No, it’s better to get it out,” she replied, collecting herself. “Well, it wasn’t until a long time had passed that I even told him about the sherry I poisoned. He put the pieces together and realized that I had gone to the wrong house.

  “In a panic I went back. I stared at the house for a long time. For all I knew the wrong man was on the floor inside, dead—but then, the lights were off, which made me hopeful that this poor Hadley person was still alive. He might not have been a sherry drinker. Fortunately for me, he wasn’t.

  “The next morning, with my father’s help, I lured Mr. Hadley out of town and then took the sherry and destroyed the bottle. After that, it was a matter of planning anew how to kill Stevens.”

  “Your father didn’t attempt to dissuade you?” asked Lenox.

  “If anything, he was readier than I to do it.” She gazed toward the low blue fire. “I suppose if two people are mad together, they can talk each other into thinking anything makes sense.”

  Lenox looked at Claire Adams. “You gave her the key to the town hall?” he asked.

  “I did, yes,” said the maid stoutly. “I would do it again.”

  “My father suggested that I visit Aunt Claire and explain—ask for her help. He was quite right.”

  “We’ve known what Stevens was for a while,” said Claire Adams.

  “Sarah Ainsworth,” muttered Elizabeth Watson.

  “It’s simply a coincidence that your aunt was working in Hadley’s house, then?” asked Edmund.

  “It’s a small village,” Lady Jane said.

  Lenox turned to Adelaide Snow. “Miss Snow,” he said, “tell me, how did you come to be involved in all of this?”

  “I found Liza in our gamekeeper’s cottage.”

  “And then?”

  “I asked her instantly whether she was the person who had tried to kill Stevens. She said she wasn’t. I said that was too bad, because if she had been I would have shaken her hand—that I had worked for him briefly, and thought he was the devil. I only wish I’d had the courage to tell my father about him. After that we became friends. I vowed I would help her.”

  The Watsons, Calloway, Adelaide Snow—a village was like that, Lenox supposed, with justice elusive for a long time, and then everyone agreeing on it all at once, and converging to help bring it about.

  He was about to speak again when there was a knock on the door. It was Houghton’s butler, Lane. Behind him was Pointilleux. Lenox had sent word that he would be here and told him to come to the ball if he’d finished his work.

  The young Frenchman bowed to all of the ladies in the room and then said to Lenox, with some urgency, “Two things.”

  “Yes?”

  “First, this. I find it in his ledger.”

  He passed Lenox the folded paper he had been carrying. It was the drawing—the schoolgirl, preserved all these years, its crease so deep that a gentle tug would have ripped it in two. In the bottom corner, in childish scrawl, a signature: Liza Calloway.

  “Well found,” said Lenox. “What was the second thing?”

  “The victim, Stevens—he is dead.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  The reaction in the room was confused, as well it might have been. A bad man was gone, there was no doubt of that; anyone who might have been inclined to question Calloway’s daughter’s story had Adelaide Snow there to confirm that it was true.

  On the other hand, it made this young woman, her eyes red, the dog still resting between her feet, a murderer.

  “Why the dog?” asked Lenox suddenly. “I understand why you stayed in the gamekeeper’s cottage—at first to avoid your father, and then to avoid being seen with him, to protect him, for of course you would have been noticed. I understand as well why you took the blankets and the books, and the herbs from your father. You wanted to stay out of the shops. The chickens I understand. It must have been easy to take the carrots when they presented themselves. But why the dog?”

  Liza put a hand down and scratched the dog’s ear. He growled happily. “I saw his owner kick him, the poor creature, before going into the pub. I couldn’t let him stay there. He came away quite happily.”

  Human beings never ceased to surprise Lenox—a person who could plot the brutal stabbing of a man in cold blood, but couldn’t abide a dog being kicked. It was true that Mickelson was a very rough fellow.

  “We must decide what to do,” he said.

  Toto made an indignant noise. “Do.”

  “Think, Toto. Calloway is in prison now, a confessed murderer,” Lenox sa
id, “and he’ll hang for this crime unless we stop it. On the other hand, Mrs. Evans, I understand—well, no. That would be false. I cannot accept your actions, honestly I cannot. You might have gone to the police about Stevens.”

  “What, to Clavering? Ten years after the fact?”

  “Yes,” said Lenox. “I feel certain Clavering would have done his best by you had you gone to speak to him.”

  All of the women in the room seemed to roll their eyes simultaneously. “What have I miss?” asked Pointilleux.

  “Too much. I’ll tell you in a moment,” said Lenox, and then, looking back at Liza Calloway, Evans, he realized he had no idea what to do. Just as he had when they were little and in the same position, he glanced at his brother. “Edmund?” he said.

  The Member of Parliament for Markethouse stepped forward, and though his face was mild, his hands in his pockets, he had a certain authority in his bearing—greater than it might have been in London, though he was an important political figure there, because here his position had been sown into the soil many centuries before, and he only a season of its long existence.

  “We cannot conceal the truth from Clavering, nor should we,” he said. “Mrs. Evans, your father cannot die on your behalf, whether or not he believes it to be just.”

  “Edmund!” cried Toto.

  “On the other hand, you are at the moment a free agent, at any rate for a little while longer. Have you any money?”

  “A small legacy from my husband, and a little more from selling our house.”

  “Friends?”

  “Me,” said Adelaide Snow.

  “No, Adelaide,” said Calloway’s daughter gently. “You have already been kind enough.” She looked up at Edmund. “How long will it be until I am arrested?”

  Edmund looked at his watch. “Clavering and Bunce are enjoying themselves in the kitchen. Call it—morning.”

  “Morning.”

  Lenox thought that Edmund was right to offer her a way out, but he also understood the feeling of hesitation in the room. Where was she to go? What was she to do?

  It was Lady Jane who took charge. “Right, then,” she said firmly, “that’s six or seven hours, which is an eternity. Charles, Edmund—perhaps you would go back to the ball, to make up the numbers for poor Houghton, who must be working like a dog. Take Pointilleux with you—he looks as if he could use an hour of entertainment. There are six women in this room. It would take fewer than that to run England. I’m certain we can solve this problem. The three of you will only slow us down.”