Home by Nightfall (24 page)

As he did at any moment when they weren't actually following the trail of the crimes that had been committed in the village, Charles sensed Edmund's preoccupations returning to him. His silence about them—it did him credit, perhaps, but it was sorrowful to behold.

“Do you know when James will hear the news?” Lenox asked quietly as they walked along.

Though it was dark out, it wasn't too terribly cold. Above them the stars were brilliant as they can be only in the countryside, where the soft whisper of wind in the grass, the motion of the leaves in the trees, seems somehow to make the heavens even more still, more immense, their innumerable scattered lights more mysterious and beautiful.

Edmund waited for a while to respond, eyes on the ground, hands in his trouser pockets. At last, he said, “He may know now.” Then he added, “I fear it will be very hard on Teddy.”

To an outsider, this would have sounded unkind, but not to Lenox. James had always been more like their Uncle Harold than either of them—sharp-witted, funny, flashy, adventurous, not notably contemplative. He would take his mother's death hard, but on the other hand there was no doubt, either, that he would be able to live past it.

By contrast, Teddy was a vulnerable soul—a thoughtful, worried boy, more inward than his older brother. From what Lenox could tell, this disposition had survived even its immersion in the rough world of the Royal Navy.

“I know,” said Lenox.

“They say that you can't protect your children—one of those great saws, you know. It's appalling to find out how true it is.”

They approached the gates where Edmund's land began, ahead of them the long, peaceful, tree-lined avenue leading toward the pond and the house. “I'm just so sorry, Edmund, you know. I really am.”

“Well, thank you. It's a trial.”

“More than that,” Lenox said.

Edmund nodded, taking in his words.

Had asking about James and Teddy, Lenox wondered, made things worse? As they came to the door of the house, he feared it had. One thing about Molly was that she had been a person without very many cares—rather like James, now that he came to think of it—and she had always been able to lighten Edmund's mood, whether he was tired from Parliament or cantankerous because they had to be in London.

Who would do that now? For his part, Lenox felt as if he kept making mistakes.

“What's that noise?” Edmund asked, frowning.

Lenox looked toward the house, which was now about a hundred yards off. “Is it music?” he asked.

“I think it is—the piano.”

“Waller,” said Lenox.

Edmund laughed. “No. Atherton, I imagine, if anyone.”

As it happened, they were both wrong. When they came into the front hallway, they heard women's voices from the long drawing room, and when they entered it they found, sitting together at the piano, mauling a sprightly waltz for four hands, Lady Jane and Toto.

“Jane!” said Lenox.

“Toto, too,” said Toto.

Lenox laughed. “My goodness, how are you both? Why are you here?”

“We took a train earlier this evening,” said Jane, who had risen up and was coming across to them. “London seemed too quiet once the party was over.” She embraced Lenox, then Edmund.

“Not quite the thing, living plain old life without a royal in sight,” said Toto. “And on top of that, we were desperate to go to Jane's brother's ball in two nights. It's been years since an overweight country gentleman trod on my feet. I intend to make McConnell very jealous.”

“I'd forgotten the ball. Is Sophia here?”

“Oh, yes, and George, too, both asleep in the nursery,” said Jane. “The servants looked pretty het up about having to help us, especially because both girls were crying and miserable by the time we arrived, since it was past their bedtimes. But Edmund, can you hold all of us?”

“Of course,” he said, and he was smiling. “It will be a pleasure to hear the girls' footsteps.”

“Well, until they step in mud and then go into the Palladian room,” Toto said. “On the other hand, I bet we can solve all your murders.”

“That will be convenient,” Lenox said.

“It's not even a murder yet,” Edmund put in. “Our mayor is still alive. Touch wood he may be come the morning.”

“Anyhow, let's skip all that now. Could we have supper?” Jane asked. “Mr. Waller said it was ready. I'm famished. The royals ate all the food before I could have any, and there wasn't a tea cart on the train.”

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The next morning at eight o'clock, Mr. Chapman, from Tattersall's, knocked on the door at the jail. Clavering let him in, and before they had even introduced themselves, Lenox and Edmund heard him say, “Yes, that's him.”

He was looking at Calloway. “Are you sure?” Clavering asked. “This fellow in the jail cell?”

“Yes, not a doubt of it. He sold me the horses. He's welcome to return my sixty pounds any time, too.”

“You're welcome not to buy stolen horses,” said Clavering.

“Well,” said Chapman, stiffly, “that's him. Will that be all?”

“Mr. Calloway, do you recognize this man?” asked Clavering.

Calloway was sitting up in his cell, reading an old newspaper that Bunce, in a moment of kindness, must have passed him. There was a roll and a cup of tea mostly eaten and drunk up next to him.

Unsurprisingly, Calloway didn't respond, and after repeating the question and waiting for a moment, Clavering sighed and thanked the horse auctioneer for coming to Markethouse.

After he was gone, Lenox said, “Mr. Calloway, you do know we have enough evidence to hang you now. I hope you appreciate how serious your position is.”

Calloway looked at them steadily, as if to say they ought to go ahead and hang him, then. He would buy the rope.

They had already been to see Pointilleux that morning. After asking where he could order in coffee and a sandwich from, he had shooed them away. Miss Harville, Stevens's secretary, had been helping him, which was surprising. Then again, Pointilleux was a handsome lad.

Now they went to see Mrs. Agatha Browning. As they had come into the village that morning—by carriage, in case they needed to move quickly—Edmund had told him that Agatha Browning was a widow, nearly eighty, the mother of nine, grandmother of thirty-odd, who was related in one way or another to nearly every other person in Markethouse.

She answered the door of her small thatch-roofed house herself, a wiry, clear-eyed, gray-haired woman, very thin, in a loose shift, not bent even slightly by age. “Hello, Sir Edmund,” she said. “Charles Lenox, I doubt you'll remember me, but you once danced with my daughter Eliza, when she was eight, and you were eighteen. She never forgot it. I'm so pleased you've come back to stay.”

“Ah, thank you, but in fact—”

“Come in, though, come in. It's brisk this morning, and I'm an old woman.”

They went into her immaculate little sitting room, which had a silver spoon over the fireplace, and a knitted sampler next to it: a room of utter respectability. She served them tea in small blue cups, very sweet, too, whether they took it that way or not.

Edmund told her they were there to ask about Calloway. Lenox had expected some resistance—a hard, appraising eye, of the sort a detective grew used to, some stubbornness—but she was only too pleased to talk. Perhaps it was because Edmund, belonging to the village, in a way belonged to her.

“George Calloway was born here about ten years after I was. He's had a hard enough passage, I suppose. His father was a grain merchant.”

“Do you ever remember him being violent?” asked Edmund.

“No, I don't, and I wouldn't have picked him for it, either, though I've been surprised too often by people in life to be surprised by them anymore, because they're all so surprising, all of them.”

Lenox smiled. “That sounds like a riddle.”

She returned his smile and said, “Well, anyhow, you know what I mean.”

“When did he become so isolated?”

At that question she shook her head, and her face grew grimmer. “After Catherine died, his wife. She was a lovely girl. Catherine Adams, as she was. Beautiful dark hair.”

“
Adams,
did you say?”

“Yes, why?”

“Any relation to Elizabeth Watson or Claire Adams?”

“Why, their oldest sister.”

Lenox and Edmund exchanged a look. Then Lenox said, “But Atherton told us that she had brought money into the marriage.”

“Oh, no, quite the opposite. He did. She was poor but very lovely. Calloway was an introspective, quiet young fellow—no interest in continuing in the grain business after his father died, and not very many friends. But he had been left very well off by his parents, and selling the business left him even better off, and he fell head over heels for Catherine. It took time to convince her, but after he did, they had a happy marriage. One daughter, Liza. Then Catherine died very suddenly, and right away George Calloway began to act oddly. Liza went to Norfolk after only a month or two. His family thought it best. She would have been fifteen or sixteen then.”

“His family?”

“Yes, he had a lot of cousins in Norfolk, who took her in. She made a very good marriage, actually—a fellow with the East India Company, I believe his name was … oh, my mind … oh, yes, Evans. Mr. Evans. They live in Bengal. A bit of a shame for her to be so far, with her father in this state, but she was always much closer to her mother. It was hard on both of them.”

“And he became a hermit?”

“He still comes to market. I see him there. He began taking a great interest in his garden. It was, oh, eight or nine years ago that he stopped touching his hat to me—that he became really very mad, you know, twitching, unhappy, shy. So he got his nickname. If I recall correctly it was actually one of the Watson boys who gave it to him, his own relatives, by marriage.”

“How on earth can you recall that?”

Mrs. Browning raised her eyebrows philosophically. “It's a small town.”

Lenox shook his head, marveling. When he had traveled on the
Lucy,
he had picked up a saying from the sailors:
When an old sailor dies, a library burns to the ground
. Here was an old woman with a thousand histories at her fingertips, not a gossip, really, but rather a storehouse, an institute, a repository of all their memories, here on this little scrap of the world's land. Part of him wanted to stay and talk to her for the whole day.

“Who were his other connections?” Lenox asked. “Besides the Watsons?”

She frowned. “Well—all of us, in a way. My husband used to invite him for a pint after Catherine Calloway died, but he stopped saying yes to that quickly, very quickly. There are no other Calloways left. His father's brother has probably been dead thirty years. But a great deal of cousinage, as you might imagine.”

“Do you know of any connection between him and Stevens Stevens?” Lenox asked.

For the first time, she hesitated—not out of discretion, but because her memory was inexact. They watched her think. “You'll have to let me remember,” she said. “I think there must be some connection there, but I can't—I'm running through Stevens's family in my head, and none of them are related to a Calloway or a Watson, not the Edgars, not the Greshams, so it must be … no, you'll have to let me try to remember. It will come to me. Some slight connection, though, I'm sure … Calloway and Stevens…”

“I'm sorry to trouble you.”

“It's only that I hate not remembering.”

“Is there anyone who might have spoken with Calloway recently?” Edmund asked. “To whom he might have confided?”

Mrs. Browning shook her head. “I know he stopped talking to the Watsons even before he stopped talking to me—his wife's own family. As I say, he was always a peculiar, inward sort of man. Catherine's death was the ruin of him. And now I think he must have gone actually mad—if it's true, that is, if he's attacked the mayor.”

“He says he has.”

“So it's true? He spoke to you?”

Lenox shifted uneasily in his chair. “I would appreciate it if you kept that to yourself.”

“Oh, of course,” she responded. “I may seem like a chatterer, Mr. Lenox, but rest assured, I can keep silent. I'm only speaking so openly because I know you need help.”

“Thank you,” Edmund said.

“Of course. You know, Lady Lenox was a wonderful woman, I always said that.”

“She was, that's true,” said Edmund.

“Did you know she was teaching the Coxe family to read?” asked Agatha Browning, and looked only a little surprised when first Lenox, and then even Edmund, had to laugh at her improbable breadth of knowledge.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

When they returned to the jailhouse, they found Clavering with Dr. Stallings. “Mr. Stevens is awake,” he informed them.

“Awake!” Edmund cried.

“Has he spoken yet?” asked Lenox.

Stallings shook his head. “I fear that speech is still a ways off, but I am heartened by his progress. I give credit to your friend from London, Dr. McDonald.”

“McConnell.”

“Excuse me—McConnell. He prescribed a very mild dose of phosphorous given in beef soup, and I would swear that the patient's pulse has grown stronger since I gave it to him.”

“That is excellent news. The moment he can speak, please ask him who his attacker was.”

Stallings looked doubtful. “Calm is probably for the best, at least until he is much stronger.”

“Use your judgment, I suppose,” said Lenox. “It would be very useful to hear the answer.”

A woman or a child.
McConnell's description of the attacker: Might it prove as incisively given as his prescription for the wounds of the man who had been attacked? Was Calloway protecting one of the sisters of his late, beloved wife, either Elizabeth Watson, Hadley's charwoman, or Claire Adams, who cleaned the town hall?