Home by Nightfall (26 page)

“Did you recognize the person?”

“Well, that's just it. I didn't
think
I had recognized him. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that perhaps it might just have been—well, Mr. Stevens himself.”

Lenox looked at her, surprised. “Near the gamekeeper's cottage! How confident do you feel in that guess?”

“Only a bit. And yet I would have said it was him—I would say it was him. But he couldn't have been staying in the cottage himself, could he? It seems impossible.”

“He might have been meeting someone there,” said Edmund. “Calloway, for instance.”

Lenox asked several more questions, Edmund occasionally interjecting. They stayed for another twenty minutes, teasing out the details of Adelaide Snow's memory. After a while Snow himself came in—a stringy, singularly ugly man, whose face softened out of recognition when he spied his daughter.

Soon after he had entered, Lenox rose, saying that they ought to go. He badly wanted to speak to Elizabeth Watson. He could sense that he was close to the solution now. Perhaps very close.

He thanked Adelaide Snow and then added, “Incidentally, if you have time, I'm sure you would both be very welcome at my brother-in-law's house tomorrow night. He's having a ball. With your father's consent, obviously.”

“The Earl of Houghton?” said Adelaide incredulously. Her cousin's eyes widened, too. “Are you quite sure?”

“By all means,” said Lenox.

After some further cavil, made solely out of propriety, both cousins agreed, happily—the father, less happily. When they had left, Edmund asked him if he ought to have done that. Lenox replied that it would do Houghton's wife good to have something to complain about, and they were very nice girls, a demographic often in short supply at Houghton's balls as he recalled, and anyhow everything was much looser in the country, wasn't it?

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Hadley himself opened the door to the little house in Potbelly Lane. “Hello, gentlemen!” he said welcomingly. “Please come in, please. I cannot tell you how happy you have made me with your conclusions, Mr. Lenox. Even now I am restoring some of the collection I had to leave here to their superb little display cases. Would you like to see them, I wonder?”

They then passed the most stultifying forty seconds of Lenox's life, pretending to be fascinated by what looked like a piece of common granite, but which Hadley assured them was a rare and invaluable example of something-or-other-in-Latin.

“Mr. Hadley,” said Lenox as soon as he decently could, “I wonder whether we could have a word with Mrs. Watson?”

“Mrs. Watson? Of course! She's in the kitchen. You know the way, if you would like to speak to her privately.”

“That would be ideal—thank you so much.” Seeing from Hadley's face that he had been abrupt, he added, “I hope we may hear more about your collection at a moment when our time is more our own. You understand, of course.”

Mollified, the insurance salesman nodded. “I do, gentlemen, indeed I do.”

The charwoman was polishing a silver teapot. Lenox and Edmund greeted her and asked whether they might have a moment of conversation, to which she assented.

Not altogether happily, Lenox noted. The first question he asked was whether she had had any contact with Mr. Stevens in her life.

“Only to see at the market, sir,” she answered, “or I suppose I must have seen him about the hustings, election time.”

“Has your sister told you anything about him? About interacting with him at the town hall?”

She shook her head. “She goes in after everyone's gone for the evening, you know.”

“And yet Stevens worked long hours sometimes.” Without a direct question to answer, she looked unsure of how to reply, and Lenox forged on. “Are you close with Mr. Calloway?”

Her face took on a look of pity. “We tried to be family to him, after my sister died, poor Cat. She was a ray of light, that one.”

“He rejected your friendship?”

“For a year or two he would sit down to a glass of wine with us, right enough. But in the end he lost his mind, did Calloway. Never had a
very
firm grip on it to start with, mind.”

“Do you know of any reason he would attack Stevens?”

“I've been puzzling over that all morning myself,” she said.

“Could it have been for you, or for your sister?”

She laughed with disbelief. “For us? He wouldn't open the door of his 'ouse for us.”

After this response, Lenox asked her to look over the list of Stevens's secretaries. It became clear very quickly that she couldn't read, however—and equally clear that she would stand there till the final battle between good and evil on the day of judgment rather than admit it—so Lenox took the list back and read her the names.

She knew all of them; her face screwed up in anger and pity at the name Ainsworth. But she didn't have anything particularly useful to say. She wasn't related to any of them.

Lenox paused. “This is a small town, Mrs. Watson,” he said, “so I will come out with it plain. You are connected to Mr. Stevens and Mr. Calloway in a dozen different ways. Both you and your sister, in our conversations, seem to me not to have a great affection for the mayor. The mayor—who has been attacked. I'd feel more comfortable if I knew why.”

This gambit of openness, Lenox saw almost as soon as he started speaking, was destined to fail utterly. A pitiless blankness descended on the maid's features. “Don't have any feeling about him one way nor the other, sir,” she said. “I'm sure I wish him quite recovered.”

The repudiation in her voice was absolute. By asking about her sons, Edmund managed to bring her around to a better humor before they left, but a last casual question about Stevens from Charles elicited no further information.

Peculiar, peculiar.

They were standing out on Potbelly Lane in the brisk air a few moments later, looking up and down the cobblestoned street. The sky was white, wan, a net of birds rising from a field and turning across it as they looked toward the countryside. Lenox sighed.

“What now?” asked Edmund.

Lenox stood still for a moment, thinking. Then he said, “Let's walk back to the house. I would like to sit alone with a pot of tea and think for a few hours.”

“Why? Do you have an idea of who did it?”

Lenox shook his head. “No. And yet I'm sure that I also know exactly who did it, if I can merely piece all of the clues together and realize that I know it! Something … something about the whole business … something about Miss Snow and Mrs. Watson … and Miss Harville…”

Edmund waited patiently after he trailed off, and remained mostly silent as they walked across the town and out across the field toward Lenox House, blessedly. Lenox was deep in thought. Back at the house he gave quick, distracted kisses to Sophia and Lady Jane, said hello to Toto and George, and then, mumbling his excuses, made immediately for his father's old chess room.

Charles and Edmund's father had been a devoted chess player; his fiercest lifelong opponent had been an illiterate farmer named Paxton, who had come up to this room every few evenings for thirty years. It was an odd, very small chamber on the second story, barely more than a closet, with just space enough for two chairs and a tiny table, inlaid with a chessboard—but it had a vast window and, sitting near the corner of the house, gave a long and beautiful view of the dipping and rising green countryside.

Lenox sat down in the chair closer to the door, with the view. Edmund had left the room exactly as their father had had it, though he wasn't a chess player himself. After a few minutes Waller came up with the pot of strong tea that Lenox had asked for and set it down. Lenox stood up and cracked the window, which let in a bracing coolness. Then he poured himself a cup of tea, added sugar and milk to it—and set about considering the case.

There were many aspects of it that he pondered. A few kept returning to him.

Adelaide Snow, for instance, saying
I would recall seeing Mad—seeing Mr. Calloway.

Calloway's behavior; and the behavior, too, of both his sisters-in-law.

Those library books.

That terrible drawing on the steps to Hadley's house; on the wall of Stevens's office.

Paxton had been a superior player—Lenox's father would have been lucky to get three out of ten games from him—and as Lenox fiddled with the chess pieces, thinking, he felt a burst of love and fondness for his father, who would come downstairs with his rueful smile and see Paxton off, promising his revenge next time. They'd been friends, though they'd spent most of their lives in such different ways, Lenox's father with the great men of the land, Paxton amid turnips and pigs.

Now they were both gone. How was it possible? It was amazing how real the dead could seem, as if they might walk in from the next room. Where had they gone? When would they come back? Why shouldn't they sit at this table again, each smoking, Charles's father in his red evening jacket, Paxton in his heavy brown cardigan, pondering their respective strategies? It was so strange. When his father had died, a great comfort had gone out of life, and being back here made him see that, and made him pity James and Teddy for losing their mother. To have Jane was an enormous consolation, but a parent—while one's parents were alive, if they were decent parents, one was always at least in some small part of one's self protected from life, from fear, from reality.

Lenox thought of Molly, and then of the line, the greatest line written by an Englishman between Chaucer and Shakespeare:
O death, thou comest when I least expected thee.

He made his way through cup after cup of tea, sitting there in silence, staring into the countryside. It grew dimmer and then dark. The hours passed.

When at last he stood up, it wasn't with a snap of recognition, or a revelation—but he had it. He was suddenly extremely tired.

He went downstairs, where his brother, Toto, and Jane were in the long drawing room, chatting amiably. “Charles!” said Jane. “How are you?”

“Oh, fine, thank you,” he said, smiling. “Edmund, do you think you might send word asking Mickelson if we could borrow his dog for the day?”

“Sandy? She's not a scenting dog.”

“Yes, Sandy, if you wouldn't mind. Unless Stevens steps to it, I suspect it's that dog who will tell us the truth at last.”

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Lenox spent the whole next morning with Sophia. It was still just warm enough that they could comfortably clomp around the dewy fields in their boots, kicking up puddles. They visited the horses in the stables and had a walk around the pond—terrifying several hapless ducks as they went—before settling in to a long spell of picking themselves apples from the trees on the west side of the house. They threw the bad ones at a stump nearby, which was satisfying.

He had refused at breakfast to tell Edmund his suspicions, just as he had refused the night before. “I'm probably wrong,” he said.

“Is it Calloway?” asked Edmund. “Just tell me if it's Calloway. I'm the one who told you about the mint and marjoram, after all.”

“That's very true,” said Lenox, “but I don't want to say anything. Just be patient a little while longer.”

“You're a bore,” said Lady Jane. “And if you know who did it, oughtn't you be out putting them in jail? The public's safety is in danger.”

“The public will survive another day,” said Lenox.

After lunch, when Sophia went up to the nursery to have her afternoon nap, he did go into town. Edmund was busy catching up on a great deal of the estate's business—what he had returned to Markethouse to do in the first place—so Lenox went alone. He took possession of Sandy, Mickelson's spaniel, from his owner, and went to see Clavering in the jail.

The constable continued to look besieged. “Mad Calloway still won't say a word more,” he told Lenox, “and I would swear that he's laughing at us—daring us to hang him.”

They were standing on the porch of the Bell and Horns, which blazed with the welcoming light of several fireplaces from its small windows. “I think I may be able to settle his hash,” Lenox said, “with the help of the dog.”

“Are you sporting with me, Mr. Lenox?”

“You have my solemn word that I am not. But listen—will you get Claire Adams and Elizabeth Watson for me, a little bit later on, and Miss Harville, too?”

“Arrest them? Claire Adams has an alibi, for one.”

“No—not arrest them. But I would like to speak with all of them this evening.”

They fleshed out the details of the plan, and then Lenox walked with the spaniel down to Dr. Stallings's house. There he learned that Stevens had relapsed into something that looked like a coma.

“Will he die soon?”

“I would have said he would be likely to die yesterday,” said Stallings, “and then he woke up briefly—and now—well, I cannot say. Nobody could say. It is all contingent.”

“I wish he might wake up,” said Lenox, shaking his head. “It would be enormously helpful.”

Stallings frowned. “No doubt of some personal consequence to Mr. Stevens himself, too.”

“Yes. Of course—of course.”

He made his way home with Sandy, tipping his cap at the window of the barbershop, where old Mr. Widaman was apparently still shaving people—though his hand couldn't have gotten steadier since Lenox had been a boy, when he had already seemed of a very advanced age. In the window of the shop there was a card that said, in bold letters:

PURE GREASE OF A LARGE FINE BEAR!

Which meant that old canard had migrated from London out at least to the Home Counties. Ten to one it was plain old cooking grease. It was considered an extremely sophisticated thing to have in your hair, bear grease, but bears were not so very common, whereas grease was. From time to time one saw an actual bear in the window of a barbershop in the West End, with the promise that this was the bear to be killed for its grease later that week. Lenox was convinced that there was only one bear, who moved from shop to shop and would live to a fine old age—not unlike Lady Jane's theory that there were fifty fruitcakes in the whole of England, and everyone kept passing them around to each other, year after year, at Christmastime.