“How strange.”
“Yes, it is. And it has given rise to tremendous gossip, of course.”
“What does the aunt say to it?”
“She trusts wholly in Captain Musgrave. I would venture that she stands rather in awe of him.”
“Is he much seen, any more than his wife?”
“No. He takes his custom in most things to Bath or to Taunton”—this was a larger town not far away—“and that alone would have made him unpopular, if people hadn’t decided that he was mistreating Catherine.”
“Yet you said he had good manners.”
“Manners; yes. Personally I didn’t see the incident.”
“Incident?”
Frederick rose and returned to the small table by the telescope, where he took a sip of his negus. “Before Catherine left Plumbley she was, of course, wooed by several gentlemen. One of these was Wells.”
“The grain merchant? Whose shop was vandalized?”
“The same.”
“And the incident?”
“Captain Musgrave and his wife were walking through town one afternoon and Mr. Wells approached them. Nobody quite heard their conversation — eyes in windowpanes, you see — until Musgrave’s voice rose. Said that if Wells was a gentleman he would call him out; that he expected him not to address Catherine Musgrave again; and that he would thank him to continue along his way. Then Musgrave grabbed his wife by the wrist — most cruelly if accounts are to be believed, though it’s possible that the myth has grown rather out of proportion to the event itself — and dragged her away. It was after that that we begin to see much less of her about Plumbley. Of course the timing may be coincidental.”
“What was Wells’s account of the matter?”
“He was very free about it in the Royal Oak — said he had merely been wishing them a good day, and was astonished at Musgrave’s reaction. Said a sort of black jealousy came over the man, though he had won his wife fair and square.”
Lenox waited, but his uncle didn’t say anything else. “And that is all?” the member of Parliament asked.
“Yes.”
“Nothing else on earth encourages people to attach Musgrave’s name to these acts of vandalism, then? I call it very thin, to think that a captain of the Tenth Regiment of Foot has been setting out about a small Somerset village with rocks and a bucket of paint to frighten the locals, simply because he may be unkind to his wife and has had words with one of her former suitors. Does that seem plausible to you?”
“Not phrased as such.”
“And what use could he have with a brass clock that might seem very fine to a grain merchant, but likely not to a gentleman?”
“None. You’re right.”
“If anything it sounds to me as if he wants privacy. Beyond that we know that he has no fear of speaking directly to Wells, which makes me wonder very sincerely why he would go to the wearisome effort of staying up half the night to break his windows.”
The older man frowned, hands clasped behind his back. “Yet there is something in the man’s air — well, perhaps you shall see, if you meet him. I fancy myself a judge of character, you know.”
“Yes,” said Lenox. “And it’s all damnably puzzling to be sure.” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps I’ll have a word of conversation with Oates, the constable, after I drop in on Fripp.”
“You’ll find that he and Weston are very eager for help.”
“Where are they?”
Frederick gave Lenox instructions about where to find the small police station. “Tell them I sent you,” he said at last.
“I shall. And is there anything else I ought to know?”
“No. I don’t think so, anyhow.”
“Nothing about Musgrave?”
“No, I don’t— Oh! I quite forgot. I should have added that it is held against Musgrave in Plumbley — held as almost damning, I fear — that he is attended everywhere he goes by a large black dog.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lenox sat in the sunroom with Lady Jane and Sophia for a few pleasant moments, during which he told his wife about Frederick’s plans to give up the house, and she reacted more calmly than he had — thought it was a sensible idea. Perhaps she was right.
After they had discussed it Lenox said good-bye to his wife and his child, called Bear and Rabbit, put on his black topcoat, and set out for Plumbley.
The clean air had already invigorated him. Few men felt more at home in London than Lenox did, yet even he had to acknowledge the difference it made to his heavy lungs and his stinging eyes to be away from the metropolis. It was a worsening problem; on one day earlier that month the mixture of yellow fog and coal smoke — what residents called the London Particular — had been so bad that the police ordered the streetlamps lit during the daylight hours, not much after noon. Then there were the cattle the year before, brought in from just such a place as this for an exhibition of livestock, who had suffocated to death. It sounded like a joke, but it wasn’t. Even every Englishman’s favorite accessory, the tightly furled black umbrella, had become that color largely to guard against the discoloration of the polluted air that a white umbrella in London invariably suffered.
The countryside was so beautiful. It was that season when the end of summer and the beginning of autumn get muddled, and one never seemed to know whether to dress for the impending October frost or the lingering September heat. In the small houses he passed on the grassy lane, there was a feel of homeward-turning, of less time outdoors, as if in anticipation of winter, with firewood stacked outside of each chimney again and, visible in the dim windows, congregations by the warmth of the stove, just while the morning chill lasted.
As he walked, he cut a solitary figure, slender, fingers occasionally dragging along the stone wall that guarded the path. The two retrievers gamboled around his feet as he went, one black and one golden. Neither ventured too far from his heel, except once in a while to contemplate for a longer moment some especially arresting scent in a clump of grass along the side of the road, like a scholar who turns a page back to read it again. When whichever dog had been detained by a particular odor was finally satisfied with his interrogation of it, he would sprint forward in bounds to catch up with the pack. As for Lenox he stopped twice during the mile and a half walk, almost as if he had forgotten something at home. Both times his eyes rose to the meadows along the path and his face broke into a radiant smile. He would pause in his steps, then carry on his way, eyes to the ground again, his expression slowly returning from joy to meditation. What had come to his mind, each of these times, was Sophia; what drew his thoughts back away from her were Captain Musgrave, his black dog, and the drawing of the hanging man.
Soon the lane brought him to a small stream, which meant he was close to town. The dogs barked a duck, strolling along its bank, back into the water, and then circled proudly back to their master for praise.
“There’re two of you,” Lenox said chidingly and nipped Bear on the ear with his fingers.
At the path’s final turn, a grove of trees gave way and revealed Plumbley. He stopped, happy to look upon it again.
It was an ancient place of habitation, set at a low point among the few miles of serene countryside that surrounded it, near the strength of the stream. It was entered in the Domesday Book as Plunten, and then round about the year 1160 took the name Plumton; two centuries later it was Plomton; soon enough thereafter it was Plum’s Lea; then Plumley, and now, finally, for the past hundred years or so, Plumbley. Whence that superfluous B came no local historian had satisfactorily deciphered, but now, planted where it was, it showed no signs of moving. What was certain was that, as they had nearly a thousand years ago, when they give the village its name, plums still grew on the lea near the great wood. Locals would tell you that they tasted dreadful off the branch but made for a fair jam.