“Toward Yew Walk,” said Carmody without hesitation.
So. It was not a lie, perhaps, but it was an infringement upon the truth. If his walk had been very long he might well have seen — spoken with — even murdered Weston on his way home.
“Did the bark of a dog ever wake you, that night?” Lenox asked.
“No,” said Carmody, “and I am a very light sleeper.”
“Thank you,” said Lenox. “Oates, I shall stop by the police station later today to speak with you.”
“Sir.”
He could feel that he was circling closer to the truth. His mind went to Dallington, who would perhaps return that evening with some account of Fontaine’s behavior. Might that prove the key?
He walked to the bar in a meditative disposition.
Frederick was sitting at a table in a private room upstairs in the Royal Oak. It was a friendly pub, full of highly polished brass and gleaming oak, with glasses and tankards hung above the bar and a worn sign that said DUCK OR MUTTON — the diners’ options, presumably — hung from two chains between a pair of bow windows, and swaying each time the front door was opened or closed.
They spoke for some time of the case but the facts, Lenox felt, were beginning to become stale to him, his energy growing inward and sterile.
“I think the solution will come to me more readily if we turn away from the subject,” he said.
The mutton had just arrived, ringed around with heaps of peas, potatoes, and smashed turnips. There was a bottle of claret on the sideboard. Frederick nodded. “Very sensible,” he said. “Occasionally when I have been too long at my desk, describing the properties of the Hyacinthus sylvestris or sketching a dried Spiræa ulmaria that I have picked — meadow-sweet, you would know it as, or meadow-queen — I can become rather muddled, and when I feel it, I immediately make the decision to go three or four days without once looking at or thinking of flowers. In general I spend the time off wandering about the house, finding things that need to be patched up or painted. Drives the servants mad, I’m afraid.”
Lenox took a sip of wine. He paused before he spoke. “Can you really be thinking of leaving Everley?” he asked. “Your gardens?”
Frederick, whose mood had been light only a moment before, scowled. “None of that, Charles.”
“I remember coming here with my mother, in ’fifty-four, and—”
“No, no reminiscing, either. I love Everley, and for that reason I must do my best by her.”
“The best she could have is your presence, Uncle Freddie.”
“Sentimental nonsense, Charles. There is no sense in resisting time, or change. Both will come to all men, whether they accede gracefully or kicking. I’m old, now, and let that be an end of it. There, eat some peas, you need a bit of greenery, you look tired.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
After their mutton Lenox took himself back to the house, while Frederick packed his pipe, unfurled a newspaper, and waited with the last quarter of the bottle of wine for his foot soldiers to report to him. He invited Charles to stay, but the younger man declined, restless still, a bit befogged from being in the warm public house on this cool and wet day, in need of the clarifying brace of the outdoors.
He made the walk back to Everley quickly. At the gates, and passing down the broad, tree-lined avenue, he gazed at the house, at its beautiful reflection in the rain-scattered pond. It was difficult to imagine it without Frederick inside. The thought reached some sorrowful place in Lenox, bound up in his mother’s early death, in his own advancing years … but it was better not to think of that. He decided he would go and find Sophia.
In fact, once he had so decided he felt a primitive need to lay eyes on her. In the activity of the past few days, dating back to his trip to London, he had gone longer spells without seeing the child than he had since her birth.
He went to the nursery. The door was pulled-to but not closed, and he hazarded a gentle tap of two knuckles against the frame. “Miss Taylor?”
Her nearly silent footsteps came to the door. “Yes, Mr. Lenox?”
Her face was forbidding, steadied for rejection, Lenox saw. “Could I see her, do you think?”
“I think just at the moment, since she’s sleeping—”
There was a faint sound behind the door, something between a cry and a yawn. “She’s stirring,” said Lenox.
A polite governess could not roll her eyes — but it must nevertheless have been a very great temptation to Miss Taylor, standing in the doorway, having anticipated a quiet forty minutes in which she might read or knit. “Come in, then,” she said.
Lenox approached the bassinet and looked down over it with love in his eyes. His daughter was stretching out her arms and legs upward, languorous with rest. “Shall I take her out?”
Miss Taylor looked through the window at the gardens. “Let me change,” she said.
“No,” said Lenox quickly, “you sit and read here. I shall take her — I’m dressed for it anyhow. You can watch me from the window if you like, to make sure I haven’t spilled her.” He looked up. “Or introduced her to tobacco, or whatever paternal vice you might suspect me of.”
The governess finally smiled now. “I’ll just prepare her, then.”
Lenox watched as this was done — as Sophia was bundled like a bag of flour into warm clothes, layer upon layer of them, and then into her bassinet — before asking, “Has Lady Jane been in to see her, already?”
“Oh, several times.”
“Perhaps while I find an umbrella to cover us both and put her in her perambulator you could cut along and ask her if she cares to walk with us?”
The governess went to do so, and Lenox, very carefully, fetched Sophia — who was gurgling pleasantly upon his shoulder, wide-eyed now — down the curved main flight of stairs. He settled her in her contraption, a buggy they had ordered especially from a workman in Kent, upon the advice of Toto McConnell, and then found two umbrellas, one of which he jimmied in between the handle and the bassinet so that it hovered above the child and one for himself.
Lady Jane sent word back that she was busy at just that moment, but would see them when they returned, and so Lenox and Sophia went along on their own into the gardens, accompanied by Bear and Rabbit. He insisted that Miss Taylor return to the nursery as a respite from her duties.
The dogs, restive after a day of sitting and staring at the rain, bounded ahead of their humans and then came back in tearing sprints, breathless, rendered simple by their excitement. After they settled they began to show signs of wanting to dig, and Lenox had to remonstrate with them, having been on the receiving end upon his arrival of a sharp, just barely respectful speech from Rodgers about dogs and gardens.
There were miles of paths extending out from the house at Everley. Lenox picked one at random, a long thin meander with sunken gardens full of Somerset flowers on either side.
“Well, Sophia, though your Uncle Freddie didn’t care to hear of it, perhaps I shall tell you of ’fifty-four.” He spoke conversationally, trying not to use that near-universal tone of loving condescension with which most parents spoke to their children, the same one men and women would use with dogs, though he had moments of weakness.
She looked up at him, big-eyed, clutching occasionally at the air with her small fist. The rain had stopped and he removed the umbrella from her pram so that she could look out at the world.
“I would have been, what, twenty-three, twenty-four, I suppose. I thought I knew a very great deal about life.”
She laughed.
“Yes, it is rather funny, though you will be civil to your papa, please.