“Thank you, no, I have a friend in London who is already looking into it.”
“Please tell me what he finds.”
“I shall, of course,” said Lenox.
The men and women reassembled soon therafter and heard Lucy play, ate walnuts and apples from a silver tray, and drank port. At eleven, finally — too early for some, including the indomitable Emily Jasper, too late for others, including Lenox, whose entire determination it took to keep his eyes open — the party broke up.
It had been another surpassingly long day, and Lenox felt he might sleep without any trouble until the same time the next evening. He gave word that he didn’t need to be awakened at any particular hour.
Soon he and his wife were alone in their room again, and he could let himself give way to exhaustion. He loosened his tie and slumped into a soft armchair by their window.
Throughout the evening Jane had been affectionate with him, but now, alone again, she was silent, undoing her hair and removing her jewelry.
He granted her the right to silence, not doubting that he had been too harsh in his speech before supper.
At least he spoke, trying to make her smile by teasing her. “I would not call it your most successful party.” She didn’t respond, and so after another moment he added, “But did you see Dallington speak to Miss Taylor?”
Here was bait she could not help taking, though she knew it was offered for precisely that reason. “They were barely apart for the last hour of the evening,” she said. “So there, Charles Lenox.”
“Freddie was on the couch with them, dear.”
“Mark my words, it will be the making of him, to marry that young woman. She has a great spirit.”
“There we agree.”
They were quiet again for five or ten minutes after this, Lenox at his desk very casually looking over his speech, Lady Jane finishing a letter to her brother, in Sussex, that she intended to send in the morning. Yet their interchange had left them feeling more inclined to softness with each other, and when Lenox apologized she circled his neck with her arms and said that she, too, was sorry — and so they made it up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
You hear of the calm that comes before the storm,” said Frederick Ponsonby two mornings later, “but I find I much prefer the calm that comes afterward.”
“Alas, the storm usually causes enough damage to make the aftermath unhappy,” said Lenox.
“Yes, you’re right of course — poor Weston.”
They were sipping coffee at a small wrought-iron table on the veranda outside the library. It was the warmest day since Lenox had arrived in Plumbley, brilliant with golden sunlight, though it was still before eight o’clock in the morning. Off a quarter mile into the gardens they could see Lady Jane, Sophia, and Miss Taylor walking, the dogs barking them to order when they slowed.
The men did not wear their customary clothes — Ponsonby his quiet gray flannel and subdued cravats or Lenox his more metropolitan dark suits and ties — but instead were dressed identically in whites, ironed white pants, white sweaters, and snub-nosed white caps. The day was ideal for cricket.
“It seems somehow more and less tragic at once, that he has no close family,” said Lenox.
“There is Oates.”
“Yes, there is Oates. Who knows what condition he is in, however,” said Lenox.
The constable had been drinking heavily in the King’s Arms the past few nights, according to the gossip that had worked its way up from the servants’ quarters. True to his word, however, Wells, in the Plumbley jail, remained unharmed. Oates and a series of reliable townsmen took shifts watching the prisoner, always in pairs.
“Oates will have himself dried out by the time of the funeral,” said Frederick.
This was to be the next afternoon. “I hope so, certainly.”
In fact the murder seemed already as if it had happened a long time before. The past few days had been wonderfully peaceable, the kind Lenox had looked for when he decided to visit his cousin. Freddie had retired to his study for the whole period, other than meal times, and looked better for it, while Jane, in between stretches at her desk, was helping to plan the refreshments they would have at the cricket. For his part Lenox rode out upon horseback at nine in the morning and at three in the afternoon, and otherwise worked with steady application at his speech, which was all but drafted now. He was proud of it. As he had written to his brother in a letter that morning:
I imagined that what I needed to focus on the writing of the speech was time away from London, in the country. In fact what I needed was this case — the matter of the coining you have no doubt read about in the papers — to free my mind from the task at hand. It has worked beautifully. My hope is that this speech shall shame the other side into doing something for the poor — something more. It is past time.
The case had, as Lenox learned almost immediately, made the London papers. In general he preferred to keep his name away from the investigations in which he participated, retaining, as he did, some sensitivity to the sneers of those members of his caste who believed his work was beneath his station — it was this that drove him to privacy, and not, as he would have preferred in himself, modesty.
Nevertheless it was sometimes impossible to keep his name out of things. There had been a raft of telegrams congratulating him on his role in the case’s solution, including one from his friend Inspector Thomas Jenkins at Scotland Yard, who was chasing a criminal in the gin bars of Brussels (and drinking a fair bit of the stuff himself in the process, from the sound of it) but took time to write; another from the head of the Royal Mint; and several from colleagues in Parliament, all of whom managed a joking reference to his speech. No doubt they thought he had been neglecting his duties. On that count, however, his conscience was entirely clear. The speech was in excellent fettle.
A team of men from Scotland Yard was, even now, dissecting the great coining machine that Wells had stored in his cellar. Apparently it was of an uncommon type, producing the kind of fraudulent coins that tended to pop up in the western part of England, which led them to believe that a great deal of coining was centered in Bath — peculiar, given that town’s affluent reputation. There was a fresh excitement and endeavor to their efforts: here was a new lead, a chance at halting the production of hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal money. They were mildly grateful to Lenox; he had solved the murder, and discovered the coining only incidentally, and for these men, who had something of the air of obsessives, the latter was a more serious crime.
The only loose end the case had left, as far as Lenox could discern, was Musgrave’s behavior. There had been no report of him in Bath, which meant that he must have switched roads in the miles of road between that city and Plumbley, but why had he left? Why had his new wife been so decidedly homebound since their wedding? Lenox hoped McConnell might provide the glimmer of an answer, if he could identify the powder that had been marked as Mrs. Musgrave’s “sugar.” The doctor had written in a telegram that he hoped to have some idea in a day or two, not longer.
As they sat on the veranda the men did not discuss any of this, however. They talked instead of the cricket, and then of old matches they had played in, many years before, when Lenox was a schoolboy permitted to stand in the field for the last few overs, never to bat. By the time he reached the age of sixteen he was the Royal Oak’s second to last batsman (both men always played for that side, for reasons lost to history), desperate to overcome the invincible King’s Arms side. The KA, as they were called, had then boasted a blacksmith named Millington — dead now, kicked by a horse he was shoeing — who had seemed like Hercules himself, back in the fifties. It wasn’t until Lenox was past twenty-two that he saw Millington go out for less than a half-century.