“Don’t hire her out to your friends for rides on the way, either, or I shall hear about it,” said Lenox. “There’s another halfpenny if you find me within the hour with the news that she is home.”
With that finished, he stood at the top of the square, gazing down at the gentle slope. Dozens of stalls were crammed higgledy-piggledy into it, the noise and smell already impressive.
“Lo there, oysters?” called a fellow passing him, with a yoke around his neck and a tray hanging from it full of cracked oysters. A pepper box and a salt cellar hung from his belt.
“Later, perhaps, thank you,” said Lenox.
There were other wandering vendors of this type, selling ale in flagons, coffee in tin pots, apples, flowers, long braided strings of turnips and onions. A teenaged boy had rock sugar for a farthing. A bargain: As Lenox knew from his boyhood, with careful husbandry a medium-sized piece of rock sugar could be made to last through a full market day.
Then there were the stalls. Cockerels, more substantial varieties of fruit and vegetable, trout (from Edmund’s and Houghton’s waters, almost certainly), fat pheasants, white sugar in twisted brown wax paper. What an infinity of things to buy! Down the west lane were the patent medicine sellers — all fraudulent, McConnell had assured Lenox, and most of the medicines simply alcohol, though many in the lower classes all across England swore by their effects with sacral fervor — and down the east lane were stalls selling jewelry, muslin, bombazine, perfume, soapstone carvings, slippers, sponges, cloaks, squares of glass, penknives, anything you could imagine. Out in front of these stands, knife-cleaners and tin-menders sat on low stools, the tools of their trade close at hand. Down near the fountain, a barber was warming water over a small covered fire to give his shaves and cuts.
“Mr. Lenox?” said a voice.
Lenox turned. “Constable Clavering, how do you do?”
Clavering looked overrun of his capacities, but he nodded bravely. “Hoping for uneventful, sir,” he said. “Uneventful would be ideal.”
“I wonder — could you point me in the direction of the sellers who were stolen from, the last two weekends?”
They spent the next hour going from stall to stall, Clavering walking with the assurance of a man who knew precisely where every stray potato in this marketplace had fallen.
None of the vendors could explain the thefts. Lenox asked them to describe any customers who had stood out, but the crowd was too various and bustling to allow for such recollection — yes, there were regulars at each stall, and among the irregulars most of the faces at least were familiar. That still left two or three in every ten who were strangers, or whom the vendors had only seen once or twice.
The most audacious of the thefts had been the half wheelbarrow of carrots. “Gone,” the fellow who had missed them said to Lenox, his astonishment undiminished by time. “Gone! Simple as that. Talked to a customer for a moment or two, turned back to the barrow I’d been unloading, and it was gone.”
“You didn’t see anyone lurking about?”
“There are always boys in and around the market. But we’ve never had a problem — always deal very severely with anyone caught stealing, several months in jail from the magistrate, ’cause we all know Markethouse needs the market, don’t we?”
Clavering nodded emphatically at that.
It made Lenox think, this. The two sets of crimes were very different. On the one hand, there was the simple theft of necessities — food, blankets. On the other, there was the rather uncanny victimization of Arthur Hadley, including the telegram, the chalk drawing, and the sherry.
Were these crimes necessarily related? he wondered.
He spent the next half hour moving around the market. He saw a great many people he knew. There was Mrs. Nabors, who had been the housekeeper at Lenox House some years before, but had been fired when she’d been found selling the house’s food from the back door; apparently she had continued in that business, for she had a stand full of meat pies and gave Lenox a very dirty look as he passed it. He saw Mad Calloway again, wandering with his herbs, simples, dandelion greens, mushrooms, and nettles, stopping occasionally to accept a coin for a bunch of them. And he spotted Mrs. Watson’s older boy, in full health apparently, sprinting up an alleyway with a group of children around his age.
He found Edmund near the Bell and Horns at a little before eleven o’clock. He was with the mayor of Markethouse — a slender, staid-looking man whose name was, for some reason that had gone into the ground with his parents, Stevens Stevens. It was really the only notable thing about him.
“Hello, Mr. Stevens,” said Lenox.
“Hello, Mr. Lenox. Wet day, isn’t it?”
“Clearing, I would have said.”
The mayor looked up doubtfully. Lenox had known him for forty years, since he was a swottish, pedantic boy at the village school, and more or less the same look of circumspection had been on his face the whole time. He had never in that time evinced any vivacity except a complete, joyful absorption in numbers. Markethouse — a market town, after all — liked that, and his rather stooped figure, permanently hunched forward from a lifetime of peering over his glasses at balance sheets, inspired a fond confidence. He’d run unopposed several times in a row now.
“I don’t know — it could be more rain,” he said. “I find these Saturdays exhausting, though of course necessary, too. Louisa, could you run inside and fetch me a glass of sherry with an egg beat up in it, and a sandwich if they have it?”
The young secretary next to him, a girl of fifteen or sixteen with thick spectacles, clutching a stack of loose papers, said, “Roast beef or cheese?”
Stevens pondered this question as if a great deal hung upon it, hemming and hawing, were they the same price, they were, interesting, before deciding upon roast beef.
The glass of sherry Stevens had asked for reminded Lenox of Hadley, and he said to the mayor, “Do you know a man named Arthur Hadley? He lives in Potbelly Lane.”
Stevens shook his head. “Sir Edmund has just been asking me the same question. I do not. I fear that my work has kept me indoors much of the summer, when I ought to have been out, behaving sociably. In politics, as you gentlemen know, that common touch is vital.”
“He’s been a victim of a theft,” said Lenox.
“So Sir Edmund told me.” Stevens shook his head, looking, like Clavering, overwhelmed. “And beyond that there are the chickens, the carrots, the books, the blankets, the—”
“Books?” said Lenox sharply.
Stevens nodded. “Yes, books have been stolen.”
“Clavering didn’t mention that,” said Edmund.
“Four, stolen from what is already a very small lending library here in town. I started it with a surplus of funds we had — sixteen pounds — because of a rather elegant legerdemain, if I say so, that I was able to perform, with the budget of the—”
“What were the books?” said Lenox.
Stevens narrowed his eyes, trying to recall. “One novel, I believe, perhaps by Mrs. Gaskell, and … but Louisa will know, when she returns with my food and drink. I wonder if I suddenly wanted a sherry because of Edmund’s telling me about Mr. Hadley. Funny, how the brain works. Do you know, I often think that—”
But Lenox, who was not very eager to hear Stevens Stevens’s speculations on the nature of the brain, interrupted him again, saying, “When were the books stolen?”
“Last week.”
“Could they have been stolen to resell?”
Stevens shook his head proudly. “Upon every page of every book we acquire, there is stamped the name of Markethouse Library, and at random throughout the book there is a stamp informing any potential buyer that the book is not for sale, nor ever will it be. They did the same at Massingstone. Rather a clever idea.”