And yet, and yet …
“I have an idea,” Lenox said.
Forty minutes later both brothers were on horseback, Lenox on Daisy, who was cantering with a sprightly gait, and Edmund on an eight-year-old chestnut he loved better than all but a handful of human beings, Cigar.
They rode in a perimeter around Markethouse. They started very close in, along the fields at the edge of town. There were several small buildings near a small public garden, but all of them were locked; when they came back to where they had started, they went a half mile farther out from the town and started the circle again.
This was precisely the way Lenox always approached a corpse: moving away from it in concentric circles, studying the body and its environs from farther away with each one. Scotland Yard had officially adopted it as a standard method two years before.
Now the corpse was Markethouse, and they circled it three times, at a half mile, a mile, and a mile and a half, stopping at every small building they saw, jumping easily over the fences they passed. On the main road a few people were starting to leave Markethouse, their goods all sold, evidently, traveling by donkey or by foot.
They came again to the head of the stream where they had started, longitudinally, and Edmund said, “Another circle?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“With all my heart. It had been too long since I was on a horse.”
Lenox broke into a grin. “I told you! There’s nothing like it.”
“Yes, I remember now that you know everything. Come along, catch up if you can!” cried Edmund, and put his heel into the horse’s flank.
Neither the next circle nor the one after that showed them anything. There were a few small buildings in various attitudes of crumble, but none looked as if its threshold had been crossed in years, never mind the last few days.
It was growing dark when they reached a small, tumbledown gamekeeper’s cottage. They were about three miles outside of town now, and another three west of Lenox House. Both of the brothers were breathing hard. Markethouse was in the distance from them on the eastern horizon, smoke rising in thin columns from a few dozen different chimneys on this brisk day.
“Whose land are we on?” Lenox asked in a low voice.
Edmund looked at him curiously. “Alfred Snow. We have been for the past seven or eight minutes. A farmer in these parts. He keeps a good deal of livestock, too. A rough sort, but very smart — worked his way up from the orphanage in Chichester, you know, wholly on his own in the world, to very great wealth indeed. I have a good deal of time for him. He bought the property from Wethering when Wethering went bankrupt, poor sod. You remember Wethering. Why? Do you see something?”
Lenox pointed at the ground. There was tobacco ash in a pile next to the door, as if someone had been leaning there and refilling a pipe. It might well have been nothing — another rider, stopping by, or the gamekeeper.
But. “Does Snow keep game?”
“No. Wethering did, and his forefathers, of course. That’s why this building is here.”
“Let’s look inside,” said Lenox. “Quietly.”
They dismounted, tied their horses to a tree, and walked silently toward the door. Lenox put a few fingers to it, and it swung open easily.
Within the small stone cottage there looked to be two rooms. The door to the rear room was drawn to, but in the first it was obvious someone had been resident recently. There was a makeshift pile of twigs and branches in the fireplace, half burned, though it had been extinguished by the rain. Lenox went to it and felt the stones of the hearth — warm.
He turned back to Edmund and raised his eyebrows. There was a blanket here, too. One of the church’s?
And then his blood went cold. In the next room there was a sound, a footstep.
Edmund looked at Lenox, who rose very, very slowly to a standing position. “Stay,” Lenox mouthed to his brother, holding up a hand.
He walked as softly as he possibly could across the stone floor and put his ear to the door.
There was certainly someone in the next room. He could hear the fellow’s breath, rather heavy, as if he’d been running.
Then there was the sound of another door opening and closing.
“Quick!” said Lenox. “There must be a back door!”
He and Edmund burst through and saw the back door of the gamekeeper’s cottage flung open. Nobody was in this second, smaller room — a kitchen — and Lenox ran to the door.
He pulled up short there. “Look,” he said, pointing out into the field.
Sprinting into the gloaming there was a small, sturdy dog, barking happily.
“A spaniel,” said Edmund.
“Sandy,” Lenox said.
Edmund shook his head. “Damn it.”
They walked back around toward the front of the house, each wishing that it were a little brighter out, careful where they stepped, both wary of someone who might be lurking there, waiting to do them harm.
When they reached the front of the house, they saw two leather lines hanging loose from the trees. Their horses were gone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was a very long walk home.
As they were nearing Lenox House, with its low glimmer of domestic light shining in the darkness of the evening, Edmund said, “You know, it occurs to me, we might easily have gone up to Snow’s and asked him to lend us a couple of horses.”
Lenox stopped in his tracks. “It occurs to you, does it?”
Edmund smiled good-naturedly. “Yes, I’m sorry. But listen, there’s no need to be cross with me. You didn’t think of it either.”
Lenox smiled wearily and clapped his brother on the shoulder. “No, you’re right. What a pair of flats we look, I’m sorry to say.”
The rain had pasted fallen yellow leaves to the smooth marble steps of Lenox House, and they walked up to the door carefully. Two of Edmund’s footmen came out to hold umbrellas over them, Waller hovering in the doorway and watching. “Thank you, thank you,” said Edmund. “Yes, thank you. Waller, have our horses come back?”
“Your horses, sir?”
Edmund, despite his light tone, was desperate to have the horses back, particularly Cigar, and had forced Charles to a breakneck pace on their walk home. He had fire in his eyes now. “Send for Rutherford, please.”
That was the man in charge of the stables. “Yes, sir. Immediately sir.”
“After that, get the cook to make us some kind of hot drink, please.”
“Make it stiff as a poker too,” Lenox put in.
“Very good, sir.”
They were in the entrance hall, and despite being wet and cold, despite having lost the horses, Lenox felt a kind of good cheer. This was the same hall, with its black-and-white checkered floor, its curving staircase, that had seemed desolate the day before, but now, with the dogs and the servants around them, it reminded him of long-ago days, coming home after a traipse in the country with Edmund, or on occasion with his father.
“And I could use something quick to eat, too,” he added.
“By all means, sir,” said Waller, though looking overwhelmed by this succession of requests.
“Rutherford first, though,” said Edmund. “We’ll change in the meanwhile.”
A few minutes later they met Rutherford in the hall, both changed, with their hair toweled dry.
He was a cagy-looking outdoorsman in his fifties with bushy gray eyebrows and a matching mustache. He said their horses hadn’t returned — and he took the news that they were gone very, very hard, particularly because of Daisy, whom he had been training. He couldn’t understand how Charles and Edmund had lost them.