“Neither Miss Winston nor I wants any bother. I say that quite sincerely.”
“I’ll see you to hell myself before I let you get married without a supper, Graham.”
Graham shook his head. “My calendar is full this spring.”
“Every night!”
“Every night.”
Lenox laughed, and was about to reply when Smith came out again. The detective scowled and leaned forward slightly, peering through the narrow slit between his scarf and his hat. “What could he be doing?”
Graham studied Smith, who was a hardened criminal, a diabolical and clever person. “I wonder if he’s working in his old line again.”
“Prostitution?”
Graham nodded. “He’s only receiving papers. Addresses, perhaps?”
Lenox narrowed his eyes. “Perhaps. But why would the carriages come to him? And why would they leave behind a trail of paper? I wonder if it’s something more complex. Stockjobbing, for instance.”
“You could find out by following him at night. If it’s prostitution, that’s when he’ll be busiest. If it’s stockjobbing, he’ll be off the clock then.”
Graham had always been an invaluable second set of eyes. “You’re right. If only it were warmer out.”
“Mr. Pointilleux is enthusiastic, is he not?”
“I wouldn’t want to put him in the way of danger. It’s my case.”
“Then you and I might do it one night this week.”
“I can’t risk the neck of a Member of Parliament, Graham. Not to mention what Miss Winston would think of it.”
“I think my neck will be all right,” said Graham drily.
Lenox continued to peer at the public house, wishing Smith, who’d disappeared inside once more, would come out again. They had a cab waiting and intended to follow the next carriage that came for him. “Well,” he said, still staring, “if you’re busy all spring it will be a luncheon. And if you’re not careful, I’m going to ask Jane to speak to Miss Winston directly.”
“Heaven help us,” Graham said.
Lenox laughed.
Several hours later, still pink-cheeked but dried and warmed, and having dropped Graham near Parliament, Lenox was sitting with Polly and Dallington at the weekly meeting of the agency’s three partners.
“Our finances are not spectacular,” Polly was saying, tapping the end of her pencil against the balance sheet she was studying. “Not disastrous, but not spectacular.”
“Not disastrous has always been my ambition in life,” said Dallington, and smiled at the look of exasperated affection that Polly shot him. “Anyhow, why be so gloomy? We’ve wiped LeMaire’s eye, we’re the heroes of Fleet Street, and we have half a dozen meetings with new clients today alone.”
“All six of them put together won’t add up to what we lost by Chadwick. I’m not joking. If it weren’t for the reserve fund, we would be in debt right now. I still think we might be wise to let one of the new detectives go. Mayhew probably.”
Lenox grimaced. It was true — Chadwick had cost them a few of their steadiest clients. “This is why it’s quite right that Polly is in charge,” he pointed out to Dallington. “Best to have a pessimist making the decisions.”
“I’m not a pessimist!” cried Polly. “A realist, perhaps.”
“Are you not pleased that the Daily Mirror called you ‘fetching,’ then?” asked Dallington.
“I’ll quit if you mention that again.”
Muller was in dock; the newspapers agreed that he wasn’t likely to serve a long sentence, since murder would be near impossible to prove, and a half-emptied sachet of arsenic had been found among Miss Schiller’s effects at the Hotel York. More than that, the palace had a strong interest in a pleasant relationship with Germany, as several of the John Bull — ish rags took pleasure in pointing out.
Lenox and Dallington had been to speak to him twice more, and also been to the Yard to receive Broadbridge’s brusque praise. (Most of that credit they pushed toward Nicholson, who looked likely, all fingers crossed, to be promoted on the strength of running Muller to ground. It would be valuable to have a chief inspector among the agency’s friends.) It was true that the three detectives had become briefly famous recently — to such an extent that even the Monomark papers had given them a few terse mentions, because it would have looked odd had they not.
But would it translate into income? That was the devilish thing about business, Lenox had discovered — never knowing quite whether the blend of publicity and word of mouth and good work would come together to create something that might be sustainable. If they sacked Mayhew he would probably be outraged, given how the business had hummed since Muller’s capture. What he couldn’t know was the difficulty of living by the books.
Let nobody say that Lenox, as he approached fifty, couldn’t learn new ways.
“Not spectacular,” said Polly again, glaring at the paper. “I really would like spectacular.”
She was their best chance of spectacular. He glanced over at Dallington, who was staring at her with unconcealed fondness, and thought that perhaps the notion wasn’t unique to him. “Let’s give it two weeks,” said Lenox. “We have quarterly payments coming in from Deere and Steele. Then we can decide about the staff.”
Polly nodded. “Fine. Next order of business, then. Dallington, have you spoken to your friend at Bonhams about looking at my client’s porcelain collection? She is adamant she has been defrauded.”
Lenox only half listened to Dallington’s reply to the question, sitting back in his chair, turning his head to look through the window at the snow that was still falling outside. He’d accept Graham’s offer to come out with him that night and follow Smith, he thought. Not far from Parliament there was a prison called Tothill. In another country, where criminals were held far away from the footpaths of respectable daily life, that would have seemed odd — but in London, the prisons were as integrated into the streets as surely as the banks and the baths. With any luck, Smith would be behind the bars of a cell there before the calendar turned over to 1877.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“Take my word for it, the great thing with a Smoking Bishop is to use oranges, not lemons,” said James Lenox, who was twenty-two, and consequently knew everything. “It’s much finer that way. And first you put cloves in the oranges and roast them over a fire.”
The debate was on the verge of growing heated. “You must be mad,” Edmund said. “Lemons are the most important ingredient of a Smoking Bishop.”
“Surely wine is the most important ingredient,” said Lady Jane.
Just to cause trouble, Lenox said that he had heard of making it with Rhine wine — and then it was called a Smoking Archbishop. James nodded and said you could also make it with raisins and burgundy and that was called a Smoking Pope. He was about to continue when Edmund, running his hands through his hair and looking ready to move into Calloway’s cottage and dedicate his life to silent study, said that it was his house and the wassail would be made with lemons — that was all.
This was Christmas at Lenox House, and though all of them missed Molly, they were making a fair fist of it. There was going to be a little party that evening. Everything was planned for it except the punch, which was what they were debating in the most beautiful room of Lenox House, which stood at the corner of its L-shape, with enormous windows looking over the pond and the front avenue. There were life-sized portraits along one wall, and above them a small minstrels’ gallery where musicians might sit. The floor of this particular was always beeswaxed and shining, and Edmund and Lenox had often passed the time playing badminton here in their formative years, until they broke a window and had been whipped for it, after which they had played in the stable.