A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Lenox and the dogs walked home. His mind moved slowly from the mysteries of Plumbley to the mysteries of the nation. When he got back he found the house empty, Jane, Sophia, and the governess on a walk, his uncle working in the muck of the gardens. Lenox went straight to his desk and began to work on his speech.

This age of Queen Victoria, through which he was living, regarded itself as one of great social rigidity, of great propriety — and it was true. The beefeaters stood guard before Buckingham Palace, the banker in his sitting room smoked his pipe and read his evening newspaper, his wife paired people off by rank as they went into dinner, the pound was worth a pound of silver.

Nevertheless, Lenox was persuaded that one day, long after he had slipped out of life and been forgotten, this epoch would be remembered equally for its profound social changes. Look how far they had come! The Reform Act of 1832 had begun the movement toward equality, permitting hundreds of thousands of new people to vote, an expansion that the act of 1867 had widened. The government was growing less brutal, too. In 1849 a husband and wife, convicted of murder, had been hanged by the neck before thirty thousand people, but five years ago Parliament had finally banned all public executions. Transportation to Australia, whose consequences had been occasionally tantamount to execution, ended ten years before that. Even more astonishing, until 1823 very nearly within his own lifetime, it had been the law — the law! — that a suicide must be buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart. Those days were gone. Society was growing gentler, more inclusive, perhaps, even, he hoped, less stratified. This was the change he had stood for Parliament in the hopes of achieving.

Finally it was happening. His hardest work as a member had come earlier that year, when he fought for a bill, a special pet of his, called the Agricultural Children Act; it had been a bill he championed in the face of widespread indifference even among his friends, had absolutely forced his brother and the cabinet members he knew intimately to stand behind. The act forbade children under the age of eight — he had been hoping to make it twelve, but was forced to compromise — from working on farms, and, as an extra step won in the compromise, had provided for the education of the same children. Fighting for the bill had been exhilarating, with sleepless night after sleepless night, the thrill of productive work, strong cups of coffee as the House debated into the small hours, the maddening lassitude of the lords. In the end it had passed.

There was still so much to do. That was to be the subject of his speech. Even as he jotted notes now he came across a new fact: apparently a study that year had determined that about a quarter of men and women who registered for marriage signed their name only with the letter X. They were illiterate. He frowned and started a new piece of paper with that at the head.

He knew what the Tories would say — that God would provide for his children — and smiled when he thought of an old quote. Was there a collected Shakespeare in here? He walked over to the bookcase and saw that there was, the usual ornament of any English bookcase, and found what he had been looking for, by way of preemptive riposte. “Our remedies often in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven.”

Occasionally it crossed Lenox’s mind that he came to this problem from a perch of exceptional comfort and ease, manufactured for him by hundreds of years of tradition and accumulation. When the thought came he pushed it away, knowing that he lacked the strength to sacrifice any of his personal comfort; ill at ease with himself for it, but also, as a man of his age, forgiving himself, and half persuaded that it was all part of the order of things. Mightn’t he do enough good to make it up?

He wrote steadily on for an hour, then two, the thoughts coming to him in phrases, little strings of inquiry. Soon it would all begin to knit together into a speech. He had been writing the same way since his English tutor set him All’s Well That Ends Well at Harrow, when he was fourteen.

Just when he was thinking that a cup of tea might not go amiss, he heard the door to the east wing open. It was Jane and Sophia returning, the governess with them. He greeted the adults with a smile, then he peered down at the child in her bassinet and chucked her under the chin. She had a curious, mobile face, which broke into a grin now.

“I’ll feed her,” said Miss Taylor.

“How was it in town?” Jane asked, busying herself with her gloves, her hair, and her shoes before sitting down tiredly in the soft yellow armchair by the window.

“Not bad. I returned with fig jam.”

“My conquering hero.”

“I thought you would like that. Where did you go?”

“We walked all over creation. Your uncle went along part of the way, but he kept seeing flowerbeds he didn’t like the look of, so it seemed cruel to keep him.”

“He was in the garden when I returned two hours ago.”

Lady Jane laughed. “And still is. We just passed him, down in the dirt, a sight filthier than the gardener who was with him. Oh, did you see you have a letter? I left it on the mantel there, see, yes, that’s the one.”

“From whom? Edmund?”

“No, Dallington. Just like him to write three sheets, too.” The penny post permitted each page to be sent for a penny; any additional pages cost a few shillings, payable by the letter’s addressee. In effect Dallington had spent their money with his prolixity.

“I don’t know,” said Lenox indulgently. He had the letter in hand and was tearing it open. “We’ve had enough free post from the British government, I suppose.”

Because he was a member of Parliament all of his correspondence was franked without charge and sent on. The day he had taken his seat it seemed half his acquaintances had handed him bundles of letters, to be distributed across the aisles. It was common enough practice.

“True,” said Jane.

The letter, sent in from the Beargarden Club, read:

Lenox spent some time reading over Florence Waugh’s confession. He was proud of Dallington — it had taken real effort to find the apothecary who sold the woman the antimony, and the young man had occasionally been more inclined to lazy, penetrating supposition than to tenacious police work in the past — and also, somewhere within, and to his surprise, jealous. The role of mentor had suited him. It had allowed him to keep a hand in the old game, to play the sage, but more and more often now Dallington’s judgment surpassed his own. It was rustiness, he supposed.

It made him want to discover who had been threatening Plumbley.

He returned to his desk. He shuffled aside his parliamentary papers, and for the first time in years began to make a complex, encoded chart of the crimes he was tracking, the kind he had made all the time when the cases came in more quickly than he could take them.