A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

For much of the next day, however, Lenox was forced to work on his speech. Fresh letters had come in the evening post from his brother and two members of the cabinet, each with detailed thoughts, each franked with Parliament’s stamp. It was advice he valued, and he rushed through a very rough outline in time to send it to his brother on Monday morning.

At about ten o’clock, after he had been out riding on Sadie and eaten breakfast, Frederick sent for him.

“Working hard?” he said, when Lenox appeared in the doorway.

“I am. But you’re all gussied up, Freddie. Why?”

The older man wore a dark suit and a pair of gold spectacles hung from a gleaming chain around his neck. He gestured toward a robe made of lawn, lying over the arm of his chair. “I’ve five cases to hear this morning. I thought you might want to observe.”

They had spoken about the possibility at supper two evenings before. “Of course,” said Lenox. “With great pleasure. I had forgotten.”

Like the great majority of justices of the peace, Frederick heard his cases in his own home. The household staff, however, did their best to imbue at least a part of it — the second hall, a large room with very high windows looking out upon the pond, mostly out of use in the daily life of Everley — with the formal mood of a government building.

Frederick sat at the center of a large horseshoe-shaped table, gleamed with beeswax to a brilliant pale brown. Behind him a wood fire was lit. There were a pair of chairs and a small table about ten feet away, with a jug of water and a glass upon it, where the accused would sit. In the corner of the room was a St. George’s cross, and upon the table were the seal and rolls of office. Standing at the door, in a suit that had seen better days, was Rodgers, Frederick’s gardener, a man whose sensibilities were of profound coarseness in all matters not pertaining to the flora of Somerset. He acted as the bailiff on these occasions. Oates and Weston were in a narrow servants’ passage with their five charges, four of whom were well-known enough in Plumbley to have been sent home on the promise that they would appear. The last man, the fifth case for Frederick to hear, had been in the town’s lone jail cell.

Lenox took a chair near the window, where he hoped to seem unobtrusive. That was not to Frederick’s plan, however. The first cases were two young men of sixteen or seventeen, whom the magistrate had evidently known from infancy. Both were accused of drunkenness and brawling. He lighted into them with identical tirades. “Aren’t you ashamed, to be called before me,” he said, “and what’s worse, what’s much worse, on the day when my house is graced by a member of Parliament? A lawmaker, no less? I feel ashamed of my village, I promise you I do.” And so on, at great length.

Lenox noticed that the appeal to the boys’ civic pride was relatively ineffective; what really struck home was when Freddie began to talk about the shame their mothers would feel, if they heard of their sons in jail. The second boy actually cried.

“Rodgers, what shall I do with him?” asked the magistrate at the end of each testimony. “Jail?”

“Set him to gardening,” said Rodgers. This was his invariable advice on the punishment of all criminals, which Frederick liked to hear but had never enacted save once, when the head shrubbery keeper of his rival in this parts, Lord DeMuth — who had a great whacking hall called Saltstow, with miles of gardens — had been scraped up after a fight in the pub; this criminal Freddie had kept for two weeks. Rodgers had been in a state of ecstasy.

“No,” said Frederick twice, “I think it had better be a real lesson.”

Each boy was fined ten pence.

“No worries there, he’s a good sort,” was all Frederick added, after each had gone. “And neither has a farthing to spare. Rodgers, you know full well they can’t take time away from the farms to garden. Of all the advice.”

“Humph,” said Rodgers, whom long service had entitled to a certain very modest degree of disrespect.

The third case was one of uttering, as it had long been known, or passing bad coin. This one Frederick seemed to take more seriously. The young man in question, a Jack Randall, had paid for a passel of candles with several coins, among them two bad ha’pence. Randall, too, Frederick had known for much of their mutual time upon the earth — he was a man of perhaps thirty-five, ill-favored, with unpleasant hooded eyes — and he questioned him with great ferocity.

This in itself was unusual. In general the criminals who appeared before a justice of the peace were not permitted to speak, but Frederick, once he had heard the testimony of the officer, always gave them a chance.

“You realize that until not long ago you might have been hung for holding a snide, as they call it, a false coin?” Of course he didn’t add that the same was true of a host of crimes — opening a tavern on Sunday, doing damage to Westminster Bridge, impersonating an army veteran — that, in practice, had rarely met with capital punishment.

Randall looked unfrightened. “No, sir.”

“And if I choose I may still send you to jail, essentially for as long as I please.”

This roused Randall out of his insolent silence. “No, sir! Which it was an accident, sir!”

“Your worship, you call him, Jack Randall,” chimed in Rodgers. “As you ought to know, being here week in, week out like.”

“Your worship, I didn’t know! I got them dimmicks off a trader at the fair in Taunton, hand to God!”

Frederick held up the coin in question. “And their extremely battered appearance, their, I would say, unnatural appearance, didn’t spark any doubt about their validity in your mind?”

“I trust the Queen,” said Randall immediately.

“Hm. Rodgers?”

“Set him to gardening.”

Coining was one of the great problems of the age; it had been since the pence, the ha’pence, and the farthing had ceased to be copper and become bronze, some fifteen years before. The Bank of England possessed a machine that could sort good coins from bad, and Lenox knew, from a parliamentary report, that of the nine million coins it sorted each week it threw out two hundred or so. The question was whether the machine was entirely effective.

In the end Frederick let Randall go with a fine, though a rather heavy one, of ten shillings, a half-sovereign. When Weston had escorted him away Frederick said to Lenox, while filling in an official form, “The fine is to keep him out of trouble more than anything. I doubt he had the sense to know the coins were false.” Here he looked troubled, however, and the motion of his pen stopped. “He’ll come to a bad end, though. I very much fear it.”

Lenox leaned forward, so that Rodgers might not hear, and said, “Do you think he could be involved—”

“No, he lives on a farm far out of town. Little chance of him taking a horse back and forth half the night to do it, even if he could take a horse without being noticed. Which is unlikely. It’s DeMuth’s land, too, and he knows where his crofters are. That much is sure. Rodgers, nod the next one in, would you?”

The cases were always heard in order of ascending seriousness, and there was little doubt of the guilt of the man who came in now, from Oates’s testimony, a French laborer named Fontaine, very large and very strong. He had beaten his common-law wife badly one morning, apparently unprovoked by drink, which was unusual, and then gone to Bath by coach, where he passed a night spending money very freely before the police hauled him in. Dr. Eastwood — who along with the squire and a few others was one of the great men of Plumbley — came in and testified to the woman’s wounds. Fontaine himself was silent but stared unerringly, some might say threateningly, at the magistrate, even when other people addressed him.

“Where did you come by this money?” asked Frederick.

Fontaine was silent, his face expressionless. Even when Rodgers tried to bully him into speaking the Frenchman remained that way, perhaps secure in the knowledge that the law could not compel him to speak, and finally Frederick sentenced the man to thirty days in jail without the option of a fine, for the violent mistreatment of his common-law wife. He would be tried in Bath for his crimes there. When he had gone out, Lenox asked Frederick if this was about the usual run of cases he saw.

“Lighter than usual, perhaps,” his relative said.

“Exceeding light,” said Rodgers with great firmness.

“But this next one is a bit novel. Call him in, then, would you, bailiff?”

A very handsome, dark-eyed young man came in, willowy and with flowing dark hair. He wore a bottle-green blazer made of velvet.

“The lady in question is here?” asked Frederick of Rodgers.

“Arrived half an hour ago, Your Worship.” Then he added, “In a curricle, too.” This was a very quick, superior sort of conveyance, two horses for one or two passengers.

“Bring her in, please.”

“Very good.” Rodgers leaned out into the hall, made a beckoning motion, and then announced, as a beautiful young woman came in with a footman for company, “Miss Louisa Pershing.”

“Miss Pershing,” said the magistrate, rising. “May I introduce myself, and my cousin. My name is Frederick Ponsonby and this is Charles Lenox. May I ask you to sit, here, yes, just near me, and give me an account of this little matter?”

Miss Pershing was only too happy — it was dreadful what a dishonest man could achieve. The trust of a young person — society today — and so Miss Pershing, who looked perhaps better in repose than in conversation, nattering as she did, eventually produced her tale. One morning she had been walking in the flood meadow near her father’s property with her small dog, a toy fox terrier, when a brutish man, passing by, had simply picked up the dog and stormed away. Miss Pershing’s grief was evident and real as she recalled this, and Lenox, who loved his own dogs, felt a pang of sympathy for her.

Two mornings afterward a handsome young man — and here she pointed to the accused — had come to her house, saying that he had heard of her misfortune and, admiring her from afar for so long, taken it upon himself to find the dog. He had achieved this, and now it would only take three pounds to recover the animal. If he had had three pounds, of course, even his final three pounds on the earth, it would have been his pleasure, his signal honor …

It was a familiar old story. In the end the handsome fellow and his brutish partner extracted eighteen pounds from the young woman.

The man himself only spoke once. “We returned the dog!” he cried, when Miss Pershing had broken into fresh tears. “It was a service well rendered!”

Here Oates stepped in. “Sixth dog they’ve caught ’em taking, here and around. It’s a pretty living, too.”

“Set him to gardening,” Rodgers muttered, unsolicited.

The young man looked heartbroken at this suggestion. Frederick, with a thank-you to Miss Pershing, said that he had better wait until the Petty Session to sentence the man, the matter lying as it did somewhere between blackmail, extortion, and dog-theft. (For many years this last had been the most serious of those crimes, when rich men’s dogs could cost as much as workhorses.) With that decision he thanked Oates, Weston, and Rodgers, and adjourned the court, looking relieved to be done.

For his part, Lenox’s mind kept returning to the strong, silent Frenchman, to what secret precisely he might have been keeping, and to why he had so much money to spread around Bath.