A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

After their mutton Lenox took himself back to the house, while Frederick packed his pipe, unfurled a newspaper, and waited with the last quarter of the bottle of wine for his foot soldiers to report to him. He invited Charles to stay, but the younger man declined, restless still, a bit befogged from being in the warm public house on this cool and wet day, in need of the clarifying brace of the outdoors.

He made the walk back to Everley quickly. At the gates, and passing down the broad, tree-lined avenue, he gazed at the house, at its beautiful reflection in the rain-scattered pond. It was difficult to imagine it without Frederick inside. The thought reached some sorrowful place in Lenox, bound up in his mother’s early death, in his own advancing years … but it was better not to think of that. He decided he would go and find Sophia.

In fact, once he had so decided he felt a primitive need to lay eyes on her. In the activity of the past few days, dating back to his trip to London, he had gone longer spells without seeing the child than he had since her birth.

He went to the nursery. The door was pulled-to but not closed, and he hazarded a gentle tap of two knuckles against the frame. “Miss Taylor?”

Her nearly silent footsteps came to the door. “Yes, Mr. Lenox?”

Her face was forbidding, steadied for rejection, Lenox saw. “Could I see her, do you think?”

“I think just at the moment, since she’s sleeping—”

There was a faint sound behind the door, something between a cry and a yawn. “She’s stirring,” said Lenox.

A polite governess could not roll her eyes — but it must nevertheless have been a very great temptation to Miss Taylor, standing in the doorway, having anticipated a quiet forty minutes in which she might read or knit. “Come in, then,” she said.

Lenox approached the bassinet and looked down over it with love in his eyes. His daughter was stretching out her arms and legs upward, languorous with rest. “Shall I take her out?”

Miss Taylor looked through the window at the gardens. “Let me change,” she said.

“No,” said Lenox quickly, “you sit and read here. I shall take her — I’m dressed for it anyhow. You can watch me from the window if you like, to make sure I haven’t spilled her.” He looked up. “Or introduced her to tobacco, or whatever paternal vice you might suspect me of.”

The governess finally smiled now. “I’ll just prepare her, then.”

Lenox watched as this was done — as Sophia was bundled like a bag of flour into warm clothes, layer upon layer of them, and then into her bassinet — before asking, “Has Lady Jane been in to see her, already?”

“Oh, several times.”

“Perhaps while I find an umbrella to cover us both and put her in her perambulator you could cut along and ask her if she cares to walk with us?”

The governess went to do so, and Lenox, very carefully, fetched Sophia — who was gurgling pleasantly upon his shoulder, wide-eyed now — down the curved main flight of stairs. He settled her in her contraption, a buggy they had ordered especially from a workman in Kent, upon the advice of Toto McConnell, and then found two umbrellas, one of which he jimmied in between the handle and the bassinet so that it hovered above the child and one for himself.

Lady Jane sent word back that she was busy at just that moment, but would see them when they returned, and so Lenox and Sophia went along on their own into the gardens, accompanied by Bear and Rabbit. He insisted that Miss Taylor return to the nursery as a respite from her duties.

The dogs, restive after a day of sitting and staring at the rain, bounded ahead of their humans and then came back in tearing sprints, breathless, rendered simple by their excitement. After they settled they began to show signs of wanting to dig, and Lenox had to remonstrate with them, having been on the receiving end upon his arrival of a sharp, just barely respectful speech from Rodgers about dogs and gardens.

There were miles of paths extending out from the house at Everley. Lenox picked one at random, a long thin meander with sunken gardens full of Somerset flowers on either side.

“Well, Sophia, though your Uncle Freddie didn’t care to hear of it, perhaps I shall tell you of ’fifty-four.” He spoke conversationally, trying not to use that near-universal tone of loving condescension with which most parents spoke to their children, the same one men and women would use with dogs, though he had moments of weakness.

She looked up at him, big-eyed, clutching occasionally at the air with her small fist. The rain had stopped and he removed the umbrella from her pram so that she could look out at the world.

“I would have been, what, twenty-three, twenty-four, I suppose. I thought I knew a very great deal about life.”

She laughed.

“Yes, it is rather funny, though you will be civil to your papa, please.

“My mother and I came here for two weeks at Christmas, your grandmother. How she would have loved you! It’s a pity you never met, but then I daresay you will like Jane’s brother very well, and Jane’s mother, and Edmund, and of course your cousins.

“Where was I? I suppose I was going to remind Freddie about the widow McReary, but perhaps he wouldn’t remember. I do. It was a cold day, there may even have been snow. McReary was the wife of a farmer who lived four or five miles south of here, upon a little allotment, two acres, perhaps three. He died, a cataleptic fit as I recall.”

How many years had it been since anyone discussed Frank McReary? Lenox wondered as he pushed Sophia along. Yet villages have long memories, and he had, no doubt, had cousins and nephews and uncles in Plumbley and the countryside around it. Look at Weston.

Sophia sent up a fidgety noise, not quite a cry, perhaps because her father had fallen silent. He resumed his story. “Shall I tell you something about the widow McReary? She was a thief! I don’t know if she became a thief before her husband died or after — she was childless, so she must have had a terrible time with the farm — but she was known in town to be a thief.

“Freddie was magistrate back then, too, you know, and could have put her in the dock with a dozen witnesses against her — she stole at the Sunday market, which earned her no friends, picked vegetables that weren’t hers, for all we knew stole from the church plate. And in fact my mother — who was a very gentle soul, not much for punishment — advised Freddie to have Mrs. McReary up in court.”

He could see miles and miles of westward country rising upward away from him as he walked along slowly, hedged into tidy squares and rectangles, mostly a lovely shamrock green but with lined fringes of red and orange and golden trees. It was the kind of vista that reminded you that you were in England, that lifted your heart. He thought of Parliament and his place there with a flash of solemnity and deeper comprehension. The world was a larger place than one ever seemed to remember.

Sophia started to squirm and her father, in his calming voice, began to speak to her again. “What Freddie did, however, was something more intelligent. He enquired about her condition. He spoke to her younger sister, who lives still in Plumbley I believe, and to her brother, whom I know must be dead by now — he was well beyond sixty then. Though perhaps not, perhaps I’ll ask Fripp if he’s still alive, since Freddie doesn’t want to hear it.

“He asked her friends. The people who had been her friends. They weren’t any longer. Which is one of the many reasons you must never steal, Sophia.” He frowned at the child, comically, and she smiled up at him. “And what did Freddie learn? That she was close on starving, the widow. She was perhaps too proud for help, or it may be that she simply liked to steal. I don’t claim that she was any saint, of course.

“So he …,” Lenox looked up at the skyline, eyes narrow, contemplating his visit of all those years ago. “It was one of the first times I had an understanding of justice, of its fluidity,” he said. “There have been more than a few times when I looked the other away, during a case, you know. It was Freddie who taught me that lesson.”

His eyes were still up, and he had come to a stop. He glanced back at the house, some ways off now, its beautiful yellow stone, the white paint around its windows.

He shook his head briskly, as if to clear it, and began walking again. “So he put her in the way of something good to steal. He visited her — stopped in on his way to a nearby farm, he said, to ask if she still had any quince preserves laid down that he might buy, for Christmas supper — which she didn’t — and he left behind a billfold and, so that it might not seem like charity, a pair of gloves. I was with him, if you can credit that. Seems like yesterday.”

They were some ways off from the house now, the pace of the dogs slackening, and Lenox decided he would go in. As they set back toward the house, he said, “I know she didn’t return the billfold, or the gloves, in the next week. After that I was gone. I don’t know what became of her.”

He thought back to that time with a quick, piercing sorrow. How strange to be forty-five and miss one’s mother, like a child in nursery!

As they returned he told Sophia other stories, allowing his voice to float soothingly over her, not especially listening to himself. He was thinking. It was a pleasure to walk with his daughter, but perhaps more importantly he understood, without acknowledging the feeling, that the facts of the case were revolving in the back of his mind, latching together, leading him somewhere. He was almost there. It wouldn’t be long now.