A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

That was a very cold winter in London. In the House of Commons one could see one’s breath, and for Lenox, in his new position, the hours and days and weeks were taken up with work, with long, exhausting meetings, too often unproductive, and — just as often — with coaxing recalcitrant liberal members to vote as the leaders of the party wished. These conferences were almost always made under a social pretext, and he grew wholly tired of the sight of his club on Pall Mall, which had once been a refuge to him.

Still, each morning he permitted himself a half hour with Sophia. She was growing rapidly, it seemed to both him and Jane, and she could sit unsupported now, even recognized voices from other rooms; her taste in toys, meanwhile, had become positively sophisticated, though she had a regrettable fondness for the loud rattle, painted a lethal shade of mauve, that her uncle Edmund had given her.

Miss Taylor was still living there, because in all truth she had nowhere else to which she might remove herself, unless it be lodgings, and all concerned, especially Frederick, considered this too dreary a prospect. It helped to have her in the house: From afar, Jane was planning the wedding at Everley.

It was not her only project.

Late one evening, while Lenox struggled to keep his eyes open over a report on sheep farming in Northumberland, she came to his study. “Hello, dear,” he said, standing. “I thought you had gone to sleep.”

“Not by a long shot,” she said. She was holding something behind her back. “Are you busy with your reading, Charles?”

“I would pay ten pounds to the person who gave me an excuse to stop,” he said, smiling and stifling a yawn, stretching his arms out.

“Do you remember when I was so secretive at Everley? You stopped asking — which I take kindly, you know.” She smiled at him softly. “Pressure never does, with this kind of thing.”

“Of course,” he said — but in truth he had forgotten all about it, once they were out of Somerset and he had less occasion to notice her habits.

Shyly she handed him a book. “Here it is.”

He furrowed his brow and took a loose sheaf of papers from her, perhaps twenty pages of them. “The Adventure of the Lucy,” he said. There was a picture of a small gray mouse below the title, wearing a morning jacket and looking out to sea through a telescope from the taffrail of a ship. “Is it a story?” he asked, smiling with the dawning realization that it was.

“It’s nothing much,” she said and stood up, then began to fix the cushions on his sofa. “I thought I might show you — one or two other people — for Sophia, you understand, after my great tour of the children’s books left me desirous of something different.”

“Who did the drawings, Jane?”

“Oh, Molly.”

That was Edmund’s wife, who was talented with watercolors. She made compact drawings, full of detail, often rather wistful; he should have recognized them straight away. “Come sit by me as I read it,” he said. “Please.”

She laughed skeptically — would have snorted, had her upbringing been different — and said, “I couldn’t. But read it if you like.”

So he did, awake now, with a glass of whisky in hand.

After only these few words Lenox was charmed, and as he read on his enchantment increased. The book told the tale of this troop of mice, and in many of its particulars — its gentler particulars — it mirrored the voyage he had made, not quite a year before, to Egypt. There were differences, needless to say. The mice successfully captured a pirate ship (full of cats) and landed on an island with a solitary human being living upon it, tired of London and committed to living there until he had grown a beard all the way to his feet. Their true mission — the recapture of a mouse girl named Sophia, who had been put on the wrong ship in Portsmouth — they fulfilled on the second to last page. On the last page they all had Christmas together, in Portsmouth again.

The book was funny, slightly magical, more contemplative and less madcap than many children’s books — certainly less moralizing, too. He felt proud of her. There was no question that it was a book that could find a public. Its pages went by before you realized you were reading at all.

Yet for some reason that he could not quite explain, reading the book and looking at its drawings filled him with a bittersweet sorrow, almost too heavy to bear. It felt as if it belonged to the past, perhaps that was it — the book had a lightness of tone and spirit that their lives had once had, too, but now, in this cold winter, had lost.

So often as one looked back on life one saw a multiplicity of choices, reduced, not quite at random, to one. There were so many houses he might have taken in London; so many women he might have fallen into marriage with; so many cases he might have taken. Rarely was there a clear path, with two choices.

Here was one, however, that he had made. Reading about the Lucy reminded him that what he loved — travel, adventure, detection — he had now traded for a different kind of work.

After he had finished reading he sat and stared into the fire for some time, sipping his drink. He didn’t know how long had passed when he heard a soft knock on the door; then, of course, he leaped to his feet and congratulated his wife on her triumph.

Throughout the first week of December both Lady Jane and the governess were closeted in the upstairs drawing room, planning for the wedding. Occasionally another person would stop in — Toto, who was back in London and rather pale, but couldn’t resist talk of a wedding — and all three of them would discuss invitations, dresses, food. (The one responsibility Frederick had retained for himself was the flowers.) It was all to happen in April.

“I always say that an April wedding is loveliest, you know,” Lenox could hear Toto saying one bright morning, “though Elizabeth Wallace was married on the first of the month, in Oxford, and as far as I can gather she would have done better to marry a mule, her husband—”

“Toto!” said Jane.

“It’s true, though.”

Miss Taylor was always the person who retrieved the conversation. “The point is that I cannot wear white. I’ve been too old for that since I was twenty-two.”

“What tosh,” said Toto. “You’ll look lovely — you have just the complexion for an ivory white.” Lenox, still eavesdropping, smiled to himself. “The only question is whether you ought to be married sooner.”

“Sooner?”

“Why wait, I say?”

“Toto,” said Jane, but she ought to have known her cousin was irrepressible.

“I think a Christmas wedding would be the finest thing I ever saw.”

“Toto, you scarcely know Miss Taylor.”

“How rude you are, Jane, really I think you are — here we are, three friends — aren’t I coming to Everley to see you wed, dear heart?”

The governess laughed happily. “I should like it very much if you would.”

“See? There. Now the great virtue of a Christmas wedding …”

So, after only ten hours or so of discussion, Miss Taylor was pushed toward a writing desk to ask Frederick whether they might be married sooner than he had anticipated. He wrote back by the next post: No haste was too great for him, and he knew just the holly tree he could cut from, the true Ilex aquifolium by Everley’s lake.