A Death in the Small Hours

CHAPTER SEVEN

They played on in silence. When Frederick finally spoke again his face had grown more serious. “I’ll tell you why I’m glad you’ve come down, however. I’ve some news I had rather tell you in person.”

“Oh?”

“I’m passing Everley on to Wendell.”

Lenox laughed. “Is that so?”

“I’m quite serious, Charles.” The older man looked obstinate. “I plan to do it some time in the next eighteen months, in fact.”

Wendell was the eldest son of Frederick’s first cousin. He was a moon-faced, respectable, surpassingly dull soul, a barrister at Gray’s, and Everley had been his due from birth — but not until his cousin died. Lenox felt the disorientation of a sharp shock. It was impossible to imagine Everley otherwise than it had been, and impossible to imagine Wendell appreciating Everley’s charms — he was a man full of the same romance and poetry as a fair-sized rock.

“I pray you aren’t ill?”

“No, but I am old.”

“You’re not yet sixty. I don’t call someone old until they’re eighty-five, these days, and even then I have a look at the withers.”

Frederick smiled. “No, I’m not sixty, not for a month, and there’s a bit of youth in me yet, but I feel a great strain in taking care of Everley — to be alone here, to be responsible. I am tired, Charles, heartily tired.” As he said this, the squire’s incipient old age suddenly showed in his eyes. “Wendell has a large family, a good wife. He will be happy here.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll buy a house in the village, I imagine. At first I thought it ill-mannered, to stay so close, but I think Wendell won’t mind. He might even let me continue in the gardens — the Ribes Rubrum that Rodgers and I planted are very beautiful this year — and I know he will keep on the staff, if I ask him to.”

“Freddie, you cannot—”

“Cannot leave? I can, and I shall.”

“Is this decision financial?” he asked.

If they weren’t relatives it would have been an inappropriate question; it was still very near to being one. “No.”

“But Uncle Freddie, how can you leave your library? The card room where the two of us used to play hands of whist with my mother and old Kempe? I cannot understand it.”

“Your mother would understand it.”

“Would she?” Lenox was beyond forty now himself, a member of Parliament, but he felt the frustrated anger of a thirteen-year-old. “What about your responsibility to the house?”

“If I think that responsibility is best discharged by passing it to a good — to a very reliable — gentleman, then that is what I shall do.” Now the squire looked severe. “We might discuss it some other time, but before you say anything else I beg you will consider my position.”

Lenox, rebuffed, still bewildered, inclined his head. “Very well. I’m glad my daughter has come to stay here, then, though she will not remember it.”

“There’s no need to find melodrama in the situation, Charles. Wendell would take any number of your daughters in if you asked him to.”

They played their game of chess on in a tense silence. It was Lenox who broke it. “I suppose you have lived here a long time alone.”

“Yes, a very long time. I like to believe that I have stood a fine sentry over the house.”

“There’s no doubt of that.”

“The gardens, in particular.” Frederick’s face looked softer now. “You aren’t my age, yet, Charles. When you are, you’ll see that it is wiser to make your own decisions than to let time make decisions for you. I hate to think of rotting away here, unable to shift for myself, a burden on everyone.”

Lenox pondered this. “My reaction was selfish. I suppose I have the attitude toward Everley that some people do toward church. I don’t always go, but it’s a relief to know that I always could.”

The squire laughed. “Precisely how I felt about leaving. I never thought I would — I love the place too much — but now I find that I would like to do it. Life is strange, I suppose.”

“Nobody could contradict that.”

“Shall I show you my final project?”

“By all means,” said Lenox.

The older man stood, and beckoned his cousin to his small desk. “Here it is. The Flora of Somerset.”

“Your book?”

“Yes.”

“At long last!”

“Easy for you to say, my boy! It hasn’t been quick work.”

Lenox leafed through the loose pages, each of which bore a drawing of a different plant. They were artfully done, and at the bottom of each page was a short description. “Will you publish it?”

“The horticultural society in Bath is eager to publish it, but I may take it to a London firm. More professional.”

“Is there not a definitive work on the subject?”

Freddie shook his head. “Only a penny-pinching little volume from the year ’twenty-eight, by someone called Horace Hargreaves. I don’t think he could have told you a tree from a sheep, to be honest — dozens of mistakes.”

“I congratulate you.”

Frederick tapped on the window. It was dark outside, but the silhouettes of a line of trees were visible. “Most of these plants I have managed to cultivate out there, too. A living monument. Another glass of port?”

“No, thank you.”

Frederick poured his own. “You’re tired, I’ve no doubt — I should let you retire. Yet—”

“What is it?”

“If you are not too upset with me—”

“Never in life,” said Lenox.

“Then let us circle back for a moment,” Frederick said, sitting. “I do wish you would give me your counsel, your professional counsel, as it were, on the vandalism we’ve had down in the village. It’s giving the constables a fearful time, and to be frank, people are beginning to grow scared. I don’t like it at all.”

“Is it as bad as all that? I assumed it would be schoolboys.”

Frederick shook his head. Outside the wind picked up, rattling the windows. “No,” he said. “I fear it is more mysterious than that.”

“I would like to hear the facts of the matter.”

“Tonight?”

Lenox shrugged. “Why not? Start from the beginning, if you like.”