An Old Betrayal

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The next night Lenox and Dallington sat in a carriage outside the bright palace, both full of nervous energy. The night before nothing had happened. It must be tonight, they agreed. It was ten, and the party — this one given for a retiring member of the Queen’s retinue, an ancient woman called Lady Monmouth — was approaching its busiest moments. Now would be the time for the thief to strike. The men of Scotland Yard, as well as the Queen’s own guards, had melted into the crowd, or attempted to, to give the thief the illusion that he was unwatched.

“Yet how could he obtain access to the palace?” Dallington asked moodily, lowering his head to peer through the window. “It is guarded on three sides, and on the fourth there is a high wall.”

“That is his best chance,” said Lenox.

“But it would be impossible to scale.”

Lenox shrugged. “Whenever I have a moment of doubt I consider the key.”

“The key?”

“How did you find the block of wax — opened or closed?”

“Opened in half. Why?”

“Whoever killed Wintering must have taken the key from the block. He had no time to do anything else, but he took the key.”

The Yard had taken the wax impression and made a key from it, then tested it. As Lenox and Dallington had suspected, it belonged to a window on the lower level of the palace’s east side — not far, in fact, from the East Gallery, and for that matter from the State Dining Room, where Lady Monmouth was at that moment being honored.

“Perhaps he has been scared off, because he killed Wintering, this person,” said Dallington.

“I don’t think so. We’ve kept Wintering’s name out of the papers. All of the extra men on duty here are discreet, in plainclothes. Besides, the Queen is leaving for Balmoral — every item of value in the palace will go into a safe immediately.”

“Bar the pictures.”

“Which could not be resold with any ease,” said Lenox. They had consulted with several members of the palace’s staff, all of whom agreed that one of the decorations only put out while the Queen was resident — diamond-encrusted clocks, ancient royal artifacts, jeweled decanters — was the most likely target.

“I don’t know why he would come,” said Dallington dispiritedly.

“I think he will.”

Two hours later, it was the younger detective’s pessimism that looked more prophetic. Shackleton and Jenkins, who were both inside the palace, had promised to fetch Lenox and Dallington immediately should an intruder enter the palace, or any guest — for this third man might have obtained an invitation, for all they knew — be seen to snatch at one of the Queen’s possessions.

They had occupied the time in reading about Wintering. Though none of his neighbors knew him — or had even heard the shot — the Yard had still managed to put together an impressively thorough dossier on the dead man.

Wintering was the scion of an impoverished but extremely ancient and distinguished family; there had been Winterings in Staffordshire at least since the Norman invasion, perhaps longer. His father, fifth son of a third son, was the curate of a small church just west of Stoke, where he lived with his wife. Leonard was their only child.

Lenox knew several curates. It was no life for a man without private means. The rector of a parish took for himself the greater tithes (traditionally 10 percent of his parishioners’ income from the harvest of hay and wheat, or the sale of wood from trees) and the rector and the vicar split the lesser tithes, from the collection plate. The curate merely got a “cure,” a small fee, and ended up doing most of the work of these two greater men. The curacy was where one found the true believers without a shred of social grace, and it inclined its holders toward either saintliness or bitterness. A curate bore the education and status of a gentleman, without the funds to live in a gentleman’s style. There was many a stoop-backed sixty-year-old curate all across England, never able to marry on such a low income, eating only two or three hot meals a week, and then mostly of Mr. Campbell’s tinned soup — and looking forward with tremendous excitement and hunger to the church supper on Sundays.

Of course, it was possible — the dossier offered no indication — that Wintering’s mother had brought money into the family, but Lenox thought he discerned the beginning of Wintering’s motive.

For at the age of seventeen, Wintering had gone up to Oxford, and if life in a northern curacy had seemed at all grand, Oxford, with its aristocratic disregard for money — such an easy pose to adopt when one had money — would have placed it in a different context. Wouldn’t it have made Wintering yearn for suits from Ede’s, for hats from Shipp’s, for shotguns from Parson’s?

After two years at Wadham, Wintering had left for London.

“Did you see this?” Lenox asked Dallington, as he came to this part of the report. “About his first job?”

Dallington looked across the carriage and smiled. “The Chepstow and Ely?”

“Yes. Sales representative to France and Ireland.”

“Only for a short period,” said Dallington. “Then the trail goes cold.”

Lenox read on and saw that, indeed, the Board of Inland Revenue had lost track of Wintering entirely some six years before. “Hm.”

“Godwin must have arranged for Wintering to get a job,” said Dallington, “and then perhaps Wintering fouled his own nest. This has been his revenge.”

“Why wait so long? Then, who killed Wintering?”

Dallington shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Wintering’s residence in Dalton Mews dated back just three months. He had received no forwarded mail and offered no previous address. “I want to know what gave him the idea of robbing the palace,” said Lenox.

For another hour the two men sat and traded desultory conjectures about Wintering, his motivations and history. Neither had his heart fully in the conversation; both, too often, peered out toward the palace, as if a flare might go up when the thief was caught.

At one o’clock, the final carriage having rolled away down Constitution Hill, Shackleton and Jenkins came outside. The party had concluded, they reported, without incident. Members both of Scotland Yard and of the Queen’s guard would remain on duty throughout the night.

“They might as well go home,” said Dallington dully. “To break into the palace without the noise and cover of a party would be tantamount to suicide. I was so sure of it, too.”

Jenkins was more positive. “We scared him off, the scoundrel. I don’t mind going back to good old detective work to find him, either.”

“The Queen thanks you.”

“Bother her thanks,” said Dallington.

Shackleton, normally imperturbable, looked scandalized. “Will you withdraw that statement, sir?”

“Oh, bother you, too. We’re sixty years past dueling, you know.” Lenox had to conceal the look of amusement pushing its way onto his face, and then Dallington, with a change of heart, or perhaps just wishing to leave on good terms, said, “I only meant that we haven’t deserved her thanks — that we ought to have done better.”

Shackleton looked only slightly mollified but said, “Ah, I see. Yes.”

“I apologize if it came out improperly.”

The officer bowed slightly. “Not at all. Good evening, gentlemen.”

It was very late, and the mood in the carriage, as they drove away from the palace, was disconsolate. Lenox had missed two important nights in Parliament. Dallington had said when the night began, only partly joking, that they were both sure of lordships. Now here they were, driving away empty-handed.

As they approached Half Moon Street, Lenox said, “Do you know who had the most to lose in this situation?”

“Who?”

“Grace Ammons.”

Dallington shrugged. He knew that the Queen’s secretary had lived in Paris for a while, and he had perhaps deduced that she had some unsavory past there, but he did not know the full extent of the story. “Her work?”

“And her fiancé, George Ivory. Everything in her life.”

“Yes,” said Dallington.

Lenox almost went on — but didn’t, because the idea wasn’t quite formulated in his head yet.

Still, he could not help but dwell on two facts, revolving them in his mind.

First, that as the representative in France for the Chepstow and Ely, Wintering had likely spent time in Paris when Grace Ammons was there, several years before.

Second, a single sentence: She also lent me a small pistol to protect myself.