Home by Nightfall

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Lenox had a favorite piece of public wit from his many years of life in London. It had appeared at the north end of Westminster Abbey, which had one of the only walls in the entire city that was not covered in handbills — those familiar bright papers pasted up all over, advertisements for steamships, patent medicines, exhibitions, notices of public auction, whole magazines laid out to read page by page.

The men who posted these handbills were a familiar sight. All of them wore similar fantastically garish fustian jackets, with cavernous pockets to hold their bills, their pots of paste, their long collapsible sticks with rollers at the end.

The abbey was exempt from their energies only because of a large, forbidding placard that read BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED in bold lettering. One day, passing nearby, Lenox had noticed an acquaintance — a usually somber fellow, a naval officer named Wilson — standing at the wall, grinning. Lenox had greeted him and asked what was so entertaining, and Wilson had pointed at the wall, where, underneath the placard, some anonymous genius had written Bill Stickers is innocent! Lenox had stared at this for a moment and then burst into laughter, and every time he saw Wilson now they smiled before they spoke, remembering the joke.

The next morning, Lenox woke up smiling, with this joke in his mind. He had been trying to remember all of his favorite ones for Edmund — most of which would elicit a groan from his brother, but a smile, too.

This one was good, and Lenox went downstairs thinking about how he would phrase it for maximum effect. But when he came into the breakfast room, he found that his brother was gone.

“Out on a walk again?” he said to Waller, who was carefully laying strips of kippered herring on a tray.

“Yes, sir, out on a walk.”

Lenox cursed. He didn’t know why this sudden uncontrollable passion for morning walks had arisen in his brother, and they had agreed the night before that they would make an early start to interview Miss Harville, Stevens’s secretary, before visiting Clavering to check on his progress. As soon as the morning frost burned off, he also wanted to take the pointer out and look for Sandy, Mickelson’s dog.

For twenty minutes he felt modestly irritated, as he ate and read the newspaper, and then in the next twenty minutes he began to grow more seriously vexed. This was a murder investigation, not a boys’ adventure. By the time he had waited an hour and ten minutes, he was full of utterly righteous indignation.

Edmund came in with red cheeks. “Hullo,” he said.

“Did you leave the dog in the stables?” asked Lenox.

Edmund was reading a letter and looked up from it only after a beat, distracted. “The dog?”

“The Allenby pointer — the one I asked you to borrow.”

“Oh, dash it, I forgot. I’ll have Rutherford send someone.”

“Just a leisurely walk, then?” asked Lenox.

“Why, what’s wrong?” said Edmund.

He was pouring himself a cup of tea, as if they had all the time in the world, and Lenox said coldly, “It’s nearly half past nine.”

Edmund glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was actually about ten past the hour, but he didn’t mention it — a piece of discretion that only annoyed Lenox further, in his current mood. “I’m sorry,” Edmund said. “Give me a few minutes, and I’ll be with you.”

“Where in creation do you keep going every morning?”

Edmund frowned and was silent for a moment, as if contemplating how to answer. Then he said, “Do you recall that one of my tenants, Martha Coxe, came to the house on the evening you arrived?”

“Vaguely.”

“Apparently Molly was teaching three of the women in the Coxe household to read, the mother and the two daughters. I have undertaken to continue the lessons.”

In a different mood, Lenox would have answered differently — but he was put out, and he made a scoffing noise. “Is that right?”

“Yes,” said Edmund.

“And you imagine that to be a good use of the time of a person engaged upon a piece of detective work — not to mention a Member of the Parliament of Great Britain.”

“I do. Why should it not be?”

“Teaching a parcel of women how to read? Your time is more valuable than that, Edmund, and if yours is not, mine certainly is.”

Edmund reddened. “And what was Molly’s time, may I ask you, valueless?”

“Of course not, don’t twist—”

“Valueless, simply because she did not sit in the greatest assemblage of fools in the history of the British Empire? Am I to consider yet another blue book on coal mining in preference to teaching these women, and leave them halfway through the alphabet? Do you call that honorable? Parliament!”

“Then there’s the case.”

“The case! It can wait half an hour.”

“That is not an assessment you are qualified to make. But more than that, how can you be so obtuse? You have a dozen duties more pressing than — you have the estate, that on its own, you know, is enough!”

“The estate,” said Edmund flatly.

“Your time—”

Suddenly Lenox saw that Edmund was close to vibrating with fury. He realized, a moment too late, that he wasn’t even angry at his brother anymore. He tried to go on, but Edmund said, in a very distant voice, “I shall conduct my personal affairs as I see fit, Charles. I do not recall telling you that it was unwise to go into trade, though neither of us has to stretch far to imagine how our mother would have felt to learn that you had.”

“Edmund—”

“I shall teach the horses to read if it pleases me. I invite you to disengage yourself from any interest in how I choose to spend my time immediately.”

“Edmund, I—”

“Please feel free to carry on the investigation without me. Good morning.”

He left. When he had gone, Lenox sat back in his chair, thoroughly dissatisfied with his behavior, Edmund’s too, and conscious as well of that word, “trade,” still alive in the room. For another ten minutes he sat and picked at the toast on his plate, dipping it in jam and eating it absentmindedly.

When he got up, he thought he might go and apologize. He stood there, indecisively. He noticed the letter Edmund had been reading when he had come in, the one that had distracted him. It was on the piano, atop its torn envelope. Lenox read it.