Home by Nightfall

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Roughly a century and a half before, in 1714, the King of England had been very, very nervous about the possibility of revolution. He was George the First, a Hanoverian, and therefore persuaded that the Stuarts were going to form mobs and depose him, or perhaps even kill him.

To settle his nerves, the government passed a law. If any twelve or more people were engaged in “tumultuous assembly,” a magistrate could stand up and formally demand their dispersal by reading it out loud. If they hadn’t separated an hour after the magistrate’s proclamation, they could be arrested, and sentenced very harshly indeed, even up to two years of imprisonment with hard labor.

The law the magistrate had to read out loud to bring into effect had a name: the Riot Act.

The act was still on the books, Lenox knew from his time in Parliament, though it hadn’t been widely used in a very long time — surviving, instead, in its name, a term for any stern lecture from a schoolmaster or mother or disappointed friend.

And yet when Clavering returned, he looked and sounded as if he would desperately have liked to invoke the old Riot Act. His shirt was torn at the collar — actually torn! — and he was red in the face. He shook his head despairingly at Lenox and Edmund.

“The whole town wants to string him up this evening, the poor devil,” he said, nodding toward the cell. “They’ve worked themselves into a frenzy.”

“I know a simple enough way to calm them,” Lenox said.

“And which is that, sir, when they’ve gone through eighteen barrels of ale in the last three hours!”

“Tell them that he’s innocent.”

Clavering looked confused. “Innocent?”

“Yes.”

It was Edmund who glanced at the cell behind them to see, and the other two followed his gaze. Calloway was staring at them. “Is it true?” Edmund asked. “Are you innocent, Mr. Calloway?”

“No,” he said.

At least he had spoken. Lenox stood up. “You maintain that you entered the town hall yesterday morning, stabbed Stevens Stevens, left him for dead, and have been in your house since then?”

“Yes.”

“Where is the knife?”

Calloway said nothing. Lenox met his gaze, and they stared at each other for some time, Lenox with the feeling that there was perhaps not much madness at all in this old fellow.

Calloway’s personal history was murky even to those, like Clavering, who had lived in Markethouse their entire lives. Both Atherton and Clavering had said that Calloway had had a wife and a daughter until roughly a decade before, the three of them living happily in the small stone cottage, but that then the wife had died of a sudden fever one winter. The daughter had gone to live with an aunt and uncle in Norfolk, Atherton remembered, her father unable to look after her properly.

Lenox had asked, as they stood huddled away from the cell, whether it was this sudden solitude that had driven Calloway mad.

“Well, he was always an odd bird,” Atherton had replied in a quiet voice. Because he was a farmer, and his goods sold at market, he had a much firmer grasp of the local characters than Edmund, so often off in Parliament, did. “Never a very avid gardener until around the time he went silent.”

“No?” said Lenox curiously. “Did he have a job?”

Atherton had shaken his head, no. “I believe he inherited some money when his wife died, or perhaps that she brought it with her in the dowry. At any rate he never worked. But it was only after her death that I think he became a — a recluse, you know, for lack of a better word.”

Clavering had nodded. “His wife was right sociable, you know, Mrs. Catherine Calloway.”

“And who were his friends? Who are his friends now?”

Neither Clavering nor Atherton had been able to answer that question. A village was peculiar: so deeply intrusive, in a way, and in another way pig-blind. Once Calloway had become Mad Calloway, Lenox guessed, people had stopped acquiring any new ideas about him. They had pegged him to his role as the town’s eremite, as surely as the local baker or the local hostler or the local thief.

But somebody in Markethouse would have a sharper recollection than Clavering or Atherton. It was simply a matter of finding the person.

Clavering was just asking Lenox again why he thought Calloway was innocent when Bunce came into the room. He had been down to see Dr. Stallings at Clavering’s request.

“Any improvement?” Edmund asked.

Bunce shook his head. “The same,” he said. “Weren’t no better nor no worse.”

“In such a case steadiness may be counted improvement, I hope,” said Edmund.

Behind them there was a noise — Calloway had snorted in disgust.

They asked why in every way they could think of, over the next few minutes, but nothing would induce him to speak.

It was late afternoon now; it had already been a long day. Lenox suggested they leave Bunce with the prisoner, get a bite to eat, and discuss the case, and Edmund and Clavering agreed.

Though the Bell and Horns was the most visible and popular, there were several public houses in Markethouse. Lenox’s favorite was the Lantern, in Pilot Street, whose presence was only indicated by a single lantern above a low wooden door. Behind this door was a dark room, full of flickering candle- and firelight, pewter flagons lining the stone wall behind the bar, and long varnished oak tables scored a thousand times with keys and coins. It was a place that served food, but would close shop before calling itself a “restaurant,” that London word — in Lenox’s youth he had never heard it, and when he first did, at the age of fifteen or so, it referred only to European dining establishments, as opposed to the beef houses, oyster rooms, and coffeehouses that served British food. More and more, though, anywhere could be a restaurant, and the beef houses, oyster houses, they had begun to have an old-fashioned air, a Regency air, which Lenox rather regretted. This kind of simple eatery was being replaced by finer ones, even toward the bottom of the economic scale, with cloth napkins, complex puddings, waiters in aprons. To be at the Lantern was to step back a foot or two from that particular progress of the modern age.

Edmund, Clavering, and Charles were the only patrons there, having slipped the crowds by leaving through a side door. The owner, a quiet but friendly older chap named Lowell, fixed them three pints of mild. Following them soon thereafter was supper: Lady Jane might have dined with three royals, but Lenox was certain that none of them had had as satisfying a meal as he did, which he ate ravenously until it was all gone, and he could sit back with a happy sigh and watch Clavering chase a last dab of applesauce around his plate with a chunk of roasted potato.

“When you said earlier that Calloway was innocent,” Edmund said, “were you being provocative?”

“Does nothing strike you as odd about his confession?” Lenox asked them.

“Only that he spoke.”

Lenox frowned. “Well, then,” he said, “let me tell you what I noticed that struck me as odd. First: Why would he take the risk and trouble of inhabiting an abandoned gamekeeper’s cottage when he has his own house in Clifton Street? Second: Why would he need a map of Markethouse, after having lived here for sixty years or longer? Third: Why would he need to steal books, or clothes, or food, if, again, he has his own cottage, his own food, his own clothes, and was perfectly entitled to take books out of the library? Fourth: How is it possible that he would believe Stevens still lived in a house he hadn’t inhabited in several years?”

Both Edmund’s and Clavering’s eyes had widened. “Hm,” said Clavering, his round face knit with concentration. “When you put it that way.”

“Fifth: Why would he have stolen a dog? And sixth, why, for all pity, would he suddenly, after all this time living a few streets away from him, attack the mayor of the town?”

Edmund nodded, tapping his fist lightly against the oak table, his postsupper pipe clasped in it. “On the other hand,” he said, “seventh, why would he tell us he had done it?”

Lenox recalled that strange look of relief and exhaustion in Calloway’s face when he had asked if they had arrested anybody. “To protect someone,” said Lenox. “The real intruder at Hadley’s house, whoever that was.”

Edmund frowned. “Who would a friendless loner, a hermit, want to protect?”

“What we need is someone who knows Markethouse backward and forward,” Lenox said, “and won’t mind filling in all of the missing details of Calloway’s history for us.”

Clavering and Edmund exchanged a glance, then said, almost simultaneously, “Agatha Browning.”

“Who is she?” Lenox asked.

But he would have to wait for his answer. The door of the Lantern swung open, and a handsome young fellow carrying a shining black leather overnight case entered. It was Pointilleux.

“Gentlemen!” he said happily. “The estimable Monsieur Bunce has inform me you are here!”

“Hullo, Pointilleux,” said Lenox, “decent of you to come.”

The young Frenchman inclined his head gravely. “Of course. Tell me, though, this supper you have all eaten so gluttonous that your plates are clean, in true English fashion, is there another of it? I could not be more hungry, I swear to you, not if I am to ran from here to Marathon and back.”