Home by Nightfall

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The food was ordered, cooked, delivered; Pointilleux fell to it heartily and happily. As he ate, the three men informed him of the situation and discussed their plans.

The clerk said he was refreshed by his trip — he had that incredible constitutional springiness of a twenty-year-old human — and didn’t need to sleep. He listened intently as they described their progress in the case thus far. When they had finished, he asked them to put him to work. This was a holiday, and he looked appropriately eager: no clerking for a few days, for once all of his energies put toward detection, ever so much more engaging than copying and filing.

“In that case, I would like to set you loose in Stevens’s office,” Lenox said. Pointilleux had proven himself adept at parsing documents in the matter of the Slavonian Club. “Look for anything, anything at all, personal, public, particularly anything at all that ties Stevens to Calloway. Don’t forget the budget is coming up, either, a contentious local matter.”

“I don’t think Stevens would like that,” Clavering said.

“That’s too bad for Stevens,” said Lenox firmly. “It would have been very helpful to know before now that Hadley bought Stevens’s old house — it would have saved us a measure of time and work. If there’s any similar piece of information in his office, we need to have it.”

“And what shall the three of us do?” Edmund asked.

Lenox had several ideas on that score, too. He enumerated them now, and the others nodded in agreement. After Pointilleux had thrown off a glass of ruby red wine—“Wretched swill,” he said, a phrase he must have learned from Dallington, “but it will do”—they walked him down to the town hall.

Clavering had a key now, and they took him up to Stevens’s office.

“Will it not bother you to pass time here alone, with that horrible drawing on the wall?” Edmund asked.

“No,” said Pointilleux cheerfully. “Charles, you tell me there are papers here and across the hall, too?”

“Yes,” said Lenox.

“And if I slow, how you say, if I desist in feeling awake — how do I arrive to Lenox House, to sleep one hour or two?”

“We’ll send a boy back with a horse,” Edmund said. “He’ll wait outside.”

“Thank you.”

“And he’ll hear it if you scream,” Edmund added in a mutter, as they left the agency’s clerk to do his work.

“Chin up,” Lenox said as they walked downstairs to leave the hall. “I think the attack was meant for Stevens. Not anybody else.”

“It’s that blasted drawing which bothers me,” said Edmund.

Clavering, who badly needed a rest, nevertheless insisted on stopping by the jail again before he went home, and Lenox felt a flare of admiration — not spectacularly intelligent, this small, round-faced man, but stout, honest, and dogged. They were lucky to have him.

All three of them went and looked at Calloway. He was asleep, as Bunce and his cousin, equally reedy and tall, played a hand of cards by candlelight.

“You’re staying overnight?” Lenox asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Bunce.

“Fair enough. And Clavering, in the morning you’ll take us to see Agatha Browning?”

“Bright and early,” said Clavering.

“Good.”

They were finished for the day then, finally, and all of them shook hands, before Lenox and Edmund betook themselves slowly back toward Lenox House.

They went by the same route that they had taken so many hundreds and thousands of times in their vanished youth. Then, of course, their parents had been waiting; more recently, Molly, usually, and often Jane, too; now they were alone together.

As he did at any moment when they weren’t actually following the trail of the crimes that had been committed in the village, Charles sensed Edmund’s preoccupations returning to him. His silence about them — it did him credit, perhaps, but it was sorrowful to behold.

“Do you know when James will hear the news?” Lenox asked quietly as they walked along.

Though it was dark out, it wasn’t too terribly cold. Above them the stars were brilliant as they can be only in the countryside, where the soft whisper of wind in the grass, the motion of the leaves in the trees, seems somehow to make the heavens even more still, more immense, their innumerable scattered lights more mysterious and beautiful.

Edmund waited for a while to respond, eyes on the ground, hands in his trouser pockets. At last, he said, “He may know now.” Then he added, “I fear it will be very hard on Teddy.”

To an outsider, this would have sounded unkind, but not to Lenox. James had always been more like their Uncle Harold than either of them — sharp-witted, funny, flashy, adventurous, not notably contemplative. He would take his mother’s death hard, but on the other hand there was no doubt, either, that he would be able to live past it.

By contrast, Teddy was a vulnerable soul — a thoughtful, worried boy, more inward than his older brother. From what Lenox could tell, this disposition had survived even its immersion in the rough world of the Royal Navy.

“I know,” said Lenox.

“They say that you can’t protect your children — one of those great saws, you know. It’s appalling to find out how true it is.”

They approached the gates where Edmund’s land began, ahead of them the long, peaceful, tree-lined avenue leading toward the pond and the house. “I’m just so sorry, Edmund, you know. I really am.”

“Well, thank you. It’s a trial.”

“More than that,” Lenox said.

Edmund nodded, taking in his words.

Had asking about James and Teddy, Lenox wondered, made things worse? As they came to the door of the house, he feared it had. One thing about Molly was that she had been a person without very many cares — rather like James, now that he came to think of it — and she had always been able to lighten Edmund’s mood, whether he was tired from Parliament or cantankerous because they had to be in London.

Who would do that now? For his part, Lenox felt as if he kept making mistakes.

“What’s that noise?” Edmund asked, frowning.

Lenox looked toward the house, which was now about a hundred yards off. “Is it music?” he asked.

“I think it is — the piano.”

“Waller,” said Lenox.

Edmund laughed. “No. Atherton, I imagine, if anyone.”

As it happened, they were both wrong. When they came into the front hallway, they heard women’s voices from the long drawing room, and when they entered it they found, sitting together at the piano, mauling a sprightly waltz for four hands, Lady Jane and Toto.

“Jane!” said Lenox.

“Toto, too,” said Toto.

Lenox laughed. “My goodness, how are you both? Why are you here?”

“We took a train earlier this evening,” said Jane, who had risen up and was coming across to them. “London seemed too quiet once the party was over.” She embraced Lenox, then Edmund.

“Not quite the thing, living plain old life without a royal in sight,” said Toto. “And on top of that, we were desperate to go to Jane’s brother’s ball in two nights. It’s been years since an overweight country gentleman trod on my feet. I intend to make McConnell very jealous.”

“I’d forgotten the ball. Is Sophia here?”

“Oh, yes, and George, too, both asleep in the nursery,” said Jane. “The servants looked pretty het up about having to help us, especially because both girls were crying and miserable by the time we arrived, since it was past their bedtimes. But Edmund, can you hold all of us?”

“Of course,” he said, and he was smiling. “It will be a pleasure to hear the girls’ footsteps.”

“Well, until they step in mud and then go into the Palladian room,” Toto said. “On the other hand, I bet we can solve all your murders.”

“That will be convenient,” Lenox said.

“It’s not even a murder yet,” Edmund put in. “Our mayor is still alive. Touch wood he may be come the morning.”

“Anyhow, let’s skip all that now. Could we have supper?” Jane asked. “Mr. Waller said it was ready. I’m famished. The royals ate all the food before I could have any, and there wasn’t a tea cart on the train.”