Home by Nightfall

CHAPTER THREE

They walked together to White’s. This was Edmund’s favorite club, where they got a quiet table near the window. Was the waiter unusually solicitous, or was it merely good service? Lenox saw his brother calculating the chances on either side of the question while they ordered their luncheon.

“Well then,” said Edmund. “Muller. You must have some idea?”

“None at all!” said Lenox cheerfully.

There was a very faint flicker of interest in Edmund’s face. “No?” he said. “Not even a conjecture?”

“Do you have one? I should be very happy to take it and pass it off as my own, in particular should it prove correct.”

“I? No, I have not followed it very closely,” murmured Edmund.

Lenox would have greatly preferred it if his brother had been experiencing a more dramatic and tragic grief — if he drank too much wine, or refused all food, or stormed about the turf near Lenox House at midnight. Instead, he was passably social, drinking a little wine, eating a few bites of food. He was simply not altogether there. In the soft, luminous whiteness of midmorning, sunlight falling in slants through the windows, it looked as if he were already half departed from the world.

How quickly it had happened! Molly had been a plump, pretty woman, with red cheeks and dark hair, of excellent but not especially illustrious stock. Edmund had met her at a Sussex dance. Then and later she had been countryish, quick to laugh, happy to chatter, even a bit silly at times — very different from Lenox’s own sharp, cosmopolitan wife, Lady Jane Grey, though the two had grown close across the years, being married as they were to a pair of brothers. She had been the type of person who enlivened a room, Molly, and since Edmund himself was rather quiet, a reflective soul, they had been a wonderful match. And she had been a woman of parts, too, fine at the pianoforte, and a really quite superb draftsman, who had left behind her hundreds of small, endearing, utterly accurate drawings of the people and places she had loved.

Her death had been fast — shockingly fast. A mild headache on a Tuesday; a fever on the Wednesday; better on the Thursday and planning out her social calendar; very weak indeed on the Friday but optimistic she would see the illness out before the weekend; then, on Saturday morning, badly feverish, and by the afternoon, unconscious, the best doctors from three counties called to her bedside. On Sunday, dead.

One of Lenox’s closest friends in the world was a physician named Thomas McConnell, a Scotsman who had often helped him in his criminal investigations.

“What killed her?” Lenox had asked after the funeral. “It would be nice to know.”

They had been walking down the lovely avenue, lined on either side with lime trees, which led toward Lenox House. McConnell, a rangy fellow, given perhaps too much to drink at moments in his life but a surpassingly excellent doctor, had shaken his head sadly. “I cannot say, exactly. A fever.”

“But you have spoken to Lincoln, Hoare?”

It had been a lovely day, one of those true summer days of September in Sussex, still, bright, mild, a few clouds in the brilliant blue sky. “There are moments when I congratulate myself on belonging to an age of sophistication, Charles — none of the slime-draughts and silver bark and bloodletting of last century, all remedies that killed more than they saved. We know infinitely more than our grandfathers did. And yet something like this — delirium … a fever … chills? We are no closer to understanding precisely what killed her than the Romans would have been. Go back farther, if you like — the ancient Egpytians.”

“Poor Molly,” Lenox had said.

“Poor Edmund,” McConnell had replied, shaking his head. “The dead are at least beyond whatever harm this world can do them.”

McConnell worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital, which served severely ill children, regardless of whether they could pay — a charity that was one of the great credits to the empire, or so Lenox thought. McConnell had seen children die. “Yes,” Lenox had said. “I’m sure you’re right.”

As he and his brother ate lunch now, talking with simulated engagement about political matters, Lenox tried to think of what he could do to help. The five weeks since that day with McConnell might have been five seconds for his brother. Edmund’s face, his mood, were no different, his shock still total.

What made it so difficult was his brother’s essential sweetness. London and his career as a detective had together sharpened Lenox into hawkishness, observance, and cynicism, not all the way perhaps, but far enough that there was little enough that could catch him off guard. Edmund, however, had never been altered, not from boyhood. Even as he maneuvered in Parliament — for he had reached a high position there — it was not through cunning but through his good nature, the ease with which people loved him, that he attained each success. He was intelligent, to be sure, but he had held on through the long years to his country openness.

Part of the credit for that was in all likelihood due to Molly, Lenox realized now.

“I’m down to the house in two days’ time,” Edmund said, as the waiter took away their plates.

Lenox frowned. “On Wednesday?”

“Yes. There’s a lot to look after — I’ve been away too long. They’ll want to know about the horses, and I hear that some of the tenants have complaints.”

“Mather can deal with all of that,” said Lenox.

This was the fellow who managed the estate, a young, energetic person, nephew of the old steward, who had retired to the village. “On the contrary, he needs a great deal of assistance,” said Edmund.

Fortunately their coffee came then — for Lenox was extremely concerned, and he managed to conceal it only by busying himself with milk and sugar. He and Jane had invited Edmund to stay with them after the funeral, but he had declined absolutely. At least, though, he had been in London, and one way or another they had managed to see him most days since then. He would be terribly isolated in the country. He had friends there, but none closer than a twenty-minute gallop. And it was where Molly had died.

“Are you sure that it will be tolerable — mentally, that is?” said Lenox, with great care in his voice.

Edmund actually laughed. “Ha! No, no, I am not,” he said.

“Skip it, then.”

He waved a dismissive hand. “No, I must go. It was urgent two weeks ago. Now it is past urgent.”

“You will be very gloomy down there, Ed.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

This was typical enough. Edmund wasn’t resistant to talking about his state of mind, particularly with Charles and Jane, and he did not pretend to be happy. It didn’t seem to help him, though. If Charles asked him, he answered truthfully and politely, but every word of his reply was filled with a monumental sense of the pointlessness of such conversation, how little it had the power to change anything. The subject would move toward politics then, or Sophia, Lenox’s daughter — and there at least Edmund could give his honest attention, with the part of his self that still remained down here among the living.

Lenox had a thought. “What if we came for a visit?”

Edmund frowned. “To Lenox House? I hope you’ll still be there at Christmas.”

“No, now. Wednesday.”

“I couldn’t possibly ask you to do that. The agency alone takes up so much time.”

“Are you being witty? It would be a positive relief to get away from the city. Dallington can manage the queue for a week or two.”

“What if they ask you to help find Muller?”

“They won’t, the devils.”

Edmund considered this. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s better that I spend these ten days there myself. It will be very dull, you know — all business, every day.”

There was a brief pause, and then Lenox decided that he would simply be honest. In a low voice, he said, “I think there is nothing I can do to help you now, Edmund, but if it would make you even slightly less alone to have company at Lenox House, I would like to come with you. I know Jane and Sophia would, too. Please allow us. At least then I will feel better, whether or not you do.”

Edmund looked at him levelly. “Very well,” he said. “As you please.”

“Ah, thank you,” said Lenox. He leaned back in his chair and hailed the waiter. “Will you have a biscuit with your coffee?” he said to Edmund.

“No, thank you.”

“Well, I call that foolish, because I know something you don’t know — which is that they have the biscuits with raspberry jam in them. We passed a plate on our way in.”

“In fact, I did know that,” said Edmund. “They have them at every meal.”

“That’s the best case I’ve heard yet for London being the center of civilization,” said Charles, and then said, to the waiter, “We’ll take as many biscuits as you can fit on a plate.”

“Very good, sir,” said the waiter.

Edmund, stirring his coffee, thought for a moment and then said, with a glimmer of interest, “Really, though, nothing about Muller? Nothing at all?”

Lenox smiled. “I think until we get more information we’ll just have to assume the butler did it.”