Home by Nightfall

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

There was a moment’s pause, and then the young woman burst out, “Well! I am! What of it!”

“Liza, no!” cried Claire Adams.

The young woman tried to hold herself steady, but after a moment she began to weep and fell back into the sofa behind her, hiding her face in the arm. Adelaide — her own face full of sympathy and grief, as if they really were cousins — sat down, too, and put her arm around Liza Calloway’s shoulder.

Adelaide glanced up at Lenox with a look of reproach in her eyes, and he felt it fully. He had needed some proof. The dog’s reaction had given it to him. Nevertheless, it was cruel to send any person into such collapse.

“At such a lovely ball, too, shame,” murmured Elizabeth Watson, as if privy to his thoughts.

It was absurd on its face, if Liza Calloway was guilty of violent assault upon the mayor, and yet there was a kind of county justice in it, too. The feeling of the room — even Clavering and Bunce, even his brother — was against him, not wrongly.

In his boyhood, one of the least reputable streets in Mayfair had been a few blocks down from the family house in London. It was a shabby, paint-chipped little lane, with a cheesemonger, an unsavory pub, and a number of scroungy fourth-rate lodging houses — oh, and at number 10, for it was the street called Downing, the residence of the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

To Lenox, raised in the rigid divisions of country society, by which two neighboring landowners might not enter each other’s houses for forty years because of slightly uneven ancestries, it was enthralling to see how London pushed every kind of person together into cheek-by-jowl life. Gladstone and the boot boy at the pub next door had the same right to the pavement. Downing Street had become more refined since the 1840s — in fact, partly at Gladstone’s insistence — but you could still find anyone out upon it at any hour, a merchant, a duke, a vagrant, drunks, priests, bricklayers, paviers, basket-men, a greengrocer, the Prime Minister, a cabman or chimneysweep. A detective. The Queen.

Here, however — well, he had played a London trick on Liza Calloway. The fact was that he bore one of the well-known surnames of Sussex, and now he stood in the sitting room of his brother-in-law, who bore another of those great last names. All of the advantage in the room was his, therefore, and in Markethouse that meant that he had a greater duty to the others than they did to him. Elizabeth Watson was a charwoman, Claire Adams a housemaid, Adelaide Snow the daughter of an orphan, and Liza Calloway was a thready pulse away from being a murderess. He had forgotten — something, noblesse oblige, perhaps, you could call it.

“I am sorry to have tricked you, Miss Calloway. I needed to see if the dog would identify you.”

Calloway’s daughter ignored these words and went on weeping. Edmund handed her his handkerchief. “Would you like a glass of champagne?” he asked. “Or something to eat?”

“Yes, sort her something to eat,” said Elizabeth Watson commandingly. Now she, too, had risen and come to the sofa. “She’ll feel better.”

It took a minute or two for a footman to return with a glass of champagne and a wooden board of cheese, apple, ham, and bread. By this time, Liza Calloway had wiped her tears. She drank a sip of the champagne and nibbled at a small hunk of bread, holding what remained in the fingertips of her two hands and staring at it, as if willing herself not to cry again. And then she did start crying again. Her aunt and Adelaide Snow embraced her.

“Can you explain to us what’s happened, Charles?” asked Edmund.

“Miss Calloway, would you like to explain?”

“Mrs. Evans,” she said. “My husband’s name was Evans — may he rest in peace. He contracted cholera and died last year.”

“Mrs. Evans,” said Lenox gently. ‘Would you care to explain how you’ve come to return to Markethouse?”

She was silent, though at least she was no longer crying. After a moment, Lenox nodded and began to explain.

“Mr. Calloway may not be a murderer,” he said, “but his confession was the most important clue we had about the case. Why? Well, from all we’ve heard, he has no strong personal ties remaining in Markethouse. He may live here, but his allegiances are dissolved. His wife’s family — the wife whom by all accounts he loved passionately—”

“He did,” said the daughter of that marriage.

Claire Adams nodded her agreement with this assertion.

“That family, including the two sisters present in this room, had become strangers to him, and though both Elizabeth Watson and Claire Adams seemed to me to bear some personal animus toward Stevens, it was impossible to imagine that Calloway would care enough about their prejudices to act upon them, or to sacrifice himself for either of them.

“Add that, of course, to the other facts that didn’t square with the idea of Calloway as the murderer — the use of the gamekeeper’s cottage, when he had his own house, the theft of the library books, the map of Markethouse, the mistake of thinking that Stevens still lived in Potbelly Lane, in what is now Mr. Hadley’s house. It was clear to me that an outsider to the village was involved.”

Calloway’s daughter looked up. Though he was old and bearded and mad, it was possible now to see the resemblance between them; both had strong cheekbones and penetrating eyes. Hers were trained on Lenox. “How do you know that I went to Hadley’s house?” she asked.

“Hush, Helena,” said Adelaide.

“How did Miss Snow come to be involved?” asked Clavering.

“Give me a moment and I’ll explain,” Lenox said.

The mood of the room had changed. Now they were upon the terrain of firm fact. Sandy was curled up happily at Mrs. Evans’s feet, eyes already settling closed in the warmth of the fire. Edmund, standing near the fireplace, was gazing at the scene with a calm, steadying sympathy.

“I asked myself,” said Lenox, “whom Calloway might then have cared enough about to protect. He more or less invited us to hang him, after all. And I thought: Who could inspire such a cheerful suicide but a child? I myself am a father — and it is no sacrifice, the idea of sacrificing yourself for a child. Your self doesn’t even come into it.

“So it was that I came to the answer: this woman, before you. Mad Calloway’s daughter.”

“Please don’t call him that,” she said.

“I apologize. In fact, I remember Miss Snow, Miss Adelaide Snow here, stopping herself just short, yesterday, of saying Mad Calloway, and saying, much more politely, Mr. Calloway. It struck me as an odd hitch in her speech at the time, until I realized she was sparing your feelings, Mrs. Evans. I also wondered why you took such a pressing interest in the condition of Calloway’s imprisonment, about which you asked us several questions. As a cousin visiting from out of town, you could scarcely have known anything about him. Now, of course, I understand.”

“But what was it for?” asked Edmund suddenly. “If Mrs. Evans did indeed attack Stevens, why?”

“Ah.” Lenox looked at the two young women on the sofa. “There I enter into the realm of speculation. Mrs. Evans?”

She remained silent. Lenox glanced at Adelaide Snow’s usually kindly face and was startled to see in it something stony and strange. It took him a moment, but then he realized what it was: rage, sheer rage.

He looked at the two Watson sisters, and upon their faces, too, was deep emotion.

“I suspect that Stevens Stevens is not a — not a good man,” he said lamely, and then went on. “Mrs. Evans, Miss Snow, you have both been in his employ. Can you tell us the truth of his character? Of what happened?”

“Never,” said Adelaide Snow fiercely. She gripped Liza Calloway’s shoulder again. “Just leave us alone. You can’t prove a thing.”

Lenox glanced at Edmund and raised his eyebrows slightly. He was about to speak again when there was a knock on the door, and then, without waiting for a reply, the knocker pushed it open a few inches. It was Lady Jane.

“Charles, there you are, and Edmund, too,” she said. “What have you been doing?”

Despite the circumstances, Adelaide Snow rose to her feet, and Lenox realized that of course his wife was famous in this part of the world. He watched her take in the entire scene with her quick, intelligent gray eyes.

“This is Miss Liza Calloway,” he said, “or more properly, Mrs. Evans.”

“Ah,” said Jane. She still had a hand on the doorway. There was a long pause, and then it was clear that she had apprehended the situation, the tenor of the room, and she said, “Well, perhaps I might sit with you.”

It was Edmund who saw the merit of the idea most quickly. He strode forward. “Listen, perhaps all of us had better clear out,” he said. “You and I, Charles, and us, Clavering and Bunce. Jane — these young women have had some trial. Ladies, you may speak to my sister-in-law with utter confidence that she will keep your secrets — or not, if you prefer, but at any rate you ought to have a few minutes to yourselves. It’s been a difficult night, I’m sure. We’ll return in a little while.”