The Fleet Street Murders

CHAPTER THIRTY

The news that followed the next day was scarce and overwrought. According to the papers Lenox could find, all of London was in an uproar about Gerald Poole’s confession. Each front page ran a long recapitulation of Jonathan Poole’s treason, and the names of the few tradesmen and servants who had met Gerald popped up again and again, uniformly to say how surprised they were. The more febrile stories called the shooting of Exeter a second treason.

There was no confirmation that Poole had indeed employed Hiram Smalls as a mercenary, but given the two men’s meeting at the Saracen’s Head pub the evening before the murders of Simon Pierce and Winston Carruthers, there was little doubt in most minds about their complicity. With Lenox, however, the idea sat uneasily.

“The question is, why on earth would Poole have sent that letter to Smalls?” he asked Graham as he read that evening, another long day of campaigning behind them. “Does it make any sense that he would meet Smalls in a public place, only to write a letter containing the same plan they had agreed to the night before?”

“No, sir.”

“Still, people get nervous when they mean to commit a crime.”

“Certainly, sir.”

“He may have been agitated and written the note to give himself some activity, I suppose. I hope Jenkins sends word of the contents of Poole’s confession. I fear he’s treading the line, however, after his suspension. Needless to say, I can’t blame the man for it.”

Indeed, in the forty-eight hours after he received the initial telegram, there was no word from London except another letter from Lady Jane, which predated Poole’s confession, and a stout and strongly worded telegram from Dallington.

Lenox answered:

He felt guilty writing it but equally felt how impossible it was to write anything different.

Originally another debate had been set for that day, but Roodle had pulled out of it. With Crook and Sandy Smith satisfied that they had covered all the countryside there was to visit, Lenox turned his attention again to the local tradesmen and Officials who would be influential among their peers. He heard a long soliloquy by Mayor Adlington about wool prices and another from a pig farmer about pork prices, all over one endless lunch at Stirrington’s social club. He toured stockrooms and the fruit and vegetable market and commiserated with the fishmonger about rising costs.

For all this, the encounter that moved him most was with a small child, a boy of no more than nine or ten years, who was guiding a herd of cattle down a lane toward the public fields. It was at the very edge of the town of Stirrington, where a few buildings straggled out into empty meadows. Lenox and Sandy Smith were sitting on a wooden fence, eating roasted beef sandwiches, after attending a small gathering at the blacksmith’s house. Lenox nodded politely to the boy, who stopped. The cattle did, too, after he made a thock with his cheek.

“You’re the Parliament?” said the lad.

“I’m trying to become a Member of Parliament. A parliament is a whole group of men.”

“I thought you were the Parliament.”

“No,” said Lenox. “Are these your cattle?”

The boy laughed, and Lenox realized that his own question had been just as preposterous as the one he had answered.

“They’re my uncle’s, my father’s brother, as was.”

“What about your father?”

“Dead.”

“I’m very sorry to hear it.”

The boy shrugged and with a nod beckoned the cattle again, and they moved onward down the lane.

“Shouldn’t he be in school?” Lenox asked.

“I don’t know that you’ve quite grasped the nature of people’s lives here, Mr. Lenox. School is a luxury, in many of their cases.”

Now, Lenox was a gentleman of his age and thought himself enlightened, thought himself progressive; indeed, vowed to fight for the enlightened and progressive causes he had long believed in. Yet it was only now that he truly realized what life in Stirrington was like — and with a burst of insight realized that perhaps Roodle was correct, in some way. Perhaps he wasn’t fit to represent these people. It was jarring. The slums of London he could comprehend, and he had grown up among rough men and women in Sussex, but for some reason the boy’s utter abstraction from Pall Mall, from Grosvenor Square, from Bellamy’s Restaurant and the House of Lords, gave Lenox a shock.

A shock for the good, though; for from that moment he had a deepened and more profound sense of the responsibility of his undertaking. For his entire adult life he had moved so easily among men who made large decisions, whether admirals or cabinet ministers or bishops, that he had forgotten to some extent what a privilege it was to stand for Parliament. The sense of honor overwhelmed him. He felt it keenly.

So the days passed, with every moment another hand to shake, another tale to listen to, until it was the day before election day.

In the late morning Crook appeared in the bar and announced that he was taking two days off, much to his patrons’ surprise. He had found a replacement barman from a pub in the countryside, however, brought in for a little urban experience, and the grumblings in the Queen’s Arms soon fell off.

Outside of the pub on the High Street there was a tremendous clatter. They were constructing a high hustings, and it was when Lenox saw this undertaking that he began to have butterflies in his stomach. He sent Graham to find a mug of tea and a piece of toast to settle himself, even though he had already eaten that morning.

“Nervous?” said Crook. He nodded in an approving, businesslike fashion. “It’s for the good. If you weren’t nervous I’d think something had gone wrong.”

“What is it for?”

“For speaking, of course. We have a succession of gentlemen who will speak there this morning, and then around lunchtime, when people are on the streets, you’ll give a speech. Another one this evening, and all day tomorrow we’ll have a rotating group of people speaking from it.”

“Does Roodle have one?”

Crook nodded. “Yes, a few streets down. Ours is in a better position, though. It may prove an advantage.”

“Good,” said Lenox. “Good.”

Just then Nettie, Crook’s niece, came out, dressed in a pretty muslin frock and with her hair in braids. Lenox saw the immediate softening of Crook’s features, the unlining of his forehead, and began to walk away.

“Mr. Lenox!” said Nettie before he had gone very far.

He turned. “Yes?”

“I said a prayer for you at mass this morning.”

“Why, thank you, Miss Crook. I’m very honored.”

Crook colored, but Lenox pretended he hadn’t noticed.

“I certainly hope you win.”

“So do I!”

Lenox bowed to Nettie Crook and walked inside.

So, Crook was a papist. It occurred to Lenox that this might be helpful, in a way, if it meant he had allies in the Catholic community of Stirrington. Then he cursed himself for the cynicism of the thought.

He stood at the door of the pub pondering all of this.

“How do, Mr. Lenox?” said a passing man. He wasn’t past thirty, a wave of fair hair pushed off of his pink, sunburnt features.

“Very well, thank you,” said the candidate, looking up.

“I’m voting for you tomorrow.”

He felt a surge of affection for Stirrington. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.

“Lower the beer tax,” the man responded with a laugh, walking on. “That should do. Good morning, now.”

So the day began, and as the sun slowly rose and slowly set there were speeches, emergency strategy sessions, and dozens of pints bought for potential voters, until at last at 1:00 A.M., exhausted, Lenox and Crook went to their respective beds.

At six the next morning Lenox was dressed and watching the day break — the day he hoped would change his life forever.