The Laws of Murder

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

If an alert Londoner had been asked to pinpoint the precise geographical center of his city’s aristocratic society, in that month of that year of that century of English life, after a little hesitation he might have pointed to a slender street in the West End, only six houses long and none of them impressively large. It was called Cleveland Row.

Drop a fellow in this ostensibly unremarkable little corridor, and he was guaranteed to be within a minute’s walk of a title, of a fortune, of a beauty — and sometimes of all three united within a single body. At its east end the street opened onto the corner of St. James’s Street and Pall Mall, which were lined with the cavernous and sumptuous gentlemen’s clubs of London; at its west end it let onto the pathways of Green Park, which offered a direct approach, not three minutes’ walk, to Buckingham Palace. The Row backed onto Clarence House, where the Prince of Wales lived, and the Queen’s own chapel next to that; it looked forward to the Earl of Spencer’s chalk-colored mansion, where the great pageant of London society held its weekly gatherings.

Cleveland Row was Lenox’s destination, as he drove away from Jenkins’s house half an hour later in a cab. (His own carriage was still in the funeral procession, now heading to the cemetery.) There were few places he felt more at home. It was a ten-minute walk from Hampden Lane, where he and Jane lived, it was half a block from several clubs to which he belonged, including his favorite, the Athenaeum, and he’d visited Spencer House only the week before.

He had the cab stop at a sprightly brick residence with bright green shutters. He paid, stepped down, and rang at the bell. The house’s windows were glimmering with light, and after only a moment a butler answered.

“Charles Lenox, to see Father Hepworth,” said the visitor. “Here is my card. Is he receiving?”

“Please come in, sir,” said the butler. He gestured toward a small brittle chair upholstered in red velvet. “If you would care to sit while I ascertain whether Father Hepworth is occupied.”

Lenox waited in the small entrance hall, occasionally peering down the red-carpeted hallway the butler had followed upstairs. Even this little room was dense with beautiful objects: a convex mirror in a burnished brass frame, a stone urn carved with cherubim (and stuffed unceremoniously with umbrellas), small paintings of religious scenes in gilt frames.

After a few moments there was a footstep on the staircase, and when Lenox half-rose, he saw that it was not the butler again but Hepworth himself. “Lenox!” he said. “What an unexpected pleasure! Come up, won’t you? I was just about to have tea.”

“I’m pleased I caught you,” said Lenox.

“On the contrary, the pleasure is mine. Come along, this way.”

The upstairs room into which Hepworth led Lenox was decorated in much the same style as the entrance hall, though the objects here were grander in scale, including a row of magnificently ostentatious reliquaries along one wall, all of them bejeweled, some of them carved, some of them painted. One of Holbein’s portraits of Sir Thomas More (a great hero to Catholics, of course — he had died rather than grant Henry the Eighth permission to divorce) hung near the fireplace.

Catholics: It was an odd but no doubt exhilarating moment to be one of these in England.

Of course, to some degree it guaranteed that you would be loathed — such was the tradition of the country. It had been Catholics who plotted to kill Queen Elizabeth, and before that Catholics who had so brutally slaughtered the brave Protestants who died while Elizabeth’s sister, Queen Mary, Bloody Mary, had reigned. (Nearly three centuries after it was written, Foxe’s gruesome Book of Martyrs, which depicted those deaths in horrible, explicit detail, was still one of the bookshops’ five bestsellers year after year.) The bias against them had long been unswerving, though recently it had softened somewhat. Since 1829 they had at least been permitted to vote and own land.

More than that, in the last twenty years things had begun to change in ways that were, depending upon one’s perspective, either exciting or alarming. First, in the 1830s and 1840s, a great number of Protestants of the “high church” variety — that is, those who didn’t mind a little bit of incense in their services, or insist upon plain vestments for their priest — had suddenly darted in a mass to the Catholic Church, led by the great controversial Tractarians of Oxford University, Newman and Pusey. Reviled in London and beloved in Rome, these intellectuals had stubbornly insisted upon their decisions, even as their conversion cut them off from the society of scholars and aristocrats to which they had once belonged.

Slowly others had followed them, one by one, forsaking society, fortune, and often even family to do so. The great poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had converted; Irishmen in search of work emigrated in more and more significant numbers to England, bringing their religion; in 1850, the pope, Pius IX, had finally reintroduced into the country proper dioceses and parishes, where there had been only uncertain and makeshift churches before. There were men in Parliament who believed the toleration of all this would lead to England’s ruin. It was a badly kept secret that Queen Victoria herself was panicked about the invasion.

At the center of this web of Catholic life in England sat Father Dixon Hepworth.

Of course, London had its own holy overseer — the Archbishop of Westminster — but it was Hepworth, not the archbishop, who mattered. The reason was a very British one, class. Hepworth came from an old and noble Suffolk family, and when he had converted at Oxford he hadn’t lost their love, which meant that, unlike most Catholics, he still had a place in society, even if some of the more religious houses of London stopped sending their invitations to him.

On top of that he had charm, wit, and wealth — and despite being ordained, he knew better than to push his religion forward in the wrong situation. He was a philosophical fellow, a bit beyond fifty, bald and rather athletic, with the practical face of a man of business. He was extremely devoted to his collection of art and artifacts, but there seemed to be nothing especially artistic about him in person. He had a mistress of long standing named Eleanor Hallinan; she was a dancer in the West End, very beautiful, with no more of an eye toward Christ than a goldfish might have had. He never preached, rarely visited with the poor, and spent most of his days here, in Cleveland Row — but his power was unassailable. He presided over the city’s Catholic institutions, whether from the board or with a softer kind of influence, and the Vatican never filled a significant vacancy in the country without consulting him first. The archbishop could make no such claim.

Lenox had known him for decades now, and liked the fellow; and if there was one man who could apply some slight pressure on a group of stubborn nuns, it was Hepworth.

The priest was sitting on an armchair and leaned forward from its edge, face full of interest, hands clasped before him. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“Have you heard of the murder of Inspector Thomas Jenkins?”

It took just a few minutes for Lenox to describe to Hepworth the sequence of interactions he and Scotland Yard had had with the sisters of St. Anselm’s, and the absolute refusal of Sister Amity to speak to them, on the one hand, and the absolute inability of Sister Grethe to do so, on the other.

As Lenox spoke, Hepworth’s face had slowly taken on a look of consternation. After the story was finished, he leaned back in his chair. “St. Anselm’s, you say?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure that’s what they said? At 77 Portland Place?”

“Yes,” said Lenox.

Just then the door opened, and a footman came in behind a rolling table, which was topped with a silver half-globe. He retracted this when the table was between Hepworth and Lenox, revealing a teapot, a plate of sandwiches, and several piles of toast. Lenox realized how hungry he was when he saw it.

Hepworth stood up, buttoning his blue velvet jacket. “If you wouldn’t mind pouring your own tea, I think I can help,” he said. “Wait here for two minutes — less, probably.”

As he waited, Lenox fell gratefully upon a stack of cinnamon toast wedges, piping hot and running with butter. When fully half a dozen of these were gone, he poured himself a cup of the light, fragrant tea, stirred in his milk and sugar, took a long sip, and sat back with a sigh of profound contentment.

To think: In Rome there wasn’t a cup of the stuff to be found.

Hepworth reappeared just as Lenox was pouring himself a little more. He was carrying a large leather book and accepted Lenox’s offer to give him a cup of tea only with some distraction. He sat down and opened the book, flipping through it.

“Is anything wrong?” asked Lenox.

Hepworth took a sip of tea and was silent for a moment. “Yes,” he said at last.

Lenox felt a surge of interest. “What?”

“Only what I suspected, when I heard your story — and what this book has confirmed. The Catholic Church has no record at all of a convent called St. Anselm’s in London, on Portland Place or anywhere else.”