now.
“I’ll feed her,” said Miss Taylor.
“How was it in town?” Jane asked, busying herself with her gloves, her hair, and her shoes before sitting down tiredly in the soft yellow armchair by the window.
“Not bad. I returned with fig jam.”
“My conquering hero.”
“I thought you would like that. Where did you go?”
“We walked all over creation. Your uncle went along part of the way, but he kept seeing flowerbeds he didn’t like the look of, so it seemed cruel to keep him.”
“He was in the garden when I returned two hours ago.”
Lady Jane laughed. “And still is. We just passed him, down in the dirt, a sight filthier than the gardener who was with him. Oh, did you see you have a letter? I left it on the mantel there, see, yes, that’s the one.”
“From whom? Edmund?”
“No, Dallington. Just like him to write three sheets, too.” The penny post permitted each page to be sent for a penny; any additional pages cost a few shillings, payable by the letter’s addressee. In effect Dallington had spent their money with his prolixity.
“I don’t know,” said Lenox indulgently. He had the letter in hand and was tearing it open. “We’ve had enough free post from the British government, I suppose.”
Because he was a member of Parliament all of his correspondence was franked without charge and sent on. The day he had taken his seat it seemed half his acquaintances had handed him bundles of letters, to be distributed across the aisles. It was common enough practice.
“True,” said Jane.
The letter, sent in from the Beargarden Club, read:
Dear Lenox,
How do you do? I trust that the country is still full of all those trees and patches of green that you went to find, a bane to any thinking man, and that you are happy there with Jane and Sophia. Here in the more salubrious climes of London we are well enough. A bit of tedium now that the Waugh matter has been resolved. I’m writing about that, in fact — to tell you about the full confession we’ve had from Florence Waugh. You’ll be surprised to hear it, I know, since you believed the servants to be involved, and yet I fancy in this matter our conjectures redounded to both of our credit, for Florence had the help of one of them. As you guessed, he was named in Arthur Waugh’s will, and it was he who poisoned his master’s final meal. The constant service of the antique world, I know.
Enclosed you will find Florence Waugh’s statement. Apologies about the postage. Inspector Jenkins took her into brig, quite unrepentant. I expect she’ll do well in front of a jury. Apparently Arthur Waugh was a brute to her despite her money. The servant fled the day before yesterday, apparently in the direction of Newcastle. Florence Waugh should have been content to let the crime ride on his shoulders, but I found the apothecary where she bought the antimony. It cost me half a sovereign of shoe leather, too, I can promise, traipsing all over London with her photograph. When I finally said “Jensen’s Apothecary” to her, just those words, she broke down crying, and from then it was easy.
Letters will find me here. Try not to breathe too deeply down there, the air isn’t healthy. Love to all.
Dallington
Lenox spent some time reading over Florence Waugh’s confession. He was proud of Dallington — it had taken real effort to find the apothecary who sold the woman the antimony, and the young man had occasionally been more inclined to lazy, penetrating supposition than to tenacious police work in the past — and also, somewhere within, and to his surprise, jealous. The role of mentor had suited him. It had allowed him to keep a hand in the old game, to play the sage, but more and more often now Dallington’s judgment surpassed his own. It was rustiness, he supposed.
It made him want to discover who had been threatening Plumbley.
He returned to his desk. He shuffled aside his parliamentary papers, and for the first time in years began to make a complex, encoded chart of the crimes he was tracking, the kind he had made all the time when the cases came in more quickly than he could take them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
For much of the next day, however, Lenox was forced to work on his speech. Fresh letters had come in the evening post from his brother and two members of the cabinet, each with detailed thoughts, each franked with Parliament’s stamp. It was advice he valued, and he rushed through a very rough outline in time to send it to his brother on Monday morning.
At about ten o’clock, after he had been out riding on Sadie and eaten breakfast, Frederick sent for him.
“Working hard?” he said, when Lenox appeared in the doorway.
“I am. But you’re all gussied up, Freddie. Why?”
The older man wore a dark suit and a pair of gold spectacles hung from a gleaming chain around his neck. He gestured toward a robe made of lawn, lying over the arm of his chair. “I’ve five cases to hear this morning. I thought you might want to observe.”
They had spoken about the possibility at supper two evenings before. “Of course,” said Lenox. “With great pleasure. I had forgotten.”
Like the great majority of justices of the peace, Frederick heard his cases in his own home. The household staff, however, did their best to imbue at least a part of it — the second hall, a large room with very high windows looking out upon the pond, mostly out of use in the daily life of Everley — with the formal mood of a government building.
Frederick sat at the center of a large horseshoe-shaped table, gleamed with beeswax to a brilliant pale brown. Behind him a wood fire was lit. There were a pair of chairs and a small table about ten feet away, with a jug of water and a glass upon it, where the accused would sit. In the corner of the room was a St. George’s cross, and upon the table were the seal and rolls of office. Standing at the door, in a suit that had seen better days, was Rodgers, Frederick’s gardener, a man whose sensibilities were of profound coarseness in all matters not pertaining to the flora of Somerset. He acted as the bailiff on these occasions. Oates and Weston were in a narrow servants’ passage with their five charges, four of whom were well-known enough in Plumbley to have been sent home on the promise that they would appear. The last man, the fifth case for Frederick to hear, had been in the town’s lone jail cell.
Lenox took a chair near the window, where he hoped to seem unobtrusive. That was not to Frederick’s plan, however. The first cases were two young men of sixteen or seventeen, whom the magistrate had evidently known from infancy. Both were accused of drunkenness and brawling. He lighted into them with identical tirades. “Aren’t you ashamed, to be called before me,” he said, “and what’s worse, what’s much worse, on the day when my house is graced by a member of Parliament? A
Lenox noticed that the appeal to the boys’ civic pride was relatively ineffective; what really struck home was when Freddie began to talk about the shame their mothers would feel, if they heard of their sons in jail. The second boy actually cried.
“Rodgers, what shall I do with him?” asked the magistrate at the end of each testimony. “Jail?”
“Set him to gardening,” said Rodgers. This was his invariable advice on the punishment of all criminals, which Frederick liked to hear but had never enacted save once, when the head shrubbery keeper of his rival in this parts, Lord DeMuth — who had a great whacking hall called Saltstow, with miles of gardens — had been scraped up after a fight in the pub; this criminal Freddie had kept for two weeks. Rodgers had been in a state of ecstasy.
“No,” said Frederick twice, “I think it had better be a real lesson.”
Each boy was fined ten pence.
