Oates repeated the phrase. “I don’t know what it could mean.”
This was obvious: The constable’s eyes were dulled with fatigue, sherry, and sorrow. Lenox doubted whether he was fully aware of his surroundings. Oates’s strength had already been frayed, and now seeing the body seemed to have destroyed it altogether. Looking at him, Lenox saw a few small details he hadn’t before — a patch of hair missed on his shave, dirt under his fingernails — and realized, with a bolt of pity, that Oates must not be married.
Yet this was no time for weakness. “Think!” Lenox said sharply, trying to snap the constable to attention.
“I don’t know.”
“It might be a month old,” said Eastwood.
“No, the paper is too crisp for that,” said Lenox. Then, under his breath, he said, “‘Swell’s basement.’ Does the phrase connote anything to you, Doctor?”
“It does not, unfortunately.”
“Oates? Think hard.”
Oates, with great effort, screwed up his eyes and concentrated but it was no use. “Perhaps after I sleep,” he said. “I feel muddled, just at the moment.”
Eastwood looked troubled and said to Lenox, “Perhaps you might carry on for the evening alone, if I see Constable Oates home? Here, Oates, sit down.”
Lenox nodded. “You know where he lives?”
“Yes.”
“I thank you, then. I’ll be on my way.”
Lenox knew from his uncle the location of Musgrave’s house. He was tired and footsore — had it really been less than twenty-four hours ago that he was a few steps from Charing Cross, rousing Dallington out of that gin bar? — but determined. The meager clues that the past few hours had offered, the cigar ends, the horses in Epping Forest, the note Weston had scrawled out for Oates, had formed a kind of useful drone in his mind, their repetition a form of internalization.
“Swell’s basement”—was it some kind of code? Increasingly Lenox thought so. Weston had been keeping a vigil by the town green, and perhaps he had written the note only if, by chance, someone came by who might convey it to Oates’s house a few streets away. In that case a code would forefend any reward for nosiness. “Come if you can,” he had written, too, meaning that he planned to stay where he was.
Suddenly Lenox realized that the whole thing — the night, the cigar ends — suggested perhaps not a meeting but a lookout. Weston had been spying on someone. Perhaps the men who had ridden their horses to the edge of town.
He felt he was making progress, now, but Musgrave brought a halt to that. Lenox arrived at the house, a rather grand one, and sent in a card with the butler, who bore it on a salver.
He returned, funereally expressioned and his tails impeccable, with the card untouched. “I’m afraid, sir, that Captain Musgrave is occupied.”
“Tell him it’s about this murder, if you would,” said Lenox.
“If you wish to return in the—”
“Tell him now, please.”
“Sir.”
But Musgrave was unmoved. The butler was gone for some time and when he finally returned, looking deeply sorrowful, said that unless an officer of the law was present, his master had no wish to speak with anyone; it had been a taxing day; he would be very happy to meet Mr. Lenox on some other occasion; and so forth.
Lenox knew when he was defeated. He thanked the butler and left the hall.
Outside it was dark now. He had come out in a light sack coat, more suitable to an autumn’s day than an autumn evening, and he regretted it, wished he had worn his tweed frock coat. It was the whistling country air: One could always find warmth of a sort in London, over a grate, in the motion of other humans, near the horses at the curb. One was more alone here. Poor Weston!
Unusually for a man of his station Lenox never carried a cane, that gentler descendant of the sword, but by the time he reached the gates of Everley he wished he did. His legs and feet were tired, and as he came into the hall he asked for warm water to wash his feet and his hands. He would have given anything for fifteen minutes of quiet repose, but then there was a great deal to do here: There were Jane and Sophia; there was Frederick; of course there was Dallington; and worse yet, they were meant to sit to supper in something less than twenty minutes.
Freddie, with his usual tact, had foreseen this. Bowing slightly, his butler said to the tired detective, “The master has requested we serve supper in your rooms, sir, unless you wish to dine more formally this evening.”
Lenox did not.
“He would also like to invite you to the small study at your leisure, sir, and adds that he will be up very late — that you cannot come too late for him.”
“Thank you, Nash.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jane’s face, when he entered, was etched with anxiety, but she saw that he was, if worn, nevertheless safe. Slowly, over an excellent supper, they returned to more even tempers. They even got to see Sophie, briefly, before Miss Taylor took her.
At last, lighting a small cigar, Lenox said, “I think perhaps you should return to London, Jane.”
“Nonsense.”
“Until I know that it’s safe to be in Plumbley—”
“I consult my memory and discover that we are in Everley, not Plumbley, Charles, and anyhow we Lenox women are made of sterner stuff than that.” She put a few soft fingertips to his face. “You look very tired.”
He smiled. “It may be that I’m not as young as I once was.”
She smiled, too. “Almost certainly you are not.”
“Are you sure you feel safe? Comfortable?”
“Charles, can you think I would leave? With the speech to come, and now this, not even mentioning poor John?”
He kissed her. In the end perhaps this was love: a balance of strength left over, just when you thought yours had all vanished.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fortified by their hearty supper, Lenox went downstairs in slightly higher spirits to see Frederick. The older man was standing by his telescope, glass of wine in hand.
“Ah, Charles,” he said when the door opened, not turning. “Put your eye here. Remarkably clear out.”
Lenox looked. “Beautiful,” he said. The stars, isolate and furious in the black of the night, were spread in a pattern unfamiliar to him. “What am I seeing?”
“Did you know that the Chinese — well, of course they wouldn’t have the constellations the Greeks set out, the bears, the dippers, Orion, would they? I’d never thought of it before. Instead they have what they call the Twenty-eight Mansions of the Moon, I learned recently. Really rather interesting. At the moment you’re looking at the White Tiger of the West. More specifically its neck, or at any rate what they call its neck.”
“I can’t claim to see the resemblance.”
“No, and the Black Tortoise of the North is less like a tortoise than anything I ever gazed upon. With a little imagination the Vermilion Bird of the South comes good, however.” Freddie chuckled. “The Chinese. Funny to think of them, for the last few thousand years, seeing the stars we see, but spotting such different things there.”
“They saw animals, too.”
“Yes. I wonder whether that means it’s a human need, the fact we all see animals in the sky.”
“Or a human superstition.” Lenox paused. “How were Weston’s people, then?”
“He was well loved. What have you and Oates discovered?”
